Here it is well past turning point on several dozen pressing global issues and we are still receiving football-coach geo-strategic exhortations. Does the following quotation from David Warren (RealClearPolitics, “The Horror Ahead”, 23 July 2006) remind you of anything?
For instance, the Israelis could scoot up the west coast to southern Beirut, start the biggest fire-fights against Hezbollah guard cells there, then begin extending and deepening a northern front line by striking east towards the Syrian border -- well north of the Litani River line that the Israelis were defending until the year 2000.
Ever hear of the end run, of the Yalu? The horror behind is dying to become the horror ahead. Don't ask me why people can't understand insurgency warfare with their spatial modes of thought. Ha-ha-ha! Time Magazine complains about “Such confusion of roles…” and “Russian ambiguity” (“Crude Power”, 10 July 2006, pp. 24-5). Don't ask me why people can't understand insurgency warfare with their structural modes of thought. Heh-heh-heh! And just like the Third Force argued about Viet Nam, we are now being told that the war in Iraq is not an insurgency: it's a civil war! Ho-ho-ho! Such thoughts are entertained in political science departments of places like Yale University, another functional element of which is still trying to prosecute the K. Rouge for perpetrating what America was responsible for. Not only the Americans, but the Israelis -- who actually live in the region -- don't seem to realize that their most implacable foe is no longer the nation-states of the past, subject to the foibles of nation-states: AmerIsraeli actions over several decades have jointly created circumstances where they soon will have to deal simultaneously with every conceivable level of intensity. You know, in run up to Trinity, it was the swarming sand fleas that plagued everyone. No solution was found, and the fleas are still there: everyone else is gone.
Hey, that was a great article on Dolchstosslegende by Kevin Baker (“Stabbed in the Back!”, Harper's Magazine, June 2006). I laughed so hard, I had to keep coming back to it to get through it. Haven't laughed that fulsome since reading Doug Pike's article on the Tet-'68 offensive -- unless it was Huntington's article promulgating “forced-draft urbanization” by free-fire zones, the blood trails left by the Mike Forces and the Hatchet Forces and the Roadrunners and Dagger Teams driven into the Delta (no, not the box-cutter boys). Took some of Derek's fire on that ol' Nazification-of-America thesis he started arguing sometime in mid-February 1968 strolling the halls of MACV-HQ, eh? Nah! This Baker article cooks the back-stab issue into a cauterization so fibrous it insures there will be absolutely no understanding. Not that there ever was any hope there would be. Only a small right-wing faction -- mouth-frothing Lefty-haters, abusers of women, despisers of people of color, fearers of the polymorphous perverse -- cultivated the back-stab myth, you see; the whole population didn't so overwhelmingly succumb to it there was no possibility whatsoever the U.S. could have intelligently responded to 9/11 such that it could have avoided creating circumstances within which millions and millions and millions of Americans very likely not to make it could somehow manage to make it. Yes, it was just that little cabal of foaming paranoids, ya know, authoritarian personalities all, believers in action-based sociologies, not the whole population base like in Weimar Germany: complicit masses of ignoramuses they were back then, not taaaday. Great rehash of the Fifties! Gotta give him that. Kind of left out a lot, though. Then we got to Viet Nam, and a summarizing (p. 37):
Yet Vietnam was a war with no real defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal when you do not lose a battle.
Yep. That's just the way she were. Yessiree! Heh-heh-heh. In fact, I don't know any one-time antiwar protester -- day-trading millionaire Lefty still, or neocon today -- who does not subscribe to this summation. And I don't know anyone who ever taught at the National War College or the Command and General Staff College who doesn't cultivate similar beliefs. And I don't know any experienced journalists or ex-ARVN Vetmanese officers who think different, nother. Moreover, they all agree that the antiwar movement played a substantial role in bringing the war to an end: ex-yippies believe that; ex-colonels believe that. And that, my friends, is Dolchstosslegende II, subscribed to by virtually the whole population base: left, right, and center. The only exceptions I have personally run across are some widely experienced ex-Special Forces, some very informed ex-intel types, and a few retired CIA and other long gone Old Hands: these few know the U.S. got its butt kicked on the ground, thru the jungle, into the sea, and off the roof. Though the U.S. Army certainly kilt alotta dem folk in Lao, Vet-num, and The Bode, both combatants and non-combatants, even exponentially more than their opponents, the U.S. Army never won a single battle against the insurgency and was militarily beaten to a pulp at Tet-'68. And if you think that's just plain crazy, then you don't know diddly-squat what constitutes a battle in actual insurgency warfare, let alone what is involved in winning one. A firefight ain't a battle; and a battle don't even require an angry word to be exchanged: just ask your wife. It usually ain't even visible: you don't get what you see. If you see it, they screwed up. To DX a combatant or not to DX a combatant, gook or no gook, that is the question; to decapitate the leadership or not to decapitate the leadership, that is another question (like Diem attempted 1956-9, without which there could never have been a clandestine National Civilian Proselytizing Convention of 1960 -- betsya didn't know that: Eisenhower's man killed by Kennedy's decision; whose leadership is this, anyhow?) -- for it is all in what non-combatant insurgents decide what decides in actual insurgency war (and if Pace lectures The Prez on politics, that's because that's what actual insurgency is all about). To the degree you have to kill, to the same degree you will lose; to kill exponentially is to lose absolutely in actual insurgency warfare. Winning absolutely is in not having even to fight (because the environment of the combat is so well in hand). Nor have you read with even minimal understanding von Clausewitz's “Ends and Means in War” in On War. Yes, I know. This is Revisionism (except this re-vision was argued and written at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2 at Tet-'68 and Doug Pike only days later produced the vision underlying Dolchstosslegende II while still employed by USIA and long since gone from Viet Nam: Pike's essay wasn't classified, wasn't LIMDISed later NODISed). This is just plain stupid! This is like saying there was no Holocaust. This is like saying the Cambodian holocaust wasn't a holocaust, that it was Holocaust and our fault. Our fault! Get that? Humph! These are the gibberish mouthings of an imbecile psychotic. But, you know, America is on a runaway train just because you believe that. Try to jump off and you're dead. Stay on, and die when the train slams into a wall taking a curve in a tunnel. And it wasn't the decision to go into Iraq that broke the brake on the train. Virtually everybody in America, including Leftwing exemplars, felt -- at the time -- that America had every justification and good reasons after 9/11 to set things right in Afghanistan. Including, even, arch-Leftwing exemplar Oliver Stone -- as we now know by his display of patriotism, rather than conspiracy-freakism, in making a straight 9/11 film: so say even neocon talking Potatoheads. UBL got that right! Bush or no Bush. Neocon or no neocon. It is this decision that America may not survive, not the one regarding Iraq, or the one regarding Iran, or China, or Greater China, or Greater China aligned to a Germano-Russian Bloc (why did the Nazi go east?). Afghanistan. There was not a single person in the American government who understood enough about the Viet Nam war to even begin to see what the Afghanistan decision meant for the future of America. Certainly not the Armitage of Four Tours: anyone who volunteered four times to do what he did didn't understand what he did. And they still don't. And they didn't and don't and won't because of Dolchstosslegende II (and the suppression of information and national self-lying, such as at the Westmoreland vs. CBS trial, that went along with it). Does America have the psychological wherewithal, the cognitive capacity? Ha! Steven Hawking, an American ally, says humans need the Moon, Mars, and the DNA Nebula if they are to survive. Lifting off the last rooftop at the end of GWOT, trying to catch a comet, he may be right -- given all the assistance radical Islamism is receiving in its movement to self-transcendence over… how many destitute billion mega-urban-region squatters by 2030? UN projections are based on uniformitarian assumptions, y'know. Beyond Big. Have we got a global actual insurgency? Not yet; soon to be. Economic development by “forced-draft urbanization” growth; that'll build Hawking Starship. Don't Blame the Hedge Funds! Have confidence in High Convenience. Study the maps of Hot Cities provided by Newsweek (July 3-10, 2006). And I do mean HOT! Soon to be. What possible relation could Steven Hawking have to the Russo-Nazi Pact to GWOT against partisan-insurgent Redskins? You see, m-valued Polish logics had nothing to do with a pact between Left and Right totalitarianism and choice of the locale of the first attack against the genii loci in that war: got a lousy grade on that paper. And the holocaust which was Holocaust had nothin' ta do with that, nother. And Hawking's being exemplar of The Whole Age in insisting on maintenance of The Classical Limit so as to service the anti-Plato psychological profile, that, yes that, couldn't have nothing to do with the Russo-Nazi Pact, neither. Decades, just decades fighting a rear-guard action against black hole computing by Polish logics. And the secret protocols to the pacts that are and will be have nothing to do with the m-valued Polish logics on the base state of Tzog-chen and the summer capitols currently being tunneled -- a North Korean AID project -- into the mountains of north Burma and possibly also overlooking the Tibetan Plateau. Hey, stop this. Just stop it! The Kantian categories are all mixed up. “Such confusion of roles…” and such “Russian ambiguity”. There's no connection between politics and physics, let alone higher mathematics and especially not logic. Singular. Not collective… Uh, I mean not plural. Get your damned sets away from me! I'm only interested in elements. And not godaweful functional elements. Who can see a function? If it's a function, it's not real; its probable. And probabilities are chances and chances are causes. And if you don't believe that, then your categories of understanding aren't my categories of understanding and the only thing we can do is… have a conversation between cultures. Ha! Well, Agnes, they just didn't do their homework, so I guess they are going to flunk the test.
The Economist (25 March 2006, p. 11) refers to the “control freaks who run China” in speaking about the perceived need for China to privatize ownership of agricultural land. But the control freaks of China are nothing compared to the control freaks of America and Israel. Call Americans or Israelis wimps -- with some act making the freaks feel they are not in control of absolutely everything, least of all their own minds, their own personas, their own self-images, photo-ops, sound-bites -- and see how proportional the response is. What easy marks they are, control freaks. Proportionality is suicide! they scream, unloading the scatter guns. Pump, pump, pump. Except that the only way the insurgent can possibly win is by being successful at provoking disproportionate responses. Truman put the Seventh Fleet through the Formosa Straits as his first anomalous response to the outbreak of war in Korea -- thus inviting China into the war. Not exactly a question of proportionality, more of psychological displacement, but wimps react like that because they gots a complex, y'see, and because they identify their complex with some socially conferred role attribution. And, well, because they ain't so smart to begin with, can't formulate a clear objective. Gotta do something, uh, gotta do something. Them terrorists, though, they are cowards hiding behind civilians they mistake for weapons. Won't meet in the clear for a quick draw like Real Men. They get our categories confused -- just like some damned Japanese variety show or something. They live in ambiguity, ambiguity, yes ambiguity. Can't find 'em, fix 'em, and finish 'em. They ain't got no simple-identity. They're another EPR paradox what needs to be renormalized. And the more those damned physicists confirm ghostly nonlocality, superposition, being more than one place at a given time, one solid passing through another solid, the more my blood boils, the more the bile clogs my throat… Fightin' OUT THERE the loss of control over my own mind IN HERE! And whose fault is that? Sure as hell ain't mine! If one route to chaos in the Middle East is blocked, the collective unconscious will find another. I know that, and I depend on that. Can't use the big scatter guns until the requisite level of chaos is attained. And without those big scatter guns how can we renormalize what needs to be renormalized? So just leave off with all this moaning “narrative” about torture. Done said all I'm goin' to about that. Here's an excerpt from a conversation that transpired between two Americans, one an ex-yippie, in Kyoto during August of 1977 (printed in MOON, Vol. 1, 1994, pp. 320-21):
“If you skip the step just described and suggest that the content of American films, the level of urban crime, the incidence of mass murder, the need for drugs, illicit and socially encouraged, et cetera, indicate that American society has become sufficiently unhinged as to produce significant numbers of individuals in leadership positions who emotionally need to engage in violence, in one or another of its many forms -- from the most immediate physical brutality, through the various psychological assaults, to the most elegant and refined of intellectual varieties. And that this is a fundamental factor determining national policy. Well… generally, there is a collective pulling in of air that marks the group as being jointly put out. The hostility, this time, is not easily contained. It pervades the atmosphere like a stony silence and is signified by abrupt departures from the immediate area. You are identified as an unpleasant person, a solecism. Someone who, obviously, always destroys the evening or Sunday brunch.
“And if in the midst of this pulling in of air you state that you have personally witnessed Americans groovin' on the torture of a thirteen-year-old girl -- after electrical shocks to the genitals no longer did the trick, her wrists were tied behind her back with a rope attached to a pulley on the ceiling and she was thus lifted until her shoulders popped out of joint -- well, there is a collective move toward hyperventilation marking the state of aghast, and in the eyes of those pulling in the air, this last statement proves what they had already suspected: you are a jaded Viet Nam veteran and nothing you say is to be given any credence. Least of all, when you up the ante one more time and predict that America will eventually manage to create another war in which this sort of activity will be much more widespread than it was in Viet Nam -- the national need for it having become even more elaborated.”
Amen, Abu Ghraib. What I would like to know is: Why's the U.S. Army's CID-JAG in Iraq located at Camp Slayer (see: “A Soldier's Shame” by Julie Rawe and Aparisim Ghosh, Time, 17 July 2006, p. 31)? Dead species walking. Fightin' OUT THERE the loss of control over my own mind IN HERE! Yes, yes, the Army must be in the business of providing baptisms before fire (p. 31) “in a makeshift prayer room in a kitchen at Fort Benning”. How else can it combat military proselytizing within its own ranks? When incendiary collapse of the Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization cusps, will America's combat arms turn against themselves? Regression of self-reference? Viet Nam or no Viet Nam. Iraq or no Iraq. Da-dah or no Da-dah. Those damned physicists! And before them, the bloody mathematicians. And before them… I need that national boundary if I am to have any ego boundaries. How can I do without boundaries? What would I do? I'm a patriot ready, willing, and able to fight climate change. Anybody who thinks he's going to stand between me and my climate better just keep to his side of the border. You are either with me or you are with the hurricane.
Awareness of imminence of climate shift was ignored or denied, even actively suppressed, by the bulk of those working in the earth sciences for nearly half a century, so, quite frankly, I fail to see how I can give credence to those currently in positions of power within the involved disciplines. Jim Hansen, for instance, writing in the New York Review of Books (“The Threat to the Planet”, 13 July 2006, p. 16) says that the tipping point is hard upon us, that “we have at most ten years -- not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” But no evidence is provided or even referred to that demonstrates this tipping point is not fifteen or twenty years from now, or ten years ago, or 30 years ago -- or 1950, the year decisive shift in measurables became manifest. And he asks a very important question he doesn't answer (p. 14):
Why are the same scientists and political forces that succeeded in controlling the threat to the ozone layer now failing miserably to deal with the global warming crisis?
Perhaps, for the involved scientists, this is because they write for or edit peer reviewed journals. Hansen says, in context of a discussion of CFCs as the cause of the destruction of stratospheric ozone, that (p. 14):
…methane emissions are not only the second-largest human contribution to climate change but also the main cause of an increase in ozone -- the third largest human-produced greenhouse gas -- in the troposphere, the lowest part of the Earth's atmosphere.
This is a statement that certainly would get past any peer reviewer, but is it actually true? I am no expert, of course, but I would speculate that the main cause of the increase in tropospheric ozone has been rescaling of the primitive equation set for atmospheric dynamics -- filtering those equations, renormalizing them -- such that acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes -- which punch holes in the tropopause boundary and thus allow drawdown of ozone from the stratosphere into the troposphere -- are removed from the models. And if you use pairs of double dashes throughout the model's program, it becomes sufficiently hard to read no one will discover implications of the filter. This filtering has been done since the 1940s, because, if it were not done, Einstein's relativity physics and Planck's quantum physics would have to be incorporated into explanations of severe storm genesis and climate dynamics. And if such an incorporation were carried out, we might find actual evidence that the tipping point was 1950, not, say, 2012. Moreover, in discussing ozone depletion in the stratosphere, Hansen fails to mention nitrous oxide -- reactive nitrogen can morph between seven oxidation states -- and how it can come from the natural gas that was flared and vented from oil fields around the world in truly staggering quantities beginning during the mid-19th century and ending about the time of the ozone hole crisis. One-and-a-quarter century of flaring and venting probably contributed at least a mentionable bit to the damage done by CFCs, wouldn't you say? Hansen notes that the (p.16) “…experts say that because technology has sufficient potential to become more efficient, our quality of life need not decline” in effectively meeting the challenges of climate change. But if the tipping point was 1950, not 2012, that might mean that what needs to be done today precludes getting rich off having your cake and eating it too -- if, that is, the Earth's atmosphere, Newtonian domain or no Newtonian domain, is subject to the second law of thermodynamics.
And now, 27 July 2006, comes Ayman al-Zawahiri's call for total jihad from Spain to Iraq, focused on Israel, including against complicit Arab nation-states, and worldwide jihad -- not only by Islamic peoples, but of the downtrodden everywhere -- against the West, and particularly its leader, the U.S.
The only sane way to regard the works reviewed in The New York Review of Books is as the adult equivalents to the art works produced by schizophrenic children. The human species is in process of trying to reach into its collective quantum brain-not-contained-by-brains so as to excise portions of that brain it has come to despise. This can be accomplished only by projective identification. The scalpel of choice that in all likelihood will be employed for the psychic self-surgery -- one tool amongst all those lying on the tray -- is hundreds and hundreds of nuclear weapons. Mankind in Amnesia -- how? By “lateral mental cleavage”, a type of vertical-disconnection syndrome regarded normative by virtue of pandemic anosognosia. Field-dependent cognition cannot be organized and devolves to digression inside digression inside digression -- the digressions, however, being organized, organized into series after series of perseverations. Fragments from unorganized field-dependent cognition persist parasensorily and paraphasically into new fragmentary cognitions. This is the prevailing collective human condition structuralized in brains by the prescriptive enculturation-forced glutamaturgic neuronal etching and pathway myelinization which concretizes severed connection between the µTm-logical quantum brain-not-contained-by-the-brain and its peripheral device, the 1T2-logical brain-contained-by-the-brain. The bridge between these two brains is superconductivity of intraneuronal and perineural DNA. Quench the superconductant state of that molecule's p-electron gas core and the bridge is severed. Once this functional disconnection is structuralized -- beginning in the womb, continuing through infancy, and into adolescence -- by neural network wipeouts and associated neurotransmitter and neurohumoral processes, there is no conscious readout of the m-logically-valued quantum processing performed by the quantum brain-not-contained-by-the-brain. One, just one, example of “normative” collective perseveration is maintenance of a “classical limit” into, not only the quantum-relativity paradigm, but into the post-quantum-relativity paradigm. These are old ideas, man! Being intuited with considerable clarity during the fall of 1967 in the rice paddies of the Mekong delta; being explicitly discussed with Wolfgang Luthe by 1973; being put into a mathematical description by 1976. Here is an early expression presented as having been blurted by Derek to Ilse (MOON, Vol. 1, p. 259):
“Look, I believe that the human need for war arises out of the denial to experience of the collective aspects of consciousness. These become buried in the unconscious and, since they cannot find healthy social expressions, emerge in regressed form as collective violence. The allure of war is to taste momentary loss of self in collective awareness -- like the petite mort of sexual orgasm. The mass hysteria involved is very like a state of collective demonic possession. The person participating in an atrocity action, for instance, is simply not an individual for the duration of the experience -- even if the act is perpetrated by a single person: the collective unconscious does not require the physical presence of a group. Many of the 'psychopathological' aspects of PTSD, I believe, relate to the continued constellation of collective contents. The collective energy gestalt associated with mass violence and activated by the dissolution of individual identities is recorded as archetypal patterns of neuronal facilitation in the brains of participants: electrical predispositions imposed on the cortex, a collective induction. You might say that a kind of electromagnetic 'ghost' is made to cling to the brain. Some primitive rites may have been designed to dissipate this specter; various psychotic behaviors may represent a struggle with it… And this 'ghost' is not just an after-the-fact residue of the killing; it's right there on the battlefield when the murder goes down. Drivin' your luuuuurp inta Injun Cuntry! If you're tuned-in, you can sense its presence: sixth sense. Deep serious shit, mon! Ain't no time ta sweat da small stuff, diddy-bop, dream about DXin' a gook. It's a pattern of psychic energy in the neighborhood of the coming kill. You can smell it, taste it, feel it crawl along the hairs on the back of your neck. Knowin' your dork is in the wrong hole, ya drop some Special Forces popcorn, swallow a greenie, take some uppers, gulp a green bomb. Some people find sensitivity to the presence of this 'ghost' is as good as radar; it's either boogie time and adios motherfucker, time for a little E & E shuffle, right you should un-ass and dee-dee-mau, Hotel-Alpha most ricky-tick, sky, make-yoarsel'-a-hat, beat feet, or necessary you get on the horn and ask your buddies back in the camp to crank up the four-deuce, forget the smoke, and come walzin' right on in with the HE. Comprendi?”
I voluntarily went to Mekong delta rice paddies with explicit conscious intent to gain insight into the sorts of things C. G. Jung described in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (which was assigned to me as a first semester freshman, and which I read over and over). The only relatively recent contribution is the insight provided by accounts of glutamaturgic neuronal etching. So, go on -- just go on.
It is hard to find a syndicated commentator on the current global crisis more insightful than Patrick J. Buchanan, but even he gives evidence of a persistent hole in the head related to the Viet Nam war. Here is an example (“Israel's Vietnam Syndrome”, 28 July 2006):
Still, how can Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, claim to have won the war, when they have inflicted far less damage and taken many more casualties? Answer: By simply standing at war's end. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. There is truth in the cliché.
True, there is truth in the cliché, but not very much -- and this statement by Buchanan reflects his post-Tet-'68 syndrome, which for him is a hole in the head. Tet-'68 was successful not because of anything done at Tet or after, and not because of press misreporting, or psychological success and military defeat, or because of the impetus given the anti-war movement; but because of what was accomplished relative to countrywide self-organizational phase transition in the year preceding Tet-'68. Tet-'68 was not a battle; the battle was already over by the time the offensive was launched. The offensive itself was the mask of the battle; that's why it could be used, and was used, to purge the Southern VCI and their factionalistic insistence upon local autonomy and many other associated behaviors and issues. Combatant operations of an insurgency or terrorist organization are only a very, very small part of what they do -- and the least important part. Such operations are engaged in by the intelligent insurgent only insofar as they are required to generate the circumstances through which radicalization can be accomplished, and by which organizational initiatives relative to those thus radicalized can be undertaken. The insurgent's enemy can never be beaten by combat operations, only by bringing organization of the non-combatant recruitment base to higher and higher levels of self-organizational competency, and by finding ways to expand the initial recruitment base to larger and larger collections through procedures of identity incorporation. This is no easy task; it is high art and exact science, particularly because the tools required to accomplish it are mostly in the hands of the insurgent's opposition. The insurgent must find ways to use his opposition's tools; there is no other way for him to go. Winning is not only in standing up after whatever combat operations there are transpire; winning is in using potential and actual such operations as the means by which organization of the non-combatant recruitment base is brought to higher and higher levels of self-organizational competency. Afghanistan is not a war. Iraq is not a war. Lebanon is not a war. They are facilitators of synoptic self-organizational phase transitions over a network nesting of horizontal and vertical scale levels mapped on a Riemann sphere wrapped around a 2-sphere called biosphere of planet Earth. What is most important about what is happening in Lebanon today is not being viewed, is non-viewable, isn't even suspected. And it is not transpiring in Lebanon; it is transpiring at myriad locations around the planet. “Think globally, act locally” is a quintessential Newtonianism. In a clandestine infrastructural network self-organizing under quantum-entangled identity-transparent relativistic framework conditions, there is no distinguishing global from local thought-action. In the well-formed insurgency, those framework conditions prevail psychologically to increasing degrees of competency.
Long before Buchanan wrote on the decline of the West, Oswald Spengler wrote Decline of the West and Julius Evola wrote (published 1934) Revolt Against the Modern World (with an implied !-imperative) which has a chapter entitled “The Greater and Lesser Holy War” followed by a chapter entitled “Games and Victory”. Evola's theme in these two chapters, basically, is that a well-formed lesser holy war is dependent upon continuous congress with a well-cultivated greater holy war: only thus can the requisite framework conditions for victory be gamed. Control the environment of the combat and the combat will take care of itself. Decline of the West is taking a lot longer than Spengler thought because it is going to be far more thorough than Spengler imagined. Spengler didn't understand what happened in higher mathematics during the early 19th century, and there is no comprehending the thoroughness factor without such understanding… Look, it's necessary to defocus, go diffuse. A career can't be made out of it. One has to be too busy to get educated and have a career. Get authentically too busy before you enter high school. Contemplation is the purest form of action: Kriya, quantal action. Artha: meaning, import, purpose: quantum measurement by Ma, involutory descent-by-negation toward actualization through sacred space into representation space. Arthakriyasamartha: function, quantum wave-function. Authentic action was transformed into work by “the modern world”. “Good work”, however good, however much better than mere work, still ain't authentic action. ((There is no work that is not slavery; there is productive action, however, that is no work. The “wage slave” is not a slave to the wage; he/she is a slave to the currency of the wage: defining properties of the currency determine parameters of the leverage exercised by the payer of the wage. The worker cannot escape being a wage earner short of becoming an actor, an actor who operates on the currency base. You want to change work back into action, change defining properties of the currency base.)) But the modern mind has so made a religion of work, that the best one can speak of is “good work”. Spengler talked about this issue. So did Evola, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon. The latter three intuitively understood the import of what happened in early 19th century higher mathematics by virtue of their esoteric and Cabalistic studies. Defocus, go diffuse. This cannot be understood one thing after another, only all at once. Part of the victory game of terrorist insurgency -- the lower holy war -- is to keep the opposition's social structure of attention focused, focused so as to prevent comprehension. Any OSS-MO (Morale Operations) graduate should understand. The currency -- actions by combatants -- of the (a)(im)moral economy of (peasantry)(downtrodden)terrorist insurgency is, in part, diversionary, not only provocation soliciting disproportionate response, and not only facilitator of self-organizational phase transitions. So long as the counterinsurgent's attention can be kept focused upon preventing terrorist actions and beheading a leadership elite paraded as enticement -- lingerie laundry hung on a public pole -- the real business of insurgency can proceed relatively unimpeded: I-to-I-to-I, Instantiated Identity Incorporation.
Who caused the Cambodian holocaust, anyway? Were the perpetrators those responsible? Will U.N. co-prosecutor Robert Petit build a case against those responsible? Kevin Doyle (“Chasing Cambodia's Ghosts”, Time, 17 July 2006) notes that: “…under the tribunal's laws, says Petit, the prosecution has a mandate to target 'senior leaders and those most responsible'…” Only trouble is: none of “those most responsible” are Cambodian. Moreover, the tribunal's very existence reinforces the factors predisposing the next holocaust.
You are challenging me to defend my statement? The statement at question being: “The only sane way to regard the works reviewed in The New York Review of Books is as the adult equivalents to the art works produced by schizophrenic children.” Generally, I don't respond too good to challenges, you see, given how much difficulty I have at taking them seriously, but just for the sake of… whatever, I will make a stab at it. In reviewing Gregor Dallas's book, 1945: The War That Never Ended, Robert Skidelsky (“Hot, Cold, & Imperial”, 13 July 2006) explains that Dallas argues (p. 50) that during WWII:
Behind every military decision lay a political calculation. Indeed, Dallas's book is so much taken up with the jostling for postwar position that it sometimes loses sight of the fact that till 1945 a war was still being fought against Nazi Germany.
I thoroughly agree with Dallas and note that Skidelsky's critical observation reveals he did not closely read Clausewitz on “Ends and Means in War” and that he fails to understand not only what war is all about, but how it is actually fought. It is the sentence preceding the above-given quotation, however, that reveals the schizophrenic child:
Nevertheless, underlying the book is an eminently sound proposition: that the war against Germany (Japan is scarcely mentioned) was simultaneously a struggle to control the post-Nazi future.
“Japan is scarcely mentioned” -- now I wonder why that is the case? Because if Japan were looked at through the lens of “Behind every military decision lay a political calculation” regarding “jostling for postwar position” then the atomic bombings would have to be considered, and there would be no escaping the obvious, that the final decision to drop the bombs had far more to do with intimidating the Soviets than with ending the war against Japan -- and if that is the case, given that the Soviets knew about the bomb project, or the probability of such, or that creation of such was very likely, long before Yalta, probably by Teheran, then the whole issue of the Soviet “choice” to garrison postwar Eastern Europe would have to be reconsidered. Before MAD and after early 1946 when SAC was created, the Soviets had no way to minimize likelihood of an atomic initiatory first strike by a U.S. which had proved itself willing to use the bomb primarily for purposes of intimidation, no way, that is, except by the Soviet Eastern European garrison threatening to steamroll Western Europe. And if that issue would have to be reconsidered, then it is very likely that Dallas's whole interpretive filter on Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact -- particularly the secret protocol -- would have to be removed from the historian's camera. And if that is the case, then the relationship between Heydrick's successful black-op planting false documents in the Soviet counter-intelligence paper mill and the Stalin purges would have to be thought through again. One might even, under such thinking through, come up with a plausible answer as to why Stalin, an accomplished street-fighter, regarded Sorge's intelligence -- exact day of the projected Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union -- to be largely irrelevant. Such “and ifs” would multiply virtually without bound, drawing into question the prevailing consensus account of the collapse of the USSR, and even current assessments of Russia's military capabilities at the very high-tech end.
This is dissociative children's art because the psychological dimensions are completely missing, split-off, submerged to subtext present only by interpretation of the authors' disabilities displayed between the lines. On the purely psychological level, unconscious to be sure, what did Molotov have in common with von Ribbentrop ((just so happens I wrote a paper on this exact subject in 1964 for Abdul Said's course “Problems in World Politics” -- and found a bunch of relevant American diplomatic material in boxes at the U.S. Archives: DC no Washington was a very different place in those days)) which focused their attentions on Poland? The Young Hegelian, Karl Marx, fled Germany to Newton's England to get away from the illogic of Hegel's transcendentals. The young Brown Shirts rabidly foamed at the Rabbinate, orthodox and secular, as well as other types of fomenters of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Dadaists, Cubists, anarchists, Surrealists, free-sex public fornicators, practitioners of atonality, and on and on, because they were the perceived social spin off of the culmination of Abel's impossible transcendentals: the illogic of quantum logic. And the most heinous crime, the greatest threat, was Polish logics, the quintessential illogics of illogic -- so illogical even Gödel ignored them. The Polish logician, Lukasiewicz, beginning soon after turn of the century, publishing as early as 1903, very explicitly attacked “logical determinism”, the necessitarian properties of traditional syllogistic logic, as being the root of social, political, and economic coercion. How many Poles does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to climb the ladder and hold the bulb, two to lift and turn the ladder. Ethnic-ridicule joke as expression of deep psychological displacement dissipating the threat posed by 3-valued quantum logic, first rigorously described by Lukasiewicz in 1921. During the same year, Neurath publishes Anti-Spengler. By 1930, Reichenbach is applying 3-valued logic to quantum theory. The next year, Neurath is drawing out the deep correspondences implied between sociology and new physics. And much, much more was happening: something had to be done. In midst of so much illogic, how can one have a well-ordered society, women in the kitchen where they belong, without a strong leader? Not only was Poland carved up first, attacked first, but well over half of those who died in camps or mass machinegunnings died in Poland, and the Communists and Nazis more or less conspired throughout the war to deal especially harshly with Poland whenever the opportunity presented. Collective psychological displacement of a perseveration digressing through European history since 1826 -- date Abel demonstrated existence of mathematics transcendental to algebra, that demonstration being designated the “Impossibility Theorem” -- and up until the present day: lacuna on the brain, psychic severance, psychopathic conversion. Not metaphorically, literally.
But anti-transcendentalism -- and its “logical” implications, and “illogical” consequences -- was not only a fixation of the totalitarians: it was pan-Axis and pan-Allied, totalitarian or not. And it was prewar, intrawar, and postwar. Important to recognize is how basically, well, not-smart, were the main players -- and how such players continue in that same status until today. One would have thought that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, places like that, would have understood implications of what transpired in early 19th century higher mathematics; certainly they have mastered the details, but the implications? Alas, one sees no evidence of that in the work of, well, Woodrow Wilson, for instance, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or even a John Kennedy and a Mac Bundy. The notion of unanimity is a kind of wave-functional beat frequency of Abelian transcendentalism (animistic Cantorian part-whole identity transparency which requires Lukasiewiczian m-valued logics to fully codify), for instance; while retention of the vote and the veto is an abysmally Lockean-Newtonian perseveration of the summation of forces. Both Wilson and Roosevelt built these irreconcilables into their world-saver visions spontaneously generated by lateral mental cleavage. Churchill, abradant that he was, was by contrast unabridgedly Newtonian in a post-Newtonian world, a throwback resolutely expressing the territorial imperative of club-wielding African genesis. Collapse space and time with the technologies of new physics, while retaining the logical properties of uncollapsible boundaries upon which legal-tender currencies are defined: sort of like mandating unanimity for action in an environment of votes and vetoes. Schizophrenic child's play, wouldn't you say?
Madeleine Albright says (“Unintended Consequences” [How many “unintended” consequences is one nation allowed by history such that it is permitted to remain one nation?] Newsweek, 24 July 2006, p. 58): “I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in [U.S.] foreign policy -- worse than Vietnam.” Is there no great leader with even the smallest clue as to the magnitude of what is transpiring on this planet? Iraq is small fries in an avalanche, just one footnote to consequences yet to be realized of the knee-jerk invasion of Afghanistan. The recruitment base over the next 20 years will grow to four or more billion people. And global insurgency against the failed Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization is only one of numerous challenges that will climb to a similar magnitude. If no great leader has a clue, that does not mean everyone is clueless. Karl-Ulrich Voss of Burscheid, Germany says (letter to Newsweek, 17 July 2006): “I doubt that Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda are on the decline: bin Laden's leadership is a projection of our Western management or administrative principles, and Al Qaeda, like the European terrorists of the '70s, is a community that readily transforms itself, reintegrates and catalyzes as needed.” My only reservation is with the judgment that Al Qaeda's leadership is “a projection of our Western management or administrative principles”. This hugely underestimates what the Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization is up against, particularly as the challenge jumps the barrier of radical Islamism, which it will. Most people not located at sites of acute inflammation still feel that their immediate lives will be largely unaffected by the multidimensional global crisis: terrorism, climate shift, oil peak dynamics, wars between nation-states, narco-wars, holocausts, mega-urban region squatter settlements growing like slime mold, immune system collapse, pandemics, grid brownouts and blackouts, economic travail… A point will come when they can no longer entertain that fantasy. Then, allegiances of every sort will undergo convulsive flipovers.
American official discourse -- and I mean virtually every statement by any spokesperson one finds quoted -- has long since left Wonderland; it's about to depart NeverNeverLand! Tinker Bell shapeshifting to Jumpin' Jack Flash.
Come on, there is no aspect of what is transpiring today that was not predictable over thirty-five years ago. 9/11? The box-cutter boys? And the knee-jerk invasion-of-Afghanistan response? Quoting Derek's journals, circa 1971, published in MOON, 1994 (Vol. 2, p. 349):
Moreover, it is well to remember that it does not take an isolated camp identifiable by satellite-borne remote-sensing technology to train a very effective dagger team. [This, from the token American placed in a Mekong delta dagger team for having inadvertently walked in upon a torture session: barefoot in night rain, no weapons but a knife. He won't survive that!] Nor does it require firearms or C-4 which actually are liabilities predisposing to counterproductive actions. It takes a basement; it takes intelligent planning; it takes endless dry runs; it takes audacity, information, and most of all knowledge of the operational procedures, information technologies, and vulnerabilities of the state and the exploitable emotional and ego instabilities of its controllers. People who have a psychopathic need always to be in control are very predictable and very destructive when they experience themselves losing control. Viet Nam was a veritable wonderland of education on that subject!
The box-cutter boys were just lucky because, by inter-service rivalry, the CIA wouldn't provide the FBI with the critical information which was ready to hand. Just luck, right? More from the same entry into Derek's journals (p. 350):
Once urban warfare training programs are created in the military arms of states, the terrorist's objective is half accomplished. The only player in the game with sufficient force available is the state. But this entity's communications systems and decision algorithms -- by necessity of its very defining characteristics -- are so confused, so vulnerable, so tending toward self-contradictory behaviors, that it takes very little to provoke the entity into autoimmune responses. All the more so, the more centralized these systems become, the more they rely on classification schemes, entry codes, et cetera. Secrecy keeps people out but promotes self-defeating responses -- especially when the opposition's strategy incorporates awareness of this fact. The opposition engages in actions to promote increasing secrecy and therefore increasingly contradictory response.
But Bush is so stupid! It would have all been different had Gore gotten in there. Look at how smart Clinton was; things never got really out of hand. True, right? More from the same entry into Derek's journals (p. 351):
Pin-point bombing works only against those stupid enough to organize themselves for simple-locality, who organize themselves, that is, so as to allow the force structures of their opposition to be effectively massed against them. But what can ya expect from a GREAT NATION so prone to hysteria it's sure ta call out da Navy's major cans an' intercontinental bombers in response ta irritants. I mean, how can one avoid thinkin' 'bout psychosexual compulsion in tryin' ta find an explanation? Societies governed by such compulsion are an easy mark for terrorist-induced autoimmune dyscrasias.
A little tryst under the table, what's that have to do with the psychopathology of American foreign policy? And who is the Middle East taskmaster of the cross-border reprisal? Cross-border actions, that is, like the one which was used to justify the present war in Lebanon (what is it, the fifth, since, uh, 1968, was it? This memory!). Following is substance of a conversation that took place at MACV-J2 in early 1968, as reconstructed in MOON (Vol. 2, p. 65):
“Do you know, sir, at Ft. Bragg right now, whenever a Special Forces soldier ETSs, one of the boxes he has to have signed-off on his separation clearing form represents a recruiting pitch made by a member of the Jewish Defense League? Naturally enough, it's not spelled out in so many words on the form; there's a cover designation.”
“Recruitment for what?”
“Ostensibly for a training assignment in a border kibbutz, but actually for cross-border reprisal raids. They are upfront about the risks and casualty rates… and there is a life insurance policy and money put into a Swiss bank account, I've been told.”
“This, I did not know,” said Toussaint soberly. “Why would they want third-country nationals involved, given how good they are themselves at such raids?”
“I really don't know,” replied Derek. “Perhaps they do not want to squander the resources of their special ops unit, Sayeret Matkal, on relatively simple -- but risky -- projects like reprisals. Or maybe they don't want to undermine the integrity of their intelligence services with such noxious tasks when they can get personnel from elsewhere. Would you hand it over to foreign intelligence -- Mossad -- or internal security -- Shin Bet -- or army intelligence -- Aman? Hell, the reasoning has to involve bureaucratic considerations. It's always best that illegal actions be undertaken by outside parties when possible; discipline breaks down within the agencies, otherwise.”
Pensive as a punch press with a short in its motor, Jacques bobbed his chin spastically.
“Permitting such recruitment on an American military base, sir,” continued Derek, “represents U.S. government underwriting of an Israeli policy of reprisals for terrorist actions -- a mindless policy that makes no tactical or strategic sense and does more to undermine Israeli security than virtually anything else they could do…”
1968 was one heck of a lot of cross-border reprisals ago! These are excerpts from just one journal entry, out of three-hundred pages thereof reproduced in MOON, and a brief exchange from a single conversation. There are a lot of reasons why MOON was never taken to a publisher.
Well, it depends upon what you mean by nihilism. By the tone, surely not mere pessimism. I have always chosen probable lack of success at potentially effective undertakings over certain success at those sure to be ineffective. One conducts one's life in such a fashion when one sees the magnitude of what is coming down the pike -- and feels that a meaningless life is not sufficiently meaningful to sustain interest in life. All the problems could have been, and many still could be, successfully met -- there are no objective obstacles -- by rapid phase transition to economic, social, political, and technological embodiment of post-quantum-relativity paradigm. This obviously hasn't happened, and surely will not happen. The human species, long ago, not quite consciously, decided against it, decided it would rather hit itself out. And so now we are in the midst of resolutely pursuing the implications of that decision. Call this nihilism if it makes you feel better.
I don't know what you're talking about, either; but I do know what I am talking about. I'm saying that entanglement-swapping is a chicken-and-egg problem in consensus quantum physics long since resolved by the Compleat Quantum Anthropologist studying insurgent infrastructures. A coherent superposition of two particles which have never come into close spatial proximity: under the Copenhagen Interpretation, they cannot be particles unless observed and there cannot be observers unless there are particles. This problem is not a problem of spatial proximity or lack thereof; it is a problem of the presence of temporal distance, the permission in framework laws for such presence. Emergent properties are incompatible with consensus quantum physics; there can be only atemporal demergence: then no chicken, and no egg, and no problem. Newsweek reports (“More Terror on the Tracks” by Sudip Mazumdar, et al., 24 July 2006, p. 24-5) that “Indian police think SIMI [the Students Islamic Movement of India thought to be involved in the recent Mumbai commuter train bombings] may have 500 hard-core members and as many as 20,000 sympathizers who can be relied on for assistance and shelter.” This is an extraordinary public statement any Compleat Quantum Anthropologist surely will prick up ears and listen to intensely. Get it: “…who can be relied upon for…” is a phrase directly out of the Westmoreland versus CBS trial concerning the enemy strength estimates controversy from the Viet Nam war era. Westmoreland decided not to count people who could be relied upon, which not only tells you something about his management style, but also reveals how little he understood of consensus quantum physics. Check out the tooth-to-tail ratio: 1 :: 40. Now I can assure you that most of the 500 potentially-combatant insurgent terrorists have never been brought into close spatial proximity with virtually all of the 20,000 non-combatant insurgents who can be relied upon -- if that ever happened, the insurgency would collapse like the quantum wave-function at observation-measurement -- and yet there is a superposition across the 20,500 sufficiently coherent as to reduce the decision-need and leadership-demand into the realms of supersolidity at high degrees, kelvin, of Islamic heat. And how is this possible? First of all, we should all know that we all will never see a 1 :: 40 tooth-to-tail noted in all or any major publication(s) concerning any and all war(s) America fights; it simply would not be in conformance with editorial policy (Newsweek has forgotten -- scold, scold -- that no manifestation of GWOT is not, by self-proclamation, not America's war). It will be in the realms of 1 :: 5, thereabouts. Entanglement -- swapped or unswapped, laughing with the wife or not laughing with the wife -- is the normative state; while demergence to discrete “particle” is an “as if” state requiring atemporal transcendence of the measured-measurer paradox under the m-valued logics of animistic identity-transparency. Suppress awareness of the normative state and you get a regressed version of the “as if” state. The psychology of suicide(murder)martyr terrorism, as it plays across the corpus of combatant and non-combatant insurgents, is what takes the infrastructure outside linear-time, over the paradox, and negates the near-absolute-zero requirement for maintenance of coherent superposition. That's what I'm talking about. What are you talking about?
Not seeing the writing on the wall, a form of writing which has always been written in blood: the Secretary of State in a display of feminine empathy briefing the press on how tragedies sometimes happen in war; self-aggrandizing clutch-player Kissinger writing in the Washington Post, quoting Clausewitz's most quoted quotable quote as intimidation, comparing the present opportunity in the Middle East to make Iran into a well-behaved Westphalian, comparing, that is, this opportunity with that in Southeast and East Asia he, the clutch-player, clinched in the early-'70s with China (read my lips: China did not agree to reverse her decision to commit ground combat troops in support of her client Bodes without the U.S. taking concessions, i.e., to include ratifying the fait accompli on the ground incorporating already fulfilled preconditions to holocaust, if not Holocaust: tough negotiating assignment, that); AB, AlphaBush, butchy as ever, yet somehow refraining from beating a spike-heeled shoe on the table set in counter-Castro country in hopes of satisfactorily resolving yet one more missile crisis, enumerating his list of demands to Iran, while reminding us all that Hezbollah broke the law in crossing the border into Israel, a border along with every other Westphalian border anywhere and everywhere, planet Earth, established by force of arms and only by force of arms, if, that is, Kissinger's Clausewitz is to be given credence; the female Clinton ramping up her bullish demeanor on forward-deployed preemption; opinions being offered by past secretaries of state, of defense, of security, of special provenance, by generals of every stripe. Not yet in a panic, are they, those exemplars, as cusp events remain memetime distant, if nowadays only somewhat distant (why would they worry? they havin' fun, like Brother Alfred). Having identified the states of their ego-spheres with their nation-state, the nation-state a mere superposition of ego-sphere projections, they believe themselves engaged in contention with nation-states, mistakenly do they so believe, those exemplars. It is not relevant whether or not, in fact, “unintended consequences” of counterintelligence over-zealousness, e.g., assassinations, precipitated a North Korean decision for preemption in 1950; what is relevant, is whether or not North Korea today remembers it that way or not. Is Yasukuni Shrine listed in North Korea's updated Strategic Rocketing Survey? I been there; you been there? Pouring over strategic bombing target options, I mean: CICV-Targets. It is not relevant whether or not, in fact, in the years immediately after WWI, Churchill's Zionism was suborned to British oil aspirations and policy, which, years later, 1953, precipitated a coup in Iran, and that in the same immediate post-WWI period Ben-Gurion proclaimed that the Palestinian Arabs had no right to exist as a superposition of ego-sphere projections; what is relevant, is whether or not Iran today remembers it that way or not. You think Iranian intelligence does not have a Targets Branch for its rocket corps? When Iran becomes convinced it absolutely will be hit -- and it has been given extraordinary forewarning and preparation time: I'm gunna hit you; I'm gunna hit you; I'm gunna hit you (Vietnam-era escalation control options over Everett algorithms governing playground rules) -- it will be confronted with a choice between the North Korean choice of 1950 and the Reagan-era Sandinista choice. Since 1979, the leadership of the Iranian revolution has been more or less committed to Islamic “socialism in one country”; formation of the Islamic Internationale has largely been left to others. Of course, leaving the international Popular Front totally to others has not been an option, has not been in the interests of Islamic socialism in one country. Is the Iranian leadership sufficiently identified with the one-country aspect of their program that they will, when forced to choose, take either the North Korean choice or the Sandinista choice -- or both simultaneously? What the North Korean choice was in 1950 is pretty clear: to preempt or not to preempt. The Sandinista choice was fully Shakespearian: to be or not to be, that was the question. To remain a nation-state or to phase-back to the pre-government, to the front, to the pre-front -- while simultaneously expanding in space and going to lower and lower intensities over longer and longer memetimes, until turnaround time comes. The Sandinista, in choosing to-be, insured they would not-be; same for Noriega. Is the leadership of Iran the functional equivalent of the Sandinista and Noriega? That remains to be seen. Iran's opposition believes it has the force-structure variants required to coerce compliance: it's just a matter of how much force will need to be brought to bear. If needs be, there is always the nuclear option, which the generals, at least temporarily, considering the needs of their future-history imagos, took off the table (according to Sy Hersh, “Last Stand”, The New Yorker, 10 & 17 July 2006: Sy argues the last stand of the generals relative to Little Boy, not of Iran's Little Big Horn). The adept knuckle-draggin' special service corps operative has nothing to fear but -- not fear itself -- but, uh, but, as The Dogs of War depicted, the woman and the child; so, when CT naval graduates of riverine wet affairs, seal teams so-and-so, the hatchet forces, ruff-puff and roadrunner advisors, and such like taught the muja-HA!-deans -- Oh, Dean! -- ta kill the woman and the child first, they were aghast. But they were fast learners, nonetheless. Surpassing learners, actually; they learned what their teachers, enchained to the Powell Doctrine, never knew: force structures can only target forces which structure themselves such that the force structures in question can target them -- and that those who hold the secret to success in this game are not combatants, but non-combatants and their organizational state: system-composite a far-from-equilibrium operator over internal system state. The Islamic Internationale, AQ&A, learned this lesson decades ago -- a lesson about how to reduce total non-combatant casualties over the long haul, if at the expense of immediately incurring a much smaller number of short-term casualties -- learned it so well that, in the demonstration area, they put on a sting-operation lesson, someone else code named 9/11, just ta show, relative to Afghanistan, recalcitrant believers in Islamic socialism in one country the effectiveness of the Shakespearian choice -- choose to not-be, and ye shall-be (collective strategic corresponding principle to the martyr's individual tactic) -- not chosen by the Sandinista: to phase-back to the pre-government, to the front, to the pre-front, while simultaneously expanding in space and going to lower and lower intensities over longer and longer memetimes, until turnaround time comes. Rich target environments for Bunker Busters and Little Boys accrue only over those choosing to remain Westphalian nation-states or to comply with capitalist “forced-draft urbanization” development, which Kissinger's Cambodian holocaust played in compensatory (forced-draft de-urbanization) abreaction to. Indeed, it's not that there may be a holocaust of the Whole Earth; rather, throughout the whole period post-WWII, such a panholocaust has been transpiring in the manner of a slow earthquake. The Islamic Internationale knows, of course, that denationization does not preclude their opposition's employment of Bunker Busters and/or Little Boys, but -- since capabilities of such munitions, relative to conditions of the battlefield environment, will have been greatly reduced by denationization -- no matter what the level of Denis-the-Menace loss-of-control tantrum, the number of such munitions employed will be far less in the poor target environment than otherwise would be the case. No functional Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state between China and Austria: transitional neo-umma coalescing a diasporic vanguard: understood as reversing resentment, spoliation, and an exclusionary multiculturalist global monism. And speaking of rich target environments being made poor, just imagine how many oil industry facilities in the Middle East are listed on the Iranian Strategic Rocketing Survey just in case, by forced contingency, the preemptive North Korean 1950-option is taken simultaneously with the Sandinista-Shakespearian option not taken by the Sandinistas. Yep, I bet Kissinger, at the request of someone, has written a long white paper on all this itemizing each and every one of the options and the odds, just like he wrote in the days preceding the Cambodian Incursion. And when the Bunker Busters and the Little Boys prove not to have been effective, then their employer will have to especially watch his back, particularly so as he has been maltreating his kids for over 50 years and the only thing keeping them -- civil-military -- in line is mainlinin' megachurch IV fundamentalism. Not to mention schools razor-wired to keep students in; curfews; incarcerators of sidewalk bicycle riders, jaywalkers, and public-transport ice-cream-cone eaters; armed guards on skateboard parks and library study carrels. Lah-dee-dah. How many survivors can you count on one hand?
Enjoyed reading “World War III -- What, Me Worry?” by Chan Akya (Asia Times, 25 July 2006). Agreed, some different ways of thinking about things. I suspect he doesn't really understand the meaning of some of the words he uses, though, like “full conflagration”. He seems to be unaware that the U.S. is capable, in about one day, directly from the ZI and from under the oceans, of destroying virtually every large conurbation on the planet. And that is speaking conservatively: more accurately, most every living thing on the planet could be destroyed as the eventual consequences of one day's work. There simply will never be a “full conflagration” between the U.S. and Islamic nation-states. Except insofar as the U.S. continues to exercise its will to take over Middle Eastern and Central Asian oil, WITHOUT SERIOUSLY DISRUPTING THE GLOBAL ECONOMY, of Islamic threats, only stateless Islam poses a potentially strategic existential threat to America, and this solely through protracted warfare and its spin-offs leading into larger confrontations, which the U.S. is unlikely to lose, but which could precipitate extreme economic difficulties and a collapse of the U.S. from within. Current activities by the U.S. and Israel greatly increase U.S. exposure to this protracted threat. The largest threat, however, is one of not-doing in relation to incendiary meltdown of the Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization and techno-base plus the climate change and pandemiological repercussions. Even several nuclear detonations in the U.S. would not bring its existence into serious question, though such detonations certainly would kill a lot of people, do extreme damage short- and long-term, and set enormous stuff into motion. The U.S. will not be successfully challenged by such means, by America's kind of warfare; its existential vulnerabilities are in other spheres -- so it seems to me. Moreover, nuclear weapons and ICBM's may well have become obsolete by the late-'70s for all-out total war by several of the most advanced nation-states.
There is absolutely no possibility Einstein produced the breakthrough intuitive insight responsible for genesis of Special Relativity, and this was intimately involved in deep-structure origins of WWII and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. The mind that could not deal with implications of Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation was not the mind that produced the seed insight for Special Relativity. There is simply no conceiving the two minds as the same mind. Deep psychological transit into non-ordinary realms of direct experience was prerequisite to production of such originating insight into the nature of time and identity -- understanding the insight after the fact, and producing elevator metaphors, is another matter altogether; any mind capable of that transit was capable of the subsequent transit made by Schrödinger. Einstein developed both Special and General Relativity in just such a way as to debunk implications of the seed insight: this is seen in the fact that 1906 did not produce the notion of an absolute limiting acceleration as liftoff into those non-ordinary realms. Instead, we got the bomb, a corruption of Nature which uses such processes in clean controlled fashion. Moreover, both the time-plasticity of Special Relativity and the identity-transparency of atemporal Schrödingerian quantum mechanics are unabashedly female in origin -- something Marie Curie deeply understood -- and utterly shatter male-identified perspectives on virtually all fundamentals across the full spectrum of Nature: animistic nature, much more Serbian than Germanic by 1900; culture of Gimbutas' Old Europe rising forth from myth to overhaul science. One can be certain the responsible agency, the agency receiving the High Intuition from the Anterior Sky, was Mileva Maric, Einstein's Hagaric first wife, the wife eventually driven into the desert with her sons precisely for having been the one to have produced the insight. Compensatory collective psychological consequences -- hagriding Hagar whilst wrapping Einstein in yet one more Hagiographa -- of this haggling Abrahamic transference soap opera were visited upon all mankind as world war and holocaust. What is Abrahamic religion if not personification of transference? The summer after my senior year in high school, studying phenomenology of childhood schizophrenia with a psychologist friend of my mother, I came more or less to understand the nation-state as collective product of projective-identification. My theme has not significantly changed in forty-five years: the nation-state system and its supranational elaborations were abysmally dead the day Schrödinger penned his wave equation. I have enunciated this theme a thousand times in dozens of ways since my senior year: winter-spring, 1962-3. Having under my belt at that time special tutorials in symbolic logic, topology, and foundations of mathematics, during the final year I simultaneously took honors economics (introduction to econometrics) and honors physics (where quantum mechanics was experimentally taught at the high school level). During this year, the seed idea for multivalent monetary units appeared from the Anterior Sky, even though I had not yet heard of m-valued logics. I never managed to get through a mathematics or science course at the university level: either dropped out of the course or was essentially thrown out of it as "a disruptive" (asking unwelcome fundamental questions). It has long been clear to me that a brain-damaged species will not voluntarily produce a post-Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization. That being the case, the collective unconscious has no alternative but to bring it up by processes of regression -- which is precisely what is transpiring. But this is not a recent phenomenon; it goes back to well before the saga of Einstein and Hagar.
Set Planck's constant equal to zero and the speed of light to infinity: fundamentalism in physics. I get back not only flat Newtonian watchmaker physics, but Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- and even Brahmanism and Confucianism. Personification of transference: monogamous monotheism, the worst; polygamous monotheism, almost as bad. Polygamous polytheism, polyandrous polytheism: still personification. Personify that! and I create the enemy by fiat. What enemy? Who cares what enemy, just so there is an enemy; otherwise, I cannot define myself. In projecting a personified godhead, I claim myself; in thus claiming myself, I initiate the kill. There is no other way to simple-identity. Self-being -- the claim to be absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct -- is in the kill that is claimed, and only in the claimed kill. The kill-in-itself, however, nullifies the self claimed :: murder is suicide; suicide, murder :: re-mergence to collective entanglement by regression. Mark the kills claimed: collect artifacts of the vanquished as signifiers of the kill establishing simple-identity of the self claimed: hang the scalps in the muse-'um, the National Museum. In projecting “the gods”, we claim “we”; in thus claiming “we”, we initiate the kill of “them” as identity incorporation: eating the “other” by projective identification and incorporation of artifacts. The collective unconscious does not work by cause and effect. Once an archetype is constellated in the Zeitgeist, myriad entrapped tunnel behaviors are simultaneously run over its event gradients: by every manner of identified-inflated individuals, groups, corpora, nations, races, genders, religions. Psychogenic Ruhmkorff coil. There are no linear antecedent-consequent relations over archetypal constellations, be they read in the stars, tea leaves, entrails, random numbers generated, Rorschach tests of the paleosciences. And an archetype is not merely a concretization of myth. The mother archetype is not what is conscious, the concrete mother; it is what is not conscious: concrete mother back through the collective residue of all experience of motherness by all generations, back through the most general case of general cases by which Ma, sacred space, involutes by negation of absolute nihil transcendental-number amnion in decomposition from… you get the idea. When Abel demonstrated existence of mathematics transcendental to al-jabr -- multivalent transfinite process maths -- he, by direct implication, killed personification of transference, most especially monotheistic transference, particularly monogamous monotheistic transference. God was dead, as Nietzsche said (even if a fundamentalist's God killed Nietzsche all over the toilet wall). How can I possibly personify so staggering an impersonality as the infinitely multivalent? That's why Abel's possibility demonstration had to be named the “Impossibility Theorem”! Read m-logically-valued p-adic wave-function in atemporal Schrödinger wave equation (written by practice of tri-adic Tantric sexual yoga) as what kind of spiritus sanctus personification? Can it be codified in Ten Commandments and etched on stone tablets? Can it be expressed by Laws of Manu? Is it in Confucian paternal familialism of the polygamous extended family compound layout? This was struggled with for a hundred years before Max Born decided that the only way out was probability amplitudes. Before that, however, Einstein renormalized by truncation the seed insight for Special Relativity by not going to the meanings of the general case of general cases of absolute limiting values of Abel's multivalue in transfinite process maths. Gödel followed suit by ignoring Lukasiewicz. Turing did his bit by acquiescing to finite requirements of Nazi code-breaking. The list of contributors is a long one -- running right up to today's nascent holocaust of the Whole Earth.
There is no avoidance, and there has been no possibility of avoidance even if staged entry has been permitted: by dictates of overwhelming cognitive failure, planet Earth, human species. One-pointed focus on after-the-fact: the only efficacious action in such a circumstance. Talk with those who survived the camp overrun. Last and First Men. The great mass of Last Men will never know why, only the first of First Men; for the last of First men, there will be no question of why. That's why, if you understand why, such understanding is tantamount to schizophrenic cognition: field-dependent registration, because symptoms are seen everywhere, just everywhere, and such connective awareness is not cognitive-failure-become-normative. One of the foremost criticisms of MOON is that it is written as if everything were connected to everything else -- even the characters are poorly differentiated, undeveloped. Reflexive open awareness of unbounded wholeness: is there a clearer definition of schizophrenia? Take Isaiah Berlin, for instance. Over and above The Hedgehog and the Fox, which virtually everyone must have read, I received a pretty good dose of Berlin in Washington, D.C. One could not be a student at the Methodist-endowed Jewish campus of American University in the early-1960s without learning quite a bit about Berlin. Hard Utopianism and Soft Utopianism: Berlin traced both back to European Confucianism, i.e., Enlightenment of the West by the likes of Voltaire, an assiduous student of The Analects. Of course, as far as I know, Berlin never made Chinese thought responsible for Enlightenment rationalism. This was clearly an oversight. As John Gray describes in “The Case for Decency” (The New York Review of Books, 13 July 2006), Berlin's diagnosis of the causes of National Socialism and State Communism (two forms of Hard Utopianism) are the same causes that were the causes of Constitutional Democracy (Soft Utopianism, particularly if conducted by “hard liberals”): the European Enlightenment notion that (p. 20) “reality is a harmonious whole” (a conspicuously Confucian idea) and that, therefore, society should sacrifice the inharmonious present for the sake of a “future harmony” (Utopianism, hard and soft). The horrors of the 20th century, according to Berlin, were due to cultivation of the notion of harmony in face of its contradiction by experience, and an insistence upon overcoming experience by its being sacrificed in the present. His alternative, according to Gray's account, was maintenance of a (p. 21) “value pluralism” (which he left largely undefined) sustaining a minimum morality (left largely undefined) designated common (p. 22) “decency” in such a fashion that we (p. 22) “learn how to live with intractable conflict”. None of this is very interesting, as it is a woefully inadequate diagnosis, a poor account of the etiology and pathogenesis of Nazism and Stalinism, out of which issues a frivolous therapeutics: one can safely turn one's back on such prescriptions. What is interesting, however, is the almost Afterward account provided by Gray of Berlin's engagement with Polish thinkers, and a recounting of the story told by Berlin as to how he came to focus on the history of ideas.
Before WWII was over, Berlin had already taken the decision to move decisively away from potential insight. During the war, Berlin met in Washington, D.C. the man who developed the postulates for Boolean algebra: Henry Sheffer (Gray only tells the reader that Sheffer was a [p. 22] “British logician”: this six-languaged, including Hebrew, American Harvard professor of Russian origins from the days of T. S. Eliot's Upanishadic studies there, and E's first meeting there with B. Russell probably in presence of Sheffer). Flying back to London as a passenger in a bomber (probably one of the many B-17s my father flew so many missions over Germany in), contemplating his discussion with Sheffer, Berlin decided to set aside philosophy for study of the history of ideas. Being a passenger in such a contraption doesn't give you the confidence being a pilot does: the leather jacket, the scarf, the swagger. This decision was taken more or less at the beginning of Berlin's attempt to understand the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. Toward the end of Berlin's career, its last decade, the mirror image of the bomber-flight decision returns as echo, an echo not quite registered. Knock, knock. Who's there? Polish logic; a donation, please. Oh, uh, I've already made my contribution; it's, uh, in press. What anti-Confucian Berlin didn't know, surely, was that G. Spencer Brown's Taoism (Laws of Form) stood between Sheffer and Polish logic -- as a connector. George Soros had a similar misanthropic experience. Before the beginning of his career, as a student of Karl Popper -- another refugee from the East who tried to understand origins of totalitarianism -- George Soros encountered self-referential propositions, the basis of Lukasiewiczian Polish logics, and interpreted them as an indication of intractable human nescience concerning processes underlying “market reflexivity” -- such reflexivity, one might argue, being but a special case of the general reflexivity in very definition of unbounded wholeness (insistence on the harmonies associated with which, being Berlin's notion of the origins of totalitarianism and the necessity to embrace, if not intractable nescience, then “intractable conflict”). Toward the end of Soros' career, the mirror image of the reflexivity judgment returns as echo, an echo not quite registered, not quite registered for 14 years of repeated returns. Knock, knock. Who's there? M-logically-valued monetary units; a donation, please. Oh, uh, I simply don't have the time. And how apropos an answer, given the critical role played by time in the formulations of both Berlin and Popper concerning origins of totalitarianism. Berlin: tyranny is in sacrifice of the present to the future, re: the notion on harmony of the whole. Popper: given that technology innovation is unpredictable, there can be no “laws” of history; the very notion of historical law is inherently totalitarian. Sacrifice of the present to the future, and properties, or lack thereof, of history, do have something to do with the nature of time -- generally with a lack of adequate time -- if I am not mistaken.
In approaching more adequate notions of the origins of totalitarianism and how they possibly could be depotentiated, let's look at a book extending Berlin's thought and exploring fundamentals Popper neglected. An explicitly Confucian treatment of the consequences of European Enlightenment neoConfucianism: Industry of Identity Deficit and Cannibalization of Time Matrices (self-published, 2001) by Betsy U. Chang (a Korean educated in Hong Kong and America, with several decades of international business experience on four continents). The first page of the book is the Acknowledgements and their first paragraph begins:
I am indebted to Prof. Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), whose teachings provided much of the illumination in the writing of this book. He represents all that could be desired in a father figure, in the largesse of his mind and in his generous sharing of experiences and insights in the hope of a better future for mankind. His texts are like an arc bent towards the realistic, descriptive and sensible versus idealistic, predictive and statistical, so that one is pulled in, drawn out and let go, freer to explore the unknown. These are author-dependent, substance-driven, timeless, enriched, fortified, anchored, and incorporable, rather than impersonal, neutral, neutered, volume-driven, trendy, formulaic, axiomatic or dogmatic with force-fitted, finite, predetermined and disposable answers that come with endings, guarantees, promises of much hype.
This passage is representative of the style, and the read requires a bit of concentration -- effort well spent. One thing Berlin never fully realized is that “value pluralism” presupposes, and is subtended by, a metaphysical notion of identity, qua identity, which cannot be formulated in the traditional logic of the West. He turned his back on this issue in turning his back on Sheffer. Chang, coming from what is perhaps the most Confucian of contemporary East Asian cultures, Korea, immediately understood the “identity deficit” in Berlin's thought -- even if that is not quite the intention for use of the term in her title -- and set about rectifying it. In doing this, she reached back, way back, back to the (Deficit, p. 52) “ancient culture” which existed before (i.e., before China made Korea a suzerain's tributary) “integration of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism” -- that old saw that never was, will be, or could ever have been. But reaching back so far as this, in the Korean context, is almost to become the castigated errant woman -- and only an old, old woman, which Chang is not, could possibly get away with it -- that woman who has always been the leading edge of Korean rebellion against Chinese dominance. So, she put one of the most important points made in her book into a footnote (p. 52):
Before Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, the primogenitor [i.e., the aforementioned “ancient culture”] had a word to represent the idea of the Reverential [Confucian glaze] Oneness of all life -- Hananim -- symbolizing the many in the one and the one in the many; one cannot see oneself except as a reflection from the others [choice of “others” indicating Confucian glaze as opposed to Taoist animism], so that the greater the clarity and transparency [choice of identity “transparency” indicating Taoist “center in midst of the conditions”] one projects, the truer the image that can be consolidated and created over time [Western glaze] and relationships.
But being an experienced computer programmer and corporate executive based in the West, Chang sought to synthesize the meaning of this very old word relative to dilemmas she observed around her (p. 53):
The social enculturation process is like building up a nest of personal Boolean statements and operators linking relationships in numerous dimensions which becomes second-nature through daily practice and exposure.
This is an attempt at cross-cultural codification of the “harmonious whole” on a deeper, more immediate, level than that addressed by Berlin, as suggested by two earlier passages (p. 12):
The teachings of Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu) address the structure, function and dynamic of identity matrices for the purpose of organic unity within a culture which evolves through time.
And earlier (p. 8):
Mindfulness is a chronological event, and when the value and essence of time are lost, there is no continuum or memory, only mindless existence where life seems both too short and long, bypassing the sense of the moment.
Identity matrices, time matrices. The average Westerner does not think of either identity or time in terms of matrices. Even if father and boss, he is either this (fatherboss) or that (bossfather), or this then that -- not, for God's sake, a multiplicative graph of simultaneous identity-signification crossovers or crossings-into. No matter how many attributes of identity, they can all be put in a list and processed by a Boolean Turing machine. “Value pluralism” does not mean, or presuppose, identity dyscrasia: that's just plain crazy (and probably some kind of autoimmune disease). And time is a line, not a matrix (even for multitaskers -- no matter how much they rely on PDA graphical-interface scheduling software). Don't ya know that, bub! Chang speaks flat-managementese, identity-matrices cross time-matrices: culture of the firm. Nonetheless, Chang's intuition is right on, and a considerable contribution to the thought of both Berlin and Popper. How could identity matrix del-cross time matrix be rigorously codified relative to Berlin's unenlightened anti-harmony thesis? Certainly not under traditional Western logic.
Transiting from Gothic to Renaissance to post-Renaissance… We could do all that, but let's cut to the chase-but-one: old and new notions of “harmony” were not the same notions of harmony. Berlin missed this. Nor were their logics the same logics. This is confusing, I know; but the confusion evaporates, SNAP! just like that, once there is direct immediate experience: in-here, not out-there. Paranormal stuff! Better believe it. Oneness, for instance, cannot be an object of Reverence absent twoness, and one must realize that the ness-ness of oneness and twoness is cardinality as opposed to ordinality -- both of which are metaphysical properties of identity, qua identity, properties not suborned to mere attribute or list of attributes. Neither are authentically programmable or processable under the Boolean algebras permitted by Sheffer's postulates proved independent and consistent by Spencer Brown with his Taoist calculus of distinctions: Draw a distinction! Imperative (!) at foundations, not phenomenological descriptor (quite a revelation about the nature of mathematics). Spencer Brown proved that the notion distinction is logically prior (not temporally so) to the notion truth-value in logic. MOON argues that the notion identity, qua identity, is logically prior to the notion distinction between identities. Truth-value is not the bedrock of logic, nor distinction. Logic, at its foundations, must be interpreted through order-types of non-simple identity. Knock, knock. Who's there? M-logically-valued monetary units; a donation, please. Oh, uh, uh, I hope you will agree to talk about something else. Now, to the chase: the monism Berlin identified in Western Enlightenment utopian futurist reality as postulated harmonious whole present inharmonies must be sacrificed to -- the basis of present-day five-star global monoculture prescribed by forced-draft urbanization -- is not the harmony cognized in reflexive open awareness of unbounded wholeness. The former presupposes selfsameness in identity -- {[father][boss][golfer][drunk]} as fatherbossgolferdrunk -- no matter how long the list of attributes; whilst the latter requires nonselfsame identity to order-class mnth power spectrum, superposed atemporally, not strung out over linear-time. What does that mean? It means that “value pluralism” cannot be codified in Boolean 1T2-logic. The full spectrum of pluralistic values (characteristic of any specifable identity order-type) is not manifest, and cannot manifest, in deterministic syllogistic logical march (extension in time, as opposed to intemporal involution by logical precedence, matrix order-type by matrix order-type), but in full spectrum of logical values to a given proposition: nonselfsame identity (no identity deficit whatsoever, ever -- whatever the involved time matrix). So long as reality is regarded as the same as itself, as selfsame, itself and only itself, not itself and simultaneously not-itself to the mth-degree, there can be only one correct description of it -- our description, not yours! And that one-and-only permitted correct description is, and must be, harmonious -- as we conceive the harmonious, not as you conceive it. By contrast, in fullness of the case, Lukasiewiczian m-valued Polish logics are required to codify a reality harmoniously whole by being infinitely nonselfsame, which is to say not-itself m-times over. In being infinitely nonselfsame -- and rigorously codifiable via Lukasiewiczian logics -- reality as harmonious whole demands diversity for realization of its unity. Unity is impossible -- no possible-world logic -- absent diversity! A plurality of values is continuously in Everett quantum “relative-state” (precisely as that term denotes its meaning in quantum theory) insofar as the multiple values of the wave-function of Schrödinger's atemporal wave equation are understood as “interpretation” (in the precise mathematical sense of that term) of the µTm-logical values to a given Lukasiewizian proposition.
Being experientially “in the moment” is being outside passing time -- whether this fact is attended to or not. To the degree one attends to it, to the same degree is one in reflexive open awareness of unbounded wholeness. This is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of direct experience. Being “in” nonselfsame identity presupposes being in the moment and being in attention to being aware of being in the moment: reflexivity. It is in the in over the in over the in over the in… that identity matrices inhere -- and given that all these in's involve being in the moment which is in the moment which is in the moment which is in the moment… identity matrices directly and immediately involve time matrices. Identity matrix del-cross time matrix. But are time matrices mere matters of scheduling graphs? Time matrices, in point of fact, have to do with classes of order-types of temporal operations distinguished one from another by the “meanings of the general case of general cases of absolute limiting values of Abel's multivalue in transfinite process maths” referred to above. The rise of Marxist-Leninist Stalinism, and, one world war later, the rise of Nazism, and, one world war later, the rise of myriad planetary fundamentalisms were/are back-reactive attempts to suppress social, political, and economic consequences of Western scientific “discovery” and verification of this corpus of very ancient Eastern insights into the nature of Reality and the reality of Nature. In order to gather some insight into transparency and projection under Hananim, don't look through a screen-grid like the Renaissance painter studying linear perspective; put one's nano-notion of selfsame identity on the reference beam reading the superposed wave-function recorded on a holographic plate, and imagine how that nonlocalizable superposition is projected to a 3-D standing wave hologramic non-simple object (this is a techno-version of Husserl's eidetic reduction, were such phenomenological reduction carried out in actual practice, as opposed to merely thinking about what such reduction should logically be). Concrete cultures, as distinct from metaculture, all assume reality is selfsame -- harmonious or inharmonious -- and that, therefore, there can be only one correct description of it. Description (like that of the Heideggerian phenomenologist), not imperative! (like that of the Brownian logician). Nonselfsame reality is not codifiable as a worldview construct transmitted as learned behaviors one generation to the next; it is codified as the time-logics (plural) of worldview propoundment per se, the meanings of the general case of general cases of worldviewing transmitted as attained states (of consciousness and identity order-type) one generation to the next. Coexistence of a multiplicity of concrete cultures is a prerequisite for atemporal demergence of metaculture. Conflict resolution between cultures is impossible on the level of culture; only in presence of metaculture is harmony between cultures logically possible -- and this requires assimilation on a working level of order-types of logic beyond the Boolean.
No, no, people -- our great communicators, our wondrous commentators -- don't understand what has happened, when it happened, why it happened, what is happening, what will happen (to rip off Dylan, who also clearly didn't understand). No amount of money can buy them understanding. They are all over the surface and do not see deeply America will not simply go with a crisp “Good night!” even though it is already gone, but will pull the temple down upon itself expending in the process its stockpiles, while specializing in backward-looking technology innovation, e.g., faster binary processing by quantum computing. They are starting to see how unimportant the Sixties were -- mere thematic flashback to the Weimar Republic -- and how the Seventies may have been some sort of a turning point, but still they do not see oil as a symptom not a cause (to couch the discourse in their Newtonian history-as-force assumptive framework). It was during the 1970s that the notion of temperature lost all meaning: one can mark this as cusp event in collapse of the Westphalian institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. “Electron-temperature enhancement”: a Star Wars term made real by Presence of a Great Communicator. Before Star Wars, temperature was random molecular motion; there was no electron temperature to enhance. What could temperature be at the submolecular level where any given constituent is spread thin over the whole universe, thus spread at least spatially, if not spatially and temporally? Even a small molecule, we now know, can be at more than one place at a given time, insofar as there is time given as a Husserlian existing time. What will we soon know about the “non-ordinary” and “paranormal” properties of identity qua identity? Spatial motion in a thin spread or of the thin spread? With entangled temporal non-locality, what is motion, anyway? There are no answers to these questions in the Cartesian-Newtonian terms without which there can be no Westphalian institutionalization. Temperature is temporal-spin resonance, not just the spin-moment of three-fold operator-time, but its resonance, because temperature is a collective and cooperative quantal behavior. Though measures of greenhouse warming (old notion of temperature) went into departures during the early-1950s, human cognitive registration transpired belatedly only during the 1970s. The Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm was slain during the 1820s (Abel, Lobachevsky), heyday of the British “coal-day” (not hay day), well before oil came mightily to the fore; death of the Westphalian institutionalization of that dead paradigm arrived at cusp during the 1970s when temperature lost all meaning: hence onset of the collective hysteria, the dissociation. Not least because: Who can understand this? and the quantum-based technologies have not been used to facilitate public understanding, but to suppress it. Internet-worked keywords are no help, only a hindrance, another level of self-metaprogramming. Post-peak oil belatedly became a manifest symptom with diathesis readable in rebound pain, later referred pain: Johnson-Nixon, by Viet Nam war forcing, terminated the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton Woods monetary system, devalued a hugely inflated dollar just as FDR had earlier done, the currency now denominating oil transactions and post-WWII stores of value, thus massively undercutting purchasing power parities of oil revenues past, present, and future. After all that, repeat after, initial referred pain was found in the reciprocated oil price hikes and embargo of 1973-4. Whilst Kissinger created the prerequisites for Cambodian holocaust, the 1968 stab-in-the-back put the sling blade right through the Corvair's gas tank directly feeding the over-effective heater: mere symptom of the death of an institutionalization of a dead paradigm. White man loses to Yellow man in Indian Country: unending PTSD, and associated immune system deterioration, because insurgency demonstrates atomistic identity in error. Open the windows, for Christ's sake; we are not yet east of Eden! If this heater stays on long enough, the only thing that can save us is nuclear winter. And Kissinger plans just how it is we will get east of Eden. After collapse of the USSR, the weakest link in the Westphalian institutionalization, the real race to arms of consequence has taken place over the Tibetan Plateau, so rich in therapeutic ozone: Confucianism versus Brahmanism versus Mullahism. The West is out of it, because its notion of temperature has been eclipsed, while these three contending hierarchical court-cultures are underlaid by low-culture tribal traditions deeply rooted in the very old new notion of temperature. Though the hysteria and dissociation will see to it that there is every manner of conflicted coalition at cross purposes fighting a virtual Hobbesian all-against-all (including Greater China and Germano-Russian Bloc), the contention of greatest consequence will play out across the m-logically-valued high Himalayan laya-center (no mere heart of a MacChild, not by half, sir).
People are still focused on current and coming events understood through an allopathic Four-Horsemen interpretive Foursquare filter: symptoms of pathology mistaken for causes, taken as etiology. They don't believe there are authentic diatheses and miasms of the current global crisis which will determine outcomes, determine not by antecedents and consequents, but by, for lack of a better word, synchronicities. Much of what you read today was already readily apparent to an intelligence analyst studying the Middle East at JFK Special Warfare Center during run-up to the Six Day war and later to a hanger-on at Cornell's Meteorology Department during the mid-'70s. I also spent considerable time during the late-'60s and early-'70s studying psychoneuroimmunology before there was such a field: Weimar-era The Book of the It updated for the 21st century via m-logically-valued quantum biology of superconductant DNA and autogenic brain discharges. Having argued as early as 1967-8 substance of what is currently appearing in general awareness about politico-military aspects of oil, my focus of attention has long since gravitated to the post-period -- post-transition, post-cataclysm, post-apocalypse, post-Armageddon, however you want to designate it. Not only is there no preventing the unpreventable, I don't believe there will be any sort of Redemption or Second Coming, be it of a Christ figure or a Madhi, or some other solemn man -- pretenders to be sure, yet another invisible return, Presence in Passage. Examine your Watch, man. Be a Scheduler! Set your Witness to Milky Way blackhole time; wouldn't want to catch the wrong comet. How many Abrahamic survivors are there likely to be: given how firmly set collective mind, of the tripartite-schisms Fertile-Crescent religionists, has become upon rapturous self-immolation? When incendiary final collapse-by-cusp-events of the Westphalian institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm transpires, no Nationenstaat will survive as a political entity anywhere on the planet, least of all the Dead Sea and the Salt Lake. That has long been my supposition. I've never voted; that makes me a Witness? Prob'ly does. How many morons can one Moroni administer? That's a postmodern “Polish” joke! I am, however, optimistic enough to believe there will be substantial numbers of survivors and that Kulturnations with ill-defined borders will persist. The best chance the species has for minimizing magnitude of the kill and the die off is by efforts as early as possible -- should have begun thirty and more years ago -- to get into place nascent structures about which quantum self-organizing processes can congeal in the post-period. The most elaborate and accurate interpretation (in the exact mathematical sense of that term) of un-dissimulated quantum theory is Indo-Tibetan in origin. This fact, I believe, will be of critical importance not only in miasmatic march of the phase transition, but in determining patterns of self-organization in the post-period. Efforts to minimize loses during the period of deautomatization and to maximize likelihood of far-from-equilibrium phase transition to a higher level of functional integration will focus upon this quantum/Indo-Tibetan correspondence and how it plays out geopolitically during the fluid period of systemic meltdown. Real solutions to energy problems and climate dynamics and pandemic immune system deterioration will only come through de-dissimulating quantum mechanics and following out implications thereof. By connectivity of the paradigmatic internal dynamic informing the global crisis, this cannot seriously happen until the post-period; but it is unlikely to happen even then unless the way is prepared in advance.
Yes, I understand that the Big Boys are not worried about Afghanistan, and therefore they would consider everything said here about not understanding the Viet Nam war to be irrelevant. In point of fact, they are also not really worried about the Iraqi situation, Lebanon, global terrorism, or a few nukes here and there, Iran, North Korea -- considering the magnitude of what is at stake. Their problem, as they see it, is to secure the resource base -- oil in particular -- and deny as much access as possible to their probable adversaries when things go big time, as it is strongly anticipated they will. Big time means concentrations of nukes and delivery capacity that can overwhelm anti-missile defenses known and unknown and unsuspected. Such threats are out there and getting more and more sophisticated. The Little Boy here and there is a nuisance only; could force a choice as to whether or not to reveal the unknown and unsuspected. But we'll manage that. Whatever is required! -- all the while doing the best possible to minimize damage to the global economy for as long as this can be achieved. Alternative energy sources, distribution systems, all the subsidiary product developments, and so on, cannot be brought on line around the planet on a timely basis at a scale sufficient to minimally service exploding demands of six-plus billion consumers and aspiring consumers: no matter how much non-zero talk, this is a zero-sum game, and if we don't secure the limited essential resources someone else will. Many, if not most, renewables, even, by our limited ability to capture them, are limited! Even if the U.S. civil infrastructure could successfully go alternative on a timely basis, this would not secure the non-negotiable American good life unless the U.S. military could similarly go alternative or were able to secure the non-renewables it needs to protect the U.S. from the large part of the world that will not be able to go alternative on a timely basis. Fact, fact, fact. Neocon or no neocon. Bush or no Bush. Clinton or no Clinton. Whomever or no whomever. If the fiat is pulled out from under the liability-financed dollar, that is the beginning of all-out total global war; however the global economy collapses, this is the result: the supreme national security threat which will elicit an end-times response. And the fiat dollar can only maintain confidence if it sets the global agenda, and it can only do that if it secures the necessary resources and denominates transactions in those resources. Woe unto all ye who lose confidence in hot dollars, for verily I say unto you that ye yourself will become hot. Whatever engagement there is with renewables, in context of this larger global conundrum, will be employed primarily as a population management tool. Enlisting the aid of religious and ideological vectors, as required, is only smart fishin'. And low-intensity threats, like terrorism, are of great assistance in managing public sentiment so as to accomplish-- Whatever is required! Consequences of climate change, if there is any reality to them at all, are remote compared to THIS! Insofar as pandemics and natural disasters happen elsewhere and to others, as regrettable as that may be, they are a great help in resolving the larger global problem; of course, we cannot say this, and we will be making our contributions when the plate comes around to overcoming world hunger, AIDS, world pain, and so on and so on… See, I contest this assessment. A fatal error has been made under a set of compulsions, an error that will prevent adequate levels of performance when things go big time, and which, ultimately, will have produced the Achilles Heel that will catch the arrow.
I am not that kind of literalist. I don't believe the Bible is the actual Bible any more than I believe the Vedas are the actual Vedas: speaking in tongues, a downgrading of Musculpt-Gematria. What else does speaking in tongues say? If the Bible were the Bible, why would there be a need for speaking in tongues? Take Pat Rob for your pet rock. Personifying the impersonable: concretizing lateral mental cleavage. Structuralize the ghost in the machine, the Holy Ghost? Whose mandate is that? Christ or AntiChrist? UpQuark or DownQuark? Damaging the brain not contained by the brain: literally. I'm that kind of literalist. The real Bible could not be spoken or written in any speakable-language-type language, any more than the real Veda could be put into poetry, even mantric poetry -- regardless of how universal the universal grammars that are Hebrew and/or Sanskrit. Quantum wave properties of superconductant DNA, first-order temporal curl, DNA nebula, double-helical feeder bands to tornadoes and comets, spiral-banded hurricanes and galaxies: actual Conveyors of the Unspeakable, of the unspoken Word that is the Word. Speakers, what Speakers, speakers of what? And whose Gift of Interpretation? Something heard? A Personal Vocation? In the Impersonable? Before baptism, and I was baptized, my childhood catechism was religiously received, week after week, I remember it still, sitting there in Evangelical Grace Reformed Dutch Calvinist insurgency: in a red brick church right off the square which is a circle in Greencastle. Still there, that church, that square, that circle, that castle. At that time, one kind of personal end time, I was a Sleepwalker. Know what that means? How does a Sleepwalker see? A seeing of the Seeing? Cones and photismic dots? As far as I know, my first ancestor on the father's side to Arrive, arrived in south-central Pennsylvania just in time for the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Attempting to state the Church, and attempting to state the Church again in the Second Great Awakening: necessary preliminaries to megaChurching the state. Being a Primitivist (by virtue of primitive-Shinto exposures, 1953-6, Midori Gaoka, Verdant Hill, another green mansion in a Land of Lotta Rain), I've been writing about this all along: what are deautomatization and re-automatization, if not about organizational vigor? Sectarian insurgency by schisms. Brain not contained by the brain, in projection. An inerrant errand into biblical inerrancy over outer darkness, the wilderness of the black sea of the unconscious one is baptismally submerged in. That amnion, that of Ma. For camp followers it's like that: Holiness upon the Land, awaiting dispensational reruns in the theater of fervor, in the cinema of zeal. Advents, Advents, so many Advents. Anti-family and anti-father. Testament :: scripture; convention :: congregation; self-revelation :: fellowship; criticism :: self-criticism. Disestablishmentarianism (deautomatization) become Restorationist (re-automatization): mistaking transdenominationalism for Abel transcendentalism. A Personal Vision upon the Rainy Mountain overlooking Greencastle: my mother learned to drive a milk truck on that mountain overarching dairyland: literally. Thereabouts, Elmer gathered at the Grange, made the camp meetings, itinerant roan that he was, in the revivals rider of the wave, circuiting the Tent, a dechurching, deschooling, carnie preachin', Bible thumpin', B-believer, calling for rain, Latter Rain. Waiting for Godot, Advent of autogenic brain discharge, cataclysm of rain dots. Go dot: quantum dot, Kusama dot, Lal-Ded dot. End time is not in time; it's the end of memetime in shakin', quakin', jerkin', swayin', swoonin', poundin', rockin' the Third Wave, third-order temporal curl charismatically rained upon the Rainy Mountain, a salvation, a rapture in the Holy Spirit, a spirit still in Ghost of the brain not contained by the brain, not structuralized by lateral mental cleavage of the brain contained by the brain. Dunkers getting slam-dunked. In-Here, not out-there. Done out-there by personified transference, there is no In-Here for the Dunker to dunk.
The religious dimension is a gloss, RiverCity Snakeoil spread like clear varnish by the White Shirts. Those against economic globalization -- right, left, or center -- have been globalizing glosses for several incarnations. If America has made a religion out of the lost cause -- saving institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm -- this has long been well lit in global wish-fulfillment: Mahikari, light of sacred space. Reformationalism cannot be separated from Reconstructionalism cannot be separated from Summationalism (the summation of forces sacred to Isaac, John, and Adam, uh, Newton, Locke, and Smith). Obviously, the details differ from place to place, religion to religion, race to race, but onset of fundamentalisms was a global phenomenon which transpired universally around the planet at roughly the same memetime: pre-WWI. World War One! Any PreTribRapt-type who is still here missed the pretribulation rapture, has been left behind to the mercy of googolplexic best sellers, and is dependent on TJ's (Terminator Jesus) dispensation (in this case, a waiver) to make selection for post-tribulation rapture. Jonestowning it through the Kool-Aid Acid Test into Heaven's Gate: no Baggy for me! Camp Meeting in the Air, right here, uh, right there! See it? Not seven Earth-solar years, Seven Years of God vouchsafed the 7th Sun Day People. Rollover, you'll see it, see it in theocratic makeover. This is explicit to any covenanting corpus, congregation, sacralizing housing development, exurb micropolis subject to a covenanting God of local covenants or global covenants, Fertile Crescent or no, megachurched or not. Buddha on the dashboard next to Christ on the dashboard, drivin' one hand clapping while the other gives-light/takes-light to-and-from sacred space. Whose in the rear window; who's in the glove compartment; who in the trunk; whom under the bonnet? So, any particular history can't account for it: not only Christianity and Islam, but Buddhism has its Second Coming expectation. Probably others. Then there is Next Year in Jerusalem, understood a confederated conurbation with conflicting covenants, no longer a spiritual state of consciousness being in the world under a Dispensationalism revealing regulatory commandments and promises etched in stone received in rigid wooden Literalism. Hardheaded to ya! Hard on ya! Geez! Always tryin' to piss in someone's pocket, aren't ya? The one gospel, the four Gospels, or six? Ain't no Ecumenicalism. Whose Jerusalem is this, yours or mine? Whose Greater Serbia, yours or mine? Whose Greater China, yours or mine? Pipelineistan, Zionipipe, or Hookahville? A plumber's nightmare as screensaver, dreamsaver, screamsaver. How many have the functional equivalent of that? Evangelicalism is not identical to Fundamentalism, be the fundamentalism tied to political extremism (fringe or become mainstream) or not, politic or no. And they, them fundamentalisms, all got lit by literalism pre-WWI: anti-psychological, anti-symbolic, anti-intellectual, anti-mod (be the modern deemed science; allopathy; modan garu modern girl; pre-, post-, neo-Darwinian or Darwinian evolution by killer and suicide genes; Miss May-I-Mount-You; ethology of bonobos; designer labels; non-televangelistic TV; internet porn: what have you). Sitting on Stevengraphs in a stew, ragin' 'bout rubbish theory. Longing for the past: the Vietnamese put this to music as the exquisite vong co series of falling tones: what we need, yes NEED, what we need, yes, is the German that Falls Well! Peace, no adddddddmonition! Addulation, no anaaaaaaaaathema! It's a brotheration, a brotheration, Sisters! Come to me. Draaaaaaw together for the Advent and the Ascension. All together now, do-re-me!
And why was this, is this, do you think? Clingers adopt clinging behaviors out of mortification, mostly. The exemplary genocides, slaveries, colonialisms, civil wars -- those most in memory today, most PTSDed, most flashbacked -- were not pre-Columbian; they were New World, New Jerusalem, post-Renaissance: Zionic. Why do you think the flashback had to be innovated in art fiction? And why has it always been anathema to populists -- socialist realists or non-conservationist conservatives? People got squelched; they got stomped, stuffed and snuffed; and as they did, they got more and more stumped, and then went on the stump. And when the Old Physics -- which was bad enough -- got replaced with the New Physics -- My God! -- who could understand it? It was mortifying, just mortifying. And over there, over there in Chyner and Babylon, they was just trying to get their heads around Newton and his Industrialism -- still are. Quenched by the quantum: who needs that? The physicists asked that, too. And that's why they conspired with the chemists to keep it out of stereochemistry. And before them, the mathematicians, all the way back through all the impossibility theorems. If the mathematicians and then the physicists dissimulated it, wouldn't let it wreck their Umwelt, then how could we be expected to allow it to rob us of our way of life, our culture, our beliefs -- especially when nobody can understand it? Bunk! They don't even understand it, so I am going to change my life? Not on your life! But the advent, the anathema, the real botheration, the unassimilateable fundamental pre-WWI trauma did not transpire in physics; it transpired in logic, Polish logic. This was the most ununderstandable ununderstandable of all the ununderstandables! Not only did this bring my identity into question, and our identity; but the very idea of identity itself was challenged, as if identity was presupposed, or somethin', and not GGed, God-Given. Doubt, yes, that is evil, the real evil. Identity an axiom! Got that? A postulation to be challenged by just any ol' Einstein. Humph! And not only did this Polish logic undercut more than 2000 years of Western understanding; the same for the Near East, the Far East, the Southeast and the Reareast. Even Chinese logic was not so slanted as this Polish stew. Chinese logic where the female can turn into the male and the male can turn into the female, at least has a male and a female, whereas Polish logic… In Chyner, if the dog comes in the cat goes out. Now there's a mighty lot a sense to that. What I can't understand is how a good Catholic nation can produce something like, like… This innovation in the first years of the 20th century was pandemically worldview destroying; every culture on the planet succumbed to the flu sooner or later. One couldn't breathe! One couldn't swallow! The Collective Unconscious is like that when a Dispensation is violated by its Congregation. Take my Church of the Earth Ministered by One to the cleaners, and smote will you be! Thus sayeth Compensatory Abreaction.
If, like C's generative UG (Universal Grammar), God is a gene (The God Gene by Dean Hamer, Doubleday, 2004), then Kazantzakis' proclamation “Man must save God!” begins to make a lot of sense, particularly in view of recombinant DNA technology, Saviors from Genetic Disease, pigmatoes, humice, fishumbers, and the like. And when the Fathers of Dolly get bored with using sheep and turn their attentions to combining the God gene with the AntiChrist gene-- wHolyMoly! This is not only possible, but likely, for if God is a gene, then religion surely can't be the opiate of the people, no mere receptor or neurotransmitter; it must be a genetic disease, and the Saviors from Genetic Disease are sure to cross the AntiChrist gene with the God gene so as to alter morphology of the Church by way of getting at the pathogenic etiology. It seems mighty strange to me, though, that God should be just one gene among all the rest. And what about the Son and what about the Holy Ghost? Maybe the Trinity is in triplets -- CAT TAG -- over the genetic code, not in this or that gene? No mere animal noises! The Word was spoken as UG -- Hebrew, certainly not Sanskrit -- and form, the Body, the world, followed the Word: ontic, not deontic. Obligatory :: forbidden; permitted :: unlawful. Dominion, not domain. Dominion implies God; domain, well… such passivity! I certainly don't want to get SRA/MACV-J2 involved in psychoanalyzing religion like R&A/OSS did: Love's Body and Eros and Civilization. Not to mention the progenitor: Civilization and It's Discontents. Both understudies of Freud spent WWII in OSS. Nonetheless, it is quite clear that just like John Nash's personal anima-in-projection went into hallucination as a result of suppression, no mere sublimation, so in pretribulation rapture when Christ returns to Heaven betrothed to the Bride, isn't this a description of how the cosmic Anima Mundi goes into hallucination as the Church? And what about Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass whereupon the Bride gets stripped bare? Isn't that a CCC -- Catholic Christian Cabala -- formulation of Dispensationalism, whereby the hallucination becomes purified within the Greater Maze of the UG? How can a structure that has become little more than a urinal be restored unless first put on display to public ridicule? 1913, The Armory Show, appropriately; and when were the basic laws of fundamentalism promulgated? Restorationalism is an inchurchency employing architectonics of C's generative UG to inform religiopolitical insurgency so as to get the genetic hymnal of the state in tune with the form of His Kingdom: insofar as one is in the form of Heaven, one is in Heaven. This was the original mandate manifest in the Declaration which would have been embodied in the Constitution if not for Federalist scalawags. Why can't they apply the organizational knowledge of the inchurchency -- deconstructing reconstruction -- more successfully in Iraq? That is the Mission which is the only mission.
Absolutely. There can be no doubt that the greatest threat to life on this planet is religious fundamentalism -- be it Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever stripe. It was the fundamentalists, remember, who were responsible for creating and using the atomic bomb, and holding planet Earth hostage to nuclear Armageddon for over half a century. And it was the Old Order Amish, like the family currently working my ancestral farm in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, who are most responsible for inducing climate change. Can we doubt that fundamentalists of some sort are behind the trashing of thousands and thousands and thousands of genomes by now -- all under the unproven assumption that quantum biochemical changes of DNA induced by arbitrary recombinant stereochemical changes in DNA have no significant biological effects, and certainly could have nothing to do with pandemiology or… Design for a Brain? Wasn't that a famous book in the evolution of cybernetics? Yes, there is a fundamentalist behind every pillar of science. These fundamentalist fanatics were especially responsible for corrupting big science with big money, one can be certain of that. And their missions pushed the roads through the jungles of Darkest Africa to let the monkeys out to cause AIDS. They probably even made hot auroras as some kind of religious stunt, a misconceived postmodernist praising of God. Indeed, the list of things gone wrong on this planet is very long and behind every one of them you can find hiding a religious fundamentalist. I'm sure it was such a fanatic who in 1826 took Abel's possibility demonstration about mathematics transcendental to algebra and turned it into The Impossibility Theorem. And the same sort of people misinterpreted Schrödinger's timeless quantum wave-function as probabilities just so they could hang onto the certainty of time evolution to heat death. How can you get more identified with End Times than that? No question of embracing science or not; it's a question of acquiescing or not to falsified science. Only a fundamentalist could have pointed that out. And a fundamentalist, surely, had to have come up with the notion of a black hole. How else understand Heaven's Gate, that entry portal to the star-gate corridor through which congregational transport will be conducted during pretribulation rapture? Do you know that in the Gnostic Gospels they talk about traveling to other worlds through the sun? Being… well, certainly not John Malkovich. That had to be the origin of the black hole idea. What I'd like to know is who caused the fundamentalists. Not those egghead mathematicians and scientists walking through glass doors. You can be sure of that. Too preoccupied to be responsible for anything as fundamental as the fundamentalists.
The point of all this… I know only what I read as to the scale of the South and North American holocaust and slavery. What slaveholder possessed more slaves than the Catholic Church? What several hundred had a higher kill ratio than the initial Christian conquistadores? Who pillaged and plundered more relentlessly? My point is that the psychology of this and the psychology of the Rapture are the same psychology, if the latter having gone through a Reformation: an assault on the non-simple identity resident in the pagan, the animistic, the quantal. The Seventh Dispensation is again Nazification by globalization of debt indemnity, and the Rapture is self-holocaust and self-genocide in lieu of the experience of non-simple identity. And this psychology is presently in possession of an Einsteinian scale of destructive capacity. At cusp, Abel, Cantor, Lukasiewicz, and Schrödinger will continue to be kept at bay by an Einsteinian Rapture, and the classical limit in the Earth's atmosphere will be reinforced by a climate shift dynamic resolved to nuclear winter. “No one Left Behind!” say the U.S. Army of Somalia and the IDF of Lebanon. You can say that again.
The truth of the matter is that none of the players and few if any of those who benefit care a hoot about the larger consequences of what is transpiring. This is not to say they do not do whatever they can to maintain the good opinion they have of themselves. Often, those most critical of the excesses of the status quo live exclusively and affluently off unearned income derived there from: capital gains, dividends, rents, interest -- and invest in the instruments thereof, land, houses, commercial buildings, options, futures, derivatives; few if any investments in actual productive enterprise. Psychology they have of the leech sucking on its own tail. Why does Warren Buffett, a critic of financial derivatives, simply hand over his enormous discretionary funds to the Gates Foundation, rather than use the money to find ways general externalities (like those Bill Gates and Sting try to Band-Aid), social adjustments costs, environmental impacts, and the like can be strategically gamed and submitted to market processing? I submit this reason: Fear of quantal non-simple identity and its m-valued, Schrödingerian, Lukasiewiczian logics! The same reason Microsoft Corporation has chosen “quantum” computing R&D approaches designed to make traditional-logic processing faster, rather than to make actual m-logically-valued quantum processors.
One could produce pages of qualifications, reservations, caveats, albeit this and albeit that -- nonetheless, the East is rising, no doubt about it; but it is a body politic sitting up in a coffin, a casket that is the once-great biosphere of planet Earth. Late comers to the scientific paradigm singing a castrato’s hymn will not long harvest rice upon it. One-hundred years after the culminating event, people still don't understand the actual prevailing circumstance, or the degree to which mathematics and science have self-falsified -- and any attempted approach to comprehension is immediately cut off or conflated to millenarian apocalyptic hysteria by those blinkered if not blinded by emotional commitments to 17th and 18th century thought. The definitive marker on the collective psyche is the coming into existence of transfinitely-m-valued logics: since the last Ice Age, nothing of comparable magnitude has transpired. Virtually without exception, members of the human species, East and West, are nearly one-hundred percent psychologically identified with the tacit logical conventions through which they process their experience. They virtually never get out of this state of identification. These largely subliminal conventions are rooted in 2-valued logic -- be the logic oppositional, as in the Western truth-value case; or rotational, as in the Chinese yin-yang case -- and have been so rooted since at least the first singers of the Vedas. Moreover, infinite regress has been universally regarded a logical fallacy, not only in the West, but also in the East: Sankaracarya and the Nyi-ma promulgators of Tzog-chen being exemplary cases. Ever since rise of role stratification in tribal cultures, selfhood of the human experiencer in normative states of consciousness never leaves identification with the tacitly-given logical conventions, and there is no religious tradition, including Tibetan Buddhism, which carries more than dim evidence of having authentically transcended these conventions. But these logical conventions determining panhuman self-definition/reality-conception for millennia and millennia were massively superseded in the first decades of the 20th century: the logics of Nature -- embodied, for instance, in severe storm and climate dynamics of the Earth's atmosphere, no less than the quantum-wave properties of superconductant p-electron gas core of DNA -- are transfinitely-m-valued. This unacknowledged juxtaposition of logics -- 2-valued psychological identification vs. transfinitely-m-valued Nature -- is the defining property of the prevailing planetary crisis and currently raging pandemic collective psychosis; no more profound an existential denial could have been issued to humanity by Nature. Dead species walking… unless something profoundly “illogical” is undertaken yesterday.
Why, forgodsake, do you think I have for thirty-five years been advocating development and implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units; employment of computer gaming of multiple scenarios strategic planning as the basis for an electronic commons to tag indicators to the m-logical values of nested currency bases; transformation of multimedia into holographic Musculpt for posting the frequency correlates of the nested currency bases (no mere “Elliot wave theory”); getting Musculpt into a biofeedback-equipped sensory-isolation environment wherein humans can learn to “hear” and “speak” in the m-logically-valued and m-valued-variable-valence of the sonic-visioning system employed by dolphins and whales Gregory Bateson and John C. Lilly tried unsuccessfully to explore; developing the gardening, dance, art-music composition, plastic-art formalism, architecture design-system systematic, and fabric weaving-system and smart-garment fiber-optic laser-enhanced cosmographic, and so on and so on orientations required to generate non-selfsame m-logically-valued metaculture from a multitude of conflicted and murderous and warring concrete selfsame 2-logically-valued cultures claiming a selfsame universe properly codified by their worldview and only their worldview; taking psychoneuroimmunology out of stereochemistry and only stereochemistry and into a homeopathy taken out of 2-logically-valued digitalized frequency signatures (digibio: got that getting rid of such self-limitations of the whole?) into the superposed m-logically-valued quantum wave signatures they actually are; and et cetera, and et cetera, and et cetera? Not even to mention double-helical first-order temporal curl transposing between electromagnetic and gravitational waves; superconductant DNA; double-helical feeder bands to tornadoes, hurricanes, comets; and double-helical DNA-type nebular feeder bands to spiral-banded Milky Way Galactic Center. LOOK AT THIS: Scientific American MIND, Volume 17, No. 3, June/July 2006: “Beyond the Neuron Doctrine: New experiments are settling a century-long debate between two camps over how neurons communicate; the surprise: both sides are right” by R. Douglas Fields. What the article doesn’t describe is how mindsets like those cultivated by Scientific American saw to it, throughout the period in question, that publication and funding were denied, careers were destroyed, minds were destroyed, lives were destroyed, and that the species, the biosphere, indeed, the planet en masse, has suffered grievously, and much of it may not even survive, specifically because of this SUPPRESSION and consequent regression. It's not science per se at fault; it's the infrapsychology of scientists! Quoting page 26:
To the neuron doctrine we now must add the glia doctrine: glia are equal partners in information processing.
The big change in perspective took place during “the early 1990s” according to Fields' account. He goes on to discuss collective and cooperative coherent behavior of neurons, in part orchestrated by glial broadcasting of signals, which he compares to cell phones but discusses in terms of stereochemical signaling, while mentioning ephaptic frequency modulation. He assiduously avoids using the proper quantum parlance, terms like “long-range phase correlation” and “superposition”. That the study of collective and cooperative coherent critical behavior, with its clocks within clocks within clocks, is, essentially, quantum mechanics goes unmentioned. During 1977, I was communicating with Robert O. Becker on this exact subject incorporated into a paper on autogenic brain discharges I presented to The International College of Psychosomatic Medicine that year in Kyoto, Japan. The subject was not whether or not the glial and Schwann cells engage in wave-effect processing and communication -- that neuroglial analog data system notion was a twenty-year-old conclusion of Becker by so late as 1977, a fact, for all the obvious reasons, not mentioned in the review article produced by R. Douglas Fields -- but whether or not critical-state collective and cooperative coherent superconductant wave-effect processing by intraneuronal and intraperineural (i.e., neuroglia centrally, Schwann cells peripherally) mitochondrial DNA is instrumental in release of ATP and how this is involved in: [1] genetics of the cell; and [2] psychoneuroimmunology; and [3] under what conditions loss of immune competency can transpire as one result of disturbance of the component processes. And, of course, how acupuncture points, as quantal physical-region singularities, likely are involved. But it was just at this very moment that Becker's research funding was being decisively cut off, and it was at this very moment that Carl Sagan was attempting to create a Science Court to try and sentence scientists who stray from the mainstream, while at Cornell specifically, through every sort of back channel, he was doing whatsoever in his power to terminate further research in dynamic meteorology which applied the quantum and relativity theories to the Earth's atmosphere, in violation of an assumed “classical limit”, research out of which, by analogy, the mathematical model of superconductant DNA being discussed with Becker had emerged. Sagan, a peer and once-friend of John C. Lilly, had earlier played a similar role in destruction of that body of research. How else does a scientist who produces very little original science reach pinnacles of consensus science? Very soon thereafter, all aspects of all this research were shut down. The underlying physics of the quantum-relativistic model of double-helical feeder-band-driven tornado genesis, once run on NASA's largest mainframes, was never published; the closest reach to such an outcome was publication of the superconductant DNA model! And that by something of a fluke. Now, thirty years later, in a dozen fields, the perspectives then being intensively explored are without direct connection again emerging in many of the same words, with much the same mathematics -- without, however, m-valued logic being explicit, as fundamentals in quantum mechanics continue to be dissimulated, for all the usual psychopathic reasons. And in the meantime -- the past thirty years -- a whole industry based on the mistaken assumption that the be all and end all in genetics is non-quantum stereochemistry, and that there is no such thing as a quantum biochemistry of psychoneuroimmunology in general, despite the work of Albert von Nagyrapolt Szent-Györgyi and others of similar mind who early on developed basics of a submolecular biology, still -- amazing grace! -- being attacked by Big Pharma over Linus Pauling's take on electron transport chains and oxygen in vitamins, or that there is a psychoneuroimmunology, in particular, of pandemics like AIDS or autoimmune diseases like SLE (the subject of my initial communications with Wolfgang Luthe, leading to the paper presentation in Kyoto because of synchronicity with immensely confirmatory research on SLE then being conducted at Tokyo University about which I could have had no knowledge -- all of which has long since been lost to the infra-psychological fog of science warfare). Also, during this same period, thirty years of response time to a climate shift dynamic inevitable since the 1950s has been lost to mindsets that foment Science Court hysterias and create “Off the Beat” columns in popular science journals to manipulate the public neurosis by now become a collective psychosis under orchestration of such psychologically regressive black propaganda onslaughts. Think about my statement that raised your hackles:
This unacknowledged juxtaposition of logics -- 2-valued psychological identification vs. transfinitely-m-valued Nature -- is the defining property of the prevailing planetary crisis and currently raging pandemic collective psychosis; no more profound an existential denial could have been issued to humanity by Nature.
No government, and no collection of governments, and no supra-national agglomeration of governments can possibly resolve this. Why? Because the prevailing collective hysterias will prevent any such governmental efforts from being adequately undertaken. And the collective hysterias are going to get far, far worse than they presently are. Hysterias haven't even reached World-War-Two level yet; and they are sure to go well beyond that. This means that only strategically-placed individuals can do anything significant. Yet, it is no surprise that the individual with the greatest access to discretionary funds is an individual who made his money off exploiting psychological identification with 2-valued logic: the founder of Microsoft Corporation. And it is no further surprise that Bill Gates has recently decided to put his money into development of a vaccination for AIDS. How very much his recent decision is an expression of his earlier exploitation! And how very little is the likelihood such an individual will significantly contribute to resolution of what most needs to be resolved! Even if a successful vaccine were to be created, it would simultaneously be a major factor in genesis of the next big pandemic! And Warren Buffett, who for two decades has been calling credit derivatives a “time bomb”, hands over several score billion dollars to the discretion of the individual already with the greatest access to discretionary funds who is unlikely to significantly contribute to resolution of what most needs to be resolved! Buffett does this “pyramiding” -- rather than himself taking responsibility to address the “time bomb”, a potential nuclear detonation, he has long since identified, which, in principle, can only be adequately addressed by development and implementation of an m-logically-valued monetary system -- for what reason? Resonance with Gates' 2-valued values, which are derivative of Gates' personal psychological identification with the selfsame identity state expressing tacit conventions of 2-valued logic, the logic used to write the Microsoft software which reinforces disconnection between the m-logically-valued quantum brain not contained by the brain and the non-quantum 2-logically-valued brain contained by the brain. Imposing constraints of 2-logically-valued software on m-logically-valued psychoneuroimmunology of human brain-immune function could not have had anything, anything, that is anything whatsoever, to do with the depression of anti-viral immunity which allowed HIV to establish its pathogenic foothold (this being the least that can be said, and was said by 1977, on this subject). That would just be too, too uncanny a self-referential paradox (like those at the basis of m-valued logics)! RNA viruses are matters of stereochemistry and only stereochemistry. Get away from me with your quantum-this, quantum-that! Get away from your 2-logically-valued psychological identification, don't you mean? What else is your simply-identifiable “me”? Moreover, Microsoft Corporation has chosen to approach quantum computing in just such a way -- make 2-logically-valued processing faster -- as to reinforce Bill Gates' recent decision about how to approach AIDS which is an expression of his earlier exploitation which generated his discretionary funds which he plans to use to attack the very thing which he contributed so much to creation of -- self-referentially speaking, which is to speak in m-logical values: which is to say which, which, which, which… Buffett naively buys into all this Gatesianism -- which is an expression of his career history, as he has specialized in buying-into. And this Buffettetic Gatesianism was all prefigured by deeds of the relatively impoverished George Soros. Soros had intercourse with m-valued logics in his youth and developed his approach to the market thereupon; but in his old age, long after making and disporting with the money thus made, has no time for m-logically-valued monetary units. Truthfully, someone worth several billion dollars does not need to have time; he only needs someone in his global organization who has time, and can report back to him. A billionaire without time is an oxymoron, and oxymorons reflect psychological predispositions which are states of identification -- in this case with 2-valued logic, the same identification suffered by Gates and Buffett. So, no help here amongst these strategically-placed individuals with the task of adequately addressing fundaments of the prevailing catastrophe. And why do you think the collective hysterias are going to get far, far worse than they presently are, far worse than the World-War-Two level? Because, for one, and there are many more than one, World War IV -- already upon us, depending upon how you want to count -- is a psycho-cultural war (“Clausewitz and World War IV” by Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, Ret., Armed Forces Journal, July 2006) according to a former U.S. Army War College commander and Deputy Chief of Staff for Doctrine reviewing recent academic thought on Clausewitz, which has very far to go to catch up with the non-academic thought on Clausewitz produced at SRA/MACV-J2 in 1968. And who, what person, was a strategically-placed non-governmental individual with regard to adequately addressing the psycho-cultural aspects of insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare transiting to world war in the immediate post-Vietnam-war era? Why Oriana Fallaci, of course, with her exposure in Viet Nam, all her cultural connections, her correct political orientation, her childhood experience in the Resistance, her being a female, and her psychological sophistication. But this consummate interviewer, who could have facilitated genesis of m-logically-valued metaculture, the only way to overcome collective psychopathic need for psycho-cultural world war, never discovered the right questions to ask. And not for lack of opportunity. Had, on one of the many times she walked out of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan's office at National Police Headquarters in Saigon, she turned left, rather than right, walked to the end of the hall and down the back steps to the floor below, she would have been in presence of approximately a dozen Special Branch analysts who in an hour could have opened a whole world she never managed to entertain awareness of the existence of. Of course, the sandalwood incense burned in Loan's office was enough to becloud anyone's mind.
It's still mighty embarrassing to read in the news the attributed quotes and summaries thereof from the experts. Speaking of Hizbullah in the recent Lebanon conflict, we have (“Eye For An Eye” by Kevin Peraino, et al., Newsweek, 14 August, 2006, p. 13):
“Their strategy is a strategy of disappearance,” says an Israeli military official… “They are well prepared for this kind of invasion. [But] we are much stronger than them. We can bring a much greater force than they can deal with.”
In Viet Nam, when POLOB (political order of battle) analysts were still trying -- before finally giving up -- to explain to OB (order of battle) analysts that there is a very big difference between “force” and “capability” -- especially in irregular, insurgency, and low-intensity warfare -- the OB types always claimed that they had always understood this distinction and that they never failed to factor this understanding into their assessments. The truth is, however, that there never was any evidence of that understanding in the OB analysts' assessments, their casual remarks, the strategies and tactics they advocated. When a combatant chooses to display force, to rely exclusively or primarily on application of force, when it is well understood, even by the involved combatant, that such display and reliance insures ultimate failure, then the POLOB analyst finds himself becoming a PSYOB (psychological order of battle) analyst and, upon reaching insight, gives up trying to influence the OB types who, clearly, for psychopathic reasons, are beyond influence. In Viet Nam, that point came in 1967 as the enemy strength estimates controversy reached cusp. After that, the POLOB types become PSYOB types continued their studies, but pretty much in an observer-only role: no use trying to prevent the unpreventable.
Even more embarrassing is the American equivalent to Israeli expertise (“New era of war, and U.S. isn't ready” by Thom Shanker, International Herald Tribune, 31 July 2006, pp. 1 & 4):
…the United States is studying the conflict [in Lebanon] closely for lessons to apply to its own wars. Military planners suggest that the Pentagon take a page out of Hezbollah's book about small-unit, agile operations as U.S. forces battle insurgents and cells in Iraq and Afghanistan…
And quoting John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School:
“This proves the growing strength of networks as a threat to American national security.” In a talk that Arquilla calls Net Warfare 101, he describes how traditional militaries are organized in a strict hierarchy, from generals down to privates. In contrast, networks flatten the command structure. They are distributed, dispersed, agile, mobile, improvisational.
In summary, after itemizing the supposed factors of Hezbollah's surprising success in Lebanon, Shanker says:
Critical to the U.S. response, military officers and academic experts say, is that the United States acknowledge that it takes a network to fight a network. U.S. intelligence agencies and the military proved they can fight this kind of war, as it did in Afghanistan to rout Al Qaeda, when intelligence officers and small groups of army Special Forces personnel worked with local fighters to call in devastating airstrikes and drive the Taliban from power.
Is the example given regarding employment of Special Forces FOs (forward observers) and BDAs (bomb damage assessment) types truly, inarguably, a case of a network taking on a network? And is the network at issue actually a network of combatants as the brief summary of Arquilla's Net Warfare 101 implies? The OB analyst would undoubtedly say, “Yes!” The POLOB analyst would surely scratch his head and observe, “Seems to me Arquilla is offering Net War 010.”
Yes, there are reasons why so little insight into the political-infrastructure-dynamics dimension exists. As discussed somewhat in MOON, these reasons are revealed, for instance, by the post-WWII institutional history of psychological operations in the U.S. Army -- not this or that operation run, but evolution of the involved institutions vis-à-vis those used to mount special ops. Lacuna over our bureaucracy! not theirs (whomsoever “their” in a particular case). Civil Affairs. Got that? Two Special Warfare Center levies for Viet Nam picked up my name for reassignment to Civil Affairs units there. Being something of a “PFC Wintergreen”, I got off those levies. Why? Because of studies in the JFK Special Warfare Center Library on the classified history of institutionalization of psyops -- being assigned, as I then was, having left Special Forces Training Group, to Psychological Operations Group. Answers to lots of questions addressed to returnees told me I wanted to be in one of two places in Viet Nam: in the field, Technical Intelligence Detachment, TID/525th MIG, Military Intelligence Group; in Saigon, SRA/MACV-J2, Strategic Research and Analysis, the INTEL staff at MACV Headquarters (i.e., POLOB, political order of battle, renamed and relocated by the revanchist in command of the command position on strategic issues). These were the two critical points in the U.S. apparat for learning what I wanted to learn. Forget Civil Affairs, which was and is utterly irrelevant: yesterday's spatula. I was lucky enough -- with effort -- to visit both critical points. But why the lacuna over our bureaucracy exists is more complicated, I think, than just waning of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, as you suggest. People, many people, have long known, if only vaguely, that post-Cartesian and post-Newtonian thought deeply challenges their assumptions, their values, their institutions, their aspirations for their children, their world, their very notion of self; that's why they so oppose Relativism and all the rest. What they don't quite understand is that they can't possibly come up with a viable political dynamic in the conflict zone because the paradigm they operate under has been irrevocably eclipsed. Creativity is paradigm-dependent. And if the paradigm you work with is yesterday's unconscious vector, well… you just ain't gunna generalize into an effective new political vision. This situation has been getting worse and worse since WWI. There is some understanding of this, vague as it may be. What isn't understood is that the psychological incapacity to process this circumstance, and hence to objectively respond to it, all but guarantees there will be no unbroken brick left behind in wake of the inescapable transition. Fact, fact, fact. On the ground, and not to be doubted. Who produced the post-Cartesian and the post-Newtonian? Those societies that will be most superseded. That's the most damnable thing about it, what most cannot be processed. And the more those societies refuse insight, the smaller will be the pieces of brick left behind, and the greater the megakill psychological refusal perpetrates.
I'm decades past being interested in this phenomenon -- inability to understand political order of battle, POLOB -- in and of itself; it's the implications of this generalized inability relative to fundamentals of much broader issues that capture my attention these days. Even insightful and highly-trained -- e.g., academic specialist -- critics, of those who everywhere see hierarchical forms of organization, don't themselves see political order of battle with anything remotely like insight. I quote here Michael Schwartz, a sociology professor at Stony Brook, criticizing the global-Phoenix-Program penchant for leadership decapitation based on a mistaken command-and-control assessment of the organizational framework of the Iraqi-AQ&A opposition (“'Going to War With the Army You Have': Why the U.S. Cannot Correct Its Military Blunders in Iraq; The Latest American Theory about the Iraqi Resistance”, TomDispatch.com, 5 March 2005):
Guerrilla armies hide by melting into the local population. (Everyone knows this, including, of course, American military men.) To defeat them, an occupying force must have the intelligence to identify guerrillas who can disappear into the civilian world; and it must station troops throughout resistance strongholds in order to pounce upon guerrillas when they emerge from hiding to mount an attack. American military strategists know this, too. But these lessons -- painfully drawn from Vietnam -- can't be implemented by the army that Donald Rumsfeld sent to war.
Though the earlier critique of the Phoenix-plus-C&C-mindset is astute, this statement is bunk. To begin with, “guerrilla armies” is a haywire term. To put this perspective into conversation with… so as to get at the semantic, epistemological, and performative… Ha-ha-ha! Gotya! Thought I was going off into a little postmodernist deconstructionist poststructuralist digression on autopoiesis, didn't you? Journey into the text of insurgency warfare: reading the IED as a religious document! Nonetheless, there is a whole host of subtleties that would have to be addressed, were this subject to be intelligently explored. Guerrillas, for instance, aren't actually insurgents -- no matter what OSS graduates like S. Alsop may have thought. Why? Because these two subsets of “the opposition” experience their entire psychological, social, political, economic “location” differently; they establish cultural habitus incommensurately. Mao's guerrillas were not Mao's insurgents. And Mao's army was not Mao's guerrillas: the three were in everyway non-comparable. Just as RF-PFs (Ruff-Puffs) were not guerrillas in RVN; no more than were the LF-RF units of the VC (Local Forces and Regional Forces). Ruff-Puffs tried (talk to their SF advisors) to be GVN constabulary-militia like the National Police FFs (Field Forces); whilst the VC's LF-RF units were authentic insurgents because organized and supported in the requisite fashion. Nor was the NVNese PLA, which was an army, even if a people's army, a “guerrilla army”. But this, though accurate, is little more than polemics -- given how deep the subject actually is; the real reason Schwartz's statement is bunk is that the two ways he itemizes to defeat “guerrilla armies” won't defeat “guerrilla armies”, especially if such “armies” are actual authentic insurgents: [1] better intelligence on the guerrillas, hopefully gathered from the civil population; [2] sufficiently extensive garrisoning and persistent pouncing. Why? Well, for one, insurgents don't win by being successful at doing what “guerrilla armies” do: deploying combatants. Insurgents win by deploying non-combatants in ever increasingly sophisticated forms of self-organization. If that subverts your notion of civil law, common law, Roman law, law-in-capital capital-in-law, anti-genocide and anti-holocaust proclamatio naming and blaming behaviors… well, the nature of things really doesn't care so much for your prescriptions and proscriptions. And if you are set on flat management as an explanation, ask yourself what is and what is not flat managed, and at what stage in global liberation war (the human species having transcended national liberation war, even if autopsies on people's war were prematurely ejaculated by the policy-company elite). Combatant actions are undertaken primarily to facilitate non-combatant deployment and organizational phase transitions. So, counterinsurgents, if they are to win the insurgent-counterinsurgent dimension of the war, must do better at what insurgents do than the insurgents themselves do. Which isn't a mere matter of intelligence gathering, garrisoning and pouncing; it's a matter of the self-organization of non-combatants, a very complex matter, indeed. Creation of the institutions of constitutional democracy is not what insurgents do. So, no matter how successfully the counterinsurgent creates such institutions, the counterinsurgent is not doing better than the insurgent at what the insurgent does: hence, the insurgent-counterinsurgent dimension of the war is not being won by the counterinsurgent. The GVN, for instance, elaborately had those institutions for two decades, if in rather sham form like so many other democracies one could name, all the while losing the war ever more thoroughly. Not only were these institutions irrelevant, they were a distraction -- until the war was over: that's why Ngo Dinh Nhu wanted to go with the pao chia self-defense system coupled to an anti-Weberian justifying metaphysic, “Personalism”, a system with enormous precedent in the cosmological neighborhood of issue, i.e., the environment of the combat. The Americans had him killed for this impertinence. Paladins with loose cap guns. Creation of the institutions of constitutional democracy is not an intelligent war-fighting strategy (particularly so, if the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm metaphysically justifying those institutions has been eclipsed for the better part of a century). Create those institutions, if that's the best you can come up with, when they can actually be created: after winning the war. The insurgent goes through phase transition after phase transition in order to reach the final state. What makes the counterinsurgent think he is Superman? Leaps to the final state in a single bound! Tee-he-he. And then there are all the other dimensions of the war, such as those not quite registered by the U.S. Army's Senior Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College (last time I was stationed at Maxwell, under my father of course, was 1951) writing in The American Thinker (“America's Strategic Fix and Our New Decision Points” by LTC Joseph Myers, 25 August 2006):
America's national leadership since 9-11 has said that we are in a “Global War on Terror.” More recently, they describe it as a “Long War.” Putting it together then we are in a “global-long war on terror” against jihadists, Islamic fascists, or however you want to describe that enemy, and implicitly any other people or nation that advocates and is pursuing the wherewithal and means to destroy this Country -- after all that is the definition of a threat. The moniker suggests this war is something different, above and beyond even the scope of World War II.
The “global” nom de guerre addresses the strategic spatial variable, while the “long” nom de guerre addresses the strategic temporal variable. Two very important variables with all sorts of corollaries and lemmas when control over them is ceded to the enemy -- mere employment of “global” and “long” clearly indicating that such ceding has transpired. Name it doesn't necessarily claim it -- whatever the dog might think. Col. Myers, in the body of his article, does not address implications of this ceding; he falls into the trap thus created. His characterization of the fix and his answers to the decision-point puzzles simply follow the “pull” of the space and time variables as controlled by the enemy. So, what are the implications, of this generalized inability to understand insurgency warfare, relative to fundamentals of much broader issues? Seeking an answer to that, of course, leads one away from POLOB into PSYOB (intrapsychic order of battle) -- and all the egghead stuff everyone knows just couldn't possibly have anything, really, just really, you know, to do with war.
Come on! Don't give me that crap. The American people by near universal consensus chose the present situation in Iraq. Advice and consent. TV Guide, The New Yorker, and Reader's Digest gave the advice and the readership gave its consent -- during the Westmoreland versus CBS trial. The whole population corpus concurred: We do not need, let alone want, to know anything about POLOB and its “revisionist” interpretation of the Viet Nam war. Besides, that guy Sam Adams with his idiot “Chronologies” is clearly a cuckoo. West-more-land is a straight-backed exemplar; so what! if he manufactured an Edsel during his Seven Years of Tribulation; he deserves promotion to the Puzzle Palace. Name it and claim it. Name your abortion after the boss' son, and there will be career Ascension to claim, let me tell you. The Advent of personal power and Rapture. Dispensations. Meetings in the sky with diamonds. And before W vs. CBS there was Getting Some Back from the Bear in Afghanistan, where, again, beginning five years before the Soviet invasion, there was an assiduous avoidance of POLOB -- and that's why there has been no end to it. You don't believe this, then read Col. Thomas X. Hammes' The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century: Afghanistan is going to be repeated over the whole of the Middle East. Only trouble with the Colonel's thesis is: David went up against Goliath during the 20th century in Viet Nam, and the stone thrown by the VCI + NVN was the inflation that brought down the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton Woods monetary system. Goliath teetered and is still toppling. AQ&A picked up the same stone and slung it once more; only, this time, Goliath is the whole Westphalian institutionalization of the defunct Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. Americans are just a bunch of paranoid hysterics: the strategic objective targeted by the human collective unconscious is not the U.S.; it is the foundation, the fundaments, the underlying assumptions, The Fountainhead, the basic ideas informing definitive properties of the whole prevailing planetary civilization. Kissinger, being a bullet-point scholar of Metternich's au pair, unanimity, aided and abetted this targeting by helping to fashion the sling: Metternich-mind, honed upon the cognitive cutting stone in a world of 300-million human inhabitants, you see, is adequate to the task of orchestrating the Age of Complexity with its six-billion humans and their apocalyptic tap into Nature's quantum-relativistic and genetic scale levels. The more simple is adequate to manage the more complex! “Apocalyptic violence aimed at the West” is not, repeat not, the stone cast by an AQ&A seeking “to reorder world power”, to quote Lisa Beyer (“Why the Middle East Crisis Isn't Really About Terrorism”, Time, 7-14 August): such grade-school assessment. The stone placed in Kissinger's sling and let fly to accurately impact the moneychangers' Global Temple was not “apocalyptic violence” -- Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki: they were adumbrations of “apocalyptic violence” -- but successful mustard-seeding of a process of planetary self-organization amongst a recruitment base of four-billion mega-urban-region squatters upon fallow ground by 2030, according to the UN's estimate -- recruited against a failed worldview construct and its militarily imposed planetary institutionalization. Joe Klein, in quoting Hammes, misses this point by a country mile (“Even Churchill Couldn't Figure Out Iraq”, same issue of Time, p. 13). What Churchill couldn't “figure out” was how to keep costs to the rapist down to zero. Meeting in BangCock in the days before Monica were only those who knew how to mount guerrilla “armies”… Oops! I mean guerrilla “infrastructures”. Which ain't political infrastructures, like the VCI (Viet Cong [political] Infrastructure: even in Viet Nam the political was hidden, which was what the enemy strength estimates controversy was all about; hidden, because the defunct Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm had no real answers to offer). Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq: one war; multiple phases; many repeats; no learning by our side. Naming it differently don't necessarily, or actually, make it into five wars -- any more than changing definitions of enemy-strength categories actually kills insurgents. People absolutely cannot think non-locally, let alone act multiply-connected: the worst thing that ever happened to Sri Lanka was the Reagan bombing raid on Libya. You think about it; you figure out why there is no such thing anymore as acting locally on this planet, with or without appropriate technology. America is in an n-dimensional strategic fix. No doubting that. N-body problem in spades! And a people enamored of 2-logically-valued self-meta-programming -- graphical interface or no -- ain't about ta git it right, whatever keywords it might Google on its IDHS, Intelligence Data Handling System (“Googling” had its origins in the EEI, Essential Elements of Information, on the MACV mainframes, you know, before this wordsearch Edsel took over the whole of American cognitive processing: aha! picturesearch, that is certain to restore health to minds of Americans). You didn't think the yuppie teddies -- goo-goo, goo-goo -- at Google were smart enough to have created Googling, did you? What's in a name? Know thyself! Know thy people! And the worldview construct they have evolved has left them behind. Left Behind! O woe is M&M -- me and mine. Regardless of how elaborate the prefigurations, personations of privilege, those ego-sphere identifications not driven into the squatter settlements, will doggedly pursue their personal individual self-interests right into the mass grave: this terminal “tragedy of the commons” was created by the tacit assumptions endemic to Cartesian-Newtonian cosmogony and Cartesian-Newtonian filters on quantum-relativistic cosmogony. What people think they think is an inconsequence; what they think they don't think sets up the event gradient. Technological regime as collective projective identification, military-service funded or no. After almost 200 years (1826 being the critical year) of “struggling” human conscious minds, the collective unconscious has concluded that the only route to biospheric survival involves taking the whole civilization down by placing quantum-relativistic technologies in hands of the Cartesian-Newtonian mind.
You have to realize that “just plain stupid” is not merely a disparagement; it's a major, major strategic variable. Awareness of, and pointing to, stupidity is not necessarily ridicule and vindictiveness; it might be realism and objectivity. Being a live-in, I know, helps to develop some appreciation, see the day-to-day psychological functions, the familial relations, the pettiness, the not paying the plumber, the emotional trash, and on and on. But a little bit of study can help. Reading, for instance, Henry Kissinger's declassified pony-show memos as reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) is an enormous embarrassment -- not to mention those of Westmoreland, Rostow, Mac Bundy, and the others. The memos produced immediately before the Cambodian incursion are staggering, truly staggering. What is even more staggering is that they are published without embarrassment by the Department of State. When I wrote the “Third Stage of Insurgency Warfare” strategic assessment paper at SRA/MACV-J2 in 1968 (printed at the beginning of volume 2 of MOON), and was bludgeoned into removing all overt references to the huge human costs to be expected upon any expansion of the geographic boundaries of the war, I not only had no care for pony style, I had no capacity to imagine future memos as uninformed as those that would be written and later reproduced in FRUS. Even though, given my Washington exposure, I should have been capable of such imagination. When, five years earlier, I was a student at AU's SIS, rumor had it that Elspeth had written “the Stages of Growth” in W.W.'s name: Dr. and Mr. Rostow! Such collective aspersions never arise without good reason. OSS Rostow: how these people's brains got frozen! And have stayed that way ever since. Later, in 1965, in a little seminar room at the Sheraton Park, I heard W.W. debate Hans Morgenthau and Stanley Hoffman: absolutely Gerrrrrrrrrrrrate display of verbal Garbaaaage, but so disgusting in its mindless content, its could-care-less attitude to human suffering, and its academic-competition comeuppance snarls on part of all three superstars, I was provoked into quitting college specifically to go to Viet Nam to find out what pathogenic etiology plagued the American mind. It takes up-close witness, really, by a highly-trained medic to the laying of napalm down flat upon a squatter settlement, to the use of WP on the impoverished, to truly learn how to strip personations identified with ego-spheres of their collectively-conferred role attributions. Thus stripped, it's hard to suppress laughter, among other things, at their presence. Nowadays, just read George Soros assessing the global situation (e.g., “We need to break the cycle of violence”, The Guardian, 31 August 2006) if you want a sense of the embarrassment. And if you want to be truly mortified, read the blog comments posted on the Guardian's website. “Just plain stupid” is a major, major strategic variable; neglect to factor it in, and you will have Tinker Bell flitting around your temples. Soros chooses this sort of arena within which to act! Staggering, utterly staggering. Does the Open Society Institute think non-locally, act multiply-connected? If so, one cannot find evidence of this in Soros' publications or public utterances. This is somehow going to cause the Red Sea to open?
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