Consanguinity, Solidarity, and Government

I woke up about 6 a.m. this morning and stayed awake until about 9, thinking about but not actually getting up. For some reason I thought about family more than anything else. I would have to say, if asked who had the most influence on my life, that my parents and three siblings had. Three of them are "gone over," the remaining three of us are all over 80. From there I would have to move to teachers and exemplars, both of the good and the bad life—I've known  both kinds. Could I come up with a list of 6 Very Important Influences to add to my own immediate family? I think so. But won't just now, later maybe.

Impressions gleaned from years of undirected reading about the early days of man (meaning the whole kaboodle, male and female and shades in between): first came the family and simultaneously the extended family. Seems very hard to imagine how a tiny mother-father-child group could have survived on its own in the earliest circumstances, so I think a larger groping had to be there for  a newly formed atomistic family from the start.

What about the start? There had to have been a moment when homo sapiens didn't exist; then came the first of the species. This had to have been a kind of virgin birth, a virtually miraculous thing: if one goes with evolution, the first true "man" must have emerged from a "wedding of God and hominid" (or you might put it in terms of natural religion as the "wedding of Apollo, the Sun, and Gaia, our Mother Earth") such that the result was the aboriginal Adam and Eve. That was evidently a few millions of years ago. And it was, say the "early" experts, in Africa. All follows from that. But before you can say Jack Robinson the new race had spread all over the globe on foot or by crude boats, leaving no traces in the form of permanent architecture until late in the day.

Extended families became tribes, tribes became communities. The first communities appear to have been towns or even cities surrounded by agricultural areas often brilliantly irrigated. Such places had an intense social solidarity. That last word, now in common use, means, according to my Websters's Tenth Collegiate edition: "unity (as of  a group or class) that produces or is based on unity of interests, objectives, and standards." Those earliest Mesopotamian city-states were ruled by kings and Gods (who tended to blend into one another) for the purpose of feeding and organizing the work and welfare of the population. 

Government: An  élite arose, initially and for a long time a priest class, then a more secular ruling aristocracy took over, which has always and everywhere tended to aggrandize more and more wealth and power to itself, at the expense of the general population. If there is anything new under the sun I don't know what it is. Revolutions a plenty, vast dreams of liberation forever entertained, always frustrated by the reemergence of a "controlling aristocracy." We are watching that go on the USA today as small numbers of bankers and media moguls and government bureaucrats, and munitions firm owners (the military-industrial complex) grab the wealth, shift the paying work overseas, and impoverish the hundreds of millions who own little or nothing.

A money thread runs through this whole story. I'll come back to that.

Ogling the luxury thing on wsj.com

I've just come from looking at a short video on wsj.com about luxury brands—cars to jewels—on offer at a luxury show in Vienna, and earlier today I read Harvard (and British) historian Niall Ferguson, also on wsj.com, talking about China's emergence as the real boss of today's global world. The thing that unites the two scenes is the strain of utter unreality that both exhibit. China—to cite an egregious example of its contribution to the world's excellences or woes (depending on your point of view)—is now the world's largest market for autos—some 14 million in the year currently. Neither China nor Ferguson nor the WSJ seems to be getting it: the "growth scene" is over, but big-time OVER.

What that means to me is that sanity now resides in studying ways to shrink our growth economies, shrink them, that is, intelligently, preserving lives and resources, as much as possible at any given moment, while diminishing threats to life, also as much as possible. What is nutty is acting as if the two-century-long "industrial age" can go on any longer. It will last somewhere between today (2010) and 2030, and that will be it. It would be nice if there were some sign the rulers of the world were taking this on. What I seem to see is a rich ruling class determined to keep their profitable thing going as long as possible, let the poor (that's us) eat cake, and the devil with worrying about resources. The market can take care of that, and if we, the rich, have all the money, what's to worry?

I suppose I have outlined the main thesis of this entire blog in this post. More to come no doubt.

The Great William S. Lind Signs Off

For several years a favorite columnist of mine was William S. Lind, who appeared on Antiwar.com (and perhaps elsewhere). He wrote a sign-off column on Dec. 15 of last year, promising to come back when he had a new job. It sounded as if he had got canned from the one he held at the Free Congress Foundation. To the best of my knowledge he has not come back. How would one know? 
Anyway I am quoting his last column in full here "for the record," my record. He may have been axed because he was so "unpatriotically" critical of our military and so dismissive of their claims for Iraq and Afghanistan. Lind was, I believe, the creator of the concept of "the Four Generations of Modern Warfare" and he explains that idea a bit in this piece. Lind more than anyone else explained for me why we were having such a tough time prevailing in the world, as we were indeed last year, and for many years before that, and are still having now, and will have into the future, unless our "leaders" wise up, which they show no signs of doing. As Ezra Pound once wrote: "Even Ernie Hemingway would admit at times that the mind has it uses." Our "leader-people" are not yet up to Hemingway's level as estimated by Pound, who knew EH well; they certainly are not up to Lind's level.

Parting Thoughts, for Now

by William S. Lind, December 15, 2009

This will be the last "On War" column, at least for the foreseeable future. I will (unexpectedly) retire from the Free Congress Foundation, where I have worked for 22 years, at the end of this month. Once I am reestablished, either with a new institution or in retirement, I intend to restart the column. When that will be I do not know. It also depends on obtaining connection to a telegraph line, which is not available everywhere.

After 325 columns, what is left to be said? Two points, I think, are worth noting in closing. First, since the Marine Corps Gazette article that first laid out the framework of the Four Generations of Modern War was published in 1989, events have largely followed the course it predicted. That is not to say I was right in all my predictions in these columns. Were my crystal ball that accurate, I would be a rich man. (Being rich, as a Rothschild once defined it, is being able to live comfortably on the interest on the interest.) But in broad terms, the theory has had predictive value, which is the test of any theory.

In particular, the theory’s definition of Fourth Generation war has proven prophetic. Since 1989, the world has witnessed a progressive weakening of the state and rise of alternative, non-state primary loyalties, for which a growing number of men are willing to fight. That is the heart of my definition of Fourth Generation war. As Martin van Creveld says, what changes is not how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for.

Other definitions of 4GW, including defining it as just a new name for insurgency, miss the mark. Fourth Generation war is more than a buzzword. It is the biggest change in war since the Peace of Westphalia.

The second point I would close with is that the U.S. military doesn’t get it. Some European militaries do get it. Many Fourth Generation entities (not all) not only get it, they are writing the book. But the U.S. military is largely an intellectual void. Its two implied (and related) theories, that wars are decided by comparative levels of technology and by who can put the most firepower on targets, have both been proven false. Were they true, we would have won the Iraq and Afghan wars quickly. In fact, the Pentagon was so blinded by its false theories it thought we had won them quickly. Sorry, guys.

While many junior and field-grade officers in the U.S. military have found value in the Four Generations framework (which says that American armed forces are not one, but two generations behind), the brass studiously ignores it. "Not invented here" is part of the problem, but the larger part is that our major headquarters think little if at all about war. What they think about is money. 4GW does little to justify bigger budgets. On the contrary, it suggests that most "big ticket" weapons programs are irrelevant to where war is going. That is not what the brass, or the defense companies they plan to work for after retirement, want to hear.

What might change that picture? Nothing will change in DOD until the money simply isn’t there anymore. The news, which is simultaneously good and bad, is that the money soon won’t be there. Like every previous imperial power, we are bankrupting ourselves. A trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there, and soon it adds up to real money. The twin financing mechanisms of piling up debt and debasing the currency can only go on so long. We can already see the night at the end of the tunnel.

There is no better way to end this series of columns, at least for a while, than to recommend a book. The best book on where America now stands and where it is going is J. H. Elliott’s The Count-Duke of Olivares: A Statesman in an Age of Decline. Olivares was what we would now call the prime minister of Spain in much of the first half of the 17th century. His era saw Spain go from "the only superpower" to a downward plunge that lasted three centuries. Unusually, the more one looks at the details, the more the parallel holds. Then, as now, the root problem was the same: the court was controlled by interests that lived off the nation’s decay. Consider the book Scrooge’s recommendation for good Christmas reading.

Obamas' Asian Trip

There are wonderful photos of the Obamas' entire Asian trip up on the Wall St. Jnl's website tonight—more than 30 of them. I desperately want to see O make a stunning comeback from the recent election pounding and think he can do it, although I am unable to advance any very convincing reasons why I think that. Obama is so classy. He (and Michelle) are so slender, so beautifully dressed, and take such heart-warming pix that it is hard to believe in what all the nay-sayers are putting out: that he is a betraying bum who doesn't keep his promises and won't make it to a second term and in general is a weakling. He certainly knows how to hold his head up when the world is watching. My present estimate of the last four presidents, Reagan, Bush the elder, Clinton, and Bush junior, is that they were all, one way or another, schlobs. (I just made that word up; I think you know what it means.) I can't presently see O that way. But what a plateful of horrors he has to deal with worldwide and what a crowd of grossly greedy corporate kingpins he has to reckon with at home. The WSJ tonight is also treating us to a wrap-up on executive compensation: a short course on how how the rich are getting richer. I own to having some interest in this display of top level grossers—good word that, meaning top-level earners but also top-level hogs. I am curious to see just how bad it can get before something bad (good?) happens.  

Fun and Games With Money

 Ellen Brown is a considerable U.S. writer on  money matters. In this post I quote her at length from an email by Peter Myers of Australia, who is dedicated reporter of world news of the sort that rarely gets emphasized in what people call the "main stream media" (MSM). Here Ellen hits on a theme dear to my heart, although I have reason to assume it is not dear to the hearts of our Wall St. bankers. The next six paragraphs are a quote from Ellen pulled from Myers's email of Nov. 10, which was in turn taken from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/chinas-creative-accountan_b_775531.html

 We might take a lesson from the Chinese and put our own banks to work for the people, rather than making the people work for the banks. We need to get our dollars out of Wall Street and back on Main Street, and we can do that only by breaking up Wall Street's out-of-control private banking monopoly and returning control over money and credit to the people themselves.

We could also take a lesson from the Chinese and dispose of our debt with a little creative accounting: when the bonds come due, we could pay them with dollars issued by the Treasury, in the same way that the Federal Reserve has issued Federal Reserve Notes to save Wall Street with its "Quantitative Easing" program. The mechanics of that process were revealed in a remarkable segment on National Public Radio on August 26, 2010, describing how a team of Fed employees bought $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds beginning in late 2008. According to NPR:

"The Fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because it has a unique power: It can create money out of thin air, whenever it decides to do so. So... the mortgage team would decide to buy a bond, they'd push a button on the computer -- "and voila, money is created."

If the Fed can do it to save the banks, the Treasury can do it to save the taxpayers. In a paper presented at the American Monetary Institute in September 2010, Prof. Kaoru Yamaguchi showed with sophisticated mathematical models that if done right, paying off the federal debt with debt-free Treasury notes would have a beneficial stimulatory effect on the economy without inflating prices. 

The CAGW ad is correct: we have turned our backs on the principles that made us great. But those principles are not rooted in "fiscal austerity." The abundance that made the American colonies great stemmed from a monetary system in which the government had the power to issue its own money - unlike today, when the only money the government issues are coins. Dollar bills are issued by the Federal Reserve, a privately owned central bank; and the government has to borrow them like everyone else. But as Thomas Edison famously said:

"If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%... It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold."

I'm not sure what in this post will work. I have not put the quotations altogether correctly in the above because I don't yet know how to. And I have not yet figured out how to make links active (I guess). And I am delighted to know that the Huffington Post is not as purblind on the realities of money as I have assumed. We have been mightily ripped off by the Bankers. The capitalized word stands for the gang who are consciously minions of the Rothschilds, who took over U.S. finances by establishing the Federal Reserve System ( a private enterprise) in 1913 and have been cheerfully wrecking us every since. Jolly fellows with many willing jolly helpers among our WASP and other ethnic leaders and more lately the Ashkenazim, who came here in droves after WWII, and are most familiar to us as the neoconservative warmongers who have convinced our recent sad presidents to go to war against the world. 


Oh well, that's enough dreary stuff for today.  

  

Obama Gets Double Shellacking

Poor old Pres. Obama is getting it hard and deep these days. Apparently, not only did President Hu give him a true Oriental shiv on the matter of currencies but the WSJ doubled down by reporting his failure to get the Chinese to do what he wanted with barely concealed glee. All this G-20 stuff seems to me the most transparent nonsense: I suppose the participants get to feel big and get some good meals, but, really, was all that fossil-fuel burning really necessary? Any time these assorted Big Birds wanted to get honest they could do so by detaching from the world banking system, returning the issue of their currencies to the various nations' governments, and jailing some bankers. This would be cold turkey indeed. But it would at least  put an honest platform under every nation and then the world could begin to sort out strong from weak nations. etc. I do not mean militarily strong; the USA is clearly the strongest militarily, but when has that done us any real good? We are viewed by all the world as a rogue nation armed to the teeth, with everyone eager to see us somehow humiliated. And our banker-rulers are overjoyed to help that along any way they can.

I realize this will seem a crazy posting to nearly everybody, but once in a while it's a pleasure to write what one thinks.

Axioms for Modern Living

This morning's news is that Pres. Obama is calling for world unity in working for growth of economies. Bernanke thinks we should be shooting for 2% per year, which means a doubling in 36 years. We now know that population rises as growth does, not precisely in tandem but in the same direction. So Obama is calling for the ultimate insanity: more people in the world. As if the world were managing the present six or seven billion in a rational way. What will happen when there are 12 or 14 billion?

It occurs to me to set forth in plain language a couple of incontrovertible axioms for thinking today. I don't know what the world figures are for abortion, but they are already grisly. A call for more population is a call for busier than ever people abattoirs.

Axiom #1: Economic growth at the national level is a no-no. At the very least pols should be laughed at when they propose it, à la O today. Babies will be born and must grow and should be fed. Will they be? That depends. I think we can safely conclude that one's birthright cannot include a 4,000 lb. motorcar for everyone, or even for very many. Them days is gone for ever.

The world's resources are finite, and we are pressing on the limits. The late Dr. Kit Pedler thought (40 years ago) that industrial civilization was racing toward entropic heat death. More lately we understand that in terms of Peak Oil. The cheap fossil fuel is running out. Industrial civilization will prove to have been about a 200-year blip—1830-2030 or so. Capitalism really took off with the spinning jenny and will end with space travel. Then it'll be back to simpler living.

Axiom #2: If life is a good thing, then death is a good thing—natural death not abattoir death—as the mystics have all said. It's a little hard to take aboard, but it's my thought for the day.

The Uses of a Blog

I intended to write a blog this morning (it is now three in the afternoon), but everything went wrong: I lost text that was not saved, I haven't been able to make links active. . . . Well, you don't want to know the full horror of it, so I'll not go on.

I have been toying with the idea of trying to do a blog a day. Not doing too well. But here is another effort. This time it will be a quickie on the New Yorker Magazine. I get the mag free from a brother who still thinks it a nifty periodical, which it once was, when he and I were young. I think, as I have written elsewhere, it is now a subtle-but-not-so-subtle-as-all-that piece of American-Zionist propaganda.

In the November 6 issue they have a Talk of the Town item on Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks site, much in the news lately. The piece is by Steven Coll, who comes on as President of the America Foundation, which is a suspiciously uninformative name. You can't exactly say the New Yorker ends up fer Assange, but you also can't say it is totally agin 'im. But Assange is a clear cut case of a guy on the right track, unless you think our government is on the right one and their opponents are all crazy. Coll tries a little psychoanalyzing of Assange but it isn't very impressive; what is impressive is the way the New Yorker succeeds in placing itself on the side of careful citizens who wish not to harm our armed forces but also on the side of our reigning warmongers, who are a bad bunch if I ever saw any, and who are casually causing the deaths not only of our service people but also innumerable other folk on the wrong end of our bullets, bombs, and drones.

I'd have to ask the questions, Who is Steve Coll? and What is the America Foundation?

Peak Oil Comes of Age

Dmitry Orlov, who is IMHO the world's expert on societal collapse, has lately said that now nearly everyone (who pays any attention to this sort of thing) accepts that "Peak Oil" is real, that is, that the world's oil is running out, and we are on the downhill slope of oil usage. Here is the link to the article he wrote to that effect:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/11/peak-oil-is-history.html

Orlov, who signs his blog "Kollapsnik," was born in Russia but came to the U.S. as a youngster. He returned a number of times "on business" to the former USSR during its collapse and ultimately wrote a book, "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects," in which he maintains that the old USSR was better positioned to go through a collapse than the U.S. now is. It's worth reading. He has also, with wife, gone a huge distance toward setting himself up for the U.S. collapse, which he thinks is coming for sure, by living on a sail boat in Boston Harbor. (Details on his blog.) From his boat-home he bicycles to work in Boston (and flies occasionally to Europe and elsewhere to talk about collapse when invited) and is, just incidentally, a fine and fun stylist of excellent English expository prose. In other words: quite a fellow.

Re Peak Oil: He is predicting a bumpy and dangerous downhill slide as the oil runs out. He seems to think we are already well past the time when we might have prepared societally for the event, and in that he is now where a couple of other people I know about have been for upwards of 40 years. I am talking about James Lovelock and the late Kit Pedler, some of whose books I bumped into in the 1970s. Lovelock has a whole series of books on Gaia, Mother Earth, whom we have savaged rather badly in "industrial times." He is a kind of "master of global warming." Read him and weep, if you are of that mind.

I own only one title of Pedler's, "The Quest for Gaia: A Book of Changes," published in England in 1979, which I have lately been rereading. His focus is the need to "deindustrialize," to stop, one person at a time, speeding up the entropic death of civilization. Both gentlemen are strictly gloomsville if you want to see them that way. For some reason (I am I know confessing weirdness) I find them exhilarating. I believe them both to be exemplary "scientists of the broadview," and to be dealing in the simple truth.

The purpose of this blog is not to convince you of anything, but to put you on notice as to some good writers on vital human affairs. Now, over to you. Soon: a note on Jim Kunstler.

The Election Again

Israel Shamir, whose emails I get, forwarded a piece by Rabbi Michael Lerner with the following introductory remark:

"Rabbi Michael Lerner makes a good point in the following piece: "Had Obama refused to give more money to the banks and Wall Street; had the Democrats refused to fund the escalation of war in Afghanistan; had they advocated for "Medicare for Everyone" instead of passing a plan that forced 30 million people to buy health care; had Obama fought courageously for a carbon tax and ended the bargain taxes for the wealthy--this election result would have been 100% different. Other suggestions of the good rabbi from Oakland are not that great, but deserve reading." 

The link to the entire HuffPost:

www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michael-lerner/10-commandments-to-revive_b_777961.html 

My comment for what it's worth (and it seems to me that Shamir, who is an Orthodox Christian and former Russian Jew now living in Israel, and Lerner, should both be aware of this as I am sure Obama is): his life would have been forfeit if he were to have done what Lerner suggests and would be if he were to start doing it now. There are some things smart politicians don't do, and among them is turn on their makers. I think O is smart.

Shapeshifters

There is new staging of Sherlock Holmes dramas going forward just now on PBS (9 pm Eastern Time on Sunday, with I think one more Sunday to run). It is a modern Sherlock, set today, with everybody using cellphones of the latest design till hell won't have it. Sherlock is still an incredibly observant sleuth (now "consulting detective") but got up rather antiquely in a long overcoat with tails that flap wildly as he runs, an odd hairdo (very bushy); he is very young and very strong, an athlete, although still wispy, and addicted to nicotine and caffeine but not cocaine. (It was cocaine in the old days, wasn't it?)

I bring him up because the new Sherlock strikes me as an example of a grossly familiar character (fictional in this case) who has undergone a "shapeshift," of what I see as the classic type: he is the same but also different; the old and new Sherlock blend together in the mind's eye.

About seven years ago, I wrote a biography for older children of Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, which was published by Boyds Mills Press. It has sold modestly ever since. (AA has long fascinated me as a 75-year-old instance of a new "spiritual movement," a late example of the kind of "healthy minded religion" Willliam James wrote about in this 1905 masterpiece, "The Varieties of Religious Experience." I am working on a companion bio of Dr. Bob Smith. Both men are deceased, so the anonymity thing is no longer in force, but both were unknown to the general public when they died.

There have been a dozen or so bios of Bill written since his death in 1971, only one that I know of about Dr. Bob, who died in 1950. This was "Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers." published by AA itself. Both men have had shapeshifts forced upon them as they emerge into a modest kind of celebrity status. Bill is now a sage of almost Confucian proportions; admittedly this is a function of AA members mostly, who meditate and discuss in meetings his considerable writings, published by AA and others; although it spills over a little into the general culture. Bob is less well known both to AAs and the public, but he looks more and more like a modern saint, who sought and actually achieved a true anonymity such that he is not easy to describe at length. But he is venerated by AAs anyway for his great personal impact on AA. Both men have had "shrines" dedicated to them: Bill at his birth place in East Dorset, Vermont and Bob at his work place in Akron, Ohio.

That leads me into discussing "Celebrity Status" today, which is for next time, or soon anyway. I'll have to begin with Lindsay Lohan, won't I?

Avatar, Guru, King, Master, Saint, etc.

I watched the election news on CNN last night until they announced that the House went Repub and the Senate stayed Dem, and then I thought the thing was essentially over and I could go to bed. Fairly sleepless night during which I thought of a few things I'll try to set down here. Thoughts in the middle of the night are often clear, but attempts to recapture them next morning are often muddled. We'll see.

I began to think of the great heroes of humanity: Jesus Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Rama, Krishna, Muhammad, and so on. And of how the Hindus, that so tolerant people, accept that there are many avatars, human representatives of God. Christianity says there is but one, the Lord Christ, who is God himself. Muhammad is a messenger merely, but you can see that for Muslims he is on the way to being a virtual divinity, a final authority, while Muslims also accept that Jesus Christ is at least a precedent prophet, and to be so honored.

I sense a kind of flowing together or all these conceptions, so that one can quite easily become another in the mind. I'll settle on a master word here, "avatars." Avatars are much alike. They teach very similar things, and they are generally more honored in the admiration of people than in people's willingness to observe the precepts the avatars taught.

The Vedanta teaches (I think) that a guru is to be obeyed as if he were God; for the devotee, guru is in loco Dei. St. Paul says we are to obey civil authority: Caesar or King. The only higher authority is God himself. Paul ended up in the crossfire of the two: High God and Corrupt King.

Some years ago I read Christopher' Dawson's book, "The Age of the Gods," his reconstruction of the city and farming civilization that arose four to six millennia ago in Mesopotamia. Here at the beginnings of our recorded history Gods and Kings were fluid: each city would have its God and Ruler, and they tended to be seen as one Perhaps, in effect, were one.

Axiom: If you can corrupt a ruler, a government, you can corrupt the religion of its people.

Perhaps I'll continue this another day.

War With Iran, Anybody?

Phillip Weiss, who is my idea of a hero of culture, has up on his blog, Mondoweiss, this morning a quotation from David Broder, writing in the NY Times, and salivating for war with Iran. Broder suggests that it will be Obama's "out" from the grisly election that will occur tomorrow. Broder writes:

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

Weiss says this proposal should bring "Joy to the World," and a true recovery from our present economic slump. How wonderful! A nice big war with Iran would save everybody's hash.