cobblehillbilly: 2016

I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so maybe naively I ascribe to Richard Wrangham's notion from his book "Catching Fire," that man's relationship to flame is integral to our genome, that we could not have become who we are without it. We domesticated fire, inadvertently at first, but to our own purpose and set ourselves on a co-evolutionary path with technology while creating, through a conscious relationship to things, an exponentially broader cultural sphere than that of any other species. Many other animals require deliberate knowledge transfers between generations for collective survival, mirror neurons in their brains, like those in ours, combine with "kin selection's" genetic impulses to form the facilitating substrate. But when hominids began to cook, they applied Morris' notion of energy capture, the import of power, to their own organism and captured the heat applied to food in the form of metabolically supercharged calories. In the process we evolved smaller guts and much larger brains and an ever expanding cultural/technological artifice constructed over and eventually changing nature itself.

With our hypertrophied brain came the explosion of culture resultant from energy capture: cooking is a technology, a cultural artifact with which we co-evolved, there's no gene for it and yet a hundred thousand years latter, here it is and we can't really do without it: this energy capture is the substrate that actually fed all our subsequent cultural efforts. Like Language, cooking is simultaneously a culture and technology that appears to have evolved as a sort of intellectual arms race for mating advantage: smarter, better sounding, better cooking, better looking and better making individuals had better reproductive prospects and proliferating technologies provided multiplying divergent avenues along which to compete in ever larger groups. All in a race of cultural evolution leaving traces in our genes only for intellectual capabilities like speed, invention and cleverness and for perceptual signals like beauty, voice, symmetry, skin, hair and eye color, but not for the manifest cultural behaviors themselves even as they have all been conserved over millennia. As we became smarter and our technologies more complex, culture co-evolved to support, integrate and conserve the results.

Our propensity to technology and the culture to support it is integral to our genetic break with our genomic relatives, and the defining technology was that of power. Power embodied both in the internal metabolic energy from cooking (external energy capture embodied), that from fire to forge to factory which makes our things, and in the language of power which commands demographically scaling, coordinated action. So power in the dual forms of material force and social coordination at scale, the two are related, is in our genome. Any understanding of human nature that leaves it out is missing the essential, and in "UltraSociety" Turchin is clear on this. Power has been at the center of culture from the start and has bequeathed us genetic artifacts beyond our large brain, particularly in the context of trust and warfare on which "UltraSociety" focuses, power has bequeathed us approximately one in one hundred people with genes that may express as psychopathy, an identification with a particular cultural form rather than our fellow humans, an identification with power.

From a genetic point of view, like rape, psychopathy has obvious selective advantages, but only as an outlier parasitic to a larger sociable community, either as a residual gene expression from less social primates or as a new mutation within our species. This gene thrives at the margins as a free rider on the evolving growth of collective goods, or public goods, the culturally selective advantage of sociability. The absence of empathy characteristic of the pathology gives individuals having it a huge power advantage: in situations short of force, they will be uniquely uninhibited in material dealings with others; once dominant, with access to institutional force, they will have an entirely different attitude to violence, that of Turchin's God King. These genes and their expression are still with us. Psychotic abuse of trust in the pursuit of power is the fissile isotope civilization can never free itself from as it forms an irreducible fraction of or genetic inheritance.

...

The Cooperator's Dilemma, Chapter 3 of "UltraSociety", clouds its argument with a reliance on fictional narratives of contemporary business malfeasance. Business is a recent, and one hopes transient, manifestation of human socio-material relations. In its modern form, it's the result of a deliberate instrumentalization of people, a sociopathic process rooted in the caste structure of pre-modern Great Britain: in the creation of a market based social system, enormous human dislocations were conceptualized and imposed despite monumental human misery to facilitate at the expense of the lower castes what would

ULTRASOCIETY

Cliodynamics is a name chosen for their collective pursuit by a group of historians trying to put the study and modeling of history on a scientific footing. Party to this effort, Peter Turchin's excellent self published book "ULTRASOCIETY" proposes a cliodynamic theory for how our biological being, the result of Darwinian genetic selection, has interacted with history through culture to create the kaleidoscopic complexity into which we all awake at birth. He has theorized in essential ways how we got here.

Previously, in Culturally Constructed Individuals, we traced the development of expanding scopes of identity, how we all construct our own "selves" by identifying with cultural institutions and narratives experience of the world presents us with as we grow. Looking at how people embed themselves in the received stories of moral behavior they grow up with, we tried to understand what institutions set out those roles and why. People look to values familiar from tales, however relevant, for the choices they make about their place or actions in society: institutions have a stake in which tales are ready at hand when such choices arise. Civilization And The Bonds Of Freedom treated where this externally structured but individually constructed identity, this self-consciousness developed in acculturated individuals, finds itself in our present world. Turchin's book tells us how the complicated density of inter-dependencies that is our culture, including inexplicably complex technologies and infrastructures, could come into being in the first place.

He and his collaborators are in the process of building a database from which to construct testable models of historical causality. The importance of their effort is in ennobling culture with agency above or parallel to the individual agents who act through it. Biologists have stubbornly resisted the idea of cultural selection, that something like genetic selection can happen at a super-individual level, that beneficial behaviors can be developed, coordinated and sustained across generations culturally rather than genetically, but are at a loss when asked to explain the scale and complexity of modern industrial society. Particularly they object to the centrality of altruism, or more reductively, of trust at the heart of this vast, complex social structure. In the absence of genetically meaningful mathematical connections between individuals, Dawkins for instance, classifies altruism a spandrel: an artifact of another genetic intent that happens to have effects of its own, un-selected for, arrived at by happenstance.

The current book effectively makes the case that civilizational complexity is the result of warfare, the most acute form of cultural competition. In facing opposing societies in the deadly competition of war, the impulses bequeathed us by biological "kin selection", well documented in many social animals, are bent to a larger culturally defined form: those societies that coordinate most effectively win at war. More than that, the forge of war causes cooperating societies to engage in social structures exponentially more complex than they will consensually enter into under any other circumstance and this complexity yields efficiencies of a scale that not only makes them sustainable but actually produces large new surpluses by socially reintegrating evolving technologies, optimizing private innovations into public goods.

It is a winning argument for "cultural selection", an idea so intuitively obvious I've always puzzled at the narrow mathematical vision rejecting it, like the "micro-foundations" movement in economics which has blinded a generation of economists to the obvious usefulness of Keynes General Theory, biological determinism ignores humanities greatest construct: culture. Turchin argues that warfare, the pitting of ever growing societies against one another in existential conflict, selects for the cultures that facilitate the greatest in-group cooperation yielding the most effective external projection of force. In-group trust is the foundation of out-of-group force projection and the medium through which newly efficient social, economic and technological arrangements are institutionalized.

This happens despite entrenched power centers built on old inefficiencies being displaced: when a social, economic or technological system is improved, its innovators will tend to capture the benefit unless new institutional relationships are brought to bear forcing equitable distribution of gains. Conservative institutional structures then tend to preserve existing power relationships making the short term effect of innovation ever increasing rent extractions, entrenching existing power relationships except in existential extremis, that is except in war. When victory in war institutionalizes the new efficiencies that yielded its' issue, those innovations yielding the greatest civilizational benefit are molded back into their most useful form as public goods. Warfare tilts culture toward public goods to the extent it must to preserve its public, the vessel of culture.

That the lessons of war can be ideologically constituted to reproduce themselves culturally, sustaining the benefits of in-group trust across generations is explained in Chapter 9, "The Pivot of History". Here Turchin shows how Axial Age Religions, a new form of ideology, extinguish earlier Divine Ruler societies, societies that seem so archaic for the centrality of human sacrifice to their governing ideologies. This earlier form, seeing the population as tools of the divine, uses people for the divinity's grandeur: conquest abroad and sacrifice at the alter underpin the system's legitimacy: it is a system based on the terrifying clarity of brute power. The Axial ideologies see the community itself as the locus of the divine, making the strength of the community the goal of the ideological structure. The in-group cooperation of Axial societies relieves them of the substantial internal costs of exploitation. Where the central ideological function of the Divine Ruler state is keeping the population in awe, subjected by costly physical force and terror, Axial societies aim to normalize cooperative behavior across society creating strong, healthy communities made entirely available for mobilization into the existential conflict of war when the occasion arises.

While the scale of societies built by Divine Rulers institutionalized efficiencies adequate to dominate simpler tribal neighbors and subjugate captive societies, Axial culture out competed the internally costly God Ruler governing form by husbanding society rather than exploiting it. Another transformative cultural adaptation, one quite possibly tied to our actual genome a hundred thousand years earlier, was the adoption of projectile weapons. In Chapter 5, "God Made Men, but Sam Colt Made Them Equal", Turchin describes how the primitive Big Man was banished from social dominance in simple tribal societies in a way analogous to the displacement of God Kings by Axial societies: incorrigibly dominant men were simply stoned to death from a safe distance by their more cooperative relations. In the process those cooperators created the egalitarian tribes God Kingdoms would later prey upon. Cliodynamics oscillates thus, between centralizing exploitative and distributive cooperative social forms.

With simple ambitions, itself the product of a much larger project just begun (the 2015 founded Society For the Study of Cultural Evolution), this short, clear and readable book opens up vistas that promise a fruitful future for its author and Society. Ian Morris' 2010 book "Why The West Rules - For Now" was my first exposure to the attempt to mathematically quantify, measure and test historical hypotheses. That book was pointedly ambitious both in its title and its subject matter. To my mind, Morris' idea of "energy capture" is the defining characteristic of our species and will be one of the lenses through which I view the current work in subsequent posts. Morris also noted that "technology changes geography", which, when we consider that technology is an artifact of culture, reduces to "culture changes geography," another lens I'll bring to bear on Ultra Society. Finally, Philip Bobbitt's "The Shield of Achilles" serves as a sort of prophetic illustration of Turchin's mechanism at work. In a future post, I'll use that illustration to bring my comments into the present to discuss the current meaning of Ultra Society with regard to the nonsensical end of Bobbitt's otherwise excellent book. It's fair to say Turchin's little book, at 233 8pt pages, has affected my thinking as much as these other two, weighing in at 622 6pt and 824 5t pages respectively.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Samizdat

Silencing The Messenger: Seymour Hersh: Truthout
Open Checkbook: Eric Pianin: Fiscal Times
Prepping For War: John Pilgin: Truth Seeker
Neo-Cold War: Paul Craig Roberts
Neo-Kremlinology: M. K. Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Links

Hillary's Not Worried: Corey Robin
If She Were: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: The Week
But She Needn't: Noah Millman: American Conservative
Why She Should: Nina Illingworth
Money Is Permission: Ted Rall
Bio Battery?: Ambrose-Evans Pritchard: The Telegraph

Friday, August 5, 2016

Links

Bait And Switch: Scott Adams: Dilbert
Bearing And Torches: Editors: Telesur
Putin/Trump: Stephen Cohen: CNN/YouTube
Unsurveillable: Rukmini Callimachi: NYT
Far Right: Daniel Little: Understanding Society
And It's Economics: System Failure: Failed Evolution
Ideological Decay: Branco Milanovic: Globalinequality

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Links

The Veracity Of Poetry: J W Mason: Evonomics
Nuclear Math: John Quiggin: Crooked Timber
Far Eastern Flux: M K Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline
Near Eastern Flux: Aram Mirzaei: The Saker
Very Different Syria: b: Moon Of Alabama

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Links

Cetacian Conflict: Brian Nelson: Mother Nature Network
Varmints In Vermont: Luke Elliot-Negri: Jacobin
Objectivity Lost: Justin Raimondo: Los Angeles Times
Clinton Credibility: Charlie Musgrove
Theories Of American Politics: Gillens & Page: Princeton
Ceteris Paribus: Balint Somkuti: Sic Semper Tyrannis
American Autumn: John Robb: Global Guerrillas
You're Getting Warmer: Houses and Holes: MacroBusiness

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Links

Conflict In The West: Golem XIV
Conflict In The East: Ren, Li & Friedman: Jacobin
Turkey From The West: Daniel Round: EA Worldview
Turkey From The East: M. K. Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline
Turkey Turns: Philip Geraldi: The American Conservative
Turkey Bombs: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Links

IDF Moral Decay: Jonathan Ofir: Mondoweiss
Arsenal Of Empire: Matthew Karp: Common-Place
Rid Of Hitlers, Not Speers: Corey Robin
The Middle Precariat: Alissa Quart: Naked Capitalism
Under Bugged: Christian Schwagerl: Environment360
Urban Agroecology: SoCal Connected: YouTube

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Links

Cambridge Capital Controversy: Thomas Furguson: Naked Capitalism
Hall Of Mirrors: John Michael Greer: The Archdruid Report
Obama And Iran: M K Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline
I Was Wrong: Chas Freeman: Mondoweiss
New Ruling Class: Helen Andrews: IASC
I'm working on a longer post (trying to make it shorter) on the points Bobbitt is making here about the world's advance toward his libertarian utopia. This article is important as a sort of Roman Catholic critique of the incipient Reformation:
Crisis Of State Form: Phillip Bobbitt: Stratfor

Sunday, July 3, 2016

The Glib Shit that is Bitcoin

If money is the commodification of trust, where an exchange value is abstracted from the constellation of productive relationships that generate actual real world value, money is then reduced to a state sanctioned power relationship and depends on the benevolence of that state for its sustained value. Similarly, Bitcoin is the commodification of waste, the monetization of pure shit that depends on the sustained production of waste to hold its value. Nathaniel Popper's June 29th New York Times article makes this clear: "Mr. Ng, 36, said he had become an expert in finding cheap energy, often in places where a coal plant or hydroelectric dam was built to support some industrial project that never happened. The Bitcoin mining machines in his facilities use about 38 megawatts of electricity, he said, enough to power a small city."

"Enough to power a small city", electricity is being diverted from productive use in the real economy to power the "mining" of Bitcoins, Mr. Ng alone owns 28 such facilities. In a reductio ad absurdum of financialization, the libertarian fantasy of commodity money independent of the state has layered an encryption dependent universally transparent accounting system, Bitcoin's blockchain, over the armature of globalized financial flows to support international gambling with pure waste energy: "Mr. Lee said the Chinese took quickly to Bitcoin for several reasons. For one thing, the Chinese government had strictly limited other potential investment avenues, giving citizens a hunger for new assets. Also, Mr. Lee said, the Chinese loved the volatile price of Bitcoin, which gave the fledgling currency network the feeling of online gambling, a very popular activity in China. There has been widespread speculation that Chinese people have used Bitcoin to get money out of the country and evade capital controls, but Mr. Lee and other experts said the evidence suggests this is not a significant phenomenon."

Like casino owners, the Chinese "investors" in this financially extractive and environmentally destructive mass psychosis are interested primarily in preserving or enhancing the cash flows they receive off the pure, unfettered waste of electricity and environmental destruction that underwrite Bitcoin: Bitcoin converts ecological shit into money.

While western, libertarian rubes try to persuade them of the "moral purpose", "some Bitcoin advocates have complained that the Chinese companies have been motivated only by short-term profit, rather than the long-term success and ideals of the project," Chinese investors couldn't care less about western fantasies of ideal power relationships and the liberation of the individual to exploit the animate and inanimate world for personal gain: the Chinese Communist Party has already established a system fully supportive of individual expropriations through such exploitation, so long as it stays clear of politics. Investors in China, just like here, have proven happy to content themselves to personal material spoils.

In fact, the Chinese are fairly contemptuous of the westerners and their proposals seeing them as naive, entitled and oblivious, "Bobby Lee, chief executive of the Bitcoin company BTCC, which is based in Shanghai, bristled at that — and at the notion that the Chinese companies represent any sort of united front. He attended the April meeting and pointed out that the Chinese companies had disagreed among themselves on how urgent it was to make changes to the Bitcoin software. He said the American companies failed to understand the power dynamics in the room that day. “It was almost like imperialistic Westerners coming to China and telling us what to do,” Mr. Lee said in an interview last week. “There has been a history on this. The Chinese people have long memories.”

I have to say, on this I'm much more sympathetic to the Chinese than to the westerners: the Chinese are clear about what they are up to and haven't confused themselves with some "objectivist" bullshit ideology that blinds them to the price the future pays for their present prosperity: Chinese "miners" may be callous, but they're not delusional shit heads.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Links

Trump On Trade: Donald Trump: Politico
Democratic Delusions: Bernie Sanders: NYT
Apocalyptic Fear: Jerry Brown: NYROB
Breaking France: System Failure: Unbalanced Evolution
Militarized Poverty: Daniel Little: Understanding Society

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Links

Brexit Causality: Steve Randy Waldman: Interfluidity
Brexit Distribution: Lord Keynes: Social Democracy
Brexit Effects: John Robb: Global Guerillas
Cracks In China: Michael Pettis
Micro Encephalitis & Zika: b: Moon Of Alabama

Friday, June 24, 2016

Links

There Goes The Neighborhood: Mark Rumold: EFF
On This, Trump Is Right: Dave Dayen: The Intercept
NeoLiberal Sees Trump: Michelle Goldberg: Slate
Conservative Sees Trump: David Stockman
New Front In Water Wars: Amanda Roth: Motherboard
Lack Of Meritocracy: Chris Dillow: Stumbling & Mumbling

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Links

What We Want: Bernie Sanders: Washington Post
Insist On Change: Kevin Gosztola: Shadow Proof
Post Capitalist Future: Owen Hatherley: LRB
Clinton, Warts And All: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis
No Longer Capitalism: John Battelle: Evonomics
What Trump Said: Donald Trump: Politico

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Links

Imbalance In The West: Raul Ilargi: The Automatic Earth
Imbalance In The East: Michael Pettis
I Modi St Policy: M K Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline
Money Power In GHz: Steve Randy Waldman: Interfluidity
Free Labor: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Evonomics

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

What's The Plan? Links

Beta Testing Disruption: John Robb: Global Guerillas
Unknowable Future: Ben Carson: AWOCS
ISIS Israeli Truth: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis
What China Seas: Pepe Escobar: Russia Insider
Dis-Information?: Marcy Wheeler: EmptyWheel

Monday, June 20, 2016

Links

Russian View Of Post 2000 US: Rossi Barbera: The Saker
Disgraceful Truth: Steve Coll: NYROB
Syrian Lies: b: Moon Of Alabama
The Sanders Dictatorship: Dan Wright: MintPressNews
Battle DC: Andrew Cockburn: TomDisatch

Friday, June 17, 2016

Links

Unequal Gains: Lindert, Williamson, Bell: Naked Capitalism
At A Trump Rally: essie mc: Storify
Economic Reductionism, Again: Fredrik DeBoer
Blundering To War: b: Moon Of Alabama
Fealty "Redeems" Fatalism: John Robb: Global Guerillas
Poor Privileged Pretenses: Nicole Vosper: The Guardian
Cui Fascist?: Raul Ilargi: The Automatic Earth

Monday, June 13, 2016

Links

To Be Free: Natasha Lightfoot: AAIHS
Surplus Elites: Ned Resnikoff: IBT
Next Balkan War: Timothy Less: New Statesman
Breaking Bad: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Telegraph
Just Another Industry: John Kay: Naked Capitalism

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Links

Planning For War: Margaret Kimberley: Black Agenda Report
Parasitic Pragmatism: Tom Crowl: Civilization Systems
Money Cult: Dmitry Orolov: ClubOrolov
The Politics It Buys: Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Consortium News
Why People Are Pissed: Liz Weston: NerdWallet

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Links

Capital Societies: Michael Pettis
Chewing Out Of A Trap: Yves Smith: Politico
Social Depreciation: Louis Proyect: Naked Capitalism
Sanctions Are Good For Russia: Dmitry Olshansky: Russia Insider
Art Of Corruption: Hannah Furness: Telegraph
Art Of Laundering: Patricia Cohen: New York Times

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Links

Brazil's Coup: Immanuel Wallerstein: Defend Democracy
Leadership Qualities: Ian Welsh
Where It Leads Short Term: Chetan Hebbale: Informed Vote
And In The Long Term: Naomi Klein: LRB
NeoLiberal Thought Collective: Philip Mirowski: Naked Capitalism

Friday, May 20, 2016

Links

Ice Melt: Chris Rooney: Washington Post
Broken China: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism
Fixing It: Michael Pettis
De'tante: b: Moon Of Alabama
Wages Of Sin: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis
Spikes & Bubbles: Wolf Richter: Wolf Street
Class In America: Jay Paul Etc.: Naked Capitalism

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Links

Parasite Economics: Nick Hanauer: American Prospect
Learning And Forgetting Nothing: Daniel Little: Understanding Society
Slowly Learning: Eli Saslow: Washington Post
Difference: Steven Randy Waldman: Interfluidity
First Do No Harm: John Michael Greer: The Archdruid Report
When That Doesn't Work: Ian Welsh

Friday, May 13, 2016

Links

Problem Of Power: Noam Chomsky: TomDispatch
Where It Leads: Noam Chomskey: TomDispatch
What Would Fix It: Pavlina Tcherneva: Naked Capitalism
Why We Never Hear This: Edward Snowden: RSN
The Unnecessariat: Anne Amnisia: More Crows

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Links

Slow Power: Kris De Decker: Low-Tech
EU, Iran, China: Moritz Pieper: Informed Comment
Turkey Turn: Efe Kerem Sozeri: GlobalVoices
Missleadership: Rod Dreher: The American Conservative
Now That's Interesting: Zen Adra: GlobalResearch
13,533,000 Reasons: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis
The Dog Ate My Homework: Patrick Lang: Sic Semper Tyrannis

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Links

Assassinating Democracy: Edward Snowden: The Intercept
The Hit On Single Payer: Lee Fang: The Intercept
Trump Can't Win: b: Moon Of Alabama
He's A Realist: Thierry Meyssan: Voltairnet
MedicalIC Doing What MilitaryIC Hasn't Yet: Agence France-Presse

Monday, May 2, 2016

Links

Soviet Trust Failure: Benjamin Peters: First Monday
Faiding Frears: Malcolm Harris: The New Republic
But Hillary's Won't Help: Andrew Sullivan: New York Magazine
Poor, Black, American, Woman: Debbie Nathan: The Nation
American Trust Failure: Stephen Deere: St Louis Post-Dispatch

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Links

On Keeping Enemies Close: Andrew Bacevich: LA Times
Why The Squid Wants Your Quid: P. & R. Martens: Wall Street On Parade
Where It Leads: Bob Lord: CounterPunch
What To Do About It: Nuno Teles: RSN
Death & Hackses: Cory Doctorow: EFF

Friday, April 15, 2016

Links

Neoliberal Geneology: George Monbiot: The Guardian
Brazil's Neoliberal Logjam: Perry Anderson: London Review of Books
Waking From Autism: Alexa Tsoulis-Reay: New York
Arresting The Elderly: A J Vicens: Mother Jones
Currency Revulsion: Martin Lobel: American Prospect
Uber/Lyft Market Fairy: Ian Welsh
American Narrative: John Michael Greer: The Archdruid Report

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Links

Settler Liberalism: Jairus Grove: The Disorder Of Things
The Settled: Emily Bazelon: Slate
The Sin Of Poverty: Joe Brewer: Medium
Corrupitalism: Phil Hearse: Socialist Project
Keeping The Wolf At Bay: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Links

The Extraction Machine: Joe Brewer: Medium
Uber Ails: Steven Hill: Alternet
Once And A Future Thing: Ollie Richardson: Fort Rus
Taste Of The Future: Everton Fox: Al Jazeera
Preparing For It: The Saker: Vineyard Of The Saker

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Links

Krugmans Cranial Rectal Inversion: Matt Tiabbi: Rolling Stone
The Bribe Factory: Fairfax & Huff Po: The Age
Ground Troops For The China War: M. K Bhadrakumar
Ground Troops For Cleveland: John Robb: Global Guerillas
The Dogs Won't Eat The Dog Food: John Michael Greer

Monday, April 4, 2016

Clausewitz Had It Backwards

Politics is the continuation of war by other means. The little coercions of intimidation and misinformation, the financial manipulations and trade imbalances. The NGO's and "color revolutions", World War III is well underway, but like William Gibson's future, which has already arrived, it's poorly distributed so most of us don't see it yet. It has come unnoticed except by its perpetrators at the dark heart of Empire and its remote and distributed victims. It is most apparent, to those who look, in places like Ukraine, Yemen and Syria, but it is "by other means" evident everywhere real popular constraints remain on the behavior of US and Western corporations.

With the Unaoil scandal, the imperialism suspected in the 2003 Iraq invasion has been revealed, though studiously ignored by the communicative organs of power. The similarities between Unaoil and what is unfolding more extravagantly in Brazil, the "car wash" scandal, is complete up to the point of the attention given each in the "establishment" Western media. At that point, however, the parallels go perpendicular. Where corruption in Brazil, Ukraine, China, India and of course Russia (no link necessary, you can find this in the NYT almost every day) is pressing news and important for Americans understanding of the world, rot at the heart of the empire goes unreported.

Corruption is clearly not a concern for those who run American government, or how could Paul Krugman scold the Sanders Campaign as irresponsible for refusing to launder the bribes of the rich through PACs for the Democratic Party? Sanders is presenting that party an historic opportunity to do without the bribes of oligarchy and fund itself directly from its constituency and the party's leaders are doing all within their power to defeat him. The party has no problem with the source of its money. It will be interesting to see, if we ever get to, how the missing 30,000 Clinton emails may touch on "Car Wash", or "Unaoil" where Reddit has already made the link. So corruption is no longer a defect to our system, it now appears to be essential, what core remains of the hollow shell imperium.

None the less, this system is at war. It's a different kind of war that's recently meme'd up with several slick new names. It started with a notion about chaotic systems and the opportunities they present for imposing change and morphed over a generation into a doctrine not publicly articulated but reducible from observation as "controlled chaos" who's targets have taken to calling it "hybrid war". The governments of Russia, China and Brazil are all acutely aware it is being waged against them and they are beginning to react accordingly. Brazil is at present the most precarious, but it is clear that the issue of imperial meddling is getting traction there. China is arming the Spratlys which could lead to any number of open war scenarios.

But the most interesting recent development is in Russia. There, a government birthed in the demographic collapse of US administered post Soviet "shock therapy", while grappling with its own demons of corruption and brutality, has spotted what seems to me the decisive fly in the imperial ointment. Having demonstrated that wars can be fought and actually won, in clear contrast to recent US war efforts, Russia has called the worlds attention to the "controlled chaos" of US "hybrid war" and pointed out the costs born by everyone but the US governing malpractitioners.

Beyond the hot spots mentioned, with induced chaos apparent now in Brazil, China and Russia one is left to assume the hapless Modi in India is already "aligned", the first "installment" of Corporate plans for the BRICs. Politics is the continuation of war by other means: as we accuse Putin of weaponizing everything, we have in fact weaponized finance with "sanctions" imposed unilaterally by the US Treasury as a staple of foreign policy. Dollar hegemony, reserve currency status, was a coercive enough tool to prostrate all our trading partners until 2001, since then that power has been compounded by personal bespoke sanction, as if a finer point was needed.

Even beyond Wall Street , war has become a profit center for private corporations the US pays to supply and, where it would be embarrassing, to wage the actual fighting (and other un-speakables). War, like every other Washington Consensus activity has been converted into a financial product to guarantee corporate cash flows even as the state pursues "national interests". But the financialization of war has peculiar consequences: private contractors profit from sustained war, sustained destruction/replacement of materiel, and by provoking ongoing hostilities. This we continue to see. In response Putin is building an Army Group, an armored attack force suitable for a large ground war.

Washington has spent the last sixteen years abusing the trust of the American people in every conceivable way. NeoLiberalism, the governing ideology, can be summed as the recognition and betrayal of trust, wherever it is found, converting trust to money profits for Oligarchs who have purchased the enabling legislation guaranteeing themselves what "benefit" such a system can offer. Trump and Sanders have identified themselves with the betrayed, with varying degrees of sincerity one assumes, and their insurgency won't go away regardless of their individual fates. Trump voters in particular are in a "post Soviet shock therapy" collapse of their own. The betrayals of trust have been so great, preying on the patriotic for so long, there is no way the US can man for war a comparable ground force: the morale for such a thing can not be hired, it can only be bread through shared sacrifice and strong, supportive group identification, through trust. Exactly the behavior our system has been monetizing for the last generation.

By the end of the Andropov era, the feedback mechanisms of the Stalinist system in the USSR were so sclerotic with corruption that the realities of life in Soviet Russia had become invisible to the dacha dwelling elite of the Communist Party. Both wings of our Propertarian party now suffer the same affliction. If the insurgency fails this fall, it is likely our next President won't be able to contain what was started by two predecessors: World War III.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Friday, December 2, 2016

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Friday, November 4, 2016

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Monday, October 10, 2016

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

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Friday, September 9, 2016

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Friday, August 26, 2016

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Thursday, August 18, 2016

Monday, August 15, 2016

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Friday, August 5, 2016

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Sunday, July 3, 2016

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Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Friday, June 24, 2016

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Wednesday, June 8, 2016

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