For those who have not had the pleasure, I highly recommend John Boyd, both his essay Destruction and Creation, as well as his slide show on military history.

Boyd was an authentic American genius, and hero, whose writings captures/explains the current moment perfectly.

As to hero status, Boyd was an ace in the Korean War.

Later on, he was a test pilot known as Thirty Second Boyd for his ability to allow a pilot to get on his six o'clock position, and within thirty seconds, reverse the situation to what would have been fatal to the other pilot in a real dogfight: drinks were always on Boyd.

It was during his stint at the Pentagon however, that Boyd became a hero in the highest sense, as in combating the idiocy of military bureacracies, he gradually stumbled onto a general social theory that is very important to understand now; really, really important.

As Boyd tried to demonstrate to "The Brass" that his Energy Manueverability Theory at the time was the most appropriate quantitative measure for assessing fighter aircraft, in this case against the Soviets, and that by that standard, the nascent F-15 and F-16 were being steered in the wrong direction, he gradually came to realize that as much as ninety per cent of the people working in the bowels of the Pentagon were full of garbage; especially the Top Brass.

In essence, the Top Brass liked to Kiss Fannies; no matter how many people died, or could die, in the process, as long as they got to "Walk on Water/Get the Star (s)."

Boyd concluded that all most people working in the Pentagon wanted was to be somebody, preferably with four stars, rather than do something, for which, like Boyd, you generally speaking only make Colonel.

I have met one great brigadier before, and I am half joking, but only half. Maybe only a quarter joking.

To be fair to the non-Boydian majority, a key goal of most organizations is to crush their Enemy the Human Spirit Totally, which succeeds with most people if they are there long enough, and especially if they are beaten on long enough: HR people and Administrators are real good at setting that up now.

Ninth Circle or the Wall for you guys after the Revolution. Just kidding.

I am sure as well that Boyd figured out that the same phenemenon of the Biggest Fanny Kisser/Backstabber/Bully depending on what is Good for the Moment and Mess Everyone Else Over Going the Farthest is true in the private sector as far as getting a corner office and big bonus, or in the academic world in terms of landing the prestigious tenured job based on publications that no one will read in five years at best. At best.

I have seen the cowards, I mean bullies, I mean Fanny-Lickers enough in the corporate world to get the point, and have been on the receiving end of a massive amount of academic bullying and witnessed more fannies kissed than I care to think about: may my academic enemies that have tortured me over the years, and we know who you are, die by Chinese water torture. But I digress, but only slightly. I am joking. Sort of.

To those of you who the above calling out of organizational Fanny-Licking etc... has now made you want to kill me for invalidating your meaningless death of the human spirit and race pointless existence, I apologize in advance.

I would point out in my defense that your type of person has tried to hurt me in every organization I have worked in for speaking truth to idiots, I mean the powers that be, and that more importantly, that your type of person is about to kill all sorts of  innocent people;so to heck with you and the horse you rode in on.

Nothing personal.

Returning to the main theme of the essay, the work of decorated by the Marine Corps Air Force Colonel because the fly-boys didn't get Boyd, the reason for this phenemenon of organizational entropy, Boyd came to realize, is of course the Second Law ofThermodynamics, as applied to organizations.

In essence, the Second Law tells us that closed systems must have an increase in disorder over time in the sense of energy available to do work.

In organizational life, this means that eventually, more and more effort/resources must be inputted into the system in order to deal with the external environment of the organization successfully, until even despite the best effort of the doctors/management consultants/re-inventing government planners, it dies; like life, like right now.

I know that if Boyd came back right now to address the current world's leadership, what he would say would be something like this:

"Uh, guys, I have some good news, and some bad news. I am sorry for being kind of a jerk for being backstabbed my entire career in the Pentagon, so first, the bad news. The bad news is that the systems of economic, social and political governance that you are currently operating are real long in the tooth and collapsing around your dumb selves. The fact that none of the so-called experts in the "Mainstream Expert /Fanny-licker" community is getting it right at all lately tells you this. The fact that the "Mainstream Expert/Fanny-Lickers" spend a lot of time complaining about not seeing the future clearly all of a sudden, and all at once, all at once, these are the key signals that you are witnessing a General System Failure, a Collapse, in the sense of Jared Diamond. That is the bad news.The good news is, you don't have to freak out about it, or go the way of the Mayans, just get Creative! The Destruction part is already here, so you might as well get creative, and not freak out, and especiallly not do dumb stuff from the past like start wars to distract people; you hear me Vladimir, Barrack and Hilary, Nicholas, Kim, Hu, Bibi, et al... . Cut it out, or see my world wide theory of Revolution I had the brass you knows to show the Top Brass at the height of the Cold War in the Pentagon no less to see what happens to your sorry dumb morons. Be Creative. War is not usually Creative. Do the exercise."

People like Jared Diamond in Collapse intuited this Collapse too a while ago, which is why he wrote the book probably, because he just couldn't watch the lemings, sheep, Mayans, I mean us, wander ever closer towards the cliff anymore without some kind of hint.

There is good news from Boyd, however, and a thought exercise that all the lemmings, or sheep, I mean Mayans, I mean, everyone, needs to start doing right now. In Boyd I trust, on this point.

I have my classes working on it. Promise.

Boyd's model of Creativity, which is in the essay Destruction and Creation, and in which we need a lot more Creation now, because in organizations like governments, corporations and universities there is not nearly enough of that going on right now, and so therefore they are in the process of taking the lemmings, I mean the sheep, the Mayans, well, you get the point, real close to the cliff, works like this.

As an example, create three images in your head of a ski slope, a park, and a lake.

Think about it. For real.

Then, when you have painted in the details of each image, smash the mental boundaries between the three images. Poof, all to pieces.

 That is the Destructive step, no more ski slopes or lakes, or Left and Right, so to speak for later, and just think about the pieces in front of you.

Now you are free of Left and Right, well, first ski slopes and lakes.

Guess what is one thing you can come up with from the three images? This is the Creation part.

Well, one thing is a snow-mobile, from the skis, the handlebars and seat of a bike from the park, and a motor from the lake, none of which occured together in isolation. I bet there are other modes of transportation too from those three images.

Now, for homework.

Just kidding, but feel free to run with it, even Vladimir,better than your dumb ideas with the paratroopers in Vladivostok lately; think we didn't notice that? Vladivostok? Really. Nice to play on the Korean Peninsula with that maniac, or Alaska. But we know. How about the cholera? Been there done that before with small pox and the Indians whoever pulled that stunt, so cut it out. You too Americans, France, Japan, the Zionists, cut it out all of you, and try something new instead of the usual homicidal game of three level chess on the world island that you think you have to play. For once do something really different. Please. It will be way more fun the alternative. Promise.

A simple thought experiment I leave below for the current system crisis; don't be so mentally lazy, it is not a good time for it.

Take a corporation, a government, and a university. Really picture them. Really think about them.

Then smash the mental boundaries between them, and see what we you can come up with from the pieces.

I know one of the things you could come up with would be the Holy Roman Empire, properly understood, and in which that is actually a good thing in many ways, and where I am betting  the survivors of the current course will end up anyway in some sense, and thinking about it beforehand will increase the number of survivors or avoid talk of survivors in the first place.

GET CREATIVE.

I am sure there are some of you in the audience who are thinking "Isn't she gone now? Oh no, she's back."

Well, I am used to persisting in life, having to earn basketball scholarships and such in order to pay for my education, granted at a time when it was a lot cheaper and easier to do so, meanwhile passing a wonderful time in the community college systems of this country.

So in response to Mr. Obama, I am all in favor of expanding educational opportunities; I just think that your educational background might blind you to some untapped resources, like the community college system, that are a lot cheaper, and more importantly, friendlier, than research universities in which students are too often bodies to be processed.

You have talked about change. All to the good, if you change the right things.

You talk of accountability. All to the good, if you look at the right things to hold one accountable for. What I found, missing, no offense, in your speech, was any call for more accountability from the higher education sector to which you propose sending more money.

My son is serving his country, and to be honest, the high cost of four year schools played a role.

I am concerned about rising health care costs to which I return in a moment, but that in the end most especially affects the old.

I am at least as concerned about the higher cost of higher education.

Why does it keep getting more and more expensive?

One of my duties as governor of Alaska has been to oversee the system of higher education, and I can tell you from personal experience, that it seems like there are a lot of adminstrative types sitting around in comparison to those actually teaching clases, and that before we throw more money at that system, perhaps we should make sure that it uses the resources more efficiently.

As to foreign policy, some of you in the audience laughed at me for saying I could see Russia. I know Alaska is a long way off for most of you, so being next to Russia sounds funny.

However, historically speaking Mr. Obama, the Poles and Baltic States and the Ukraine have not found it funny to live next to Russia; no one has. No offense to the Russians; it's a rough world. Poland, the Baltic States are NATO members however, who are now being threatened with tactical nuclear weapons by a former KGB operative whose employees radiation poisoned Antonin Litvinenko for having the nerve to point out the probability that the FSB blew up apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 in order to get Mr. Putin dictatorial powers, and that Al Qaeda operative Ayman al Zawahari was in Russia for six months in 1998.

My Party does not think now is a good time to show the slightest weakness towards Mr. Putin at all, and this  talk of coming to a deal over missile defense shields in Poland is showing weakness to him. No bear baiting; we like bears, even Russian ones in Alaska, but we watch them carefully too. We have a Pipeline to protect; more on that later.

Continuing with the theme of foreign policy, you say you will save money by pulling troops from Iraq.

But is that not a false economy if it encourages ever more adventurous  moves by Russia and potentially other Great Powers?

Weakness always draws bullies, and not just Russian ones.

As to the economy, yes it is the case that the current economic situation is more trying than most people had been led to believe to be possible.

And that is exactly the problem. The Federal Reserve System and the continuing use of monetary and fiscal policy  to smooth out the inevitable bumps in the free market economy, a free market economy that you rightly point out as our great strength, in conjunction with regulatory encouragement of increasing the rate of homeownership, is the immediate cause of this collapse.

I see too much of the same in what we are doing to date. I want as Ron Paul has suggested a very serious inquiry into the role of monetary policy in this collapse along the lines of the Aldrich Commission in the wake of the Panic of 1907 that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, in which I think Mr. Paul should be able to make his case that if money is nothing but paper, in the end, it won't be worth much.

That leads to my last point. You talk about energy efficiency. Well and good to a point.

But it is inefficient not to use the resources of my state, especially because I beliece as does Mr. Paul that money should be backed by something, and energy wealth seems to me the main asset that is not being used by the Federal Government in this crisis, and that is not responsible stewardship of nature's bounty. There are trillions of dollars of oil in ANWR; why would we want Mr. Putin to have more of an on/off switch on the world economy than he does already by allowing the Alaskan Pipleline go dry, a Pipeline that supplies not just the United States, but also our most important ally in the Pacific, Japan. That seems dumb to me.

Finally, returning to the economy, the Baby Boomers are getting older. Their asset prices have fallen when they needed them the most.

I am all for easing the flow of credit, but the right way.

Part of the source of this crisis is the concentration of risk in the financial system. I propose that we distribute ownership shares of banks to the Social Security Trust fund and create new banks backed by the natural resource wealth of the federal governement in partnership with the private sector in which no bank will ever take on excessive risk because it is too big to fail.

I look forward to working with my party and Mr. Obama. I enjoyed running against with Senator McCain, but am of course as they say, my own woman now.

Sorry for those who don't like me, yet I hope. I am here to stay, because although I will disagree with Mr. Obama, I certainly want my Party to work with him where we can.

Thank you.

I write this in response to numerous well-thought out and well-written posts on Town Hall on Democracy and Republics etc... .

Unfortunately, I believe that these writings replicate one of the key omissions and errors of the academic literature on Democracy and Republics, in the end because they replicate the ommissions and errors of the historically significant reflections on this literature.

This historically relevant literature most especially includes an omission in Federalist Papers Number 10 and 51, and most importantly, the errors and omissions of the root sources of most of Political Science as we know it, which especially included Madison even with his grounding in English sources, which are Aristotle's The Politics ,and Plato's The Republic.

The error in question is  failing to consider the external environment in the analysis and in the construction of domestic politcal institutions; hence the title.

Thucydides, by this analysis, read properly when he was no longer only of the Party of the Few after the betrayal of the Athenian 400, was the greatest political thinker or the ancient world, and probably the greatest political thinker of all time, except for possibly Herbert Spencer, Vilfredo Pareto and Max Weber, who appear in this analysis in the obvious places about the Few versus the Many and the nature of Government and its functionality in terms of survival.

As to the analysis, Democracy is a form of government, first and foremost, although it does have economic and social corollaries within ranges

Democracy is therefore a subset of governments in general, hence the definition of government below.

The definition below is very general in character for a reason, because the highest level of generality is necessary for proper analysis, in order to avoid being too myopic, and thereby not see how the pieces of all forms of government fit together, especially the external piece, which is the primary focus of this essay.

Definition: Government: A functioning system of institutionalized controls over the use of physical violence that prevents the violent part of the world of Hobbes (Leviathan and De Cive) from being the predominant reality of daily life for the majoirty of the inhabitants who may be considered legitimate participants in the system of government in terms of said systems own rules of operation.

Life may be brutish, nasty and short in some parts of a society said to posess a government in comparison to living in an American planned community, but fear of a violent death does not constitute the main worry of an average individual, an individual who under the rules of the form of government, may be said to be legitmate participants in the operation of the government of the society being said to have a government in the sense of a system of functioning controls on the use of physical violence. 

This definition allows using slavery based societies like Athens and the American South pre-1861, or even the United States prior to the passage of the nineteenth amendment enfranchising women, as being pertinent to the analyis of Democratic Government, if only because all the principles of Democratic Government, indeed all government, were developed in a time period in which notions of Equality as to who was considered part of the Demos/Many were significantly different than is now the case: no throwing out babies with bathwater.

Thus, under this definition, American inner cities often teeter on the edge of not having a functioning government in many instances, but they are still governed because

a) most days one does not get shot in even the worst inner city ghetto making economic and social exclusion stressors primary on average

b) the overarching government of American society could impose total control on the use of physical violence in inner cities if it so wished by deploying more police and social workers and tax incentives to said areas. That is choice.

c) the inhabitants of such zones on average who under the current system of governance are legitmate participants in said system would prefer b to its alternative of secession and/or civil war as demonstrated in the current lack of significant armed revolutionary bands in American inner cities. Of course, nothing precludes said occupants of inner cities from so chosing should the larger society fail to deal with the myriad problems of the American inner city more efficaciously, which demonstrates the point about government or no.

Such controls on the use of physical violence in the definition of government may involve solely or almost primarily physical institutions such as police forces and armies as in a Universal Monarchy like the Roman Empire, Han China  especially in the Shih Huang Ti period, Tsarist Russia especially under Ivan IV, or the Persian and Mauryan Empires, or a modern police state like fascist Italy and Germany, currently Putin's Russia and the CCP governed China, and the recent past U.S. supported Pahlavi regime under the Shah.

We call this a militaristic system of government, or in the language of the Da Vinci Model, the P form.

Such militaristic systems of governance have of course other institutional backstops, like monarchical legitimacy or the wisdom of a communist party or the Dear Leader/Fuhrer/Savior of his Country, but the main characteristic of said governments is the threat and/or direct use of force to impose order. Such a form again is called militaristic in character.

Such institutionalized controls on the use of physical violence that are characteristic of any government may also primarily rely on social norms such as especially the Chivalric Code of Feudalism of Western Europe and its analogues in the Bushido Code of Japan, although Japan still qualifies as a militarist order from the time of the Kamakura Shogunate because of the centralization of the control on violence of the Bukufu which was not the case under the feudal order,  and note the especial imortance of the decentralized religious sanction of authority of the Holy Roman Empire under which feudalism and the Chivalric code functioned, or a theocracy like Iran and potentially Israel under the right conditions, or a true sense of social identity like class as existed under War Communism in 1919-1921.

Communism in this sense everywhere followed a natural trajectory from a social basis of revolutionary identity initially towards  the militarism of the first type of government.

The second form is called socially constructed government in character, in terms of the Da Vinci model, the S form.

Such controls on physical violence that are constitutive of any government may also involve primarily economic incentives of legally sanctioned economic losses and punishments for violations of system governance rules that include a physical enforcement component, but in which the physical violence component is not the primary means of enforcement of dispute resolution, but rather the lawsuit is the means of enforcement, as in the Commercial Societies of Western Europe and North America as said societies evolved after the English Civil War and the American Revolution; Ancient Athens, the Venetian Republic, the Roman Republic prior to the Gracci and especially Julius Caesar, and probably Carthage prior to Hannibal Barca would also fall into this typology of what we call economically constructed governments.

It is possible that Sumerian city states prior to Sargon of Akkad and the Indian civilization of the early Vedic period would qualify as well, although the evidence alas is inconclusive, and given the Indo-Aryan basis of the latter, more probably militaristic in character for the Veda period.

We call this form of government an E form in the Da Vinci Model, and for the purpose of this essay, an economically based form of government.

Moving to Democracy as a type of governement clearly falling within the economically constructed typology, we define sub-types as follows.

Definition: Democracy: A system of governance in which the Demos, the People, the Many, may be said to have the ultimate exericise of political authority in terms of control over the use of physical violence. The Many will vary in its extension in time and place, but at a minimum must constitute a significant portion of the population exclusive of women and slaves in the pre-modern period and inclusive of essentially ALL after 1900.

This compositive defintion of the Demos is standard practice in compartive politics.

We may then turn to sub-types of Democratic Government.

Sub-types of Democracy: Assembly Democracy: A type of Democratic Government in which the People, the Many, gather and vote on the majority of laws which are enforced through some means of sanctions, but in which the physical sanction is not primary, and in which the use of said sanctions is controlled through the use of the direct votes of the People though legally regular processes.

Example: Athens before the 400.

Representative/Republican Democracy: A sub- type of Democratic Government in which the People vote for Representatives who then cast votes for Laws that are binding on all, and in which under both types of Democratic Government, the use of phsyical violence is strictly controlled by Law in the sense of following well-established procedures, and that the use of physical violence is an adjunct to other sanctions, mainly economic, but also social (ostracism of a formal/Athenian  or informal/Open Salon character.). I am joking as to the latter, I hope.

Now to the crux of the matter of the ommission of all too much political thought, in which all governments must be evaluated in terms of control over the use of physical violence, which must by definition include control over the use of violence by outside states, unless the Democratic Government is a World Empire.

By definition, a Representative/Republican Democracy can span more terrirory than can an Assembly Democracy, because to have every citizen participate in the debating process over laws in the latter form would be an impossibility in terms of time beyond the numbers of minutes in a day times a reasonable length of debate: 14,400 (10x1440) is a not unreasonable upper bound for the Many to have even the possibility to be said to rule directly.

Moreover, as a practical matter, among any population a Few are better at public speaking than the Many, like our modern intellectuals who are so "dis-interestedly enthusiastic" about Assembly Democracy in the intersts of the Many, so it is therefore the case that anywhere and everywhere there is, under both Representative/Republican Democracy and Assembly Democracy, an Oligarchy/Collegium which exercises a veto on the rule of the Many, and which on average directs the political life of the Many as well.

There are usually subsets of the Few/Collegium in both forms of Democratic Government whose control over their own intrigues for power over the Many is per Thucydides actually the main issue of Poltics anywhere.

We return to that theme at the end of the discussion.

There is therefore a very definite and inescapable reason why the most perfect Assembly Democracy in history, Athens, can have its political life periodized into the lives of Themistocles, Pericles,Cleon, Alcibiades, and Demosthenes etc.. : the necessity of having public debate creates an automatic few of a certain type, namely the Great Orator, in which the modern substitution would be a good looking writer/speaker.

The question that therefore is truly relevant to evaluating the sub-types of the form of government called Democracy, which in reality is always a mixed system of rule between the Few and the Many in any case, in which in an Assembly Democracy again some Few speakers/writers constitute the Oligarchic element, and in which in a Representative Democracy there are per Federalist 10 bases for more numerous forms of Oligarchic elements of an economic, social(say religious or ethnic identity) and political (family name, imperial ideals) character, is which sub-type of Democracy is more likley to survive in an external environment of either Militarist or Socially constructed basis of governance.

The answer is clear.

If the socially constructed form of rule government constitutes the external environment,(think the Holy Roman Empire, the early Abbasaid caliphate, or a modern theocracy) then if such a government is grounded in the same culture as the Assembly Democracy, then the greater extension of the socially constructed state and the economies in the use of physical violence that this implies means almost sure incorporation of the Assembly Democracy into the Socially constructed state.

If the socially constructed government resides on a different cultural basis, then the incorportion is almost to be culturally and probably physically genocidal in character because of the economies of scale that always exist in the use of physical violence.

There was a reason the Jews were exiled by the Assyrians and the Romans, which is that because of the choice to not demographically incorporate sufficiently with surrounding populations, there were not enough Jews to resist the encroachment of militarist societies on the Jewish Kingdoms, a logic which would have applied even if the Jews had been ruled as Assembly Democracies.

It is similarly obvious which form of government survives in  contest between a territorially extensive militarized government and a small Assembly Democracy: the former. There are high start up costs to being able to fight a Great Power War, and that gives a big edge to what Madison called the Extended Republic (Democracy).

To reiterate as to the survival aspects, and therefore functionality, in terms of a form of government, in comparison of the Assembly Democracy versus a Representative/Republican Democracy, the use of military force has clear economies of scale as one moves away from zero up to in the nuclear age a very high upper bound, and so therefore the latter has superior survival traits and is to be preferred.

Given the by definition small extent of an Assembly Democracy in terms of avoiding a total demarcation between the Few and the Many, the survivability functionality is heavily weighted towards the Representative Democracy.

Athens and Carthage lost to respectively Macedon and Rome for a reason, which is that they were outmanned, and in said defeat, the rule of the People was meaningless, whether the city was burned to the ground or not.

This is also why the only states in which the Demos can be said to rule to any meaningful extent must be large, not small, states, and that even then in all but the smallest states, there will exist an oligarchy.

The alternative is to have a harmless debating society under the rule of some future Macedonians/World Empire, in which the rule of the Many is pointless, no matter how much we may dislike the Few, or to create a World Federation of Represntative Republics.

Given the contemporary cultural diversity of the planet, such a creation of a World Federation would almost surely make the First and Second World Wars look like cricket matches.

The real problem absent a Third World War for all Democracies, Republican or not, is the tendency of the Few, as was warned about by Thucydides, to take their sub-set arguments elsewhere for foreign military assistance or on self-destructive imperial adventures.

The difficulty Thucydides first identified is that beyond a certain social distance, we don't care what people think. Among the people we care about what we think, human nature being what it is, our concern is ultimately homicidal in character.

Among the Few, the only concern is competition within the Few. 

The Many to them are Sheep.

What the Few usually forget is that most of the Few are Wolves; Shepherds are rare, especially in politics, even though all governments only prosper under the rule of the Shepherd, not the wolf, in the long term.

A member of the Few can take losing to one from the Many, which will occasionally happen in any Democracy, because the Many are in effect considered sub-human; but not a loss to one among the Few.

The latter loss is so hurtful to the sense of being within the Few/Collegium and therefore one's sense of self, that as in Athens and the 400, the temptation to invite a foreign power Within the Gates, or to launch idiotic imperial ventures like the Sicilian Expedition like Alcibiades, becomes so overwhelmingly high, that what will seem on the surface like respectively are socialist or fascist cliques, but in reality are just the sort of egoisitc factions Madison warned about, destroy the Democracy, Republican or otherwise.

It is to the realm of Elite Rotation a la Pareto that one must look to preserve any Democracy, and again, the extensivity of the Republican version, per Madison Federalist 10, points to the superiority of the Republican over the Assembly Democracy, because the Few are less homogenous in character in an Extended Republic, and therefore less likely to have grudges to hold that get put before the welfare of the Many.

I write this in response to a nice post by Rick Lucke on Open Salon.

Never talk Politics and Religion; well, here goes.

In the end, it seems to me that at a minimum Deism, defined as the belief that there is a Universal Mind that gives an Intelligent Design to the Universe, in which Design is defined in the sense of internally consistent Laws of Nature, is economically, socially, politically, scientifically, both epistemologically/logically and physically, and personally necessary.

That was a mouthful.

Eptistemologically,Physically, and Scientifically necessary?

With all that other stuff? Really?

Yes.

As to science, the Scientific Project proceeds on the assumption that there are Laws to describe phenemenon that are more useful than random chance; otherwise, one would do just as well sacrificing sheep or flipping a coins in comparison to consulting a scientist as to the best course of action in a given set of circumstances, or even just predicting what is going to happen under a given set of circumstances.

Newton and Libenitz and Franklin understood this basic principle very well, which is by logical necessity a Deistic epistemology, as we shall see.

Note, this basic distinction between Theism and Atheism is a logically exclusive and mutually exhaustive categorization of epistemology.

Why is Theism and Atheism a mutually exclusive and logically exhaustive categorization?

What about Agnostics?

If one insists on bringing in Agnosticism, which is usually really one or the other, but let us relax that assumption for the sake of the Proof. Alternatively, one can assign by random chance agnostic epistemologies to either category Deist or Atheist under a Bayesian choice function that assigns a prior probability to the Investigator/Philosopher's belief that there is a God or No on the unit interval inclusive, with Theism being Probability One, and Atheism being Probability Zero, and the result as to the Probabilistic Choice over a basic epistemological dichotomy between Theism and Atheism is the same.

The Atheistic epistemology that culminated in Logical positivism got us all off track, because the logical postivist approach to epistemology argues that all scientific theories are just that, theories, subject to disconfirmation, without considering the structure of theories to one another in a very precise set theoretic sense.

Disconfirmation under logical positivism is by the process of Karl Popper, as when Einstein's Theory of Relativity is said to disconfirm Newton's Theory of Gravity when Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted Mercury's appearance from the earth better than newton's approach  did in 1919.

We say that under logical positivism, when Einstein predicts exactly the same consequences as does the Gravitational Theory of Newton, except under a set of circumstances in which Newton's theory fails to be as accurrate as the Einstein forecast, and when in all other cases Einstein's theory is at least as accurate as Newton's, (among the relevant circumstances turns out to involve high velocities),  we can then subsume Newton's theory of gravity under Einstein as a subset or special case.

If there were inconsistencies between Einstein and Newton, so that there was not one clear dominant theory in what they forecast, then we would go looking fo a new theory that covered both cases under teh logical positivist approach.

Logical postivism thus induces a series of sets and subsets over knowledge.

The difficulty with this approach in terms of Atheism is that the Goedel Theorem, the Incomputability results of Church et al and the necessity of using the Axiom of Choice all imply that the Completion of the Power Set of the Universe in a mathematical sense, which is necessary to the scientific project, involves the existence of a decision function that is infinitely fast: Infinity.

It always comes back to the Infinite, and when one forgets about the Infintite, one makes grave epistemological errors in Finite Time.

As to the Physical Necessity of a Creator, no Effect without cause is a basic scientific rule, traceable to Aristotle.

Modern cosmology has run into this dead end for a long time.

If we trace things back to the Singleton set of the Universe before the Big Bang, where did that come from?

There is no testable way, in a postivistic sense, to know.

Moreover, the Universe, as must be the case for science to make sense epistemologically and physically, is governed by a strict set of constants that must be in a precise mathematical relation to one another.

The Universal Mind is a Beautiful Mind, and it can only be that way. This is why the formulae governing the universe are always so elegant, with such wonderful numbers as i, e, pi and phi being among the most important.

The dodge the aethists and agnostics in cosmology are trying to use now is to argue that there are an infinity of universes embedded in a space time continuum that fluctuates generating multiple Big Bangs in which only the orderly universes persist; survival of the fittest universe.

But then there is the infinite regress again; where did the space time continuum come from.

In the end, the Hindoos told the story best.

A Grasshopper asks his Master, " What holds the World up?"

The master replies, "An elephant."

"Master, what holds up the elephant?"

"Four turtles."

"Master, what holds up the turtles?"

"Shut up, it is turtles all the way down."

That is our existential dilemma, even as scientists, that we persue an infinite regress of subsets  but cannot get there in Finite Time.

It is also in the end, our comfort.

We as finite minds cannot, and will not know, the Completion of the Universe, which is the Univeral Mind, It is that it Is.

But we can know that it is of necessity a Beautiful Mind, and that if we work at it, we can come to closer and closer approximations, even if we never get there in Finite Time,.

We can also draw comfort from the fact that almost surely along the Way to Understand the Universal Mind, we will come to feel pleasure from its Tao, its Karma, its Telos, its cycles, which is what the Mystics and Prophets have been trying to get us to see for millenia.

As to the economic, social and political necessity of religion, left to its own devices, any economy with any ownership over economic, social and political resources (henceforth ESP), and any uncertainty over the same, will, by the Law of Large Numbers with Probability One, generate a Power Law distribution over Wealth defined in one of those terms, E, S or P.

Thus, Generalized Wealth Processes accumulate exponentially in a generalized stochastic motion. It is in the Nature of the Universe.

Unfortunately, or not, it is also a Law of Nature that human beings must measure themselves by others, if they do not have a Universal Reference standard in the Universal Mind.

Like most Laws of Nature, the Social Distance Function that so results under the generalized stochastic motion must have a metric over it, which is almost surely an inverse square law among the relevant metrics; the distance I feel from you grows by the square, other things equal, of our difference in wealth.

Thus, the universal phenemenon of keeping up with the Jones, as was noted by Veblen, is quite intense.

 Remember again at this juncture that ownership can be expanded from narrow economic notions to a more generalized, and accurate notion of control over ideas (social), or instruments of ultimately force (political), and the argument goes through the same way.

This universal competition for economic, social and political power under the fact of the exponential generalized wealth accumulation process creates the Univeral Phenemenon/Law of the Few and the Many. This is true of all human societies across all time.

The exceptions are a set of measure zero, and have not lasted long.

Because of the Inverse Square Law governing the competition under a Power Law Accumulation Process, over time, the Few feel more and more remote from the Many.

The inevitable rise in hostility, which is a form of distance in terms of envy and its inverse snobbery, must always finishe in either War, Civil War and Revolution, or a combination of all three.

In this sense, Lenin was actually right, as was more importantly and more precisely, Thorstein Veblen: The Natural Order of course includes Natural Selection, on human beings and societies too, just like Spencer argued.

Thus, for Social Peace, one must have Rules, and in the end, they must be Revealed from an Outside Reference Source, or it will be the case that either the Few or the Many write the rules to their own benefit, and over time, this will become Common Knowledge.

Without such rules, a Sub-Game Perfect Noble Lie/religion, society, by the Condorcet Theorem in its full development, would otherwise turn into a war of all against all and the inevitable rise of the singleton/dictator as was argued by  Machiavelli and the man on the horse if he lives is alwa; hence the function of religion, economically, socially and poltically. QED.

It is so patently obvious that Russia is now openly trying to displace the United States as the world's pre-eminent power without the slightest objection by the U.S. government or comment in the media, and is thereby in the process endangering the very life and future of every American, that I have been forced to the conclusion that the people of the United States are immoral cowards by and large, who would not defend themselves if there were Russian paratroopers on the front lawn of the White House, and that our political elites know this, and are going to surrender the hard fought victory of the Cold War for human freedom for the illusion that they will be left alone by Russia and the rest of the world after doing so.

Bad news, immoral cowards, we won't be left alone, because as long as the United States could come back, it would be a threat to Russian domination, so that the only thing that is is safe to do is stop Russia while we still have allies.

Just think, have you ever been the top dog who fell on hard times? Did your enemies, and especially your friends and family, show you mercy, or did they try to crush you totally in body and especially spirit? We know the answer to that question already, which is why it is never safe to let go of power once you have it.

Why the immorality part is so important to this story is because a consumerist society like the United States is bound to generate immorality and degenerate into a war of all against all over money, power and sex if left to the greedy devices of those who run it, and will eventually succumb like Athens and Carthage to a society like Russia and China later, in which private pursuits are put behind the collective interest.

Athens and Carthage were like America, and they lost to Sparta and Rome because they were soft, just like the United States is now.

Machiavelli warned of this in the Discourses, that if a society doesn't have some overriding collective purpose, it shatters pretty quickly into greed, lust and vengance, and that like it or not, the pursuit of Empire has usually been the best course.

Space exploration is the only alternative for U.S. national survival now, and that does not mean NASA, but it means outright colonization of Mars by millions, with global cooperation or not.

What does not grow, rots.

As to the enemies within the American gates who are in the process of surrendering, it is worth remembering that the commerical elites of the commercial/sea powers of Athens and and Carthage thought they would be safe surrendering too, only to find in the case of Athens that their walls were torn down (Ballistic Missile Defense) and of course in the case of Carthage that they were to be sold into slavery if not put to the sword.

The idea that we will be safer if Russia is allowed to replace us is laughable, and only put forward in the end by selfish cowards who would dishonor the American dead of the Marne, Normandy, the Hurtgen, Bastogne, Heartbreak Ridge, Hamburger Hill, Diyala Valley, and Fallujah in the vain hope that cowardice will be rewarded by a man like Vladimir Putin, a sixth degree black belt in judo.

I must take my hat off to Mr. Putin and Russian ingenuity:Friday's destruction of a U.S. military communcations satellite, the Iridium network is really mainly DOD, was brilliantly conceived and executed, and the demonstation effect is likely to be large. 

Our American Allies (e.g.Britain, Germany, Poland, Turkey, the Commonwealth, South Korea), Frenemies (e.g.Pakistan, France, Israel, Japan, Greece), and Enemies (Russia, China right now but wait and see after the excitement on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea although they are actually mainly a suicidal pawn, Iran, Venezuela) and Neutrals (Italy and now Spain will always be on the winning team) know the importance of satellites for U.S. military operations all too well.

Now some may immediately accuse me of being excessively conspiratorial in character, but consider the blowing of the Khyber Pass Bridges last week, the follow-on ejection of the United States from its Kyrgyz airbases two days later, and then a week later, a Russian military satellite happens to crash into part of the core communications link of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Really? Over Siberia apparently?

Really?

Is that not a curious series of unfortunate events?

All the Russians had to do was know the postion of the Iridium satellite, and the "accident" occurred over Siberia and the tracking ability of the Russians is quite well developed for such things just along different technological lines, and then send a universal signal to its COSMOS satellites to hide the fact that encoded in the message was one to the satellite in question to move just a little, a satellite which was sleeping until needed to go into the appropriate tumble, a "tumble" that could easily be made to look out of control, with course "corrections attempting to prevent an accident" that if necessary could be made to look like they "failed,"and then there would exist a continuously calculable and optimal, with respect to all the parameters of the problem including deniability, trajectory to smash into our satellite.

Nice work Vladimir, and give credit to Russian science and engineering, which by the by, is way better than Americans have been led to understand.

The whole history of mathematics is littered with Russian names, not Americans, so this would be no surprise.

This conjecture is consistent with the history of Russian weapons design approaches, which always thought that the Americans traded off too much in quantity for higher quality.

This Russian approach actually has justifcation in Lancaster's Sqaure Law as to the efficacy of numbers in generating firepower, and more importantly in terms of the long-term debilitating effects of relying on technology to avoid difficulty, especially casualties, on national will as the ultimate source of national power.

Clausewitz and Sun Tzu are smiling Vladimir Vladimirovich, and the Russians always have felt that if it were Russians using Russian weapons instead of idiot "satellite"/client states against the Ameirican armed forces that the historical U.S.-Russian weapons comparison would look way different.

In the end, that kind of thing is something you just have to know, just like at the end of the bank robbery scene of the beginning of the first Dirty Harry movie, when Clint holds the gun at the black guy on the ground, alarms going off everywhere, fire hydrant expoded and shooting water all over the place, and Harry has already blown three people away and says:

"You're probably wondering, Did he fire five shots, or six?"

"Well, this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world."

"It could blow your head clean off."

"So you have to ask yourself, Do I feel lucky today?"

"Well, do you, Punk?"(Big sneer from Harry)

The guy on the ground, after Harry kicks away the shotgun he was eying carefully two seconds earlier, looks at Harry, and says "I gots to know."

Harry pulls the trigger;black guy flinches. Click. Empty. He falls backwards in the agony of defeat.

Vladimir, and the Russians, in the end, I think they gots to know.

I think somebody has to know the agony of defeat. I don't want that to be the United States.

Moreover, it would seem to this author that this conjecture is consistent with the placement of huge numbers of Rusian satellites into orbit that were called "deep space probes" at launch time, then boosted into earth orbit, in which the U.S. interpretation was that the Russians were merely trying, like all bureaucracies, to make their performance look better by hiding the failure of the deep space probes. Except that they were all military, even granting it was the Soviet Union at the time.

Instead, by this conjecture, much of the time the Russians were putting up rather expensive, but not nearly so expensive as their U.S. satellite counterparts, rocks to throw at the U.S. lines of space communications, should the need arise.

Just watch the American orbits, track them, and send your rocks into a tumble if you need to: simple, but very effective, and very, very Russian.

A simple test of this conjecture is to ask the Russians to begin to de-orbit all their dead COSMOS satellites in conjunction with the U.S. due to the obvious "problem" with space debris, and watch the excuses.

Of course, all the Great Powers are now more openly testing their anti-satellite and anti-missile capabilities as witnessed in the Chinese shootdown two years ago of one of its satellites, and the U.S. Aegis/ Arleigh Burke Cruiser shootdown of a "falling" satellite last February in response.

Let the Great Game for the High Ground of Space begin.

Furthermore, demonstrating the ability of the Russians to shoot down American satellites is consistent with the military demonstration in Georgia this summer, the probable Russian arming of the Somali pirates this fall, the increasingly obvious tilt of Pakistan towards Russia and associated events in Afghanistan etc... that the Russians are trying to overturn the verdict of 1989 by demonstrating that the United States cannot provide global order.

Thus, history did not end, the earth may be crowded and hot, but it definitely is not flat, and the United States had damn well start thinking about what it wants to do about the global order and act accordingly.

Vladimir feels lucky.

In the end, the case for the American Empire is simply that the United States has provided global stability among the Great Powers for the last sixty years.

It cost millions of dead Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans and Congolese in the process,  so I would not underestimate the structural violence inherhent in the dynamic global political equilibrium between the United States and the Soviet Union on the Eurasian landmass during the Cold War, referred to hence as the World Island as per the work of Harold Mackinder.

The question before the world now in a time of global economic crisis is what would be the alternatives to such an American Empire on the periphery of the World Island?

The most probable, indeed I believe certain result, which is why Russia is promoting this talk lately, is a Russian Empire of the World Island, and then a mortal threat to the United States.

Remember, critics of the American Empire, there has been no Great Power War on the Eurasian landmass for sixty years; that is not a trivial accomplishment of American Power.

Other than the Long Peace of 1815-1915,  a British Peace guaranteed by a structure not dissimilar to the current world order in a very general sense, Great Power War was common on the Eurasian landmass prior to the middle of the last century.

The question is, why the current Long American Peace?

The answer is that the U.S. nuclear arsennal and massive forward deployment of troops backed by command of the sea deterred any state or coalition of states from attempting to launch a Great Power War in order to achieve their political objectives.

It is that simple.

In Western Europe during this last sixty year Great Power Peace, neither France nor Germany could seek dominance by deleting the other and crushing the United Kingdom and Poland, because they did not have the ability to do so given the large physical presence of U.S. troops to prevent Russian/Soviet dominance of Western Europe.

Note, the Russians would have dominated Western Europe without the American forces that were always the center of NATO, and the tactical and strategic weapons that made their presence on the World Island defensible.

In East Asia during the Cold War, the United States always provided Japanese protection against the intrinsic threat of the existence of China in terms of the power potential of its population.

In the long run, this American presence also provided the Chinese protection against the logical Japanese response to the threat posed by the existence of China, which would be genocidal in character.

Remember, critics of the American Empire, the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Was the American Empire worse? Really?

Ask the Koreans how they liked that experience first, and how much fear that instilled in Australia, oh critics of the American Empire.

For both China and Japan, in the long run the United States provided protection against Russian designs in East Asia, which with respect to the Chinese must, by the nature of the size of China's population, as in the Japanese case, be genocidal in character.

Turning to the South of the World Island,critics of the American Empire seem to forget that after Suez in 1956 and especially after the retreat of Britain East of Suez in 1971, the entire international capitalist economy has hinged, under the surface, on the U.S. provision of a physical guarantee that oil would freely pass out of the Middle East.

Who was the threat to said access? In the end, Russia and the homicidal chess games we have to play with them in the Middle East because they want access to the sea, like always.

The Turks and Persians would think well on that point of Russian demands for the sea,  and that they are really Allies.

The Greeks and Israelis ought to remember that betrayals go poorly with Americans in the long run, even if we understand your historical goal of respectively a return to Ionia and Eretz Israel.

In the coming days ahead, the critics of the American Empire should think about the alternatives before they blink before Russian power.

Those in Libertarian-land on the Right, and those of the "America is always wrong crowd" on the Left, have forgotten your history, which is that Russia has sought security objectives for the last five centuries that most people living near them found threatening most of the time.

I am sorry the Mogols were not nice to the Russians; the Chinese stopped using the hard childhood excuse a long, long time ago.

To be feckless now in the face of the coming Russian adventurism will not make Americans safer in the long run for the reasons alluded to below, which is not surprising because victory in the race of life goes to the bold, not the timid, in the end.

As to the reason that showing weakness before Russia now is a dangerous idea, if, as is proposed by many now, the United States were to withdraw from the Eurasian landmass, one state would likely come to dominate the Eurasian landmass/World Island: Russia.

The United States would unlikely to be safe in the long run, because under the surface other Powers eventually would seek to approach the United States to gain their liberty at some point from Russian domination, so America would be going back to the World Island in less than advantageous circumstances.

For example, as we are sitting here, it is very obvious that Putin is trying to get the French to go over to his side in Europe, and playing the Japanese and Chinese against one another in order to create a Russian dominated security environment on the World Island. He is playing the same game between the Israelis, Iranians, and Greeks, and has more up his sleeve between Pakistan and India: the Great Game.

Eventually, the French and Japanese/or Chinese etc... would remember that if Americans can be obnoxious imperialists, the Russians are worse.

This would be foreeable to the now dominant Power on the World Island, in which case if it valued said dominance as a core national identity, like Russia clearly does, then the United States would be a mortal adversary in need of subversion and destruction.

It is that simple folks.

I wish it were not so, but we don't have to worry about provoking Russia, as they are quite agressive about getting what they want: just ask the Balts and Poles what they think first before we surrender the victory of 1991, and think to of all the Korean, Vietnamese and American lives especially that victory cost.

No offense to the other Allies, is must of necessity be a long list to contain the Russians, as always.

"A wise builder dug down deep and built upon a Rock."

The real problem with the debate hitherto on the economy is that no commentators have gone deep enough and broadly into the past in order to be able to see what is happening  today in order to correctly assess our options for the future.

Until we do that, we are building our policy efforts on a foundation of quicksand.

History takes time to remember, but like Proust, it is our remembrance of things past that defines current reality.

Making matters worse, the debate has occurred in a highly polarized ideological environment in which the truths of the Left and Right get exagerated too much for the Truth to emerge.

Here is my shot.

The current economic order, the world we think we know, dates from the Roosevelt era, and especially World War II.

All orders have a lifespan; global politico-economic orders are no exception.

The Liberal Capitalist states of the West, after the collapse of the Great Depression, made an implicit deal with their populations, that although private property would be preserved for the most part, the government would henceforward take on the role of insurer of last resort for economic risk.

That system, with much regional and country variety, was definitively established after the defeat of fascism and the rise of the Soviet Union to near peer Bi-Polar Power status with the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The rise of the Soivet Union, and especially the popularity of the Communist Party in France and Italy, pushed the United States into guaranteeing economic risks not only at home, but also abroad politcal and economic risks, as embodied in the Breton Woods and GATT systems, NATO and the U.S. Japan Security Agreement.

These institions and their evolutions remain the foundation of the global order: period.

Under the Breton Woods system, the United States would fix its currency to gold at $35 to the ounce, and all other countries in this order would fix to the dollar, a de facto Western"Japanese Gold Standard, but with a catch; namely that the equilibrating mechanism inherent in the Gold Standard would be violated, because all Gold reserve transactions would henceforth be between central banks, not private individuals.

This made the dollar the reserve currency of the international order. That remains the case, but is under grave risk.

Breton Woods was a governmentally managed Gold Standard, rather than the far more impersonal standard of the nineteenth century that died via state action in 1914 in the fields of Flanders, and one that would be far more vulnerable to political concerns taking precednce over long-run economic rationality.

Breton Woods companion, the GATT order, was designed to prevent the Beggar thy Neighbor Trade policies that in conjunction with the failure of the Gold Standard in the United Kingdom and the move to competitive devaluations that many analysts blamed for the spiral into WWII, with the key principle of the GATT being the Most Favored Nation Principle, one that was violated early on with the move towards a trading bloc in the nascent European Union that served the political objective of restraining Russia.

Economics is not just economics, but fused with politics and sociology.

If you don't always remember that, you make grave errors eventually.

Domestically in the West, again now inclusive of Japan, regulated corporate capitalism and the provision of social insurance with much variety as to what risks would be insured was to the order of the Post WWII day. 

Although the United States did not move nearly as openly towards such social insurance provision, the existence of the Social Security program and the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs illustrates the point that even so-called capitalist America has hardly lived in some perfect, or nightmarish, depending on ones ideological proclivities, capitalist system, but rather an economic order welded to social and especially political concerns.

In this vein, Keynesian fiscal policy gradually won acceptance by the 1960's as the dominant intellectual paradigm of the economics profession, although there were always dissenters a la Milton Friedman, Hayek and especially the followers of Von Mises as to especially the criticality of money.

Abroad again during this time period, the U.S. nuclear arsennal would guarantee the physical security of the West, which now again somewhat anomolously included Japan.

These American imperial expenditures gradually grew because the creation of a Soviet atomic bomb meant that the U.S. nuclear arsennal lost significant crediblity as a deterrent, meaning the United States would henceforward be required to maintain a large conventional force should it wish to remain engaged on what Mackinder called the World Island, i.e. the Afro-Eurasian landmass.

These expenditures were further escalated by the use of war by proxy tactics a la Vietnam around the peripheral areas of the World Island.

In effect, the United States and Soviet Union were fighting World War III in slow motion, which was of course often the case in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta as well, and it is worth noting, a conflict in which it seemed like the Athenians had won at one point.

Maybe they thought history had "come to an end too" with the Sparan defeat at Pylos/ spetsnatz in Afghanistan?

Returning to our core theme, throughout this history into the 1960's, American aggregate demand in terms of the defense budget was the balance wheel of the Western capitalist system, referred to by many as militarized Keynesianism.

The difficulty with this Post WWII political system was that the Western Europeans did not wish to pay for conventional and nuclear armed forces sufficiently large in character to deter the Soviet Union, that the United States did not trust its Allies, especially the Germans and Japanese especially, sufficiently to allow them to do so, and that America in the end wanted control more than Allies, like Athens and the Delian League, which is by the way the ultimate source of the ongoing Franco-American antagonism since Dienbienphu and Suez.

The chess players of the homicidal game of three level chess on the World Island have long memories, and nurse grudges, Amerique.

The eventual result was a large external imbalance in terms of dollar payments abroad for imperial expenses, which raised credibility issues about the gurantee that the U.S. dollar was actually worth 1/35 of an ounce of Gold in a free market for Gold, as was required under the Breton Woods system.

This disequilibrium feature was identified first by economist Robert Triffin in the early 1960's, reflected in the begining of ever more extreme U.S. Federal Government interventions in the market to square incommensurate domestic and external American policy goals as in the Kennedy Interest Equalization Tax, and known in general as Triffin's Paradox.

The reason to bring this up at this level of detail is that we are witnessing at root the same phenemenon right now as in the 1970's: the alteration of an imperial finance system.

That is what this crisis really is, as all imperial systems have to have financing, whether from open contributions of tribute a la Athens and the Delian League, or from the more subtle trinute of foreigners holding U.S. debt to maintain the dollar's status as a reserve currency when there is a question as to the difference between the nominal and real value of the currency/debt in question.

The Breton Woods system gradually came under speculative attack, because in the end the capital controls necessary to sustain such an economic  disequilibrium inevitably felll victim to the busy little beavers of the financial engineering world, and failed defintitively in 1971, with Nixon pulling us off the Gold Standard, thereby generating the era of pure fiat money that is now the core source of our present difficulties in conjuntion with the political and social concerns identified below.

The reason to understand this history is that the external drain on the U.S. economy is directly associated with an American national security decision to maintain a U.S. backed global physical security order over the  entire world's oceans and on the periphery of the entire World Island that the American political classes have been unable to persuade the taxpayers is sufficiently in the their interest to pay for over the years.

However, when push has come to shove so far, none of the other Great Powers has been able, the Soviet case, or willing, the European and Japanese case, to create the military arsennal capable of providing physical security in a fashion that did not seem likely to cause more harm than good; especially, since Suez in 1956 and the British retreat from East of Aden in 1971, the provision of physical security for the supply of oil at the heart of the Western and now globalized order coming under such tremendous stress at this moment.

It seemed as if all this was a moot point with the collapse of Soviet Power in 1989-1991. It was "the end of history, right." "The world is flat, right?"

That is what Norman Angell said in 1910. Lenin and Spengler were closer to the Truth; the hope going forward is no Flanders, but that is a real prospect now if we blow it.

The key point going forward is to understand that the Russians did not go away, history did not end, nor did Great Power politics end.

Returning to our narrative, after the premature challenge to the new American hegemony by Saddam Hussein was defeated in 1991, the potentially temporary era of total American dominance emerged.

Athens thought it had won at the Peace of Nicias/Reagan; the Spartans tore down their walls in the end, because states speak as they always speak, that the strong seek such terms as they can get, and the weak accept such terms as they must. I like strong.

What happens next depends on what we do next, as in unstable dynamical systems, which is what this is, small choices can have large consequences; just ask the Athenians before they almost took Syracuse early in what we now think of as a disastrous expedition.

Baghdad and Kabul used to look good too, and still can, if it is at the center of our attention, as the matter of life and death of the state that it necessarily must be.

This 1990's American hegemony was confirmed in the unwillingness of the Chinese to use force over Taiwan in 1996, by he failure of Russia to be able to protect Serbia in 1999 despite the attempt to land paratroopers in Pristina covertaly, and most importantly by the inability of the Europeans to create a true national army, and the unwillingness of the Japanese to go beyond the option value of their 1 per cent solution of a big GDP to national defense.

It is stll a bid budget though, and it is a Japanese option, because they fear China.

Under the surface however, all was not well for the American Empire during the 1990's.

Despite Bush I and Clinton's effforts, the United States was experiencing the development of an external economic imbalance generically similar to Triffin's paradox after what hopefully future historians will NOT have to call the Peace of Raegan/Nicias to be followed by an American defeat: Missile Defenses are city walls.

In the end, the potential rivals in the 1990's to the United States hegamonic status were not able to pose a credible alternative to American power, and the American political classes were unwilling to address the inter-temporal insolvency of the Social Security and Medicare programs.

In effect, whether by design or led as if by an invisible political hand of short term political interest, the political classes of the United States used the power of fiat money and the dollar's reserve currency status to prop up financial crisis after financial crisis from the Mexico episode in 1994 through LTCM and NASDAQ onwards in order to keep asset prices high enough to make Baby Boomers feel secure about their retirement and foreigners secure enough to invest in the United States, especially by purchasing Treasuries, that had the effect of reinforcing the dollar's status as world reserve currency.

That system is now under tremendous stress, because the long run disequilibrium of Entitlements is now becoming a short run disequilibrium because of the natural social cycle of Baby Boomers reaching the end of their working years in conjunction with a rapidly if temporarily advancing Russia and a China that has a CCP that has in this crisis lost the main legitmating reason for its existence, save Taiwan.

That is the combination that needs to be addressed: how to restore Social Security on an acutarially sound basis while preserving our position on the World Island, and more imporantly, its by historical standards peaceful Great Power equilibrium.

My personal preference for a stimulus package addressing the current state of the economy in proper context would have been addressing the unemployment problem among the young by increasing the size of the Army temporarily by over one million men, which is a form of job training and deterence to Russia and China, creating a new dollar on the basis of the natural resource wealth of the United States federal government as the carrot to Russia and China as well as to our Japanese and other East Asian creditor Allies, and taking all the bad American financial assets valued at a Dutch auction that cannot be sold to the private sector and putting them into the Social Security Trust Fund, and re-capitalizing U.S. banks on the basis of bonds issued on anticipated revenue from, again, the monetization of the entire natural resource wealth of the United States Federal Government, and in which the Federal Government will have to absorb the difference in the auction price and the nominal values of the securities as it re-captitalizes a new solvent banking system, but the Social Security Trust funds holds the assets until maturity thereby mitigating the real as opposed to the accounting loss, and the knowable immediate accounting loss is financed by a special issue of bonds, if necessary on the basis of a temporary forced levy through FICA to create individualized accounts, and the American people are told, look, we got here by letting things slide,and this stinks, but it sure beats the economic alternatives, and especially the Russian and Chinese political alternatives, and most especially global anarchy a la Flanders fields.

Time will tell if it is too late, I suppose.

Now on the surface, if the Federal Government is using federal tax dollars to supposedly stimulate the economy, in a Keynesian model the stimulus has the biggest economic impact if it is all spent within the country: no leakages in technical terms.

Of course, we live in a semi-open economy,  one that has grown more open to trade in the last thirty years.

In an open economy, by contrast, some of the stimulus will leak abroad in terms of foreigners seeling us steel.

Unfortunately, what the House and Senate Democrats, in including Buy American provisions in the stimulus packages, have done is ignore history, the structure of the world economy, and most importantly Putin's speech in Davos offering a new global order.

As to the first point, in the 1930's, the world's governments practiced a form of beggar thy neighbor policies that was a significant incentive to go to war in the long run in order to capture market share.

The current stimulus package is a step in that direction, especially because the current structure of world order is to have the United States allowed to stimulate the world economy by living beyond its means in order to have the World's Powers have a market of last resort in return for which the United States gets to be Globo-cop. Hence the reference to the current global order.

The stimulus package then leads towards point three above, Putin's offer in Davos to overturn the American centric order to a Russian order because the buy American provision is one less reason for Japan and Western Europe to follow the U.S. lead and one more reason to try an alternate architecture of military order. Hence the reference to Putin.

That would seem to be a high price to pay for jobs in ay industry. The United States may well have to re-think trade in terms of domestic social peace; it should do so knowing full well the risks such actions take for global peace, although war is of course the ultimate economic stimulus package, for the survivors.

Now in their defense, there was a time when Rush and Ann served a useful function in terms of activating the masses towards Conservatism.

Unfortunately, that time has now passed, because their lack of knowledge about history has led them astray.

To be fair, that is true across the political spectrum, aided and abetted as we shall see below, by an absolutely brilliant Russian maneuver, and facilitated even more by the naivete of the American professoriate and educational classes as to the historical reality of international politics.

In the end, the shrillness and anti-intellectualism  of Rush and Ann are now doing more harm than good, as their rhetoric is now infected with the overall debasement of the American culture that was probably an inevitable con-committment of the post-World War II era prosperity, and was especially accelerated by the ennui that was bound to set in after the Ten Year Peace of Reagan.

The fact that Rush and Ann will not understand the following analyis very well means that they are not in a position to lead the Conservative movement and as a matter of national life and death the country in the coming struggle; what is needed is a new William F. Buckley.

Returning to the analyis, the Peace of Reagan refers to the relatively quiet period in Great Power politics marked by the American truce with Gorbachev in 1988, exactly analogous to the Peace of Nicias in 421 in the Peloponnesian War, and in which the Russian adventure in Afghanistan with the spetnatz was the equivalent surrender of the Spartan Peers at Pylos.

Just as in the Peace of Nicias in the Peloponnesian War, there was always tension under the surface between the Great Power rivals, as the Russian oligarchs of the Russian security apparatus believed that Gorbachev had quit too early, which explains the Russian game in Iraq dating to 1990 of using Saddam as bait for the United States.

To be fair, the American politcal elite violated the terms of the Peace of Reagan by deciding for domestic poltical reasons as lobbied by Brzezinski to extend the frontiers of the American Empire to Poland and the Baltic States.

In the end, it was probably the case that the United States and Russia's Great Power rivalry would have to continue until total victory for one side or the other was achieved. The "End of the Cold War/End of History" was just a truce, a Peace of Nicias.

The rise of Vladimir Vladimiovich Putin demonstrates the issue now at hand.

Putin's minions in the FSB arranged for Al Qaeda Number Two Ayman al Zawahari to stay for six months in Russia in 1998.

1998. 1998. 1998. 1998. 1998.1998.1998.1998.1998.1998.1998.1998.199

You see?

Antonin Litvinenko was radiation poisoned for pointing this out, and for pointing out the fact that Putin practiced the effects of terrorism for sure on civilian populations in September 1999 in the Moscow apartment bombings that allowed effectively speaking for the re-imposition of the traditional Russian depsotism at home, and more importantly paved the way for optimizing the actions of their agent al Zawahari (with the Iranians for transit) in attacking the United States on 9/11 in the form of target practice. 3000 dead.

That is what happened.

The purpose of the attacks on 9/11, which thereby ended the Peace of Reagan, was to draw the United States into the Middle East, as the Russian security services simultaneously distracted the American Intelligence Community with a misinformation campaign to lead the United States to think there was possible Iraqi involvement, as well created an associated misinformation campaign for those of a suspicious frame of mind to suspect the American government. I missed for a long time, until I read Litvinenko, and the pieces started to align correctly.

Thus, 9/11 was was a well-conceived and executed Russian covert operation; if you want evidence of the proclivities of the Russian security apparatus towards such activities, just remember Stolypin and the Oprichina to see how deeply rooted such proclivities are welded into Russian political instituions over history.

No offfense to the Russians,by the way.

I respect them for their toughness and brilliance of chess play in the three level game of homicidal chess on the World Island that constitues and will always international politics until one side wins.

As Thucydides said 2400 years ago, in the end "The strong seek such terms as they can get, the weak accept such terms as they must." Conservatives must understand this truth at the level of knowledge required for survival: Ann and Rush do not and Buckley did.

Putin has the United States right where he wants us, and is now trying to sever our alliances and crush the American Empire. Read his speech in Davos, watch the Russian actions in Kyrgystan, the attack in Georgia was a test of American will which we failed, and you will see that the open period of conflict is about to return. Ann and Rush did not see this, so they must go the sidelines because of the reality of the next paragraph.

Since the existence of the United States as a Great Power would always allow for the possibility of a change of heart among our about to become former Allies back away from Russia and towards the United States, Putin's victory must be complete; he must crush the United States without mercy.

Rush and Ann had their time and place. But they do not understand the realities of Great Power politics, and the naive Liberals among us will get us all killed if we allow it.

On the Right as to potential spokespersons, the neo-cons were fooled, and so therefore disqualified. As well, too many of the neo-cons frankly have a blind spot for Israel'; they are as the Egateans of the Sicilian expedition that destroyed Athens.

Moreover, they failed to comment on and therefore at best do not understand the awesomely ominous significance of Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's trip to Moscow this October, nor the significance of the massive wave of Russian immigration for Israeli politics in terms of their adherence to the American Empire.

The Christian fundamentalists are blind on this point too.

As in 431, some will ask why the United States should care.

Pericles would say as he said then in his Funeral Oration; "perhaps in the wake of our defeat of the Nazis (Persians), we should not have created an Empire; it is not however, safe to let it go."

Conservativism as a matter of American life and death needs a new spokesman to mobilize the masses for the life and death struggle with the Russians, lest the naive within the city walls allow them to win the game of three level homicidal chess on the world island forever by destroying the American capacity to resist.

The recent cutting of supply lines via the Khyber Pass bridge bombing in Pakistan in conjunction with the clear Russian maneuver to force us out of Kyrgyzstan ought to be an alarm bell in the night that the United States is in grave danger now of being set up for an American Dienbienphu in Afghanistan.

To refresh the reader's memory, at Dienbienphu a well-trained garrison of French Legionaires, Regulars and Colonial soldiers was forced to surrender to the last man to the Vietminh in 1954.

Dienbienphu was a total defeat, everyone killed, wounded or captured.

The French were not dumb or cowardly at Dienbienphu.

They just had poor military options in late 1953 in their stuggle with the Vietminh guerilla army, just like the United States is now finding to be the case with the guerilla army in Afghanistan and Pakistan that we call the Taliban for short hand.

The French parachuted into Dienbienphu in order to create the conditons for a set piece battle that they thought would be advantageous to their war effort in Southeast Asia.

In addition, the creation of a French "airhead" in the pursuit of the "hedeghog" strategy would have had the effect of crushing Vietminh supply lines in Laos if successful.

Unfortunately, the French did not learn from their experience at Na San the previous year, while General Giap did.

At Na San, the French almost lost a garrison using this same paratrooper strategy.

Fortunately for the French at Na San, General Giap was precipitous in his infantry attacks, and not in posession of the correct weaponry, i.e. artillery and anti-aircraft artillery, necessary to cut off and destroy the garrison.

General Giap learned the appropriate lessons from Na San, however, and crushed French power in Indochina totally at Dienbienphu, thereby setting in motion the permanent reduction of French power globally to this date.

(As an aside, the failure of the Americans to relieve the French garrison through easily available tactical non-nuclear bombing and further, from a French point of view, American duplicity at Suez in 1956, explains a long-simmering French desire to down the United States. This is why Putin courts Sarkozy so assiduously, and why their meetings are never a good sign. But more on that in another post.)

Returning to the core theme of an American Dienbienphu in Afghanistan, Russia is clearly now trying to cut off access of American troops to supplies via Central Asia, and is well-positioned to do so.

That would make Afghanistan a giant American "airhead" were anything to go wrong with Pakistan, and what in Pakistan goes right, very vulnerable to further interdiction efforts, and the shaping of the battlespace to create a nightmare for an American garrison.

The Central Asians are likely to go along with this Russian strategy, because they remember the Russians for the last two hundred years, and are rightly intimidated by them.

Russians can be rather assertive in such matters, historically speaking.

Since Iran is obviouly a non-starter for American re-supply efforts, all Putin has to do now is keep arming the Taliban, have them harass the American re-supply effort via Pakistan, arm them with "Russian Stingers" and encourage the United States deeper into the same vortex that ended the Soviet Union, especially if he keeps manipulating the Pakistanis into playing dangerous games with the Indians as at Mumbai.

From his point of view, creating an American Dienbienphu in Afghanistan would be poetic justice, and there are plenty of other Great Powers that would love to kick the United States now really, really hard.

Sarkozy of course is the more obvious problem here.

Many may say that the United States deserves this.

I do not think that is actually an important question: this about the safety of all Americans, especially soldiers serving in good faith in Afghanistan.

Arguing via analogy, anyone who has fallen on hard times before knows that all sorts of "friends" reveal themselves as frenemies, and try to do us great harm when they get their shot in our moment of weakness: Cain versus Abel, sexual rivalries, past slights that suddenly appear not slight when one has the power to avenge them  etc... come to the fore.

Well, if the United States is an Abel that has fallen on hard times and has lots of new frenemies and old enemies drooling at the chance to damage it as severely as possible, I don't like that story's ending, which means that the United States should avoid becoming "bear bait" at all costs in Afghanistan.

Personally, I think we should find a way to declare victory, and leave the Afghans to their fate. No one governs Afghanistan. Ever. Not even them; they just fight.

The easist way to generate this maneuver would be to announce to the Pashtun tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan that the Taliban are fair game as we leave.

We will kill Taliban without mercy, but only as we are going home.

If they ever come to mess with the United States again, beyond their usual opium growing activities which lies in the who cares department really, then B-52's, B-1s and B-2's from Diego Garcia etc... can deliver tens of thousands of tons of highly destructive weapons into the appropriate areas.

Why the emphasis on areas and highly destructive?

In that case, if the Pashtuns have prompted barbaric style retaliation by another attack on American civilians, we don't have to have any concern for collateral damage in the process of responding.

That strategy would give the sane Afghans and Pakistanis an incentive to do their own policing by killing their, from an American perspective, insane country men, rather than Americans doing it all the time, the latter of which is unsupportable economically, politically and socially for all the parties in the long run.

Otherwise, I say live and let live with the Afghans.

The British couldn't really deal with them, the Russians really couldn't deal with them, and there was no reason to expect otherwise from an American/NATO venture.

We just want to leave on terms that make it very clear that messing with even a weakened United States is a very, very bad idea, and signal to the Russians, and the French, that we are not at all tied down should the Russians get a hankering for a "European Vacation" in Poland and the Baltic states with a French invitation.

            In the future, the financial turmoil of the last year will be labeled properly as the Federal Insolvency Crisis of 2008.

It was the fiscal insolvency of the federal government that required the monetary policy that created and destroyed the stock and real estate bubbles of the 2000’s decade necessary to the final unwinding of the unsustainable situation of Federal finances.

            This is not the first time such a crisis has occurred historically speaking. The most similar case historically was the Mississippi bubble generated by Scotch womanizer, duelist, mathematician, gambler, economist and overall brilliant fraud John Law in the 1720’s in France, a bubble the purpose of which was to resurrect state finances undone by the wars of Louis XIV.

Since in the end Law’s efforts were a sophisticated Ponzi scheme and Shell Game, they ended badly, just like the Federal Reserve backed Federal Government Ponzi Scheme and Entitlements and Empire Shell Game will end badly too: you always run out of suckers, and people eventually figure out that the shell will never come up for them.

The question before the world now is not if the Federal Government Ponzi Scheme and Shell Game unravels, but how badly.

There was a warning as to the current unfolding crisis in the writings of Robert Triffin in the 1960’s, who predicted the end of the Breton Woods system. Unfortunately, since as Nixon put it contemporaneously “We are (were) all Keynesians now,” the decision was made to try to keep the Keynesian postwar settlement between capital, labor and the state alive by moving to a pure fiat (un-backed) money system.

That system began to unravel in the 1980’s due to the American political classes’ unwillingness to ask the American people to make choices about the level of government purchases for Empire, especially protection from Russian imperialism, versus transfers for Entitlements, personal consumption and investment for future production.

The result of this failure to choose was massive borrowing explicitly and implicitly by the Federal Government and private sector actors.

The former governmental borrowing was explicitly  reflected in the Reagan budget deficits, and implicitly reflected in the Allen Greenspan created Shell Game of the Social Security Trust Fund, the latter of which masked temporarily the disequilibrium between Entitlements promises and available future taxes.

The latter private sector borrowing was reflected in the current account deficit, in which the functionality of the system as a whole was to raise output levels to politically desirable and/or short run acceptable levels in order to keep taxes temporarily high enough over the medium term to mask the long term insolvency of the Federal Government.

The tax issue is critical here, as taxes must always be high enough relative to revenues in the short run to keep alive a market for governmental debt. Long run governmental solvency issues generally play out more slowly because of the level of uncertainty about the ultimate fiscal path that will be chosen, because the latter is essentially a question of social and political leadership not amenable to quantitative modeling.

Returning to the evolution of the Federal Solvency Crisis, in the 1990’s President H.W. Bush and especially President Clinton made some progress in restoring fiscal sanity to the United States Federal Government, but in the end, not nearly enough.

As we shall see, they made progress in what accountants call an income statement sense, but not in terms of balance sheet issues that are relevant to long run solvency.

Moving to specifics, although President Bush bravely incurred grave political costs by breaking his “read my lips” promise on taxes, President  H.W. Bush also and more fundamentally expanded U.S. imperial commitments in the Middle East in Iraq, thereby creating a potentially very expensive long term imperial liability.

He also failed to see that the core national security of the United States remained Russia after the Cold War, because of Russian cultural assertiveness as to imperial status combined with their nuclear arsenal, with the sense of urgency necessary to launch a true Marshall Plan.

Although President Clinton to his credit raised taxes sufficiently to create the first positive Federal net income statement in a generation, President Clinton still evaded the more fundamental balance sheet issue of Entitlement reform, in which Entitlements generate the single biggest portion of the Federal Solvency Question.

President Clinton also maintained a commitment to Empire again unmatched by a willingness to collect taxes for future expenses of Empire, especially in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Especially by making the momentous decision to extend NATO membership to the Baltic States and provoking Russian nationalism over the Balkans, President Clinton created potentially the largest balance sheet liability of all in assisting the rise of Vladimir Putin and the return of Russia to despotism. In terms of imperial management, both Clinton and H.W. Bush failed to see that Russia would someday be back, an error in vision that is increasingly obvious.

In the end, one could say the American people are ultimately to blame for leaving their political classes with the impression that they were not mature enough and lacked the historical knowledge necessary to make choices among competing ends given scarce resources, especially over time, although the dearth of leadership in this time will remain a mystery.

The author, although this will offend many, personally believes that the feminization of American life played an important role in the absence of leadership during the 1987-2008 period, in which feelings, rather than truth, became more important in public debate, witnessed in the ever teary eyes of Clinton, the public’s preference for Bush over anyone with an intellect, and more fundamentally the excessive hostility displayed towards anyone telling unpleasant truths.

 The author also believes that playing a very significant role in this systemic leadership failure was the unhealthy self-segregation of the corporate, academic and media, and bureaucratic elites that led to a dialogue of the deaf.

During this entire time period, there were not enough people speaking the same language in the end. Finally, the author believes that the social climate of the United States was poisoned by a lack of morality and excessive jealousy, the former leading to decreasing levels of public trust necessary to find honest leadership and demonstrated in the proliferation of corporate financial scandals, and the latter jealousy crushing honest leadership, because no one wanted anyone else to get credit for proposing positive solutions to long term festering problems.

In the end, this failure of leadership resulted in the continuing disequilibrium in the American economy and increasingly the empire in the 1990’s, as was most fundamentally reflected in the current account deficit and associated massive foreign borrowing, and an ever shrinking savings rate.

This foreign borrowing had been facilitated since 1987, and was indeed required by the whole system of the American Federal Ponzi Scheme and Shell Game, by Allen Greenspan’s use of monetary policy to prop up asset prices in order to of course encourage the foreign capital flow, but also to induce a level of output driven by consumption that maintained federal taxes sufficiently high in the short run to mask the long run Federal Solvency Question.

This imbalance came to a head under President George W. Bush. In his modest, modest defense, President W. Bush did propose reforming entitlements in Social Security, although with such wishful numbers as to the pain involved that his program’s defeat was all but inevitable.

President W. Bush in any event offset that effort with his drug entitlement program for political benefit in the 2004 election that exacerbated the insolvency of the federal government.

Similarly, in a modest, modest defense of President W. Bush, the expenses associated with the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq could be viewed as long-term liabilities of the federal government’s overseas Empire that were bound to pop up eventually (maybe not Iraq, but surely Afghanistan). By looking into Putin’s eyes and finding a partner and not paying the Russia question the life and death attention that it always deserved, W. Bush’s imperial mismanagement may have generated the greatest fiscal problem of all.

In any event, the hint of the solvency crisis became very clear as President W. Bush’s term progressed.

Faced with the Federal Reserve generated NASDAQ bubble, and 9/11, both of which were functions of an unsustainable system respectively domestically and internationally, the Federal Reserve System created the next to last bubble of the post war period in housing.

The tie of the real estate bubble to imperial finance may be briefly pointed out by the trip of Benjamin Bernanke to Japan in February 2003 to arm twist the Bank of Japan to buy agency mortgage debt to in effect help finance the war.

Whether the Iraq War could have been managed to a more successful conclusion will remain one of the great mysteries of history.

In the end, it seems likely to this author that “success” in Iraq would have eventually led to disaster some where else, possibly Iran or Syria: there is no particular reason to believe that any human being has the wisdom to manage the affairs of foreign countries through the use of force through military bureaucracies better than would be the result of internal evolution.

In any event, the Iraq war under President W. Bush was managed with incredible incompetence, with no plan for rebuilding Iraq, and with insufficient armor and especially insufficient troops for the task at hand.

This incompetence by the U.S. government probably caused the deaths of at least one thousand American soldiers, at least tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and most fundamentally raised doubts globally about American imperial management that amplified an inevitable Federal Solvency Crisis when it arrived: think of the butterfly effect in this context.

In the event, once the real estate bubble, which was the next to last bubble of the post war order, ended, the open and terminal phase of the Federal Insolvency Crisis made its debut in 2008.

As the crisis unfolded, foreign creditors gradually began to back away from the United States. The hint of this was seen in the wild moves in oil prices over the year, the appreciation of the yen, and the insistence of the Chinese and Arabs that the Federal Government guarantee the value of the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both agencies having entered a death spiral with the collapse of the real estate bubble.

Once the federal government got in the bailout game, there was an inevitable explosion of the growth of Federal liabilities, the result of which is that the death of the current order is now at most 36 months away; it could actually now happen at any second.

The problem at hand is this. The Federal Reserve System is adding assets to its balance sheet at an explosive pace to prop up all asset prices, so there must be an offsetting increase in liabilities: Federal Reserve Notes. Since these asset prices are valued at bubble levels, the result of this process must be a hyperinflationary creation of money, because otherwise the Federal Reserve’s net worth would go to negative infinity, which is impossible, absent the ability to sterilize the money creation at a later date by issuing Treasuries to absorb the money.

This is where the Federal Ponzi Scheme and Entitlements and Empire Shell Game enters the death spiral. The Federal Government is bankrupt in the sense of its future taxes versus its future revenues. The Social Security Shell Game enters its death spiral phase in 2010 and especially 2012, because the surplus of revenue over expense reverses course with ever accelerating force.

That would mean that even as the Federal Reserve needs Treasuries to sterilize its hyperinflationary monetary creation, the fiscal arm of the Federal Government of the Treasury is going to be selling an amount of debt that does not have the taxes to back them in real terms.

The Ponzi Scheme and Shell Game is then definitively over, because no one but the Federal Reserve will want to buy Treasuries that will have to be destroyed by the inflation tax.

Whether or not the Fed goes out swinging by monetizing the debt and its own losses on the bailouts does not really matter at that point, as in any case there will have to be massive fiscal adjustments or a hyperinflation with increasingly draconian economic controls to prevent flight from the dollar domestically and internationally.

This is not a test, but a national monetary and fiscal emergency. There is no more time left to try short-term Keynesian measures. In 36 months this crisis hits with full force, and given the fall in oil prices in the short run and the temporary resurgence of Russia in alliance with Iran, the possibility of war is high, which would end the Ponzi Scheme and Shell Game of course quite definitively.

The correct step to take is for the United States to immediately offer its Allies, especially Japan and France, but also Vladimir Putin and the OPEC nations, a place in a new Breton Woods energy based monetary order, in which the United States will reissue its currency on the basis of the natural resource wealth of the lands owned by the federal government and decisively deal with entitlements within the first one hundred days of the Obama administration.

We still have time, but because the Federal Ponzi Scheme and Entitlements and Empire Shell Game is entering its death spiral, the United States is highly vulnerable to Russian attack in a fashion that could be devastating in character because even small events can now have large consequences.

Russia cannot live at these oil prices, and has the means to solve the problem well at hand with Iran and in the price of oil, and in the Baltics and the death of NATO. If we do not manage the tie between economics and politics, the Federal Ponzi Scheme and Entitlements and Empire Game will come to a far more dramatic ending than need be the case.

The passage of the economic stimulus package in the House means only the Senate stands in the way of a hyperinflation.

The facts of the matter are simple. The Federal Government is already insolvent in an inter-temporal sense because of entitlements to the tune of $30 trillion.

Given the assumption of liabilities by the unified Federal Government in terms of TARP and the use of the Federal Reserve Balance Sheet, that number is far worse, and now the politicians want to pile on more debt.

Congratulations, political class, you have acclerated the bankruptcy of the Federal Government, because what will happen is that when the Fed tries to sell Treasuries to sterilize the hyperinflationary impact of its "stabilization" activities, there will be no buyers, because the taxes will not be there to maintain the real value of the debt, as everyone knows what follows is the full monetization of the Federal Solvency problem, which is to say, a hyperinflation.

We could prevent this if we would re-launch the dollar, preferably attached to a commodity portfolio, but I fear the Keynesians in the academic world have blinded the political classes to the Classical wisdom to such a great extent that we have to go over the cliff.

Russia has lots of gold, oil, gas and nuclear weapons. Excellent portfolio.

Party on Vladimir. Party on America.

You beat up the Georgians to send a message to the Europeans: Russia is back and ready to turn off the gas and beat people up. Excellent strategy Vladimir.

Party on Vladimir. Party on America.

You do this in an environment you prepared by manipulating  9/11 into happening via your agent Ayman al Zawahari, in order to draw America into the Middle East in order to damage it. Curve Ball and the Italian Memo were magnificent touches for Iraq, and getting your agent George Tenet in at CIA was the all time penetration of an intelligence service. Excellent covert operations, Vladimir.

Party on Vladimir. Party on America.

Now you have the U.S. where you want them. You offer the Europeans and Japanese in Davos oil and gas, and a new reserve currency based on gold. Russia has lots of gold, and a new security architecture based on Russian nuclear weapons.

Gold, oil and nukes. Excellent portfolio.

Party on Vladimir. Party on America.

You manipulate Mumbai via your Pakistani puppets, arm Somali pirates and militants in Gaza via Iran to destabilize the world order based on the U.S. Navy and military protection in general in order to scare Japan and the Europeans into doubting that the Americans can guarantee their oil and gas like Mother Russia.

Excellent covert operations Vladimir.

Party on Vladimir. Party on America.

Now you are ready for the real move, to shatter NATO over Poland and put the Navy underwater in Iceland and split the Pacific alliance over the Korean pennisula and Taiwan. Excellent strategy Vladimir.

Party on Vladimir. Party on America.

Just one thing.

We will beat you Vladimir.  Party on America.