You raise what might be a problem inherent in writing about deceptive practices. A normal sentence, like this one, goes from one end to the other; it has one intention, one destination.

Does writing an accurate title about deceptive practices inherently involve a “double-headed” sentence? As in, adding a qualifier, thus: “In a deceptive move, …”

That ends up cluttering up titles, so, IMOFWIW, the simple declarative is best.

What I appreciate about this blog is the ability to follow the excruciatingly detailed legal proceedings in which the duplicity (inherent and otherwise) in our effed up system is hidden in plain sight.

Believe it or not, it’s an exercise in fractal, not Euclidean poetics. Get the picture? Growing naturally vs. reducing our narrative to stick figures. Let me try to explain a multi-dimensional idea.

We all know about parallel development, right? In fact, it’s been sanctified as the only duty of journalists: he-said / she-said applied even to the behavior of political parties. Well, what does fractal narrative development look like?

As a medium, IMO, it looks like this thread right here. The fundamental unit of fractals is the self-similar pattern; here, it’s the topic. Instead of buying the party “line,” fracturing along age-old divisions and entrenched interests, what happens when we just detail each and every instance of crucial behaviors and look at the patterns that shape and suggest themselves? After all, actions speak louder than words, and intentions motivate actions, so there we go, we don’t need crystals balls or special access to keep our eyes on our public servants.

Here’s the problem for the Pentagon’s influence operators and their $4.7 billion budget: they can’t fully dominate this medium of narrative diffusion. The old feudal order of the so-called Newtonian revolution can’t keep up with this new organic order.

For example, as this excellent Laura Flanders segment discusses, we don’t have to get on-board the press bus, not when we can do this right here. (Full disclosure: I was just asked for permission by GRITtv for possible use of a comment I made there.)

As an example of the power of myth to shape events, check out this (somewhat lengthy, but hey, it’s Saturday) Chomsky description, from ZNet in 2007 and ChomskyInfo, detailing the effect of Kissinger’s fanatical faith in the myth of the world as Newtonian mechanism on US history. It’s the same mistaken mythos that imagines the cosmos, and therefore us, to be not a growing organism, but a mechanism governed by laws derived from Newton’s old balls in empty space.

These are exciting days in Washington, as the government directs its energies to the demanding task of “containing Iran” in what Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, joining others, calls “Cold War II.” [1]

During Cold War I, the task was to contain two awesome forces. The lesser and more moderate force was “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” Hence “if the United States is to survive,” it will have to adopt a “repugnant philosophy” and reject “acceptable norms of human conduct” and the “long-standing American concepts of `fair play’” that had been exhibited with such searing clarity in the conquest of the national territory, the Philippines, Haiti and other beneficiaries of “the idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” as the newspaper of record describes our noble mission. [2] The judgments about the nature of the super-Hitler and the necessary response are those of General Jimmy Doolittle, in a critical assessment of the CIA commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954. They are quite consistent with those of the Truman administration liberals, the “wise men” who were “present at the creation,” notoriously in NSC 68 but in fact quite consistently.

In the face of the Kremlin’s unbridled aggression in every corner of the world, it is perhaps understandable that the US resisted in defense of human values with a savage display of torture, terror, subversion and violence while doing “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” as Tim Weiner summarizes the doctrine of the Eisenhower administration in his recent history of the CIA. [3] And just as the Truman liberals easily matched their successors in fevered rhetoric about the implacable enemy and its campaign to rule the world, so did John F. Kennedy, who bitterly condemned the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy,” and dismissed the proposal of its leader (Khrushchev) for sharp mutual cuts in offensive weaponry, then reacted to his unilateral implementation of these proposals with a huge military build-up. The Kennedy brothers also quickly surpassed Eisenhower in violence and terror, as they “unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity” (Wiener), doubling Eisenhower’s annual record of major CIA covert operations, with horrendous consequences worldwide, even a close brush with terminal nuclear war. [4]

But at least it was possible to deal with Russia, unlike the fiercer enemy, China. The more thoughtful scholars recognized that Russia was poised uneasily between civilization and barbarism. As Henry Kissinger later explained in his academic essays, only the West has undergone the Newtonian revolution and is therefore “deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer,” while the rest still believe “that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer,” the “basic division” that is “the deepest problem of the contemporary international order.” But Russia, unlike third word peasants who think that rain and sun are inside their heads, was perhaps coming to the realization that the world is not just a dream, Kissinger felt.

Not so the still more savage and bloodthirsty enemy, China, which for liberal Democrat intellectuals at various times rampaged as a “a Slavic Manchukuo,” a blind puppet of its Kremlin master, or a monster utterly unconstrained as it pursued its crazed campaign to crush the world in its tentacles, or whatever else circumstances demanded. The remarkable tale of doctrinal fanaticism from the 1940s to the ‘70s, which makes contemporary rhetoric seem rather moderate, is reviewed by James Peck in his highly revealing study of the national security culture, Washington’s China.

[1] Wright, WP, July 29 07
[2] Correspondent Michael Wines, NYT, June 13, 1999. Doolittle report, Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA, Doubleday 2007
[3] Ibid., 77.
[4] Ibid., 180.

Cold War II

The mechanistic reduction absolutely adopted by the US as policy is what’s killing us. It’s the myth within which our military men become weather men, and weapons of destruction become tools of nation-building. It’s the myth that powers our attempts at asserting “full-spectrum dominance.”

Problem is, did all you legal eagles know that reductionism has failed as a model for us humans?

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology — and for two major reasons.

First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code — and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems…. Humbled by the Genome’s Mysteries

That means, with our non-linear growth and virtually infinite possible interactions, we humans have this power right here: to shape our human history from within. I’m hoping this is the death of the effort to reduce humans to mechanisms and then master us as if we really were mechanisms, as in APA’s wrongheaded support of torture.

Paraphrasing Bob Dylan, I suggest our answers to our most pressing problems are being written in the threads, whiplash titles and all.