Monday, May 30, 2011

What is a Mystic?




What is a mystic?

One who uses experience to distill truth from life,

Or one that seeks conjugal harmony with all existence?

To fly with the heart over every plain and hill, or stand with the soul in every stream, lie in the rushes with each tiny insect that chirps at night, to be at peace with every being in their beds, or dash with the devas across starry heavens, then fuse spirits with every wild bird that dwells in a forest.

To be one with all creation in a burst.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Take the Pawn - Have Western Powers again Misunderstood Libya?

The Western allies, in particular France, Britain, and the United States have completely been taken aback by events in Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and across the entire Arab world in recent months.

Nicholas Sarkozy has had to reverse France's policies most of all, since only recently he feted Libya's Gaddafi, Egypt's Mubarak, and Tunisia's Ben Ali, as southern friends who enjoy an economic alliance with France.

Events in all these countries forced European leaders to play catch-up at understanding the psychology and minds of peoples not more than a few hundred kilometers from their borders.

Now that the revolutions of the Arab spring have transformed the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, revolutions are transforming Syria and Yemen as well. But does the West have an accurate understanding of the forces at play in Libya? Are we on the 'right' side of events there, as we think we were for instance, in Egypt?

Armed with UN Security Council Resolution 1973, European airstrikes supported by American cruise missile attacks in March 2011 made haste to deal with the impending threat of Colonel Gaddafi's forces against the East Libyan city of Bengazi.

While NATO claims a 'pragmatic approach' is now being taken - NATO is managing the implementation of that resolution, to 'protect the citizenry' of Libya - might I interject the question, which citizenry is being protected?

Secretary General Rasmussen of NATO explains why it is quite obvious that the same rules cannot be applied to Syria for example. Syria is intricately woven into a much more incendiary legacy of Shia-Sunni blood feuds, and tensions with bordering nations Israel and Iran. Western leaders, while applauding moves towards democracy in Tunis, though not anticipated, are secretly keeping their fingers crossed, hoping that the Syrian dictatorship stays in power. After all, if it falls, all hell may break loose.

Libya is a theatre of action, because it is one place where action is possible. The Arab spring, though long awaited, has the oil hungry West quaking in its boots.

In chess, as in many games, the board of play often becomes locked up by many layers of impending reciprocal action. Only a genius, or computer program can look ahead past the many permutations of moves, and predict the sum of outcomes. When novices play the game, rather than risk the impending trade of pieces with an uncertain result, beginners often play out a move by taking an unprotected piece at the periphery of the opponent's board of play.

You go for the pawn.

Gaddafi is neither powerful enough, nor the consequences of attacking him far reaching enough to bring jeopardy to his attackers. It is wise to note that Britain and France, as early as March 2010, held war games, presupposing that there would in fact be a need to conduct a military strike against a southern aggressor. In this case, history has played out exactly as planned.

Was it planned?

Or was the lone pawn always at risk of being fair game? Despite Sarkozy's loyalty reversals on old friends Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Ben Ali, there is no doubt that the West is intervening in Libya simply because it is possible. The dangers are lowest.

The reasons for that intervention has many inputs. (cf. Al Jazeera, Empire May 11, 2011):

Re-election of Sarkozy may only be one of the smaller reasons. Yes, oil is a reason. Yes, protecting citizenry, helped sell the project. Yes stimulating our broken economies is a reason.

So why not rush to the aid of Syria's citizens where over a thousand innocents have been murdered in the two months since the protests began?  I ask the question only to expose the hypocrisy - all recognize that Syria is a powder keg preparing to blow up, and that the deaths to 'citizenry' (that's the hot word bandied about by political leaders posing as doers of good) will be much higher than in Libya. What shall we do then? Perhaps bringing stability to Libya might in some way rub off on other regions.

Not likely. But securing the stability of Libya might secure the supplies of some of the oil!

It appears more than ever that the West, sprang into action in a theater that as it turns out, bears little resemblance to the rest of the Arab world.

The gravity of world events disguised any true understanding of what was happening in Libya. It is completely the opposite situation to that of Tunis, Egypt, and even Syria and Yemen as I shall show.

In each of these states there is first and foremost, a nation state, where a united populace with a substantial middle class agrees on the need for a change of power. Libya on the other hand is a loose confederation of five Berber tribes, most of them poor, that historically have hated each other. This confederation has been welded together through the bulwarking of a strongman. Gaddafi shared the wealth, some of it anyway, (more than most Middle Eastern despots), kept his military strong, and ruled with an iron fist. He retained the hearts of the poorest by lashing out periodically at his monied customers to the North, subsidizing terrorist acts.

Gaddafi has always been a problem. Mubarak? Only briefly. Mostly he was a loved friend of the West. So was Ben Ali.

In recent events monied interests from the East of Libya have made a bid to form a free state, and defect from Gaddafi's control. It would be oil rich, with close allies to the north. This opportunity came as a result of the Arab spring, and at the provocation of Gaddafi's government signing long term contracts to supply oil to the Chinese.

Europe, and the United States, have all aided this effort towards 'freedom' for East Libya in more ways than military. Large numbers of rebel fighters of different provenance, and previous political alliances, have journeyed to join the rebel cause. Professors of economics from the US have returned to their Libyan homeland to take posts in the new transitional government.

On the face, it appears that the West is aiding and abetting a move towards democracy by a significant percentage of the Libyan population, by a people that is craving the attributes of free government. The reality is that the 'people' of Libya that we are rushing to aid financially and militarily, are but a fraction of the country.

And so as with so many efforts on the side of 'right', it is conveniently assumed that the Libyan government will collapse once Gaddafi is removed from power. This is supposed to be a short-lived war. It's a structure that's all head. Remove the head and the Libyan government will fall.

But in this last assumption I believe the West has again erred gravely.

Gaddafi's strength does not come from oil wealth, or from military aid. Unlike the dictators of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Gaddafi never did have enough of a take from the oil riches of East Libya to ever depend on them. True, oil enriched his power. And his sons have no doubt enjoyed the obscene and ostentatious wealth that oil always provides. Gaddafi, like the strongmen of Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia, who are / were despised by the West, receives his mandate from the poor of that land, from his own tribe and a few clans that are friendly. He is universally despised by those that are well off.

Gaddafi's base, psychologically, (this is important), is desert Africa, and that includes countries outside Libya itself. This has always been so. Just a few generations ago they were desert horsemen, warriors. They also were ocean pirates. The North Sahara is a very tough place to live, and these tribes have a culture of war, bravery, and fighting. This is true across the Sahara.

Poverty rules. It all changed in Libya when oil was discovered during the 1950's.

Many of Gaddafi's troops are composed of poorly paid mercenaries, essentially 'volunteers' from Chad and Niger. I say mercenaries and volunteers in the same breath only to draw a distinction. These countries are so poor that any employment offerred is taken, even if the wage is a square meal a day the cause may be worth travelling a long distance to to take up.

It is ironic that Gaddafi views himself as a champion of North Africa's dispossessed. He certainly uses them; their support he does have, else he wouldn't  be putting up such a fight.

Of course these people don't count in the radar of the West which has sympathies almost uniquely to city dwellers, to those that speak some Western languages, have a middle and upper class, and are willing to partake in Western commerce. It is natural that we should seek relations with parties most like ourselves. Gaddafi strength has historically come from the poorest tribes of the region, who haven't shared in the oil development as much, and poor neighbors, in particular Chad and Niger.

He is equally despised by many tribes in the region.

He gets enormous support from sharing crumbs from his table. So it is with every wretched nation. The  poor suffer, and the boss guy lives in a palace.

By fighting Gaddafi we actually have chosen the Libyans with the least hopes, as our adversaries, and those who are most patterned after our way of doing things, as our friends.

But by intervening we have set up the same pattern that is being played out in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it is profitable to send young men to go and fight, and die against foreign agressors. America is so wasteful with its funds abroad that the very poor will always choose a job fighting us over trying to eke a living from the most arid soil on earth. Because if the very poor can't farm the land, they become slaves of a kind.

Is this not the chain of command, the formula if you like, that gives rise to the most terrorism?

'Volunteers', have rushed to fight for the cause of the East Libyan transitional government, though many of these foreign rebels may have suspect motives. It is after all, where the oil is.

Unlike isolated leadership in countries that have modernized, and are integrally aligned with forces of modernity, and are peoples that wish to self-govern, the war with Libya is a war against the face of the most extreme poverty, led by the most extreme dictatorships, since extreme dictatorships always rule the extremely poor.

This beleaguered point is not being made to suggest that we bolster Gaddafi, or prop up the fragile walls of his state.

On the contrary, the story cannot end happily if we intervene in any way at all. The greatest myth fostered on the democratic public today is that intervention achieves any objectives at all. It cannot, ever, in fact intervention always creates a movement equal and opposite, and against the interlocutor.

The terrible irony in all this is that Gaddafi, his family, and regime, are irreparably corrupt. The supporters of this dictator are poor. The wealthy ones have left, escaped, or defected. Yet Gaddafi surprises us with the strength of his fighters. This was supposed to be long over!

The West miscalculated, assuming that it entered a war with a short life. We've sided with Libya's aspiring well-to-do, against Libya's poor, and while short-term that decision may prevail, and may build a 'Modern Libya' to the East, it will always be an adolescent propped up by the West.

Like Israel where we've created a situation that will haunt the West for generations.

For these reasons I estimate that the Libyan conflict will drag on indefinitely. A new face of terrorism will emerge, and dangers to Western allies, beset by the conflict of self interest vs. trying to 'doing good', will enlarge into a theater of conflict against the poorest but sparsely populated regions of North Africa, which have nothing to loose by attacking strongholds of European colonialism - in places where oil wealth abounds.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

The Child in the Region

With the assistance of America's billions, Israel has a unique opportunity to become an angel agent for peace and change in the region, but so far has ignored that possibility, perhaps because that is what her sponsor (the US) wants.

For peace to occur Israel must turn the other cheek, just a few times, and show her human side. She must become true to her flag of peace, and realize that dream. If she doesn't do this she will certainly perish, and not because America did not try to save her, rather that America let her dig her own grave through a slight of hand; through arms and money for aggression. She is after all, our very own pit-bull in the region. (Excuse the metaphor. I do know that the pit-bull is a nanny dog originally.)

What I'm saying speaks for Israel's continued right to exist. One thing is certain, that such an aggressive regime, surrounded on all sides as it were by more numerous, and poorer peoples of a different faith, cannot survive. Extremes of aggression, Logos mobilized by fear, never endures.

A well funded minority pressing all the hot buttons for World War would be allowed to perish simply because it is such a risk to the global community, or will become that instrument of Armageddon from which we all perish.

Unless, Israel choses a path that is 'sustainable', to borrow a term from ecology, short term thinking cannot prevail in the Middle East. The nurture of feuds are a presage of doom in an atomic age. Israel, now, today, more than ever before, has the chance, and obligation to turn a new leaf, a last golden opportunity for the world, for all of us.

Listen up. The Israeli problem is not Israel's. It is all of ours. With funds for war we've created war. Israel is a reflection as much of American fear, American anger, American desire to control, American industry, as an expression of American Jewish guilt, and holocaust shattered imaginations.

The problem is profoundly psychological, not military.

Aries desires conflict, to paraphrase James Hillman. Conflict we pay for, so conflict we get. Aries, amongst the pagan pantheon, was a spoilt child. You could not take him anywhere. In shops he would break the merchandise, and his parents too often indulged such infantile behavior.

There is a Mars that is red blooded, but understands by listening to the pounding of his own heart in unison with others. This is the mature warrior. In a word, Israel needs to grow up, and the US, as an ineffective parent, needs to withdraw the billions of support. Math will make that decision for us if we don't decide to do so on our own. The cost of wars in the region will bleed America dry and Israel will be left without a friend.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Why Hurricanes, Tornados, Floods, will get Worse


                                'Il faut cultiver notre jardin.' Voltaire

Man's hubris never ceases to amaze:

a) The very notion that the Mississippi basin can be 'tamed' by dikes, levees and our Army Corps of Engineers.

b) The idea that we can strip our planet of trees, and even our prairies of grasses, and not expect changes to our environment.

c) The vanity that we can take examples of fierce storms like Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy, and justify the cost of rebuilding our vulnerable society without modification, because we statistically accept these events as "100 year storms".

The crisis is us, humanity, and how we think.. Our actions come from thoughts. For every action, there exists in nature, and in humanity, an equal and opposite reaction. It's all physics.

We as a people, and I include myself as one of the culpable, show little respect for the continent that we bought for fifteen million dollars and a basket of beads.

We're at war with peoples around the globe, and nature herself. Perhaps everything came just too easily for Homo sapiens to show humility to the earth, and to the planet that gave him life.

It is time to ask, 'Why is all this happening? Killer floods, killer tornados.

Consider for a moment the amount of rainfall on the continental United States. The Mississippi is the world's third largest river basin, second only to the Amazon and the Congo Rivers; it receives and drains more than 60% of all that rainfall hitting the continental US.

Did it ever occur to our feeble brains that we could mess with that? Yet we've wasted billions trying to 'contain' natural flooding events, with dykes and dams along the Mississippi.

Floods and storms are all much much worse in recent years! Why?

I offer a thought experiment:

Take a cookie sheet. Do this in your mind. Really do it if you doubt my results.

Tip it on a slight angle so that it can drain into the sink or bathtub. Now spray some water onto it. Notice how the water immediately moves off the sheet and down the drain. You'll notice that the water 'surges' first and then moves off the sheet at the rate it is sprayed on.

Now drape the cookie sheet with a towel. Spray on the same amount of water. Keep spraying. You will notice that the towel buffers or absorbs the surge of floodwater. Eventually if you spray enough the amount of water exiting the system will equal the amount that is sprayed on. But there will be no 'storm-surge'.

Now stop spraying. You will notice that water still drips from the edge of the towel. This is exactly what thick-soiled natural grasslands and forests do. They absorb water, and release it slowly and evenly to the rivers and seas during drought.

In the Adirondack mountains of Northern New York State, over-lumbering brings river surges that have eliminated much of the native fish populations. The Adirondacks, like the Amazon basin, does not have thick soils. Areas of the land are becoming bald, gravel and rock, where once trees stood. The forests that remain are stunted, shorter, less diverse. And floods have become a problem.

Everywhere it is the same story, whether in forested mountain regions or flat prairies of the West.

A healthy ecosystem of deep tree roots and topsoil moderates the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the wet of storms. Water levels in America's rivers when the colonists first came to this country were quite moderate.

The worst floods are yet to come. Indeed as Dylan has warned us, 'A hard rain's gonna fall.'

Throughout America, as in the South American Amazon basin, and Africa as well, all over the world, soil levels are declining through wasteful agricultural practices. Nearly all of the rivers of the American west, particularly in the Great Plains, were once lined with deep rooted cottonwood trees, that acted as natural dikes to the rivers. These have almost all been cut down. The natural soil levels in Kansas for instance which historically measured over 30 feet thick, are less than 15 feet thick on average; there's less then ten feet of soil now in many areas.

The towel is getting thin.

All of this means less absorption of rain water. The rain that falls flows more quickly to the edge of the cookie sheet.

A thin layer of soil means the land dries out fast, and then heats up. A hotter landmass creates stronger storms. This isn't advanced math.

We're turning the continent into a sheet of rock, and long before that happens the storm surges along rivers like the Mississippi will be powerful enough to wipe out entire cities.

Why?

Storms of all kinds, tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes particularly, are gaining strength from global warming. Tornados and hurricanes function as a 'land-cooling systems', they simply become more powerful as the land beneath becomes hotter. Temperature extremes have become worse due to misuse of prairie and forested lands, and the tarmacking of vast areas of the country.

As the heat rises, so does nature's attempts to deal with the excess heat.

Expect more beasts such as the mile-wide tornados that virtually destroyed Tuscaloosa Alabama in April 2011 and one month another eirie reminder of the same power of nature wiped out a third of Joplin, Missouri.

Expect more hurricanes like Katrina which waterlogged all of New Orleans, and left thousands homeless. Expect monster storms like Hurricane Sandy, with barely hurricane force winds, but a large enough system to lift storm surges to historic levels over a vast area, flooding homes, public transportation and businesses.

Just as tornados and thunderstorms are a land-cooling system, hurricanes are an ocean-cooling system. As the world's oceans rise heat up so do the strengths and wind velocities of hurricanes. These storms are symptomatic of global warming, a side-effect that even terrestrial scientists were unable to predict.

Fallow land? Have you ever walked out onto a 'fallow' field in Kansas in the summer?

It's as hot as a supermarket parking lot. Oh sure we were all taught in school that letting land go fallow is good.

What might we expect in just a few years?

We will see hurricanes blow skyscrapers over and turn them into piles of rubble. I fully expect to see storms with 200 mile per hour winds within twenty years. [Wrong - I was not aggressive enough in this prediction. Hurricane Dorian produced gusts of over 200 mph]

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