µTm Scenarios, T8(M)
Even given Basho's barley-love and a monkey's raincoat to hide the beast in Elvis, it would be hard to PI whether John Perkins -- one more shadow-boxing drama-is person-I in a Javanese weigh-in cool-it! -- is writing dumbed-down or he actually knows as little monetary-system history as his discourse indicates (which is not to disparage his overall theme, though the proposed solutions are uninspired). In his The Secret History of the American Empire, Penguin, 2007 (containing no proprietary information and over-protective of pre-WWII U.S. history so as to retain something nearby to resurrect), for instance, no distinction is made between the “gold standard” -- largely a 19th-century affair -- and the very different gold-exchange mechanism of Bretton Woods One. Indeed, Perkins makes statements about BW1 which do not apply to BW1, but do apply to the 19th-century gold standard (distinctions regarding which are available these days to anyone accessing Wiki). Moreover, the transition from what was essentially a barter arrangement for movement of oil to dollar denomination of oil-market transactions was a process begun in the 1950s and early-'60s as the Seven Sisters lost “total control” (that “dodecaphonic” device permitting barter) over oil discovery, production, and refining; it was not an abrupt snap-over in relation to the Yom Kippur war as Perkins describes. Given the enormous global value of oil trade, early on understood sure to increase through the post-peak production period, what currency, especially in a floating regime, other than the foremost international reserve currency, could sufficiently protect itself against assaults as to be seriously considered a denominator of the trade? None and only none -- not only, There was no other. Speaking in superlatives, trade in all scarce commodities should be denominated, not in a vehicle currency, or a basket thereof, but in Hayekian “time-shapes of total capital stock”. Furthermore, the dollar was not “weakening” prior to outbreak of the Yom Kippur war, to use the word Perkins chose; Nixon had undertaken a major devaluation of the dollar, which was already -- before the Yom Kippur war, before the Six Day war (as I knew at the JFK Special Warfare Center at the time, being there an intelligence analyst of the Middle East) and increasingly so over the prior decade -- denominating oil transactions. Thus, the Nixon devaluations in the post-1971 period greatly reduced the “absolute value” of OPEC oil in the ground, as well as separated that “value” from a somewhat reliable store-of-value, as Nixon had already separated the dollar from BW1's gold-exchange (at a fixed value for MONETARY gold -- which is to say not gold bought and sold) mechanism due to the enduring inflation “spike” LBJ's Guns 'n Butter plus no increased taxes had created to further reduce the post-WWII value of monetary gold set to $35/oz. Increasingly, from the Kennedy era onward -- actually Eisenhower's 1958 tipping point -- even reduced-value monetary gold was better to hold than inflation-debilitating dollars, so there was accelerating use of the BW1 gold-exchange window by central banks, with an increased time rate of change of acceleration (one of the “impulses” shaking the black glass of MACV-HQ as I stood there in Strategic Research and Analysis during the wee hours starring in awe at the golden light-flowers of rocket rounds impacting the airfield's runways) in gold-window use immediately following the 1968 Tet offensive in Viet Nam. Perkins says that dollar denomination of oil transactions functions as an automatically collected global tax because the U.S. can simply print dollars to settle its obligations, the resultant inflation being the “tax”: this is true of any commodity trade conducted in dollars. It is also true that any nation-state can print its currency, exchange for dollars, and pay: it's just that the U.S., skipping a step, can do this without short-term negative consequences to a far greater degree than any other nation-state. In the period 1945-'71 under BW1, the difference between the U.S. and other nations in this regard was very much less than it has been since the 1971 closing of the BW1 gold window, because the gold-exchange mechanism functioned (as systemically non-functional as this mechanism was) as a restraint upon the printing of dollars over and above that amount required to fulfill responsibility of the foremost international reserve currency to maintain sufficient global liquidity to ostensibly clear international trade accounts. Nonetheless, there had been global inflation throughout the whole period 1945-'71 (telling us, not only about volume of dollar printing, but also influence of a wide range of externalities upon behaviors of internalities), so, with Nixon's unilateral renunciation of the BW1 gold-exchange mechanism (succinctly argued in public forums prior to the 1968 Tet offensive, most prominently by oil company CEOs: prefiguring, all but announcing to any Vietnamese ears which could hear, as well as to ears at SRA/MACV-J2, U.S. pull-out from Viet Nam), the U.S. DEFAULTED on the total value of post-WWII global inflation (a “tax” in Perkins' sense) dispersed over all sovereign holders of monetary gold and dollars as stores of value. This was an enormous, unprecedented default (from the beginning built into the structure of BW1, a structure the U.S. had insisted upon -- against advice of both White and Keynes) which the U.S. economy could never, but never, hope to cover (given the role HUAC and Nixon played in White's premature death, these two “entities” were directly culpable). Evidence of the impending DEFAULT had become so great by 1969 -- as exacerbated by LBJ's international borrowing to fund the Viet Nam war -- that IMF Special Drawing Rights were created as a sop (also a SNAFU become an SOP) to deflect demands for restitution of the default sure to come as U.S. gold stores depleted in fulfillment of the requirements the U.S. itself had self-interestedly and stupidly and anthropogenically insisted upon at Bretton Woods in 1944: the Greatest Generation as the worstest generation. Uninformed authoritative discourse on monetary-system history veils the fact that no commodity or commodity basket, no vehicle currency or basket of vehicle currencies, and no combination of these four, whether pushed through IMF SDRs or not, can yield a functional monetary system with a reliable store of value -- however “value” is to be defined. Which is not even to mention a monetary process capable of facilitating self-organization of externalities, the greatest present unfulfilled global need. The prevailing employed notions of “commodity” and “currency” and “store” and “value” are not sufficiently general, i.e., abstract, to permit the fashioning of a monetary process with the level of autopoietic competency required. The only “value” a reserve instrument should store -- if markets are to adequately process internalities and externalities -- is the relative-state of the quantum-composite, i.e., the “stack” of Hayekian “time-shapes of total capital stock” of the overall global economy (an idea, admittedly, completely off the cognitive Richter scale, and likely to remain there). Such a reserve unit cannot be fashioned absent global implementation of m-logically-valued LETS -- which, in principle no less than in practice, can only be accomplished from the bottom up. It's not just issues of exploitation, as many people believe, but primarily issues of projective-identification in collective transference alienating insights long since achieved and necessary to intelligent response to prevailing circumstances. Not at all unusual, e.g., Harvard's Huntington -- originator of “forced-draft urbanization” -- became famous recycling a Toynbee theme (as almost noted by Perkins). The required ideas, though long in existence, simply can't be cognitively metabolized.
Being no fan of cyberiated SanFran mind, values-driven Berrett-Koehleria, rappered exogenous ketamine-stoked VRed house-music man-a-burnin', blood-banking, money-soul, cellularated, PDAed, What Every Foreigner Should Know about Each American, memo-bribing “wiwa that grinds smoke”, as my mother used to say, I don't believe, you see, in “rule”, which includes “majority rule” -- that principle of the 17th- and 18th-centuries Locke justified by appeal to Newton's Laws of Motion and the procedure of vector summation; I believe in what a century ago replaced Newton's idea: Schrödinger's wave-function, particularly as understood in relation to Everettian “relative-state” and Hayekian “time-shapes”. Looking Backward to Foundling Fathers, progenitors of 18th-century 1T2-logic rationalism, as role models to imprint upon in seeking solutions for a foundering civilization two centuries into the m-valued and a century into the m-logically-valued: no promising strategy. Four-hundred years of tweaking the demo and demo-crazy never became democracy: seems like Newton got more wrong than merely the limit in the calculus and how to mind the mint. Another example of executing moves appropriate to sock her, when the game being played is tent his: no real theory of moves. Therefore, I don't look for an electronic commons as a direct, participatory-democracy, referendered voting booth, WiFied and cellular-SmartMobbed, but as computerized “human chess” of yore, go, wei qi, m-logically-valued multiple-scenarios strategy game fulfilling some of the prerequisites to a close approach to quantum-based spontaneous social, economic, and political order by, step-wise -- as in Michi-gan (michi-yuki sacred-dance parade: not of Dark Angel; not of Deviant Art; not fan-dubbing doll-lyrics; not dyadically brown-shirting the walk-toward-death in a transference mirror reflecting mere shadows) goose-flight infrasound-signature surfing -- increasing competency at realizing the identity-transparent condition of relative-state. In FaceBook of quantum relative-state identity-transparency, where every action is omni-transforming, the very notion of limited liability is ludicrous, and of a limited-liability corporation, nothing if not an oxymoron, especially when legalistically concatenated to the 19th-century notion of corporate personage in a quantum universe which in principle absolutely precludes absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct individual persons (WholeFace transplants, or no). Is this an econoimmune-competency conundrum and social-tissue graft rejection, or an environmental-context conundrum, or both, or three? Got religion? Spiritual insight is not reducible to milk; religion has always been an organizational tool. Yeah, yeah, right. Stalking the angel over voodoo river on the sunset express, we all yearn for free fall into lullaby town. Bang on! And when the tripwire -- ever hit such a wire, stood in blowback of an IED? -- takes you to the killing floor, without fail you're running blind as you die trying. Brutal, riveting, tough, visceral, muscular: not what the doctor ordered. So, the idea of enticing issue-oriented pressure-lobbying-activist groups into supporting implementation of m-logically-valued LETS does not appeal, for the end achieved comes in the form of the means employed. Creation and deployment of touchable Musculpt is the way to go.
Africa as the “dark-continent” holder of the “heart of darkness” has nothing much to do with Africa qua Africa: “darkest Africa” is the collective unconscious in transference by mass projective-identification, the “all against all” which is the projected “state of nature” that the Westphalian-Leviathan Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state was fashioned to suppress, keep at bay, slay. Collective suicide in displacement by mass conversion disorder. Post-Newtonian, Schrödingerian-Everettian relative-state identity-transparency is subliminally recognized a terrifying -- “the horror, the horror” -- upwelling evocation of that time-independent animistic collective occasion of experience which is m-logically-valued nature in the raw, uncooked by glutamatergic neuronal etching to 1T2-logic alone. This terror, this horror, in face of the projection come back as introjection to haunt modern man, now postmodern man, is the state, not of nature but of mind, guaranteeing that what has been done to Africa in due course will be done to the WholeEarth. Plunder and power are incidental, derivative “motivations” covering, hiding, concealing the fear-itself feared by the ego-in-service-to-regression in projective-identification as regression-in-service-to-the-ego -- e' what, E. Kris?
The nation-state is not only the worst thing that's happened to humanity, it's the worst thing that's happened to planet Earth. Pick a million people. How many believe that, really believe it? One, maybe. How many, then, in seven-billion people? That's the odds, the odds the human species will survive what's coming its way. No insight: “There will be a means of escape; always has been, always will be.” No preparation: “It's a scam; nothing has changed, everything is fine.” How do I know the nation-state is the worst thing? Because of how it facilitates the next worst thing! Quoting Rolfe Winkler (“Letting Goldman role the dice”, Reuters, 15 October 2009):
Saving Goldman was largely about saving the derivatives market, which is so big and unstable that the death of one counterparty could mean the death of all… Yet serious reform of the derivatives market -- something that would reduce its size significantly -- is nowhere on the radar.
But it is not so much the size of the derivatives market as the size and small number of counterparties and their market shares (this oligopolistic structure transferring risk up the “Devil's Staircase” -- percolation by reverse-cascade effect, like with vertically-propagating acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes -- from microscale to macroscale to the metaeconomy of central banks and We-Are-the-World fiat vehicle-reserve currencies, concentrating the risk to avalanche posture). This problem could not have happened under m-logically-valued LETS, no matter how big a derivatives market, because there would be a virtually uncountable number of counterparties and there would be fractal entrapment/band-pass e-boundaries mitigating against daisy-chained meltdowns. Avoid such precipitous chain reactions: that's why the Earth has an ozone shield; that's why the solar system has a heliosphere bubble around it (sporting a Riemann Hypothesis hydrogen stripe with Gödel-numbered tickertape spots recording cycles in solar-galactic information-exchange processes, processes that are analogue-variants of blackhole computing). Quantum economies, too, must have such devices -- if they are to attain high levels of autopoietic competency.
O, the problem, the problem of pacing pell-mell prose in a variable time-pace universe -- Tullia Trench's Gemeinschaft being oh-so-much more interesting than Sam Spade's Gesellschaft. And what's to choose between getspatchos… uh, I mean, gestapos? One little piggy, two little piggies, three little piggies, four.
However urgent a thing is, there comes a point where there are no more places to go. The urgency burns out, and you sit there like you've got all the time in the world, while the world rages on around you: Running Blind. (Lee Child, Putnam's, 2000, p. 184.)
Yep, it's just like that, and it can go on like that for decades, decades of awe in the thing: masses' opiate, neuronal etching. Eristic in accommodating clichés: my body, clear and present danger, the national interest… One inside the other: syllogistic, everyday life is, a collective hypnosis, a running blind in the 1T2-logic of a Bach Invention that turns against itself like Gödel's Proof, just one more EscherFormDance: meaning resident in patterned trivia -- or is it trivial patterns? In awe of the BEAUTY of logical necessity -- even, or most especially so, if that logic confounds itself. At least it's got a self to confound: existential confirmation, eh? The governing strange attractors insure that the requisite collective unconscious impulse-gradients trickle down to geopolitical determinants. Lodge Bill recruits to Special Forces were political -- well, rage-related politics. Then, early-'60s, it all turned Existentialist; motivation of the more intelligent was inner counterwork: use autohypnotic devices of stress-oriented training and actual combat to deautomatize participation in the collective hypnosis. Ice-cream torrents fall, shaking Sundae Hills, pelting sheets upon strawberry fields, forever undulating that plain, darkling nasty the night armies. Then came the religious violence of Generation X.
What are you saying? Securitization is tranching. What else is M-numbering all about? Asymmetric information talks of the tranche. The planted dense subgraph problem as distinguished from the hidden dense subgraph problem. Well, excuse me! Nested grid systems (with variable time-steps) are nothing I don't know about, surely. Are you MONEY MOTIVATED? Are you INFORMATION SENSITIVE? Does the factoring derivative have anything to do with derivatives? I mean, it's really tough talking with the boundedly rational (i.e., confined to the 1T2-logic order-type). None of this is an example of full rationality, not to my mind, mined and unmined. Complexity has its costs. Notation costs something. So do parameters. What about the densest of the densest, how much does that cost? In full rationality, the densest of the densest subgraph is the MVRS (m-logically-valued reference space, all numbered in numbered Gödel numbers). This costs, really costs, vis-à-vis the “time-shapes of total capital stock”. Bet your binary CDO into exponential time. Bet your tranched CDO (m-valued, not yet m-logically-valued) into poly time (which ain't exactly operator-time, but it is PROGRESS, after all these years). Can you doubt that indetectability is indetectability regardless of how random the binary derivatives you counterparty might be -- given that they aren't referenced to an MVRS, not any MVRS, let alone THE MVRS, nature's own? So, what are you saying? Gaussian copula? MonteCarlo simulations? Me, I can't see no, can't see no, nope, none of those. To me, it's timing conditions, uh, say Bohmian clocks within clocks within clocks, which ain't nothing if it ain't 3-fold operator-time laying down a little Hayekian time-shape. Put it there, bro. Slap-slap.
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