kerkko.fi

It certainly feels uncomfortable to watch American, British, and French planes enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, bombing Libya’s anti-aircraft defences, and destroying Libyan tanks. Certainly the hypocrisy of the West and the Arab dictators is as galling as ever. The fact is that the Libyans have not had the leisure to discuss politics and choose good leaders -- their priority now is to get rid of the tyrant and to simply stay alive.

Many people are crippled in their judgement by ideology: leftists who think Gaddafi is an anti-imperialist hero, non-Arab soft Islamists who have a problem admitting the Arabs are connected to each other beyond the borders drawn by imperialists, Zionists who tell themselves the revolutions have nothing to do with Palestine, Americans who tell temselves that the invasion and destruction of Iraq started the democratic ball rolling.

It is the stupid fringes of the left who have the most to answer for at the moment, as they not only express logical concerns about the extent of Western intervention but actively support Gaddafi. They say the UN "aggression" is designed to ease Western access to Libyan oil, as if Western companies did not already exploit Libyan oil under Gaddafi’s regime. They talk about Gaddafi’s great "victories" against imperialism.

These leftists are ignorant of the stagnation of Arab societies under dictatorial regimes and of the enormous suffering of those imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. If they are not ignorant, they simply do not care. They are the kind of people who supported Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe in 1956 and 1968, who think the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was a liberation, and that Mao's cultural revolution was progressive.

These people are posers, for whom ideas and facts are useless except as adornments for the sexy self. They are an insult to leftism and anti-imperialism. Fortunately, their residence in fantasyland makes them entirely irrelevant to the real world.

TO: Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Issues w/Various Countries

We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it fast. If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home.

We also need to solve the Pakistan problem.

And Korea doesn't seem to be going well.

Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?

Thanks.

http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/YearInPhotos10/year-in-photos-2010.html

WikiLeaks above all shows the difficulty the US has in understanding other cultures and societies. The cables show an entire corporate mindset at work on world populations who must surely be, in their psychological make up, just like Americans. How do you tell a world superpower that the world's other 4.5 billion do not think the American, Chinese, or [Russian] way? That societies and cultures are as complex, subtle, and various as the millions of people who compose them. How do you prevent superpowers who, in trying to understand the rest of the world, take it to be their own reflections in a mirror coming back at them?

The left's thinking is governed by the "Standard Left Explanatory System" -- an intellectual construct that gained popularity in Europe and the US in the 1960s after the demise of European colonialism. The basic principle is simple: Always support the underdog, particularly when non-Western, and always accuse Western powers, preferably the US and its allies, for what the underdog does. Anything aggressive or destructive a non-Western group says or does must be explained by Western dominance or oppression.

The system assumes that if you are nice to people, all conflicts will disappear. It disregards the human desire for dominance, power, and a belief system that gives them self-respect. The system, under the guise of humanitarianism, assumes that non-Western groups do not have a will of their own; that all they do, feel, or want is reactive to the West. It is devoid of respect for non-Western groups: It assumes that they are not responsible for their deeds, and that all they do must be explained by Western victimization.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan. The previously unknown deposits -- including iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium -- are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, US officials believe.

Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who makes more money in a day than most Americans in their lifetime. Hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food chain, and Dalio runs the largest one of all, Bridgewater Associates.

Dalio, a self-described "hyperrealist," is author of a book of maxims leaked recently via the financial blog Dealbreaker. Dalio titled his collection "Principles," and he makes every Bridgewater employee memorize it. This is what Dalio has to say:

When a pack of hyenas takes down a young gnu, is that good or evil? At face value, that might not be "good" because it seems cruel, and the poor gnu suffers and dies. Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently "cruel" behavior exists throughout the animal kingdom.

Like death itself, it is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life. It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self-interest and the interest of the greater system, including those of the gnu, because killing and eating the gnus fosters evolution.

http://www.alternet.org/story/146964/top_billionaire_hedge_funder_sees_himself_as_a_hyena_devouring_wildebeests_/

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Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.

Historians often misunderstand complexity; they are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes. In reality, most of the "fat-tail" phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect."

When things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news will make the headlines. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry but the public at large. This shift is crucial: A complex system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability. Empires function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28,0,7706980.story

In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power. The first is the projected deficit in 2011: nearly 11% of the country’s entire economic output.

The second number is the one that really commands attention: American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, President Obama's budget draws a picture of a nation that simply cannot get above water.

Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, used to ask: "How long can the world's biggest borrower remain the world's biggest power?" The US may end up like Japan: as debt grew more rapidly than income, Japan's global influence eroded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/us/politics/02deficit.html?hp