Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
By David Cay Johnston
Portfolio, 2007
352 pages

“The country bathed in God is now practising an economic driven morality that would cause any observant god to loose a flood.”
Free Lunch could be dedicated to Sgt. Friday: “Just the facts Ma’am.” In that sense it is the book of an award winning New York Times reporter who has written 26 chapters demonstrating the thievery that has been standard practise for over two decades in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Each chapter tells a narrative story or two that should have produced a response that would have dwarfed what is presently going on in Greece.
Assets earned by the majority of house houses – most now containing at least two wage earners who are working over 350 hours a year, just to maintain: a kind of running in place that calls to mind a treadmill – have hardly increased in decades, while a relatively small group of fellow Americans have made out like the bandits that just paid a visit to Harry Winstons just before closing time.
Abetting this trillion dollar transfer of assets have been most Congressmen, so the great theft could be called legal if without conscience.
The facts devastate: the reporting is as good as you could hope for. It is a quasi-legal bill of particulars that is an indictment of the entire American system that is now a sad parody of the hopes expressed by our founders and expressed so succinctly: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.”
Goals and guiding principles that have been mocked in all aspects of life by recent American collective behavior. Behavior, as it relates to all aspects of our economic life, that Free Lunch describes with great clarity.
His book provides the basic facts for the death of capitalism, though he does not talk in such terms and Karl Marx whose shadow now hangs over our age once again, in spite of the collapse of the USSR, is absent from the book and the index.
Johnston relies upon the bible and Adam Smith as his strictures are moral, as are the faults he castigates so thoroughly, not technical or historical.
This book was finished before our current disaster emerged, but listen to Johnston’s prescience: “What makes such huge returns possible is not just computer programs that spot pricing gaps. What fuels hedge funds is debt. Lots and lots of debt. Hedge funds and banks have become joined like algae and fungus to form financial lichen. And just as attractive lichens can be poisonous, so can this financial symbiosis, with its attractive investment returns, turn toxic.” (p. 251-2)
“Of course, if things go badly, the investor can be wiped out. Banks foolish to lend so much can also suffer huge losses. If the banks have no idea how many intertwined, cross-connected deals their money is in, and something unexpected goes wrong, it could wreak havoc with the global financial markets.” (p. 252)
And the kicker: “that consideration goes to lenders and virtually none to borrowers, is central to the creed of government as a source of greater wealth for those already rich enough to have money to lend.”

His immersion in the reporting of the scurrilous dealings that now characterize our social/economic behavior, as presently emblemized by the Governor of Illinois, created a deep insight into our greed and its functioning, marking Free Lunch a wonderful primer.
We now need lots of good theory to put it all in Context and those who have the courage to talk about what is going on: the extreme class war and the turning of democratic America into an oligarchy run by the rich.
Read Free Lunch in the meantime, as facts begin any real process of change and if we are to survive as a nation we must fully expose what is behind the facts that Johnston lays out so well and heed Adam Smith: “what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us, by Philip Rieff (Pantheon, 2007)

The inevitable thrust of the cultural elite in western civilization, certainly from 1750 on, though many would date it back to the earlier emergence of empirical science as a licit activity, has been the destruction of any viewpoints not based on empirical observation, well expressed in many statements but driven home very strongly by Courbet’s statement: “Show me an angel and I’ll paint you one.” The very fact of basing a world view on such a position threatens faith, belief and of course their object: religion.
Science itself, the reformation, the industrial revolution are all a part of a long historical process that de-centered the Catholic Church and turned it into a fossilised object of abjection, no matter what residual power it is able to draw from outside the west.
The church that Gibbon saw as a major factor in the decline of Rome became the sheltering force under which life found its meaning for well over 1,000 years.
For most there was no choice: to live in what we now call Europe meant that one was a Christian within the confines of the church. Life was focused upon subsistence and salvation and the promise of the after life controlled all of the energy directed towards the pursuits that we now call knowledge acquisition.
Thus all one needed to know was contained in the Bible that most could not read and those who translated it into the vernacular, for those who could, were burnt. The Catholic Church burnt vernacular bibles well into the eighteenth century. One could obtain knowledge and salvation only through the church. Monopoly gathers power, and is of course corrupting.

The Reformation that Martin Luther began in the second decade of the sixteenth century was certainly a response to this corruption, shifting the focus of salvation to a more direct encounter between the individual and God. He questioned the way in which religion was organized; he certainly did not criticize the object of salvation.
Yet, his criticism and the change of focus that the Reformation brought about, lead to the Bible becoming an object of study rather than one of total veneration as the word of God brought to the people under the aegis of the church.
It inevitably lead to what is known as the higher criticism which brought the Bible to earth and demonstrated by assiduous gathering of fact, the process by which it was created, when and how. This process inevitably ate into its power and began a long process of what we now call secularisation.

At the highest cultural levels this process culminated in the works of Nietzsche, the product of a long line of German Protestant pastors, whose entire opus can be viewed as a continual questioning of the basis of western Christian civilization and the values upon which it is founded.
He was an offshoot of the tradition of higher criticism as is all of the German academic tradition that still reigns in the west and governs the activities of those scholars, whether Protestant, Jewish or Catholic who have broken the link between knowledge and salvation.
Anyone who seriously engages with Nietzsche encounters a mind that shakes the very foundation of any faith or belief that our religious tradition is the last word on the nature of reality.

Science, of course, has triumphed in the empirical realm, though perhaps ultimately based upon the habits of mind engendered by over 1,000 years of theology, as Whitehead points out in one of the great books of the twentieth century: Science and the Modern World.
The western world is now secular. The magic has fled and for most the bread and wine is just bread and wine. Yet faith and belief seem integral to our humanity, and in spite of total disenchantment, refuse to go away.

Philip Rieff s Charisma speaks to these issues with a depth and intensity that few can muster, for he has been musing upon the effects of what I outlined above for over sixty years.
His recent death did not cause the stir that the death of his one time wife, Susan Sontag caused, but I have no doubt that Rieff will be read long after Sontag is a distant memory.
Think for a moment upon the continual fuss – mainly media generated – for that is our indication of importance (an appearance on TV), around Brittney Spears, Paris Hilton or Amy Winehouse. It is the attention paid to them and their supposed charisma that is the focus of Rieff s book, though of course he never mentions them.

Rieff s focus is the use of the term ‘charisma’ and the employment of it by one of his historical mentors – Max Weber, one of the great scholars of the twentieth century and an emblem of German culture that two world wars destroyed, to the benefit of NASA, the Institute of Advanced Study and umpteen American Nobel prizes.
Weber and his fellow German mandarins created a culture whose last reflection can now only dimly be glimpsed in a few fossil remainders.

Having been fortunate enough to spend seven of my formative years with a man who lived the American version of that German intellectual life, I have some sense of what has been lost and just how debased our life of the mind, or what is left of it, has become.
Rieff lived in our tradition of the professor whose task is to maintain the standards that tradition has bequeathed to us. Yet all his early work – work that earned him a chair and a University Professorship at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania – was about the creation of a new type: the therapeutic.
It is the path that Protestant scholarship has taken us on from Luther on through Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Weber and of course Rieff and my close companion and mentor: Morse Peckham.

The therapeutic, which is of course associated with Freud and his work on the unconscious, projection, transference and those childhood pattern which determine how we encounter others for the rest of our lives, is akin to the post-modern which Derrida made so popular among academics looking for a way to destroy the grund upon which their own disciplines were formulated.
Those who wish to grasp the real power of this erasure – to borrow a term from Derrida that goes back to the Schwartzwald mortal dwarf, Martin Heidder’s SEIN – must go back and read Nietzsche, for as ‘deep’ as Derrida and Heidiger might seem at times, they are both water carriers for Nietzsche, who has yet to be fully grasped, though his work is the most influential source of what Rieff is deeply upset about in Charisma.

The 60s brought Nietzsche to a popular conjuncture by taking his proclamation about ‘The death of God” into every aspect of life. The challenge still reverberates as so much of USA history, 1972-2008, has been a response to the fear brought to the surface by the shock administrated to the entire culture by the 60s eruption.
The 60s was about the death of the father in both a symbolic and a literal sense. Father had disappeared from the American home in terms of actual time spent and the deeper and related symbolic sense of authority.
Rieff’s concern is about the loss of this authority as it relates to the very root of our Judeo-Christian culture. And let me be clear about this: Rieff, as all western thinkers tend to do, speaks in universal terms, though his data only refers to the west.
A religious structure is promulgated by a leader who inculcates a mode of existing in the world and whose charisma transmits a code of conduct that forms a consistent framework of interdicts that give structure to the lives of those who call themselves by the name of the charismatic figure: Christians, Buddhists, etc.
Those who live within these interdicts form a covenant that is a structure of moral demand. To violate these demands, to transgress, is to experience guilt.

The culture that is maintained and transmitted is the means by which a transgression is severely limited, produces guilt and is quickly punished. That Rieff is talking about a limited spectrum of such situations should be obvious from the above.
The conscious intention of the therapeutic is freedom from this internal structure of authority, for true guilt is produced by the ‘police’ who live within and were inculcated with the imbibing of our mother’s milk and our father’s NO!
The Freudian analytical situation is designed to create a situation in which the unconscious forces that control are re-enacted and thus objectified in such a way, by analysing their transference with respect to the analyst, and thus depotentiated, thus ideally doing away with the projections that lead to the submission to authority, producing an individual who can’t be manipulated or interdicted in a charismatic matter.

The manufactured charisma of our present moment is to Rieff an indication of our loss. I don’t disagree. What could any semi-mature adult want with a Paris Hilton or a Brittney Spears besides the administration of a good spanking.
Rieff is also correct when he looks upon a great deal of modern art as being transgressive, not a surprise to anyone who has fully grasped Nietzsche, the strongest nineteenth century influence upon the art of the last 100 years.

Rieff’s analysis bodes well for the eventual triumph of Islam, in the west, for Europe now mainly lives outside the covenant that reinforces the interdicts that Rieff rues the passing of and feels to be essential to the maintenance and transmission of culture. The elite, for the most part, has long said goodbye to religion.
The USA is a parody of interdiction, for the Catholic Church lives in paedophilic incipient bankruptcy, both actual and moral and ever proliferating Protestant sects may do lots of good works, but are drifting into a consumer religion that is a parody of the original charismatic transmission and can live quite happily with pornography and wife swapping.
And alas the kicker: eight years of a supposedly religious president whose continual lies could only disgust a genuinely religious person.

Rieff possesses a depth and intensity that dwarfs most of the scholars that I have spent a lot of time reading.He is addressing questions that will determine our very future.
Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and their ilk pale in contrast to his more refulgent light as do the Catholics who give up meat for lent in light of the martyrs who were roasted on slow fires.
The utter triviality of our culture is what comes off of each page of Charisma and reflects the experience I have had in seven years back in the United States.
If one searches for American Innerlichkeit, one quickly discovers that it is akin to Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: there is no there there.
Rieff is posing questions of utmost importance: can a culture live without religion and the interdicts that flow from such charismatic structures? Can rational authority replace charismatic authority? And perhaps most important: can love survive the dissolution of authority? His answer is no and I tend to agree.

We don’t seem to be able to live without a real sense of sin and evil. That conjecture is deeply substantiated by the fact that one in every hundred American adult is now in prison.
Something is broken and the utterly immoral behavior of our last two presidents seem indicative of the fact of the breakdown, and alas I am totally unmoved by the thought of an Obama presidency, though I have nothing but good feeling for the man.
I feel as if the ‘help’ is being brought in to clean up the mess or be a caretaker as in Detroit, Newark or Philadelphia.

In Defense of Food: an eater’s manifesto
by Michael Pollan

Watching, without a great deal of surprise, the destruction of the world’s economic system and of course the calling into question of the ideology: American capitalism, that has sustained, created and destroyed it, can only reflect on the years 2001-2008, the period of time during which I wrote thousands of letters of alarm about the unsustainable way of life that I discovered during those years in the USA after 20 years of absence.
Now at a pivotal point, when Americans have reached out to an “other” to save them, I can only hope that the burden place on such slim shoulders does not break them.
American hypocrisy has become so constant in the only pursuit that matters: MORE, that everyday living for a great percentage of the population has become contradictory on the face of it.
An economic system geared to producing more money, rather than a secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, is now in tatters.
To break bread together is a ritual that binds. The pace of American life has destroyed that ritual and helped to destroy the family that both sustains and has sustained the ritual of the communal meal.
People now fuel up, often on the run or in their car, alone. They fuel up on manufactured food that is akin to mainlining sugar to its close biochemical containers, producing quick energy that the body can’t handle.
“We’re in the middle of a national experiment in the in the mainlining of glucose.” (p. 113)
For many this leads to diabetes II and its attendant by-products: obesity, hypertension, heart disease and certain cancers. Young with kidney stones are showing up, increasingly, due to the amount of salt found in what has become known as the Western diet.
All part of the Western diet and the metabolic syndrome that has produced the explosion in weight that people carry and the problems, mentioned above, that flow from it. Young obese children appear to be, when the cell walls of their heart is examined, 40 or older. A ticking health time bomb.

The root of all this is our economic system and the advertising Leviathan that sustains it. I am not a Marxist, though his analysis of capitalism is still the best we have. It should be dusted off and read. His philosophy of history and predictions should be quietly bypassed.
The history of modern industrial life in the West has taken place within an environment that has increasingly downgraded Christianity and the idea of God that fills The Divine Comedy with light we can bathe in as we read, but can’t really understand.
We are frail and weak creatures, forced out of amniotic paradise, slapped into breath and then set loose into a world we hardly understand; thus when the overriding comfort of god disappears, few of us are able to believe in nothing and sustain ourselves; as G.K. Chesterton saw so clearly, we tend, once our major sustaining belief is lost, to grab hold of another: almost anything will do.
Thus for so many Americans, still mouthing Christianity, and going to church, as John McCain doesn’t, the real God is MORE.
That MORE is part of the most unrelenting system that human beings have ever created; contemporary capitalism. It melts everything, no matter how sacred. It is a dragon that must be bridled, so that its positive productive possibilities can be used in the service of human well-being, not difficult to define, instead of profit, another name for more.
Go back and read Adam Smith’s two books. What has been done in his name would infuriate him. The crimes of our present band of thieves must be carefully documented, so that we can see the linkage between our ideology and CDOs, sub-prime mortgages and the other instruments of our present destruction. Greed, the desire for MORE, lies at the basis of it. The willingness of thousands of people in positions of fiduciary responsibility to skip their required reading of the fine print and go for it with dollars not their own, so that Whitefish Bay Wisconsin will do without teachers, northern Norway towns can’t afford to staff its libraries and New York’s MTA will raise prices and do without needed maintenance. Three examples among tens of thousands.
In Defense of Food deals with the destruction of our food history. The substitution of that which has sustained us for millennia for a unsustainable quick hit. With reason, the more complex an ecology, the more sustainable it is. It is similar to an oriental carpet. Count the number of threads per square inch.

If I ear from that complexity, I am also imbibing protection from the predators that are everywhere, for what the plant has developed to sustain itself can sustain me. To denigrate that garden, to produce a monoculture for cash is to rip the carpet apart, loosen the threads and destroy the complexity that sustains. Thus we then must add to that mono-culture chemicals to kill the predators that previously were held off by the plant itself and then use that denatured product as a basis for manufacturing food that is less nutritious and must have other chemicals added to it to be able to sustain long distance shipping and time on the shelf.
That is what the application of capitalism has done to our food supply with the secondary effects to our health and well-being described above. Complex foods take time to digest and thus allow the body time to assimilate them; they nourish and give us feedback that tells us to stop eating.
Something that fast food does not do, hence the obesity epidemic and as Pollan feels, the constant eating to satisfy body needs that our denatured foods can’t satisfy.
“Our ancient evolutionary relationship with the seeds of grasses and frit of plants has given way, abruptly, to a rocky marriage with glucose and fructose.” (p. 114)
We are what we eat. What we eat is killing us, but it provides PROFIT and the opportunity for those interested in this to make even more money, by producing products for those made ill by the previous food products.
“Diabetes is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West – recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity. Apparently it is easier, or at least more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way the civilization eats.” (p. 136)

There is only one cure for our exploding health care costs: health itself. A great part of that health can be achieved by eating well. Contemplate these statistics. In 1960, the USA spent 17/6% of its income on food and 5.2% of its national income on health care; now those figures are: food 9.9%; health care 16%.
The basic rules are simple:
1. eat more complex foods;
2. eat more whole foods;
3. eat for quality not quantity;
4. shift from seeds back to leaves;
5. pay attention to what grandmother ate rather than food science.

Pollan does not tell you what to eat, but how to choose what you eat. His book is clear, well-documented and full of life-saving info. Reading it and gradually adapting his common sense ideas would add years to your life and slowly destroy the industrial system of food that is killing us.

The New Pearl Harbor, David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2004

Americans appear to have an attention span that is relevant to the flicker on MTV.

Remember ENRON?

I grew up in a slower time when focus and concentration was the rule and multi-tasking, which research has shown to be counterproductive, was unheard of let alone desired.

The assassination of J.F.K. brought my American bred innocence to an end. I spent two years (1964-1965) working with an international team of researchers, helping to develop the unwanted facts that made it clear that our young president was gunned down by a group of men, as part of a conspiracy that included parts of our own intelligence community.

The researchers I worked with focused on forensic minutia, failing, at least in the beginning, to focus on the larger picture; the context of politics and economics that led to Kennedy’s death.

Facts are important; they are essential to proving any assertion or raising questions about incorrect assertions. And facts you will get in The New Pearl Harbor, but as the title’s reference to Pearl Harbor indicates: today’s researchers are not neglecting the broader context.

9/11 was a great crime. It was done for reasons that the title indicates: to provide the rationale for previously planned invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Invasions that the American people would not have approved without the anger fuelled by 9/11.

We have a tradition of such events: The Maine, Tonkin Bay, Pearl Harbor, and now 9/11.

9/11 allowed previously desired invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to go ahead. Invasions that have to do with “Peak Oil” (we are running out of oil: the petroleum age is coming to an end; America is positioning itself to grab what it can). There is also the small matter of this year’s opium harvest: $7,000,000,000. Money which is often laundered through the New York Stock Exchange.

9/11 allowed for the hurried passage of the Patriot Act, elevating national security above all of our constitutional due process and other rights; rights that our fore-fathers spent their blood to achieve. It made toilet paper of the Constitution.

It created a large pork barrel called Homeland Security which has a Nazi ring to it, and in an emergency is allowed to end all of our disappearing freedoms. The rather dim leader of this department of fear created a color alert system that has nothing to do with the natural spectrum. His pronouncements have been ludicrous. He acted like a character out of Alice in Wonderland who has produced mainly fear and confusion. And alas, laughter with his famous duct tape suggestion.

We also have an endless war on terrorism that a misinformed and heavily stressed-out populace has allowed itself to be taken in by, thus allowing an incompetent presidential administration to continue the war in Iraq, the killing of our young and the bankruptcy of our future.

All of the above and more is a direct outcome of 9/11; a traumatic event that has so many eager to give up precious liberty to guarantee an elusive security that is nowhere to be found. Such cowardice is despicable, portending ills for us all.

“Waving the American flag became a substitute for critical and independent thought, and slogans such as ‘united we stand’ were used as blankets to smother whatever critical impulses existed.” (Richard Falk, Foreword, P. IX)

Thus 9/11 deserves a scrutiny equal to the Kennedy assassination.

But now is not 1964. A major technology has intervened: the Internet.

It allows teams of people to communicate effortlessly and often. It allows new facts to be quickly shared, checked out and discarded when found to be wanting.

It allows official lies to be quickly brought into the sunshine. It is a marvelous new form of the Rousseauian General Will when utilized in an open, sharing manner. It provides a means by which the perps can be flushed out before the issues go cold.

The New Pearl Harbor is a worthy contribution to this task.

Anyone who looks at some of the basic facts has to be suspicious:

1. The President sat and read to school children for 20 minutes, though he knew, for quite a while, that the nation was under attack, and that he was therefore in danger. A danger that he evaded for the rest of the day.

2. The hole in the Pentagon could not have been made by a Boeing 757.

3. The Pentagon is the most protected building in the world. How did anything get by that protection?

4. Why were planes not scrambled to shoot down at least two of the hijacked planes?

5. How did steel frame buildings suddenly collapse from fire?

6. All indications are that buildings 1, 2 & 7 were brought down by carefully placed explosives.

7. Why was the forensic evidence - the steel members - immediately sold and shipped out of the country? 9/11 was a crime scene. Those steel beams were evidence.

These are a few of the basic questions that Griffin raises and discusses. Questions that patriotic hand waving or loose talk about conspiracy theory can’t dispel.

They are questions that official reports avoid.

In addition, there are a number of individuals within the intelligence and law enforcement communities who are being gagged, for they have information that would upset the applecart.

The book, now in its second edition, is just 200 pages.

It is clear and to the point.

It makes a devastating case in a calm and logical way.

Griffin has been a professor of philosophy of religion at the Claremont School of Theology in California for over 30 years. He is the author and editor of over 20 books.

His book is essential reading for anyone troubled by the present direction of the USA: over 50% of the nation according to the polls.

If The New Pearl Harbor convinces you that 9/11 must not be allowed to be buried, you are then ready to read Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon, which details the context in which 9/11 operated, in much greater detail, and points a long finger in the direction of those responsible.

The leader of these men was re-elected for mainly moral reasons. What irony.

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the cover-up, and the exposé, David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2008

I have previously reviewed two of Griffin’s meticulously researched and written books. This book is an update as many are researching 9/11.
Any honest reading of Griffin’s work will call forth suspicion of the 9/11 report that Griffin demonstrates: WAS WRITTEN IN OUTLINE PRIOR TO ANY RESEARCH.
The fact alone is devastating.
The man who controlled every aspect of the report, Philip Zelikow, was acting as an agent of the Bush Administration and was in contact with both Condoleezza Rice, a friend with whom he has previously written a book, and Karl Rove. An obvious breach of trust as both of them were implicated in the events leading up to 9/11.
The various 9/11 research groups should strive to make Philip Zelikow very famous.
Other facts also convince this reader that we need a new 9/11 investigation: immediately;
1. cell phones in 2001 did not work at the heights that the plane was at during the times the calls were made. This has been confirmed by tests, research and FBI work presented at the Moussaoui trial.
2. anyone who knows any physics can immediately tell you that the fall of all three buildings could not have happened as a result of fire.

April 22, 2008

Dear Professor Wood,

Enclosed are a short note and a letter that I wrote to the New York Review of Books about your recent paragraphs on the fourteenth amendment which I found quite surprising for a number of reasons.
The first being the fact that you are an excellent historian whose work I greatly respect and have recently used in a long briefing on a court submission about the “Einhorn Law” which was passed by the Pennsylvania state legislature to contravene a final decision of a court, an obviously unconstitutional act.
At the appeal level, the court ducked the ruling on the obvious unconstitutionality of the law. It refused to rule on the merits of the issue, using as an excuse, a false one – that they could not grant the remedy. This is of course specious reasoning, as once jurisdiction is assumed a court must rule on the merits and worse can’t treat of the remedy without first considering merit.
What they did produced a due process violation. Thus I began a long study of the fourteenth amendment. Briefly spoken about in my letter to the New York Review of Books, that lead to a reading of Berger, a number of law review articles and the many cases in which incorporation became accepted law.
That long process made it clear to me that Berger was correct historically and I’ve seen no historical data to the contrary.
I benefit from being able to use the fourteenth amendment and having spent years in the movement, I am both emotionally and politically in consonance with what the courts have done and agree, Justice Thomas notwithstanding, that there is “no likelihood of its ever being expunged or reversed.” However, I am troubled by history being trampled upon, as Amar’s “Intelligent answer” does and perhaps even more so by a historian of your quality seconding the motion.
And what present court is doing – a reverse Warren Court – seems to be part of this process, wherein history and good judicial practise be damned: We’re in control now and its your turn to suffer. That began with their “electing” W and has continued through a very shameful seven years of the destruction of the Constitution and the acceptance of torture.
This egregious process is perhaps beyond healing, yet I believe that the use of history, a tool that your work exemplifies, could somewhat mollify the situation, hence my concern at what I see as its misuse.

Peace,
Ira Einhorn

April 20, 2008

To the Editors:

Re: Praying with the Founders, Gordon S. Wood, May 1, 2008

The meaning of a law can best be determined by the intention of its framers. It is a legal principle that is older than the Magna Carta.
With all due respect to the intellectual work of Professor Amar, he has not adequately responded to the definitive historical scholarship on incorporation displayed in Raoul Berger’s “Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment” (second edition, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1997), a book that has shown that the original intention was not to incorporate.
Justice Holmes made clear the weight that should be given to Berger’s deeply grounded historical arguments, re: Amar’s after the fact rationalization: “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.”
That said, anyone who is trapped in a state judicial system which in 2008 is but a reflection of Guantanamo and equally a cause for shame, is thankful for what the court began to do over eighty years ago: incorporate.
If one reads the law review articles and the cases cited there that deal with this transition, one quickly discovers a violation of historical intention which Justice Holmes also spoke about: “The criterion of constitutionality is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.”
I believe that our desire for “ordered liberty” is enhanced by incorporation and I am happy to have a legal tool to fight against a system in which justice isn’t, but I do not think it furthers the cause of just society to twist the historical record which Berger so carefully laid out.

April 20, 2008

A note to the Editors:

As a prisoner I find myself among the most excluded class of people in America.
The International Herald Tribune in a recent editorial estimated that between 5 and 10 percent of the people in the US prison system are not guilty as charged.
That means that ca. 500,000 people are being treated by the intellectual elite as non-existent; people who should actually be able to read the New York Review of Books and e-mail you when they have a response.
The rest are basically forgotten.
That’s a lot of people, some of whom, as I am, are very well educated indeed.
The court system, and that includes most lawyers, is corrupt beyond description.
Please spare some time and print space to look at the horrors that is a festering sore, just as egregious in its own way as our little gulag and the torture that accompanies it.

Peace,
Ira Einhorn

The following brief comment is a response to: “The Megacity: Decoding the Chaos of Lagos,” by George Parker, New Yorker, November 13, 2006

Note: George Parker’s first hand reports from Iraq were a model of informative journalism and an adumbration the debacle that we have brought upon ourselves and the Iraqis. His book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq is now in paperback.

I picked up the above titled article while rereading Dante.

Packer’s description of present day Lagos chilled me as much as Dante’s. Contemporary Lagos is indeed hell on earth and Packer’s article is full of descriptions that would not be out of place in Dante’s Inferno.

Worse, however, are the western intellectuals who are now feeding off of Lagos and other megacities without any real on the ground knowledge. A ‘perverse” phenomenon that I wish to note as the problems of a declining America increasingly need the attention and concern that Africa and other parts of the world are now receiving.

Stuart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue is quoted as follows: “Squatter cities are vibrant .. each narrow street is one bustling market.” He seems to think that the horrors that Packer describes is a “cure for third world poverty and an extraordinary profit making opportunity.,” [Packer’s worlds].

I found Brand’s enthusiasm ridiculous in light of Packer’s description from the actual experience of Lagos.

Rem Koolhaas, a leading designer/architect is worse: he and his team were so intimidated by Lagos that they were afraid to leave their car on their first visit. They then rented the president’s helicopter. Things obviously looked better from the air:

“From the air, the apparently burning garbage head turned out to be, in fact, a village, an urban phenomenon with a highly organized community living on it s crust…what seemed from above an accumulation of dysfunctional movements, seemed from above an impressive performance, evidence of how well Lagos might perform if it were the third largest city in the world.” [Rem Koolhaas]

Packer’s comment on this idiocy: “The impulse to look at an “apparently burning garbage heap/’ and see an “urban phenomenon,’ and then make it the raw material of an elaborate aesthetic construct, is not so different from the more common impulse not to look at all.”

An impulse that seems to be rampant in the world as the data from global warming piles up and the wave of destruction that it is ushering in gathers strength.

Think I’m exaggerating; see for yourself.

Google: The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock and then perhaps read the book.

The New Brain, Richard Restak, Rodale Press, 2003

“The dumbing-down, lowest common-denominator dynamic that cable and internet and tabloid culture have brought means that anything that is big and exclusive and legitimate is quickly turned into something trivial, tawdry, and dumded-down. If we had the most consequential scoop of all times about wrongdoing in the Bush Administration, it would quickly turn into “how’s it polling? What are they saying about it on Drudge? What are they saying about it on “Hannity and Colmes”?’ And it would be reduced to its cheapest most ephemeral essence.”
Mark Halperin, New Yorker, October 25, 2004

Richard Restak has written a small book that very deftly and gracefully provides the general reader with easily understandable information from the edge of neuroscience.

Its small package contains information that will eventually dwarf two major public interest issues that have occupied headlines for a while: tobacco and fast food.

Restak’s presentation of the research brings closer to scientific validity the intuitive awareness that many socially concerned people have shared for decades: presentation of violence in the media is a serious problem that effects us all, children in particular.

Restak’s 212 page book contains: a short overview introduction; an opening chapter on the plasticity of the brain; 7 chapters on research that will effect how all of us think about ourselves and live in the world; a concluding overview chapter that talks very directly about both the opportunities that the new knowledge opens up and the ethical dilemmas that our greater knowledge will force us to face.

New tools are now able to monitor the brain in both a safe and non evasive way. The information abstracted by these tools and massaged by computer programs enables researchers to formulate hypotheses and make predictions that are testable.

The correlation between watching violent action on TV and committing acts of violence is now established.

Restak talks with great sensitivity about loss and how TV violence is causing our inability to react to the pain of others. We are becoming desensitized to a whole spectrum of negative behavior.

He shows us what doing two or more things at once is producing. Multi-tasking is ineffective and costs us both in time and accuracy. Faster, faster, faster is the theme of an increasingly superficial age (read the head quote to this review slowly and ponder it.) that is characterized by increasing slippage.

He looks at what this frantic pace of processing is doing to our lives and the fact that ADD/ADHD may be classified as diseases, but is actually a lifestyle now being forced on people if they wish to survive.

He provides a number of moving anecdotes about what this lifestyle is doing to personal relationships.

Our frantic rush is overseen and controlled by an economic system that is ruled by one linear variable and can be simply defined as more. Anyone who has studied systems theory knows that the sad anecdotes that Restak presents are examples of sub optimization: the destructive output of an increasingly mad socioeconomic system that has avoided Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.

There are positive fruits to the knowledge gained by the research, but they will be but noise in the system, if we don’t pay attention and be more mindful of the wrong pathway that our system-as-a-whole is now perusing.

Our too concentrated linear economic behavior is rapidly making the planet unlivable. What Restak writes about is reflective of the total situation.

If we fail to heed the mirror he holds up, we are looking at species extinction.

The End Of Faith, Sam Harris, Norton, Paperback Edition, 2005

When I lived in Ireland (1981-1986) my closest male associate was a former terrorist leader who had been trained by the Syrians and as a result had been on call for a number of years, if needed on a mission.

There are very few males in a life richly adorned with friendship with whom I have bonded more deeply. After Eugene moved out of Dublin, I opened my apartment to him as a second home, and he came to treat it that way. When I fell into difficulties toward the end of my Irish stay, I was given duplicate identity papers and for ten years became an identity duplicate of my friend. Our mutual trust was absolute. We talked about everything connected to our past situations. That is everything but religion, though Eugene had not seen the inside of a church for decades, the idea of Marquis De Sade practiced for over 1,500 years by the church in its own form had captured him at a deep level. Give me a child for his first 8 years said De Sade and I will return to you a libertine for life. The church had the same philosophy in respect to producing Catholics. Thus I quickly learned to avoid all discussion of religion while I was in Eire.

Knowing about his background, I was deeply surprised to realize that Eugene did not fully grasp the nature of suicide terrorism in spite of his often having gone out on missions that would result in the death of others and certainly could have resulted in his own death.

He attended all my seminars. In those seminars I discussed suicide bombing as it emerged. I soon realized that it was so alien to Western minds, at least those I was in contact with, that a new political weapon had emerged on the planet. A weapon that in less than 20 years has brought the West to its knees and if people like Sam Harris have their way, Spengler’s book title: The Decline of the West, will become prophecy.

The moral weakness that I have experienced since my forced return to this country in July of 2001 had made me metaphysically ill quite often. The feeling has accelerated as the response to 9/11 progressively produces an amnesia with respect to the asserted values of the United States.

John Le Carre’ conveyed it so well in his books about the cold war; if fighting an enemy becomes miming, one soon looses all sense of value and self; the exercise becomes a game without values.

Most of The End of Faith is a necessary book written by one of the few younger Americans who seems to have escaped some of the noxious fog that has enveloped the USA during the past 25 years. A fog produced by what Harris is railing about. A fog that is leading us to ecocide, a concept we must grasp and focus upon if anything is to be saved from what is coming.

The context in which we live, breathe and eat our daily bread is rapidly deteriorating. The linear projections about global warming that lull us into just continuing to walk into some distant destruction have changed into a hurried last call accompanied by all sorts of data that indicate that the system is broken, and that we now live in the world of the non-linear which no one can predict and few will like or benefit from. It is as if we have left the friendly local train that was comfortably carrying us to hell and have boarded the ecocide express.
That makes the 4% of the spaceship, who create 27-30% of the pollution, into the enemies of the rest of the planet, into killers if you will and whether they intend to be killers or not is besides the point.

I bring up the issue of intention due to the fact that Harris uses it to beat Noam Chomsky over the head with arguments that could only make sense if one was unaware of just how destructive American ‘good intentions’ have been, but he isn’t. His footnotes are filled with the American horrors that enable one to see what a destructive force my homeland has been from its inception up till the present, and Noam has been the most tireless chronicler of recent horrors: The most accurate, the most unrelenting during the years when 60’s hope turned into a backlash of puritanical despair that has led the republic into hyper-consumption (now using, by some estimates up to 80% of the savings of the entire planet) and a spreading condition of personal obesity that has one recent wag describing Americans in the following manner:. “It’s a place where people are so fat it’s as if they had decided to become their own air-bag system.” (Edward St. Aubyn)
Harris is well trained in philosophy, so the distinctions he uses to berate Chomsky give the game away when one slightly shifts the focus.
It seems as if our intentions in bombing Iraqi citizens are OK, as we don’t mean to kill them. They just happened to be in the way as we tried to kill soldiers defending their homeland, disruptive terrorists, Italians driving too fast, Iraqis who can’t understand English…the list is endless.

But we do know what depleted uranium does, we do know what phosphorus does to human bodies, as we should have known what would happen to unguarded museums. How do our intentions look when we widen the focus?
And the real question! Why are we there? Harris does not deal with this question at all, so his talk about ‘collateral damage’ accompanying our ‘good’ intentions is twaddle as a famous Harvard Professor used to say. Once you throw that large pinch of salt into the cooking pot, so much of his use of intentions collapses and we are left with some hard collateral damage facts and Noam’s naked lunch presentation of them: not good eating for those who would claim the moral high ground.

And there is more and worse: ‘ethics of “collateral damage”’ which has Sam Harris justifying the torture of innocents, if there is a chance that good information might result.

I have studied torture, extensively; I spent 6 months writing a chapter of a novel on it (I will post that chapter on this site as soon as I can locate it.) I abhor it; the thought that my country is practicing it and that an intelligent well educated American man such as Sam Harris can advocate it makes me very sad, for it indicates that our loss of who we are and what we stand for has been greater than I thought.

If you read deeply into torture material as I have, you soon learn that torture rarely produces usable information, for obvious reasons: if I begin applying a blow torch to your face or do some other egregious thing to you, you will talk after awhile, but what you tell me may be sheer nonsense, as had been confirmed to me by people who have first hand experience.

Those we seek to track by such obtained information have elaborate contingency plans in the event of the capture of someone who has pertinent information.
The proof in the pudding: Where’s Osama?

Do you want to encourage behavior demonstrated by Ms. English and her cohorts or the CIA operative described in Jane Mayer’s recent New Yorker article who unknowingly killed his victim (his face was hooded, so the torturer did not see it turn blue: the man was suspended by his arms (held behind him) from a window frame), or provide torture entertainment for bored off duty cooks as described in many recent articles?

Behavior spreads. Once you begin acting as if conventions and treaties are toilet paper, you create an immoral force field that could destroy an army and a nation.

No one can be proud of Abu Ghraid.

No one can be proud of torturing innocent people on the hope that someone in the group of the victims will produce some useful piece of information, and the kicker is that totally innocent people have been tortured to death.

How does this standup to our browbeating China, Turkey or one of the ‘stans’ about human rights or John Bolton’s contempt for members of UN human right’s organizations.

The blow back is enormous and has just begun, and I’m not even thinking about what the rendition scandal is set to produce. When one claims to live on high ground, one’s light has to be very clear. Alas, it has dimmed and the claims about what we stand for ring hollow in too many well disposed ears.

It puts our captive soldiers in great danger. What we do to others, can and will be done to us. Will over 200 years of struggle to abolish torture suddenly be sidetracked by American fears and over reaction?

And last but not least is John McCain who has lived out the captive’s nightmare, certainly he should be trusted on this issue more than W., the Veep or Rumsfeld, who have not served a day in combat between them. His large majority vote in the Senate, in spite of our Veep’s vehemence and W’s threat of a veto is good confirmation for all of the above, as I more than defer to Senator McCain on this issue, I bow down to him.

To torture someone is to effectively destroy a life. Abusers have mainly been abused. A pattern is created. We can only hope the same thing is not true for the tortured, but their lives are marked and human trust is destroyed.

Without basic trust, there is no adequate life.

All of that said, I find parts of The End of Faith quite refreshing and essential, though his total reliance on rationality seems misplaced given the recent history of our species when weighed against his attack on faith.

The book’s real weakness is his attempt to speak in universal terms, but of course that is the nature of rationalism: it pretends to speak for us all as if it were a universal language that we all speak and use in exactly the same way.
Recent cross cultural work has demonstrated that this is just not so even in terms of basic perception: we do not even see the same thing when presented with common perceptual objects.

Given that wobbly pivot, how can we expect to reach agreement on matters that are deeply engrained in our tribal mores and have been so since Neolithic times.
The agreement or should I say truce that rules math is rare, and what Godel has wrought is missing from his book.

Modern physics in non-coherent, general relativity and quantum mechanics do not belong to a conceptual greater whole. The struggle to create a quantum gravity that might unify all four fundamental forces has come to naught. 96% or so of the universe is among the missing, called either dark energy or dark matter, but do not ask me what it is for no one has the slightest idea. It is akin to what Newton said about gravity: “It might as well be an angel’s wing.”

The either– banished by late 19th century physics - is threatening re-entry; string theory (choose your version) seems un-testable.

Thus coherence and rationality seem weak tools to employ against our entire cultural history. Our present world view smells more of chaos than cosmos.
Yet Harris is correct. We must use the tools we have, though his over-emphasis on rationality and coherence speak as much about personal need as they do about universal norms.

And there’s the rub.

The book cries out for more personal description and statement.

Why the extreme overreaction to 9/11 and Noam Chomsky?

Why did so many of our elected officials so quickly give up our precious blood won freedom to the aegis of an unread law?

9/11 could not have been totally unexpected. I do not have access to the president’s daily intelligence briefing, but long before I was forced to leave France, July of 2001, I told my wife that a major terrorist attack would soon hit the United States. I could feel it in my blood. Her letter about 9/11, received soon after that date, expressed deep shock at the event and wonder about my prediction.

Was Sam Harris totally shocked? Is he a Jew? Does he fear for the future of Israel, for though The End of Faith has a covering surface of rational criticism, it is written out of a deep emotional distaste for Islam whose main enemy is the Jewish state: Israel.

I bring this up as a Jew who sees the fundamentalists in Israel as the trigger for the destruction of Israel. Unless their rabid extremism is severely bridled and a just peace made which includes their extraction from the West Bank, I see the destruction of Israel within the next 20 years. In addition, any threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran just brings that day closer.

We live in a world that grows more dangerous with each passing day. Given the forces now unleashed, there is no way to fully protect any country from attack. It is just impossible to anticipate and protect against every contingency.

But we must grow up a bit and put things in prospective.

The World Trade Center action is rapidly becoming a mortal blow, due to our reaction. If we are so weak that the loss of less than 3,000 people forces us to give up over 200 years of precious freedom and move in the direction of a Garrison state, then we are lost.

If we could have the courage to continue living without allowing the struggle to destroy our values, the strength drawn from such action would be incalculable and infectious.

Listen to Joseph Lelyveld in his review of the book that James Yee published on his surreal treatment by the military:

“The idea that Camp Delta had been infiltrated by Al-Qaeda was far-fetched from the start, but the prison was on a war footing since the day it was set up, patrolled as if attack from the sea, by the non-existent Al-Qaeda Navy were a real possibility; infiltration from within was not the least plausible threat imagined by the command in training exercises designed to keep the prison’s guards on constant alert.”

Did 9/11 suddenly make Sam Harris aware of Islam as a danger?
The growth of his ideas would inform us all, for we all are going to have to dig deeper to survive.

I have studied and taught the Bible. I spent years studying the history of Christianity and Judaism. I have read in the Koran, so have come across the inflammatory passages that Harris quotes. I totally agree that organized religion and the deference shown to it is a cruel joke. I’m appalled that our president claims to speak to God and bases major decisions upon such purported conversations.

I have studied early Christianity, the Inquisition and the Cathar Horror. I have read lots of books on the witch craze.

I know that religion is responsible for more deaths than anything else in human history, that Christians killed more of their own in the 100 years after they became the official Roman religion than the Romans killed of them in the preceding 300 years.

I abhor organized religion though some of my finest friends have been church functionaries and I was part of a bishop’s kitchen cabinet for 7 years.
I am now in jail. I am surrounded by those who clutch the Bible and the Koran. It is their comfort. I don’t see rationalism replacing that comfort.
So, although I agree with Sam Harris and thank him for his courage in beginning an awesome task, I do not see any hope in that pathway.

I fully agree with his assessment of New Age nonsense. What junk people are eating. But Chesterton warned us. When major belief is lost, people don’t replace it with nothing, but rather anything at all. Belief similar to nature abhors a vacuum.

Faith based 12 step programs form the basis for all rehabilitation in Pennsylvania prisons. The parole recidivism rate is 93%. The programs are a prison hype for gaining federal funds. A scam, but so much of American life seems like a scam at present, and the tone is set at the top.

When the president lies, when the president breaks the law, we all suffer, no matter what the intention.

Think about all those statements about the linkage between Al Qaeda and the former Iraqi leader. There is no linkage. The president and the vice president are both liars: the effects of their continual lying has poisoned the entire context in which we are forced to function. We are all victims of such lies.

The heart of The End of Faith is to be found in the following quote (page 221):
“It seems to me that the nature of consciousness will trump all these developments. Whatever experience awaits us – either with the help of technology or after death – experience itself is a matter of consciousness and its content. Discover that consciousness inherently transcends its contents, discover that it already enjoys the well-being that the self would otherwise seek, and you have transcended the logic of experience. No doubt experience will always have the potential to change us, but it appears these changes will still be a matter of what we can be conscious of in the next moment, not of what consciousness is in itself.”

I totally agree.

All this part swapping, brain downloading, computer merging is an avoidance of sitting quietly in a room and getting on with the task of clearing away the accumulated dross that would allow us to stop over consumption and learn to live within our planetary means.

And yes Buddhism holds the key to this further stage in human evolution, for the west is indeed a child when faced with the inner knowledge that Buddhism has gathered. Our philosophers seem puerile in comparison, but ‘happiness’ [the word Harris uses] seems a bad choice describing the enlightenment that a well trained and achieved master can point us in the direction of.

There are no guarantees. Our time may be short. The ecological disaster grows apace. Enlightenment can’t be forced, but Harris has made one thing very clear: religion is a dangerous mess of pottage whose disappearance would release enormous new bound human energy.

If that energy could sit quietly and meditate, we would have a fighting chance at survival.

Terrorism is a meek energy by comparison with the forces of consumption: Osama will kill thousands, perhaps destroy a city or two, render some areas uninhabitable, but the ecological changes now underway threaten to collapse the entire structure of our civilization.

Science benefits from feedback and open discussion, but it can provide no means for explaining something as basic as the 2 slit experiment in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics works, but I would not call it coherent or rational.

The criticism of rationalism itself made by Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin is not easy to counter.

In addition the view of science held by Kuhn or Feyerabend certainly runs counter to the Harris program as put forward in this book.

And then there is the data from the new branch of psychology that explodes the Harris program totally. Evolutionary psychology had made a loud and overly reductive case about those we tend to love and support. They turn out to be those who carry our genes into the future and they are a very limited group of people, not the totality of our fellow earthlings, so one of the most recent of data sets generated ‘rationally’ indicates that what Harris wishes for is just not on.
But if he would exam his fear and anger re: 9/11, religion and Islam in particular, we all might learn something. The outcome has to do with introspection and honesty and little to do with ‘rationality’ which is one tool among many, just as science is one form, not the form of knowing.

While I was writing this review, a friend told me about a recent debate at the Kennedy School at Harvard in a building I know well, as I spent a semester there in residence. I have not read the transcript of this debate between Alan Dershowitz and Noam Chomsky, but was told that Dershowitz called Noam a Nazi and an anti-Semite. To label a Jew a Nazi and an anti-Semite, particularly a man who is recognized outside the USA as the world’s leading intellectual, is indicative of how far ideology, as distinct from truth has bled into our world.
I have great respect for Noam’s courage and intellectual persistence. He has refused to be quiet in the face of years of pariah-hood. He has walked this singular pathway without flinching. Such courage is very rare; he now has a vast audience, planetary recognition and respect. The mud that Dershowitz is slinging will only besmirch his own reputation.

I can also empathize with Alan Dershowitz, and more to the point of his present book review: Sam Harris. Both are obviously freaked by what they see happening to things they love; both are willing to defend what they see threatened by any means available: name calling, “collateral damage” (read Torture and Death of Innocents) and a twisting of rationality into an ideological club for hammering at anything that threatens.

At the point we cease to understand each other and feel frustrated, action should cease, for any action that flows from frustration is counter-productive and violative of both self and other. At that conjuncture we can go to war or deeper into the self.

Publicly we are at that point almost all the time in the United States. We insult à la Rush Limbaugh instead of talking. We have lost all sense of manners and mutual respect. We ‘dis’ instead of honoring each other. We outer ourselves constantly in a manic need to assert our disappearing identities. We seem to have lost all sense of what an inner life could be. American culture feels so superficial; a micron thin mélange of TV sports and celebrity watching that is so disdainful of life’s precious beauty and wonder. A continuous orgy of consumption that sets me to musing upon army ants, the feeding frenzy of sharks or a fox let loose in a chicken house.

And the dis-ease is spreading!

That is why I find Harris of interest, not for what he says in this book, but for what he hints at.

Zen And The Brain: Toward An Understanding Of Meditation (Cambridge, MIT Press: 1998) by J. H. Austin is the most important book I have read in the last two decades for it is both a personal report of the quest for enlightenment – what Harris is on about in the quote above from page 221 – and an exhaustive attempt to reflect upon the experience in light of scientific study of the mind and consciousness. A bridge of survival that I hope is greatly increased by the explosion of Buddhism in the United States, the presence of the Dalai Lama in our midst, and the work of Francisco Varela and others.

Martin Rees, Our Final Hour seems to be correct: We don’t have much time. We are looking in the eye of species extinction. Whether we do it through ecocide or nuking the planet into oblivion is irrelevant.

The following quote from a catalogue announcing the 100th birthday celebration of Albert Hofmann, Basel, Switzerland (13 to 15 January, 2006) describes the situation with great clarity: “Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. Let’s cut this time-span down to 46 years for a better understanding. GAIA’s early years rest in the mists of history, it wasn’t before it turned 42 that it started to bloom. After about 44 years dinosaurs inhabited the planet. Some eight months ago the first mammals evolved, and during last week the first hominids entered the scene; modern man exists for only four hours. Some sixty minute ago he took up agriculture, and a minute ago the industrial revolution began. During these very last sixty seconds man managed to turn Gaia into a garbage dump, to exterminate thousands of plants and animal species, to kill an uncountable number of its own kind, to loot the planet’s resources, to pollute soil, air and water and to leave nuclear and other waste for future generations.

“Within the next few seconds all of us will decide whether we are going to make life on our home planet impossible, or develop a consciousness that allows us a future existence with Gaia.”

There are three pathways which we can now follow:

1. Muddle through by somehow not pulling the triggers on all those drawn ‘guns’. This seems doubtful as technology continues to develop and quicken, giving a small group or even one person the power to destroy entire cities (9/11 awakened or exponentiated this fear in Sam Harris).

2. Develop a new energy technology that is both totally scalable and portable. It must also be renewable (not add to present level of bads no matter how measured).

This requires the establishment of a multi-disciplinary review panel and many levels of proposal sorting, so that something that seems impossible does not get discarded before being honestly tested.

It requires total commitment of resources and the willingness to set up 5-10 diverse research structures.

It requires whatever money is necessary, agreements to share and pay back, etc.
It requires total openness, so the best can freely use the internet for knowledgeable criticism.

I’m talking about a technology worth at least 1015 in $, so the stakes are high and the planetary best should be involved.

3. Submit the claim of enlightenment to the same process as I described in 2 above. Let us take the Harris quote seriously and try to organize the knowledge, so that many find the context which allows the logic of experience to be transcended, a seeding of such minds throughout the planet may provide enough leaven/levity for us to rise above the instinctual identifications that are presently killing us.

Ira Einhorn Dec. 20, 2005

P.S.: We have entered a new historical era as a result of structural changes that everyone talks about but does not focus enough upon.

The two major concerns that all past large polities focused upon were currency, the ‘coin of the realm’, and weaponry. Their control was an absolute need of the rulership no matter what name it bore.

Recent events have changed that situation as George Soros and others have made obvious; Americans may one day find out about this lack of control of their currency when they awaken one morning to a $ worth very little.

When I jokingly asked in a public lecture during the mid 60s what we would do when 42nd Street got the bomb, my intuition was anticipating our present acute paranoia (not totally uncalled for) about suitcase nuclear weapons and other horrors (chemical and biological) that are now more available than our ‘protectors’ let on about.

The ‘king’ now lives in a bubble, but he no longer is in effective control. We are in a totally new situation and past reflexes will be of no avail.

P.P.S.: Reflect for a moment upon one aspect of our madness. We are spending $7,000,000,000 a month on just our soldiers in Iraq; the total cost of the war will probably top out at over one trillion $. Tax reduction during the last five years under W. will come to trillions more.

Yet we can’t spare some relatively small change to set up energy projects that could realistically save the planet. In that light ‘rationalism’, no matter how defined, is a very distant dream.

In Search of P.D. Ouspensky. The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff, Gary Lachman, Quest, 2004.

The question of consciousness: What it actually is, how it functions, how we can modulate or raise it, is an enormous present concern that is occupying millions of people in one form or another.

During the 1970’s when I created an international information network out of whole cloth with the aid of one farsighted business executive and the resources of his massive company, the original focus was the ability of Uri Geller to produce effects upon the physical world that the science then accepted not only couldn’t explain, but also was forced to deny.

The core members of that network soon gravitated towards an attempt to explain how consciousness itself could effect the physical world. A discipline, let us call it the physics of consciousness, that one of my close associates, Andrija Puharich, had helped create when he originally published Beyond Telepathy.
The focus on consciousness, as a scientific object not as something to be raised, was rather unique then, and two decades away from the beginning of the present explosion and its focus in the massive Tucson conferences.

The 1960’s occupied itself with the question of how to raise one’s consciousness. It cared not a whit about consciousness as an object of scientific intention, but I cared, for I felt that consciousness must have some relation to the actual state of the body, and that we could learn many things by studying the relationship between specific bodily states and the kind of consciousness they produced. I was thrilled when I first encountered Beyond Telepathy in the mid 60’s, and then the author himself who became a close friend and associate in what we jokingly called the ‘psychic mafia.’ I took the trouble to have Doubleday republish both of his early books, doing an introduction to Beyond Telepathy.

Gurdjieff came to me during the 60’s via an apartment mate who loved Gurdjieff - though I kept reminding him Gurdjieff was dead - and his intense involvement with All and Everything that I am not alone in finding incomprehensible for the most part. With Gurdjieff came Ouspensky and a slew of others. There is nothing comparable in modern consciousness studies that approaches the quality of the literature that has gathered around the Ouspensky-Gurdjieff axis.

I also had a friend - a Leary LSD veteran - who ran the Boston Gurdjieff Group.

I am a reader, so I devoured all the extant literature and continued to do so until about the mid 80s.

Certain concepts developed in the work, as it is called by initiates are very powerful: self-remembering being primary, but the idea of higher centers, the fact of our mechanicalness, the concept of different levels of being coinciding with different types of people, the fact that we are not a unity, but a mixture of many ‘I’s who reign from time to time and quickly forget what they said or worse what they intended to do, and last but not least the idea of a magnetic center leading to real intention and the possibility of actually doing something.

Many of my ‘I’s developed a strong interest in knowing more about both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

Gary Lachman’s book has helped to fulfil that desire.

In Search of P.D. Ouspensky: The Genius In The Shadow Of Gurdjieff is as objective and honest a presentation of the life of P.D. Ouspensky as we are apt to get, given the present state of available sources.

The tale is a sad one, both in the sense that Ouspensky got sidetracked by his hypnotic meeting with a powerful sly man: Gurdjieff, and never actually realized the brilliant promise of his early books. An observation strongly reinforced by Lachman’s description of Ouspensky’s sad alcoholic twilight years, and his own sense of Ouspensky having given up his own path for something ‘miraculous’ that was never achieved.

The life path is almost an archetype of the powerful intellectual - juiced by Nietzsche’s intoxicating words about the superman - who is able to formulate concepts that transcend present knowledge and point to a higher reality that is suddenly realized using a substance that immediately puts one face to face with the experienced fact that there are other realms, mainly unmapped though they may be.

But, one comes down as Dick Alpert, now Ram Dass, said to me a number of times during the 60s. Ah, there’s the rub.

That experience, which words do not even begin to convey to the uninitiated and certainly do not satisfy the experiencer (part of the reason why language held such a fascination for so many philosophers, artists and writers during the 20th Century), lead many on a quest to permanently achieve the state of consciousness that the use of a substance or technique has allowed them to glimpse.

William James pulled back from this not to be future and continued his work, producing in the process The Varieties Of Religious Experience which has few, if any equals for those interested in consciousness.

Ouspensky didn’t, meeting the sad end Lachman describes with such empathy.

The real question that the book raises is that of quality control. In the older traditions the relations between teacher and student are carefully governed. The students are certified by teachers who have been carefully prepared in a long tradition in which certain states of awareness are recognized by the teachers under whom they are studying. The work takes years and usually, certainly in the most successful traditions, the many forms of Buddhism for instance, involves years of patient mediation whose effect can be somewhat understood by reading the literature, but only can be fully judged by a teacher who has explored the full range of described states and has reached a permanent state of realization that is transmitted by their embodiment and the practice that produced that embodiment.

After 45 years of investigating these areas, both historically in the culture of the recent west and in the historical traditions of Buddhism and other master disciplines, I feel deeply that most talk about consciousness is sheer nonsense. Anyone who is serious must seek a situation described in the paragraph above.

To do otherwise is to risk the fate so aptly described in Gary Lachman’s book.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond, Viking (2005), 576pp.

“…because three-quarters of the world’s population will be living within 50 miles of the seacoast by 2010.”Jared Diamond

“The earth’s history suggests that with warming of two to three degrees, the new sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising the sea level by 25 meters or eighty feet.”
James Hansen

Comparing these two quotes will make any honest processor of information quickly aware that we are in the midst of “the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we have not even begun to deal with.”

I would say that Bill McKibbens’s quote just above is an understatement. The nuclear threat, involving the relationship of the leadership of two countries, was a minor difficulty given what we are now facing combined with our almost hallucinatory failure to fix our attention on what we are facing now, not during the lifetime of our children.

Not next year, not tomorrow, but now. As I pick the latest global warming facts off of the bottom of page 6 or 7 of my Trib., I must seriously question the sanity of my species, a concern echoed by McKibben re one of the two books he is reviewing (New York Review Of Books, January 12, 2006: For convenience I have used some of his facts which serve my purpose as well as the facts I’ve gathered of late.)

Think upon:

The increasing slow down of the Gulf Stream.

The Arctic Sea is melting fast: there was 20% less of it this summer: “the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover.”

Methane which I’m told has twenty times the effect of CO2 is bubbling up from the Russian Tundra in the midst of winter, so that standing H20 could not freeze even during the Russian winter.

Microbiological activity has increased in British soil (growing season is now eleven days longer), so that more carbon is escaping.

Ice in Alaska and Greenland is melting at increasing rates.

Soon we will be able to say two things: remember animals; remember glaciers.

I could go on, but if the above does not convince you, click on something else.

Every data point I have seen of late just reinforces one perception: we are now trapped within an out-of-control planetary experiment whose eventual outcome will please no one, and the closer you live to a sea coast, the less pleased you will be.

We are about to lose a great percentage of the real property that our species has created.

Think of a New Orleans once a month.

Also reflect upon the enormous failure of leadership: the gap between what W said on Jackson Square (playing catch up ball) and the now abandoned poor of New Orleans. A gap not dissimilar to “mission accomplished” and the actual on-going very expensive ($7 billion/month for troop maintenance) egregious horror that is IRAQ on 1/1/06.

We have apparently passed the tipping point in many processes whose accumulated non-linear hell now seems beyond our power to stop.

The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora’s box is open. Each data point is singing of chaos to come. Put all those divas together and you will get a cacophony that no one can even begin to predict. A series of extremely decoupled systems looking for new points of resonance. Markets going like yoyos. Nerves snapping like shoe strings.
Farmers getting 36″ of rain one day and then 2 years of drought.

When? Sooner than we think, if past earth perturbations are any indication, BUT in extreme non-linear systems no one can say much beyond: chaos is coming.

In light of the above, Collapse, an excellent book by Jared Diamond while packed with information about past collapses of individual civilizations (mainly) and avoidance of such (not really his focus) appears almost quaint though his research is large, his honesty is not to be questioned and his heart and soul are in the right place.

Anyone attempting to deal with global warming must have an absolutely global focus. That is not possible given the present political situation on our planet. And the ultimate reason for our dilemma: our present focus on growth in economic activity as the only game worth playing.

Capitalism and the infinite growth that it assumes as its just due does not allow for anything but MORE, for it is a system regulated by a linear variable (picture Sodom’s Bed Of Iron) and increasingly pushed by two unrelenting and maniacal forcing functions: daily stock quotations and shareholders incessant cry for more profit. Behavior that may be locally rational but is globally suicidal, under present conditions.

The system that produced the problems that got us into the mess we are in can’t be expected to solve it, for we would have to totally shift our central planetary focus on getting and spending to something more ethereal to avoid the sheer effect of numbers (there are too many of us now and many more each day). The by product of those numbers who are involved in a frenzy of consumption that is producing the warming effect that is melting the ice, pouring cold H2O into the oceans, and slowing the Gulf Stream is of course effecting everything that lives and breathes on the planet.

The disastrous changes seem locked in given our present momentum, sharply underlined by the accelerating development of China, India and Brazil. Miming the great criminal enterprise of the 20th century: American capitalism, profit, return on investment and everything else be dammed. And no, socialism/communism was not the solution for those systems have even worse ecological records.

The trouble is us Dear Reader, for we are truly what an earlier Diamond book called us: The Third Chimpanzee.

Monkey see, monkey do; what we see among our ‘elite’ is ‘conspicuous consumption’ aptly named by a brilliant relocated American Thorsten Veblen over 100 years ago.

All those SUVs, those gigantic houses, those celebrities with garages full of expensive cars, $10,000,000 parties, bonuses at Christmas that are equal to an honest worker’s lifetime salary – the worst excesses of finance capital – serve as models for our behavior, have diminished us all and are now threatening the basis of our existence.

Diamond seems too smart not to be aware of this, yet his book gives little hint of how deep the crisis is.

From my perspective, it is little better than Greenwash for it refuses to challenge our basic assumption as Americans that we can just continue to consume with some nod to ecology.

It would have been right on the money in the 70s. Welcomed gladly by those of us on the ecological front lines; in 2006 it is fine sociological history, but to me, little help in the quest to find some way out of the horror that grows closer with each published data point, bringing us ever closer to the reality of this Hopi/Zuni statement: “We were here long before you came, and we expect still to be here long after you too are gone.” (143)

P.S.: Those who wish to dig deeper into the crisis need to fully grasp two principles:

1. Sub-Optimization: What the use of profit, exclusively, to run our system is doing to the entire planet.

2. Ross Ashby’s LAW OF REQUISITE VARIETY: An excellent way to begin to understand how a complex system can be modulated and transformed.

Also those who have not: look up the work of Vaclav Smil whose books are each an education in themselves and each seems to require years of work.

I get the same impression from Joyce Carol Oates regarding her novels, short stores, reviews and obvious wide range reading.

Two rare pleasures in this age of intense focus and specialization.