Obama as America's Rorschach Test - III

The proxy war continues and escalates. Obama in the crosshairs via the proxy of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. It's new news on ABC today and Bill O'Reilly has clamped his jaws down it far more ferociously than he did with his misguided attempt on Baraka via Michelle Obama.



Obama's pastor's sermons scrutinized
"Attention must be paid!" That line from a famous play is certainly appropriate when we talk about Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial sermons are now being listened to for the first time by the public at large. In his sermons, he rails not only against Hillary, but white America and its supposed ills. Judge for yourself if this man's influence helps or hurts Sen. Obama.

Plus, we'll have the latest on Geraldine Ferraro's critique of the Obama candidacy and her resignation from the Clinton campaign. Don't miss these two hours of the Radio Factor today.

As Above, So Below, As Within, So Without....,

This article is available in its entirety to registered users at Technology Review. So click the link and go and register, abundant good material with an underlying dot-connecting editorial sensibility. Anyway, the discussion of neural density, dendrites, synapses, and so forth was serendipitous to me in view of the beautiful blogospheric visualizations presented in the current issue of the magazine. Here are a couple of those visualizations - look an awful lot like the bioflourescent and fMRI visualizations of cytoarchitechtonic structure in the human nervous system, don't they?

Blogosphere
The core of the blogosphere, made up of several thousand popular blogs that are heavily connected to one another, divides into two regions when seen up close. The region on the left, at the center of which are two areas showing a lot of pink, contains political blogs; the region on the right, divided from the first by the triangular indentation at the bottom, contains blogs focused on gadgets and technology. The two regions are held together by popular blogs with ties to both subject areas. The size of the ­circle representing a given blog is proportional to the number of other blogs linked to it. Hurst notes an apparent difference in culture between the two regions: pink lines, which represent reciprocal links, are much denser among the political blogs than they are among blogs focused on technology.


Twitter Social Network
People have different intentions when they share information through social networks, says Akshay Java, a member of the eBiquity Research Group at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He cites three purposes that bring users to the microblogging site Twitter, where they share brief updates via text message, instant messenger, and the Twitter website: finding information, sharing information, and having conversations. These images show the different networks produced by the different types of communication. When all connections as of April 2007 are mapped (top image below), news sources appear as huge nodes. When maps show only mutual relationships (bottom image below), in which all users both share and receive information, nodes are smaller and the network appears more tightly knit. (The different colors reflect a loose attempt to group close contacts together.)

Got No Soul....,

The energy wasted while the attention is caught in the internal wheel of perpetual associations is what could be harnessed and directed to produce the presence necessary to develop a correctly crystallized soul, a higher body of consciousness able to withstand death of the physical body. This is the problem, men forget why they are alive on this world and therefore they have no real continuous aim. A man is alive on this world to develop a correctly crystallized soul through self-remembering and transformation of experience and in that pursuit each man must focus his attention on both his inner consciousness and the external world that fate has delivered him into. As a man’s mind rolls with aimless associations he allows this pointless inner activity to draw his attention away from both the inner Self and the world around him. He falls into a dream world that is under the law of chance, where any kind of fantasy can lull him into a false satisfaction. Men do not notice this state because they are asleep, but this is where each lives the greater measure of his life, fantasizing in a state of false satisfaction.

Fragments of a Well Known Teaching - go read the whole thing, you may find it interesting.

Obama as America's Rorschach Test - II

Is Barack Hussein Obama the Antichrist?



John Hagee tell's Glenn Beck no, but the number of viral videos proliferating on youtube tend to say otherwise.



What this all says about the collective American psyche is what is most revealing and most valuable. Sock it away in your political calculus - connectomics that you can really use.

Obama as America's Rorschach Test - I

Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King stands by controversial Obama comments;



I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al Qaeda, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11, because they will declare victory in this war on terror,” King said, as reported in The Daily Reporter in Spencer, Iowa.

King added: "Additionally, his middle name (Hussein) does matter. … It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. That has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says: Pull out of the Middle East and pull out of this conflict."

Domestic Ruling Class Warfare

Like the Kwame Kilpatrick situation, the Elliot Spitzer situation ought to be instructive to folks seeking to understand how politics actually work. THIS public humiliation is a case study in how the ruling class fight each other via proxy.

Vice setups and the like are perfect tools for derailing the continuing political viability of selected managers of public resources and public opinion. (politicians). Spitzer, like Kilpatrick, is a political brand. He as accumulated brand value and in one fell swoop, he has squandered a professional lifetime building the brand.

Most folks look at this kind of thing and just call it vice. Certainly, there is an aspect of that at play here, along with an aspect of technotragic stupidity, and plain old stankass tendencies. The fact of the matter, however, is that it goes much deeper than that.

The demise of Gov. Spitzer is an exemplary case study in the way in which rich folk use the apparatus of state as a private security service (bank/IRS/FBI) as private investigators. Folks have extremely short memories. The Privacy Act and its corollary Freedom of Information Act were initially enacted in response to allegations that the Nixon administration used the IRS as an instrument of harassment for Nixon's political adversaries. Remember all of this as we watch the continuing "political" spectacle playing itself out in the Democrat presidential primaries....,

Predicting Human Interactive Learning by Regret-Driven Neural Networks

Davide Marchiori¹ and Massimo Warglien^2*

Much of human learning in a social context has an interactive nature: What an individual learns is affected by what other individuals are learning at the same time. Games represent a widely accepted paradigm for representing interactive decision-making. We explored the potential value of neural networks for modeling and predicting human interactive learning in repeated games. We found that even very simple learning networks, driven by regret-based feedback, accurately predict observed human behavior in different experiments on 21 games with unique equilibria in mixed strategies. Introducing regret in the feedback dramatically improved the performance of the neural network. We show that regret-based models provide better predictions of learning than established economic models.

¹ Interdepartmental Center for Research Training in Economics and Management (CIFREM), University of Trento, Italy.
² Advanced School of Economics and Department of Business Economics and Management, Ca' Foscari University, Venezia, Italy.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: warglien@unive.it

Read the Full Text

Connectomics

T3 hollar'd at me this morning about neural density. This in turn provoked me to dredge up this post on neuroeconomics from the archives and do a bit of google-ing. My remarks to T3 were rather disparaging of the state of the art. As it turns out however, the dismissive remarks were right on target as this article in the current Technology Review bears out.

The diagram is the fruit of an emerging field called "connectomics," which attempts to physically map the ­tangle of neural circuits that collect, ­process, and archive information in the nervous system. Such maps could ultimately shed light on the early development of the human brain and on diseases that may be linked to faulty wiring, such as autism and schizophrenia. "The brain is ­essentially a computer that wires itself up during development and can rewire itself," says ­Sebastian Seung, a computational neuroscientist at MIT, who is working with Lichtman. "If we have a wiring diagram of the brain, that could help us understand how it works."

Although researchers have been studying neural connectivity for decades, existing tools don't offer the resolution needed to reveal how the brain works. In particular, scientists haven't been able to generate a detailed picture of the hundreds of millions of neurons in the brain, or of the connections between them.

Not exactly the product of crack smoking, but a little on the "crackish" side, just the same...., The pictures are pretty and the underlying techniques are interesting and in sync with some prior articles on bio-fluorescence.

The Great Game in the Second World

A Game Where Resources Dwindle and Partners Shift

In the 21st century the empires strike back. The United States, the European Union and China dare not call themselves imperial powers, Parag Khanna argues in “The Second World,” his sweeping, often audacious survey of contemporary geopolitics, but they are busy reshaping the globe to suit their interests. The game is afoot, with the natural resources and potential wealth of countries like Ukraine, Turkey and Brazil as the prize.

Mr. Khanna is the director of the Global Governance Initiative at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute. He strides the world in seven-league boots, armed with a powerful thesis: in the postcolonial, post-cold-war era, three superpowers have emerged with a ravenous appetite for energy and natural resources. Restlessly, they look to the second-tier economies of Latin America, the former Soviet bloc, the Middle East and Asia for partners or patsies. This argument was laid out recently in The New York Times Magazine in an excerpt it published from the book.

No shots will be fired. Instead the three imperial rivals will woo and coerce, relying on distinct styles. The United States offers military protection, along with the promise of democracy and human rights. The European Union dangles the prospect of membership in, or affiliation with, the world’s most successful economic club, provided that applicants undertake specific reforms. China talks trade, investment and infrastructure projects, with no annoying demands for political reform in its would-be client states.

“To a large extent, the future of the second world hinges on how it relates to the three superpowers,” Mr. Khanna writes, “and the future of the superpowers depends on how they manage the second world.”

Global Governance Challenges

Temple3 continues his analysis of global governance challenges and the bare-knuckles quest for power within the empire;

more than oil…concessions, access, other resources, the whole nine yards. Oil is just a part.

The complete calculus includes “go along to get along” votes in international organizations, support for NGOs, permission to establish military bases and much more. It’s a big deal - and while this pattern clearly did not start with Slick Willie, he seems to be about the only one masquerading as a “Black President.”

He's dot connecting a quest to politically control many of the resources required to exercise a new model of global governance. This subject is foundational to the mission of this blog. Last October I recommended the following RAND study to your attention;

This report summarizes the issues that arose and the discussions held during the meetings of a 1998-1999 study group focusing on global governance of information technology and biotechnology. The goal was to bring a policy perspective to bear on a discussion of new technological developments through a series of free-flowing and exploratory presentations and discussions.

Download it and read it in its entirety when you get a chance...,

The governance challenge of the 21st century is no longer democratic control over centralized systems, as it was in the 20th century, but governance over decentralized, distributed systems. The features that make these technologies different from and their potential benefits greater than those of other technologies increase their potential for abuse.[...]The mechanisms societies use to control, direct, shape, or regulate certain kinds of activities is what we mean by governance. Governance is almost always conducted by governmental bodies, although it can be carried out in other ways. Yet, the practical obstacles to governance of these new technologies are tremendous. Success in governing them requires the cooperation o stakeholders, states, nongovernmental organizations(NGOs), interest organizations, and the average citizen. Within any decision making process, commercial, defense, social, and individual interests will intermingle and a consensus among many players may be integral to any workable outcome.[...]Two recent shifts in attitudes strongly influence the issue of governance within technological arenas. The first shift is the decline of conventional top-down governance models and an emphasis on applying privatization, deregulation, downsizing of bureaucracy, and private, market-based solutions to many social problems.

Stakes are very, very high - and T3 has thickened the plot in a way with which I can vibe without any further reservations. As he said; My people suffer from a woeful lack of knowledge....,

The Gaza Bombshell

The April issue of Vanity Fair reports that it has "obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the US and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams to provoke a Palestinian civil war."

The magazine adds that the plan "was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America's behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically-elected Hamas-led government from power."

A great irony here is that Israel originally (covertly) helped Hamas when it was first founded in the late 80's, on the grounds that a religious extremist movement would help undermine the PLO. (sounds vaguely familiar...,) - it is ironic that the Israeli leadership [and, we can add, the US leadership as well] is now supporting the PLO in the hope of undermining Hamas.

Both policies - Israel's initial support for Hamas and this latest US effort to undermine it - have been disastrous as far as Israeli security is concerned. The article in Vanity Fair concludes:

"It is impossible to say for sure whether the outcome in Gaza would have been any better-for the Palestinian people, for the Israelis, and for America's allies in Fatah-if the Bush administration had pursued a different policy. One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any worse."

The more things "change" - the more they just seem to stay the same....,

What You Gonna Do? (when they come for you...,)

What will the effects on American social order be when society is even more seriously buffeted by economic collapse? A best case scenario would be similar to the Great Depression (1929-39), when neighbors tended to band together and help one another. A worst case scenario will be one in which stealing, killing, and violent criminal gangs increase and become the more prevalent order of the day.

The two scenarios seem so contradictory that they seem nearly mutually exclusive. Both highly contradictory scenarios will, however, occur and the main question is what must you do now in order to facilitate the former rather than the latter? What must you do in order to choose? Let's refer to the two scenarios respectively as (A) Co-operation and (B) Competition.

Choosing examples of the two modes, what social and historical patterns reveal themselves as important to facilitating one or the other way of life? Do any patterns begin to reveal themselves?

South America on the Brink of War

Venezuela's military currently has about 100,000 regular troops and a growing force of reservists that now totals 280,000. Colombia's U.S.-backed military has 255,000 regular troops and 62,000 reservists, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Radical Simplification?

5.5 Billion too many humans is one of the foundational premises of the world problematique as originally formulated and as analytically refined by a subsequent handful of good faith futurist thinkers. Bear in mind that extensive old-school operations analysis and serious infrastructural investment in old-school solutions delivery capability is a fact of life.

I posted Orlov's Five Stages of Collapse as part of my continuing information sharing agenda, and, as a rhetorical counter to the false optimism and relentless apologetics for unsustainability by so-called conservative commentators. I'm going to go out on a limb this morning - and pose an interrogatory challenge to my most respected blogging associate Temple3 and any and all commentators tracking on the subject matter we're both following and around which he's formulating a dot connecting explanatory thesis.

T3, what if what you're about to describe is indeed the case? Knowing the absolute seriousness with which cultural hegemony is sought (a deep tenet of - what it do - because the monoculture has shown its true nature for the better part of a century) is the path to minimal-regret you're outlining a "worst case" scenario, or, a hard choice on a hard road scenario?

The word “collapse” implies for most people something highly negative. No doubt it is important to be sober about the level of shock and suffering that will be entailed in this process. But it is also important, in order to be able to imagine any light at the end of the tunnel, to play with other language that could also describe the process we find ourselves in. For example, it feels very different to say: “We are on the brink of the radical simplification of human society on the planet.”[...]

The word collapse calls up images of horror. And that’s not inappropriate. But images of collapse inspire no visions of ultimate benefit. On the other hand the term radical simplification could sound a different chime for people exhausted from the current wage slave system, where the many work ever harder to stuff the ever more soft and opulent feather beds of the few elite. Radical simplification of life, if people would slow down enough to contemplate it, could actually feel like a breath of non-polluted air. Too many people, most people I would venture to say, and even those with currently stable incomes, are incredibly lonely. They sit in quiet despair in front of their television sets or walk the malls with iPods stopping their ears, or drink beers and soullessly cheer at yet another sporting event, forever in frantic search of more distraction. For most, collapse will be, alternatively, either a shock or, if it proceeds slowly, just a heightened erosion of already degraded and meaningless lives. The coming transition will not be pretty for the bewildered herd. But for visionaries and cultural creatives collapse, or radical simplification, likely calls up what may seem to be paradoxical feelings of relief and even empowerment. I’ve heard more than one friend recently exclaim, “Bring it on. I’m sick of this shit.”

What provoked this morning's question? I came across a lengthy though somewhat new-agey and hand-wavy response to Orlov's Five Stages of Collapse article called Orlov and the Wonderful, Terrible, Radical Simplification, and, I fell asleep on Roberto Rodriquez' Planet Terror last night....,

Engineering Life to Convert CO2 to Fuel

A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.

Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California.

"We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.

"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."

Simple organisms can be genetically re-engineered to produce vaccines or octane-based fuels as waste, according to Venter.

Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step is life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste, according to Venter.

"We have 20 million genes which I call the design components of the future," Venter said. "We are limited here only by our imagination."

His team is using synthetic chromosomes to modify organisms that already exist, not making new life, he said. Organisms already exist that produce octane, but not in amounts needed to be a fuel supply.

"If they could produce things on the scale we need, this would be a methane planet," Venter said. "The scale is what is critical; which is why we need to genetically design them."

The genetics of octane-producing organisms can be tinkered with to increase the amount of CO2 they eat and octane they excrete, according to Venter.

The limiting part of the equation isn't designing an organism, it's the difficulty of extracting high concentrations of CO2 from the air to feed the organisms, the scientist said in answer to a question from Page.

Scientists put "suicide genes" into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves.

Venter said he is also working on organisms that make vaccines for the flu and other illnesses.

"We will see an exponential change in the pace of the sophistication of organisms and what they can do," Venter said.

"We are a ways away from designing people. Our goal is just to make sure they survive long enough to do that." — AFP

Part III of Bill's Long Con - T3 Continues

Week before last, I had the privilege of linking T3's first installment of a deep mapping series on the longterm designs of very powerful elements within the TEP. After having read the current installment a few times - with the interim backstory linked over at his site - I believe I understand where he's going with this. Needless to say, I'm very much enjoying the unfolding of the data as he lays it out and draws our attention to various and sundry connections, and look forward to the big picture he promises to disclose.

"invasion of sovereign bodies" is a strikingly liminal allusion that is deeply sympatico with the subrealist approach. While it's clear that T3 is addressing himself to the who, what, when, and where of the thing, I'm equally if not more taken with the "what it do" aspects of his treatment. In a nutshell;

The emergence of biological and chemical research and experimentation which objectified Black and other bodies was part of a broader cultural framework. The value system of the scientists was consistent with broader societal beliefs and was framed within a pseudo-humanitarian “box” which condoned the invasion of the sovereign body in the same way that the notion of “civilization” and “democracy” and “capitalism” condoned the invasion of sovereign lands.[...]

The invasion of sovereign lands has always been a complicated endeavor for Europeans. The spectre of disease has always loomed large. Eradication, then, has been critical to support the managerial requirements of appropriating wealth from “hostile environments.” In most instances, stating that objective has been too bold for public consumption. Instead, Western philanthropists have emphasized the long-term needs of children versus the short-term needs of adults in their approaches to humanitarian aid. For children, the priorities are education (solution: build schools), healthcare (solution: provide vaccines), and security (solution: subsidize persons or groups promising democracy or at least access to markets and natural resources). For adults, the issues are a bit different - and adults are not the focal point of these efforts - except as it relates to testing. [...]

Resolving the critical needs of African adults - the care takers of African children - requires different solutions. For all the millions spent to cure the fourth leading cause of death, thousands of African communities continue to suffer from the THREE LEADING CAUSES of DEATH for lack of a 21st century WATER and SANITATION system.

Do these folks actually want to keep the baby, and throw out the parents with the bathwater?

Having been condemned for letting folks off the hook for their historical and continuing behaviors, (not like I or anyone else is likely to be able to hold major actors accountable anytime soon - if ever), I remain principally fascinated with coherent and falsifiable descriptions of what's happening that can be put to work to increase collective awareness of the same.

The World's Growing Food-Price Crisis

If you don't get it yet, please read the implosion article in its entirety. Not merely the titillating excerpts that I quoted. Then, go read The World's Growing Food-Price Crisis at Time.com.

I don't believe that the centuries old art of elite gangster macking can be presented in terms any more straight up, simple, or plain. Only difference now, is that the game is international, worldwide...,

"U.S. and British farmers are laughing all the way to the bank,"

says Simon Maxwell, director of the London-based Overseas Development Institute, an independent think tank.

"And some poor people will get jobs on farms or in local communities."

Yet those people will need to buy food, whose prices are rising far faster than wages. With relief agencies struggling to feed the hungry and the shelves in Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Senegal and many other countries in the developing world stocked with food many locals can no longer afford, the prospects for chaos are steadily growing.

The Whole Depraved Mess is Going to Implode

Yielding the floor once again to the devastating power of the hypertiger wisdom;

Democracy is just a nice sounding word...You say..."We are in there to give the poor unfortunate people of country X Democracy"...And the population generally appears to accept invasion/conquest without too much resistance.

But Yes the parliamentary system or Westminster administration system was basically invented by the British...And it works well...The top can maintain control of the bottom but when they lose control and the bottom demands blood...the elected scapegoats take the fall...Not the top...[...]Here it is again...A reminder...

The purpose of the Police and military is to protect the top from the bottom...

To protect cause from consequence...

The easiest prey of the hunter gatherer is the farmer and the simplest operation is the protection scheme...[...]

All money is decreed money...fiat...

The top says this is money...Or else...period end of story....

You Farmer are on the Land owned by the LORD of the land and will pay tribute to the LORD of 1 Gold coin a year...

Where do I get this GOLD coin?

You can take one short ton of grain to the grainery of the LORD and there you will be given a GOLD coin for it and then you can give the gold coin to the servant of the LORD...

What if I refuse?

Then the LORD will drive you from the Land that the LORD is the LORD of...

There you go an abundant supply of free food to power your wildest hopes and dreams...Lies and delusions...[...]

Well what is done with all that Food the tillers of the LORD's land give the LORD as Tribute? It powers the Absolute capitalist Hierarchial food powered make work enterprise...

The city state...Or Civilization...The thing you all popped into existence within...and are in now...

Free your mind....,

The Scapegoat is Being Readied

Came across this blogpost a little while ago explaining in some detail the nature of the economic situation. It just doesn't get any more simple and direct than these quotes;

Those managing it are attempting to get to a point where it's planned to fall to pieces...While they are all babbling and creating a smokescreen to obscure the situation the scapegoat is being readied...A mezmerizing spectacle of some sort...to focus attention away from the system as cause and onto an effect as the cause...[...]

Behind the scenes the debate currently is between doing what is required to at least keep you all fed (save as many as possible) or just pulling the plug and letting you all starve (Liquidate as many as possible)...and how to deal with the fate resisters.

Behind the scenes they are not wondering if....they know what is coming...The war on terror is just cover to implement all the new crowd controls for the austerity measures that are to follow.

Be careful what you pay attention to. Not everything that looks good to you is actually good for you.

Dueling Systems and the Five Stages of Collapse

Over the past week and a half or so, I've been chatting with a number of Cobb's commenters and intermittently with the man himself. Here lately, he's embarked on an apologia for war socialism. Brahman has a tendency to get caught up in philosophical rather than practical or empirical argumentation. I've begun to suspect that a significant part of his political orientation is attributable to this tendency. In opting for philosophy and abstraction - both he and his conservative co-religionists have a tendency to get lost in flights of metaphorical fancy.

Case in point yesterday afternoon on a post he called The Morality of War he asked;

"Are you suggesting that we should not have fought Stalin?"

Last I checked, we didn't...., but that minor historical quibble aside, this was not a discussion of history, philosophy, or morality per se. Rather, it was the branching of a prior thread in which I was accused of blaming G-Dub for the American war socialist posture. A brief review of Jay Hanson's warsocialism site will clearly dispel any such notions of contemporary blame - and - put the concept of war socialism on its proper historical footing. Hanson calls the system of American governance a war socialist system - I happen to find his arguments concise and very persuasive.

Aside from the countless tragic, wasteful, and destructive proxy wars that it spawned - the political, philosophical and moral dimensions of the Cold War hold little interest for me - I won't be pursuing any of those issues at great length. Rather, what I'd like to bring to your attention is the way in which the former Soviet Union survived it's own economic and industrial collapse - and - invite you to compare and contrast the adaptability and survivability of our own war socialist system of governance in the face of impending collapse. Dmitry Orlov writes;

the collapse of the Soviet Union - our most recent and my personal favorite example of an imperial collapse - did not reach the point of political disintegration of the republics that made it up, although some of them (Georgia, Moldova) did lose some territory to separatist movements. And although most of the economy shut down for a time, many institutions, including the military, public utilities, and public transportation, continued to function throughout. And although there was much social dislocation and suffering, society as a whole did not collapse, because most of the population did not lose access to food, housing, medicine, or any of the other survival necessities. The command-and-control structure of the Soviet economy largely decoupled the necessities of daily life from any element of market psychology, associating them instead with physical flows of energy and physical access to resources. Thus situation, as I argue in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Collapse, allowed the Soviet population to inadvertently achieve a greater level of collapse-preparedness than is currently possible in the United States.

Having given a lot of thought to both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers - the one that has collapsed already, and the one that is collapsing as I write this - I feel ready to attempt a bold conjecture, and define five stages of collapse, to serve as mental milestones as we gauge our own collapse-preparedness and see what can be done to improve it.

IMOHO - this is the type of systematic thinking that we need to enjoin in America as we gird ourselves up to cast what may be operationally and systemically decisive votes in this year's presidential election. I sincerely believe that the U.S. is caught up in a still civil dispute among its ruling elites over the type and pace of contraction and collapse that citizens will be subject to over the next twenty to thirty years. I believe that the frontrunning presidential candidates literally embody the respective elite camps and their dueling perspectives on how this should shake out.