Young Social Media Idiots Forfeit Education

Don't expect US students to come anywhere near the top in science or math: they are wedded to their social media and the specious 'friends'  We interviewed 22 students from Amherst High School and were shocked to learn that 16 of those students, reported a daily cell-phone and Ipad use of 4 hours or more. Obviously, something has to give. What gives is education: the careful examination and logical analysis, and exposure to entire new domains and fields of inquiry. Loss of these capabilities just confirms what the economy bears: just 3% of Americans are minimally competent in any discipline. The big masquerades is the corporate-loving economists. The government has made sure that all those foolish investors in subprime mortgages were paid back, while cutting unemployment benefits, foodstamps/SNAP, Medicare.

Our research into ancient Anatolia, Palestine and Mesopotamia must necessarily focus on the temple. That structure was usually open to all. It was the center of re-distribution of products, and workers. In ancient Sumeria, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria, and the Land of Hatti, the temple provided rations.

The modern dopes say this is socialism, not capitalism. But evidence shows that providing everyone with basic necessities, allowed small investors to save and invest, without worrying about meeting basic needs. This re-distribution also kept folks from falling into debt. It also allowed companies to form without paying high salaries and commissions even before one starts.

As a result of the 2008-10 great recession, millions lost jobs, homes, but the government in Washington has increased benefits. Now it routine to see workers at Walmart and many other places, make so little money that they cannot live. In this case, the US government must return to the roots of polity and economy - the re-distribution of surpluses.

There will be those business people who warp ideological, loudly decrying any hint of socialism, but the redistribution of wealth is actually very good for the economy at large. At certain times in history, ordinary people could hold shares, save and invest, becoming capitalist. So those who descry helping the poor forget the poor would buy things, even to save and invest. That is prosperity, and not the enrichment of a few at the top. Such monopolization of wealth, power, metals, knowledge and information by urban magnates and landlords, had grave consequences, even for polities ringed with brutal troops and cavalry.

Secession Now Approved by state and citizens

Secession has become a practical, workable idea. Back in October, when a bitter battle over funding the federal government was taking place, farmers from three northern counties in Colorado, staged a press conference in which they advocated secession from Colorado. Many people secretly nodded. Then Time Magazine put the secession Texas on its front cover in November, 2013. One can see how organized the southern half-wits are. There are active secessionist parties in 36 states, plus Puerto Rico and Guam. It turns out that there is a lot more thought has been put into this issue, than was recognized by the government, science, the press and by individuals.

'The South will rise again,' they say, and indeed, it has. The main thing rising is heated dust: a legacy of 11 years of drought. Yet the militarist pastors and christ mockers verbally condemn everyone unlike themselves. Texas plays herd boss as sick southern states draws them into a devil's pact. First, destroy 'Obamacare,' what they call the Affordable Insurance Act. These rich bigots do not care to see the millions of Americans who, denied specialist medicare, die. At the same time, they call themselves 'Apostles of Christ' which puts the entire southern Republican political discourse into La La land. Have you seen any bigger hypocrites?

Here in Western Massachusetts we have been preparing for Quebec's eventual independence. That will split Canada in half. That would be a good time for New England to invite the Canadian maritimes to form a greater New England.  Boston is rich enough to support the move.

There are all sorts of combinations. One thinks of the nine nations of NorthAmerica. Need we name them? The Pacific NW from San Francisco to Alaska; Mexiamerica, the SW states, led by Texas; the Empty Quarter: Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Montana; the Breadbasket, the Mid West; Dixie; Miami and the Caribbean; the Rust Belt, from Sudbury Canada to Louisville Kentucky, from New York to Chicago; New England, including the Canadian Maritimes. And Quebec.

There are other combinations. So much research has been done on US counties that one can chart the fault lines of ideology and identification. The people of the USA are richer and poorer at the same time. Half the people make enough to save, the other half cannot earn enough at work to live on.

The economy is something of an illusion. Only because the US treasury and bank have been injecting $85 billion a month into the financial industry, is the economy functioning at all. In bad times, all the capitals return like birds to their roosts. US business people are spooked, baffled, and certainly reluctant to share the wealth with the workers.

Reversals in the physical processes of fat accumulation and suburbia.

Like the more corrupt countries of the world, the USA has a grossly inflated rental market. Rising rental prices due to scarcity is a better way to these dupes and dopers, than actually creating new housing that is affordable. That many of these building companies get sweeties from the government(s) condemns some 34% of the citizens to live in cramped sub-normal apartments. The government has its Section 8 Federal Housing Program, but that is under steady relentless attack by Republicans. Behind them are whole neighborhoods of white old people, in and out of the Tea Party, who want to cut all social assistance 'that they might go back to the islands or to Africa.'  These largely Protestant congregations believe God has chosen us - given to us, riches and command over others. They want to clean the government of all social welfare programs - 'we do not want losers' - for genocidal purposes.  Fortunately, the combined power of women, the poor, immigrants, adolescents, and college students is enough to keep the USA out of their clutches, to slowly render the dead GOP, to boil it down to fat, and use that to generate the electricity for your window AC or electric car.

Window Air Conditioning units is an American invention. It is credited with saving lives in times of heat. But it has also become a palliative panacea, to make the patient or client more comfortable. One thing that happens, is that people keep their ACs running 24/7/365 at full blast. They seal themselves off from the outside, hermitically, then live, year after years, in bubbles. Most have the TV on continually. (Soap operas are favorites)  Not walking causes them to gain weight and eventually cripples them. They often believe in certain fallacies: that AC brings in fresh air, that it cleans the air, that it is easier to breath even if the temperature outside in 24 degrees. The allergies they complain of are usually the mould in their clothing and bedding. They are dry-throat allergies, not nasal bronchial congestion. ACs take water out of the air, so exacerbate the condition, which never heals.

An estimated 20 million American live in bubbles. It does not matter if they are rich or poor. The various ethnic groups are partiucularly susceptible to electronic media, spend 1- to 16 hours a day watching television. Obviously television is ruining the country, at least for the bubble victims.

Overweight people living in bubbles, watching trash TV...what a horrible fate. Children should be removed to such homes. The state should intervene. We cannot afford more zombies on Turtle Island.

by John Paul Maynard, Harvard University

The sun finally came, after 10 days of wind….something’s happening out on the Great Plains, and I don’t feel at ease. I feel like a pin in a bowling game: those big angry storms, bigger than anyone has ever seen, tend to break up after becoming 100 tornadoes, pieces of which I can see come right over the western Berkshire Mtns - toward me.. Like 3 years ago, a little twister killed 3 and destroyed 600 buildings just to the south….the people of Springfield had’t seen something like that since the Agawam chief of the Pocumtuc federation, burned the place in 1675.

Now right now about 20 storm chasing caravans are deployed to the Devil's Stage - that strip of the USA running from Oklahoma City south into Texas, past Waco and G.W.Bush's ranch, to Dallas. These science guys just cruise around, driving fast, heavy SUVs ...they don’t try to get into the funnel, just close enough to spit in it….their footage is really disturbing to watch…

“Twisters were once little things, a hundred feet across, but they’ve steadily grown in size. The monster that hit Oklahomo City was 2 ½ miles across, almost 4 km. The killer that hit Moore should have killed ‘a good two hundred’ but only 29 perished: another weird fact about big tornadoes – you can ride them. Yes, ride them right up, spiraling through the funnel, and then, in some cases, gently put down on the ground…"

The storm chasers I know don’t intend to enter ‘the tunnel funnel.’ They have PhDs after all. But Dr. Owen Swan said: “We approach a funnel like you approach a dangerous snake. You distract it by honing right towards it, then another hand slips around behind, and grabs it from the back of the neck.” He meditates and believes in mind over matter.

Looking at all the southern church-captive communities cowering every time they hear a weather report, one notes simply the weight of ignorance, the tragic and foolish belief by American Biblical fundamentalists, that God sides with the Israelis and the Americans, against the Muslims, Iranians and Russia, and the Africans. This belief, held by most members of the Republican party, is a certain abuse of the holy scriptures, for partisan advantage. But for what? It is harming the world.

We're not surprised that the biblical plagues and 'dust devils' keep thrashing those Southern Zones of Emptiness, for as God says in Exodus 20:7: "If you use my name to commit evil, I will subject you an especially dire punishment."       -JPM, Amherst, Massachusetts USA

 

Putting Our Citizens to Work: The ‘Century’ Approach to Creating Jobs

By John Paul Maynard, Harvard University

In 1932, right in the middle of the depression, John Maynard Keynes reminded us that “capitalism is so powerful that it can generate jobs for everyone who wants one .”  Forty five years later, in the midst of another collapse, Mika’il Gorbachev  stated “ every community in the world, no matter how remote, has something to give to this emerging global economy.” These statements I take as realistic challenges.

If it is theoretically possible to give a job to everyone who wants one, then why cannot we realize it?

One reason is that we tend to think in a binary way: public sector/private sector, Republican and Democrat, employer and employee, socialism and capitalism. This is not accurate:  a third force is required, always.

I take the atom as proof: electron, proton and neutron. The problem is that the 3^rd neutralizing force is often invisible. To make bread, one needs flour and water and heat. We don’t see the heat.

I have a book underway entitled Twelve Capitalisms. It goes back into civilized history, to outline how capitalism evolved in the Middle East, and the various ‘branches.’ First we have the early civilizations: Sumer, Babylon/Akkad, Assyria, Hatti, Peru, Greece and Rome. Then there are the great nomadic empires: the Persians, the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Mongols and the Ottomans.  A third group are the more modern  Euro-styled civilizations, the various empires:  British, French, Austrian, German, et al.

Curiously, one element these empires all possessed, was a way of organizing their populace separately from ethnic, tribal, political and religious divisions. Indeed, there was a practice to organize the population into groups of one hundred, in Assyria, in Hatti, amongst the Mongols.  The Romans called these  groups ‘centuries.’ Rome consisted of some 38 tribes, but some several thousand centuries.

Our ancestors organized their populations into such informal groups, not for conscription or for corvee labor, or for taxes, but for business development, and for mutual assistance, for medical purposes, and natural disasters, including drought and famine, and war relief. (The military had their own ‘centuries.’)

The great utility of the century organization is that it brought together, brings together, highly diverse elements in a group not too large or too small. The members of a century all get to know each other, not so much personally, as professionally. Members state exactly what they want.  The century may have a charter and even admission requirements, but no membership fees.  In order to find a good job, or to make one, i.e., start a business, one needs about one hundred people, all alert to each other’s aspirations and talents. Out of this come flexible, adaptive responses, to change and to need: individuals gaining employment, or starting new businesses, or developing new products, new technology, new medicine and new art. Because the proposed organs’ financial needs are almost zero, organizing our populations into ‘centuries’ is not difficult or far-fetched. Centuries seem to organize themselves spontaneously, at least in some cases.  Many already exist, though unnamed. Let me simply list what a century organ can do

A century’s benefits.    It is…

-          a large, powerful  job search and job prep organization, free of charge.

-          an incubator for new technologies, businesses and services

-          an easy way for businesses to tap into labor, skilled and unskilled

-          a way for immigrants to meet a lot of Americans

-          a way for the isolated and the distressed to find community (esp. the aged)

-          a political organization without ideological or party affiliation, flexible

-          a frame for informal study groups – a thousand different kinds.

-          medical monitoring and assessments, greatly assisting medicine.

-          emergency responses, quick time, for fires, tornados, flood.

-          a mass transfusion of all kinds of ideas, between members

-          an alternative for individuals in low-grade church-captive communities

-          help for troubled youth – “Hang with them, and you’ll become like them.”

-          exercise:  supervised group walks all over the place

-          focused communication between groups and individuals of other centuries.

-          a way of adjudicating local violations and complaints, through mediation.

-          a way of sharing scientific truths and questions, old and new.

-          a reduction of ethnic and class conflicts

-          an alternative to committing fraud and crime.

-          a way by which Republicans and Democrats can find common ground.

-          assistance for ex-cons in finding a place in society

It stands to reason that a correct solution would solve many problems at once.

The idea is not new, and not far-fetched.  It is not Utopian. Unless I am mistaken, this informal way of mobilizing larger numbers, is the secret to survival and economic survivability, not just to the various civilizations, but for towns, villages, corporations and individuals, world wide. For many, such centuries meant survival.  Anthropologist say that our common ancestors generally lived and functioned in groups of about one hundred adults.

In my many travels in Eurasia, I sometimes ran into villages organized as schools and study groups. They are genuine ‘smart towns.’  Curiously, the best ones are, or were, in Afghanistan.  They had no books and no electricity, yet the village ran diverse businesses, like shipping their produce in their own trucks across Pakistan to India. We, too, have so-called ‘smart towns’ (like Amherst) but they define themselves in terms of data processing and energy tech. But to be really smart, requires much more.  

The century has no ideological baggage. It may be compared to Freemasonry.  Yes, the Freemasons had real answers: our beautiful big colonial houses here in New England, were built by Freemasons using mathematical laws (ratios, proportions) taken from the Middle East. That’s real wealth.

                And of course most of our founding fathers were…Freemasons.

                How can we possibly institute such a neutral, undefined organization of our many societies?

                From the bottom up. Yes, the various levels of government might have roles to play: publishing the idea, explaining the concept, in detail, and perhaps organizing the centuries across regions and within regions. But the century grows from the bottom up.

                I’m sure businesses will want to get in on this. Remember, a century is a mirror of the local population. It includes people with jobs and without jobs, business owners, professors, doctors, scientists and technicians, people who grow food and fight fires,  as well as housewives and students and ex-cons, plus the disabled, the retired, the wise child –  not just people looking for work.

Organizing ‘centuries’ is not hard simply because their purpose has nothing to do with ideology, ethnic identity, conscription, employment status, wealth,  age, sex or religion.  A century does not need money to get started, or outside supervision. It organizes itself from the grassroots up. Humans can easily do that.  

Our President is a community organizer, so he’s aware of what can be done, bottom up.

Careful scrutiny of disaster response reveals hundreds of humans organizing themselves, each with a specialty, in just a few minutes, and without leaders.

An objective examination of most any thriving community, reveals an inner group. They usually are not ‘business leaders,’ but socially-conscious individuals, activists, teachers and even, on occasion, clergy.

The Century Concept is not a mechanism for state control. The Japanese, for example, still maintain a neighborhood organization, for police purposes.  This is not what we have in mind. A century might get involved in police work, not in controlling it members, but in helping police prevent and solve crimes.

Look closely what the best police departments are doing. Here, in Amherst, officers are being assigned to represent, cover, specific neighborhoods, specific groups. The police and fire depts. organize courses for citizens, go into the schools, hold picnics for the elderly, receive foreign police groups for tours and seminars. They meet with ‘undefined centuries.’

No, it is not difficult to organize centuries. Hold a few block parties, distribute literature, dedicate a computer. Get the libraries involved: they have space and computers, and would be excited to help. They already do this, offering courses for immigrants, computer-novices, job-seekers, et al., freeing centuries to focus on their own role(s) in the economy. Community Colleges can start a few centuries and would love to do so. So also colleges, universities, even trade and professional schools. Some doctors and scientists might like to enlist centuries in studies, as they are generally mirrors of the population at large – a ‘control’ group which is not controlled.

Odd, perhaps,  but I have %100 confidence that people can organize more intelligently, more efficiently, by themselves, while many ‘formerly-prosperous’ business men and women, and clergy, say this could never happen. Governments don’t want to get entangled in yet another new program. But the jokes on them: organizing centuries doesn’t cost any money.

Our near-collapse in 2008-2010 would never happened if these self-advertising ‘financial/business experts’ studied a little economic history. Or read David Ricardo. We live in a culture of debility.  So-called responsible ‘experts’  fail, or just don’t get it. Technology, electronic devices, residential segregation, prescription drugs, adulterated food, chemicals in the home - all conspire against us.

Take the idiot box. I’ve talked to young women who spend their days watching soaps, and unemployed men playing very violent computer games with toddlers at their feet; then watching violent TV all night. They all hate themselves, secretly. All are, secretly, unsatisfied, desperate to get out of their ugly boring prisons.  The children are trapped. If they follow their parents, they’ll be just like them.

They say: “Life is about entertaining me.”  Of course real satisfaction cannot come this way. Only conscious struggle, the pursuit of excellence, and/or a need to serve, will satisfy the humans.  Add to this physical exercise.  Not long ago, Americans understood this. We were once a nation of hobbyists. Men and women, kids and old people, all had their beloved hobbies. They spent many hours working hard with no thought of financial gain. Some of them, artists, musicians, activists, inventors, scientists, ended up worth more than their weight in platinum, improving the lives of millions.  This is the real wealth, and anybody can get it, provided they can defer gratification,  hang out with disciplined, working folks, on occasion, and meet people older and different from themselves. Or put it this way:  the individual applying for work, must need to develop some objectivity, free of personal desires and day-dreams, in order to do any job well.

A Century Can Take Many Forms –

Some centuries are already functioning, if not formed or ever mentioned. Many centuries will need be formally established.  Some grow out of neighborhoods, like an inner city project, while others are not defined spatially: they cut across regions, becoming more specialized. Some centuries might be associated with schools, or even churches, if they “are humble men and women who have died to themselves,” i.e., if they are real Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wicca or shamans.

All kinds of institutions can help found century organs.  Many would love to participate.

A century might be organized in detail, with everybody having a job. Or it might be more informal, allowing things to develop by themselves. Start as a block party, or a monthly social. Then ask participants to define what they need, what they want and how they would like to contribute. Publicize these, so all members know all members. This is because humans have the ability to care and think of each other, with no fuss or comment.

Take one of top leaders. Admiral Mike Mullin, or the later Hilary Clinton, John Kerry, or the man with steepest learning curve of all, President Obama. They all have developed minds resembling the US Aegis radar platform – able to track 400 incoming missiles at once. We all have those deeper possibilities. The brain is eminently malleable, like silly putty. It’s what you make of it.

This is not new idea or far-fetched idea. Century-organization is well within human capabilities. As I said, most societies have them functioning already, or in emergencies. Even if the US creates only 10,000 centuries, they’ll demonstrate all the above. By themselves, with little direction from above, they will begin to specialize in such a way to form, basically, new professional associations.

Some centuries may form around specific technologies, and/or scientific domains – they provide a focused, level-headed understanding of tools and devices and various scientific, medical and government programs.  This is why businesses and scientists will want in.

What about the Republicans? What about the Democrats? The Republicans will get behind the century concept. I’ve already talked with a few (smart) Republicans, and they like the concept. The Democrats – they’re a bit hidebound.  They think of improving life for everybody in the country, but don’t know that somehow, we must trigger in the ‘underclass,’ something more than ‘An American idol.’  Our minorities, Blacks, Hispanics, are being eaten alive by pop electronic media.

Afro-Americans have generated five (5) world class musical traditions: spirituals, the blues, jazz, Motown, Black folk music. But what is taking over? Rap. My black friends hate it. Here is what they said: “In rap, you don’t need to play an instrument.”  “There’s no melody, so it’s not music.”  “The beat is the simplest, the most boring, 4/4 or 2/2.”  “The lyrics are threatening and debased.”  “We don’t like this culture of macho violence and women-hating.”  “BET is racially targeting Black people.”  Of course the big record companies, Warner Records, Viacom, BET Corp., M-TV et al, are all exploiting this ‘rush to the bottom.’   Who are these media masters? Can they be shamed? We are creating people who think the purpose of life is to be entertained. 

No government (s) can afford this new, huge, emerging underclass. Many teenagers never have a chance to get a job – or will not prepare for it – such a loss in incalculable. Our sedentary, very narrowly-defined lives,  is causing such high medical costs, that the country will go bust.

The American people cannot afford not having century organs. All successful societies seem to have them. If the underclass grows, if discontent grows, yes, we will see action on the streets. Just yesterday, Texas police almost gunned down non-violent demonstrators. How many demonstrators need be shot dead before the United States breaks up? We’re already talking about a ‘United States of Canada’, our northern tier, while the American south can call itself ‘Jesus land’ (and, led by business interests, link up with northern Mexico and assorted banana republics.)

No, realistically, we see the Quebecoise voting for independence, cutting Canada in two, in which case we here in New England, will extend an invitation to the Maritimes, who are culturally identical, almost. These Canadian provinces  are all in the ‘red’ and in need of economic help, which rich New England can provide, not for glory, but just to survive. Very few native New Englanders think the purpose of life is to be entertained.

With secessionist organizations in 38 states, no, it is not hard to see the break-up of the big dinosaur, into the ten nations of North America: New England (incl. the Maritimes), the Rust Belt, Quebec, the Bread Basket (Mid West), Dixie, Miami and the Caribbean, the Empty Quarter (extending up through Alberta, Mex-america, Ecotopeia (N. California up through Alaska). The tenth is, of course, Nunavut and all the Indian reservations. They are their own nation, for sure. Indeed, I see a time when native Americans, Inuit and the First Peoples, will teach us again to live lightly on the land.

I am of course using Joel Garreau’s book The Nine Nations of North America (1991).

One way to introduce century organizations is to start with…Massachusetts. Where else? Who else always comes out on top in math, English, science, and/or foreign languages every single year?  Mass residents are second only to Colorado in (low) body weights.  We are number 4 in health. We have the lowest rate of divorce in the country: one might argue that Mass residents best enjoy social solidarity. But New England is a melting pot that doesn’t melt: Massachusetts may be the most ethnically diverse state.  One of our governors, a Republican, instituted universal medical coverage, a first.

Massachusetts regularly fields presidential candidates. The most Democratic or ‘blue’ of states, we don’t hesitate to elect a Republican if it suits us.

I know my home town best, so let me conclude with concrete experience.  Many educated people, worldwide, associate Amherst with E.D., the finest women poet in the entire English-language tradition.  Amherst was also the home of the young Paul Nitze.

Of course, as a ‘smart’ town, we tried to incubate new technologies, but alas, as soon as these companies got on their feet, they left for Boston and Zurich. There are many small innovative proto-companies associated with UMASS. But they contribute surprisingly little to us town folk.

Amherst has the smallest police department per capita of any Massachusetts municipality. The main reason is that we are poor. Amherst can only tax a third of its land and properties. We have two colleges and a large state university . And 27 conservation lands, with trails, open to the public. Plus 13 successful farms (because we don’t tax their land).

Another reason for the ‘mission impossible success’ of our police ‘against superior numbers and firepower,’ is that about half our officers are combat vets from Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. They have to be tough as nails to deal with 34,000 students, half inebriated on the weekends. All weekend the police respond aggressively to loud, drunken students. We only have 48 officers. One out of ten are usually recovering from injuries sustained in the line of duty. Many young men don’t hesitate to assault the police. Or drive cars into them. Why? Alcohol is the main factor, but there are others.  Let us just say, we are in decline…

My point is that our police departments will be big supporters of Century Organizations – but not for surveillance.  Japan still supports a neighborhood police organization of its communities; though these organs serve several purposes,  surveillance seems to be the top priority. Of course this kind of organization of society is very un-American. Our police understand this.  

Amherst also run its highly successful ‘leisure services’ i.e., a school with diverse classes and programs. It also has a very active senior center, with additional classes. Its high school has long taught Russian and Chinese. To top it off, Amherst has received a constant stream of immigrants and minorities, the children of whom are educated at $20,000 a head.

So I ask you, how possibly can we possibly end up with a $2 million surplus? But we just did.

Tomorrow, Amherst is having its first town-wide block party. The whole downtown will be closed to vehicles for 4 hours. Over 60 restaurants and craftspeople will set up booths. Artists will display their paintings, musicians will play. Hundreds of outsiders will try to crash it, so our businesses are sure to make money.  Some of us are talking about instituting an annual ‘Venetian Carnival’, which is different from Marde Gras, Trinidadian and Brazilian carnivals, being a masquerade, with sartorial flourishes, in the manner and style of the Most Serene Republic.

Many Americans societies are already participants in centuries, though they don’t know it. Let us fine-tune the process that is already underway. You might use Amherst (and other ‘smart’ towns) as a test case. Every other year, Amherst residents elect 236 Town Members, each tied to an undefined ‘century,’ be it a neighborhood or an interest.

People joke about the Town Members - they can be rowdy. The real estate agents and the developers do not like them, generally, for reasons relating to zoning.  But the extraordinary (if modest) economic success of Amherst, owes much to the ‘limited growth’ preferences of leftist Town Members. Amherst preserves its forests, its farmland, its historical heritage, keeping home values up, even during the recent bubble-collapse. We often have more tourists than we can handle.

People come from all over the world to walk our streets and study in our schools. Very high-quality individuals are drawn to us, like a magnet. Over the years, I recall my many Chinese, Arab, and Indian friends, all citizens of this town (when they were here). We came up with this precept:

“Real socialism cannot exist without real capitalism” (too many folks marginalized). “And real capitalism cannot exist without real socialism. “ (government needs money to fund its programs). In other words, the two require each other. They go together.

The author is a legal anthropologist specializing in the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia. He is the moderator/instructor for the on-line discussion group ‘Islamic Civilization,’ hosted by the Graduate Alumni Office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. He can be reached on-line at johnpaulmaynard@post.harvard.edu. Or by telephone at: 413 549 7726

 کل 

Organizing Democracy in Islamic Nations

The Week's Headlines - Oct.21 - Oct. 28

Syria - After Friday prayers, some 170 protests were recorded, all peaceful. Yet the regime's police and army shot dead 37 in the hours after Friday prayers. Most of the victims lived in Der'a, Homs and in Hama. It seems sanctions make no difference: the secret police are as active as ever, and as brutal.

Tunisia - National elections have split the next interim government. The An Nada party took more votes, but not a majority. Even though urban Tunisia is deemed to be the most modern and secular of Arab nations, the bulk of the population live outside Tunis and its suburbs. Thus they are in daily contact with local Muslim leaders. The governments of Tunisia almost succeeded in providing basic services for its people. As in Egypt, the local Muslims provide services the government cannot. The dominance of cities over the villages in the countryside is a chief theme, largely outside people's awareness. But, unlike Europe and North America, the cities are not seen as centers of authentic culture: the culture is safeguarded by a 'purer' rural strain, closely tied to life-ways, featuring native music, art, and trade. That's why Middle East and North African leaders are almost all born in villages.

In Tunisia this week this chasm between urban and rural provoked riots and protests in Sidi Bouzid.
Egypt – the same urban-rural split characterizes Egypt as well as Tunisia (and Algeria and Morocco). Elections coming up in November will likely favor the Islamists, but again, like Tunisia, the Islamists will be a plurality. Pluralities are curious because they force a kind of fusion of ideologies, philosophies and personnel up and down the ranks. Or such cooperation may fail.
Most Americans still believe that Muslims attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. But the one thing all these terrorist groups have in common, is ignorance of Islam. Many American 'christians' hate the prophet Muhammad and all things Islamic. Their knowledge of the shari'a is limited to laws of stoning, the cutting off of hands, persecution of non-Muslim, the repression and restriction of women, terror and jihad. None of these are Islamic. We know this because we can trace each of these errors – we know where they came from and how they got into Islamic law.(See 'Islam under the Knife', at www.middleeastspeculum.blogspot.com. Scroll down)
Note: Though these governments have sufficient revenue to fund secular services (schools, clinics, hospitals, emergency food and water, burial) the money went to the armed forces, weapons, pensions, and to enriching the leader, his staff, his family and cronies.
Turkey – a devastating earthquake, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale, hit the cites of Edris and Van, killing over 500. Even after four days, some villages are still cut off. The quake occurred simultaneously with the first winter weather. The Van region is far from Istanbul and Ankara, so we puzzled when the Turkish gov. turned down all outside help. Chalk it up Turkish national pride. (later, outside teams were admitted). Turkey is trying to win a big power status in the region, under the cloak of regional unity – peace with Iran and Syria. Both have proven to be big embarrassments.
Curious thing about the Islamists heading up the government in Turkey: they seem not to have studied the many Ottoman studies of fiqh and the shari'a. We know from our own research, that the Ottomans successfully modernized all those aspects of the shari'a not related to religious services.



Yemen – soldiers loyal to president Ali Abdullah Saleh and dissident general Ali Mohsin and his defecting forces. Unfortunately, people protesting and marching are being 'protected' by Mohsen's forces, which triggers gunfights and civilian deaths. Soon, we think, Saleh will step down, but till he can safeguard himself, his staff and his family and friends, from prosecution by a new government.



How that government will accrue and be ordered, is hard to imagine, because already, all the factions, septs, tribes, labor leaders, intellectuals, socialists, private and public companies, plus the women – are jockeying for power. But before this happens, the shibab, the youth, will retain their decisive influence. These kids feed on angry dumbed-down rap 'music' from the US, and have no inkling to compromise, even with the protesting adults.

Libya – with the death of Mu'ammar Qaddafi and complete liberation of all Libya, the end of fighting, one might expect that the oil brokers and investors, might return the price of gasoline, heating oil and diesel, back to the level they were a year ago. Those prices were 50% less than they are still today.
Saudi Arabia has been pumping extra oil, but the price has been kept artificially high, constituting a huge distortion of the market. But this is not discussed, even though most Americans have to pay this extra surcharge on almost everything they buy. To me, it is the strangest thing I have ever seen in the USA: a total silence as wealth is just sucked away by some 24 future traders engaged in wanton speculation, plus the big oil companies, who never hesitate to exploit a situation to raise prices.
The so-called 'jitters' (insecurity) of the market – all those monied investors and brokers and traders – is perhaps the key factor. But this is very embarrassing. The money people have figured out that 'oil is important' and 'much of it is in Muslim lands' – so they get nervous. Of course they've never studied the Middle East, employing the methods of social science, and fear what they do not know.



A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially of the Middle East.



Now for the theme of the week: Organizing Democratic Reform

Except for Syria, the citizens of Arab countries are busily discussing social and economic and political reform. Only in Libya has a complete regime been swept away. All others are discussing issues and dealing with economic demands. People from very different backgrounds have been meeting, and talent and expertise is pooled.

The overwhelming view held by politically active Arabs is some sort of parliamentary democracy, where elections are held for offices on some four levels – neighborhood sheriff, to village mayor, to one's rep in state, and the state itself, via the PM and his many ministers.

One big difference today is that so many Arabs, women as well as men, are educated. America did not have to trumpet its own version of democracy, because the educated Arab is aware of the various political economies: not just the differences between a prime minister and a president, but various kinds of socialism, Islamism, 'Athenianism,” et al.

It hurts whenever I hear some ignorant mullah or American politician say that Islam is incompatible with democracy. In Arabia, the bedouin elect their leaders. The emirs and sultans must keep their doors open to all members of the community. I have attended meeting in the Middle East and Central Asia, where collective decisions were determined by a show of hands.

Muhammad himself was a democrat. He said: “Government must consult with the people at every step.” The first four caliphs – the rashidun – were elected. Islam has a very strong sense of equality between all people, rich or poor, black or white, literate and illiterate, and yes, men and women. So democracy fits in well and the Arabs need no instructions as to how to configure their governments. Putting together a constitution, on the other hand, might require some international expertise.

All the Arab states have distinct differences, making each revolution rather complex. With this great wave of political activity sweeping over Arab lands and beyond, we are afforded a chance to see the differences between them.

Readers of this publication have been fed a summation of these national characteristics, in abbreviated format. By clicking on the titles in the archive (on the right margin) you can acquaint yourself with how the protests took different courses.

Syria is a gaping flesh wound that just festers. Over 3,000 Syrians have been killed. The populations in 'bad cities'are under continual attack. The revolt is endemic in Homs, Halab, Latakia, Ar Rustan, the Douma suburb of Damascus, Deir az Zaur (out east on the Euphrates), and in the far south, As Suweida and the city which started it all – Dera'a.

Frankly, we were stumped for months and months, seeing no solution. The activists turn down all offers and suggestions coming from their respective regimes. Compromise is not possible, it seems, given the amount of blood shed. A gov. does lose its legitimacy if it turns its weapons on unarmed citizens, so the democratic opposition will not truck with Damascus. “There is no way we can talk it out” said one student from Syria. Bashar and Maher Al Assad will not stop the attacks because they know their very survival is at stake.

As late as last month, we saw no hope for a ceasefire, no less a settlement of issues. But the Syrian regime is running out of money. Sanctions prevent supplies, electronic toys and food from getting through. Foreign accounts have been frozen. Out of all the nations, Syria can count on no true friendship, though ties remain between Russia. China, like Russia, do not like to see autocratic regimes collapse into the chaos of democracy. North Korea supports the Syrian gov., as does Serbia.

Because of these pressures, the Syrians just might be persuaded to cease fire and perhaps talk. Maybe the opposing leaders change their thinking and find that they are both Syrians. So international calls for a ceasefire just might be answered. That call might be from the UN, the USA, the Arab League, the EU, or perhaps from Iran and/or Turkey. Stop all provocative manifestations, and prohibit the police from interfering in illegal demonstrations. Those are the first, basic goals that need be met. We should remember them, for no political process, no dialogue, can come out of the violence. Both sides have been violent: demonstrations turn into riots then the police shoots, as it trained to do.

The Seven (7) Steps to Democratic Government

The first step is the ceasefire.

The second step is to release all the political prisoners.

The third step is to talk, discuss needs, issues, events and endemic problems, across class, gender, professional associations, race, labor unions, religious affiliations, and across the great divide separating the very rich from the very poor.

Step four is to write a constitution,

step five: ratification of the constitution in the new assemblies or in the central divan for the ulama.

Step six: formation of party platforms

Step Seven: elections.

That's the octave of modern state formation. Each 'note' is itself an octave, and each of the smaller octaves are themselves made up of seven elements.

Let us explain, citing an example. We start with a country that has overthrown its leaders, using civil disobedience. Somehow a ceasefire must be effected, and for that to happen, both sides must step down. The process of negotiation, back and forth like a tennis game, can go either way, either building trust, or aggravating the relationship. There is no such thing as the status quo: it's either up or down. Mostly down. So the complexity of getting a ceasefire in place consists of seven activities: from making contact, to recognizing economic and ecological changes, to adapt in order to fulfill material and medical needs, to actually enforcing a ceasefire, to transition into formal talks. And each of these is a complex affair.

We will return to the seven steps in organizing democracies in North Africa and the Middle East.

By John Paul Maynard

The author is, amongst other things, the moderator/instructor of an on line discussion group on Islamic civilization, for the Graduate Alumni Association, Harvard University.

Speculum USA - Tracking Decremental Decline, Bubbles and Free Fall

Is the Decline Terminal? Assessing Indicators to Isolate Causes behind America's Decline

Only a more rigorous, more rational science will extricate us from the tragic down-ward spiral which characterizes America's 'development.' All the indicators, all the neglect and willful ignorance, aggravate each other, when faced with changing environmental and economic realities. They constitute a veritable vortex, as if our nation's lifeblood was pouring out onto the sand. Behind all this are errors in science, physical and social – a devilish corruption.

Many of the errors ultimately stem from not understanding what we are – species Homo Sapiens sapiens. We are all closely related, a human family. Yet the conditions under which the humans were made, are not those in which we live today. Our common ancestors lived lives much more physically rigorous than ours. They were much more emotionally tight, one with another. As for intelligence, they had to be scientists, just to survive. Our ancestors had to know a hundred things perfectly to survive. But today, one needs not know anything. And though America has some of the best schools, it also has very poor ones, not poor in money, but in understanding. It is unfortunate that the latest discoveries in archaeology, evolutionary psychology, economic history, anthropology, neuroscience, embryology, genetics, don't get the space on radio, film or TV that sports does.

Corruption is also viewed as a denying factor, aiding in decremental decline of the polity and the economy and the culture. But there are other kinds of corruption than defalcation and nepotism. When so-called experts bend science to justify a narrow, harmful, unjust policy, that is corruption of the highest order.

1. A Broken Social Contract:
   Such is the anti-intellectualism in the USA, that citizens seeking advanced degrees become impoverished, which is the main reason why our graduate schools now teach mainly foreigners. The country does not value knowledge, and those who seek, quite often get penalized. For example, human resource departments. just did not like people who work overseas, especially outside of Western Europe. Meanwhile, as the firm goes under, the CEOs cry out for people with foreign language skills and experience abroad. One consequence: US companies only account for 25% of their potential, if only they could market overseas.

Since there are few jobs, younger citizens band together. Call them gangs, but they are human groups banding together for survival in this money-first society.

2. Environmental and Climatic Changes:

Huge hurricanes, monster tornadoes, floods and drought, the invasion of aggressive alien fish, plants, insects, pollution and poisons – America's decline may be driven in part by environmental factors.

3. Energy: cheap oil from the Middle East or the Gulf is a thing of the past. This new high price for gasoline, diesel, home heating oil and jet fuel, means that companies, foundations, and social services, just cannot make it. Their decline may be sudden or it may be gradual. Many Americans can no longer commute to work.

4. Electricity: Power may bring light to the home at night, but in America, about one half the population is glued every night to the Television. Only 5% watch educational programming (including classical drama and concerts), so 45% are watching TV some 10-12 hours a day, mostly spectator sports, dopey cartoons, sex-silly soaps. Spanish-language TV and BET exhibit a corporate dumbing down, just like one can find in Anglo TV.

       Much is made of the social media, but is not the question, what will these media say? Why make media an object when it is a tool, a vehicle to channel new perspectives and fresh ideas and facts to the users. But 90% of cell phone conversations are unnecessary. Curiously, it is the minorities which main-line the social media: the TV is on for 74 hours a week in the typical minority home, vs. only 52 for whites and Asians.

     Minorities of course suffered from poor self-esteem, but now, thanks to the cell phone, minority students can 'commune' with each other after school, so now, the African American kids have higher self-esteem than whites and Asians. But there's nothing behind it. It's just bluster, just socializing. Ideas have no place in these communications.

5. Food

The refining of foods is an adulteration because organic substances are reduced to inorganic ones. So Americans processed foods are to be classified as drugs (inorganic) and not herbs (organic). Any drug must be administered with care; it must be given in careful, moderate doses. But processed food, food with sugar and salt and fat, is a drug that is not dosed, and the outcome is this: over half of Americans are overweight. The medical costs cannot be calculated. Most Americans do not possess a body image they can be pleased with. And we are amongst the most sedentary people ever to live on earth. See section 4, on how electrical devices substitute for nature, leaving many Americans cut off from nature, until they get sick and die. See also 'Disorientation,' coming right up.

6. Poor Education, Disorientation, Closed Off from Nature

America has the best schools, but also some of the worst. Those students in high school who choose excellence, are up against bullies and aggressive cliques. Students who put down other students is a standard of many if not most American public high schools. In some states, more money is spent on high school sports (and cheer leading) than on the sciences, or history, or civics, or the arts. The narrow, competitive model of play help license violence, reinforced by TV and films.

America sponsors and rewards, socially, several separate species of anti-intellectualism. Scientific achievements are not valued by the people; the great scientists go unknown. In many cases, US governments, under narrow ignorant interests, pursued un-scientific and often unjust policies, against the American people. The holocaust of the Native Americans, the cruel injustice of the irredentist slave-holding South, and the restoration of Southern repression under Jim Crow right up till the civil right legislation of the 1960s – and beyond, till the present – these are the great miscarriages of American democracy, bubbles of willful ignorance and crass racism, active right up till today.

Let us hope such collective delusions are in the past. But listening to the far right, who have now become mainstream in the South, the Tea Party and the Republicans, one sees the disparagement and willful neglect of both physical and social sciences. In their naked pursuit of control, the mock Republicans will ruin this nation. It is already happening. Under Reagan and then Bush the Lesser, the rich were basically given a cool trillion and exempted from taxes. Big corporations in America often pay no taxes whatsoever (e.g. GE and Exxon-Mobile)

The willful abuse of science may well break up the United States. The racial bigots in the south, never felt or feel any shame. Why? They say they are Godly but insist of their racial superiority. Why should they control the country, just as they did with their Fugitive Slave laws, and after the Civil War, where, within one year, the Confederacy had basically reversed all US Government edicts, even continuing to hold slaves. These bigots ruled the South from 1868 to the present day. Can we expect their economic or historical theories to hold any value?

7. Pop Culture: A Race to the Bottom

Little comment is needed, as it obvious that pop media, driven by corporations interested in quick and easy profits, is a sure indicator of America's decline. All countries in the Western Hemisphere possess profound bolero or folk traditions. But these are not sponsored by the big media companies. Instead, Hispanic music features the fast, big-band mariachi style, while Country Music, is carefully managed, the sappier the better. Dumbing down music will sell more records, up to a point (short term).

Take rap, for example. First, let me remind the reader that African-American music is world class: spirituals, all the traditions of jazz and the blues, Mo-town, and the folk/ballad one as well. But rap is different. There are no melodies (which are hard to create), no need to learn to play an instrument, and no beat more complex than 4 over 4. The rhymes are all obvious, not literary. Any real genre or tradition of music can express a range of emotions, none of them boastful, in your face, self-centric, violent or angry. Yet this music was, is, sponsored, staged and propagated by corporations, for a quarter of a century.

The issue relates to the inner city. Both the artists (African-Americans) and the corporate sponsors, the Jewish executives of Warner Records, were both so highly urbanized that they forfeit a living relation to nature. A human media world is substituted for the natural one. Nature of course does not exclude the humans, but the presentation of what a human is, of what music is, is a total flop.

8. Housing

The USA has an amazing housing stock: even middle class people can often afford a second house, maybe a cabin in the woods. But there is, in some counties, a shortage in adequate family housing. Because abortions are restricted, some one million poor women have children each year, children they cannot support and which may suffer poverty in the form of an absent father, or a father unemployed and idle. Housing is often the first of the needs, since it is the local, the physical frame for the family or the single resident. America is woefully short affordable apartments and rooms for single people of modest means.

Federal housing programs have done wonders keeping needy vulnerable citizens healthy and happy and safe. Yet the Republicans every year threaten to end the Section Eight funding, or just reduce it so only a million are cast out on the street.

Then there is the tie-in with energy. For the rich, the houses got larger and larger, as if the country could maintain burning 20 million barrels of oil a day indefinitely. No. Already petroleum is too expensive for ordinary Americans to burn (much). While heating oil and NG have not gone up as much as diesel and gasoline, there really is no way to sustain our present system.

When people can't afford to burn refined petrol products, the links between communities snap. All the stuff brought in doesn't come: towns, suburbs, cities, rural villages, outlying farms and homes must be 'smart.' To be smart, a town must grow most of its own food and fuel, while being connected to the world wide web.

Rents are way too high. It is not unusual for an American to spend over 50% of his/her discretionary income on rent or mortgage. So housing actually is impoverishing folks, be they home-owners or renters. Landlords must pay because the rich companies and families and ex-CEOs fail to pay their fair share, so the federal government is not able to help the towns (like they used to, before Bush), forcing them to charge higher taxes, which the landlords simply pass on to renters.

The economist David Ricardo often mentioned and examined renting, and concluded that investing in house or property is not best, optimal way to invest money, if you are a true investor, a capitalist out to make profits.

Of course the housing bubble bursting after such a run, triggered the larger collapse of the banks and mortgage lenders and insurance companies, which then afflicted all businesses and many home-owners. The US housing market has not recovered, and it will not, because the money to fuel another bubble, just is not there.

9. Drug Costs and Drug Policy

Drugs refer to inorganic substances, poisons, while herbs refer to much more complex organic substances, some of which are toxic. When an organic substance is reduced to an inorganic one, through fermentation, distillation, chemical synthesis and concentration, these simple substances wreak havoc on the human body. Examples of such drugs are: heroin, derived from the opium poppy; cocaine, derived from the coca plant; nicotine, derived from tobacco; LSD, derived from rye ergot; aspirin, derived from the willow; and alcohol (C2H5OH)– the reduction of a complex plant, or herb, to an aldehyde and then a simple substance which can then be used to reduce organic substances (alcoholysis).

        The point is that drugs are dangerous because they're poisonous. These synthesized and reduced inorganic substances are entirely alien to human evolutionary history, except with the rise of civilization following the Neolithic. So drugs are deadly poisons. Herbs are a different story altogether. About a third of the plants are toxic to humans, but some others which are not, become a medicinal herb, sacred.

      Marijuana is not a drug. It is an herb. It's not poisonous, it's not even toxic. The basic problem is an abujse of science, as cannabis is routinely grouped with heroin, cocaine, and speed, as a dangerous drug. It is neither a drug nor dangerous. It's toxicity has never been determined.

It is impossible to assess the costs and damage that this willful confusion has perpetuated. People routinely get drunk, beat their wives, terrorize their children, and no break any laws. They then go on to kill people with their cars.

      Meanwhile, some 19-year old gets pulled over illegally (for his long hair, perhaps). The car is carefully searched, till, voila! - a roach. In some states, that young person's chances in life have been basically ended. If he's caught with another roach, he goes to prison. What a stupid, cruel and indeed fatal mistake this is. For I see no way some 12 states can restore solvency and meet their many obligations, without regulating, taxing cannabis.

One can identify a real solution when it solves several problems all at once.

10. Economics: Crude Indicators, Bad Science and Blind Spots

There are some eighteen to twenty economic 'critical aspects,' ranging from high commodity prices to 'catastrophic blind spots' in the thinking of economists. Many Americans with money assume that capitalism is best studied in its American context. But no: The US economic system is energy-intensive, based on cheap oil from the Middle East (and elsewhere). It marginalizes some 30% of its population. No one should imitate America's system, even if it is hyper-productive. But as an economic historian and legal anthropologist, I know there are many other kinds of capitalism. The word just refers to money or credit that is carefully accumulated and then invested, spent in projects or for tools and materials. (See the author's “Twelve Capitalisms” on line)

      Probably the most profitable and humane capitalist system is the Muslim one. Anyone who visits a Muslim country is struck by the markets: even the poorest vendor is guaranteed a place in the market. Ordinary people hold and trade shares, in many kinds of projects, such as long-distance trade, opening a well, staffing a small store, and in real estate. According to Islamic law, a house is owned by the family. But of course today, men own the houses. The Islamic system has been isolated (see “Land-use and Land-ownership in Islamic Civilization,” on line at www.middleeastspeculum.blogspot.com) but has long been prey to tribal dictates, corrupt actors including clergy, the secular elite and strong international factors.

American people with money talk of the 'market' - Wall Street – but of course there exist hundreds of discrete markets. Lacking knowledge of the octave, modern economists are at sea in talking about economic realities, because they have no frame by which to carefully discover and assess the synergies and mutual aggravations leading to cascades of profits or losses. While physicist swear by the laws of octave, American social scientists do not know how to apply it social and economic issues.

All the categories of decline listed here bear some relation to economy and economic thinking. When you look at the category, apply its relation to the various economies. These are (in their order in the octave): home, family maintenance (the original meaning of economy); the village; the town; regional economies; urban, national and international markets.

      Energy is the elephant in the room, and the USA will not be ready when refined petrol products are two expensive for ordinary people to burn or use. That time is here, or soon to come. And what happens is that all the links that connect communities, towns, villages, snap, one by one. So the task clear: make every town and village, suburb and urban zone, be 'smart.' Being smart means simply that the community can produce most of its food and fuel, while being wired into the world wide web.

Of course, the economists working for money interests have no idea on how create 'smart towns.' The dominant social process over the past two or three centuries, is, of course, rural flight and the cancerous growth of the cities. The only way to staunch this hemorrhaging is to create regional hubs, smart towns, between the rural and the urban.

      Money is a rather recent innovation and of course has immeasurable advantages over barter. No body is at fault for the fact that the average wage and income in the city might be nine or twelve times that of a laborer in the countryside. It just happens, because of the concentration of energies in a city. In any country you can see that cities concentrate, monopolize, information, knowledge, money, imports, industry and bureaucratic offices.

     Money is not simply an instrument, a technology; it is a symbolic system whose value is agreed upon, that is, a consensual arrangement. It is advisable that communities coin their own monies – simple ways by which families and single folk can be paid for essential work but never recognized by the big money economists: babysitting, care-giving, home maintenance, carpooling, and all transactions by ordinary people who have excluded from capital or credit.

Much is made of debtz

9. Government Failures: Intentional or What?

Since the War of 1812, the government of the USA has often been subverted by groups bent their narrow corporate interests. The South managed to legalize slavery in all states – the Fugitive Slave Act – which ordered all authorities, at all levels, everywhere in the US, to return escaped slaves. Again, the South re-gained control just some 20 months after their defeat at Appomattox – abused (i.e. killed) American citizens, both white and black, maintaining Jim Crow right through the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Now they've organized again, commandeering the Republican party, and threaten to impose their wretched self-serving agenda onto the people of the United States. They want to cut government support for the poor, the elderly, the disabled. Having looted America's wealth (under Bush the Lesser), and now trying to get the little given to poor, the sick, these rich men, for some dark reason, want to take the little that the US government gives to the retired, the sick, the disabled, and the destitute. They now hope to balance the budget by cutting aid to the poor, and that includes cutting foreign assistance as well.

       The Democrats are not so innocent. They have bought into the same mistakes, allowing the rich and big corporations to go tax free. They use the same twisted statistics – “unemployment is 9.1%.” Of course, those who are unemployed, under-employed or hate their jobs, constitute just about one half the population.

      Government does many things well. The US gov. is not particularly large. Nor is it debt to other nations, firms and individuals, particularly large. US debt in 2011 is some $14.2 trillion, but the debt of the British gov. was, is, some $9 trillion. Such debt can be re-paid quickly, were the US gov. willing to cut its bloated defense establishment, tax corporations and the privileged, and rationalize its drug policies, and health expenditures.

It may be that the US will once again succumb to the self-serving southern rich, but it will not go down easily: people will take to the streets, and the much-vaunted union will be no more. There are nine nations in North America, all of them with large regional economies, all of them diverging.

Unemployment is a big issue, requiring government intervention, but the Republican camarilla will not sponsor gov. job-creating. I am thinking of Pres. John son's CETA program, which was highly successful.

      Having taken the nation's money, the Republicans now guarantee the broken contract (that if you educate yourself and obey the law, you'd get a job). God knows there is much that needs to be done.

10. International Dimensions -

Failure of US policies overseas must be balanced by its success: the Arabs may have vilified and humiliated by US policy (a knee-jerk support of Israel), but they want 'North American style democracy.'

     The ideology of free trade may look sound, but the implementation of tariff-free 'global markets' has proven deleterious to America's poor. Poor American farmers should not compete with under-paid serfs in other countries. And American manufacturers should not have to compete with firms from nations that give subsidies to those firms, or keep wages so much lower than those American's earn.

Immigration is an international issue. The computer now permits a more precise immigration policies, where a representative from a foreign country, say a small farmer representing his village, might come to the USA to take courses or serve as an intern, to then return to his village, and upgrade its agriculture.

      Yes, the character and culture of the USA has been altered by mass immigration. Approximately 25 million immigrants arrived just in the past 10 years. Poor black, Native and white people now cannot find jobs: they go to immigrants.

     It was of course the rich right industry captains (incl. Big farms) who opened up the gates for the poorest territorials to flood in, along with of millions of poor from other nations, in order to cut wages down to survival levels.

The Vortex of Decremental Decline

We missed a few indicators and causes: the role of religion, political decisiveness and grid lock. “One must not bear false witness against another” might be the best prescription for US governance. The same people who do defame and distort their political adversaries, also call themselves, loudly, to be Christians. I smell a rat. Christ did not champion the rich against the poor, quite the opposite: “If you care to follow me, give away your wealth.”

All these indicators bear relations, one to another, and constitute a vortex. It is the opposite of synergy: it is a set of mutually-aggravating factors. The question is not whether the US is in decline, but whether such decline is terminal.

-John Paul Maynard

Harvard University

The author is a web publisher who also moderates the on-line discussion group on Islamic civilization, for graduate-school (GSAS) alumni, Harvard University. Check out his two blogs re America: speculumusa.blogspot.com, and thehumanpreservationproject.blogspot.com.

Is the Decline Terminal? Assessing Indicators to Isolate Causes behind America's Decline

Only a more rigorous, more rational science will extricate us from the tragic down-ward spiral which characterizes America's 'development.' All the indicators, all the neglect and willful ignorance, aggravate each other, when faced with changing environmental and economic realities. They constitute a veritable vortex, as if our nation's lifeblood was pouring out onto the sand. Behind all this are errors in science, physical and social – a devilish corruption.

Many of the errors ultimately stem from not understanding what we are – species Homo Sapiens sapiens. We are all closely related, a human family. Yet the conditions under which the humans were made, are not those in which we live today. Our common ancestors lived lives much more physically rigorous than ours. They were much more emotionally tight, one with another. As for intelligence, they had to be scientists, just to survive. Our ancestors had to know a hundred things perfectly to survive. But today, one needs not know anything. And though America has some of the best schools, it also has very poor ones, not poor in money, but in understanding. It is unfortunate that the latest discoveries in archaeology, evolutionary psychology, economic history, anthropology, neuroscience, embryology, genetics, don't get the space on radio, film or TV that sports does.

Corruption is also viewed as a denying factor, aiding in decremental decline of the polity and the economy and the culture. But there are other kinds of corruption than defalcation and nepotism. When so-called experts bend science to justify a narrow, harmful, unjust policy, that is corruption of the highest order.

1. A Broken Social Contract:
   Such is the anti-intellectualism in the USA, that citizens seeking advanced degrees become impoverished, which is the main reason why our graduate schools now teach mainly foreigners. The country does not value knowledge, and those who seek, quite often get penalized. For example, human resource departments. just did not like people who work overseas, especially outside of Western Europe. Meanwhile, as the firm goes under, the CEOs cry out for people with foreign language skills and experience abroad. One consequence: US companies only account for 25% of their potential, if only they could market overseas.

Since there are few jobs, younger citizens band together. Call them gangs, but they are human groups banding together for survival in this money-first society.

Environmental and Climatic Changes:

Huge hurricanes, monster tornadoes, floods and drought, the invasion of aggressive alien fish, plants, insects, pollution and poisons – America's decline may be driven in part by environmental factors.

3. Energy: cheap oil from the Middle East or the Gulf is a thing of the past. This new high price for gasoline, diesel, home heating oil and jet fuel, means that companies, foundations, and social services, just cannot make it. Their decline may be sudden or it may be gradual. Many Americans can no longer commute to work.

4. Electricity: Power may bring light to the home at night, but in America, about one half the population is glued every night to the Television. Only 5% watch educational programming (including classical drama and concerts), so 45% are watching TV some 10-12 hours a day, mostly spectator sports, dopey cartoons, sex-silly soaps. Spanish-language TV and BET exhibit a corporate dumbing down, just like one can find in Anglo TV.

Much is made of the social media, but is not the question, what will these media say? Why make media an object when it is a tool, a vehicle to channel new perspectives and fresh ideas and facts to the users. But 90% of cell phone conversations are unnecessary. Curiously, it is the minorities which main-line the social media: the TV is on for 74 hours a week in the typical minority home, vs. only 52 for whites and Asians.

Minorities of course suffered from poor self-esteem, but now, thanks to the cell phone, minority students can 'commune' with each other after school, so now, the African American kids have higher self-esteem than whites and Asians. But there's nothing behind it. It's just bluster, just socializing. Ideas have no place in these communications.

5. Food

The refining of foods is an adulteration because organic substances are reduced to inorganic ones. So Americans processed foods are to be classified as drugs (inorganic) and not herbs (organic). Any drug must be administered with care; it must be given in careful, moderate doses. But processed food, food with sugar and salt and fat, is a drug that is not dosed, and the outcome is this: over half of Americans are overweight. The medical costs cannot be calculated. Most Americans do not possess a body image they can be pleased with. And we are amongst the most sedentary people ever to live on earth. See section 4, on how electrical devices substitute for nature, leaving many Americans cut off from nature, until they get sick and die. See also 'Disorientation,' coming right up.

6. Poor Education, Disorientation, Closed Off from Nature

America has the best schools, but also some of the worst. Those students in high school who choose excellence, are up against bullies and aggressive cliques. Students who put down other students is a standard of many if not most American public high schools. In some states, more money is spent on high school sports (and cheer leading) than on the sciences, or history, or civics, or the arts. The narrow, competitive model of play help license violence, reinforced by TV and films.

America sponsors and rewards, socially, several separate species of anti-intellectualism. Scientific achievements are not valued by the people; the great scientists go unknown. In many cases, US governments, under narrow ignorant interests, pursued un-scientific and often unjust policies, against the American people. The holocaust of the Native Americans, the cruel injustice of the irredentist slave-holding South, and the restoration of Southern repression under Jim Crow right up till the civil right legislation of the 1960s – and beyond, till the present – these are the great miscarriages of American democracy, bubbles of willful ignorance and crass racism, active right up till today.

Let us hope such collective delusions are in the past. But listening to the far right, who have now become mainstream in the South, the Tea Party and the Republicans, one sees the disparagement and willful neglect of both physical and social sciences. In their naked pursuit of control, the mock Republicans will ruin this nation. It is already happening. Under Reagan and then Bush the Lesser, the rich were basically given a cool trillion and exempted from taxes. Big corporations in America often pay no taxes whatsoever (e.g. GE and Exxon-Mobile)

The willful abuse of science may well break up the United States. The racial bigots in the south, never felt or feel any shame. Why? They say they are Godly but insist of their racial superiority. Why should they control the country, just as they did with their Fugitive Slave laws, and after the Civil War, where, within one year, the Confederacy had basically reversed all US Government edicts, even continuing to hold slaves. These bigots ruled the South from 1868 to the present day. Can we expect their economic or historical theories to hold any value?

7. Pop Culture: A Race to the Bottom

Little comment is needed, as it obvious that pop media, driven by corporations interested in quick and easy profits, is a sure indicator of America's decline. All countries in the Western Hemisphere possess profound bolero or folk traditions. But these are not sponsored by the big media companies. Instead, Hispanic music features the fast, big-band mariachi style, while Country Music, is carefully managed, the sappier the better. Dumbing down music will sell more records, up to a point (short term).

Take rap, for example. First, let me remind the reader that African-American music is world class: spirituals, all the traditions of jazz and the blues, Mo-town, and the folk/ballad one as well. But rap is different. There are no melodies (which are hard to create), no need to learn to play an instrument, and no beat more complex than 4 over 4. The rhymes are all obvious, not literary. Any real genre or tradition of music can express a range of emotions, none of them boastful, in your face, self-centric, violent or angry. Yet this music was, is, sponsored, staged and propagated by corporations, for a quarter of a century.

The issue relates to the inner city. Both the artists (African-Americans) and the corporate sponsors, the Jewish executives of Warner Records, were both so highly urbanized that they forfeit a living relation to nature. A human media world is substituted for the natural one. Nature of course does not exclude the humans, but the presentation of what a human is, of what music is, is a total flop.

6. Housing

The USA has an amazing housing stock: even middle class people can often afford a second house, maybe a cabin in the woods. But there is, in some counties, a shortage in adequate family housing. Because abortions are restricted, some one million poor women have children each year, children they cannot support and which may suffer poverty in the form of an absent father, or a father unemployed and idle. Housing is often the first of the needs, since it is the local, the physical frame for the family or the single resident. America is woefully short affordable apartments and rooms for single people of modest means.

Federal housing programs have done wonders keeping needy vulnerable citizens healthy and happy and safe. Yet the Republicans every year threaten to end the Section Eight funding, or just reduce it so only a million are cast out on the street.

Then there is the tie-in with energy. For the rich, the houses got larger and larger, as if the country could maintain burning 20 million barrels of oil a day indefinitely. No. Already petroleum is too expensive for ordinary Americans to burn (much). While heating oil and NG have not gone up as much as diesel and gasoline, there really is no way to sustain our present system.

When people can't afford to burn refined petrol products, the links between communities snap. All the stuff brought in doesn't come: towns, suburbs, cities, rural villages, outlying farms and homes must be 'smart.' To be smart, a town must grow most of its own food and fuel, while being connected to the world wide web.

Rents are way too high. It is not unusual for an American to spend over 50% of his/her discretionary income on rent or mortgage. So housing actually is impoverishing folks, be they home-owners or renters. Landlords must pay because the rich companies and families and ex-CEOs fail to pay their fair share, so the federal government is not able to help the towns (like they used to, before Bush), forcing them to charge higher taxes, which the landlords simply pass on to renters.

The economist David Ricardo often mentioned and examined renting, and concluded that investing in house or property is not best, optimal way to invest money, if you are a true investor, a capitalist out to make profits.

Of course the housing bubble bursting after such a run, triggered the larger collapse of the banks and mortgage lenders and insurance companies, which then afflicted all businesses and many home-owners. The US housing market has not recovered, and it will not, because the money to fuel another bubble, just is not there.

7. Drug Costs and Drug Policy

Drugs refer to inorganic substances, poisons, while herbs refer to much more complex organic substances, some of which are toxic. When an organic substance is reduced to an inorganic one, through fermentation, distillation, chemical synthesis and concentration, these simple substances wreak havoc on the human body. Examples of such drugs are: heroin, derived from the opium poppy; cocaine, derived from the coca plant; nicotine, derived from tobacco; LSD, derived from rye ergot; aspirin, derived from the willow; and alcohol (C2H5OH)– the reduction of a complex plant, or herb, to an aldehyde and then a simple substance which can then be used to reduce organic substances (alcoholysis).

The point is that drugs are dangerous because they're poisonous. These synthesized and reduced inorganic substances are entirely alien to human evolutionary history, except with the rise of civilization following the Neolithic. So drugs are deadly poisons. Herbs are a different story altogether. About a third of the plants are toxic to humans, but some others which are not, become a medicinal herb, sacred.

Marijuana is not a drug. It is an herb. It's not poisonous, it's not even toxic. The basic problem is an abujse of science, as cannabis is routinely grouped with heroin, cocaine, and speed, as a dangerous drug. It is neither a drug nor dangerous. It's toxicity has never been determined.

It is impossible to assess the costs and damage that this willful confusion has perpetuated. People routinely get drunk, beat their wives, terrorize their children, and no break any laws. They then go on to kill people with their cars.

Meanwhile, some 19-year old gets pulled over illegally (for his long hair, perhaps). The car is carefully searched, till, voila! - a roach. In some states, that young person's chances in life have been basically ended. If he's caught with another roach, he goes to prison. What a stupid, cruel and indeed fatal mistake this is. For I see no way some 12 states can restore solvency and meet their many obligations, without regulating, taxing cannabis.

One can identify a real solution when it solves several problems all at once.

8. Economic: Indicators and Professional Blind Spots

There are some eighteen to twenty economic 'critical aspects,' ranging from high commodity prices to 'catastrophic blind spots' in the thinking of economists. Many Americans with money assume that capitalism is best studied in its American context. But no: The US economic system is energy-intensive, based on cheap oil from the Middle East (and elsewhere). It marginalizes some 30% of its population. No one should imitate America's system, even if it is hyper-productive. But as an economic historian and legal anthropologist, I know there are many other kinds of capitalism. The word just refers to money or credit that is carefully accumulated and then invested, spent in projects or for tools and materials. (See the author's “Twelve Capitalisms” on line)

Probably the most profitable and humane capitalist system is the Muslim one. Anyone who visits a Muslim country is struck by the markets: even the poorest vendor is guaranteed a place in the market. Ordinary people hold and trade shares, in many kinds of projects, such as long-distance trade, opening a well, staffing a small store, and in real estate. According to Islamic law, a house is owned by the family. But of course today, men own the houses. The Islamic system has been isolated (see “Land-use and Land-ownership in Islamic Civilization,” on line at www.middleeastspeculum.blogspot.com) but has long been prey to tribal dictates, corrupt actors including clergy, the secular elite and strong international factors.

American people with money talk of the 'market' - Wall Street – but of course there exist hundreds of discrete markets. Lacking knowledge of the octave, modern economists are at sea in talking about economic realities, because they have no frame by which to carefully discover and assess the synergies and mutual aggravations leading to cascades of profits or losses. While physicist swear by the laws of octave, American social scientists do not know how to apply it social and economic issues.

All the categories of decline listed here bear some relation to economy and economic thinking. When you look at the category, apply its relation to the various economies. These are (in their order in the octave): home, family maintenance (the original meaning of economy); the village; the town; regional economies; urban, national and international markets.

Energy is the elephant in the room, and the USA will not be ready when refined petrol products are two expensive for ordinary people to burn or use. That time is here, or soon to come. And what happens is that all the links that connect communities, towns, villages, snap, one by one. So the task clear: make every town and village, suburb and urban zone, be 'smart.' Being smart means simply that the community can produce most of its food and fuel, while being wired into the world wide web.

Of course, the economists working for money interests have no idea on how create 'smart towns.' The dominant social process over the past two or three centuries, is, of course, rural flight and the cancerous growth of the cities. The only way to staunch this hemorrhaging is to create regional hubs, smart towns, between the rural and the urban.

Money is a rather recent innovation and of course has immeasurable advantages over barter. No body is at fault for the fact that the average wage and income in the city might be nine or twelve times that of a laborer in the countryside. It just happens, because of the concentration of energies in a city. In any country you can see that cities concentrate, monopolize, information, knowledge, money, imports, industry and bureaucratic offices.

Money is not simply an instrument, a technology; it is a symbolic system whose value is agreed upon, that is, a consensual arrangement. It is advisable that communities coin their own monies – simple ways by which families and single folk can be paid for essential work but never recognized by the big money economists: babysitting, care-giving, home maintenance, carpooling, and all transactions by ordinary people who have excluded from capital or credit.

Much is made of debtz

9. Government Failures: Intentional or What?

Since the War of 1812, the government of the USA has often been subverted by groups bent their narrow corporate interests. The South managed to legalize slavery in all states – the Fugitive Slave Act – which ordered all authorities, at all levels, everywhere in the US, to return escaped slaves. Again, the South re-gained control just some 20 months after their defeat at Appomattox – abused (i.e. killed) American citizens, both white and black, maintaining Jim Crow right through the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Now they've organized again, commandeering the Republican party, and threaten to impose their wretched self-serving agenda onto the people of the United States. They want to cut government support for the poor, the elderly, the disabled. Having looted America's wealth, while trying to get the little given to the less fortunate, these rich men, for some reason, want to take the little that does goes to the retired, the sick, the disabled, and the destitute. They now hope to balance the budget by cutting aid to the poor, and that includes cutting foreign assistance as well.

The Democrats are not so innocent. They have bought into the same mistakes, allowing the rich and big corporations to go tax free. They use the same twisted statistics – “unemployment is 9.1%.” Of course, those who are unemployed, under-employed or hate their jobs, constitute just about one half the population.

       Government does many things well. The US gov. is not particularly large. Nor is it debt to other nations, firms and individuals, particularly large. US debt in 2011 is some $14.2 trillion, but the debt of the British gov. was, is, some $9 trillion. Such debt can be re-paid quickly, were the US gov. willing to cut its bloated defense establishment, tax corporations and the privileged, and rationalize its drug policies, and health expenditures.

       It may be that the US will once again succumb to the self-serving southern rich, but it will not go down easily: people will take to the streets, and the much-vaunted union will be no more. There are nine nations in North America, all of them with large regional economies, all of them diverging.

Unemployment is a big issue, requiring government intervention, but the Republican camarilla will not sponsor gov. job-creating. I am thinking of Pres. John son's CETA program, which was highly successful.

Having taken the nation's money, the Republicans now guarantee the broken contract (that if you educate yourself and obey the law, you'd get a job). God knows there is much that needs to be done.

10. International Dimensions -

Failure of US policies overseas must be balanced by its success: the Arabs may have vilified and humiliated by US policy (a knee-jerk support of Israel), but they want 'North American style democracy.'

The ideology of free trade may look sound, but the implementation of tariff-free 'global markets' has proven deleterious to America's poor. Poor American farmers should not compete with under-paid serfs in other countries. And American manufacturers should not have to compete with firms from nations that give subsidies to those firms, or keep wages so much lower than those American's earn.

Immigration is an international issue. The computer now permits a more precise immigration policies, where a representative from a foreign country, say a small farmer representing his village, might come to the USA to take courses or serve as an intern, to then return to his village, and upgrade its agriculture.

Yes, the character and culture of the USA has been altered by mass immigration. Approximately 25 million immigrants arrived just in the past 10 years. Poor black, Native and white people now cannot find jobs: they go to immigrants.

It was of course the rich right industry captains (incl. Big farms) who opened up the gates for the poorest territorials to flood in, along with of millions of poor from other nations, in order to cut wages down to survival levels.

The Vortex of Decremental Decline

We missed a few indicators and causes: the role of religion, political decisiveness and grid lock. “One must not bear false witness against another” might be the best prescription for US governance. The same people who do defame and distort their political adversaries, also call themselves, loudly, to be Christians. I smell a rat. Christ did not champion the rich against the poor, quite the opposite: “If you care to follow me, give away your wealth.”

All these indicators bear relations, one to another, and constitute a vortex. It is the opposite of synergy: it is a set of mutually-aggravating factors. The question is not whether the US is in decline, but whether such decline is terminal.

-John Paul Maynard

Harvard University

The author is a web publisher who also moderates the on-line discussion group on Islamic civilization, for graduate-school (GSAS) alumni, Harvard University. Check out his two blogs re America: speculumusa.blogspot.com, and thehumanpreservationproject.blogspot.com. 

America in Decline: Tracking Indicators to Find Causes and Cures

Part Nine : Drugs and Drug Policy: An Appeal to Science

In our survey, we were a bit surprised to find drugs to be such a strong factor in America's decline. We tried to estimate the cost of drug abuse and the failed US drug policy, but quickly found that the costs were multiple and interdependent, and that they were so great they could not be quantified.

Here we appeal for scientific truth - a return to basic scientific principles.

RATIONALIZING DRUG POLICIES IN THE UNITED STATES

It was Muhammad Qurayshi who, more than anyone, initiated modern medicine when he said, publicly: “Every disease has a cause and a cure.” That ended all the superstition and all the quackery relating to ignorance. The Qur'an picked up the medical theme, saying “Do not think disease and disability are punishments from God.”

Amongst their many achievements in medicine, the Muslim scientists (who included Armenians, Jews, Persians, Turks and others) initiated a pharmacopeia consisting of some 700 inorganic substances – drugs. Each was dispensed in a calculated dose, for a given term.

It was the Swiss doctor Paracelsus (d. 1541) who, some 800 years later, brought pharmacology to Europe – against great resistance. His initial, cardinal axiom was, is: “Every substance is poisonous.”

Drug is a Dutch word. It came into England on the same wave that the stock market did. A drug is an inorganic substance. But another meaning of the word evolved: any substance ingested which alters the health or in particular, the consciousness of the subject. For example, food is a drug. Even good food becomes poisonous if taken in excess of the lawful dose.

Quite correctly, the meaning of the Dutch word 'drug' has expanded to include other cravings and addictions: TV as a drug, religion as opium, war as a drug, and so forth. This meaning is indeed backed up by neuroscience: all rewards use, play on, the same mid-brain system, with its pathways through the limbic system.

Simple pure inorganic substances are not natural or customary to the humans. They played no part in human evolution, except maybe salt. The humans got high on plants. Almost all human communities used some plant or plant concoction to explore their quite peculiar (semi-) consciousness; or to relieve pain. Pain of course is not just physical pain, but emotional as well.

Having re-stated the key axioms and corollaries, let us approach North America. The Canadians and the Americans use the most drugs, though other nations are not far behind.

One constant to civilization was, is, the fermentation of plants into liquor and beer. It is the reduction of an organic substance to an inorganic one. Alcohol is a drug because organic substances are distilled to make very simple inorganic alcohol.

All these potent alien substances, alien to humans, must be used under a doctor's supervision, by prescription, that is, carefully dosed for a given term. And that doctor today in North America is now a pharmacologist, because drugs are so dangerous – not just in their incisive affects and effects, but because they can interact, fatally.

Plants contain, of course, much more complicated molecules. Many plants are toxic. (Poisons are inorganic substances). About one third of plant species are toxic to animals. Bacteria are generally poisonous, because their waste consists of inorganic molecules. The social insects have evolved deadly venoms, as have the older snakes, some ancient lizards, fish, and octopus. But most plant toxins are not venoms. Some are alkaloids, originally designed to ward off insects and fungi.

The largest, most complex molecules in nature are snake venom: molecules so large and complex that scientists have rightly concluded they might also have benefits, unique benefits, for people in certain situations. Acute hypertension, acute chronic pain, are two disorders now being treated with the toxins of deadly snakes. Or the synthesis of such toxins.

My point is simply that there is an experiential dialogue going in our bodies between organic toxins and inorganic poisons. For example, drinking alcohol does not go well with cannabis, and the population is divided into these two groups.

Bear with me, dear reader: I am trying to get to the bottom of the drug issue, by summoning first principles and accurate data re drugs, herbs and human physiology. Careful attention to terms is requisite and pertinent. Drugs refer to inorganic substances, while herbs feature organic molecules. Drugs are entirely alien to the humans. Exploring herbs and plants was normal. This is backed up by modern neuroscience, which has located wide-spread cannabinoid receptors throughout the brain.

Those receptors probably developed independent of cannabis, but, as of this date, this huge number of tiny receptors, found in every region of the brain, only responds to cannabis. This presents three problems: first, I doubt the relationship between cannabis and humans was that intimate, that prevalent and that old, to influence evolution. But I could be wrong. Cannabis entered Africa at any early date, so early we cannot be sure that the plant was not carried into Africa, from Central Asia. Some modern humans left Africa some 200,000 years ago. And 200,000 years ago is just enough time for the quickly-changing brain to develop tiny receptors, receptors responding only to cannabis.

The second problem is this: since the brain is primed for pot, the user can become dependent on it. It can be too good.

The third problem is this: the toxicity of cannabis has never been determined. This goes against our core principles, 'that every substance is poisonous.' As potheads know, you can't get sick on it, no matter how much you smoke. And potheads also know that you don't get any higher if you keep smoking the stuff.

Before we turn to look at the United States, let me reiterate that drugs are alien to human evolutionary experience, while plants were always used all through evolution, to produce psychotropic and therapeutic effects.

The great danger is the synthesis of plant materials into inorganic chemicals. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, LSD, synthesized mescaline, amphetamines, caffeine - these are all derived from plants, but carefully isolated, 'distilled,' and then, synthesized. As inorganic substances, they cut through the delicate biological complexity and balance, drastically – and mechanically – altering consciousness.

Organic substances derived from plants (and fungi) function very differently – a much more complex and organic process - locking into preexisting receptors in the brain, and elsewhere. Those who use herbs to heal know well the gentle, slow, deep, effects and affects, as befitting an organic substance acting in and upon an organism.

I want to turn now to examine drugs in American society, noting their costs, and laying out a proper course for government policies. But I do not want to lose our scientific rigor. Sadly, this rigor has been lacking in American approach to drugs.

Obviously, any intelligent society would rationalize its toxins and its poisons. By that, I simply mean ordering and listing drugs and herbs in order of their danger, their toxicity and their damage to peoples' lives and society in general. That is such an obvious thing to do. But the USA government, and state and municipal governments, do not do that. Their list is not scientific. The damage can be traced to this lapse in science. Marijuana is not a drug but an herb.

In America you can get drunk every day of the week, slap your wife, cut her up verbally, rape her in a drunken stupor, yell at the kids (or withdrawal in shame and stupor), kick the dog – and not break any laws.

Yet if a man or woman gets stopped and searched 'on suspicion of illegal use of a dangerous drug,' - and a single little pot roach is found (after lengthy police search of the vehicle), that individual, usually a young man, will be prosecuted with a vengeance, convicted, fined, sentenced often to jail. And when that individual comes out of prison, he will find that he can no longer get a job, support a family, access public housing – for the rest of his life.

Why on earth is America so vindictive? Is it 'pharmacological Calvinism'? If so, it is not good Calvinism. Because if you read the writings of John Calvin, you'll see he calls humans 'weak' and 'flawed' and would not support for a moment cannabis over alcohol, if he knew the facts.

No, one cannot quantify the damage inflicted by so-called 'law enforcement.' Let us try. Some 830,000 Americans are arrested for marijuana each year in the USA, a steady statistic going back forty years. That's roughly 34 million people, over half of whom will be treated as criminals and deprived of rights and the chance to support a family.

How could such a travesty happen? Are we not scientific? Are we not just? Why does the law permit people to freely damage themselves and even kill others using legal alcohol, and processed food, while an entirely innocent and harmless behavior – experimenting with a non-toxic plant – can land you in prison for life (for dealing), ruin any chance of life outside prison, and condemn the individual to a life-long marginalization? But this is the American way, in most states, even at this late date.

The fact that this scientific society cannot rationalize its toxins and its poisons does not augur well for either the people or the government. Many of the costs relating to drugs stem from this strange refusal to rationalize toxins and poisons.

Both culture and politics are responsible. The cultural mistakes are made by so-called experts who keep proving to the public, just how foolish and biased and mean they are. Still today, one can still hear authority figures, doctors who do not practice, often in pay of narrow interests, speaking of heroin, cocaine, and cannabis in one sentence, as if they could be equated. And they do this with a straight face!

So one can see why it is an emergency situation. Once again the truth has been subverted, and millions are suffering grievously. Some are suffering from the hard drugs they use (i.e., alcohol, speed) while others suffer from being criminally prosecuted for using a (basically) harmless herb “to put a little buzz on.”

When I first tried cannabis, I wondered what all the fuss was about. It was not intoxicating. It seemed to increase, not decrease, the accuracy and speed of reflexes, and thoughts (which are reflexes) in my case. But it was just “a little buzz.” And of course it is non-toxic, and that is very good news. Because it is the herb of choice by the discriminating.

As I just tried to explain, drugs, that is, inorganic synthesized chemicals, are much more damaging than (non-toxic) herbs. True, plants can be toxic but, oddly, the toxicity of marijuana has never been established. That is an anomaly.

With all of our science and education, with our talk of freedom and rights, the USA seems unable to view drugs and herbs accurately. And therefore fails to treat its citizens justly. Why?

When prohibition ended, the enforcement bureaucracy needed jobs so they after marijuana use amongst the African Americans and Hispanic minorities. Tens of thousands of innocent minorities were convicted and sentenced to hard labor in chain gangs: slavery.

Today, the government and so-called anti-drug lobbyists constitute an industry and a tax-paid bureaucracy which, again, insists on listing marijuana as a dangerous drug. It is neither dangerous or a drug.

Then there are the bureaucrats and officers and staff who all depend on prosecutions, busts. It is easy to hide heroin and cocaine or tabs of LSD, MDA, speed or illegal prescription drugs. Marijuana is of course much bulkier. So pot busts have always been the easiest, and many a cop has won his stars by busting innocent citizens for tiny roaches. The police get their little gold stars, while the busted American can no longer get a job. That is evil corruption that should have been halted in 1970. But it is still going on in most of the states.

Then there is corporate corruption. The liquor industry does not want people going off drink and onto pot. So they work behind the scenes, funding lobbyists and certain 'experts' who then testify before congressional sub-committees, that pot is the most dangerous of them all. That's evil corruption.

Repeatedly, in the history of the United States, industries have dictated inimical and unjust policies. The most obvious example is the sorry history of the cigarette, which in America, is an extremely most toxic substance because it is adulterated. American cigarettes are sugar cured, which is carcinogenic in itself. Then American industry puts into cigarettes some 500 different chemicals, including fiberglass and saltpeter. Under combustion, those chemical become deadly.

Because foods have been so refined in the US, many foods pass from being organic substances into inorganic ones. Eating a piece of white bread, for example, throws as much sugar into the system as a piece of cake or a dish of ice cream. The pancreases of most Americans are like a yo-yos, being constantly summoned to produce and secrete insulin. No wonder the diabetes epidemic.

But the pancreas is just one organ that suffers when food becomes, literally, chemically, a drug. The obesity epidemic is most pronounced in the USA, and there is no mystery why this is so. Our super-refined foods are all drugs, potentially poisonous if not dosed, activating the exact same reward system triggered by the drugs heroin, cocaine and alcohol.

The adulteration of food in the USA is, of course, legendary, and needs little comment. Let me just say that the pure food movement in the US has deep roots. It began in the 1820s in Northampton , Massachusetts, when Sylvester Graham decided to move against white bleached flour: he advised eating bran. But he was legally harassed by bakers, some of whom plotted to kill him. He did a little science and found that it was a regular practice of bakers to pour into white bleached flour, 'filler' – plaster, lime, white lead paint, and sawdust and floor sweepings, including dried dung from rats. Even before the railroads, Graham established some 100 chapters throughout the East, traveling relentlessly. Nabisco popularized the 'Graham Cracker' but, today, it is an over-refined sterile white flour cake with sugar and a little cinnamon.

Red meat is known to be poisonous, yet the cattle industry wants all Americans to eat beef eight times a week – and are willing and able to corrupt the courts to enforce this. Anybody who speaks against red meat, in any public medium, is liable to be destroyed.

The drug issue is just one of some eight or ten reasons the US is going down. Focusing on pot is to the point. Because pot is bulky, and can be detected by smell, police miss the dangerous drugs, but still get their golden stars. It has distracted them.

Our research validates the findings in early June 2011 of the very special Global Commission on Drugs. But we are going to go one step further and show how the US government can use the “a-legalization” of cannabis, to cut in half the hard drugs coming into the USA, and the number of victims who use these dangerous drugs.

PRESCRIPTIONS:

Now, suppose the governments said to the street: “If you deal or possess hard and dangerous drugs, we will prosecute you, sentencing you to prison. But if you deal in herbs, we will view that as a-legal.” This message would be repeated and delivered to the Caribbean, to South America and Mexico, to the farmers of Afghanistan, as well as the many thousands of gangs in the USA. Meanwhile, border police would focus on preventing hard drugs from entering the country, and preventing guns and ammo flowing into Mexico. If enough cannabis gets through, or is grown, then, of course, the price comes right down, thereby rendering the gangs irrelevant, since they can no longer pay their men and women.

What do you think will happen?

If I am not mistaken, we will cut the dangerous drugs coming into the US by at least half, and hard-drug consumption by Americans by even more, as the years go by. Many alcoholics and heroin/cocaine/speed victims, say they would have stayed with pot, if was easy to get. Even alcoholics say that. No one can calculate the benefits of such an intelligent substitution.

If we found the right solution, it would solve many problems at once. For example, I see no way many of the American states can restore solvency without legalizing marijuana. And since pot is so widely used, it stands to reason that the government should tax and regulate it.

Here is a read out of the benefits of a-legalizing marijuana:

-cut in half the dangerous drugs coming into America

-provide a non-toxic substitute for dangerous inorganic substances (alcohol, drugs)

-drive the gangs out of business, because of competition, the price of cannabis comes down.

-assist hard drug addicts and users to switch to cannabis

-provide Americans with a valuable non-toxic medicine to treat a variety of ailments. Need I name them?

- allow states and local municipalities to make the money, money they desperatly need. They will not get unless they tax reefer.

-prevent the ruining of peoples' lives because of some cannabis conviction on their record, and reverse the unjust convictions thereby restoring some 15 million American lives.

As an anthropologist, I know that almost all societies use plants to alter their consciousness. So experimentation with herbs is not an aberration for the humans.

The need is to reduce the harm. Top priority: rationalize the toxins, that is, order drugs according to their costs, their damage: alcohol, heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs, amphetamines, ecstasy – we need to reduce all these dangerous substances – now!

People can become dependent on marijuana, but people become dependent on all sorts of things. One way to cure the alcohol, nicotine fiend is to just give him all he or she wants – make him drink, make him smoke. Pot smokers know they don't get any higher if they keep smoking, so they desist, then learn to go without it, by not valuing it so much. Since it no longer costly and illegal, cannabis loses its cache.

Younger people do need to know about themselves. Instead of driving them into beer, liquor, cigarettes, and hard drugs, let them substitute their poisons for a little marijuana. The Chinese used cannabis to treat senility, and it does seem that those who can most benefit, are the middle aged and elderly. But the Chinese prescribed cannabis as a regular, long-term therapy. I doubt they gave it to patients with severe neuro-degenerative disorders, or anyone not of sound mind.

The anti-marijuana 'expert' in the pay of companies or the government, will point to marijuana's “proven” effect on killing motivation, especially amongst teenagers.” Well, the lack of motivation inevitably comes from another source. Maybe the family watches TV instead of discussing issues. That's enough to thoroughly de-motivate and demoralize an intelligent teenager. Some high schools are fine, but others feature bullying (even by teachers), vapid curriculum, and reward system that rewards athletes over scientists. All our efforts have failed to change these schools. Do we blame all these students who are looking for more, more inclusion and better ideas? Why kill the freaks?

Why does the Republican right wing hate marijuana? Note that the Taliban in Afghanistan do, basically the same: tolerate and encourage the poppy, but punish farmers growing cannabis. Why? In prisons overseas, where western drug/herb possessors are found, the heroin and cocaine dealers have the money to buy lawyers and protection, and bribe the guards to treat them like kings. In one prison, the guards would regularly beat the cannabis possessors, while serving tea and dinner to the heroin dealers in another room. Why? Because the US State Department pushed through an evangelical agenda. Some self-acclaimed 'Christian' priests and pastors, largely in the American south, understand full well that marijuana sometimes opens minds, and that means, they sometimes leave the Judaic-Christian tradition, to pursue Buddhism or become Pagans or secular servants of the Goddess of Mercy – and all this is intolerable to the mean uneducated American clerics and politicians. Is the USA similar to Iran?

Obviously the American people should be informed of a rational list of dangerous drugs, while placing their herbs in their

proper category.

That these mean, self-serving self-appointing 'representatives of God,' should set and determine US government policy, augurs poorly for a safe, just, democratic and financially solvent America.

Regarding morality, we speak of 'moral,' 'immoral,' and 'amoral.' Legally, there exists a third category as well: legal, illegal and a-legal. We don't have to legalize marijuana. We just need to deploy our limited resources more accurately to catch the dangerous drugs. Some 20 American states are looking at steep debts and insolvency; people are already perishing. It just stands to reason that the three levels of government exploit the situation, tax reefer, and get back to solvency. That's only rationale.

These are not my opinions: I've insisted on scientific rigor. In addition we've presented a scheme, a plan, whereby hard, dangerous, addictive drugs, like alcohol, speed, cocaine and heroin, can be drastically cut. If the a-legalization of marijuana turns out not to work, it can easily be rescinded. Why cannot our policies be flexible?

As I explained, cannabis is not a drug: it is an herb. And a noble one. The uses of hemp are too numerous to list. If the US does not start to grow hemp, it forces a high resource consumption of petroleum-dependent 'second bests.' I'm talking about paper, cardboard, plywood (which is poisonous), clothing and textiles of all kind, shoe leather, fiber board, heating fuel, and more. Hemp seeds and oil also have many good uses.

To solve this issue, to rationalize toxins and poisons, we must return to science and insist that science be the basis of our drug policies. This is a Class A civil rights issue. One can trace the error back to errors in science. The government bent science to enforce an unjust policy. They based their views on non-practicing physicians, none of whom studied herbs. Because plants are so complex, doctors just do not study herbs – not in school and not in their practice.

Science has reduced living organisms to just bundles of chemicals, simple molecules undergoing simple predictable mechanical reactions. The 'miracle' of modern bio-chemistry is still limited to simple organic molecules, featuring the geometric hexagonal carbon 'ring.' All this chemistry happens totally mechanically – or so they think. But cells are highly intelligent, and quickly adaptive: they are little cities, even more complex, because these micro-cities are basically factories. Inter-cellular life is even more amazing.

Science scoffs and says there is no 'life force.' There, their investigation stops. But the simple atom, is set up in a vibratory harmony that does obey the Law of the Seven and the Law of Three.

Up to now we have paid close attention to correcting obvious mistakes and confusions. Toxins and poisons are very different, and the most damage comes from taking a plant, then reducing it to 'active substances' synthesize then insert into the body. It is these refined and distilled products that constitute the most damage to the human, both biologically and socially (as a cost). It can be seen in the processing, the “refining' of food. It is seen in the deadly effects of liquor, heroin and cocaine and amphetamines. And ion prescription drugs as well. Such inorganic poisons often prove fatal .

But herbs are different. If inorganic drugs prove so poisonous and destructive, then their plant precursors might have other curative abilities, as herbs. Heroin may be highly dangerous, but a little pellet of fresh opium can (and will) save the life of a child with diarrhea. Red wine may be healthy but it is the plant material, not the alcohol, that confers the benefit. All liquors retain an essential plant component, and only wretches drink alcohol straight – a deadly mistake.

Powdered cocaine is highly dangerous, but chewing coca leaves is not even addictive. Chewing on a willow sprig provides a purer and safer relief than aspirin, which can be destructive to the stomach. Herbs are not studied by doctors because herbs are complex and sometimes slow-acting:'not effective immediately.' But history tells a different tale: Those herbal witch-doctors caused more help than harm, while Western 'medicine' was more harmful than good, until the 20th Century.

Our conclusions were confirmed by the Global Commission on Drugs, which released their finding in early June (2011). Marijuana should be decriminalized. It's just an herb with mild effects on the head – a little buzz – with no toxicity. While every human society may have experimented with plants, most plants they used for psychotropic effects and affects, were toxic. We are lucky that many Americans have eschewed liquor and hard drugs and some expensive prescription drugs, in preference to smoking a little pot, which is not toxic. Cannabis is an unusually noble weed, long in use, not just by the Central Asian tribes, but in sacred temples in Africa, Greece and Israel as well.

Is marijuana completely harmless? No. It seems to enhance whatever state the user is in – while pacifying it, a bit. It can induce psychosis, rarely, in people who are unaware of what is happening, or who are so rigid in their views or so habituated they cannot cope with the enhanced perceptions and a vivid interior. Teenagers will experiment with mind-altering drugs – but cannabis is an herb, and should be classified as such.

Many 'experts' believe pot-smoking inhibits motivation. But if you look carefully into cases, they all exhibit other reasons why a young person may not be motivated. Some of our American communities are actually sterile places: the inner city, the anonymous suburbs and their ridiculous uniformity, and in the rural areas as well, amongst the poor.

Now why would a young person not be motivated in America? Is he distracted by the media – too much TV and cell phone use? Or is his family toxic? Almost certainly, that pot-smoking high school drop-out failed to be acknowledged or recognized and appreciated by his immediate superiors. Is the recourse of these American children to cannabis dangerous? Not really. They might need an herbal medication, against boredom if nothing else. Why pump them full of drugs?

It used to be that a young person might expect that, should she educate herself, not break the law, he or she would find, eventually, a job that would use her/his hard-won competencies. That is not what is happening. Only 1/3 of those winning graduate degrees ever got a job in his or her field. Now, it is much worse. Less than one in 5 are finding any relevant work (over a 5 year period).

Now, how do you pay these people for the failure of a weak and bewildered government? You don't harm them, take away their rights, put them in prison. Don't you think these citizens might deserve a little smoke, just to calm them down?

Yes, marijuana is just compensation for many millions of Americans who have been effectively denied a place in this rapacious oil-heavy corporate capitalist economy. Because of its waste and anomie, its marginalization of most citizens, and its aggressive harming to its poor, the American form of capitalism is not even listed amongst the 12 kinds of capitalism we have isolated and studied. It's too wasteful. No other people should imitate it. And it is short lived.

-John Paul Maynard