Bleeding Edge

This morning of October 9th when we woke up in the Bay area of San Francisco, the power grid was out … and although this was a pre-announced power outage by the local electricity company PG&E — early morning complete & total chaos ensued.

Suddenly all the train crossings of the East bay were inoperable, ATM machines were out, all the traffic lights went dark, and all such nuanced difficulties that kept causing hundreds, if not thousands of fender-benders amongst the early morning commuters, who were driving recklessly due to being irate at the electricity outage and the resulting inoperable streets.

Consequently all traffic in East Bay was backed up, all the way to the next city, all the Universities, colleges, as well as all the schools were shuttered, banks went kaput, Wi-Fi routers crapped out, alarms were bleating everywhere, bakeries were out of bread because the night ovens were cold and couldn’t bake bread, the Wi-Fi wireless internet was off, and so were the mobile telephony networks wherever the mobile network towers run out of electricity, and so on, and on, and on…

Dude — what a mess…

And all of that happened because of expected strong winds that threaten to cause forest fires due to the potential of power boxes on the transmission poles sparking fires…

And although this East Bay power outage was pre-announced, expected and pre-planned for only a certain few hours of duration, and although in actuality it only lasted half the night — the results were immense, chaotic, and hugely disruptive.

Chaos, trauma, and anguish, resulted throughout, simply because of lack of electricity for a few night hours — when everyone is ordinarily supposed to be asleep.

Wow…

And this chaotic power outage, reminded me of another strange event, that took place about a month earlier, on September the 17th of this year 2019.

That event can only be described as the quantum chaos effect of when a yellow butterfly flew over Ukraine’s capital Kiev, right at midday, during the sweetest Indian summer that has ever descended upon Ukraine, and on that special date and at a safe distance too many thousands of miles — this fluttering of the fragile paper-thin wings during unseasonably warm weather in Ukraine, apparently caused an economic panic in Hong Kong that spread through contagion to the Shanghai Bunt, and to Beijing Financial Street, the communist country’s economic nerve center.

Never mind the reasons for this economic panic, but the effects of unseasonably warm weather in food production areas, are well documented in the World’s financial markets.

Quietly, the effects of this butterfly’s angelic dance, reverberated instantly around the world, and this fluttering of the wings of the yellow Kiev butterfly, seems to have brought long distance unintended effects elsewhere around the world, because unbeknownst to any of You, the global financial system went bust for the briefest of times… starting out in Hong Kong and spreading contagion everywhere you looked.

And thus, the cost of short-term overnight interbank loan, that is keeping the banks afloat, that is the settling of the cash position of banks overnight and is usually hovering around 0%, suddenly skyrocketed to more than 10% and has remained high ever since…

In response to this, and just two days after the butterfly flew in Kiev, the Federal Reserve injected a massive $128 billion into the global financial system via the overnight interbank lending market, in an effort to maintain cash liquidity for banks.

The effort is still going on with an uncertain end date…

The financial and business media were quiet, but also strived to make attempts to understand and to explain this sudden crisis in cash availability.

Was it a transient effect of corporations withdrawing money from short term money market funds in order to pay quarterly taxes in the U.S. on the 15th?

Or is it the effect of a large Treasury bond auction settling at the same time?

Could it be that the transient but severe spike in oil prices immediately after the attack on Saudi Arabia triggered margin calls in oil futures markets?

Because that would require those who had sold oil futures, to come up with hard US dollars to meet their obligations…

Some analysts have noted more structural factors, ranging from the Fed shrinking its excess currency and bank note reserves, which in turn shrinks cash available for overnight lending to banks, to shifts in foreign capital, to geopolitical issues.

Others noted that there had been growing rate instability for some time, and apparently that instability, flew under the radar of most observers.

One thing that is certain, is that regulatory measures instituted after the 2008 financial crisis, not only didn’t work to prevent this short and severe shock — by triggering Federal Reserve measures and imposing higher cash requirements on banks and corporations, they almost certainly contributed to it.

Add all these things up, and what emerges is a picture of serious fragility in the most important financial financial system in this earth.

Now, serious economists predict, that the Fed will need to inject $150 billion of liquidity every year to keep it functioning.

We rely on increasingly interconnected, interdependent systems today.

Beneath and enabling them is a range of highly disruptive technologies that have upended social, political, financial and other dimensions of our daily lives.

Those frustrated with the interminable debate over how to “take back” America must now, walk away and address a new reality.

And to do that, requires understanding the deep “How” of what we are facing today.

And it to understand that — it further behooves us to challenge the very terms of that debate.

Because today in America, the currency of evil statism, tyranny & hubristic violence coming from the so-called progressive Left, is coupled with the doltish simple mindedness, the deafness, the muteness, and the obtuse blindness from the conservative Right.

And thus all Americans in the middle, are facing the Firing squad of the two main parties that have formed the firing line, in a circular execution.

So it’s not only the financial system that is stressed right now, but it is the average American citizen, same as the whole of the knowledgable members of the Western civilization which is in a deep political, social, communal, financial & even foundational crisis.

On the Democrat party side, and on the generic Left, voyeuristic hubris is on full display in the progressive assumption of moral superiority and their wish to present some erroneous ability to “control” the world and its future, like a new gestapo, and through overwhelming force, sense of pride, and arrogance — they are seeking to impose their childish will, while lashing out in a murderous rage, if and when their temper tantrums are opposed.

On the Republican party side, there exists only an empty message, a melancholic nostalgia for a putative former era of American greatness, a misremembered time of opportunity and virtue, and in a strange way an admonishment of misbegotten acts of the past orthodoxy, a distinct memory lapse — that acts as balm to the Conservative Soul, when told in same way as the recanting of the war stories of our grandfathers who fought in the Great Wars.

Yet, today, the American Right is completely blind, deaf, and mute, to the impact that their administrations over the last decades upon most Americans, due to their singing songs of pride & praise, for their “patrons” who then provide them with cutlery, a place on the table, and a cot near the hearth…

And thus, the ordinary Americans have suffered from both parties mightily, as seen in the hollowed out communities, low-paying, flexible & elusive jobs, and try as best they can, to wade through their opioid strewn lives, of random addictions, in scenes of quiet carnage all over the American heartland.

That’s the American Gothic of today.

And yet the coastal cities that have long since descended into nihilistic savagery, with a gloss of carefully protected elite glamour, riding on top of the rest of America, like grease on top of the pot — enjoy their riches and scoff at the poor sheeting at their barbaric displays of wealth and debauchery. Sodoma & Gomorrah, could have been today’s New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles or Seattle…

But Babylon is always the capital, that “Whore of Babylon” is perennially Washington DC, as indeed her critics always have said…

Yet this American crisis is acute and systemic, and the steam of this boiling pot has got to find an escape or we are all gonna blow up…

And we must tend to the boiling pot, all over the World, because this crisis, is far from limited to America, or to other developed countries in the West. It is boiling all over the planet, and one need only look at the so called Civil War in Yemen today to understand the failure of all of ur global peace making and Stability institutions that we thought capable of stemming the flow of Evil…

Yemen is where a proxy war is being fought today, and the failure of the United Nations, of the United States, of the Big Five of the Security Council of the UN, and of all the rest of the International community, is manifest.

And it is manifest vividly in the arc of failure because we can see all the great institutions of the past now being centrally focused on perpetuating the corruption for personal gain, and the debauchery that their officials bring to the job. It is indeed this terribly disconcerting erosion of the post WWII transnational institutions, such as the United Nations, the big five, the G7, the G20, and all others, and their failure to even see the scope of the Evil that faces us.

Yet this maybe by design, because the administrative elites who manage those institutions, and who identify as transnational entities, have gained immense wealth, look at the new Billionaire status, of the Clintons and of the Obamas, and so many other heads of State that undeservedly gathered conspicuous wealth, and have gained global elite status as a result, and thus continue to benefit from these self serving elites institutions — only interested in their own self-aggrandizing — as a result.

And of course, much like the dying children of Yemen, the ordinary citizens are hugely harmed, by this untenable situation.

In the US the rise of the Uniparty system, out of the partisanship of the two-main-parties, and their complete domination of US elections through the corruption and the anti-progress obstinacy of the American political class, reflects the tacit understanding that old dichotomies — the collective vs the individual, social responsibility vs individual free choice, and state control vs free markets — no longer exist, nor can they address the new reality of our Country’s reaction of the Citizen to the Status Quo.

Because when the will to power, meets nostalgic ennui, power always wins.

As evidenced by the intolerable, inhumane, and shameful situation that persists in the Middle East today and all around the world where “Might makes Right” and where the weak ones, such as the children of Yemen, meet their awful end.

And those who are supposed to save the ones without agency, the ones without voice and the ones without power — as the so called progressive Left, and the screaming benches of constant and perpetual indulgence of outrage — are simply themselves hellbent on asserting power and imposing their will on the weak ones at the point of the gun, as evidenced by the American Antifa thugs and their brethren, the militant wing of the Democrat party.

That is the awful corruption of the Democrats, the shameful corruption of the DNC, and the Clinton machine, and of the theft of the 2016 primary elections as performed by Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders — who then to his eternal shame, turned around and supported the thief, in exchange for a lakefront home to spend his declining years of shame and tedium…

What is to be with these awful people going unpunished?

And why can’t we get along and discover new ways to exercise our political freedom?

We need drastic options and alternatives to these gatekeepers of our Citizens’ power to elect Good Leaders to represent us and to lead us out of the morass.

We need them and we ned them now.

And this is where the Lincoln party fits in the mosaic of the American body Politic…

So any alternative party, requires new ways of analyzing events and new categories, within which to frame a message that shapes a hopeful future where men and women, communities, and the nation, are both free and responsible to one another.

And that is what the Lincoln party of Independents for America, exactly does, in order to inoculate our Nation, our Civilization, and our Empire, against the possibility of sudden collapse due to the looming Civil War…

Seems we are the only ones working our butts off, to help our Civilization avoid collapse, due to American Civil War 2.0

A lofty goal indeed.

But why are we even doing this?

We are doing it for the children.

That’s all.

Just look at the children’s faces in Yemen and you will understand.

Enough said.

Because a Civil War today with our vast arsenals of nuclear weapons will surely destroy all of the Earth’s civilizations in a clean fell swoop.

And to avoid this awful and dismal fate — we want to teach the rest of America that we can screw up our complex systems real easy.

We can end this thing we call the American experiment in a really easy way.

And as the Leader of the Lincoln party and as a Leader of America, I want to teach all of you, the how’s and the why’s of Civilizational Collapse — so that we don’t do this daft thing on our own.

And to teach this important lesson I shall all I can — so to that in the end, I hope that you can derive some clues about a Nation’s collapse, from an ancient civilization collapse of a seemingly healthy nation state, some three thousand years ago.

A collapse of a trading empire, that has now been recorded as a major extinction event, and the study of which, has brought about a brand new scientific discipline, to study that which occurred when the “Unthinkable” catastrophe and collapse occurred in the empire of Ugarit in 1192 BC.

Ugarit was a nation state, on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean sea, as represented by the kingdom of Ugarit that was thriving, with a sheltered deep port, sitting at the intersection of the great imperial spheres of influence — Egyptian, Hittite, distant Mesopotamia and others all adjacent to a string of kingdoms along the Mediterranean coast.

In that way, the Kingdom of Ugarit, was a bit like what Panama is today…

And at that time, Ugarit was also a central player in a rather vibrant international economy, yet fragile to it’s internal cilil war like convulsions — akin to something like Hong Kong’s state & economy today, which is riveted and buffeted by the pro-Democracy demonstrations and it’s civil war like divisions.

Yet back then, it was Ugarit, where its leaders, who were the wise Kings of Ugarit, were able to keep calm and control by deftly balancing the books of national independence, by alleviating enmities with powerful and militant neighbors by the paying of “tributes” while alloying friendships by contributing in alliances, strengthening their reach by contributing subscriptions with the various empires, or tying the knot of strategic weddings with neighboring kingdoms — all of these acts of leadership, carefully calculated and coordinated for maintaining a power balance for their own independence.

And of course, at that time, also, no one wanted to disrupt the critical trade that flowed in-n-out, throughout Ugarit’s harbors and onto the neighboring states, because above all else, no one wanted to disrupt the flow of crucial materials for metallurgy — the art of making metallic weapons — such as tin, pewter, & bronze, or of tools and foodstuffs, or implements of finished bronze and other metal ingots, and of the high value pottery, glass implements, as well as jewelry, crafts and artifacts.

And because the pottery, precious stones and crafted goods, along with the more plebeian and ordinary goods, that regularly flowed into Ugarit, came from not so exotic places such as Crete, produced by the Greeks, and the Minoans, and also came from far more exotic places, further afield — it was extremely important to be able to also find eager and sophisticated wealthy buyers, in their midst, able to buy the products off the boats in the harbor-side auctions, of the port towns of Ugarit.

Three thousand years ago this nation and its civilization were going through a sophisticated time, a time of international trade and cultural exchange, and indeed a time of prosperity and power.

Read the words of those people of Ugarit, the administrators of it, as were recorded by themselves, and recently discovered from remnant tablets, found near the Royal Palace, where the houses of wealthy merchants and government officials were situated. To the east lived Mr Rapanu, whose records — written in multiple languages — show that his vast trading, postal and financial exchange network, carried his diplomatic correspondences, southwest to the Pharaoh in Egypt, northeast to the Hittite vice regent at Carchemish, and southeast to the Babylonian rulers, bankers and military men.

Some of those letters allude to the military problems with the so called “Sea Peoples” who roamed the Mediterranean sea as brigands, or pirates and mercenaries, at the disposal of anyone who cold pay for their services…

Be that as it may, but the bulk of this ancient administrator’s records show a lively, multifaceted trade in metals, pottery and other goods which he sold to distant places, and that he had to deliver either by sea or with caravans traveling overland. Sea travel at the time was relatively safe — at least from natural threats, and at any rate, since the ships sail with the seasonal winds, hugging the shoreline of the Mediterranean sea, all the way from Tyre in the Levant, to Cyprus and on to SW Anatolia, and then on to the Aegean, and all around the shores of the Mediterranean and even further west, past the gates of Hercules…

Yet, the overland travel was more difficult and far more dangerous, as caravans were marked targets of highwaymen, ambushing tribes, kidnapping and thieving bands of roaming knaves, and it always required high quality donkeys, mules and horses. And when traveling and transporting goods overland in the desert sandy environs — it required high quality dromedaries, camels, and guides who could read the sky and the winds, in order to carve a safe path through the deserts of Arabia and beyond; all the way to China.

To this end, indeed, the professional Mr Rapanu employed a skilled staff who breed, train and manage his herd of transport animals, the dromedaries of this trade, and some of this herd, was purchased by the Royal Palace purchasing agent, for the state’s own trade efforts.

Also nearby, live other merchants and officials, such as Mr Yabninu, a wealthy trader and previously the regulator of trade within the vast administration of Ammittamru II, who holds military rank in the elite Mariannu. Mr Rasap-abu, less wealthy but also a member of the Mariannu and supervisor of the harbor, receives customs duties and provides the palace with an inventory of imported goods and materials. The prefect Mr Urtenu engages in extensive correspondence with far-flung contacts in Egypt, all of the major Phoenician ports, the inland areas of Syria, Babylon, and Hattusa, capitol of the Hittite empire…

And all this civilian business created vast deposits of wealth for Ugarit, and it’s peoples so that they advanced their Arts, their Temples, their Homes, and their beautiful public buildings, their palaces and their administration centers, and in general their wealth led to the flourishing of their commercial & trading Mercantile Civilization…

So these were the fervent occupations of Ugarit for millennia of their existence, because these healthy trading & mercantile empires are not born overnight…

Yet, two years after all of these correspondences of this highly complex trade and intercourse with the world at large — this Kingdom of Ugarit and its capital city, would all lie in ruins, with its great public buildings reduced to rubble and ash. The private dwellings were all leveled as if an atomic bob had gone off, and its people, are all dead, and most were left unburied…

The great city of Ugarit and its famed port city, were no more, and perhaps more crucially, they were never rebuilt.

A variety of explanations have been advanced for the collapse of this brilliant, Late-Bronze-Age-Civilization of Ugarit; who, same as many other late-bronze-age-civilizations of the region, suddenly expired…

The key word here is “suddenly”

Because suddenly, these great civilizations, whose multinational, multicultural, technological, economic, diplomatic, and urban sophistication, would not be seen again until the twentieth century AD were erased from the face of this Earth as if they had never existed before.

Of course, we don’t know definitively, why these civilizations disappeared, but we think that maybe it was due to pirate attacks sacking their vital port cities, or martial marauders from other neighboring nations, or the waging of bloody battles and systemic wars that decimated the population, or it may have been the effects of climate change, or even extinctions of civilizations caused by extended droughts.

Or maybe the disappearance of these famed and fabled cities and nations, could be due to the invasions of the Sea Peoples, or perhaps the advanced cities and the progressive kingdoms like Ugarit, were ravaged by virulent epidemics that spread via the unchecked & unprecedented free trade and the resultant transportation of foodstuffs, goods and people.

Or perhaps environmental destruction through the effects of acidification of the soil, or even enemies salting of the arable lands, causing a permanent salinity of the hummus, that destroyed their arable lands and diminished their food supplies as their resources dwindled through intensive agriculture, that demanded greater and greater areas of healthy cultivatable land.

Yet the most compelling explanation is simply, that these civilizations were exhausted through an overall systemic cybernetic collapse, due to the complexity of their civilizational systems that had too many points of failure, built within, and not enough resilience pathways, and outlets of chaos dissemination.

And that is today, the main theory of their Civilizations’ collapse, because the Mid and Late Bronze Age civilizations were built on complicated, uber-complexed, and interconnected systems of trade, diplomacy, military alliance, agriculture, and cultural diffusion — that left very little to chance, and thus were completely interlocked in a “live-or die-together” cybernetic envelope. And as these countries became increasingly complex, they outgrew the ability of the ruling classes to control them, and thus, by themselves, became more brittle, and cracked and failed into the abyss of history’s forgotten Peoples.

Accidents, incidents, random events, or the “here and there” the “this and that” and the ordinarily issued challenge, or the next troublesome issue, proved too much, and that was the destructive weakest link, that broke the wheel of progress, until the whole set of interconnecting systemic limbs — all collapsed together and in unison.

The study of Ugarit and the surrounding countries’ collapse, has spawned today a new scientific discipline, that is the study of complex adaptive networked systems, and this is the field of study that shows us how such system collapse occurs. And it is this field of scientific study, which suggests a new focus for thinking through the prospects of today’s America and its long term capacity for resilience and preservation against collapse.

Mind you, we are not talking about complexity, where the whole is far more than the sum of its parts, but about simple multicellular biology…

Now, you would be right to ask me what the hell does biology have to do with the Kingdom of Ugarit during the middle ages of the Eastern Mediterranean sea?

To this, I would answer you with a different question, such as this one here:

My friend, have you ever pondered the mystery of slime molds?

Me neither.

But for many years biologists were deeply puzzled by the emergence and disappearance of them on forest floors. They sprung up among rotting debris, slowly move about, sprout spore bodies, and then — disappear for a while.
Mycologists noted that their emergence seemed linked to moisture and acidity on the ground. But despite decades of search, they were unable to identify the controlling cells, the equivalent of a nervous system, that coordinate slime mold behavior. And that’s not surprising. Despite the appearances, slime molds are not actually organisms. Instead they are what complexity theorists call a “complex adaptive system.” They are “complex” because they emerge from a very large number of interactions among a large number of cellular elements (cells). The cells are “adaptive,” i.e. they have different behaviors depending on a constellation of conditions immediately surrounding them. Those conditions include moisture and acidity, but also the presence of other cells that influence those environmental factors. The result is a “system,” a set of things that interact so as to produce repeated behaviors. Complex systems exhibit behaviors that are often non-intuitive to us.

You may have heard of the so-called “butterfly effect” in which a small behavior like a butterfly flapping its wings allegedly could affect weather half a world away.

That’s an exaggeration, but complex chaotic systems do have sometimes very non-linear, non-proportional behaviors in response to small changes.

Sophisticated fluid dynamics equations capture this in many cases. If the system elements are adaptive, however, you can’t predict its behavior with equations. You need to run massive computer simulations programs in which software agents programmed with the element behaviors interact over many iterations. This is the basis for “agent based modeling” built with cellular automata—bits of code that interact with each other according to rules.

The more sophisticated agent based models program software elements with a degree of uncertainty in their behavior. In other words, the agent’s response to events and circumstances is drawn from a probability distribution rather than being hard wired—a degree of freedom of choice, as it were. In either case, it requires hundreds of thousands of interaction steps, and often many more, to get something resembling stable system behavior. Change small initial conditions, do it again, and you’re likely to get different behavior. Do it again and again and again and again and you might see some general similarities. When the elements of a complex system are adaptive, i.e. have varying behaviors, the resulting complex adaptive system’s overall behaviors are said to “emerge” from those complex interactions. They can’t be predicted directly. And that means that they can’t be directly controlled, because in order to control a system, the system’s response to interventions must be predictable.

Let that sink in.

What cannot be predicted, cannot be controlled.

Influenced?

Perhaps.

But not controlled.

Case in point: If I heat a sealed container of water on my stove, it will contain a very large number of water molecules. The added heat causes those water molecules to move more and more rapidly and to bounce against one another, resulting in increased pressure on the container walls.

Fair warning: Please do not try this at home…

Because, that water, does not form a complex system.

The laws of thermodynamics from physics accurately predict just how much heat transfer is required to produce a given increase in pressure. The water behaves according to predictable equations, in the aggregate and consistently over repeated attempts. The whole is the sum of its parts. Complex adaptive systems do not behave according to predictable equations. In such systems, the whole is significantly bigger than the sum of its parts and has its own behaviors.

Please keep in mind that slime molds are at the very low end of complexity…

Us people, humans — we are surrounded by, we have constructed, and we are made up internally of far more complex systems.

And on the outside of our bodies — we have complex systems like economies, social communities, infrastructures, telecommunications and transport network infrastructure that link continents, and trade across those links. That has deep implications for thinking past today’s current political impasse, which we’ll explore in a moment.

But first it’s worth pondering fireflies, because of their connections, between fireflies, fads, and finance, since unlike the lowly and unappealing slime mold, fireflies flashing in summer twilight, captivate our attention, grab our oversight, and delight all of us.

But in the latter 1990s, to the graduate student Duncan Watts they also posed an interesting mystery. When the male fireflies in a local area like your backyard flash, they do so in a synchronized rhythm. Add a new firefly to the mix who was flashing at a different rate and they’ll soon be back in sync—but often at a rhythm that is neither the original one of the local swarm nor that of the newcomer. How, Watts wondered, does that happen? What determines the new rate? Fireflies are not easy to study. For one thing, they won’t flash in captivity. But Watts persevered and the results lay the groundwork for a new insight regarding complex systems.

It seems that fireflies form social networks, relationships that persevere and influence their behavior even when the flies involved are not physically close to one another.

And therefore, as the new fly is introduced, she, and those near her begin to synchronize their flashing. But they move out of physical proximity before the synchronization fully occurs. Each of them then begins to sync with and influence the flies temporarily nearby — but also with those they’d begun to connect with earlier, even if they happen to be on other sides of your back yard by now. Over time the new flash rate emerges out of highly complex sequences of interactions in all directions of the local group.

Fireflies, it seems, form complex adaptive networked systems.

Some complexity has internal network structure.

With this crucial insight, a new discipline emerged.

Once we knew what to look for, we began to realize that complex adaptive networked systems are all around us.

Natural ones like ecologies, and the neural interactions of the human brain.

Architected ones, like the ones we have constructed ourselves, like the aerial transportation networks, that played a key role in the spread of potentially deadly H1N1 influenza virus in 2009’s outbreak that threatened to become a global pandemic.

Betrayal can easily come also from the power generation and transmission networks, that we have created as it happened today in San Francisco bay area, because these power grids, can unravel quickly, widely, and simply, all due to a minimal damage in only one location.

Electricity, communications networks, phones, the internet, and the Web that sits atop all of them. Financial networks that link consumers and small businesses across continents through the services of intermediaries like SWIFT interbank systems, corresponding banks, national banks, community banks, wall street banks, investment banks, internet banks, FinTech companies, Paypal, credit cards, bank transfers, bitcoin and crypto currencies, crypto-exchanges, FX networks, and all other decentralized systems of finance…

Social networks of all sizes and geographical distributions, that in turn promulgate influential news, memes, fads and fakes, are particularly vulnerable, same as the societies that incorporate these networks and many more like them that are combined with deeply disruptive technologies, like powerful visual processing in smart phones, artificial intelligence supporting deep predictive analytics, and the emergence of Big Tech monopolies facilitating their usage.

And if we apply these principles when building a rapidly expanding surveillance state, while placing increasingly powerful, high tech weapons (including cyber capabilities) in the hands of rogue states, and non-state actors, and doing it while eroding the local natural connections that jobs, communities, and families have traditionally provided — it would appear that the result of all these, is a recipe for civilizational collapse, far greater than that of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean basin.

Because all these networks, and in particular all of the adaptive networks, impact our lives today at every level from the local household to the increasing inability of transnational structures and agreements to provide stability and well-being to the citizenry of the West. And not only of the West, since globally oriented trade, and other multilateral agreements have destroyed traditional communities and societies elsewhere as well. Radical Islamist terror networks and violent domestic terrorism groups like Antifa, are only two examples of the response such disruption triggers — and those networks are themselves enabled and empowered by modern technologies, financial networks, and other networked systems that were originally devised in the West.

So, if our current political thinking is to be effective in the face of System Collapse, we must curtail the hate and division as job number one in order to avoid Civil War 2.0

And that means that the ideology of the progressive Left’s collectivist juggernaut, must also address the centrality of complex adaptive networks in our lives, and their impact on our society’s resilience, because their ideology as it stands today — is a complete failure. And because such networks have deeply disrupted the status quo economically, socially, and geopolitically — it also devoid of any backstop to brake their slide to destruction.

As for the ideology of the Marketplace, it also means that while the anodyne talk of free markets emanating form the Right’s Republicanism, is moronic talk, if it is served piece meal, while their beloved corporations cozy up with the regulators and create silos and monopolies “free” of innovation and disruption, and while the conservatives’ talk of the primacy of the individual gets the Media’s attention, while ignoring the physical and virtual community contexts within which we all live as individuals — has deeply failed.

And thus the current populist wave that almost elected Bernie Sanders and because Hillary stole his primary elections, the populace elected Donald Trump to the White House — is only one simple evidence of that ideological failure of the Uniparty system operating it’s oligarchical & elitist tyranny in America today.

But what can we say about the ideology of people who understand the complex adaptive networks, like the Lincoln party’s complex adaptive network itself?

Political theorists are not, for the most part, prepared to delve into the mathematics of modern network science. Fortunately, they don’t need to be, because what follows are a few insights that can already be gained from this new discipline. They present a challenge and opportunity for new political thought, about the complex adaptive system’s fragility and how to built resilience within the general National system. To that end we can learn a lot by recalling that in 2003, severe bad weather, caused several power plants in rural Italy to go offline. Within 12 hours, 56 million people in two countries were sitting in the dark with no internet access. And although the blackout occurred shortly after allied force entered Iraq, with many of them staged through Italy’s NATO bases, no evidence of terrorism or sabotage was found. After some finger pointing the whole thing was quietly buried deep in a bureaucratic report.

Buried deeply until 2009, when two very senior physicists who had turned their attention to complex adaptive networked systems took another look at the data. Chaos theoretician Shlomo Havlin and International Boltzmann Medal for Physics awardee Eugene Stanley, uncovered a key counterintuitive behavior of such networks, took to looking at a network as an isolated system, and it was fairly easy to identify the elements, or the links between elements, whose removal would most impact the network overall. So they posited the theory that if there was damage in a single node (element) that was highly connected — then the damage would have surely linked-up between highly connected nodes, that otherwise didn’t share links in common, and therefore, the power outages occurred.

In essence the learning from this is, that if you want to damage the whole Web, you could start by taking out Google.

And if you want to throw a modern & highly developed country into chaos, you could start by attacking a key city.

Or if you want to cripple Osama bin Laden’s terror network, you could start by assassinating the most senior official who is visible, like the third in the hierarchy.

But that’s not what happened in the 2003 Italy blackout, because modern networks don’t stand in isolation. They interconnect and depend on one another, like the power grid and internet do in most Western nations.

Internet nodes require power to operate. But the internet in turn is used to monitor and control the power grid in many countries. When those local plants in Italy went down in 2003, a regional internet node also failed because it lacked a backup power system. And that created problems in the wider power grid. Which affected more internet nodes and…well, you get the picture.

A cascade of accelerating failure that spread much more widely than the initial damage. Complex adaptive networks become fragile when they depend on a limited number of interconnections among them.

Within a network itself, the same thing is true, so if you use regulatory power to limit, say, the energy production options available to a community, a city, or a state — you are introducing hidden fragility.

At first it might seem that the power grid has become more efficient, or more ecologically sound. But instead what we have done is actually made the electrical grid, much more susceptible to major unravelling collapse.

And a collapse of the power grid spreads to all other systems, as we all discovered in the Bay area today, boucle of a pre-planned power outage by PG&E that not only closed down schools, colleges, and Universities — but it hampered the operations of all institutions thus closing down the vast majority of them…

From the hospitals, and the banks, that after exhausting the fuel of their diesel backup generators — they shut down, to the train transportation grid that shut down because of the unworkability of the street crossings where automobiles and people kept crossing since the barriers were out of operation. The disturbance of the trains, kept the supplies of food and medicine from reaching the people living in the large California cities. And after a time, this pre-planned power outage has started affecting public health.

And as a memory, of another disastrous power outage — we all owe a great debt of gratitude to the Cajun “Navy” and all other scores of volunteers whose prompt rescue work helped avert a potential major crisis of dysentery and more epidemic diseases, right after Hurricane Harvey flooded the houses, stock yards, and the refineries of Houston, Texas, back in 2012.

Look around and you will find many instances where the regulatory state, the Big Tech, and all of the unchecked & highly aggressive progressivism, have introduced serious fragility, into the very networked systems they celebrate as modern advances, and into society as a whole, including the minority communities that the Dems purport to protect and favor.

And indeed there are two opposites to fragility in complex networked systems, but the first one is always resilience, that is the ability to absorb local damage without triggering a cascade of failures, catastrophes, and unravellings. Resilience occurs in complex adaptive networked systems when there are redundant local connections. Our grandparents grew a few vegetables, if they didn’t simply live on farms. We rely on produce imported from several continents away. Our parents worked in jobs that were linked to other local and national companies in a local or national economy. The 1990s and 2000s saw many industries and jobs move overseas, making the dependence links between jobs here and those industries much more fragile. And when jobs are fragile, so are local communities, economies, and families.

Healthy ecologies host a variety of plant and animal species, suited to the climate and terrain. If weather changes, rainfall patterns shift, or flooding occurs — some species may be affected, but the ecology as a whole, can continue to thrive and adapt.

In essence: Resilience absolutely requires local redundancy.

Another opposite to fragility, is anti-fragility, the ability to actually thrive as a result of uncertainty or change. In theory, free market economies under conditions of classical liberalism promote economic and social anti-fragility as they reward innovation and risk taking. But that analysis is fraught with blind spots when the networked nature of today’s context is acknowledged.

This standard slogan of old school conservativism is blind to the cascade of second and third order effects, that failure can introduce. To make the large scale complex adaptive networks that constitute communities, regions, nations, and economies anti-fragile requires first making them resilient. And resilience requires inefficiencies in the form of local and regional redundancies and diverse approaches.

The bad news, is that taking the conceptual initiative, it becomes clear that the bad news is that Western civilization, and the traditional conservatism that considers itself the West’s true defender, face a truly existential crisis — mediated in part by the highly disruptive tech-based changes.

The good news is that we have the opportunity to change the conceptual terms of the political debate.

Yet, to do so requires that we first accurately perceive and understand the workings of complex adaptive networked systems, increasingly interconnected and interdependent on one another, in our lives at individual, community, national, and geopolitical levels. It means recognizing that the critical importance of the family occurs in the context of other networks, including virtual ones that conservatives tend to ignore or discount.

It means re-evaluating economic policy with an understanding of the ways in which disruptive tech has undermined the ability of central banks to control currency values. It means demonstrating to American voters how we can re-weave new, resilient, diverse social and economic fabrics that support their dignity and well-being.

Our modern word “crisis” comes from the Classical Greek verb “krinein” that means “to decide.”

And decide we must do.

Because when a crisis emerges, it forces a decision.

Yet, who makes the decision for all, is rather important here too, because how will the misinformed American leaders promoted by the two political parties, such as the ones we’ve seen lately, can positively affect the disillusionment of the American Citizens, who are fed up, by the conservative or the liberal impasse, and their lack of anything but transactional leaders who constantly fail to address the many & deep crises that are facing the Western civilization today?

Because if we want to open up the way forward for RESILIENCE — we must address the deeply interconnected, interdependent, complex networked nature of the world today, and of the fragilities that have been created in it, carefully avoiding anything that might lead to a Civil War 2.0 in this America of our time.

And as a practitioner of the Art of Cybernetics — a scientific discipline that speaks to that system complexity and introduces the necessary resilience already — so does the Lincoln party that is the party of SCIENCE and REASON, along with a capital L for LOGIC … and for the LONGING for our Democracy and Republic to exists for the ages of ages.

So now you can consider yourself fully briefed, and perhaps also fully, and existentially, warned.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

A nuclear exchange even if it were a limited one such as the one constantly brewing between Pakistan and India, or between North Korea and the United States — will surely kick up enough radioactive ash, dust, and dark matter into the upper reaches of the atmosphere where it will stay long enough to block sunlight and launch our precious green Earth into a multi-season nuclear winter that will shut down our agriculture for quite a few years — and therefore kill off the great majority of the human species, throughout both hemispheres of this planet…

Same thing would happen if there is a limited nuclear exchange with Iran and whomever else wants to join the nuclear club…

Or if Iran stupidly is blown up along with its few nukes by a stray Israeli pre-emptive attack and then a really limited nuclear exchange occurs…

Or if the US lobs a few nuclear warhead ICBMs onto China’s nuclear proxy, the Pyongyang hydra of terror, North Korea…

Or if we just do it by ourselves lobbing nukes onto ourselves, in a self destructive and hugely suicidal version of the misguided Civil War 2.0 for the new millennium.

All manners of scenarios of gloom & doom exist out there and are all outlined by the Union of Concerned Scientists who control the nuclear clock that is about to chime midnight and is at the closest point that is has ever been to striking the Midnight bells — since it’s inception.

Even during the Cuban missile crisis this doomsday clock was not as close to striking midnight as it stands now, a mere 45 seconds before midnight…

THat’s how close we are to our certain demise and to the total and complete annihilation of our Civilization.

Does anyone else (bedsides You reading this missive) even remembers the great people and the artful, joyful, well mannered and well administered, yet complex civilization of Ugarit?

Methinks, not.

And how can anyone remember Peoples and Civilizations long ago lost in the sands of time?

And some of you – no doubt shall ask, why on earth do we need to be reminded of them “lost peoples” by Dr Churchill?

Am just doing my duty to alert my people to what happens when we choose to play with matches inside a tinderbox called “Detente” and “National Security” with “Nuclear Proliferation Policies” and with concepts such as “Civil War” forgetting the ending of that awful movie that is played in the heads of the archeologists and long ago Historians who studied the demise of all the great empires, that came and went with the frequency of gnats, and fireflies, whose life and light extinguishes within eight hours or so…

And that is the dance of the Kiev butterfly, whose brief life span, signals the onset of the harsh winter and the snows of Ukraine that right now threaten to upend the United States upcoming 2020 presidential elections, where yours truly has also thrown his har into the ring, due to the uncertainty factor and to the dearth of anyone strong enough and wise enough to lead our Nation to safety.

Because I am the one person that has seen the evils of Civil War in many dark places around the world where my philanthropic missions have brought a small measure of succor to those in need after suffering the devastation orchestrated by the forces of Evil against the most innocent of all — the elderly, the women, and the babes.

And if you want to start seeing things as they are and to dissuade yourselves from any ideas about internecine conflict in our country amidst the fratricidal politics of today’s Uniparty system of America — you just see what happens today to the children. of Yemen during that country’s Civil uncivil war…

And because I know these things and I have faced the Evil unleashing this horror in the eyes — I can stare back at those evil men and women who want to unleash this horror upon our own country once again, as if the carnage of the 1860s was not enough to teach us anything about Civil (uncivil) war.

However should we want to go that route — one thing is for certain: Those unlucky few, who will survive a nuclear tipped Civil Was in America, will certainly fall back to the stone age, and will have to fight their next wars with sticks & stones, and maybe with a few bows and arrows too…

Going back to flintstones might be a fitting scenario for some evil doers who spew hate and derision 24/7 behind the complex safety of their satellite televisions, and their personal digital screens, not even being able to imagine how this nastiness will end…

And I ask you again this: Do you think that we are destined to go quietly into the night, as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas railed against?

Are we ready to disappear as a People and after dimming our Light, to go away leaving behind unburied our victims, and disappear from the face of this Earth, to not even be remembered by the historians of the next thousand years?

Or will we be effaced from History and forgotten as that failed experiment in a Constitutional Republic that kept Democracy alive for a few generations, before government by the people, for the people, and from the people — disappeared completely from the face of this Earth?

At least — and I surely hope that this disaster like the one the people of Yemen today go through — will never come to pass for America.

And I make here a solemn promise, that if I have anything to say and do about it, this great country of ours will be saved, and it will continue on it’s path to Glory, and it shall be remembered as the leading light of History — because I believe that we still have got a lot to give to the World, and that our best days, are up ahead of us, in this tortuous path of History and Civilization, that we call the Journey of the American Experiment in Humanity’s greatness…

So let us come together again as brothers and sisters and rejoice in forgiving each others’ sins and misdeeds, and let’s embrace each other because we can do well in this country together.

And because it is our Wise Leadership and Strong Statemanship, that can alter the course of History and because it usually takes just one Man to do just that, in order to save our Civilization from Collapse — I offer myself up to you, to become this Leader, that will set the standard of Quality and Excellence for generations to come, but most importantly, to be the Leader that saved our Country, our Civilization, and our People from destruction.

My grandfather proved that axiom (One man saving the whole Civilization) and I aim to prove it as well. So give me the helm, to steer this great boat of ours, to play the heavy swollen seas, safely away from the blackjacks, the shallows, and the hurricanes, to a course of wisdom before America and its Democracy gets lost and flounders in the

Let us not go quietly into the night with harry but a whimper, after a big bang in the night. And let us not get swallowed up wholemeal, by the sands of time, as the Ten Thousand Empires that Herodotus, the father of history, reminds us, that had existed, well before his time, but nobody remembered their names any longer … so he could not record them for posterity either…

And since this piece was written on the day of Yom Kippur — may the power of forgiveness allows us to forgive our own and each other’s sins, and may we go ahead and give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of self-love and thus to allow ourselves to take our minds off, the hate & discord that surely leads to the immense horrors of the Civil War, and instead find the way, to allow all of us, to focus on the Power of Love.

Because the Power of Love is the only thing that will allow us, to cast away our sins, and become healed, renewed and re-sanctified, as People of God once again.

And let us rejoin our human family, and our brethren of America, in a sacrificial feast of Love and Tenderness, where we sacrifice our egotistical thinking, and replace it with the abundant love, this new season of wise leadership can bring to America.

And may the good God bless you, and may our commonly loved One God, also bless America and heal its internal divisions that are the present and clear danger and the cancer in our body politic.

Let us not allow a few winds to disrupt our Civilization like the strong winds today, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Northern California, where the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has turned off the lights and has purposefully cut power to as many as 700,000 customers in 34 of California’s 58 counties due to the severe fire risk.

These blackouts, which were announced less than 24 hours before the first homes and businesses in areas surrounding San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Sacramento and Northern California’s Wine Country all lost power, as a preventative measure that was meant to stop electrical equipment from sparking a fire when high winds and low humidity make these parts of the Golden State a tinderbox. These outages may stretch into next week, according to PG&E’s decision to shut off power, because PG&E pointed to a red-flag severe windstorm warnings, from the National Weather Service, that showed from Wednesday morning on, the Bay Area will see “extreme fire danger,” high winds, and humidity levels, well below 20 percent…

Indeed, on Wednesday morning, gusts of around 90 miles per hour were recorded in the hills of Berkeley and beyond…

And the PG&E move to shut down electricity might have contributed to avoiding scenes like this one from the fast-moving Saddleridge fire in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, that has charred dozens of homes, many thousands of acres of chaparral and forested lands, as it has closed down roads, byways, and freeways, and has also forced many thousands of people to flee their communities in order to seek shelter from the flames consuming their carefully patched together livelihoods.