Community Entanglements

A long time ago a person I hardly knew gave me a recording of The Soul of Black Peru, it was a magnificent orchestration of Samba music, if that is samba as I am not an expert. Today as I sit to write this and I think how her acquaintance with me had fulfilled so many sweet moments and yet I did not know her at a personal level.

I don’t know what motivate her, it was an unexpected gift, but her kindness drew me much to think of her often, to enjoy the music and now as I write this I am looking at the CD and reaching back to her smile, and her soul.

When we are at a football match, and hundreds of thousands are watching with us, we are entangled in community. Our fervor our actions our anxieties are all troubled and inspired towards the same cause, football fans all over the world synchronize their humanity to overwhelm themselves with the feeling of community, the game is a secondary result, a means to an end.

Mickey Mouse has a lot in common with many of us. Personally that forever happy ringing smile is a nuisance, but many of us fall prey to its salutations, many of us feel something in Mickey that we don’t need to feel at some profound level, but that smoothly moves us to feel a sense of happiness, a somewhat conventional happiness, of children joined together round and around chewing lollipops.

A soap opera combines together an essence of common worries and trivialities which amount to a personal tragedy but can not impact much beyond that personal sphere, even as the acts, betrayal, lust, grief, sin, gossip are themselves exponentially replicated throughout families and relationships, they never become events of a universal order, this is true even of dolphins who practice rape and birds and frogs sodomy. The events are in themselves localized by the low energy impact. That is, the world will not collapse nor will it endure a war based on those machinations.

A television set rises into being from our need of exercising a communion with the world. The telephone joins us with those individuals which we feel we must have a personal connection with; planes, cars and ships link us live to that place where we feel our history or to that person that our longings can not ignore and thus turn into desire.

News and commercials are how those parts of the world that we are not willing to excert energy upon, contact us, reach for us, so that they don’t lose themselves from the lack of our attention. The degree of magnification of any type of propaganda is defined by the level of attention that we circumscribe to it. A terrorist is yielding to an explosion of desire to be heard by us all. An acid rock star can not hear himself and is yelling to drown the cacophony of silence between his desire of self and himself. An impressionist is listening to the silent strings of nature, Picasso was dislocated, cubism senses how difficult it is to join the endemically disjointed nature of the universe. The surrealist were seeing how reality blurs with mere observation, the realist are trying to stare hard to avoid surrealism, Goya was seeing how feelings paint reality.

The world is written based on our desires, the most common desire is to be entangled with all of our humanity.

RC

Self Entanglings

It is improper and specially improper to draw any conclusions from the universe that are objective, the very criteria of the universe imposes that upon us, the presumptuous assumption that we can harness the laws of universe doesn’t work for the universe it works for us, and only for us.

Once we recognize this axiomatic maxim what advantage is there in it? The relationship of things to us becomes truly independent of our judgment and we can allow for our bias which has been what we have so definitively attempted to subtract with objective logic. Once we are aware that the math and the experiments live to serve us and are not in themselves universal laws, then we can liberate ourselves from absolutes which ponderously have only hitherto serve to imprisons us in the bastion of individualism, which is nothing more than a representation of a profound self entanglements.

A new world view is being demanded from us not even by us, but by the tired ideas which have exhausted their own creative energies and are now circling around the axis of their origins. It is not the catechism taught by the academics that is corrupt, it is that its time has come and gone, and the ideas themselves are tired of being called to represent all of humanity in dialectical cathedrals which loop eclecticism.

Repetition is always harsh even to a dull observer, the myriads and abundance of economists and hamlets is a decisive reckoning sign that their clock has stoppeth. We can try to continue to foster new generations onward and into the universe with our cults of self, capital, democracy and freedom of speech, but they will not believe the ideas of their parents, they will not believe in them because they are not theirs to believe.

Quantum is impressive, so what! String Theory wow unto thee, your father has abandoned thee.

How far can a mother reach unto her children and their progeny before there is only .00000000000001/2 of her in them? Is it so far that our ancestors will recoil and the future will tremble? Does forward momentum surpass the weight of its own history? You may never know the full answer to this question, surmise then, if there was a beginning does the beginning get to touch the end too. Will Adam and Eve die when the species dies? The question is reflectionary, when we blow up Buddha statues created hundreds of years back does that mean that the past has been breached? Indeed it feels like an entire connection to us has been blocked, someone blew up a portion of our world, the world that through analogy and rock fortified our experience as a humanity. If our species dies out because we keep on breaking the bonds with our history then Adam and Eve will die too. Jesus and Confucius and culture allow for the consistency that death punctuates. A mother will never have a zero relationship to her progeny and their posterity. We can always make that assumption, because it makes sense that origins pursue descent, and more, we can not make sense out of an absolute disconnect between Adam and Eve and us.

But of course we should try to make sense of that disconnect and even believe it because it is the more difficult thing to believe. Serial relationships are easy to connect, this is why we have such a difficulty calculating and working out parallel computing and the more interesting quantum computing. Serial connections are automatic by nature, parallel relationships are not that complicated because in the end they are multiplied serial relationships, they have become complex because instead of making them truly parallel we have opted to take a serial process and divided it, and cross it over and re-cross it over into a serial parade so as to administers a single serial process in parallel; whereas the parallel world would rather simply administer entire processes in parallel; and quantum that doesn’t believe in time and space but rather in instances of observation and acceptance, more difficult to believe and virtually impossible to conceptualize through modern logic, doesn’t bother to administer sequence. Our problem in comprehending quantum is that it is too independent of cause and effect, distance and time.

This is because it is the disconnect that makes sense to quantum, it is the disconnect that doesn’t make sense to us. People write code in qbits but they haven’t got a clue why it works. They suppose connections, they suppose happenings, they amass probability factors, create material functions addressing witnessing observations which become digital annotations, but we are far from uniting that divide, and more troubling it is doubtful that we will “need” to unite that divide because the only circumstance that demands unity is logic. Maybe we didn’t come from our parents, maybe our parents didn’t birth us, maybe we did not give them and choice and actually from afar manipulated the consequence of our birth upon mostly an unwilling. Maybe life doesn’t have a sequence, maybe there was never an Adam and Eve, they were only two, so doubtful, maybe we spontaneously came into existence by will of desire; by some magnification of an abhorrence or a reaction to nothingness, maybe the nothingness gave us up so us to diversify, so as to not be itself, so as to deny the absolute nature of its being, maybe the nothingness was so entangled with itself that it created us to undo its Gordian knot, we are then the discontented disconnect of an entangled self.

RC

Liberals a vote for Bush is a vote for your cause!!!

It is often that we make the case for being against our opponents, and as a society, a people and a world that has largely defined ourselves based on opposition, it makes sense to say that there are those that are on our side and that there are those against us, and knowing where the dividing line is drawn, ought certainly to determine our alliances.
 
Either you are for me or against me, that is the ultimate question of alliance, without mincing words or swords, the grandiose defining factor of any alliance, devotion or patriotism is if you are willing to fight for the cause, liberal or democrat, Christian or Muslim the right cause is usually always my cause.
 
This is all well and fine, throughout the centuries we have found that loyalty pays off handsomely, knights were knighted on account of their contributions and the Vikings were successful because they rewarded barbarism, and all successful presidents spend the first year in office anointing their political aficionados with the appropriate office. We shall then reward those that are loyal and we ought refuse those that are disloyal, we shall embark in campaigns against those that do not believe in our cause, those that are not willing to fight on our team or more clearly those that can not be trusted.
 
Team spirit, group effort, focus, devotion, dedication and loyalty cannot ever be seeing as other than paramount characteristics of any successful campaign and or adventure. To succeed in business, politics, even religion devotion to the cause is a fundamental factor, it is the fanatics like Jesus Christ, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, that define, direct and accomplish great deeds!
 
But what if to succeed we need to take our opponents side?
 
Is it possible for us to imagine that there might be a more successful adventure if we promote our opponents cause? Can we have such a large worldview that we might comprehend when it is truly in our interest to side with those that oppose us? Or must we be blind to the possibility that at times our enemy might in fact be on our side if only by virtue of the fact that they are human and that they have a family and thus suffer needs just like us.
 
Today we find ourselves in a most acrimonious situation; the political divide has become so poisoned by righteous partisanship that neither right nor left see compromise, as possible but rather complete demise of the other seems the only acceptable proposition.
In the end, logic would have us surmised, that either the left or the right will win a final victory but for now the two parties will cohabitate in the same political universe.
 
All this is so because the dichotomy that divides the left and the right has reached such absolute definition that they can now feel completely comfortable as members of their pertaining camps, without having to cross partially or wholly to the other side. The last democratic election embodied the absoluteness of the right-left divide when the outcome of the election had to be determined by a judge!
 
Even today as we are on the run up to the 2004 presidential election we find ourselves in another photo finish type race, where we will not know with any certainty which pundit or statistic is right until the bitter end.
 
This rather fascinating situation is not an argument for the diversity that is promoted by democracy but rather evidence that democracy has a natural tendency to simplify and simmer. The simplification comes in the fact that America only has a two party system, black or white if you will, a donkey or an elephant, the fact that right wing voters opt to stay in their camp and left wing voters opt to do the same is a sign that there isn’t a catalysts to alter their mutual reactionary positions. The voters do not see a formidable difference either to motivate them to shift or to challenge the prevailing view of their own party.
 
Simmering occurs when the ambivalence reaches such a heights that corporations, social entities, religious organizations and even foreign countries opt to support both sides rather than side with a particular party or candidate. Most revered organizations and corporations don’t take sides, they contribute to both parties, equally, thus canceling out their vote so as to benefit from any outcome.
 
Under such conditions it might be argued that political ambivalence is justified, and I would not be one to argue differently, the people have sufficient comprehension to know when their vote will not make a difference and so the fact that voters feel disenfranchised by all the political hubris which is in the end contrived merely to maintain a perfectly symmetrical left-right political hegemony, under such conditions voter apathy is wholly justified, and lack of participation is even an intelligent choice as any other choice is equally defunct.
 
However I am here to claim that this year we can make a substantial difference, but first we must acknowledge that there isn’t that much of a difference between parties, this in order to accept the contradicting and yet favorable opportunity that is now before us. Some people might be able to substantiate a difference between the Regan years and the Clinton years but they both made the country feel good. One could argue that their success could be attributed to both their lack of interference and good fortune. Either character can claim a good reading of the signs of the times, and a happy go lucky character that went forth and claimed success as warranted. I am sure history will give them more credit for all the changes that took place on their watch, while today those changes seem rather inevitable. China and Russia had to open up, their centralized localized economies were fantasies, both Regan and Clinton were people who, more than anything, didn’t stand in the way of change, and as a result they did not hinder our progress.
 
But now we stand on a completely different presidential platform, President Bush is actually an interventionist and a spender, not a very republican platform but he definitely sides with it, he wants to proselytize democracy throughout the world and he wants to prevent dangers before they ever occur to the nations potential enemies. He is also very defined in his objectives by the assumption that winning makes right, not might makes right, but winning. The assumption that America won the cold war makes Bush imagine that that makes it the policeman, teacher, and leader of the world. The natural nature of capitalism to secure wealth also assures president Bush that capitalism, creates jobs and economic well being, therefore it should be adopted by the Arabs, the Indians, the Chinese, the Russians, the Latin Americans and so on. The United States became a great country with capitalism and democracy the rest of the world can succeed just the same hence the current crusades.
 
Liberals have decided to fight against Bush because of his pronounced necessity to homogenize the rest of the world based on American values and ideals. But I think back to Nietzsche who often said that one should listen to ones enemies because enemies primarily attack our weaknesses.
 
Liberals aside many foreign peoples and nations are against the Bush doctrine, but again I go back to Nietzsche’s insightfulness on the matter, and perhaps also to the martial art of Judo which centers on the doctrine of using an opponents energy against them. From that I deduce that we liberals might have a problem realizing when our enemy has become his own worst enemy and thus our friend.
 
For foreigners such as China, France and Germany Bush is the ideal president because he is giving them a voice, he is allowing them to define themselves against his policies in a rather overt manner. Bush is not a diplomat, his is more of a bully type, and so anyone can run against him and look at least a moderate. This gives the EU and others a super advantage to take a position against NATO, against America institutions and values without having to go though the usual rigor of esoteric diplomatic machinations. And because President Bush doesn’t believe in alliances but rather prefers to go at it alone he is justifying isolationist ideals which can only benefit and fortify any acting block of nations. Even the fact that the president has turned Clinton’s budget surplus into a huge deficit is a benefit for foreigners as these places a check on American actions, that is, without prior consent of those nations, like China and Japan, that are lending America huge sums to maintain a semblance of economic stability. And you can thank Bush for the lower value of the dollar which gave the euro the monetary importance in badly needed.
 
In some ways even the Muslims and Arabs and all those that oppose American ideals have the best president they could have ever desire, president Bush by promoting either Christian or Secular values and preempted preventive Force is acting as a unifying, though repelling, power to those that oppose those values. President Bush is actually forming a coalition of peoples and nations that now may have a greater and clearer definition of their mutual interest and causes; as owed to the greater antagonism these ideologues are plugged-in and turned on through American actions.
 
Based on that information, and making the gross assumption that liberals are more interested in an international cause, a cause that serves the world community and not just America, which one would plot as a cause that levels the playing field of geopolitics, where there really are groups of interests that intertwined and endear themselves to bipartisan policies and actions; then Bush is the president for these times. He alone is making obvious the need to contain and manage American world power, he is also humbling Americans, by showing his aggressiveness and amply demonstrating that American interest are paramount to all others. In a sense Bush is forcing America to mature by exposing how worldly naive it has been, and by overtly alerting the world, that obviously America is not always the enlightened power or the benevolent maximum.
 
Liberals should and ought to unite their vote for Bush, the world and America will best be served by a Bush presidency as he exposes the fallacies of American benevolence and amply demonstrates how blind self interest can be. In a sense, like it or not when America won the cold war it reached the climax of its own power, and had to flounder around until it found its own Gorbachev, that will liberate it from its grandiose fantasy of manifest destiny. Bush is Americas Gorbachev.
 
Bush as president will create a necessity, as Gorby once did for Russia, for all Americans to learn to get along with the rest of the world. Liberals unite - vote for Bush!
 
RC

A letter to the Rest of the World

Dear Rest of the World… VOTE FOR BUSH!

I am here to ask you to please do everything in your power to reelect George Bush Junior. (Does he by the way become Senior ever, and if so when?) But before I go into why we must work for his reelection I think I better define, for those that don’t know, who you the rest of the world are.

Obviously Tony Blair wants Bush to be reelected president and so by default, even if they don’t want him, the United Kingdom has to go along with it. Unless they of course decide to recall or impeach Tony, which the English, being so civilized and restrained in all matters except football would just not do. So, obviously Britain is not the rest of the world, therefore anyone outside of that country and the United States, are technically The rest of the world.

You might say “but if what you really are talking about here is the Alliance of Goodness, why are you not including Spain, Australia and Italy and all those other little countries that supported the crusades against unrepentant Iraq?”

Well, simply put Australia, please forgive me down there, is not a world power, I don’t even think they will ever be, they may have participated in the war effort to get the “next to big brother feeling” but really the Los Angeles police department is more destructive than any aussie commando.

The Italians were there too, shame on the Vatican for not stopping Berlusconi, the Pope should have refused the religious tax that the state pays the Holy See until all Italian troops came home. But really Italians are suppose to be food lovers, and romantic lovers, and passionate and aesthetic, I know that is a stereotype but that is a stereotype that I wish my own country Colombia would share. However Colombia and Italy are equally insignificant in the game plan; I don’t take Italian soldiers seriously, they should do the same as Spain, which is simply to adopt a foreign legion, at least that way deserting cowards can be excused for not being patriotic.

There are of course a bunch of other countries that supported the war effort and they are not mentioned here because frankly they should close their foreign relations imaginings, shut down all embassies, you may keep the consulates for visa revenues, but really, please, stop wasting our time.

Now then, anyone who can follow logic has so far deduced that the rest of the world is anyone outside of the United States and England.

Having said that I must now project forward the fact that I did not support the war against Iraq, currently credited with 9436 Iraqis deaths, and 957 American and alliance soldiers dead, with ignored, not dead, thousands injured. But part of the reason I did not support the war was because I did not realize that it would be a watershed point, perhaps even I dare say, the climax of American power. A downfall which while unrecognizable started when the Soviet Union collapsed as it was the cold war polar opposites that held the two dichotomies in gyroscopic equilibrium.

Indeed the war in Iraq has been, even if it is won in the end, which would require a wide definition of victory, indeed the war has been an Spectacle Emasculator of American prestige and power and has then, the most likely capacity to humble America and then perhaps to help it to join the world community as more of an equal partner.

Certainly the events have displayed courageously that being brave is not the same as being successful, and I believe they will further demonstrate that culture is more powerful than might, and so in the end, the results expected from this war, outside of marketing, will publish a record of infamy.

And it is not just an infamy of what has happened to Iraqis, it is what Bush has done to his own nation, even McCarthyism does not compete in the level of destruction harmonized against American respectability in the world. Dully put, today America is suffering from their own internal terrorist, Bush!

That the American people needed this is questionable, there is nothing wrong with greatness and they certainly have had it, but Bush has put that greatness to question: he has turned immortal America into an error-prone, helpless, vulnerable and finally doubtful and objectionable power.

Again I can not imagine that this is good for America, but I think it is fair to say that Bush has become an extension of the terrorist rather than a front; and as such he is creating a more level playing field where American morality and its approach to world domination, through its subjective ideals and values, will become suspect and challengeable.

Over all, for America Bush is a bad omen, but for the rest of the world… Vote for Bush: he levels your playing field.

RC

SUPERBOWL

Manifest Destiny
From sea to shiny sea
The melting pot
Of iron fisted fears

Alarm wakes up
Shower and deodorant heavenly
Coffee wired
450 horsepower traffic jams
Giving it back to the environment
Radio fanatic humor
Radio fanatic politics
Turn left
Turn right
Work
Jockeying meetings
Review by your boss
Review by your peers
Review by your customers
Review the new girl in accounting
Testing your gossip
Review by your bank
No layoff’s today
Don’t drive drunk
Happy hour salty peanuts
Review by your children
Book review
Movie review
Restaurant review
Culture worn on t-shirts
Economic growth 3%, better than average but needs improvement
Traffic news
Weekend weather
Sitcom fast food laundry
Sleep

World News Today or Find A New Enemy

The rest of the world wants to kill you
They have bombs
They have gas
They have germs
They have tuberculosis
They have malnutrition
They have the mob
They have the underground
They have many children
They have Islamic tendencies
They want to steal your money
They hunger for your intellectual property
They want to bribe you
They want you to bribe them
They want to corrupt your freedom
They want to kidnap you
They want to drug you
They are malicious and cruel
They circumcise women
They don’t let them drive cars
They don’t let them wear makeup
They don’t fear your Christian god
They don’t fear the law
They don’t fear you
They are illiterate
They are underemployed
They all want to come here
Overly armed and going nuclear
They are anarchist
They use child labor
They beat their wives
They sodomize boys and rape girls
They elect dictators
They blow things up
They don’t like news reporters

And now for your local news:

New drug cures cancer
Physiology is not destiny gene therapy is
Scientists have discovered a gene that when turned on it is an alarm clock
95 percent religiosity and going for 100
Don’t stop drinking or smoking alone
The stock market bullish bound bear
The longest aging populace a short term voting majority
Elderly pay homage to Indian casinos
Teens are drinking and smoking more
Teens are having more unprotected sex
Out of this world colonies
Gloating chemotherapy
Ripening cesareans
Your kids’ education is the worst that it has ever been
Garbage collectors get paid more than teachers
Your forever abnormal local weather
The Internet is changing your world unlike the phone, the wheel and world war II
The nuclear family invented in America barely a decade after the atomic bomb
Moral breakdown of the social fiber that would shock Genghis Khan, Cleopatra and Henry VIII
America adolescent isolationist ever masturbating with its toys
And the winning lottery numbers are…
Not yours
Computers are getting cheaper faster and smaller
And smarter, they can beat you at chess, at poker, at being difficult
Child abductions prove how caring milk companies are
A dozen new dieting plans make liposuction the last self improvement option
Phone scamming nice seniors
Seniors using their voting majority to scam the rest of us
Doctors recommend that you intern yourself for colon and breast cancer exams
Everything is genetics, you can have every illness ever known to Adam and Eve and beyond
The Christian right wants to reverse reengineer humanity
Homeless people on city streets making it harder for businesses to make a decent living
Not enough cops
Not enough jails
Not enough protection
We are too free
New surveillance cameras allow police to protect you without detecting your privacy
Cross training for sex
Rising low sperm counts
Traffic jams
Love jams
Happy ecstasy

And now back to our regular commercials programming

The wild world of animals, they just don’t know
The exciting world of sports from your couch
Soap opera incest, affairs, and money hoarding, not like you
Cop show rape murder mystery, premiering
Detective show murder mystery, remake
Lawyer show murder, scam, betrayal mystery, sequel
Doctors save lives, have affairs, lose face
Purchasable nanny-toons will entertain your kids tomorrow
Comedy, best out downs put downs
And now for our movie of the week: aliens invade the planet, or your body, or your sister
A special report on illegal aliens and welfare recipients

In the final moral analysis it is good to remind the ever struggling moral right that:
In 98.2% of all books, movies and television programming good always prevails in the end!
And of the 1.8% remainder, when the bad guy wins he turns out to be a misunderstood good guy
The bible stands out because it has nothing but promises and a bad ending; even so, it is still the best seller of all time
“That which God has brought together no man can bring asunder.” Translation:
In the entire history of humanity not a single good marriage has ended in divorce!
Patriots always become victors or martyrs
Traitors are always discovered, jailed or shot to pieces
Success comes to those that never stop trying
The rich know we live in a classless society
The middle class knows we live in a meritocracy
The lower class doesn’t know anything
A strong dollar buys you more vacation fun abroad
Angels are secretly working your life better everyday
Someday you are going to Mars

Go to sleep SuperBowl

RC

GO FROM COBOL TO JAVA!

In the 90’s the world of the internet took on mythological proportions; there wasn’t an ill in the world that wasn’t going to be cured by proper use of this online panacea. Businesses would be able to know their clients’ needs and wants before their customers even thought them. Universities would go online and teach the world from the comfort of their living rooms. Governments would not only be able to deliver on-line voting, but, through democracy and expenditure accountability, become paragons of leadership.

Almost a decade later we have come to realize that the internet is only a reflection of the real world with all its human limitations and potential. That, rather than radicalizing our existence it has merely become another tool that we use to perform our usual assortment of daily tasks.

The truth is that it is difficult for humans to change the way that they do things. Survey after survey from the likes of Gartner and CDI shows that an internet centric company can effortlessly reduce operational cost, increase ROI by 400% and deliver closer to real time benefits to customers, vendors and owners. Despite this, we find that companies consider a migration to the internet a Cost rather than an Investment towards their future success.

Yes, the Internet future with all its benefits was there, but our ability to change was not. However this isn’t the tragedy one might suppose, because, after all, the Internet was not a mature product.

Fortunately for us here in the Southern hemisphere, all Latin America is still using mostly Legacy technologies with COBOL and Visual Basic, C, Proprietary Databases and Client/Sever environments. Businesses are running unique solutions that are proprietary and expensive to maintain. Meanwhile, Europe and North America have happily invested billions of dollars to migrate towards Internet centric solutions. South and Central America remain largely untouched by this model and the reason why is our opportune resistance to change.

Resistance to change in a world that seems to be changing its methodology every six month is not a bad thing. If Latin America had caught the Internet fever in 1995, today it would have been involved in a quagmire of Internet technologies, contradictions, evolutions, and billions spent without proper results to show for it.

While Europe and North America have spent billions in migrations to the latest technologies, they have failed to gain the true rewards or productivity increases because the technologies had simply not matured. Technology was too rapidly evolving and early adopters inadvertently became no more than paying test dummies. In fact, it wasn’t till Gartner released its now famous report noting how inappropriately companies were overspending for IT solutions, that corporations finally got the picture. They were pursuing the perfect solution and the perfect solution kept on changing standard horizons, and costing more and more.

We could all blame Microsoft because it fragmented the industry by refusing to migrate to Open Standards and Open Technologies, but the real blame lies in the infancy of the Internet technologies and, more, the infancy of Global Standards. Who knew in 1995 which programming language or which communication protocols would truly dominate the NET? No one knew, myself included. We weren’t that worried about standards back then, we actually thought that the Internet was the solution and never really concerned ourselves by which methodology we got there. If we programmed in C or Cobol or Visual Basic, and used an emulator to publish on the Internet, we thought we had accomplished our aim, of course we hadn’t accomplished our aim, we were only making it more difficult to reach. But then again back in the early 90’s the Internet was no more than a glorified messaging system with the ability to publish information. It did not take too long for us to realize that the ability of the Internet to grant global access to millions of potential clients while handling business processes meant that each penny you spent on servers and communications could empty your bank account. The model to turn Client/Server architectures into emulated Internet solutions was defunct. Early adopters of this faulty concept had to go back to their bankers and ask for more money to bail out their operations.

While early adopters jumped online and fuelled a demand for Internet solutions and Engineers, Internet companies saw their raging popularity aggregate billions of worth to Wall Street. It seemed that the bubble would never burst, but we now know better; one day the Net’s net value did not meet any logical criteria for return on investment, and there the bubble popped!

Contrary to popular expectation, after the Internet bubble burst the Internet continued to thrive. Never in the history of the Net has there been fewer users, more and more people and more and more businesses hop on the Internet every year, yet the industry continues to grow, and has never had a year where its growth went negative. It has always been positive! Sure, large and small Internet players faded or went bust, but the Internet as a whole, and as an industry, kept growing, creating jobs, maturing, and with maturity it only got better and more realistic.

But first, the mindset of the eighties and nineties had to be eradicated… That you had to own and develop the technology and that everything had to run on a client/server environment was an attitude that had to be archived.

ENTERPRISE FOUNDATION STANDARIZATION
A very strange thing happened on the way to the Internet, the industry became obsessed with interoperability, compatibility, process interaction and communications. It is no longer considered a brilliant idea to own proprietary computing environments. In fact, proprietary has become the persona non grata of the industry.

Today we find that there are only two serious Enterprise standards playing in the market: .NET, sponsored by Microsoft, and J2EE, sponsored by the likes of IBM, SAP, Peoplesoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and BEA, etc.

The defining architectural standard for how we develop a software program is now Unified Modeling Language (UML). This magnificent and elegant methodology for defining a solution is programming language independent, that is, once designed in UML you can program it in any language. UML also gives companies autonomy from IT professionals; by allowing anyone able to read a UML schematic access to the logic innards of an application.

Based on development infrastructures, security, global deployment, adoptability, scalability, object orientation and reliability, there are really only two true Internet Centric programming languages: Microsoft’s C# and Sun Microsystems Java.

Impressively, there is an industry wide agreement for communications and interoperability: SOAP (Simple Objects Access Protocol), which will greatly embody the new bold world of WebServices, and a solid MetaData defining model, XML Extensible Markup Language), which finally allows for the data to intelligently advise client applications of its character definitions. Best of all, these protocols are followed by both the .NET and J2EE camps, thus allowing for a clear approach to heterogeneous interactions.

The Internet and Java have also done away with the localized simplicity of the Operating System. While Linux, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems might be slugging it out to control the OS server market, the truth be told, that war no longer matters. The operating system is a has been, destroyed by the Internet’s demanding architecture of distributed processes to bring in the benefits of load balancing, clustering and peer to peer process distribution, where you don’t know, nor does it matter if your Internet server is going to be in Japan or in Chile. Nor do you care if parts of your application are running whole or as parts of a virtual whole throughout a server farm.

What matters today is not your Operating System, it is your Middleware. IBM-Websphere, Web Logics-BEA, Sun Microsystems-SunOne, Oracles-IAS, Open Source JBOSS, these are the Internet’s operating systems. Designed to communicate with the rest of the world, these are not server or PC operating systems, these are Internet Operating Environments that compile, publish and interoperate your process and/or applications across logical geographies without concern for time or physical location.

Even the simple fact that today we really only have one browser, Internet Explorer from Microsoft, has helped to simplify the way we view and use applications. In the old days, every application had its own look and feel and it took time to master. Today, thanks in large part to the limitations imposed by browser technology, most applications look and feel very similar, and require minimal training to have a user up and running.

Standardization is now a solid reality within the Internet foundation.

WHY OWN IT?
But perhaps the most defining change, and the change that need to occur for the internet world to become the standard method of application and service delivery system for Businesses, Government and the Educational communities, is the precipitous fall of the in-house, IT department, or the In-sourced Application.

Gone are the days when IT was a paradise that could only be inhabited by Fortune 1000 corporations because they were the only ones that could afford the technology gurus and their expensive supercomputers. Gone are the days when small to medium size businesses made a valiant effort to own an IT department, while they were held hostage by inadequate budgets, error-prone programmers and proprietary technologies.

Today’s savvy Managers know that precious time, energy and money have been thoroughly wasted in trying to own the technology. It is now widely understood that owning technology is a high-risk enterprise that should only be attempted by those with flexible budgets and professional IT on staff. Today we know that businesses lost their core competency edge in the 80’s and 90’s because they were also trying to be technologists. We can accept that the technology should be left to core technology houses, and that it is more productive to avoid the in-house solution and to adopt Outsourced or Application Service Providers that give you standardize processes, faster time to market, and quality, offering the latest and best enterprise technologies at affordable prices.

Gone are the days of huge, risky investments in IT, which, during the inevitable downtimes, would stick you with high fixed cost and inflexible infrastructures. Today’s ASP and Outsourced solutions delivery models adjust your cost and infrastructure based on your business cycles.

The entire Internet has dramatically evolved thanks to its standardization and adoption of complementing technologies. Equally, software developers have learned an important lesson: that it is not about the technology, it is about the solution. Customers don’t want to see the technology; you don’t have to learn auto mechanics to use your car, so why should you have to know technical acronyms to invest in software solutions. These days, customers want solutions, they want results, and they want to gain in efficiencies. When IBM bought the consulting services division from PricewaterhouseCoopers the message for the industry was clear, we are not selling technology anymore.

The Internet today offers clear cut choices with definable benefits and a positive Return On Investment. The days where migrating to the Internet was a trip into uncertainty are over; the technologies are now more affordable, the industry and expertise has grown professionally, and the dirty work of debugging Internet technologies has been done by Asia, Europe and North America.

For Latin America the immediate benefit is real: Go from COBOL to Java without the painful steps in between.

RC

QUE SE VAYAN!

I keep of hearing figures of the exodus of the Colombian population to foreign lands. They are moving away to escape the violence a civil war torn country offers and its lack of opportunity.

The people that are leaving the country tend to be well educated, or from the middle or upper classes of Colombian society. All willing to work hard where there is opportunity, which is what they can’t find here, an opportunity to earn a decent living within a stable environment.

Where there is war and depression the first to leave are the intellectuals, the educated and the well to do. The poor are the only one’s that have no choice but to stay patriotic. Fortunately over 55% of the Colombian population lives at the poverty level, it is then safe to say that there will be enough patriots around to keep our nation status instead of being downgraded to village.

So far the figures are that approximately two percent of the population has left the country, these are only the legal figures. Most countries that suffer difficult times find their populations and money taking a walk. Mexico has long been the victim of labor exodus to the US. Russians are not only leaving their country they are also not marrying. Marriage being the atomic unit of the social structure this can not be good in the long term. Russians are also refusing to be born, the rate of deaths to the ratio of births is higher, which means that the Russian population is shrinking by process of attrition. Ireland has had a history of economic, calamity or terrorism driven exoduses. The potato famine certainly helped to push many to foreign lands. An Irish bartender once told me: “All the good Irish have already left Ireland.” If so Ireland may actually be the only purely bad place on earth. Interestingly, Ireland is currently going through some beautiful economic growth, not bad for bad people.

Even the number one economic power in the world has gone through hard times. But the interesting thing about the United States of America, and not the only case, is that Americans, when there is a depression at home don’t leave the country, they change jobs or they move within the country to where the jobs are, regardless of what those jobs might be. They stay home! Some might say: but the US is a big country, moving from California to New York, is the equivalent of moving to another country and perhaps even a totally different culture. I would simply point out that during the great depression from sea to shiny sea America was all the same poor broken down country, and the exodus never externalized.

The paradox and problem that Colombia faces today, is that the people that are leaving the country are also the ones that have benefited the most from the establishment. Colombians that have made their money in Colombia are leaving with their money. Colombians that have been educated and given the most opportunity are leaving. Colombians who have had good jobs are leaving. People that have been well trained and well paid are leaving. People with political and media influence are leaving. And the problem is, that they are leaving when their country needs their expertise the most.

They are abandoning Colombia because of the lack of security, lack of stability and lack of opportunity. And to all of them I say: QUE SE VAYAN! If they are so bright and intelligent why don’t they help us change Colombia? If they don’t see opportunities here why don’t they help us create them? And if there are all these problems in Colombia how are they, as bright members of the better educated and better paid, not responsible? Colombia’s political and economic problems did not rise out of the farms, they rose out of the cities where they are managed. To them I say: QUE SE VAYAN!

Colombia has one fundamental problem, its people want peace but don’t want to pay the price. Its people want jobs but they don’t want to create them. They want to work for someone else and they want a title, Doctor, professor, gerente, a title is nice. As Colombians we also seem more concerned with going to the supermarket tomorrow than where we are going to be five years from now. We need instead to learn how to demand more from ourselves and our government; to learn how to employ ourselves, and to create skilled jobs that make a difference. We need to forget that we have been taught to work for someone else. Colombia needs planers, promoters, developers and doers. Most Colombians going abroad want just a good job, and so to them I say: QUE SE VAYAN!

RC

orchid 

We Will Take The Cows with Us

Brief:

I wrote the following article because I was broke and The Economist along with Shell were running a contest where the winner would get 20 thousand dollars. I know that is not a lot of money but in Colombia it is a lot of money. The average person here makes $300 dollars a month, 20 thousand dollars at the current exchange rate, 2,700.00 pesos per dollar, would amount to 54 million pesos, divide that by 12 months, and I would instantly become an upper middle class citizen with a pretentious $4,500,000. pesos per month.

Strangely I did not win, I did not make the finalist list. Why? Mi Rosa thinks that Shell oil and the Economist have such genetic make up that they were never going to allow people like me to win the contest. There is probably a contradiction about caring for the environment and sucking oil and profits out of every thing; but I kind of thought my article made it clear that exploitation not butterflies were what was important for the survival of our species.

Besides that, I have been a religious reader of The Economist, I am not proud about that fact but they are so good at being the good side of the bad side that I can not help myself; but that aside I have easily paid them close to 20 thousand dollars at the newsstand rate. So if I had won I would have merely gotten reimbursed for my twenty + years of dedication as an Economist reader, but hey, even funding my own winnings, I still didn’t win!


“Do we need nature?”

I don’t myself remember, nor did I know it for this forty-four years of life, but for my father that recently came back to his homeland, Colombia, that I was in an incubator for life support, when I was but eight months old, for a period of eight days. My father is of the opinion that it was all those pins and needles, tubes, artificial air, with all the sterility of a hospital that made it possible for me to have a natural fear of the world and all of its thundering noises.

It is true that when the door bell and the phone ring I acquire a certain anxious preoccupation that doesn’t go away with the proper identification of the inquirer. It is as if my environment had been cursed by a violent force. Still I am pleased, and I am sure Dad is equally pleased to still be alive because of an artificial environment; the incubator was a very nice artifice.

One could argue that modern technology kept me alive, and that in Victorian times without the incubator and the sterility of that environment I would not be alive. In Victorian times there was no room for babies that required special medical treatment, you had, for the most part, to be willing to carry yourself to adulthood, and to meet the demanding expectations of your inadequate surroundings, the mortality rate was high, no one questioned that reality.

But was that a reality? in other words was that a real world? a real environment?

There are many ways to gauge an artificial construct, if humans make it one could argue it is artificial. It seems to be the key gauge of AI (Artificial Intelligence), that it is conjured by the analog human brain makes the digital workings of a computer artificial. that is, nature by itself would not produce the Personal Computer with all its accompanying software. Is that a sign that nature is not artificial? I don’t think so, nature produces the human that divines the computer and the results are then an abstracted natural contraption, not possible without the priori of a human being, arguably a pure natural creation.

When I came into this life I was doomed, by some strange illness, to stay alive only through artificial means, but the truth is that my artificially propped existence began before that. You see my mother was adopted, the concept of adoption is very much an artificial environment, my mother’s adoptive parents were not her real parents, her real parents gave her up for adoption for very much the same reason that I was placed in an artificial environment, to survive. That is, my mother was not going to survive with her natural parents because they did not have the resources to keep her, they could have abandoned her but instead they gave her up for adoption, thus she survived and thrived because of her adoptive parents that we could easily call artificial parents; making her artificial home, giving her artificial parental care so that she would not feel abandoned.

When an astronaut goes into outer space, or when an aquanaut submerges into the deep sea both individuals are trespassing into non human territory through the use of an artificial environment. They are both bubble children immersed into an unknown and accomplishing the feat by bringing with them a part of their atmosphere, and a made up, exhaustible contraption of their endemic environments.

But superficial environments are not just subject to physical properties, as we have seen a home can be created around adoptive parents, which assimilates the perhaps natural condition of a nuclear family. But there are other less seemingly obvious artificial conditions. Freud created an artificial world when he created the world of psychology. Many people today make their living from psychology, many people are being treated through the psychological process, and live their lives purely in a psychological construct. Woody Allen, for example, could no more live outside of Manhattan, than he could live outside of the psychological world which he so willingly inhabits. One has to conclude that Freud and Jung are Woody Allen’s true parents and that without them, and Manhattan, he probably would not exist.

So many people live in the artificial world of psychology with all of its psychological rules. And there are other artificial worlds, such as the stock market. Again many people make their living and many more are affected by the movements of the stock market more than by the movement of the stars or the change in climate. The stock market is however an artifice contrived to reflect a perceived value so as to determine if it warrants investment, or attention, or if it should suffer a quick demise. Stock holders don’t pick apples, apples are very tangible items, stock holders pick stocks; and if the general audience judges them correct it values the stock asset by placing an inordinate amount of attention upon it. If for some reason the market does not pay attention to the stock, the perceived value collapses and the stock plummets, and with it the reputation of those that gambled upon the artifice of stock.

When a stock collapses because its value has suffered a perception change the value change is real, but the company may actually have not suffered any change in its natural value, its natural value being the more accepted value of its assets, which generally have a more concrete acceptance of their value; however the natural value of assets is equally a capitalistic artifice.

There are many values that we no longer question which have become endemic parts of our civilized society but equally there was a time when they were not real, because they did not suffer from acceptance, hence the reason why they did not exist. There was a time when the stock market did not exist. There was a time when a legalized marriage did not exist. There was a time when democracy did not exist. Neither the stock market nor democracy appear to be requirements for human existence. They are nice, they seem to work well among well defined civilizations, but there is nothing inherent in either that can lay claim to being native to our sense of being nor to our origins.

Today’s city dwellers are hardly natural embodiments of their precursors. The further back in time we go the less civic and city life played a role in our lives. The civilized male or female is actually a very rare specimen, most of the world actually lives under uncivilized conditions, a nomadic life is really still the norm, there are 6 billion earth inhabitants less than one billion of them inhabit any significant form of civilization. By an large the world does not read The Economist, nor do they confine themselves to family planning and socially minded activism. We can say that most of the world lives a natural existence, I mean by natural that it requires the littlest amount of input by human, that is that it is not contrived by them.

Humanity by an large has demonstrated an incredibly adaptive ability to live under some of the most extreme conditions and endure. It seems incredible but humans survived concentration camps demonstrating an ability to adapt to incredibly repressive, torturous and harmful environments. Even ghettos, repressive regimes, famine and rampant disease have demonstrated time and again the resilience and persistence of our humanity.

It would be difficult to imagine a future with nature in it.

Nature as we know it has been persecuted not only by us, but also by catastrophe; environmentalist would have attempted to save the dinosaur but whatever killed all the dinosaurs wouldn’t have it. The archeological record demonstrates that more things have gone into extinction than are alive today. That would indicate that extinction is the norm and not the exception. Climate change is the norm, not the exception. The question is not “Do we need nature?” The question is are we being realistic in assuming that nature is an imperative? Can our future possibly have nature in it? And if the future does have nature will it be a nature garden wholly contrived by our will to carry nature forward much as we have done with cows?

The nuclear family is an artificial environment, will it survive into the future or will it be better to have a social human being that strictly adheres to values based on systematically civic minded ideals instead of familial tides?

The record of any given civilization over time proves a lack of persistence, civilizations change but the human race thrives against the odds. The environmental archeological record amply demonstrates that to save mother nature from us we will probably have to first save it from itself.

In many ways our quest for air-conditioning, electricity, internet, artificial intelligence, and scientifically flavored foods, genetically modified crops, are proof positive that we have the ability to live in wholly artificial environments; and that, like Disney or Hollywood these environments are tolerable and more interesting; once inside of an artificial world we are disoriented as to its boundaries and limitations.

The odds that humanity will save the environment are insignificant in stature, we better be prepared to go at it alone. A world without trees and squirrels might seem horrible but as the generations pass so do the memories. Our sentiments for saving the environment are betrayed by population growth and consumption. The most sophisticated nations, which claim to be environmentally friendly, are causing exponential harm to the environment through a multiplicity of factors such as consumption and waste. The harm done to the environment by carelessly polluted underdeveloped nations is insignificant by comparison.

Are we willing to prevent further population growth? My parents were certainly pleased to have me and five other children. Do we have the power to stop the gracing-hunter meat eater human from conquering every natural resource and dwindle it into extinction. Oil is not an infinite resource but if we preserve it is nature going to preserve it too? or are we going to lose it in some geological upheaval? Even oil is in danger of being done in by the forces of nature. We and the greens may try to save nature from us but that doesn’t prevent the probability that nature will do us in. Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, violent temperature changes, a well placed asteroid could make pointless any attempt we have of saving mother nature from us or from itself.

It is important to note here that we as humans are not prone to tolerate sudden and violent environmental changes. We are fragile, our temperature tolerating potential is plus or minus a few degrees. It is no coincidence that the nearest and most obvious planets appear to be lifeless for life doesn’t truly tolerate a lot of variance. This points to the limitations of our bodies which are the space suits that our souls, at least for those of us that have souls, posses. Our soul’s body-suit is a high maintenance device that requires incessant attention, just check out how important the technicians and industry that maintain it have become. Most of us spend an inordinate amount of our lives trying to feed and maintain the soul’s body-suit.

It would be absurd to imagine that our habitat will continue to host us indefinitely, future generations will have to accept limiting and artificial environments. With video games, software desktops, artificial nutrition and fake plants we are slowly being adapted to future artificial worlds and space stations.

Do we need nature? Today we need nature, its beauty is pleasing to the senses but nature and even entire species disappear with the growth of sentient beings. Our ability to adapt and to manipulate the environment has given us the edge over nature and its contents. We have come to greater and greater independence from nature through the ages by building damns and nuclear power plants.

The beauty of civilization is largely artificial, the arts, literature, architecture, philosophy, politics, etc, these are all artificial constructs which, like justice, only have validity in human perception. According to quantum physics we are the construct of defined observations. Nature exists because of its interaction with us, if trees and tigers stop rubbing against us they will cease to exist. A tree that falls in the forest doesn’t make a noise if we are not near.

Our species has been successful because of its fundamental ability to modify nature, if nature wants to continue to exist it will have to be more observant of our needs and wants, and it will have to continue to provide resources which will call our interest. Otherwise, to the future, we might only take the cows with us for they produce juicy and delicious prime rib.


RC

Benevolent Violence

I want to comment on the current global situation that is grossly overburdening the world with a propensity towards benevolent violence that should wrench us all from our sanity.

The Bush administration has succeeded in convincing itself that it is going to rescue the world by making it more like America and less like it is. This entails convincing the rest of the world that it needs to adopt democratic principles and Christian values and puritanical ideals such as capitalism (Maximize your returns by reducing your expenditures).

This should all be easy enough since it does seem like the first world nations live particularly well compared to the rest of us. They have more cars, more televisions, freedom of the press, freedom of expression and the ability to know what is better for others in an invasive sort of way.

I live in a third world country, Colombia, spelled just like it sounds and not to be confused with Columbia as it often is. Living in third world countries has its merits; we don’t have the military capability to mount a sustainable war effort against other countries. We don’t have the ability to influence world opinion so we let the European Union and the United States think what they may; and have not ever attempted to change their national ideals, from sea to shiny sea and one Europe all the way to the Baltics, stop at the Russian front.

Of course we do produce a lot of cocaine and marijuana, which appears to have many effects on musicians and European and American policy; as it regards to their consummate war against drugs within our borders, but not in their own backyard where there appear to be no great and mighty drug kingpins, they all reside outside of American borders and the logistics are all managed by brilliant Latin America enterprising master minds. Hence the reason why all drug wars have to be waged outside of American borders.

In America the enemy is always externalized, the problem can never be resolved within. You can very much figure that Colombia is not going to war against anyone but itself, as for the last forty or so years it has been brother against brother, with our home founded Guerrilla movements, which depending on how you count amount to three significant militant groups, that all want to liberate us from our government and most often instead succeed in liberating our souls from our carnal bodies.

It is the inherent tendency of societies that don’t have the capability to destroy others to destroy themselves. Colombians are just as aggressive as Americans; we are just introverted with our aggression due to a lack of military and organizational capability. We have never managed to conquer much of our own country; about sixty percent of our economy is concentrated in Bogotá the capital. Colombian business managers don’t imagine that there is a market worth pursuing outside of it since most of the country suffers energy shortages and unmanaged roads. Medellin our next closest city-state is an industrial might, inhabited by two million aggressive and organized business centric peoples but of incestuous mentalities. Meaning that Medellin is a country onto itself, wholly confident that it could also operate the entire country if it could take control of Bogotá but it can not do that because they don’t have enough relatives there, yet!

I think it was Freud that said that aggression was a natural constitution of humanity, and so the option was merely if that aggression would be externalized or internalized. Third world countries are largely self-destrucitive because they are closed societies, they are not extroverted nor do they derive their self-confidence from being able to convince others that they have the best and only peanut butter in the world. First world nations have a need to externalized their desires and ideals, they have to win the most medals at the Olympics, they have to have the greatest number of Nobel Prize winners, they must succeed at deploying their ideals, music and culture unto the minds and hearts of the rest of the world. There is no doubt in the American, German or French psyche that the world would be a much better place if it were more like them, shall we say civilized. Perhaps the most striking aspect of being civilized is the need to spread the message across nationalities so that we can all become yuppies and successful single mothers.

Today, the Americans are in Iraq in an obvious way attempting to redo and reshape that society right. Surely, if women had the right to drive on Iraqi roads that would mean that they are free and happy. Freedom to Americans means the ability to drive your own car and to own guns and to say anything you want to say no matter if it offends others or not.

That Iraq needed to be liberated and especially by the same people that liberated Iran with the Westernized and liberal Shah, is suspect, but you are not going to tell the Americans that the rest of the world may not want to me made in their image. The fact that the concepts of republic and capitalism took root over many centuries and that they were molded from European and American longings for such things does not strike the other plausible fact, that Islamic theocracies and Latin American dictators arouse out of the hearts and minds of those cultures as well.

It is difficult, perhaps even implausible for most Americans to imagine freedom any other way but there is such other freedom. As I mentioned earlier I live in Colombia a fairly lawless country where most crime goes unpunished and there aren’t to many social safety nets, and you have to watch when you cross the street because people who own cars here think that they have accomplished something great and unique. And yet I feel freer than perhaps an American. This is because here we are not always trying to improve and perfect ourselves so as to be ready for all the magnificent stuff that is going to happen to us in the future. We are no thinking that technology and medicine are going to solve any of our problems; more important we don’t have to worry about the world hating us because we can’t attack that world with our consumerism or our do-gooder Christian army.

Yes there are Mormons and Baptists preachers, and the IMF and the World Bank trying to help us civilized ourselves, but they wont be successful because we don’t know how to be that anxious to change; it takes so much energy and dedication to be successful that we just don’t have it in us; given the choice of getting another degree, a higher paying job, a face lift or drinking and dancing, we will go dancing and drinking. Productivity for us is being with friends and family, we have the highest number of holidays second only to I think France. But I am optimistic that we can beat them soon, as the EU will force France to be more productive.

But in all I want to say one thing, unlike many of my fellow third world citizens I am not opposed to Bush the aggressor king, I am not oppose to Bush the preemptive prevention oppressor, I am actually liking the guy. Of course he is not Bill Clinton the likable guy, but I don’t dislike Bush because I believe that he has done more for the rest of the world than for his own country; and we peoples of the rest of the world should be grateful to him for taking it upon himself to demonstrate to the world that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts completely.

Given his position as sole world empire America could have easily enjoyed the good will of the rest of the world and it could have been benevolent. But Bush decided not to be a diplomat, he opted not to hide his intentions, he opted instead to be honest and to say, America wants the entire world to be made in its image, America wants women to be able to drive in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and America wants women to be able to show their faces and wear miniskirts, and America wants the world to be democratic and to have freedom of the press like the New York Times has the freedom to say what it wants about the Bush administration.

It is a rare and remarkable man that is so candid. It is rare for a superpower not to hide under the guise of diplomacy and global altruism; today Bush’s America is telling the rest of the world honestly where it stands, “my enemies enemy is my friend and you want to be like me or don’t you!”

Clearly hitherto no American president has done more introverted damage to the image and to the cause of his own country. No president before him has fought harder to destroy American greatness! Bush is the first American president to internalize America’s destructive tendencies, and while it might seem that Bush is out of control or in control the truth is that neither is correct. Bush is merely the last destined emperor of what was an empire based on the duality, dichotomy and dialectic embodied in the special relationship of the USSR and the USA during the formidable asynchronously balanced cold war. The fact is that neither country could do without the other; it was never going to be in America’s interest that the Soviet Union collapsed, it was their chess game that kept the world under their mutual control. When the USSR collapsed it was a sign that America would too collapse, a country without a natural enemy is bound to suffer from runaway evolution, the checks and balances removed would have to give rise to the Last Emperor, a man that would know not his limits, a man willing to stand alone in the world, such a man has done what Osaman Bin Laden could only have wished to do: He has imploded American restraint and exposed its every weakness.

Again Americans should be aghast at the their president, but the rest of the world should be grateful for Bush is single-handedly slaying the arrogance of Goliath.


RC