Self-awareness, Animal Consciousness and Non-Existent Objects

I listened to an interesting philosophical discussion on the topic of animal consciousness recently and so thought to make a comment on an element of that.There are several theories regarding how various animals might experience reality such as horses with nearly 360 degrees of vision, and octopus with neuron in their arms, yet it is the coherent concentration of neurons, the optimal spacing and size of circuits resembling the max theoretical for a computer regarding distance of connections, overheating and processing capacity that seems  to be the main thing for consciousness.

Human self-consciousness allows a reflective capacity for making complex decisions that probably isn't existent in simple neural networks. Atheists however tend to disregard intelligent decision making preemptively and shut themselves out of intelligent thought on greater topics than empirical existence. Yet even atheists may be able to consider the epistemological context of not existent objects such as Pegasus, a balanced federal budget, unicorns and etc.

Non-existent objects are a development of the capacity of self-consciousness to imagine and comprehend what exists and what might exist with detachment form automatic processing of immediate empirical sensory input. It is doubtful that animals without self-consciousness can imagine non-existent objects. Instead, like the face recognition circuits of a digital camera,the neural network of non-self-aware animals probably processes just immediate data possibly with pre-wired responses to threat objects such as fish with larger teeth.

Well, there is much work on the topic of self-awareness, animal consciousness (e.g.do they feel anything like being alive?) etc. that make it worth reading and thinking a little about. Following are a pair of web pages summarizing the work

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/

Pussy Riot, The Sex Pistols and Bi-Polar Democracy

The Russian punk band Pussy Riot was sentenced to a term of two years being convicted of hooliganism for their profane musical performance contra Russian President Vladmir Putin from the capitol city of Moscow's main cathedral. The Russian President may have been unhappy with the egregious violation of the separation of church and state or secularism with the ladies' music lyrics. Probably he will have their sentence commuted to public service washing the feet of the poor in some distant oblast.

It is difficult to imagine the late British Punk Band The Sex Pistols being allowed to sing their hit song 'Anarchy' from Canterbury or Westminster cathedral. One wonders what the Metropolitan had in mind if the prelates gave permission for the performance of Pussy Riot in church?

Evidently the song lasted for just 40 seconds. There are several musicians and celebrities that have expressed support for Pussy Riot's right to perform secular 'prayers' in churches. One hopes that celebrities would tend to have respect for the sacredness of the church environment as well as the right of musical will-to-political-power.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/18/entertainment-us-russia-pussyriot-reacti-idINBRE87H07X20120818

It is possible that the Pussy Riot Band made a sincere expression unto God I suppose. Certainly one doesn't want much editing of prayer by secular authorities, or any at all actually.

The time span of a song isn't really the best way to judge how bad a song is. There are some songs that I switch off on hearing instantly. The hegemony of musicians via radio to take political power and exploit the masses for profit is more notable these days internationally. Mostly musicians don't sing songs that contribute to a good economy or environment that make it to mass broadcast airplay. 

With the changes in Russia after the end of the cold war the restoration of nation's churches to an openly religious status has had some limits with the sects permitted to open a church being restricted. It seems probably that with the transition of youth from a godless atheist state intolerant of criticism of their mobster commie leadership (only joking) to a nihilist punk ethos without experience of churches as sacred instead of profane places they naturally wandered in to the wrong place to launch their political diatribe. The Russian President could help with that too.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/entertainment-us-russia-pussyriot-idUSBRE87F1E520120817

Like the Londoner's' tradition of speaking from a soapbox in Hyde Park their raving attacks on Prime Minister Cameron and additional suspect politicians Moscow should develop a platform in Red Square for occasion evening musical performances and in the other corner a preferred speakers soapbox. It could be the start of a new tradition for a more egalitarian democracy-for even in the U.S. Congress today their is little enough legislating that isn't of a bi-polar two party nature of illogical extremes. The Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is on leave for bi-polar disorder and the rest of the congress is on vacation with something like the same roughly, approximately, more or less.

The strength of a democracy actually is in free speech and political pluralism-the trend today through networking is in the opposite direction-toward consolidation of power and wealth. President Putin could make another contribution toward the of defense and development of democracy with a few adroit moves.

Simple Digital Voter I.D. Database with Face Recognition Software

The national conundrum about voter I.D. laws to prevent undetected voter fraud is symbolic of the U.S. decline in innovative and creative thought miring about 25% of the people in under-employment and unemployment. Of course the elites don't care including the Democrat Party if the poor inertially founder in futility cause they've got theirs. The Democrat leadership of tuxedos and mint juleps with Hollywood Stars is the way things are.

It would be quite simple to use existing notebook computers, table digital cameras and photo recognition software to snap a picture of every voter and have a record to compare those with in the future. In fact even without and I.D. card state governments could create a voluntary voter photo database at some agency for free so each voter can be a real person instead of a faceless abstract theory to the electoral system.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981183096

I suppose some might argue that requiring some voters do drop their hijab and let their mug get photo'd would discriminate against the privacy of some and profile minorities unfairly in order to exclude them from taking over the nation; well, that could be so if they have ugly profile photos as well as straight on shots.

For every vote to count and in order for the franchise to be respected it is necessary that voter fraud does not become the ruler. Some Democrats may resist verification theories of voter I.D holding the mistaken belief that only Democratic partisans perpetrate voter fraud. It is not certain that the Jim Crowe south never had an advantage through use of voter fraud to nullify the rise of the negro vote.

In the close 2000 Presidential election a few thousand fraudulent votes here and their could have made illegal voters the electors of the President of the United States instead of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the partisan decision of the Florida State Supreme Court on criteria for determining if another round of recounts should proceed to determine finding what counted as a hanging chad and which way the wind blows. If those hanging chads were cast by illegal voters the troubles and paradoxes of inadequately documented hypothetical eligible voters is compounded.

I just wanted to point out that the U.S.A. is becoming a can't do nation too much these decades, rather than the opposite.

VP Biden's Gaffs & The Eignevalues of Random Hermitian Matrices

Vice President Biden made another of his famous gaffs recently in making a campaign speech to an audience with a preponderance of citizens of African American ancestry when he surpassed his prior remark that then candidate Obama didn't smell bad like some negroes with a remark that the Romney-Ryan Presidency would return them to wearing chains. He did not specify if that would be without or without hog jowls and chittlins.

In the quest to solve the Riemann  Hypothesis determining if the zeros of the zeta function all fall along a critical line of value 1/2 to infinity mathematicians for more than a century have sought ways to prove the theorem's validity and that has led to discoveries from the utility of factors and primes in generating Internet computer security codes (RSA) to the Dyson-Montgomery discovery that another way of mapping the distribution of the zeros of the zeta function of primes along the critical line resembles very closely, as Dyson famously observed; 'that's just the same as the behavior of the difference between pairs of eigenvalues of random Hermitian matirces!".

Some of us learn about the eigenvalues of random Hermitian matrices early in life as we move up the ladder of evolutionary progress to college, and others such as myself will learn about them today on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermitian_matrix

We may find with more research-such as reading a book named 'The Music of the Primes' that the patterns Dyson remarked about are representative of the spectroscopic distribution of heavy elements such as U-92. Because heavy elements and the frequency of vibrations of the particles of their nuclei are complex it is easier to statistically describe those than to graph them in particular. That's why I wanted to write this post today.

The average statistical relationships of power of fundamental elements averaged out within particular structures ought to provide a 1/2 paradignmatic balance between being and nothingness, between sticking together and flying apart, as the zeros of the zeta function of prime numbers appear on the .5 critical line between 0 and 1.

Philosophically speaking being and nothingness seem roughly equivalent to o and 1. There is another issue of 1 being representative of a monistic, non-pluralized universe. That might be a universal field concentrated at a singularity before it expands and differentiates metaphorically, yet it is perhaps better to just leave it philosophically as One without any denotable structure.

Prime numbers factors being just themselves and 1 no matter how large occupy a philosophical position within their number system of indivisibility and fullness regarding zero as the starting point leading to themselves-if folded in half along the zero-zeta function critical line their value is half with a fraction left over. They are perfectly balanced along the tipping point without turning in either direction as might a static universe be if its interior components too could have eternal renewability in a Fred Hoyle sort of cosmology.

Their are some things that never change-such as physical constants of the Universe-upon which myriad pluralistic forms evolve like scum froth on a standing tide-line presenting new appearances. We enjoy the thermal disequillibria if it doesn't go too far, and move with the waves of temporal advance along the parameters of thermodynamics. It would only be in a different sort of Universe-perhaps with more than four dimensions of space-time, that prime numbers would not be indivisible regarding Universe (1) mathematics criteria.

Multidimensional prime numbers instead of one-dimensional regarded in four dimensions might have random statistical eignevalues of complex Hermitian matrices disappearing into extra-dimensions with non-standard spacing of real energy components. Philosophically it is interesting to conjecture what sort of mathematical axioms physicists and mathematicians might use in a variegated universe in which energy and mass appear and disappear with eignevalues or imaginary number values that appear irregular.

Yet one could even so count on the gaffs of Vice president Biden for a renormalization of political levity.

Reduce Size of Government, Corporations, Schools and Global Heating

The Obama tax cuts passed with the President's vigorous leadership reestablished the low, low tax rates on millionaires and billionaires that cannot pay for the federal budget. The Presidents budget criteria plans for a trillion dollars of federal deficit for each year of the next decade bring the total U.S. public debt then to 26 trillion dollars with the interest on that debt being more each year than the present cost of funding the Department of Defense. The fundamental economic problem with the economic picture is that government spends too much in trying to keep up with the immense global economic and political power of global corporations.

The United States had intelligent founders able to invent a constitution that provided for an economic paradigm supported by the state of the art of business and the demographic realities of the era. The economic philosopher Adam Smith wrote in the same era his brilliant tome 'On the Wealth of Nations'. The current national intelligence for political philosophy generally relies on that economic theory of 1776. Adam Smith if alive today would reinvent and reform the prospects for free enterprise in order to liberate a nation from the snares of concentrated power and wealth.

Reduction of the size of corporations and government ought to accentuate the positive elements of free enterprise and full employment. The poor should be natural supporters of vouchers for private schools to break-up the multi-thousand union student ranches. Reducing the vast size of public schools,corporations and government while increasing ecospheric health ought to create new jobs.

The U.S. middle class faces challenging times ahead. It has been in decline since the end of the cold warn and even the past 30 years. As a class it has average intelligence and yet consumes more than perhaps half of the rest of the people of the nations of the Earth without really contributing more than people of average intellect would. With the post cold-war labor and intellectual market driven by billions of hungry people that condition of privilege isn't likely to continue with the current economic style.

Adam Smith however would have reformed capitalism to enable free enterprise to flourish once more outside the totalizing strictures of global corporate power. When global corporations grow large and government declines the era of pure corporatism envisioned by Mussolini and Hitler develops with the corporations becoming the big brother of a compliant revolving door government. The government appoints the same people from party to party because neither party does more than serve the will of the financial and economic elite.

Saving free enterprise from corporate hegemony and the fiction of corporations as individuals requires a cap on the number of employees any corporation might have that once to do business in the U.S.A. at just 5000 individuals. With fewer employees intelligence will become more important that management networking and racketeering of the system. With far more corporations and businesses with fewer than 5000 employees inventiveness and adaptability will become features, neither will technologies become 'too big to change' such as the automotive industry with more than a century of inertia driving perpetual renewal of the highway bill at about a half trillion dollars.

In order to increase competition and break up second degree monopolies through networking no individual with American citizenship could lawfully own shares in more than three corporations. No foreign national could buy shares in more than three U.S. corporations.

Another good idea would be to cut taxes in the reformed era on high-end earners, yet to raise inheritance taxes on estates of more than fifty million dollars in present terms to about 51%. There should be no penalty on an individual earning a lot from his business on merit so long as he does it within the legal criteria, nor should they be discouraged by not being able to pass on an inheritance to their descendents. With a 51% inheritance tax rate on large estates a non-productive generation would experience the regular reduction of their capital to the average social condition.

The point of competition with full employment and opportunity for all to start an enterprise without being repressed by networks, collectives and organizations of any sort is the pursuit of happiness. Human beings natural seek after their interests and good-even mathematicians pursuing construction of a program to disprove Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems are being idle gamers consuming just for the heck of it.

The United States may encounter real climate turbulence in the years and decades ahead with global warming desiccating productive farmland. A remedy should be to develop a vast public works desalinization of saltwater project to bring Wets Texas and the Midwest into an irrigated condition. Areas for wildlife should be thrown in to the reclamation project also getting a share of a man-made natural desalinization project exploiting gravity, solar power, evaporation and condensation.

The United States' middle class is the target of much political gamesmanship by the elites today even as they face the challenges of social and climate decline in the years ahead. Very likely continuing public debt increase will create a catastrophe shift toward a terminal dust-bowl future. The futurist and inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis James Lovelock foresees a challenged Earth reduced to a population of 200 million in the centuries ahead through climate overheating and economic collapse. Alaska may become the last resort for surviving Americans. Considering that state with even 30 million citizens in 50 of 70 years is breathtaking. If the Arctic ice pack is now in progressive decay and a rapid increase of global heating follows in the next couple of decades the present global corporate economic leadership is completely inadequately prepared to provide leadership.

Democracy is an important thing for the quality of life of average citizens, yet as Aristotle observed they tend to not lead themselves in a good direction and lapse into picking a dictator. Autocratic societies though are inflexible on permitting free enterprise and inventions that might disturb their control of political power. The remedy for the United States now ought to be for a reform to capitalism, a refocus on public participation and leadership in church, environmental recovery and space exploration and a securing of our national borders in order that political self-determination can continue to be possible. The self-determination should be more than a determination for debauchery, personal, social and environmental decay.

The Obama administration recently announced that it would allow oil drilling in the high Arctic of Alaska's national Petroleum Reserve sprawling nearly across half of the northern littoral of the state. It will also allow a network of oil pipeline to be built to support offshore oil drilling. The high Arctic is the region of the world with the greatest increase in global heating. It is also experiencing an increasing ozone hole and is a location where the pollution from fossil fuel machines can most affect climate change. Plainly the Democrat Party has insufficient concern about reversing global heating to take a stand on the development of oil and destruction of the health of the ecosphere.

Human beings are a biological life form with self-awareness. Automobile engines and other machine carbon exhaust is a non-biological contribution on a vast scale increasing the Co2 in the Earth's atmosphere-more than the ecosphere in balance without the human contribution can balance-thus the atmospheric heating that may bring about the end of human life. It is something to be serious about.

Democratic Party Platform 2012 Declares War on The Defense of Marriage Act

The Democratic Party 2012 convention has made the destruction of the Defense of Marriage Act part of their platform. They also seek to bring sex change to the legal criteria of marriage in order to adulterate the institution to include homosexuals in twos I think.

 I find that supporters of homosexual ingressions into political hegemony usually attack opponents to their platform on a personal, ad hominem basis. I believe that is a consequence of their lack of principle and correct content and perspective on issues. To oppose rotten Democratic platform planks does not require anything more than good judgment and better ideas of history and society.

On the topic of homosexuality being wrong sexually-of course it is. Sexual reproduction was the reason for the development of marriage as a social establishment to facilitate that fact of life. Homosexuality is a dysfunction of the heterosexual nature of the species, and empirically today maybe a preponderance of homosexuals and assuredly the Democratic Party leaders seek to terminate the rationale for marriage and confer the financial benefits of marriage upon homosexuals. That is a fundamental nihilistic act that will probably lead to the end of marriage supports from society socially.

When the reason for marriage is surpassed and the transmogrification of the empirical phenomenalities are ended the conference of financial benefits of marriage upon everyone except for single people creates an evident burden upon single adults that discriminates unjustly. If reproduction is not the purpose of creating a marriage then establishing special, unequal financial categories for various classes of citizens with a marriage paper as the qualifier is wrong. The constitution is not about setting aside special groups of citizens for more-than-equal financial treatment. Groups should not have advantages over individuals before the law. Corporations are not individuals and homosexuals do not marry-single people should get all of the tax breaks that couples do when reproductive theory is removed.

In the era of dynamic subjectivism it is common for people to describe too many things as 'phobias'. Perhaps some don't consider it rude for people to confer 'phobic' status upon indigents that don't support one's own political will-for-others, that doesn't mean that it isn't. It is unreasonable for anyone to expect that the corruption of a few thousand years of human history in the institution of marriage should develop in American politics without substantial and lasting opposition.

It may be that some homosexual social nihilists will seek to establish their subjective psychological characteristics and desires as a joker in the deck of the national political psyche, yet those sorts of changes in the temporal stream of historical time are aberrant rather than transformative. The recurrent characteristics and cycles of history return just as mice always stick their heads into a mousetrap in the same way.

On the subject of hunting, my concern about guns are surpassed on the topic of self defense instead of hunting. Just night before last about midnight a black bear walked over to my tent door and began sniffing around before moving in. I awoke and shooed the bear away, yet if that had been a brown bear instead of a black I might have been a late night snack like so many others in Yellowstone now and then. Guns for self-defense are a part of human necessity, as are guns for home defense and guns for defense against a Stalinist, leftist social movement by the state to conform society to it's supremist decretals. The founders recognized that a well armed citizenry is the best defense against state tyranny, besides of course a citizenry intelligent enough to have at least a viable, progressive republic if not democracy.

One may develop a philosophy of what life is about as one wishes. The accuracy may or may not be achieved such that the beliefs are representative of what actually is. Some believe the purpose of life is about gaining personal power, and many of those enter politics. The pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides differed about the question of does everything always change or in the change does everything remain the same. One can never step into the same river twice.

One likes to find a less subjective foundation for the real world of physical experience than 'everything changes'. Challenges and responses are a component of Toynbean historical cycles, even a salient feature. It is a sad fact that people in the sciences tend to lack good historical perspectives on civilization and prefer to take a scientific and narrow view of the capacity for society to change to the way they believe that perhaps it could. Scientists also tend to have a less than democratic point of view upon their own right to determine what is best for humanity politically on occasion.

So challenges and responses today to the internal and external proletariat in an age of globalization, twitter and facebook, a declining domestic industrial production, exhaustion of environmental resources, decline of comparative standing in education, corruption of marriage, demographic increases such that myriad species are exterminated-these challenges and responses are being prevalently met with failure if not outright ignorance. One Princeton historian wrote a book named 'The Age of Fracture' describing the political evolution in the U.S.A. that since the 1960s created a somewhat existential and hedonist political philosophy that is mal-adaptive to the times. The Democratic Party certainly is going in the wrong direction, is a failure at economic reform and creativity and even extended the Bush II tax cuts making them the Obama Tax Cuts in December 2010. They are a mal-adaptive joke that ought to be reformed.

On the Riemann Hypothesis, The Magnolin and Spuds

Reading further in 'The Music of the Primes' I have learned more about the Riemann hypothesis of prime numbers. It is a more specialized conjecture than simply proving that their are an infinite number of primes or of finding the number of primes within N numbers. Riemann's development of the hypothesis occurred within an interesting period of the development of mathematics generally in France, Germany, Norway, Italy, and Russia etc wherein imaginary numbers were invented. Imaginary numbers as you know are negative numbers.

Mathematicians like Gauss, Cauchy built foundations for Reimann's study with origins from Euclid to Euler. Riemann found that the zeros of the zeta function (with imaginary numbers) plotted on a graph or chart invariably would turn up with a value of 1/2. That is a philosophically satisfying place for prime number zero zeta values on Reimann's critical line to fall.

Not being a mathematician the zeros of the prime zeta function with a location of 1/2 appear to be logically situated between being and nothingness. In the development of any self-consistent mathematical series there should be a golden mean of 1/2 denoting the midway between the two boundaries existentially.

Prime numbers are indivisible within a given number series and so in relation to the number system place midway- or at the .50 percent location between theoretical deviations in any direction. That is quite non-mathematical yet as I mentioned, philosophically satisfactory. If there were other number systems with primes the zero zeta function of those two should have a value of 1/2.

Irrational numbers have values to the right of the decimal sign that go on for infinity such as pi while fractions have an end to their decimal extension. Prime numbers as midway locations in a self-consistent criterion have a balance that might represent some values in another field I don't know much about; particle physics.

The strong force bind the nucleus of atoms together is made of quarks I seem to recall and they are bound in such a way that their force gets stronger as they are pulled apart. The numerical values of particles are in ratios consistent with their force distance, spacing, momentum and numbers from other particles. They have valence values of how many can be in a shell (e.g. electrons) without flying apart or otherwise effecting the composition of the structure. Loading a boat or building a mountain range of offices and condos has similar weight, load and materials limits.

 The Reimann hypothesis for prime numbers presents a general statistical way of finding primes with a zero zeta function it seems (so far as I presently understand the hypothesis). It seems like a good book to read on a rainy day after a bear visit.

Fourier found mathematical foundations for harmonics that support the premise that prime numbers too have a musical progression rather than general chaotic noise. On might build metallic or ceramic strings held in place by super-conducting electro-magnetic that would let the harmonics trail off either like a clarinet or a violin as the player made adjustments for simple pure harmonics or complex overtones such as a violin has.

The strings at each end would go into the electro-magnetic receiver and not make direct physical contact. I suppose one could adjust the strings so that they could have variable pitch characteristics themselves with magnetic force. Yet that idea might be more effective than making a dehydrated potato factory in Wasilla Alaska to take in northern potato growers produce and convert it into packaged powder spuds for the growers for just 19% of the crop. Northerners with a few hundred or thousand pounds of potatoes might find it simpler to store mashed potatoes for the winter instead of raw.

Adam & Eve, Original Sin, Morality etc.

I believe that original sin has several meaning consequents. The one most meaningful is that human experience would occur within a space-time paradigm with entropy and temporality such as is the Universe. The 'testing'and fall of Adam and Eve brought about birth and suffering as corrections for their moral failure. It is a complex criterion. The space-time relationship of mind and body is simpler to describe after the fall for it occurs within a paradigm congruent generally with evolutionary parameters.

Adam and Eve seem to have been spliced into an already existing evolved society outside 'Eden' eventually after their expulsion. Cain was concerned about being killed by others, and was given the mark of Cain as a warning to others. I have written about some of these topics in my book 'Creation and Cosmos - The Literal Values of Genesis'lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/ ... 22612.html

The problems of self-awareness or innocence compared to non-self-awareness as a paradigm for itself is not a positive or negative, but one that brings recognition that the self-aware necessarily acquire a moral structure and need for one whereas the purely animal world of non-self-aware beings does not. God helpfully provided moral instruction to humanity and it has been a tremendously challenging project as has been described in the Bible. Humanity forever fails to live by fundamentally good moral principles-even the U.S. economy is not founded in rationality but instead within a paradigm of unlimited consumption and increase of consumption existentially without empirical limits-and the immorality of the pursuit of power for itself eclipses even democracy and reform of both capitalism and democracy.

There is a good reason why the apocalypse described in the Bible is inevitable - human nature is fundamentally wicked and unable to live with advanced social intelligence well enough to avoid disaster.

Development in Free Online College Courses

Free online college courses for the masses is a growing trend at several elite institutions. A few universities have already offered courses (e.g. M.I.T.) and more on going on-line this fall (Harvard).  At the Coursera site more than 16 academics disciplines from 16 Universities are providing coursework.

https://www.coursera.org/ A MOOC center with more than a million students.

The offerings so far as modest, and only a few Universities so far intend to offer college credit for the free, unaccredited course, yet its is an encouraging development because a mind in a brain is a terrible thing to just stick in a football helmet from an early age and to get trained for concussions. Evidently the average life span for pro footballers of the N.F.L. who play more than 5 years is fewer than 60 years.

An introduction to mathematical thinking course is being offered at Stanford beginning September 17, 2012   https://www.coursera.org/course/maththink

http://mooctalk.org/tag/stanford-mooc/

https://www.coursera.org/

http://mooc.ca/

http://moocguide.wikispaces.com/0.+Home+Intro+to+MOOC

One would think that math courses on-line could be made as interesting as chess videos and learning to play chess watching chess videos at YouTUbe. Human beings need to get their thinking caps on even more in an era of mass entertainment consuming zillions of hours of citizens watching living room television screens..

Basic Questions About U.S. Middle East Policy

The Obama doctrine of providing overt and covert support for Middle Eastern revolutionaries in Libya and Syria presents questions that don't have simply answers for many Americans. I will go over a few of the points .

Before the First World War Turkey's Ottoman Empire ruled most of the Middle East and North Africa-even Iran was under its authority. Saddam Hussein and Al Qa'eda both wanted to restore a unified Arabic or Sunni empire, caliphate or modern state in the Middle East. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war for the Arabs was an opportunity to bring that to fruit starting with the destruction of Israel. Though that didn't work out for the Arabs the goal of creating a larger Middle Eastern Moslem bloc of nations remained in the forefront of Arab thinking so far as I know.

Though Nasser and Sadat were gone a secular drift in Egypt continued with Mubarak. Because the Moslem Brotherhood machine-gunned to death Anwar Sadat in a parade stand the Mubarak regime and the Egyptian military continued to keep the populous Moslem Brotherhood repressed a little. Egypt would have a preponderantly secularized state somewhat like that of Turkey. With the post 9-11 new world order of terrorism the Mubarak government probably was more repressive in keeping power and putting dow2n terrorism. Institutions that develop those practices tend to develop inertia of their own developing a logic of pervasive civil oppression in concert with the need to defilade real terrorists. Paradoxically the state itself can become a public enemy.

President Obama's policy of support to remove the corrupt secular Khaddafi regime of Libya and support for the removal of the Mubarak Regime in Egypt followed by the support for Syrian revolutionaries aided by Al Qa'eda and several Sunni States presents the prospects for accomplishing a Sunni belt from Turkey to Algeria with just Israel the sole island of religious pluralism. If the Alawite Government of Syria is removed it would perhaps stimulate a kind of theocide of the hybrid Shi'te sect those people practice, the very real dangers for continuing purges of the Alawi people from Syria is something some might expect as well.

The administration may be concerned with the history of the Assad government allowance for terrorist to journey through the nation on the way to Iraq. It isn't certain that it could have prevented that, yet Iraq's Bathy party had its origins in Syria's Baath party of Afflack-they may have viewed U.S. developments in Iraq as some kind of danger to their own political survival.

Yet the question of what U.S. foreign policy is remains unanswered. The United States has removed its military forces from Iraq and Iraq is experiencing continuing terrorism against the Shi'a of Iraq. It is known that the United States since the revolution against the Shah and the later Iranian Hostage crisis has had a firm anti-Iranian foreign policy that for some seems to be a self-fulfilling policy of bad relations. I will write a little about that...

In the 1930s I believe it was, the United States had an economic adviser that helped design the Iranian economy-the U.S.A. was on good terms with Iran having never had a history of conflict or perfidy with it, while the British and others were exploiters and schemers of long standing.

Eisenhower was perhaps too busy managing world affairs to get involved with support for democratic populism in Iran-we tended to support the removal of the left-leaning Prime Minister Mossadeq and prop up the Shah who had already left the country only to return.

The Shah had a grand vision for the role of Iran in the Middle East working to let it become a unifier something like Saddam Hussein believed he might lead. With deep American military support and aloof to Iranian in-country politics while pre-occupied with the Vietnam War the U.S.A. viewed the region through cold war lenses. U.S. oil corporations and staff in country had something of a separate and aloof attitude toward 'the natives'.  We did not work enough to eliminate the torture of the SAVAK organization.

After the end of the Vietnam conflict without a plain victory for the United States the international communist and revolutionary movements were emboldened to work against governments such as that of the Shah often with support from the left. It is one of history's ironies that the left in Iraq and Iran were mostly liquidated after they helped depose the government of their day. Ayatollah Khomeini let his hard-line supporters purge the Tudeh (Iranian Communist Party).

After the end of the Cold War for more than a decade thousands of pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium were stored unguarded and likely plundered by hidden nuclear arms speculators. Forward thinking revolutionaries could have sent hundreds of pounds of plutonium to the United States in ordinary shipping containers for before 9-11 most U.S. ports did not screen well for radioactive materials.

 The economic value for wmd entrepreneurs and political revolutionaries of fissile materials in the U.S.A. or anyplace buried like treasure to be sold later would be very high. Iran too as well as Saudi Arabia may have made purchases. The secret world of 1990s plutonium, enriched U-235 and biological agents is one of the darker mysteries of the present generation. Only those caught are generally known to legal authorities while the successful are secretly holding their bomb materials like hoarders of gold, if they exist.

Some wonder if Iran might have made a purchase-it is known that Iranian agents were in Kazakhstan at a plutonium storage site in the 1990s. What difference to American security or financial interests will a Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi Syria make in the decades ahead? Is the idea of pressuring the Shi'a of Iran through formation of a Sunni Near and Middle East on its borders a good idea?  

The Allies of the United States in Afghanistan in the Northern Alliances are mostly Shi'a. What are their long-range prospects if U.S. policy is toward the elimination of the Alawi and the degradation of the Shi'a politically speaking in a quantitative context regarding nation? Obviously Pakistan is Sunni and radicalized with support for Kashmir fighter against Indian and Hindu interests, and I suppose President Obama living in Indonesia experience a Sunni version of Islam rather than the Shi'a variety.

Can the United States lead the world toward a better future with a pursuit of classic 'great game' policy possible in favor of supporting nations with vast oil and gas reserved in a global warming era with demographics against a sustainable policy of resource consumption expansion globally? Wouldn't it be a better idea to exploit transformative economic renewal development toward pragmatic infrastructural efficiency in the United States and then provide nationally transformative cultural technology to Middle Eastern nations instead of the implements of war?

In failing to upgrade and humanize the U.S. national economy toward a post-modern ecospheric and social hyper-efficiency U.S. foreign policy interests suffer too as they seem inevitably to lead toward temporal pursuit of illusory goals that pass off to the future the generation of the new illusions of rational policy objectives.