klamuse

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

T. Greer at Scholar’s Stage had an outstanding post on Sun Tzu and his classic The Art of War the other day in which I learned a number of things that were new to me, which is the best kind of blog post!

The Radical Sunzi

When translated into English, the Sunzi Bingfa, usually titled Sunzi’s Art of War, is a fairly small work. When we take away the commentary and annotation added by its translators we are left with a sparse text indeed: Roger Ames’ translation is 71 pages long, the Denma Group’s translation is 66 pages, Victor Mair’s translation is only 56, and Ralph Sawyer’s translation clocks in at a mere 30 pages total. [1] The brevity of the Sunzi explains its staying power. The Sunzi only has space for a foundational discussion of abstract strategic principles, leaving no room for detailed discussions of either the tactics or the political realities of its time. This is what gives the Sunzi its transcendent feel. Great power competition between the kingdoms of Chu, Qi, and Qin faded into the realm of memory centuries ago; the proper way to deploy squadrons of crossbowmen and charioteers is now a question that interests only the historian. In contrast, the strategic principles outlined in the Sunzi endure. Their very terseness frees them from the historical context from which they came and allows them to be applied by men living thousands of years after they were first etched into bamboo.

Timeless as it may seem, however, the Sunzi was the product of problems experienced at a specific time and a specific place. It is my belief that we cannot really understand the Sunzi if we do not first understand the world from which it came–the world of the Warring States.[2] A few historians and scholars of Chinese thought have written this sort of analysis; the best of these attempts to place the Sunzi within its historical context are usually focused on the broad, macro-historical trends that divided the Spring and Autumn period that preceded the Sunzifrom the Warring States period that gave birth to it. From this perspective the Sunzi and the other military manuals that followed it were the natural product of a world torn asunder by wars waged on an ever increasing scale between large infantry armies fighting in the name of territorial, bureaucratized states.[3] There is, however, more to the Sunzi‘s historical setting than the institutional history of ancient China. Just as important is the intellectual milieu of early Warring States times. The compilers of the Sunzi were not the first Chinese to write about war. When read as a response to these earlier voices, the Sunzi’s vision of war and politics is nothing less than radical. [….]

Here comes the important part, one that demonstrates a curious symmetry with the cultural shift  between the post-Dark Age heroic-aristocratic Archaic Greece to the Classical Greece of the Golden Age that laid the foundations of Western civilization:

….The Sunzi that Meyer describes is radical–at the time of its compilation it was possibly the most radical attack on ancient China’s old aristocratic order etched in bamboo. The Sunzi‘s assault on the old regime begins with its opening line:

The military [bing] is the great affair of the state, the terrain of life and death, the way of survival and extinction, it cannot but be investigated. [4]

To modern ears this sentence may sound controversial, but it is hardly subversive. Its revolutionary nature only becomes clear when we see what it was written in response to. The place to turn is the Zuo Zhuan, China’s oldest narrative historical account and one of the few preserves of the old Spring and Autumn ethos. One of its better known dictums reads:

The great affairs of state are sacrifice and warfare.[5]

Meyer comments on the contrast between the two statements:

[In the Sunzi] all mention of sacrifice is eliminated, telegraphing the text’s contention that martial matters must be viewed in purely material terms. Rather than “warfare,” the “military” is held up as the great affair of state, implying (as the text goes on to elaborate) that there are uses for military power beyond the ‘honorable’ contest of arms. Moreover, the word that the Sunzi uses by reference to the “military,” bing???, does not evoke the aristocratic charioteer but the common foot solider, who had become the backbone of the Warring States army.[6]

The Sunzi‘s insistence that military methods were more important to the state’s survival than sacrifice was not merely radical–it was nonsensical. In the early Chinese world view, sacrifice and warfare could not be separated from each other. As with the Aztecs, Maya, and many other premodern peoples, for the Chinese of Zhou times, warfare was a sacrificial ritual. The Lost Book of Zhou, an early warring states record that chronicled the conquests of the semi-mythical King Wu, provides a clear picture of these views. It contains an interesting narrative account of the King’s return to his clan’s ancestral temple to report his victorious conquest:

Read the rest here

I just finished reading a book by the Israeli scholar Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice; here’s an enormous difference between a culture that “sacrifices to” and one that is worth or requires “sacrificing for“. It is not only a cultural difference, it is cognitive. Strategy is possible in a “sacrificing to” society only to the extent that it does not conflict with (often maximalist) religious dictates, which will often mean a rational strategy to achieve victory is impossible. The Jews at Masada or the Greeks of the Trojan War would have understood the precepts of warfare of the ancient Chinese of the Zhou era very well.

In war, the bronze age peoples sacrificed to. We sacrifice for – and to spend our lives to best effect we need strategy.

[ by Charles Cameron — or it may be time treat the newfangled term “omnimpotence” as a valid theological descriptor for the hubris manifested by “great powers” ]
.

**

Abu Bakr Naji makes an interesting point about hubris in his jihadist dissertation, The Management of Savagery (cover image above), which I was thumbing through today:

Therefore, the two superpowers must resort to using a deceptive media halo which portrays these powers as non-coercive and world-encompassing, able to reach into every earth and heaven as if they possess the power of the Creator of creation.

But the interesting thing that happened is that these two superpowers believed, for a time, their media deception: that they are actually a power capable of completely controlling any place in the entire world, and that (this power) bears the characteristics of the power of the Creator.

**

You know Parkinson’s Law, that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. It’s one specific instance of the more general saying “Nature abhors a vacuum” — and as always, if there’s one instance of a more general rule, there are liabke to be others.

I’d like to suggest that Abu Bakr Naji may be onto something: that when the idea of an omnipotent deity vanishes (“appears vacuous” or is no longer taken with any depth of seriousness), whatever power is sufficiently well-placed for that purpose is liable to fill the vacuum with its own sense of, well, omnipotence.

This omnipotence of a superpower (or powers — Naji refers to two “poles” in his treatise, the US and Russia) may not be clothed in such a religious term as “omnipotence” — but it can still carry with it the idea of a quasi-divine aegis, as in the concept of American exceptionalism, the “shining light on a hill” able to illuminate the rest of the world.

Thinking America is the sole remaining superpower, Russia having lost its claim to that status at the end of the Cold War, clearly has enough support in practical reality to make it very easy for us to blur the distinction between “omnipotence” and “superpower” — with much of the theological resonance of the former term remaining as a halo, to use Naji’s term, about the latter.

From a psychiatric point of view, this is the very nature of hubris — an overweening or excessive confidence or pride — of the sort that Carl Jung, interestingly enough, would term “inflation” — a sense of power that puffs itself up beyond its realistic limits to fill the vacuum made available by the absence of a recognition of God as an authentically omnipotent higher power.

And we know what happens to over-extended balloons, bubbles, and the like…

**

It is only too easy for us to be so “rational” that we overlook the “irrational” or frankly “magical” aspects of our thinking — but the gap between supposed “realism” and reality may be a crucial one, and one which Naji sees from a distance more clearly than do we who are within it.

[ by Charles Cameron -- an open question to our readers, and a koan for strategists ]
.

It is one of the world’s great questions, and a central koan for strategists: which is mightier, the pen or the sword? I found it posed yesterday in two cartoons memorializing the journalist James Foley in British newspapers.

The sword was made in Britain, The Times suggests.

According to The Independent, the pen is mightier.

Sources:

sword

pen

**

To the sword goes the short term, vicious victory — but it was and is the pen, surely, whose power was so persuasive that the sword was brought out to defeat it, and the pen, surely, that will triumph in the end.

James Foley, RIP. Daniel Pearl, RIP.

The tragic irony is that both journalists worked for a better understanding of Islam as a peaceable religion, and were brutally murdered in Islam’s name for their pains.

[by Lynn C. Rees]
What Angelo Codevilla writes on what diplomacy is for has rarely been topped:

By their very nature, diplomacy and military force are means to the ends of statecraft as well as channels by which governments press their agendas onto others. Neither is inherently more or less useful than the other. Diplomacy verbally communicates realities that may move nations (it is not to be confused with any particular message diplomats may carry or with its effects), while military action (not to be confused with war) physically communicates a government’s wishes by trying to sweep away resistance to them. Whereas diplomacy represents realities, military operations create them. Statecraft—with which neither diplomacy nor military action should be confused—is about managing reality, coupling ends and means in ways that advance a country’s interests. Far from being antithetical to one another, diplomacy and military force are complementary insofar as they serve the same political ends.

Diplomacy is often popularly thought of as the peaceful alternative to violence, but in fact, diplomacy serves to prepare as often as to avoid war. It is an important part of waging war, often makes the difference in who wins, and nearly always codifies wars’ results. Again, diplomacy is the verbal representation of compelling international realities, and military force is one of those realities.

Conventionally, major military action is called war. The connection between means and ends determines the character of actions. War is military operations tailored to achieve one’s preferred peace. Only insofar as a military operation is so crafted as to bring about the desired peace does it qualify as an act of war as opposed to senseless violence.

The study of history helps us to see through the fog of contemporary loose talk…Studying history helps us to understand the arts of diplomacy and of war for themselves and as tools of statecraft.

[...]

Imagine two persons at odds over any given matter. A friend might suggest: “Why don’t you resolve your differences through diplomacy? I’ll set up the meetings.” But, what could each say at those meetings that would make the differences less important than they were before? If the differences remained important, why should either side accommodate the other’s wishes? Perhaps the differences were not real—mere misunderstandings. Perhaps, though real, they were small in comparison with other interests that either or both are willing to take as currency in exchange for giving up their claims in the matter at hand. Perhaps new events have reduced the controversy’s importance for either or both. Or, one side may present to the other realities of which it was ignorant that lead it to change its position. If so, the meeting may produce agreement. But if neither side presents to the other anything it did not know before, both sides will be lucky if the meeting just leaves the controversy where it was and does not worsen it.

John Quincy Adams, a student as well as a practitioner of statesmanship, believed that governments understand their own and others’ interests quite well. His involvement in diplomacy, which lasted from 1778 to the end of his presidency in 1829, convinced him not that negotiations are superfluous, but rather that they ratify the several parties’ recognition of existing realities regardless of agreements or lack thereof. Diplomacy can make it more comfortable to live with reality by clarifying mutual understanding of it. On the other hand, Adams’ magisterial notes on his 1823 recommendation that America spurn the invitation to join Britain in a declaration disapproving any attempt to recover Spain’s American colonies…

!!!PRIMARY SOURCE INTERLUDE!!!

From the Journal of John Quincy Adams:

Washington, November 7th. -Cabinet meeting at the President’s from half past one till four. Mr. Calhoun, Secretary of War, and Mr. Southard, Secretary of the Navy, present. The subject for consideration was, the confidential proposals of the British Secretary of State, George Canning, to R. Rush, and the correspondence between them relating to the projects of the Holy Alliance upon South America. There was much conversation, without coming to any definite point. The object of Canning appears to have been to obtain some public pledge from the Government of the United States, ostensibly against the forcible interference of the Holy Alliance between Spain and South America; but really or especially against the acquisition to the United States themselves of any part of the Spanish American possessions.

Mr. Calhoun inclined to giving a discretionary power to Mr. Rush to join in a declaration against the interference of the Holy Allies, if necessary, even if it should pledge us not to take Cuba or the province of Texas; because the power of Great Britain being greater than ours to seize upon them, we should get the advantage of obtaining from her the same declaration we should make ourselves.

I thought the cases not parallel. We have no intention of seizing either Texas or Cuba. But the inhabitants of either or both may exercise their primitive fights, and solicit a union with us. They will certainly do no such thing to Great Britain. By joining with her, therefore, in her proposed declaration, we give her a substantial and perhaps inconvenient pledge against ourselves, and really obtain nothing in return. Without entering now into the enquiry of the expediency of our annexing Texas or Cuba to our Union, we should at least keep ourselves free to act as emergencies may arise, and not tie ourselves down to any principle which might immediately afterwards be brought to bear against ourselves.

Mr. Southard inclined much to the same opinion.

The President was averse to any course which should have the appearance of taking a position subordinate to that of Great Britain. . . .

I remarked that the communications recently received from the Russian Minister, Baron Tuyl, afforded, as I thought, a very suitable and convenient opportunity for us to take our stand against the Holy Alliance, and at the same time to decline the overture of Great Britain. It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.

This idea was acquiesced in on all sides, and my draft for an answer to Baron Tuyl’s note announcing the Emperor’s determination to refuse receiving any Minister from the South American Governments was read.

!!!PRIMARY SOURCE INTERLUDE!!!

—that jointness would have added nothing to the reality of parallel British and U.S. opposition to such a venture—underlines the central fact about diplomacy: though it conveys reality, it does not amend it.

In 1968, Fred Ikle published How Nations Negotiate, which is used by diplomatic academies around the world. Too many graduates, however, forget its central teaching, which is that the diplomat’s first task is to figure out whether agreement is possible on the basis of “the available terms”—in short, whether both sides’ objectives, though different, are compatible. Only if they are can negotiations proceed according to what Ikle calls “rules of accommodation”—making sincere proposals, honoring partial agreements, etc. If the objectives are incompatible, the diplomats may choose to walk away, or to “negotiate for side effects”—to use the negotiations to undermine the other side’s government, sow dissension among its allies, deceive it, pocket partial agreements and renege on commitments, buy time, gather intelligence, etc. Disaster looms when one side follows the rules of accommodation while the other negotiates for side effects. The essence of Ikle’s teaching is that the negotiator’s primordial job is to judge correctly whether the other side is negotiating for “available terms” or is waging war through diplomatic means, and hence to choose whether to negotiate for agreement, walk away, or treat the diplomatic table as a battlefield. That choice is “perpetual,” he writes, because human motives are variable.

The history of U.S. diplomacy since World War II is in too-large measure that of what happens when this judgment is made badly. Whether with regard to the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Soviet Union, or the Middle East and North Korea in our time, the default U.S. modus operandi has been to consider diplomacy as an independent factor, for diplomats to treat all interlocutors as “partners,” and to treat negotiations as mutual good-faith searches for agreements. Of course this has permitted, even encouraged and rewarded, America’s adversaries to treat negotiations as instruments of conflict. Just as important, by validating the other side’s bona fides, American diplomats have placed themselves in the awkward position of taking blame for the failure of negotiations to achieve the ends that they themselves proclaimed were at hand. The embarrassment of revoking certifications of bona fides granted gratuitously has pressed American diplomats preemptively to dismiss the option of “walking away” and to worry lest the other side take it up. Hence also, American diplomats are wary of exerting pressure through “side effects” lest they “sour” the negotiations. Thus they end up valuing less the substance of any agreement than the appearance thereof. The result has been not just the practice but also the advocacy of international agreements that are no such thing.

Most often, today’s high-profile agreements are written purposely so that both sides may interpret them precisely as they wish—that is, precisely as if no negotiation had taken place. Whom does this benefit or disadvantage? Clearly, governments who depend on public opinion and who publicly subscribe to the fiction that an agreement has been reached must realize that if and when they subsequently take action in response to the other side’s undiminished pursuit of its goals, they will impeach thereby their own judgment and performance. Moreover, make-believe successes are guaranteed to turn into real defeats that cannot be spun away. That is why—the case of U.S. negotiations with North Korea illustrates the point well —diplomats have caveated their claims of agreement by adding the word “framework.” But what is a “framework agreement” other than the codification of an agenda and a pledge to agree later, maybe? Agreements to agree really advertise that no agreement exists.

Even more transparently unnatural are so-called agreements on “Processes”—e.g. “disarmament processes” and “peace processes.” You wanted disarmament and peace; you have armament and war. But you’ve succeeded in engaging the several parties in procedures that will overcome substantive intentions—tomorrow. Casting thin veils over unpleasant realities is not, however, diplomacy. The ultimate in such see-through diplomatic garments is surely the 2005 agreement on the Bush administration’s “roadmap” to Arab-Israeli peace. Here policymakers and diplomats cannot manage to pretend that there is any agreement even on a diplomatic agenda, much less on the fundamental issues. But they tout agreement on ambiguously phrased interim goals as tracing the road to talks leading to a process.

Why then do policymakers and diplomats, followed by the media and academe, so abuse the fundamentals of their craft? Because doing the craft badly is easier than doing it well. Competent diplomacy requires deciding on one’s own course of action before making diplomatic contact rather than during negotiations. In book 8 of his history, Livy tells us of a meeting of the Latin cities to instruct their joint delegation for a meeting with the Romans. After much wrangling, one Lucius Annius said: “How we act will affect the main issue more than what we say. Once we have set our plans in order, it will be easy to find words to fit our deeds.”

!!!PRIMARY SECONDARY SOURCE INTERLUDE!!!

[8] but the Romans, though quite certain that the allies and all the Latins were going to revolt, nevertheless, as if concerned not for themselves but for the Samnites, summoned to Rome the ten chief men of the Latins, that they might give them such commands as they might wish.

[9] Latium at that time had two praetors, Lucius Annius Setinus and Lucius Numisius Circeiensis, both from Roman colonies, through whose contrivance, besides Signia and Velitrae —likewise Roman colonies — even the Volsci had been induced to draw the sword.

[10] it was determined to summon these men by name. Nobody could be in doubt why they were sent for; accordingly, before setting out for Rome the praetors held a council, and explaining how they had been summoned by the Roman senate, asked instructions touching the answers they should give to the questions which they supposed would be put to them.

4.

[1] while one was suggesting this thing and another that, Annius arose. “notwithstanding I have myself referred to you,” said he, “the question as to what our reply should be, nevertheless I consider that what we are to do is of more importance to the welfare of our nation than what we are to say.

[2] it will be easy, when we have straightened out our plans, to frame words suitable to our conduct. for if we are able even now to endure slavery under a shadowy pretense of equal treaty —rights, what is left for us but to give up the Sidicini, and obeying the behest not of the Romans only but also of the Samnites, make answer to the Romans that we are ready to lay down our arms at their beck and call?

[3] but if our hearts are pricked at last with a longing for liberty; if treaties, if alliances, mean equality of rights; if we may now glory in the kinship of the Romans, of which we were formerly ashamed; if they mean by “allied army” one which added to their own doubles its numbers, one which they would not wish to make its own war and peace, apart from them; —if

[4] these things are so, I say, why are not all things equalized?

[5] why is not one consul furnished by the Latins? where a portion of the strength is, there, too, should be a portion of the authority.

[6] for us, indeed, this is not in itself any too great an honor, since we suffer Rome to be the capital of Latium; but we have made it seem an honor by our prolonged submissiveness.

[7] and yet, if ever at any time you have desired to share in the government and to use your freedom, behold, now is your opportunity, bestowed on you by your valor and by Heaven’s favor!

[8] you have tried their patience by denying them troops; who can doubt that they were enraged when we broke the tradition of two hundred years? yet they swallowed their resentment. we waged war on our own account with the Paeligni; those who aforetime withheld from us even the right to defend our own borders by ourselves, never interposed.

[9] they have heard how we received the Sidicini into our protection, how the Campanians have left them and joined us, how we are raising armies against the Samnites, their confederates, —and have not stirred from the City.

[10] whence comes this great restraint on their part, if it come not from the consciousness of our strength —and their own? I have good authority for saying that when the Samnites were complaining of us, the Roman senate answered in such wise that it might readily appear that even the Romans themselves no longer demanded that Latium should be under their authority.

[11] do but take up in your demands what they tacitly concede to you. if there is any man whom fear prevents from saying this, lo, I declare that I myself will say it, in the hearing not of the Roman People only and their senate, but of Jupiter himself, who dwells in the Capitol; that if they wish us to observe the treaty of alliance, they must receive from us one consul and a moiety of the senate.”

[12] These bold encouragements, and even promises, were received with a general shout of approval, and Annius was empowered to act and speak as might seem conducive to the welfare of the Latin state and befitting his own honor.

!!!PRIMARY SECONDARY SOURCE INTERLUDE!!!

Jobs in policymaking have always been attractive, but making hard choices is naturally unattractive.

Second, figuring out what “the available terms” may be and securing them requires some creativity. Consider Thucydides’ account of the Spartan general Brasidas’ conquest of Thrace, accomplished very largely through diplomacy. Brasidas made offers the other side could not refuse and asked for little. He passed through neutral territory with a small force after professing friendship at the border and getting those who had stopped him to go home for consultation. On his way to Amphipolis, home of the Athenian garrison in Thrace, he secured the nominal alliance of cities (he needed and asked for no more than that) by offering friendship and trade while holding hostage the cities’ ripe crops. After seizing Amphipolis’ landward approaches and farmlands, and knowing that Athenian reinforcements were on the way, he offered everyone in the city, Athenians included, safety, political rights, and respect of property in return for letting him free the city from the Athenian empire, immediately. He figured correctly that few would be willing to risk their lives and surely lose property by fighting a superior Spartan force for the sake of the Athenian empire. Brasidas’ diplomacy fit ends, means, and circumstances just right. Diplomacy’s need for solvency is not just an old story. It is also the leitmotif of the twentieth century’s leading American diplomatic historian, Norman Graebner.

Third, in the balance of incentives, an edge in the capacity to instill fear usually outweighs positive factors. Again, consider Thucydides. As the Athenians were trying to round up Sicilian allies against Syracuse, the local great power they were besieging, they told the people of neighboring Camarina that siding with Athens would free them from their ancient hegemon and that Athens could not oppress them because it would be too far away. By contrast, Syracuse’s Hermocrates offered no positive incentives. Small cities like Camarina, he said, cannot escape being under the big ones’ thumbs. Camarina must keep in mind that, whatever might happen, Syracuse would surely remain nearby, and that if Camarina sided with Athens, sooner or later it would not escape “the lasting hatred we should feel for you.” Thucydides tells us that the Camarinans’ fears drove them to spurn uncertain hopes to side with their ancient oppressors. The reality that Syracuse was going to be there for the long run, along with its venom, made up for the besieged tyrants’ lack of present incentives.

Fourth, diplomacy is not about tricks, lies, bluffs or misrepresentations. It is about representing reality in precise words on which all may rely, and of course on the compelling qualities of the things the words represent. Reputations for reliability are hard won and easily lost—by countries as well as by individuals. Hence it is incumbent on a diplomat to brandish only consequences that follow naturally from events, and the fulfillment of which is in his country’s interest as well as capacity, which it intends and may not even be able to avoid—in short, to warn but not to threaten.

Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham talked to Megyn Kelly about Dave Brat’s stunning upset victory in the Virginia Republican primary last night.  It’s a great conversation, beginning with Kelly’s observation that conservative media added so much fuel to Brat’s surge, particularly when the topic of illegal immigration heated up.  That might be part of the reason the outcome took pollsters so completely by surprise.  I’ve seen it estimated that turnout was up by 40 percent over defeated Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s last race.  A lot of new people turned out this time, and they might not be the sort of people who turn up in polls… except for the one that really counts on Election Night.  Ann Coulter makes a good point about how polling is used to manipulate public opinion on topics like immigration, but when it’s time to fill out a ballot, voters look at what’s really happening right now on the border and render a different answer than the one they give to pollsters.

Laura Ingraham observed that the polished, connected, well-funded political pros haven’t been doing such a great job of running the country, which might be a reason voters find a well-run outsider campaign attractive.  (Note to outsider candidates chomping at the bit: poorly-run campaigns are far less attractive, and I suspect both voters and the media will always be inclined to judge severe mis-steps harshly, leaving you with less room to recover than the insiders get.  Bring your A-game!)

Listening to Coulter and Ingraham’s discussion reinforces my sense that immigration reform is not only an issue that galvanizes voters, but it’s a proxy for the sense of alienation from the elite that drove the creation of the Tea Party movement.  It’s an issue where the Ruling Class, reaching across both parties and their respective power brokers, is completely out of step with the common man.  That sense of alienation was particularly powerful in Cantor’s district, where Brat successfully argued the Majority Leader was not spending enough time tending to his constituents.  The Tea Party is what happens when Atlas stops shrugging, and starts voting.

 

Infinity Journal has a special issue out dedicated to this important book on strategy (registration is free):

The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice by Colin S. Gray 

There is an excellent group of reviewers in this IJ issue including – Williamson Murray, Antulio Echevarria, David Betz and Nathan Finney. Here are a couple of samples:

Nathan Finney:

….What is clear from The Strategy Bridge is that there is a general theory of strategy that can be distilled empirically from history and experience to complement Clausewitz’s general theory of war. It is also clear that it may be easier to capture in a thoughtful work than to actually implement it. Clausewitz’s theory of war requires men of “genius” with coup d’œil to achieve success. Similarly, though he does not state it explicitly, Gray’s concept of strategy requires strategists of “genius” that can intuitively see the strategic context and effectively provide a bridge in the negotiation between politics and tactics. As such, Gray’s bridge does not necessarily require commanders, but conductors that can translate the relativity in the contemporary strategic context and manage civilian-military relationships, for “the principal core competency of the strategist is the ability to direct armed forces in war, not necessarily to command and lead them.

David Betz:

….I like also that he does not cut corners, nor oversimplify that which is inherently complex. This is sometimes pitched as a criticism but I reckon that it ought not to be. In The Strategy Bridge he describes fully twenty-one dicta of strategy in four categories in three parts – theory, practice, and context and purpose – before concluding with six ‘broad, more than a little compounded’ claims tempered with five ‘cautions, or caveats’.[v] This is clearly not a book to be read and digested in a lazy Sunday afternoon. Strategy, as he illustrates in a recurring theme throughout the text, is complicated to conceive and to practice: it is, he writes, ‘possible but difficult’. If one adds ‘but worth the effort’ to complete the epigram it would seem also an apposite description of The Strategy Bridge. It is not that the author of ‘Clausewitz Rules, OK?’ is unable to make a point concisely; it is, rather, that in this case he has quite a few points to convey – and, moreover, they intertwine in complicated ways that defy easy unravelling. I found crossing The Strategy Bridge to be hard going but the effort was amply rewarded. This is not a review, however; it is instead a short essay inspired by the reading….

Read the special issue here.

I also had a review of The Strategy Bridge over at Pragati: The Indian National Interest

….The Strategy Bridge is subtitled “Theory for Practice” because it is intended as a serious work of theory, a framework for understanding enduring principles of strategy so that a practitioner can thoughtfully apply them in making strategies for the specific context in which they find themselves to provide correct guidance for the operational planners and tacticians who will execute it. Consequently, Gray has not written an introductory text for a novice student but an insightful book for the strategic practitioner of journeyman experience – field grade officers, senior intelligence and foreign policy analysts, academic strategists, think tank researchers and national security advisers to senior government officials – who have a store of knowledge of their own. Hence the repeated invocation of “the bridge” metaphor by Gray; his primary audience are the people “doing strategy” and their success or failure “manning the bridge” will help determine the degree to which government purpose remains connected to action or whether the whole business will go off the rails into a quagmire, as it too often does.

I think it is worth reviewing LTG (RET) Sam Wilson's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_V._Wilson) wise words on special operations -  in particular the 20 Characteristics of Special Operations (pay attention to numbers 11, 14 and 17 highlighted below) as well as the planning suggestions, 7 principles and 6 requirements for special operations.  I received a xerox copy of these as a young SF officer in the 1980's and have been carrying them around with me ever since.

Who knew? Jane Austen was a dyed-in-the-wool, easy-money-loving, stimulus-demanding 'expert' on monetary policy. As Citi's Steven Englander finds in his eloquent new year's note, it seems the antiquated authoress has much sense-and-sensibility to reproach those of us who believe in real money and a return to a real economy. From justifying QE, "Money is the best recipe for happiness," to the importance of the wealth effect, "If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow;" Austen offers some 'balance' to offer on Fed transparency, tapering, and congressional spending.

Via Citi's Steve Englander,

‘Elinor now found the difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty itself.” – particularly apt in light of the market reaction to tapering.

"Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself."  -- more on tapering

"A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch."  -- on the tapering calendar

“I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly.”  -- advice on communications policy

"I think we are a great deal better employed, sitting comfortably here among ourselves, and doing nothing."  -- insight into labor force participation

"I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it."  -- the hysteresis effect

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of." – on the need for more stimulus

"I am sorry to tell you that I am getting very extravagant and spending all my money: and what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too. "  --  message to Congress

"If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow." – the importance of the wealth effect for human capital

"Money is the best recipe for happiness.” – QE justified

"If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next."   -- on economic forecasting

"There is a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing, & common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit."  -- FOMC press conferences

"It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering." –taking the easy policy route

"We do not look in great cities for our best morality." – distribution effects of QE

"I don't approve of surprises. The pleasure is never enhanced and the inconvenience is considerable.” -- the argument for Fed transparency

"It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first."  -- nothing more need be said

"..people always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them"  -- on the need for entitlements reform

"And we mean to treat you all,' added Lydia, 'but you must lend us the money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there." – on balance sheet expansion

Via Reuters: (Reuters) – Local officials and residents in Yemen’s southern Lahj Province said a drone destroyed a vehicle travelling on a mountain road late on Saturday evening killing its two occupants and bringing to 15 the death toll from four strikes in three days. The local officials and residents said the vehicle, which was [...]

Now read “Race and Crime in America” at The Unz Review

The noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once declared that “Reality is what continues to exist whether you believe in it or not.”  Such an observation should be kept in mind when we consider some of the touchier aspects of American society.

Recall the notorious case of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose 1965 report on the terrible deterioration in the condition of the black American family aroused such a firestorm of denunciation and outrage in liberal circles that the topic was rendered totally radioactive for the better part of a generation.  Eventually the continuing deterioration reached such massive proportions that the subject was taken up again by prominent liberals in the 1980s, who then declared Moynihan a prophetic voice, unjustly condemned.

This contentious history of racially-charged social analysis was certainly in the back of my mind when I began my quantitative research into Hispanic crime rates in late 2009.  One traditional difficulty in producing such estimates had been the problematical nature of the data.  Although the FBI Uniform Crime Reports readily show the annual totals of black and Asian criminal perpetrators, Hispanics are generally grouped together with whites and no separate figures are provided, thereby allowing all sorts of extreme speculation by those so inclined.

In order to distinguish reality from vivid imagination, a major section of my analysis focused on the data from America’s larger cities, exploring the correlations between their FBI-reported crime rates and their Census-reported ethnic proportions.  If urban crime rates had little relation to the relative size of the local Hispanic population, this would indicate that Hispanics did not have unusually high rates of criminality.  Furthermore, densely populated urban centers have almost always had far more crime than rural areas or suburbs, so restricting the analysis to cities would reduce the impact of that extraneous variable, which might otherwise artificially inflate the national crime statistics for a heavily urbanized population group such as Hispanics.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status.  But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

This presented me with an obvious quandary. The topic of my article was “Hispanic crime” and my research findings were original and potentially an important addition to the public policy debate.  Yet the black crime figures in my charts and graphs were so striking that I realized they might easily overshadow my other results, becoming the focus of an explosive debate that would inevitably deflect attention away from my central conclusion.  Therefore, I chose to excise the black results, perhaps improperly elevating political prudence over intellectual candor.

I further justified this decision by noting that black crime in America had been an important topic of public discussion for at least the last half-century.  I reasoned that my findings must surely have been quietly known for decades to most social scientists in the relevant fields, and hence would add little to existing knowledge.  However, since that time a few private discussions have led me to seriously question that assumption, as has the emotion-laden but vacuous media firestorm surrounding the George Zimmerman trial.  I have therefore now decided to publish an expanded and unexpurgated version of my analysis, which I believe may have important explanatory value as well as some interesting policy implications.

 

The Pattern of Urban Crime in America

My central methodology is simple.  I obtained the crime rates and ethnic percentages of America’s larger cities from official government data sources and calculated the population-weighted cross-correlations.  In order to minimize the impact of statistical outliers, I applied this same approach to hundreds of different datasets: each of the years 1985 through 2011; homicide rates, robbery rates, and violent crime overall; all large cities of 250,000 and above and also restricted only to major cities of at least 500,000.  I obtained these urban crime correlations with respect to the percentages of local whites, blacks, and Hispanics, but excluded Asians since their numbers were quite insignificant until recently (here and throughout this article, “white” shall refer to non-Hispanic whites).

I also attempted to estimate these same results for the overall immigrant population.  The overwhelming majority of immigrants since 1965 have been Hispanic or Asian while conversely the overwhelming majority of those two population groups have a relatively recent immigrant family background.  So the combined population of Hispanics and Asians constitutes a good proxy for the immigrant community, and allows us to determine the immigrant relationship to crime rates.

Presented graphically, these various urban crime correlations are as follows:

 

These charts demonstrate that over the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and “immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general range of -0.20 to -0.60.  Interestingly enough, for most of the last decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.  Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

These particular calculations do rely upon several minor methodological choices.  For example, I have used the 2000 Census population thresholds for selecting the sixty-odd large cities in my dataset, while I could have chosen some other year instead.  The substantial annual fluctuations in the urban ethnic percentages provided by the Census-ACS estimates led me to instead use the interpolated Census figures for all years.  The annual urban population totals used by the FBI sometimes differ slightly from the Census numbers, and I used the former for population-weighting purposes.  However, all my results were quite robust with respect to these particular decisions, and modifying them would produce results largely indistinguishable from those presented above.

On a more difficult matter, there is always the possibility of local bias in FBI crime statistics, with the data for some cities possibly being more reliable or comprehensive than for others.  But the reporting rate for homicides is widely accepted as close to 100 percent, and the close correspondence between the results for this “gold standard” crime category and those for the robbery and violent crime rates tends to confirm the validity of the latter.  In any event, we would expect the highest-crime areas to be those most likely to suffer from under-reporting problems, so we would expect our figures to somewhat underestimate the true size of the correlations.

It is important to recognize that within the world of academic sociology discovering an important correlation in the range of 0.80 or above is quite remarkable, almost extraordinary.  And even these correlations between black population prevalence and urban crime rates may actually tend to significantly understate the reality.  All these correlations were performed on a city-wide aggregate basis.  The New York City numbers include both the Upper East Side and Brownsville, Los Angeles both Bel Air and Watts, Chicago the Gold Coast and Englewood, with each city’s totals averaging those of both the wealthiest and the most dangerous districts.  This crude methodology tends to obscure the local pattern of crime, which usually varies tremendously between different areas, often roughly corresponding to the lines of racial segregation.  It is hardly a secret that impoverished black areas do have far higher crime rates than affluent white ones.

If instead we relied upon smaller geographical units such as neighborhoods, our results would be much more precise, but ethnicity data is provided by zip code while crime data is reported by precinct, so a major research undertaking would be required to match these dissimilar aggregational units for calculation purposes.  However, the apparent geographical pattern of crime in these cities and most others might lead us to suspect that our national racial correlations would become substantially greater under such a more accurate approach, perhaps often reaching or even exceeding the 0.90 level.  The inescapable conclusion is that local urban crime rates in America seem to be almost entirely explained by the local racial distribution.

But could such a strikingly simple sociological truth possibly be correct?  After all, academic scholars have long advanced a wide variety of different socio-economic explanations for crime, and these have often been heavily promoted by pundits and the media.  Commonly cited factors have been urban density, especially in the case of high-rise housing projects, and local poverty.  There is also the relative number of police officers to consider.  We should certainly compare the possible influence of these factors with the ethnic ones examined above.

Since the geographical borders of a city are generally fixed, average population densities are easy to calculate and in recent years their apparent impact upon crime rates has been negligible, whether for homicide, robbery, or violent crime in general.  For the last dozen years, the density/crime correlations have always ranged between 0.20 and -0.20 and were usually close to zero.  Perhaps many of us have an intuitive mental image of densely populated East Coast cities being natural hotbeds of crime.  But this appears incorrect: crime rates and urban density seem to have little connection.

What about the sizes of the various urban police departments?  Although precise comparisons are sometimes difficult, the Bureau of Justice Statistics periodically publishes official reports on the subject, and the latest 2007 study lists the numerical totals of America’s fifty largest urban police forces, allowing us to calculate the weighted correlations between these per capita policing levels and the corresponding crime rates of the years 2007-2011.  We discover that there actually exists a moderately strong positive correlation, generally falling in the range 0.30-0.60: the more police, the more crime.  Although this might seem counterintuitive, the explanation becomes obvious once we reverse the direction of causation.  Higher crime rates usually persuade local authorities to hire additional police officers.

Finally, although urban crime rates do track local economic conditions, the relationship is far from tight.  For the years 2006-2011, the Census-ACS provides estimates of the Mean Income, Median Income, and Poverty Rates for each urban center, and we can easily perform the same calculations we did in the racial case.  The correlations between the Mean Income and Median Income levels and the various crime categories generally fall in the range of -0.40 to -0.60, being moderately rather than strongly negative.  Even the correlation between Poverty Rate and crime—supported by the obvious truism that most street criminals are poor—is hardly enormous, falling between 0.50 and 0.70, and usually well below our racial figures.

The relative strength of these different correlations may be seen by a chart superimposing the economic and ethnic results for the last dozen years of robbery rate correlations for our major cities.  Although the hard economic times since 2008 have considerably increased the influence of the poverty correlate, that factor is still considerably less significant than the racial one.

Indeed, the race/crime correlation so substantially exceeds the poverty/crime relationship that much of the latter may simply be a statistical artifact due to most urban blacks being poor.  Consider that both blacks and Hispanics currently have similar national poverty rates in the one-third range, more than double the white figure, and each constitutes well over 20% of our urban population.  However, major cities with substantial poverty but few blacks usually tend to have far lower levels of crime.  For example, El Paso and Atlanta are comparable in size and have similar poverty rates, but the latter has eight times the robbery rate and over ten times the homicide rate.  Within California, Oakland approximately matches Santa Ana in size and poverty, but has several times the rate of crime.  Thus, it seems plausible that removing the black population from our calculation might actually reduce the residual poverty/crime correlation for non-blacks to a moderate or even a low figure.

To some extent, this surprising possibility is merely a statistical syllogism.  Whenever the correlation to a single factor approaches unity, no other non-equivalent item may have a large, independent impact.  And failing to recognize the existence of such a single, overwhelming factor might lead us to misidentify numerous other spurious influences, whose apparent causal importance actually derives from their own correlations with the primary item.  For many years, the black connection to local crime has been so strong as to almost eliminate the possible role of any other variable.

We must obviously be cautious in interpreting the meaning of these statistical findings since correlation does not necessarily imply causation.  Over the last few years the crime correlation for Hispanic or Hispanic-plus-Asian numbers has been substantially more negative than the same figure for whites, but this does not necessarily prove that whites are much more likely to commit urban crime, though it would tend to rule out the contrary possibility that Hispanics or immigrants have far higher rates of criminality.

However, if we examine the official FBI arrest statistics, we find that these seem to support the most straightforward interpretation of our racial crime correlations.  For example, blacks in America were over six times as likely to be arrested for homicide in 2011 as non-blacks and over eight times as likely to be arrested for robbery; the factors for previous years were usually in a similar range.  The accuracy of this racial pattern of arrests is generally confirmed by the corresponding racial pattern of victim-identification statements, also aggregated by the FBI.  Indeed, several years ago the liberal Sentencing Project organization estimated that some one-third of all American black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.

A sense of the real world impact of these grim statistics may be found in the stratified 2011 Census-ACS data for major American cities.  The three urban centers with the largest black populations are New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and together they contain over one-third more adult black women than black men.  The corresponding national shortfall of black males runs well into the millions, partly accounting for the notorious “marriage gap” problems faced by women of their background.  Those millions of missing black men are generally dead or in prison.

Over the last few years, the official publications of the Bureau of Justice Statistics have made it increasingly difficult to determine the racial totals of inmates in state prisons and local jails but the figures from the mid-2000s probably still provide a reasonable estimate, and I had used these in my 2010 article.  Since crime is overwhelmingly committed by young males, for comparative purposes we should normalize all these incarceration totals against the base population of adult males in their prime-crime years, and the results are summarized in my previously published chart, reprinted here.

Since the mid-1990s, the issue of street crime has mostly dropped off the front pages of our national newspapers and disappeared from the public debate.  Meanwhile, black Americans have gained much greater visibility in the upper reaches of our national elites, while Barack Obama has been elected and reelected as our first black president.  This might seem to indicate that traditional racial cleavages in our society have become less substantial.  Furthermore, with such enormous numbers of young black men now in prison, we might naturally expect that the racial character of American urban crime rates has sharply declined over the last couple of decades.  However, the quantitative evidence demonstrates the exact opposite situation, as may be seen by examining the combined twenty-five year trajectories of our various racial crime correlations, which have steadily grown more extreme.  The images shown on our film screens or television sets may portray one America, but the actual data reveals a very different country.

Once we accept the reality of these stark racial facts, we must naturally wonder about the causes, and also why the historical trends seem to have been moving in exactly the wrong direction over most of the last quarter-century. Certainly many theoretical explanations have been advanced, both from the Left and the Right, and whole library shelves have been filled with books on the subject since the urban violence of the 1960s. A short article is no place for me to summarize such a vast literature on a contentious topic, especially when I can provide no original insights of my own. But good theoretical analysis requires a solid factual grounding, and my main purpose here is to establish those facts, which others may then choose to interpret howsoever they wish.  Absent such information, any national dialogue becomes an exercise in empty ideological posturing.

 

The Racial Subtext of American Electoral Politics

Racial issues have traditionally been among the most highly charged in American public life, and the nexus of crime and race has been exceptionally contentious for many decades.  Under these circumstances respectable scholars tend to be cautious in discussing or merely investigating this topic, and the mainstream media is usually even more gun-shy.  The striking racial findings presented above require only trivial statistical calculations and may be glimpsed in any casual inspection of the crime rankings of our major cities.  But I remain uncertain to what extent they are already recognized by our experts in social policy.

For example, when I presented my correlation results to one very prominent conservative social scientist, he found them shocking and remarkable, and said he had never imagined that the statistical relationship between race and crime was so extremely strong.  But when I showed the same data to an equally prominent liberal academic, he took the information in stride and said he assumed that almost all experts were already quietly aware of the general facts.  The reactions of other knowledgeable individuals fell all along this spectrum ranging from surprise to familiarity.  Knowledge so explosive that it is usually unspoken and unreported may easily remain unknown even to many of our foremost intellectuals.

But whether or not most of our ruling elites explicitly recognize the stark racial character of American crime, the reality still exists, and we should consider exploring whether these unpublicized facts may have had broader influences in our society, possibly in seemingly unrelated areas.  After all, urban crime has frequently been a leading issue in American public life, during some periods ranking as one of the most important.  Certain matters may not be easily discussed in polite company these days, but if even just a portion of the citizenry is intuitively aware of the situation, their attitudes might have broader ripple effects throughout the entire population.  Is there any substantial evidence for this?

Consider the electoral behavior of American whites, and especially their inclination to support either Democratic or Republican candidates.  Because of gerrymandering, most individual congressional districts are overwhelmingly aligned with one party or another, and general elections are a mere formality; this is often also true of statewide races for senator or governor.  However, in presidential elections both parties almost always field viable national candidates with a reasonable chance of winning, so these provide the best means of gauging white political alignment.  And for these campaigns, the racial lines are clearly established, with the modern Republicans being the “white party,” drawing over 90% of their support from that demographic group, while over 90% of blacks regularly vote the Democratic ticket, which also usually attracts the overwhelming majority of other non-white voters.

As I pointed out in a 2011 article, there has been a striking statewide pattern to white voting behavior over the last couple of decades.  Many conservative activists and media pundits have spent years attacking immigrants, illegal or otherwise, and have regularly denounced the cultural threat posed by the growing population of non-English-speakers or non-white foreigners.  Nevertheless, the empirical fact is that presence or absence of large numbers of Hispanics or Asians in a given state seems to have virtually no impact upon white voting patterns.  Meanwhile, there exists a strong relationship between the size of a state’s black population and the likelihood that local whites will favor the Republicans.  The weighted-average correlations between the racial compositions of the fifty states and the degree to which their white voters favor Republican presidential candidates is summarized in the following chart.

GOP leaders are always fearful of being denounced as “racist” by the major media, and often seek to camouflage the underlying source of their electoral support by adopting the most extreme forms of tokenism, promoting black party leaders and spokesmen while heavily recruiting black candidates and focusing almost entirely upon non-racial issues.  Conservative activists often rhetorically identify themselves as heirs to the “party of Lincoln” and may even accuse their Democratic opponents of seeking to keep blacks in Welfare State bondage.  But the actual data tells a very different story about the likely sources of Republican support.

The strength of this pattern may be seen at its extremes.  Mississippi is the state with the highest black percentage and across all six elections its white population was the most likely to vote Republican, with the figures recently running at nearly the 90% level.  Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina are generally clustered together as the next blackest in population, and in most elections their white populations were the next most likely to support the Republican ticket, although being sometimes exceeded by the whites of Alabama, the fifth or sixth blackest state during those decades.

By contrast, consider the three states with the largest non-white percentages: Hawaii, California, and New Mexico.  The whites of the first two have actually been far less likely to vote Republican than whites nationwide, while those in New Mexico fall close to the national average.  This tends to confirm the national statistical results that the widespread presence of non-whites, even in overwhelming numbers, seems to have little impact upon white voting behavior.

While I would not argue that black crime is the sole determining factor behind the racial polarization in white voting behavior, I do suspect it is one of the largest contributors.  Empirically, the presence of blacks causes whites to vote the “law-and-order” Republican ticket, while the presence of Hispanics or Asians seems to have negligible political impact.

Nevertheless, we should remain cautious in interpreting these results.  For example, although these national correlations are certainly substantial, they are almost entirely due to the weighting of the Southern states, in which blacks are almost 20% of the total population and racial tensions have traditionally been the strongest.  In non-Southern states, the correlations are nil, perhaps partly because blacks are found in far smaller numbers, being less than 9% of the total.

 

The Hidden Motive for Heavy Immigration?

Consider also the highly contentious issue of immigration.  Obviously, much of the underlying conflict is purely economic in character, with workers aware that restricting the supply of available labor will protect their bargaining power over wages, while businesses seek to maximize their profits by expanding the pool of potential employees, whether low-skilled or high-tech.

But all involved participants quickly discover that despite endless protestations to the contrary there is also a clear racial subtext, usually accounting for the emotionality of the debate.  For the last half-century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants, especially illegal ones, have been non-white, and the resulting racial fears have been a central motivating force driving many of the most zealous restrictionists, who fear being swamped by a tidal wave of “the Other.”  However, I believe that racial considerations, whether fully conscious or not, might also be found on the other side of the issue, helping to explain why our national leadership today so uniformly endorses very heavy foreign immigration.

America’s ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black populations, including a violent underclass.  During the early 1990s, many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of American homicide capital.  In each city, the violence and crime were overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.  But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700% larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or Asian immigrants as they are for whites.  Thus, replacing a city’s blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly 50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C.  The inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population, which declined, often substantially, in each location.  And all three cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of these underlying demographic changes.  Meanwhile, the white population increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford the sharp rise in housing prices.  It is an undeniable fact that American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC.  A couple of years ago he recounted on his blogsite how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party.  At first he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city.  Yet no respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a precautionary measure.  Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the incident.  Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological framework of American elites becomes apparent.  The more conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration, sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.  Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Such factors may also play a role outside the major urban centers discussed above and even where least suspected.  Among all American businessmen, Silicon Valley executives are probably strongest in their pro-immigration advocacy, as indicated by the major political advertising campaign recently launched by top technology CEOs, organized together as “FWD.us.”  Obviously, their own cosmopolitan background and desire for an unlimited supply of inexpensive, high-quality engineers is their primary motive.  However, widespread sentiments in favor of lesser-educated immigrant groups such as undocumented Latin Americans also seem quite strong, and we find Steve Jobs’ wealthy widow Laurene Powell Jobs focusing her efforts almost exclusively on that particular aspect of the legislation, with her sentiments hardly being discordant with those of her wealthy peer group.  Could hidden racial factors be part of the explanation?  That might seem quite unlikely since Silicon Valley’s black population has been very low for decades, running in the 3 or 4 percent range.

However, a closer examination reveals a very different situation.  The small city of Palo Alto is one of the most desirable local residential areas, home to the late Steve Jobs, as well as the current CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and a host of other companies; by some estimates, it may contain the world’s highest per capita concentration of billionaires. On three sides, Palo Alto abuts communities of a similar character: Mountain View, containing Google; the Stanford University campus; and Menlo Park, the center of America’s venture capital industry.  But on the fourth side, mostly separated by Highway 101, lies East Palo Alto, which for decades was a dangerous ghetto, overwhelmingly black.

I moved back to Palo Alto from New York City in 1992, and that year East Palo Alto recorded America’s highest per capita murder rate; although relatively few of the homicides, robberies, and rapes spilled across the border, enough did to leave many people uneasy.  Gated communities and even street fences are quite uncommon in the region, and for years anyone who wished could go to the home of Steve Jobs and walk around his yard or even peer into his windows.  Meanwhile, the sort of harsh racial profiling widely practiced in some large cities was completely abhorrent to the socially liberal citizenry.  One may easily imagine a scenario in which escalating street crime from the ghetto next door might have produced a collapse in high housing prices and sparked a massive flight of the wealthy.

One reason this did not occur was the vast influx of impoverished immigrants from south of the border that swept into the less affluent communities of the region during those same years and rapidly transformed the local demographics.  Between 1980 and 2010 the combined Hispanic population of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties nearly tripled.  A city offering cheap housing such as East Palo Alto saw far greater relative increases, reversing its demographics during that period from 60% black and 14% Hispanic to 16% black and 65% Hispanic.  Over the last twenty years, the homicide rate in that small city dropped by 85%, with similar huge declines in other crime categories as well, thereby transforming a miserable ghetto into a pleasant working-class community, now featuring new office complexes, luxury hotels, and large regional shopping centers.  Multi-billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife recently purchased a large $9 million home just a few hundred feet from the East Palo Alto border, a decision that would have been unthinkable during the early 1990s.  Technology executives are highly quantitative individuals, skilled in pattern recognition, and I find it difficult to believe that they have all remained completely oblivious to these local racial factors.

However the powerful role of immigration in transforming the crime rates of important urban centers probably had a much smaller impact on the national totals.  The combined black populations of New York City, Washington, and Los Angeles may have dropped by half a million over the last two decades, but the individuals pushed out did not disappear from the world; they merely moved to Atlanta or Baltimore or Riverside.  But from the personal perspective of America’s ruling elite, they did indeed disappear.

For over thirty years, local black activists in Washington, D.C. have accused the ruling white power structure of promoting “The Plan,” a deliberate strategy of removing most of the black population from our national capital and replacing them with whites; and this “conspiracy theory” has been endlessly ridiculed as absurdly paranoid nonsense by our elite Washington media.  Meanwhile, during this same thirty year period, Washington’s black population dropped from over 70% to less than half and will probably fall below the white total within the next few years.

Indeed, the strong support of our political elites for Section 8 housing vouchers may be less connected with any alleged social benefits these provide than with their important role in moving large numbers of impoverished urban residents away from the near vicinity of wealthy neighborhoods out into the remote suburbs of the middle class.  Several years ago the Atlantic published a major article by Hanna Rosin on the rapid changes in the geographical pattern of crime induced by these demographic shifts, and the piece provoked much discussion even though the author avoided unduly emphasizing the troubling racial aspects.  Elite selfishness is hardly surprising and a policy of exporting those populations with a strong link to crime into other localities seems a natural strategy, especially if this can be accomplished under the altruistic guise of socially-uplifting anti-poverty programs.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that this clear political interplay between heavy levels of immigration and black urban displacement is a relatively recent development and certainly was not anticipated by the original promoters of the 1965 Immigration Act.  Indeed, although restrictionists routinely denounce that legislation for having flooded America with Hispanic immigrants, the facts are precisely the opposite.  While the 1924 Immigration Act had drastically curtailed immigration from Europe (and Asia), the entire Western Hemisphere was totally exempted, and the U.S. retained its previous “open borders” policy for Mexico and the rest of Latin America until strict quotas were finally introduced as part of the 1965 law.  Although these 1965 changes were expected to enable renewed European immigration, no one anticipated the vast inflow of Hispanic and Asian immigrants in the decades that followed, nor the resulting impact upon the racial composition of our major cities.  But today these continuing urban demographic changes may have now become a significant motive in the minds of the elites advocating increased immigration under the legislation being considered by Congress.

During the 1960s black author James Baldwin coined the widely-quoted phrase “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” I suspect that a somewhat similar semi-intentional national policy is today transforming America’s leading urban centers, although it remains almost entirely unreported by our mainstream media.

On rare occasions, the mask slips and the underlying mental workings of our national elites are momentarily revealed. Consider New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of our most vocal pro-immigration voices on the national stage and a man whose vast wealth and influence often allow him to be far more candid on controversial topics than most other public figures. In May 2011 Bloomberg was interviewed on Meet the Press, and explained that if he had full authority, he could easily fix the seemingly insoluble problems of a city like Detroit at no cost to the taxpayer. He proposed opening wide the floodgates to unlimited foreign immigration on the condition that all the additional immigrants moved to Detroit and lived there for a decade or so, thereby transforming the city. I suspect this provides an important insight into how he and his friends discuss certain racial issues in private.

 

The Remarkable New York City Exception

Powerful quantitative evidence for social determinism may be dispiriting, and when the main determinant seems to be race, many Americans will choose to throw up their hands and ignore the statistical facts, simply hoping that these might somehow be proven incorrect.  That is certainly their privilege, but for those individuals who prefer to grit their teeth and mine the data for contrary indications, there do exist a few interesting nuggets.

Weighted average correlations are a very useful summary statistic, but they neither tell the whole story nor do they preclude the existence of outlying cases, which might provide some insights on ameliorating the grim situation we have described.  And it so happens that among our many dozens of major urban centers one of the most extreme race/crime outliers is neither small nor obscure: New York City.  Our largest metropolis often has crime rates that deviate sharply from the usual urban pattern observed almost everywhere else.

Recall our earlier mention of the surprising absence of any correlation between urban population density and crime rates.  Those summary statistics were correct, but they also hid some important variations and the null overall result was almost entirely due to the extremely high density and low crime rates in America’s largest city, combined with its huge population-weighting.  If we excluded New York City from our calculations, the remainder of America’s major urban centers would demonstrate some moderately strong and fairly stable correlations between density and crime over the last dozen years; for example, density has generally had a positive correlation of around 0.35 with robbery rates.

Similar anomalies appear in the racial crime calculations that have been the central focus of our analysis.  Based on its racial composition, we would expect New York City’s homicide rate to be some 70% higher than it actually is, with robbery and violent crime also being far more widespread.  Cities like San Jose and San Diego may have homicide and violent crime rates only half that of New York City, but given the stark differences in their underlying demographics, it is New York City’s Finest who deserves praise for their remarkable effectiveness in crime prevention.  Evaluating the apparent success or failure of urban law enforcement policies without candidly considering a city’s demographic challenges may lead to incorrect policy judgments.

Little of New York City’s success in crime prevention seems due to the relative size of its police force, which is roughly similar to those of Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston on a per capita basis, and far below that of Washington, D.C., all cities whose crime rates reflect their demographics.  So it appears that New York City’s crime-fighting methods rather than merely the number of its officers has been the crucial factor.

Ideas have consequences, as do attempts to avoid them.  For most of the last twenty years, the policing methods implemented under mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg won enormous national praise as they so dramatically cut New York crime rates: murders dropped by over three-quarters.  But during the last few years, some of these same policies have begun receiving widespread criticism among those pundits who may have forgotten just how bad things were two decades ago.

Our simple statistical analysis obviously does not allow us to disentangle the relative importance of the different factors behind New York City’s success.  Since the early 1990s, the city implemented a “community policing” model as well as pioneering the rapid use of local crime data to pinpoint dangerous hotspots and allocate resources more accurately.  But other elements of the package have included strict, even harsh policing methods, such as the widespread use of “stop-and-frisk” to reduce gun violence.   Denouncing these techniques as unconstitutional or racially discriminatory may be perfectly justified, but those who do so must consider the trade-offs involved, including the very real possibility of a 70% rise in homicides if local policing effectiveness declined to levels found in the rest of the country.

Let us compare the demographic and crime trends of New York City and Washington, twin abodes of our East Coast urban elite.  Between 1985 and 2011, Washington’s homicide rate dropped by 26%, robbery fell 27%, and violent crime in general was cut by 30%; but the city’s black population also dropped by 27% during this same period.  Meanwhile, New York City’s corresponding declines in crime were far greater, 67%, 78%, and 67% respectively, but were accompanied by only a small 7% decline in black numbers.  For all these serious crime rates to decline at nearly ten times the rate of their primary racial determinant is absolutely remarkable, a combination that left the city an exceptional outlier among America’s major urban centers.

Put another way, if America’s other cities with large black populations had somehow managed to achieve the same surprisingly low crime rates as New York City then most of the  high racial crime correlations that have been the central findings of this article would disappear.  Conversely, if New York City were excluded from our current national statistics, many of the existing racial crime correlations would exceed 0.90.  These are objective facts and well-intentioned analysts who sharply criticize New York City policing methods should recognize that they may face some unpalatable choices.

Perhaps further research would establish that the widely-lauded elements of local police practice are the ones primarily responsible for such results, and the more controversial methods may safely be eliminated without negative consequences.  But for whatever combination of reasons, the overall results achieved by New York City have been quite remarkable and caution should be exercised before drastic changes are made in such a successful model.

Obviously New York City is not the sole positive outlier on these crime statistics, though it is by far the most significant, both because of its size and the magnitude of its deviation from the predicted results. If we examine the 2011 homicide rates for our set of sixty-six large cities, seventeen of these were at least 30% below the projected trendline, with four cities—Charlotte, Raleigh, St. Paul, and Virginia Beach—achieving even better results than New York City. But many of these successful cities have numerically small black populations, and the total for all seventeen combined is not much larger that of New York City alone. One intriguing fact is that although fewer than one-third of the all our large cities lie in the South, these Southern cities account for over two-thirds of those particularly successful examples, and a roughly similar pattern applies both for other crime rates and for other recent years. The exact mix of cultural, socio-economic, or demographic factors responsible for such notable Southern success in achieving relatively low urban crime rates is unclear, but might warrant further investigation. 

 

Over the last decade or two, liberal intellectuals have regularly denounced their conservative opponents for allowing ideological considerations to trump objective facts, sometimes styling themselves the “Reality-Based Community” as an ironic riposte to the foolish criticism of a top Bush Administration official.  Many of these liberal accusations have considerable merit.  But individuals who claim to accept reality undercut their credibility if they pick and choose which portions of reality they acknowledge and which portions they carefully ignore.  Our academic and media elites should not avoid factual evidence that they dislike.

Consider that over one-quarter of all the urban black males in America have vanished from our society, a loss-ratio approaching that experienced by Europeans during the Black Death of the Middle Ages.  Yet these astonishing statistics have largely remained unreported by our major media and hence unrecognized by the general American public.  Should the medieval scribes of the Fourteenth Century have ignored the annihilating impact of the bubonic plague all around them and merely confined their writings to more pleasant news?

It is said that very young children sometimes believe they can hide themselves by covering their eyes, and that seems to be the general approach taken by our major media to the unpleasantly grim racial crime statistics analyzed in this article.  But the reality continues to exist whether or not we ignore it.

  These 17 designations made in sutta are given only as regards the citta, no other proper noun is given such status. Nothing but the citta itself is lauded in so many proprietary and important ways as is the citta below. There is no higher acclaim in Buddhism than these 16 which are said only of the citta. 
     You will not find this list anywhere on the internet, and sad to say, also in no book on Buddhism either in print or out. Many thousands of hours were spent compiling even this small list of irrefutable facts about the most important word, the citta (will) to Gotama the Buddha as reflected in his teachings. This list is quite possibly the most important list here on kathodos.com
What is the meaning of the most important word in Buddhism, the Citta, in short?

     The Citta is the ontological will, or metaphorically in the scriptural context of Buddhist doctrine (as well as the Upanishads too for that matter, which  translates citta as "Pure-Consciousness"), is the “Light” which is unmanifest. “The light (joti) within one’s mind/will (citta) is the very Soul (attano)” [DN2-Att. 2.479]. The metaphysical nexus of purification in Buddhism is the non-empirical and pre-corporeal citta. As per Buddhism, the inchoate (self-nescient) will (citta) is manifest as an attribution and self-sublimated, as the empirical consciousness (vinnana), the finest attribute of samsaric and empirical existence. In short, this ‘white-light’ Will (citta), when manifest upon ‘blue’ form is blue-vinnana (consciousness), or when manifest upon ‘red’ form, is red-vinnana (consciousness). The sati (recollection) and samadhi (assimilation) methodology of Buddhism is to make this primordially pure but inchoate Will (citta), choate (self-Knowing) such that further identification with its phenomenal attributes has been forever cut (bhavanirodha nibbanam). 

     Just as there is no Light (citta) in what is merely illumined (vinnana/consciousness) from afar, but merely En-lumined by this non-empirical Light, so to is the apex of Buddhism the disidentification with this causal nexus beginning with phenomenal consciousness (vinnana) by making the will (citta) self-choate by the erasure of nescience (avijja/avidya) thru means of gnosis and sati and samadhi methodologies. [12-1 Upadisa] “Just as a man (erroneously) looks upon his body placed in the sun as having the property of light (citta) in it, so, he looks upon the intellect (vinnana) pervaded by the reflection of Citta  as the Self (inner-nature of the Citta).”

      In summation, the Citta is nowhere as pertains the body, and certainly not the brain (as erroneously presumed by pseudo-buddhist researchers), but is the unmanifest Light which constantly feeds light, or rather life, into this dead form of many constituents. We are to see our True-Selves (svabhava) as this unmanifest Light, rather than its petty corporeal reflection/manifestation, being consciousness and its lower superstructure (the body). 
1. Citta is the only thing which is said to obtain the state of “non-clinging” (anupada) “This is immortality, that being the liberated mind (citta) which does not cling (anupada) after anything” [MN 2.265]. 
2. Citta is the only thing which is said to obtain the state of being “taintless” (anasava) [DN 2.35, MN 1.501, MN 3.20, SN 3.45...etc etc].
3. Citta is the only thing which is said to obtain/is gathered in “the realm of immortality”: “he gathers his mind within the realm of Immortality (amataya dhatuya). This is tranquility; this is that which is most excellent!” [MN 1.436]. “This is immortality, that being the liberated citta” [MN 2.265]. [AN 1.282] “He gathers the mind inside the immortal realm”. 
4. Citta is the only thing which is said to be the basis (arammana) for Parinibbana. Said immediately after Gotama’s physical death: [DN 2.157] “No longer with (subsists by) in-breath nor out-breath, so is him (Gotama) who is steadfast in mind (citta), inherently quelled from all desires the mighty sage has passed beyond. With mind (citta) limitless (Brahma) he no longer bears sensations; illumined and unbound (Nibbana), his mind (citta) is definitely (ahu) liberated.” The taintless (anasava) mind (citta) being = parinirvana: [SN 3.45] “The mind (citta) being so liberated and arisen from defilements, one is fixed in the Soul as liberation, one is quelled in fixation upon the Soul. Quelled in the Soul one is unshakable. So being unshakable, the very Soul is thoroughly unbound Parinirvana).” “This said: ‘the liberated mind (citta) which does not cling’ means Nibbana” [MN2-Att. 4.68]. 
5. Citta is the only thing which is differentiated from the five aggregates (rupa/vedana/sanna/sankhara/vinnana): “Whatever form, feelings, perceptions, experiences, or consciousness there is (the five aggregates), these he sees to be without permanence, as suffering, as ill, as a plague, a boil, a sting, a pain, an affliction, as foreign, as otherness, as empty (suññato), as Selfless (anattato). So he turns his mind (citta, Non-aggregate) away from these; therein he gathers his mind within the realm of Immortality (amataya dhatuya). This is tranquility; this is that which is most excellent!”[MN 1.436, AN 4.422]. [SN 3.234] The Aggregate Sutra. At Savatthi “Followers, the desire and lust for formations is a defilement of the citta, the desire and lust for feelings is a defilement of the citta, the desire and lust for cognition is a defilement of the citta, the desire and lust for experiences is a defilement of the citta, the desire and lust for vinnana is a defilement of the citta. But, followers, when one abandons the defilements of the citta regarding these five stations (aggregates), then ones citta inclines towards renunciation. Ones citta is made pliable and firm in renunciation by direct gnosis.” [MN 1.511] “For a long time I have been cheated, tricked and hoodwinked by my citta. For when grasping, I have been grasping onto form, for when grasping, I have been grasping onto feelings, , for when grasping, I have been grasping onto perceptions, for when grasping, I have been grasping onto experiences, for when grasping, I have been grasping onto consciousness.” 
6. Citta is the only thing which, when perfected by samadhi and panna, is = Soul (attan):  "Steadfast-in-the-Soul (thitattoti) means one is supremely-fixed within the mind (citta)” [Silakkhandhavagga-Att. 1.168]. “'The purification of one’s own mind', this means the light (joti) within one’s mind (citta) is the very Soul (attano)” [DN2-Att. 2.479]. [AN 2.6] "Him who is Lord of the mind (citta) possessed with supernormal faculties and quelled, that One is called 'fixed-in-the-Soul' (thitattoti)”. [AN 1.196] "With mind (citta) emancipated from ignorance…this designates the Soul has become Brahma”. [MN 1.213] "The collected and quelled mind is the Supreme Soul”.  "Steadfast-in-the-Soul (thitattoti) means steadfast in ones True-nature (thitasabha'vo)"[Tikanipa’ta-Att. 3.4]. 
7. Citta is the only thing which is said to be the basis/medium for the recollection of past lives: “directs his mind (citta) to the recollection of past lives” [DN 1.81]. 
8. Citta is the only thing which is said to be “its own foundation/not based in anything” (anarammana), therein philosophically anything which is “a thing in itself”, i.e. “without a foundation of its own” is hence the basis for marking the mind as the Absolute (when wisdom and samadhi are culminated):  [Pati-A 2.478] “The sovereign-mind which is its own support (an-without + a’rammana=support) means the sovereign-mind is the foundation”. [Dh-A 4.26] “Ones own mind is the foundation of the Soul”. [MN-A 2.297] “Nibbana is the foundation, that being the emancipated-mind (citta)”. [Sn-A 2.583] “Emancipation is meant the foundation, that being the establishment of the emancipated mind”.[Theragatha-A 1.138] “Supramundane samadhi is the foundation of Nibbana, that being the exceedingly quelled mind (citta)”
9. Citta is the only thing which is compared to the “indestructible” diamond: [AN 1.124] “What, followers, is a being who has a diamond-mind (vajiru’pamacitto)? That one who has destroyed the taints (asavas) and has both a liberated mind (citta) and is liberated by wisdom. Just as there is nothing which a diamond cannot cut, be it stone or gem; so to is one with a diamond-mind who has destroyed the taints and has both a liberated mind (citta) and is liberated by wisdom. This is one who possesses a diamond-mind.” 
10. The entire Aryan path itself is said to both being and end with the citta (mind) as its basis: [MN 1.197] “Followers, the Brahma life is not lived for sake of gains, honors, or acclaim; nor is it lived for virtuousness, nor for absorptions, nor for gnosis and insight. This Brahma life is lived for the sole preeminent purpose of emancipation of the mind alone, which is the quintessential final core”. [MN 1.301] “What is samadhi (the culmination of the entire Aryan path) for? Samadhi, friend, is for making the mind (citta) sovereign”. 
11. The citta is the only thing which is said to go to the light/heaven realm: [SN 5.370] “His mind goes heaven-bound to auspiciousness.” 
12. Most importantly, the citta is the only thing which is said to obtain freedom from nescience/ignorance/agnosis (avijja): [MN 1.279] “When his steadfast mind was perfectly purified, perfectly illumined, stainless, utterly perfect, pliable, sturdy, fixed, and everlastingly determinate then he directs his mind towards the gnosis of the destruction of defilements. Knowing thus and seeing thus his mind is emancipated from sensual desires, his mind is emancipated from becoming, his mind is emancipated from ignorance.” 
13. The only proper noun which is said to obtain the state of emancipation (vimutta) is the citta (cittavimutta)- common pali term. 
14. As per the ‘superior’ path VS. the ‘inferior’ path, the mind is the sole basis for the ‘superior’ path: “ariyacittassa anasavacittassa ariyamaggasamangino” [MN 3.72] “The Aryan citta, the taintless citta; this is that with which the Aryan path is endowed with”. 
15. The citta is the only thing which is deemed “the highest absolute”: [MN 1.298] “Emancipation of the mind is the highest absolute.” [MN 1.298] “Of all types of unmanifest emancipations of mind, the fixed unshakable emancipation of the mind is the highest supernal.” 
16. The entire basis for Buddhism itself is said to be for/ as regards the citta:  “The purification of one’s own mind (citta); this is the Doctrine of the Buddha” [DN 2.49].“How is it that one is called a ‘Buddha’?...gnosis that the mind (citta) is purified (visuddham)…such is how one is deemed a ‘Buddha’.” [MN 2.144] [AN 1.6] "I do not have, followers, insight into anything or any dharma which, when made to become and made to expand that brings greater bliss than the mind (citta). The mind, followers, when made to become and made to expand, brings the greatest bliss." [SN 1.26] Those followers absorbed, their minds (citta) flawless having assimilated the Soul; a charioteer (Soul) in control of the reigns, sages like them guard this supranormal-power! 
17.  The citta is the only thing which is deemed to achieve ‘freedom from becoming (bhava)’. All thing “as become must pass. The borne, the become, the made, the create has no other fate than to pass just as they have arises”. The philosophical implication that the citta can transcend causation/becoming cannot be denied. "My mind (citta) is emancipated from desire (kama), emancipated from becoming (bhava), emancipated from nescience/ignorance (avijja), ‘Emancipation! Emancipation alas!’…there exists no fruit more exquisite and perfect that this." [DN 1.84]

There is a ton of information on the internet about UFOs and extraterrestrials.  Much of it is bizarre, making wild unproven assertions about things like presidential candidates being […]

It has repeatedly organized groups of self-interested entities into unified cooperatives. ... John Stewart is an Australian-based member of the Evolution of Complexity and Cognition (ECCO) Research Group of the Free University of Brussels ...

Enclosed (below) is the publication for the first time of an obtuse and ignorant eight page letter sent to Bishop Richard Williamson in December, 2010, by his subordinate, Fr. Niklaus Pfluger, "First Assistant" to the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) Superior General, Bernard Fellay.  Pfluger is a German Catholic priest of Bishop Richard Williamson's former SSPX fraternity. Bishop  Williamson, you may recall, made international headlines by refusing to recant his statement to a Swedish television station that the persecution of Judaic persons had been exaggerated, that no one was gassed in homicidal chambers, and that the Six Million death toll was an unconscionable exaggeration. For his remarks, he was expelled by Fellay from the SSPX seminary in Argentina where he was rector,  and expelled from Argentina by the government. He faces continuing prosecution in criminal court in Germany (where he gave the interview to Swedish TV).

SOURCE

Writing in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler perfectly summarized the central theme of the twentieth century, a century which amounted to a total Jewish triumph over and destruction of Western civilization.  Hitler wrote, “The ignorance of the broad masses as regards the inner character of the Jew, and the lack of instinct and insight displayed by our upper classes, are among the reasons which explain how it is that so many people fall an easy prey to the systematic campaign of falsehood which the Jew carries on.”  Of course, Hitler was specifically describing the German nation, but his statement equally applies to all of Western civilization.  The “ignorance of the broad masses as regards the inner character of the Jew” combined with “the lack of instinct and insight displayed by” the upper classes has led to a total destruction of our civilization, by and large, a fact most Westerners do not even recognize because they cannot fathom the “systematic campaign of falsehood which the Jew carries on,” as Adolf Hitler explained.