The iArchitect Group

Think Again: American Decline: This time it's for real.

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:18:11 PST

"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."

This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world." Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.

The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world's leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.

Japan, of course, also experienced many years of rapid economic growth and is still an export powerhouse. But it was never a plausible candidate to be No. 1. The Japanese population is less than half that of the United States, which means that the average Japanese person would have to be more than twice as rich as the average American before Japan's economy surpassed America's. That was never going to happen. By contrast, China's population is more than four times that of the United States. The famous projection by Goldman Sachs that China's economy will be bigger than that of the United States by 2027 was made before the 2008 economic crash. At the current pace, China could be No. 1 well before then.

China's economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.

And China is only the largest part of a bigger story about the rise of new economic and political players. America's traditional allies in Europe -- Britain, France, Italy, even Germany -- are slipping down the economic ranks. New powers are on the rise: India, Brazil, Turkey. They each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which collectively constrain America's ability to shape the world. Think of how India and Brazil sided with China at the global climate-change talks. Or the votes by Turkey and Brazil against America at the United Nations on sanctions against Iran. That is just a taste of things to come.

"China Will Implode Sooner or Later."

Don't count on it. It is certainly true that when Americans are worrying about national decline, they tend to overlook the weaknesses of their scariest-looking rival. The flaws in the Soviet and Japanese systems became obvious only in retrospect. Those who are confident that American hegemony will be extended long into the future point to the potential liabilities of the Chinese system. In a recent interview with the Times of London, former U.S. President George W. Bush suggested that China's internal problems mean that its economy will be unlikely to rival America's in the foreseeable future. "Do I still think America will remain the sole superpower?" he asked. "I do."

But predictions of the imminent demise of the Chinese miracle have been a regular feature of Western analysis ever since it got rolling in the late 1970s. In 1989, the Communist Party seemed to be staggering after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the 1990s, economy watchers regularly pointed to the parlous state of Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises. Yet the Chinese economy has kept growing, doubling in size roughly every seven years.

Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power forever. And the country's traditional dependence on exports and an undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the United States and other international actors demanding a "rebalancing" of China's export-driven economy. The country also faces major demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened by water shortages and pollution.

Yet even if you factor in considerable future economic and political turbulence, it would be a big mistake to assume that the Chinese challenge to U.S. power will simply disappear. Once countries get the hang of economic growth, it takes a great deal to throw them off course. The analogy to the rise of Germany from the mid-19th century onward is instructive. Germany went through two catastrophic military defeats, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the collapse of democracy, and the destruction of its major cities and infrastructure by Allied bombs. And yet by the end of the 1950s, West Germany was once again one of the world's leading economies, albeit shorn of its imperial ambitions.

In a nuclear age, China is unlikely to get sucked into a world war, so it will not face turbulence and disorder on remotely the scale Germany did in the 20th century. And whatever economic and political difficulties it does experience will not be enough to stop the country's rise to great-power status. Sheer size and economic momentum mean that the Chinese juggernaut will keep rolling forward, no matter what obstacles lie in its path.

"America Still Leads Across the Board."

For now. As things stand, America has the world's largest economy, the world's leading universities, and many of its biggest companies. The U.S. military is also incomparably more powerful than any rival. The United States spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. And let's also add in America's intangible assets. The country's combination of entrepreneurial flair and technological prowess has allowed it to lead the technological revolution. Talented immigrants still flock to U.S. shores. And now that Barack Obama is in the White House, the country's soft power has received a big boost. For all his troubles, polls show Obama is still the most charismatic leader in the world; Hu Jintao doesn't even come close. America also boasts the global allure of its creative industries (Hollywood and all that), its values, the increasing universality of the English language, and the attractiveness of the American Dream.

All true -- but all more vulnerable than you might think. American universities remain a formidable asset. But if the U.S. economy is not generating jobs, then those bright Asian graduate students who fill up the engineering and computer-science departments at Stanford University and MIT will return home in larger numbers. Fortune's latest ranking of the world's largest companies has only two American firms in the top 10 -- Walmart at No. 1 and ExxonMobil at No. 3. There are already three Chinese firms in the top 10: Sinopec, State Grid, and China National Petroleum. America's appeal might also diminish if the country is no longer so closely associated with opportunity, prosperity, and success. And though many foreigners are deeply attracted to the American Dream, there is also a deep well of anti-American sentiment in the world that al Qaeda and others have skillfully exploited, Obama or no Obama.

As for the U.S. military, the lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars is that America's martial prowess is less useful than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others imagined. U.S. troops, planes, and missiles can overthrow a government on the other side of the world in weeks, but pacifying and stabilizing a conquered country is another matter. Years after apparent victory, America is still bogged down by an apparently endless insurgency in Afghanistan.

Not only are Americans losing their appetite for foreign adventures, but the U.S. military budget is clearly going to come under pressure in this new age of austerity. The present paralysis in Washington offers little hope that the United States will deal with its budgetary problems swiftly or efficiently. The U.S. government's continuing reliance on foreign lending makes the country vulnerable, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's humbling 2009 request to the Chinese to keep buying U.S. Treasury bills revealed. America is funding its military supremacy through deficit spending, meaning the war in Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese credit card. Little wonder that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has identified the burgeoning national debt as the single largest threat to U.S. national security.

Meanwhile, China's spending on its military continues to grow rapidly. The country will soon announce the construction of its first aircraft carrier and is aiming to build five or six in total. Perhaps more seriously, China's development of new missile and anti-satellite technology threatens the command of the sea and skies on which the United States bases its Pacific supremacy. In a nuclear age, the U.S. and Chinese militaries are unlikely to clash. A common Chinese view is that the United States will instead eventually find it can no longer afford its military position in the Pacific. U.S. allies in the region -- Japan, South Korea, and increasingly India -- may partner more with Washington to try to counter rising Chinese power. But if the United States has to scale back its presence in the Pacific for budgetary reasons, its allies will start to accommodate themselves to a rising China. Beijing's influence will expand, and the Asia-Pacific region -- the emerging center of the global economy -- will become China's backyard.

"Globalization Is Bending the World the Way of the West."

Not really. One reason why the United States was relaxed about China's rise in the years after the end of the Cold War was the deeply ingrained belief that globalization was spreading Western values. Some even thought that globalization and Americanization were virtually synonymous.

Pundit Fareed Zakaria was prescient when he wrote that the "rise of the rest" (i.e., non-American powers) would be one of the major features of a "post-American world." But even Zakaria argued that this trend was essentially beneficial to the United States: "The power shift … is good for America, if approached properly. The world is going America's way. Countries are becoming more open, market-friendly, and democratic."

Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that globalization and free trade would serve as a vehicle for the export of American values. In 1999, two years before China's accession to the World Trade Organization, Bush argued, "Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side."

There were two important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing. The first was that economic growth would inevitably -- and fairly swiftly -- lead to democratization. The second was that new democracies would inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the United States. Neither assumption is working out.

In 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Western analysts would have believed that 20 years later China would still be a one-party state -- and that its economy would also still be growing at phenomenal rates. The common (and comforting) Western assumption was that China would have to choose between political liberalization and economic failure. Surely a tightly controlled one-party state could not succeed in the era of cell phones and the World Wide Web? As Clinton put it during a visit to China in 1998, "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is … essential to the greatness of any modern nation."

In fact, China managed to combine censorship and one-party rule with continuing economic success over the following decade. The confrontation between the Chinese government and Google in 2010 was instructive. Google, that icon of the digital era, threatened to withdraw from China in protest at censorship, but it eventually backed down in return for token concessions. It is now entirely conceivable that when China becomes the world's largest economy -- let us say in 2027 -- it will still be a one-party state run by the Communist Party.

And even if China does democratize, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will make life easier for the United States, let alone prolong America's global hegemony. The idea that democracies are liable to agree on the big global issues is now being undermined on a regular basis. India does not agree with the United States on climate change or the Doha round of trade talks. Brazil does not agree with the United States on how to handle Venezuela or Iran. A more democratic Turkey is today also a more Islamist Turkey, which is now refusing to take the American line on either Israel or Iran. In a similar vein, a more democratic China might also be a more prickly China, if the popularity of nationalist books and Internet sites in the Middle Kingdom is any guide.

"Globalization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game."

Don't be too sure. Successive U.S. presidents, from the first Bush to Obama, have explicitly welcomed China's rise. Just before his first visit to China, Obama summarized the traditional approach when he said, "Power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another.… We welcome China's efforts to play a greater role on the world stage."

But whatever they say in formal speeches, America's leaders are clearly beginning to have their doubts, and rightly so. It is a central tenet of modern economics that trade is mutually beneficial for both partners, a win-win rather than a zero-sum. But that implies the rules of the game aren't rigged. Speaking before the 2010 World Economic Forum, Larry Summers, then Obama's chief economic advisor, remarked pointedly that the normal rules about the mutual benefits of trade do not necessarily apply when one trading partner is practicing mercantilist or protectionist policies. The U.S. government clearly thinks that China's undervaluation of its currency is a form of protectionism that has led to global economic imbalances and job losses in the United States. Leading economists, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the Peterson Institute's C. Fred Bergsten, have taken a similar line, arguing that tariffs or other retaliatory measures would be a legitimate response. So much for the win-win world.

And when it comes to the broader geopolitical picture, the world of the future looks even more like a zero-sum game, despite the gauzy rhetoric of globalization that comforted the last generation of American politicians. For the United States has been acting as if the mutual interests created by globalization have repealed one of the oldest laws of international politics: the notion that rising players eventually clash with established powers.

In fact, rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in Asia to human rights. It is mercifully unlikely that the United States and China would ever actually go to war, but that is because both sides have nuclear weapons, not because globalization has magically dissolved their differences.

At the G-20 summit in November, the U.S. drive to deal with "global economic imbalances" was essentially thwarted by China's obdurate refusal to change its currency policy. The 2009 climate-change talks in Copenhagen ended in disarray after another U.S.-China standoff. Growing Chinese economic and military clout clearly poses a long-term threat to American hegemony in the Pacific. The Chinese reluctantly agreed to a new package of U.N. sanctions on Iran, but the cost of securing Chinese agreement was a weak deal that is unlikely to derail the Iranian nuclear program. Both sides have taken part in the talks with North Korea, but a barely submerged rivalry prevents truly effective Sino-American cooperation. China does not like Kim Jong Il's regime, but it is also very wary of a reunified Korea on its borders, particularly if the new Korea still played host to U.S. troops. China is also competing fiercely for access to resources, in particular oil, which is driving up global prices.

American leaders are right to reject zero-sum logic in public. To do anything else would needlessly antagonize the Chinese. But that shouldn't obscure this unavoidable fact: As economic and political power moves from West to East, new international rivalries are inevitably emerging.

The United States still has formidable strengths. Its economy will eventually recover. Its military has a global presence and a technological edge that no other country can yet match. But America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008. Those days are over.

From FP.

America and China’s First Big Test By Zbigniew Brzezinski

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:18:20 PST

We are faced today with the second provocative warlike act committed in recent times by North Korea. The first of these, the torpedoing of a South Korean warship, was covert: the origin was deliberately disguised. But the consequences were overt and painful. This current action is clearly overt. The origin of Tuesday’s attack is identified beyond a shadow of doubt. It is an outrageous action that could qualify even as an act of war.

This raises fundamental questions. If these actions are deliberate it is an indication that the North Korean regime has reached a point of insanity. Its calculations and its actions are difficult to fathom in rational terms. Alternatively it is a sign that the regime is out of control. Different elements in Pyongyang, including parts of the military, are capable of taking actions on their own perhaps, without central co-ordination. That is an even more ominous possibility.

So what is the world to do with a problem that has long vexed the major powers without a hint of resolution? Here we enter another realm of uncertainty because it is increasingly apparent that we are dealing with a clash of two alternative historical perspectives between the two major powers indirectly involved and actively engaged, namely the US and China.

In the case of China we are dealing with a regime that is historically self-confident. It perceives tectonic shifts in the distribution of global power as ultimately favourable to its prospects. It senses its power is growing and this leads to a posture of great self-restraint, even passivity and reluctance to rock the boat.

The other major power concerned with these events – the US – is in a rather different historical phase. Public discussion is increasingly dominated by the perspective that historical trends are against America. And so Washington is preoccupied with the need to mobilise a collective response and is frustrated by the relative unwillingness of others to share with it cumbersome responsibilities.

Making matters worse, America is bogged down largely alone in a prolonged decade-long misadventure in an area ranging from the Middle East proper to south-west Asia. More recently, some major US diplomatic efforts to bring peace to the Middle East were successfully defied by a state totally dependent on America.

In these circumstances there is a real risk we may find ourselves in a situation where the Chinese favour an under-reaction that will simply lead to further acts of provocation, and where America may be inclined to push for a response that the Chinese will see as a dangerous overreaction.

It is important that President Barack Obama displays cool, firm and globally visible personal leadership in working with China and the other major parties in the six-party talks. If I were back in the situation room in the White House asking myself what I would advise the president, this is what I would do.

The president has to take the initiative. Provocation of this kind cannot be dismissed lightly or left in the hands of diplomats. He should call President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea to reassure him personally and directly of US support. Then he should call President Hu Jintao of China and express serious concern. He should call Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan, as America’s prime ally in the Pacific and given its proximity to the Korean conundrum. He should also call President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, should then follow up on these calls and set in motion convening the United Nations Security Council.

North Korea has been defiantly challenging the international community[5] in a way that Saddam Hussein was not, at least overtly, and which the Iranians are not quite doing. The Iranians are maintaining, maybe mendaciously, that they are not seeking nuclear weapons. That is a different kind of challenge in which our response has to be the insistence that they prove their case. The North Koreans, however, are defiant, boasting their nuclear prowess and now openly provocative.

One of the things we have to discuss in these conversations is the possibility of a selectively punitive embargo on North Korea in the area of high-tech and energy. This would be a tempest in a teapot were it not for the fact that Pyongyang has nuclear weapons and some manifestations of insanity in the regime.

Critically, however, our approach to China should not be adversarial. It is not in America’s nor China’s interest to create massive popular hostility. Governmental disagreements can be managed: they are the stock of international affairs. But if you arouse public emotions, such crises become harder to control and dangerous.

A call from Mr Obama to Mr Hu should be a call between leaders who share a concern. It should not be an American demand, nor an admonition. It should be an affirmation that our respective interests are endangered and so we have a common stake in an effective response.

The writer, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was US National Security Adviser from 1977-1981. And possibly the sanest person in all of NSA & DOD.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e1a70a0e-f6d1-11df-8feb-00144feab49a.html#axzz16B2V0KpH

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a8f9a83c-f6eb-11df-8feb-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=319b98a6-0c1a-11db-86c7-0000779e2340.html

http://www.ft.com/north-korea

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0c4d68e2-f6e7-11df-8feb-00144feab49a.html#axzz16731SEOr

BASEL III: An Unmitigated Disaster for Consumers

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:59:02 PST

Basel III, Banking Architecture Blueprint, makes matters worse for consumers. The latest rules judge risk largely on the basis of credit scores and data from the worst outlier years of the recent crisis. A consumer or small business seeking a loan will therefore be assessed largely on what happened from 2008 to 2010. Little weight is given to future prospects. This history-based approach will raise capital costs for a large group of consumers and many small and medium-sized businesses – the primary job creators in our economy. No one disputes that riskier loans should be backed by higher levels of capital. But basing risk measurements almost entirely on data from the crisis years [2008-2010] will mean that the “haves” who need credit the least will get the most, and pay the least for it. The “have-nots” who need credit will be those hurt most.

-- Vikram Pandit fo Citibank says: BASEL III: An Unmitigated Disaster for Consumers. FT: http://link.ft.com/r/J0VG55/LQCTBW/TS4TY/BM1L52/72E1ON/CM/h?a1=2010&a2=11&a3=11

The banking & finance 'Haves' have one again short circuited the 'Have Nots' and have designed a system of global banking regulation essentially extrapolating the relationship between predator and prey into an institutionalized victimhood across the planet.

Banks have become israelis, while global consumers have become stateless palestinians. Banks have become Lower Manhattan, while global consumers have become Flint, Michigan. Banks have become Nariman Point, while global consumers have become Dharavi Slum.

Financial Districts across the planet have very little time left before they can reverse course, or the plebiscite public will destroy the Solomon's Temple, once again. Banking & Financial sector must not forget that they caused World War I & II. As of now, Basel III justifies the rise of a Hitler, & actively facilitating such a strategy.

“Under Basel, the ‘sweet spot’ business model for banks in the developed world will be to take retail deposits from ‘mom and pop’ [small but stable customers] and lend only to big business and the wealthy,” he said. “I don’t believe this is the banking system we want,” says Citi's Vikram Pandit. FT: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1d392ba0-e071-11df-99a3-00144feabdc0.html

The exact phenomenon that is going on already, where life is all about paying bills - banking & financial deposits - from 'moms & pops' and enriching the wealthy monarchs while pretending to offer free market, capitalist opportunity & civilization.

Basel III will also create 'Shadow Banking Systems' that have already created a dangerous world of zionists and jihadis who are currently the singular threat to global security, peace, prosperity & the very existence of mankind. The longer this game is played, the more dangerous the game becomes. It is time to recognize, or time to teach a lesson, either way inaction and status quo is a voluntary death warrant.

Basel III is an Architecture of Financial Colonialism and Slavery.
Related articles
Pandit Criticizes Some Basel III Bank Rules (dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com)

UPDATE 1-Citi CEO Pandit criticizes some Basel rules (reuters.com)

Economix: Capital Failure (economix.blogs.nytimes.com)

Basel Could Make Credit Crunches Worse, Pandit Says (businessweek.com)

Basel III not enough to stop another crisis, according to Mervyn King (newstatesman.com)

Basel III misses opportunity to break down the silo culture in banking - Algorithmics questions the missing link between capital and liquidity (prweb.com)

Wall Street & the Economic Game of Western Capitalism is Rigged - Signed, Sealed & Delivered: Confirmed! (iarchitect.org)

Deepawali: The Way of the Light

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:26:10 PDT

Divya

The mind must rise above the material nourishment of the body and soul, like a wick above the oil, for it to be lit by Enlightenment and shine like the bright oil lamp in the Darkness of Existence.

: Diwali celebrations

If the wick is too short it will be drowned in the oil of material existence and shall not have the ability to rise above the common denominator to be fired up to a lamp of life.
If the wick it too tall, it shall burn too fast, too brightly, without the nourishment of life and shall extinguish.

: Oil Lamp, Ancient Samaria

When millions of billions of these lamps are lit, then and only then, shall the civilization of life be worthy of the Way of the Light.

Deepawali celebrates the Way of the Light.

There is no wisdom in the universe that an ant cannot see.

: Ant's Eye

Light does travel in a straight line only in theoretical physics. Even an ant can look up to the sky and the twinkling stars shall speak of the Way of the Light.

Happy Deepawali !

: Cosmic Lamp

There will be Blood! There will be Sacrifice!

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 04:13:03 PDT

Had a big fight last night over Kieth Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and especially Chris O'Donnel on MSNBC.

The problem is white liberal democrats simply do not get it.

Firstly, this country was always racist. It was a racist who invented League of Nations. It was a racist who dropped the atomic bomb. It was a racist who let the attack dogs to suppress civil rights. It was a racist who dropped more bombs than entire WWII Allied and Axis Ordnance on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

When Daniel Ellsberg wanted to release the Pentagon papers he wanted to expose the quantity of bombing. Instead the white liberal jews and Wall Street turned it into 1st Amendment issue and sidetracked the fact that Secretary of State Holocaust Jew Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Irish Pit Bull Robert McNamara were fundamentally racists.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when we went to war against muslims.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when we shafted the gays and lesbians with DADT and stripped them of all other rights including hospital visitations in a manufactured disease called AIDS.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when cities after cities were segregated into economically depressed communities that demonstrate the architectural earthly footprint of racism, discrimination and bigotry.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when US$ Colonies have directed financial missiles against Asian Tigers and destroyed their economies in the 90s.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when US$ colonies are now decided to attack BRIC and emerging countries to become their financial slaves.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when even the highly qualified Indians were reduced to Silicon Cotton Pickers while their own kind made a killing in Dotcom and after.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when colored brown mexicans and other central/south americans want to come to America for a decent living instead they are hounded like mangy rabid dogs.

Instead the liberal white democrats hid behind sophisticated garbage and moralistic debating when their own kind is wiped out from the middle class.

At some point of time these liberal white democrats have to understand that the time for talk is over. Whatever they have worked all their lives to make their lives and those around them of all races, color, gender, religion, orientation is NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

At some stage nothing will happen that will make the lives of colored people such as my own self any better. At that stage we'll all be willing to give up our lives for a sliver of hope that our sacrifice will make the lives of those after us better.

That time has arrived. Now the question is whose side will the liberal white democrats stand on? Will they willingly sacrifice their own lives for a better cause? Will they quit bombing us and attack the Henry Kissingers and Robert McNamaras among them?

Will you betray your own white genes? Will you betray your own Judaism? Will you betray your own Christianity? Will you betray your own Hinduism? Will you betray your own Islam?… Will you betray everything about your selves in order for this nonsense of apartheid existence to end?

The liberal white democrats just don't get it.

When they hear conservative latino groups calling for a boycott of the November 2010 Mid-Term Elections, the liberal white democrat brushes it off as vile Republican strategy to demolish the Democratic Candidates and hide behind the comfort of their denial that the colored are really, really angry.

What part of ENOUGH! does the liberal white democrat have a problem understanding?

Michael Lind of Financial Times is right in his assessment today. It is not Tea Party, and it is not this elections. But something somewhere else is going to happen. "Novel Forces May Arise to Shake Up US Politics!"

There will be Intafada. There will be Satyagraha. There will be Civil War.

There will be Blood. There will be Sacrifice.

America has been Conquered!

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:16:16 PDT

"As in the city-state of Rome, urban populations [in contemporary America] elect[ed] governing magistrates [Senators, Governors, Justices, Regulatory Chiefs, Boards] from among the most wealthy and influential members of the community, and these civil leaders [fully paid up members of neo-imperialist Wall Street, K-Street] carry[ied] the burden of funding [via gargantuan money supply to political puppet elections] in the municipia, the village communes turned into cities with the rights of Pax American citizenships."

Read up on the foreign money influence and Wall Street money influence on contemporary politics. http://read.bi/aird6t

The village idiots transformed the municipia into civitates with the money poured from the Wall Street into gridded downtowns with skyscrapers across the continent. Just as the homeowner was willing executioner in maintaining the unbridled rise in home equity which translated into financial instruments of tsunami profits, the very architecture of dollars-per-square-feet achieved by grid layout and financial services replicates of Wall Street from Chicago, Lexington, San Francisco, Miami to London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Istanbul have created an architecture of the western empire called Pax Americana.

The Tokyos, Seouls, Tel Avivs and Shanghais are nothing more than roman veteran colonies by the cross-breeds of Captain Perrys and General Marshalls parading in local attire, culture and funky accents while their hearts, minds and souls are decidedly white European colonists playing the imperial game upon their own gene pools on both sides of the planet hemispheres.

North Indians do not discover India with their food but discover Persia from where they come from. Europeans do not find Asia in Phillipines but their own kind of abrahamists in coconut sauce. Capitalists do not find China in Shanghai but the next version of their own Manhattan on steroids. British do not find tea in Darjeeling but English tea time in the foothills of Himalayas served by colonial servants. Americans do not find technologists in India but digital house slaves serving their silicon kingdom in the verandah. The White House does not serve the people who elected them but act as the outhouse for the Financial Monarchs.

As Pliny, the Elder, lamented, "through conquering, we have been conquered."

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:29:31 PDT

The parallels between mid-1930s Great Depression and the early 21st century are frighteningly similar. Yet, the 1930s produced far richer allegories such as "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" than in the last decade. It was a gargantuan task just to convince Americans, especially the investment class, that the American Psyche is indelibly altered by the experiences of the last decade with traumatic finance and economics. Our findings on that aspect of purely scientific study minus the allegories and art can be found at http://www.decitica.com.

Almost all of the middle and lower classes are locked in a dancing marathon where they slog their asses off to eke a decent living. But the end of the marathon dancing does not wait a prize, a windfall, as $1500 in Depression era dollars for the destitute, but unpaid bills. People are working to pay off their bills, investing to pay off their bills, working overtime or double shifts to pay off their bills. Sending children to education to pay off their bills. Saving for future to pay off their bills. In the end, American Life a loss-loss game, a negative-sum returns.

Americans are in the same predicament as Jane Fonda was at the end of the film; Unable to take her own life, she wishes someone else can shoot her from her misery. The prize horse has broken her leg and is in peace with euthanasia as the final solution.

The film comes closer to my heart and soul as I watched the winning horse in Kentucky Derby in 2008 being shot to death on the race track. Eight Belles, not knowing what the Americans had in mind with that name, represents Ashta-Lakshmi, or eight incarnations of goddess of wealth, Lakshmi. Shortly after my College of Design splattered their hands with the blood of my mother's death, they shot the horse in symbolic parallelism.

America has since shot her horses, her wealth, her civilization. Americans can dance all they want, but there will be no prize at the end of the line. Merely the smoking end of the barrel waiting for the next in line.

Welcome to America. "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

Al-Qaeda's Next Target: Kentucky. Huh??

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:02:34 PDT

The Seven Kabbala Clues of Kentucky Zionism

The first clue came in on September 12, 2001. Every single airport and airstrip controlled by FAA and NTSB in America was shut down, with the exception of Air-Force Bases and airstrips classified even within NORAD. Yet, the BlueGrass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky was opened for a single private jet to take flight. Osama Bin Laden's family needed to be flown out of this country. Since USS Cole bombing off the coast of Yemen, Osama has been on America's cross-hairs. President Clinton even launched a decapitation strike against Bin Laden by launching missiles from Navy's Aircraft Carriers off the Arabian Sea into Afghanistan. There is no way Osama's family network is going to be shopping for horses in Lexington unless his family members are within the custody of the Islamic Al-Qaeda's counterpart - The Zionist Al-Qaeda.

The second clue happened when I met Professor Penny Miller. Something simply did not go right and my critical thinking triggered. She had no talent to be a professor, let alone be promoted to full professor and climb the ladder this far with a single publication her entire life, a book co-authored with a former Kentucky Governor which she never wrote. She was in a very strategic position filtering out students who were politically interested and active with a desire to go into Law School. She was fostering those who were about to enter the world of legislation. She doled out scholarships and grants to students of a certain profile that I later came to term zionist-friendly. Her son was the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Kentucky bankrupting individuals and institutions critical of the Jewish banker and their Zionist network. He's now the treasurer of the state democratic party and the point man for Jewish political money.

The third clue arrived when I was admitted into the zionist infested School of Architecture. For some odd reason this school was stuck-up with Modernism. Most people do not know that Modernism was born as a counter-revolution to Nazi architecture that harked back to Renaissance and the grandeur of classicism, the architecture of the Roman Empire. The jews who opposed the blatant revival of empire classicism for the Third Reich adored Modernism, which was discarded and disbanded by the Nazis and relocated to America. Modernism is the architectural response to the victory at WWII in terms of political ideology of designing the civilization and urban plans. Architecture had moved away from the failures of modernism except at University of Kentucky. Such colonial hangover and apartheid architecture requires significant financial backing of Zionist network to survive well into 21st century.

The fourth clue arrived in the form of a fool of an Indian Muslim. He joked one day that the historically preserved modernist house that he civil engineered for the husband of Professor Penny Miller really only needed reinforcement steel rods the size of the thumb, or a normal zionist penis, but instead the client insisted that he use concrete rebars the size of elephant penis. The design came in from Mossad and they needed a local fool to sign off on the structural engineering. In return, he'd conduct crash courses every year for engineers and architects across the country who need to pass an external exam in structural engineering in order to be certified a professional in the field. The exorbitant fees, annually, for the crash course served well as a continued retainer to maintain the image of a fool and avoid any financial audit. Given the euro-centrism and white-supremacy in the course content, pedagogy, admissions, and graduations, that resulted in loss of accreditation his presence was an anathema as a token colored man.

The fifth clue arrived when one fine morning the famous Civil Rights Lawyer and husband of Penny Miller died. She fell in love with a zionist at the funeral and married him within a year. How can a woman married to a civil rights lawyer for 41 years be married to a zionist within months of his death? I dug around to find that the owner of the elephant-penis-sized steel reinforced historical modernist house never really fought for the african american anytime in his life but was of the singular objective to create legal precedences to protect his 1.7% jewish-american minority should they someday face anti-zionist backlash from whites, browns, blacks, asians and europeans. He used the Civil Rights laws enacted by President Johnson since June 3, 1965 intended for the African American for the exclusive benefit of the Jew. That answers part of Louis Farrakhan's oft-repeated question, "Where were the white jews when blacks were slaves?"

The sixth clue arrived when Richmond Army Depot started leaking dangerous nerve agents as Sarin and Agent Orange into the surface water and underground streams. It turned out that my neighborhood was heavily protected with an enormous stash of Weapons of Mass Destruction. While nuclear free for energy, Kentucky has an enormous stash of nuclear weapons on top of all the WMD. It is very hard to fathom why the Beverly Hillbillies need so much weaponry. And why a jewish lawyer needs a house that can withstand any tank or missile attack with the sole exception of last decade's JDAM - missiles made with depleted uranium DU for bunker busting efficiency. When depleted uranium arrived the house went into inhabitable museum.

The seventh clue arrived when I happen to chance on a documentary on PBS that Supreme Court Justice Brandeis originated in Kentucky. The documentary makes one fleeting cursory mention in the very end about his association with the zionists. Brandeis in Kentucky is extremely interesting because the Zionist Organization relocated its headquarters from Berlin to New York in the late 19th century with the help of Brandeis in leadership. Such a relocation is impossible without the financial network firmly in Kentucky.

If the Islamic Al-Qaeda is looking for its counterpart - Zionist Al-Qaeda - to tango then it needs no further to look than Kentucky.

Bulls-Eye! The horse capital might very well witness the Trojan Horse in the future.

Mutation of the Concrete Jungle in Free Market Capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:16:50 PDT

Today’s mutations have the potential to shift us away from business models based on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, and central control. The deconstruction of the Financial Colonialism and Monarchy has begun.

Creating value in the age of distributed capitalism
As mass consumption gives way to the wants of individuals, a historic transition in capitalism is unfolding.

Capitalism is a book of many chapters—and we are beginning a new one. Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can’t meet. When a majority of people want things that remain priced at a premium under the old institutional regime—a condition I call the “premium puzzle”—the ground becomes extremely fertile for wholly new classes of competitors that can fulfill the new demands at an affordable price. A premium puzzle existed in the auto industry before Henry Ford and the Model T and in the music industry before Steve Jobs and the iPod.

The consumption shift in Ford’s time was from the elite to the masses; today, we are moving from an era of mass consumption to one focused on the individual. Sharp increases in higher education, standards of living, social complexity, and longevity over the past century gave rise to a new desire for individual self-determination: having control over what matters, having one’s voice heard, and having social connections on one’s own terms. The leading edge of consumption is now moving from products and services to tools and relationships enabled by interactive technologies. Amazon.com, Apple, eBay, and YouTube are familiar examples of companies solving today’s premium puzzle. Lesser-known companies like CellBazaar (in emerging-market mobile commerce), TutorVista (in tutoring), and Livemocha (in language education) also abound.

It would be easy to construe these as isolated cases of innovation and industry change, but I believe they represent much more: a mutation in capitalism itself. What’s the difference? Innovations improve the framework in which enterprises produce and deliver goods and services. Mutations create new frameworks; they are not simply new technologies, though they do leverage technologies to do new things. Historically, mutations have superseded innovations when fundamental shifts in what people want require a new approach to enterprise: new purposes, new methods, new outcomes.

In the same way that mass production moved the locus of industry from small shops to huge factories, today’s mutations have the potential to shift us away from business models based on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, and central control. That’s not to say factories are going away; their role in supplying quality, low-cost goods, including the technologies underpinning the shift to more individualized consumption, is secure. Yet even mass production is becoming less homogenous (consider the ability to order custom sneakers from Nike). And for many goods and services, new business frameworks are emerging: federations of enterprises—from a variety of sectors—that share collaborative values and goals are increasingly capable of distributing valued assets directly to individuals, enabling them to determine exactly what they will consume, as well as when and how. This shift not only changes the basis of competition for companies but also blurs—and even removes—the boundaries between entire industries, along with those that have existed between producers and consumers. The music and newspaper industries ignored this shift, to their great detriment. I believe all businesses will have to find ways to adapt to this new world if they want to grow.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter cautioned his readers not to expect new forms of economic development to announce themselves with a grand flourish. “The ‘new thing,’” he wrote, “need not be Bessemer steel or the explosion motor. It can be the Deerfoot sausage.”1 My hope is that this article will help executives see the links between today’s “Deerfoot sausages,” recognize the magnitude of the economic transition these mutations portend, and begin setting—or at least contemplating—a new course in this changing world.

It won’t be easy. But enterprises that can leverage technology and real-world social connections to solve their piece of the premium puzzle—creating individualized ways to consume goods and services at a radically reduced cost—will prosper as they realize wholly new sources of value that remain invisible to companies still bound by conventional business models.

20th Anniversary in America.

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:42:28 PDT

Today, August 16, 2010 marks 20 years in America. The journey has been long, eventful, exciting, & of course with all the trappings and vicissitudes of a good life.

I can only thank all those people I have come across -- friends, foes, lovers, haters, acquaintances, relatives, one-night stands and all those who stood by me through the thick and thin, good times and bad, fun and frolic, and a special bow to those who have left this world and me.

Thank you, thank you to all those who are dead and alive.

Spatial Fix to American Economic Landscape

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:05:42 PDT

The key to understanding America’s historic ability to respond to great economic crises lies in what economic geographers call the “spatial fix”—the creation of new development patterns, new ways of living and working, and new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic of 1873 and long downturn was forged by the transition from an agricultural nation to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities.

WPA 1930s

Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs, which again intensified and expanded our use of space. Renewed prosperity hinges on the rise of yet another even more massive and more intensive geographic pattern—the mega-region. These new geographic entities are larger than the sum of their parts; they not only produce but consume, spurring further demand.

Infrastructure is key to powering spatial fixes. The railroads and streetcar, cable car, and subway systems speeded the movement of people, goods, and ideas in the late 19th century; the development of a massive auto-dependent highway system powered growth after the Great Depression and World War II. It’s now time to invest in infrastructure that can undergird another round of growth and development. Part of that is surely a better and faster information highway. But the real fix must extend beyond the cyber-economy to our physical development patterns—the landscape of the real economy.

Architecture of Information

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:32:33 PDT

The psychopathology of human nature invented the wall. The greek and ancient philosophers refer to separation of civilization from nature, what was already ancient wisdom for them and called it "Chora" or "Ur."

Over the years, centuries and millennia, the moat, castle, fortress, pentagon and temple came to separate one set of humans from another.

Humans who were civilized within these architecture of civilizations built the same kind of architecture for information, and still continue to do so.

But, for the first time in 20th century when a bomb was fitted to an aircraft, the separation of humans by a wall, moat and everything grounded by gravity was blown apart.

Today, you can see the opening sequence of Disney's logo before the start of any of their movies. The elaborate Cinderella's Castle is celebrated with fireworks, completely denying the purpose of its thick walls and towering structure. Then there is a huge arch in the center of the castle where the water that appears to be a river than a moat cuts right through the arch to the other side of the castle. A small boat with plastic explosives will blow up the entire castle and the image is a total anathema to the very nature of a castle.

The Architecture of Information is an exact parallel to this Disney Castle. The 'Metaphors We Live By' define the information we design. That metaphor is in a state of war - a war between old guards of heritage, tradition, conservatism, conservationists and preservationists on one side pitted against the those who have realized the world has already changed.

Information is power, and like a river, it wants to flow, not be dammed and exploited without serious consequences to the ecology of decision making.

I've spent the last 25+ years helping organizations transition from a centralized theocracy to transparent decision making networks of information. The fortress wants to be a city. The city wants to blend into nature.

Response to: The changing face of IT: Five trends to watch

Alternative Architecture of the United States of America

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:25:04 PDT

Not since the Algonquin people were displaced and Charles L'Enfant designed Washington, DC for post-Independence America, not since Napoleon III and Baron Haussman designed Paris for post-Revolution power grab, has a nation-state capital power architecture been so radically expanded until the last decade when Washington DC in response to 9/11 Terrorist Attack expanded to occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built with about 17 million square feet of space.

Not since Soviet-KGB/Nazi-SS/US-OSS-CIA has intelligence apparatus been so radically expanded until 'Top Secret America' was expanded in the last decade to process intelligence to maintain the global empire of Pax Americana.

Nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11 - the largest increase in any central/federal bureaucracy in the history of mankind.

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances inside what amounts to an alternative architecture and geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.

Yet, the technology and design housing 854,000 boobs could not spot an underwear on Christmas 2009, and a Nigerian crotch blew up on the faces of this grand 3202 intelligence institutions. That's entertainment!

Resistance is futile; You will be AsSimulated

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:56:35 PDT

Urban Planning Simulation is my area of #1 pet peeve.

We can simulate an entire nuclear explosion inside a computer that has made land testing completely obsolete, yet we really do not have a system of urban simulation anywhere near the nuclear computing capacity that Los Alamos, Livermore or CERN can perform.

As a civilization we've the entire supply-chain of intellectual rigor and pedagogy to market, research and technology for bombing the planet out many times over but cannot simulate the planet to live in it even once.

After all, the end result will be a Borg Cube... "You will be AsSimulated."

Every time I discussed this issue with my faculty advisor and the precious few non-racists in the Architecture & Urban Design profession, they always said I should take the idea to Yale or Georgia Tech and see if I can make a PhD out of it... or even possibly create a graduate school based on the research to attract endowments and NSF fundings.

Simulating 8 billion variables called humans on one planet is not as complicated as simulating a nuclear explosion or finding a boson particle. But, I do find the architecture & urban design profession quite luddite and simpleton.

If the simulations in my head is a supercomputer, then what is out there in practice is an etch-a-sketch. So, I am not very concerned about what is out there, as much as what I can do to create a new field of study synthesizing upon the foundations of many fields.

Urban Simulation is extraordinarily organic, non-linear, diverse and complex. I'd be very interested in creating a think-tank to handle that challenge.

"Resistance is futile; You will be AsSimulated."

Surrender Pax Americana, just surrender! it's Pax Indica.

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 08:11:08 PDT

Everything everyone in the western civilization thinks in, reads in, speaks in and has nightmares and dreams in... is in English (or european languages) which are all the third order derivative of Indo-Sankrit.

Every number whether decimal or imperial system the people of the world operate, comes from what is erroneously called "arabic numerals" which are originally from India. That country not only invented the basic meme segment of all our alpha-numeric representations in our cognitive matrix, but also invented Zero... along with the philosophical concepts of void, that western civilization until Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant and Kafka, could not even grasp, and even then erroneously translated it as nihilism.

If capitalism is based on who owns the property, then everything you think, dream, nightmare, talk, speak, write and everything in-between belongs to my ancestors, that I have inherited.

If my ancestors decided to horde knowledge, or were racists & bigots, the way Colonial Europeans and Wall Street hordes money, we won't be using this medium to communicate. We won't be using this language to communicate. We won't be using these numbers to let Shakespeare's Shylock to count beans on bloomberg terminals either.

The Marshall McLuhan's 'Global Village' came into existence long before the west asian gods and messiahs of Abrahamism - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Ba'hai - all from the blood-soaked holy land that westerners worship, came into existence. Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed are all from Asia, not Europe, not Africa, not Australia, not America, not Arctic, certainly not Antarctic.

The skin maybe European, the complexion maybe African, but ultimately the west surrenders its heart, mind and soul to the figments of divine imaginations born in Asia.

The westerners drunk in imperialism will be well advised to remember that the next time they make references to their heritage, they are bowing to gods & messiah's from Asia.

Surrender Pax Americana; it's Pax Indica.

Avatar: Do you really know who you are?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:06:09 PDT

Cyber-Persona has been around in the internet world since the 1990s. They have a significant usage among both young and adult population especially in the multi-user game world. Current technologies such as 2ndLife allows for avatars to live any imagination of lifeform attached or detached to real persona. Chatrooms routinely have people posing as their own younger selves, or in the case of pedophilia, as someone quite younger than oneself, except for Raimund Liebling also called Roman Polanski.

In the real world, both authors/writers and spies routinely use a pen name or alias. Authors and actors live the life of their characters they create. People such as the famous architect Frank Gehry changed their name legally, from an obvious jewish sounding Goldberg, so they can pretend to be someone else, even though he was living under the largesse from the wealthy jewish client Lewis for decades before he became anyone of architectural substance. Le Corbusier changed his name to the exotic form from something mundane as Jeanneret-Gris - a name more suitable for a kitchen appliance . Russian and American spies, as well as American Special Ops in Iraq/Afghanistan warfront sport beards and local garb to blend in with the natives, where a marine crew cut would have them six feet under in no time. Mossad routinely blends into the local culture of many countries, especially banking and media social circles.

Voluntary Schizophrenia, both real double-triple life and cyber-schizophrenia via avatars are a fundamental part of human existence. The concept of Avatar has been around longer than written words, as the sanskrit word itself indicates.

Children routinely live the life of Barbie or GI Joe or Teenage Mutant Ninja. Or Superman & Spiderman. Older adults live in respectable suits and ties during the daytime and change to leather, chains and rebel road hogs on weekends. Under the tough unreachable professional garb is a screaming victoria secret. The greek philosophers called it oikos & polis.

Boston Red Sox baseball fans, wherever they are, belong to the Red Sox Nation. Every provincial championship in America is a World Championship when you cant even find local diversity in them let alone national and international diversity.

The egyptian pharaohs conducted heb-sed ceremonies where a person is transformed completely to a different human, demi-god or god, breaking all links and semblances to the past persona. The old self is officially dead, complete with funeral procession.

In hindu and buddhist mythologies, gods routinely change avatars, souls routinely change lifeforms.

So, lets get some real perspectives and time scales into the play. The very concept of identity was deconstructed long before it was established.

The geo-politics of identity is a figment of infertile imagination.

When was the last time you really gave some thought about who you really are?

Halt the Land Cycle: The land of western civilization is a Pyramid Scheme

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:32:19 PDT

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. This applies not least to the immense financial and economic crisis into which the world has fallen. So what lay behind it? The answer is the CREDIT-FUELLED PROPERTY CYCLE. The people of the US, UK, Spain and Ireland became feverish speculators in land. Today, the toxic waste poisons the entire world economy.

In 1984, I bought my London house. I estimate that the land on which it sits was worth £100,000 in today’s prices. Today, the value is perhaps ten times as great. All of that vast increment is the fruit of no effort of mine. It is the reward of owning a location that the efforts of others made valuable, reinforced by a restrictive planning regime and generous tax treatment – property taxes are low and gains tax-free.

[Note: The house I lived in the proximity of Intel HQ in Silicon Valley is now selling three times it costed me in 1995. California has to pay me three times as much as I once earned, just to be able to go back to the same old house I lived in, rejected and left. Is California, the 8th largest economy in the planet now administered by minimum-wages state employees, thoroughly bankrupt with the space equivalent of 14 Empire State Buildings fallow and unoccupied just in SIlicon Valley, three times better than it was in 1995 that I should pay three times the price for that used house? If I too am three times better than I was in 1995 as California claims in valuation, then should I not expect three times better a place than I used to live in before? That means unless I am paid 10 times what I used to earn in Silicon Valley, I am not going to California.

And California is stupid enough to be paying someone less talented than I am, three times the pay to live in my house. Why should I hire someone who studied or lives in California when I know I am paying for his land, not her talent?

My iPad is costing me $1000, because I am paying for the real estate of Steve Jobs and his silicon valley employees' homes & offices, as well as the Manhattan offices and homes of the financial terrorists we call Wall Street Bankers, who spend billions in lobbying on Capitol Hill and making me pay for those offices and residences in K Street, Washington, DC.

FOB China, iPad is not a penny more than $100. The rest of the $900 fuels financial terrorism].

So I am a land speculator – a mini-aristocrat in a land where private appropriation of the fruits of others’ efforts has long been a prime route to wealth. This appropriation of the rise in the value of land is not just unfair: what have I done to deserve this increase in my wealth? It has obviously dire consequences.

First, it makes it necessary for the state to fund itself by taxing effort, ingenuity and foresight. Taxation of labour and capital must lower their supply. Taxation of resources will not have the same result, because supply is given. Such taxes reduce the unearned rewards to owners.

Second, this system creates calamitous political incentives. In a world in which people have borrowed heavily to own a location, they are desperate to enjoy land price rises and, still more, to prevent price falls. Thus we see a bizarre spectacle: newspapers hail upward moves in the price of a place to live – the most basic of all amenities. The beneficiaries are more than land speculators. They are also enthusiastic supporters of efforts to rig the market. Particularly in the UK, they welcome the creation of artificial scarcity of land, via a ludicrously restrictive regime of planning controls. This is the most important way in which wealth is transferred from the unpropertied young to the propertied old. In his new book, David Willetts, the universities minister, emphasises the unfairness of the distribution of wealth across generations. The rigged land market is the biggest single cause of this calamity.

[The city of Lexington, Kentucky, that houses 270,000 humans, is surrounded and land locked by horse farms, permanently, by 5000 farms owned by 400 oligarchic families. 400 families decide how Lexington City/Fayette County will copulate and reproduce population increase. If you plan to have a child in Lexington make sure that your house can support an extra floor when that child grows up be an independent adult who wants her own place to build a nest. Ask for the permission from the 400 oligarchs before you get your chick banged up! Is this America?]

Third and most important, the opportunity for speculation in land both fuels – and is fuelled by – the credit cycle, which has, yet again destabilised the economy. In a superb new jeremiad, the journalist Fred Harrison argues that this cycle – with a duration of 18 years – was predictable and, by him at least, predicted. In essence, he notes, buyers rent property from bankers, in return for a gamble on the upside. A host of agents gains fees from arranging, packaging and distributing the fruits of such highly speculative transactions. In the long upswing (the most recent one lasted 11 years in the UK), they all become rich together, as credit and debt explode upwards. Then, when the collapse comes, recent borrowers, the financial institutions and taxpayers suffer huge losses. This is no more than a giant pyramid selling scheme and one whose dire consequences we have seen again and again. It is ultimately, as Mr Harrison argues, a ruinous way of running our affairs.

[The land of western civilization is a pyramid scheme].

I have long been persuaded that resource rents should be socialised, not accrue to individual owners. Yet, as Mr Harrison tellingly remarks, “as a community we socialise our privately earned incomes (wages and salaries), while our social income (from land) is privatised.” Yet, whatever one thinks of the justice of this arrangement, the practical consequences have become calamitous. Do we want to start yet another credit-fuelled property cycle as soon as the debris of the present one is cleared away, some years of misery hence?

If “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”, here is an urgent case for action. Socialising the full rental value of land would destroy the financial system and the wealth of a large part of the public. That is obviously impossible. But socialising any gain from here on would be far less so. This would eliminate the fever of land speculation. It would also allow a shift in the burden of taxation. Perhaps as important, with the prospects of effortless increases in wealth removed, the UK might re-examine its planning laws. There is panic about the dire consequences of such a liberalisation of restrictions for the countryside. It is worth noting, however, how little is needed: an increase of just three miles in the radius of London would raise the capital’s surface area by 50 per cent. Would this really be the end of England’s green and pleasant land?

I do not expect any government to dare to wean the English from their ruinous trust in land speculation as the route to wealth. But I can hope. It is bad enough that the result has been expensive houses and inefficient taxes. But it is surely far worse that such insane speculative fevers have ended up destabilising the entire global economy. Even if few know it, it is time for a change.

What America and the west suffers is hyper-inflated land valuation. This land is not worth the money it claims. Never in the history of mankind has so much blighted property worth so much.

FT's Martin Wolf is right, END THE LAND CYCLE, or step aside and lets carpet bomb the whole west, and especially America's self-aggrandized hyper-inflated cities that were left out in the WWII destruction.

I conclude, The land of western civilization is a Pyramid Scheme. For the good of mankind, the Architecture of the West must be destroyed.

There can be no creation without destruction.

Abyss of Future Darkness

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:16:33 PDT

Think Apple. Think Oracle. Think LG. Think Asia.

Unthink IBM. Unthink GE. Unthink GM/Ford/Chrysler. Unthink US. Unthink Europe.

Creativity to Business is the same as Al-Qaeda to Pentagon. They both are deconstructionist forces that redesign the very structure, architecture, form & function of all existing order, empire, unipolarity and market capitalization.

20 years ago Unix & C Language and a protocol called TCP/IP altered the structure of information which can be described no less than electronic atomic bomb that has now grown to threaten all forms of existing order.

The only other time such a thing happened is when the concept of flying got fitted with bombs. What was once the very architecture of a city - the Wall - was deemed completely obsolete when "Us vs. Them" was no more grounded on mother earth, with all perspectives rooted by gravity. Everything from the Parthenon to fortresses became obsolete in one single masterful stroke, that no army of history could accomplish. Now, the fortress and castle are reduces to, as Baudrillard puts it, a facade - a comic book fantasy where plane loads of repressed adults and children are screaming their way into excitement at Cinderella's Castle at a Disney theme park. Never again will there be an Athens or Ur built across a moat, above a mound, and behind the walls.

In today's world, think iPad. It is poised to rethink the architecture of computing, information and human interaction. Its an utter disgrace that HP, Sun, Dell, Microsoft or Cray did not think that way. Since I was at Palo Alto Research Center I too witnessed the idea of compressing the entire form & function of computing into an ICON, where Steve Jobs got the idea for Apple first; he certainly went on a serious meditation on the icon then, as well as now. Now we have a concept of an App Store - the electronic greek Forum & Marketplace - where humans interact with hundreds and thousands of icons.

No child of the Book, no abrahamist - no jew, no christian, no muslim - could have pulled off what Steve Jobs has done. The icon will deconstruct the word. The word will deconstruct the number. Since all words and numbers go to India, and all pictographs go to Pharaohnic Egypt & China, the third order derivatives of the word & number - Wall Street & Capitol Hill - are looking into the 'abyss of future darkness.'

The excess of the opposite gives rise to creativity. To put it as a koan: 'Starvation is the invention of Food.' If food never existed, how can there be a starvation?

Creativity in an Organization, is changing the very philosophy & religion that brought you this far. Creativity is acquiring a 'Zen Mind; A Beginner's Mind."

Want to be creative? Then go meditate. Quit working so hard. Quit executing orders. Quit operating complexities. Quit talking. Quit listening. QUIT!

Go Meditate!

Architecture as a Weapon

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:15:13 PDT

Is Architecture a Weapon?

Can Architecture, large work of art, be a Weapon?

The world's greatest icon, an undeniable work of art and a definite iconic architecture, The Taj Mahal, is a weapon directed at none other than Islam itself; Islam the religion, philosophy and theology of Iconoclasm.

The Taj Mahal is the icon of the world's greatest Islamic Civilization and Empire, The Mughals, can only exist in India, built by the Hindus, the greatest architects of Icons.

Icons so large that they had repeatedly built concentric geometric walls enclosing an entire city, not unlike the Forbidden City in Peking. A 'City as a Mandala' can only exist through the theology, philosophy and architecture of those who invented Hinduism, and Buddhism. No iconoclasm, no religion and no god can defy that architecture. No god can deny that man.

While the Judeo-Christian Western Civilization has city full of icons, such as skyscrapers, palaces and churches, with the capacity to crusade and blast the Islamic civilization out of existence with sophisticated explosives and even contemplate the use of nuclear devices with cowboy rationality... nothing comes close to shoving the world's greatest icon right up the very manifestation of iconoclasm, for several centuries, than the Taj Mahal itself.

So, Allah itself has to take it up — more than a man, like a god — an entire architectural icon, in what can only be computed as the world's greatest deconstruction of theological thought and its embodiment of iconoclasm.

If that's what the ancients gave Allah, what then awaits or has been given to Yahweh?

The god of Judaism gets nothing less than the Pyramids themselves.

Today, is not a good day for the gods of Abrahamism. Sorry, Samuel Huntington, it is not the 'Clash of Civilizations' anymore. This is nothing short of a warfare between man & god.

I have to concede, the Hindus & Hopis had it right, we certainly are in a 'State of Existence as War' — a war between Man & God: Naqoy-Qatsi or Kali-Yuga.

Is Architecture a Weapon? A resounding, yes!

Cover Design for The Oracle : The Succession War

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:13:57 PDT

The Cover Designed by me for the book "The Oracle : The Succession War" has been RELEASED!

Book Release on November 16, 2010.

Please visit The Oracle Blogsite for latest information about the book: theoraclethesuccessionwar.blogspot.com

Wall Street & the Economic Game of Western Capitalism is Rigged - Signed, Sealed & Delivered: Confirmed!

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:31:54 PDT

Time to take Wall Street out of Washington : Financial Times & Robert Reich

Washington’s relationship with Wall Street is growing more schizophrenic by the day. On the one hand, Congress is trying to show how tough it can be on the financial sector by enacting a law ostensibly designed to prevent another near-meltdown and taxpayer-supported bail-out. As the mid-term election looms, a staggering number of Americans remain unemployed or underemployed. Most blame Wall Street, whose top bankers are raking in almost as much money as they did before the crisis. The lawsuit launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Goldman Sachs for alleged fraud only confirms the view held by many that the economic game is rigged.

On the other hand, both parties are going to Wall Street seeking campaign donations to fund critically important television advertising in the months ahead. In recent years, the financial industry has become the second-biggest source of campaign contributions in America – just behind the healthcare industry. Even as Congress debates legislation to tame it, Wall Street is conducting a bidding war between the parties for its continued beneficence. More than 60 per cent of the $34m given by the financial industry to fund the 2010 elections has so far gone to Democrats, but since January it has switched to the Republican camp. In January and February, Citigroup, Goldman , JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley donated twice as much to Republicans as to Democrats.

[Washington, Pentagon & Wall Street are Co-Dependent] It is hard to bite the hands that feed you, especially when you are competing for food. The finance reform bill emerging from Senate Democrats takes a hard line in many respects – requiring that most derivatives be traded on open exchanges where buyers can see what they are getting and sellers have adequate capital, establishing an agency to protect unwary consumers from predatory lending, and giving the government authority to wind down the activities of banks that get themselves into trouble. Democrats point to these and other features as evidence of their willingness to be strict with Wall Street, despite their dependence on its generosity.

But the American public has no independent means of judging how tough the bill is. Most people do not understand the intricacies of finance, and still do not know exactly what Wall Street did to bring the economy to the brink. [Behavioral Strategy & Economics, even Nobel Prized, explains this American Mass-Hysteria and Stupidity].

Behavioral Economists: Warning, You’re So “Predictably Irrational” They Know Your Next “Stupid” Move Before You Do … Helping Wall Street Casinos Make Billions!

Also see: The Case for Behavioral Strategy

The dependence of both parties on the financial industry for political support inevitably feeds suspicions that the bill is not nearly tough enough. Questions are being asked. Why are so-called “customised” derivatives exempted from the exchanges? Does this not create a big loophole? Why does the bill not limit the size of banks so none can again become “too big to fail”? Why is the Glass-Steagall Act – which once separated commercial from investment banking – not being fully restored? Why does the bill not separate investment banking from the private banking and wealth management activities that got Goldman into trouble?

It does not help that in recent months both parties have held at least three-dozen fundraising events with Wall Street bankers and their lobbyists. Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, has trekked to Wall Street cup in hand, while in February and March the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee invited financial industry executives to pony up $10,000 each for the chance to confer with Republican senators.

Tight connections between Washington and Wall Street are nothing new, of course, especially when it comes to Goldman. Hank Paulson ran the bank before becoming George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary. Robert Rubin followed the same trajectory under Bill Clinton, then returned to Wall Street to head Citigroup’s executive committee. Dick Gephardt, the former Democratic House leader, lobbies for Goldman. Some 250 former members of Congress are now lobbying on behalf of the financial industry. President Barack Obama himself received nearly $15m from Wall Street during his 2008 campaign, of which almost $1m came from Goldman employees and their families.

Politicians cannot continue to have it both ways. The close nexus between Washington and Wall Street is eroding trust in government. This has already helped spawn the so-called “Tea Party movement” of disaffected Republicans and many Democrats are no less cynical.

If Washington knew what was good for it and the nation, it would sever its financial connections with Wall Street. Better yet, it would enact legislation seeking to limit the impact of private and corporate money in politics. That goal is made more difficult to achieve by a grotesque recent Supreme Court decision holding that corporations, including financial firms, have the right to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns. But there are ways around this, such as more generous public funding for candidates that choose not to take private contributions. Hopefully as well, the president will nominate Supreme Court justices who understand the importance of public trust in democratic institutions, and the difference between companies and people.

[The US Supreme Court in 2010 decided well to give private and corporate entities unlimited latitude in political campaign funding and influence. We already have such undue influence, so why smear the pig with lipstick and pretend to control campaign contributions? Rather keep it all in the open].

The writer, a former US labour secretary, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the forthcoming Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

The case for behavioral strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 16:56:28 PDT

Why Organization Needs should Shape Technology Architecture

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:38:34 PDT

To get the most out of these programs, organizations must ensure that they are led by people with the right skills, connections, and attitudes.

Too often, efforts to fix architecture issues remain rooted in a company’s IT practices, culture, and leadership. The reason, in part, is that the chief architect—the overall IT-architecture program leader—is frequently selected from within the technical ranks, bringing deep IT know-how but little direct experience or influence in leading a business-wide change program. A weak linkage to the business creates a void that limits the quality of the resulting IT architecture and the organization’s ability to enforce and sustain the benefits of implementation over time.

Revolutionizing architecture management: A CIO checklist

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a framework for managing IT architecture that strives to align the needs of both IT and the business. CIOs need to ensure that the effort is well structured along several dimensions.

Leadership

Focus on transformation.
Educate leaders at the highest level to help them understand that EAM is about change management and not simply a new IT initiative.

Choose new leadership.
Select a chief architect or CTO with strong business and technical skills and the requisite budgetary and leadership authority to manage the change process.

Know what to avoid.
Expand candidate searches beyond the ranks of career IT denizens such as senior developers and engineers.

Governance

Define the mission.
The goals of EAM must be translated into business terms. A failure to do so can breed mistrust and create the perception that the program is an IT-driven initiative rather than a collaborative effort to improve the business.

Communicate clearly.
Many EAM frameworks are written for a technical audience, with no clear business rationale for non-IT types. New rules for implementation must stress the business case rather than the engineering details.

Lead locally.
Ensure that the project-management team includes both business line and IT managers on a global, regional, and local level to disseminate program changes throughout the organization and ensure institutional buy-in.

Adopt new metrics.
Align milestones, key performance indicators (KPIs), and incentives with business goals, such as a 10 percent increase in new-customer acquisition, 99 percent–plus statement accuracy, or a 15 percent cap on the number of custom applications. These metrics focus the discussion on the new architecture framework.

A new architectural model

Establish a new blueprint.
Business requirements—rather than technical needs—should be at the center of the IT architecture.

Standardize and simplify.
Break up complex applications into their component parts to find common elements that can be standardized and shared. Capabilities that involve similar functions and rely on similar data, such as billing or credit approval, can be grouped into domains. A domain-based architecture streamlines the number of applications supported, freeing up human, financial, and system resources.

Create a new playbook.
A guide to the architecture should dispense with complex hardware and software specifications and instead describe what IT can deliver to the business.

Better yet... Hire me.

Business Strategy is undergoing a historic shift with renewed emphasis on creativity

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:05:01 PDT

Business Strategy is undergoing a historic shift with renewed emphasis on creativity.

In the modern economy it is these forward-thinking chief executives that are winning, and that is why I believe that the pendulum is swinging away from the extremes of scientific management towards a different way of thinking, typically named design thinking. By delving into the mysteries that define the future of its businesses and developing the heuristics for understanding them, the new generation of business designers is seizing the high ground for the future.

This is the world of Apple's Steve Jobs, Cirque du Soleil's Guy Laliberté and Procter & Gamble's A. G. Lafley. Each understands that he could turn every element of a company into an algorithm, but to do so would leave so much out that they would turn iPods into generic MP3 players and global destination entertainment events into, well, circuses.

These and other business designers like them recognise that while they need to utilise the core tools of scientific management, which are the deductive logic of what must be and the inductive logic of what is operative, they need to supplement the scientific with the creative, which is powered by the abductive logic of what might be. They need to imagine possibilities that don't exist. They need to balance the desire for reliability - a consistent replicable outcome - with imperative of validity - the production of an outcome that is exactly what is needed and wanted.

For shareholders, the embrace of design means that they need to accept striking failure as the natural co-product of smashing success. Apple shareholders have come to understand that to get the stunning breakthrough that the Macintosh represented, they needed to accept the abject failure of the Lisa that preceded it. And that the Newton was an important precursor to the iPhone. While a wild ride, that is not a bad deal. Despite a series of errors that would daunt many companies, Apple has become one of the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalisation, and has closed to within a stone's throw of toppling Microsoft as the most valuable technology company.

For the past century, dating back to the stopwatch-wielding days of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American engineer and arguably the first management consultant, business has moved towards ever more intensive scientific management. From Statistical Process Control to Six Sigma to Supply Chain Management to Decision Support Software, business has become ever more quantitative, analytical and algorithmic.

But forward-thinking business executives have begun to recognise that this approach has overreached. They read the crisp reports that spit out of their enterprise resource planning systems and while they know exactly how many widgets they shipped last week, that isn't helping them figure out the next great thing that customers want.

While their customer-relationship management system lets them quantify the profitability of every buyer and then serve up a perfectly customised offer, buyers don't necessarily see the value and have an eerie feeling that Big Brother is watching them shop. While executives can draw on research that is statistically significant without a doubt, they wonder why their products or services don't grab the targeted consumers.

These executives are realising that we can't turn every aspect of business into an algorithm and are leading a shift from analytics towards judgement, from crunching towards creativity. They are moving from the world of algorithms to that of heuristics, where rules of thumb help them understand the complex and ambiguous world around us, but stop short of being a formula and leave room for people to collaborate, to use judgement and create the future.

We are seeing the reversal of a century-long pendulum swing, and design now sits at the heart of a rising number of innovative companies.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

noreply@blogger.com (Zen) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:15:17 PDT

World leaders are fast converging on Washington tonight for Barack Obama's two-day Nuclear Security Summit on April 12-13, 2010. Delegations from 46 countries will come to the United States next week for a summit on nuclear security, but the heads of state and foreign ministers in attendance are unlikely to let their time in Washington go by without raising other concerns. A massive security blanket has been thrown over a large part of Washington for the biggest gathering of world leaders on US soil since the end of World War II.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the gathering would be the largest assembly of world leaders hosted by an American president since the 1945 San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations in 1948.

A massive projected increase in the use of low carbon nuclear power, partly in response to climate change, will make securing the world's stockpile of nuclear materials even harder over the next two decades than it is today.

The consequences of a major nuclear security incident, such as a terrorist nuclear bomb detonation in a major city, would almost certainly be catastrophic and global. Any attacked country would respond with massive military force at whatever target thought responsible, and a cycle of international conflict, instability and likely economic chaos would follow. Perhaps just as significant, this scenario would also cause a backlash against all things nuclear, undermining the political viability of civil nuclear energy programmes around the world and destroying many national plans to achieve climate change related reductions in carbon outputs.

The unspoken agenda is Israel's Nuclear Armament, its potential use to exercise Islamophobia by the white-European Jewish state in Western Asia under the cloak of Holocaust, and the resultant retaliation at US complicities. Global support for Israeli pariah, apartheid state and atrocities, paid for by financial securities and guarantees has become the primary cause and well-spring for global terrorism. While Israel may or may not have an existential problem, its very existence has become the fundamental source of global instability for all countries.

Here's a look at who's coming and what's on their agenda. The BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India & China, as well as, a few other important players in the current positionality in the game are listed below. The full list is available at the Foreign Policy website by clicking on the title or here:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/09/guess_whos_coming_to_dinner?page=full

Brazil

Who's coming: President Lula da Silva

What they want: R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Brazil wants to play a larger role on the international stage and will probably make a point by defending all countries' right to peaceful nuclear energy -- a reference to Iran's nuclear program. Lula has come out against a round of fresh sanctions against the Islamic Republic, arguing that such steps would only radicalize the regime. Although Brazil denies backing Iran outright, Iranian President Ahmadinejad came to Brazilia last year and Lula plans to visit Tehran in May. [Lula also extended the hand to Israel and was snubbed].

Russia

Who's coming: President Dmitry Medvedev

What they want: To push back on missile defense. Russia is seeking to link the recently signed disarmament treaty to the planned U.S. missile-defense shield in Romania and Bulgaria. But the discussions this week are more likely to focus on Iran, how to persuade China to agree to U.N. sanctions, and how severe the sanctions resolutions can be while still securing Moscow's critical Security Council vote.

India

Who's coming: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

What they want: Help with Pakistan. India is expected to push for greater oversight of loose nuclear material, especially given New Delhi's constant fear that terrorists could potentially steal some from archrival Pakistan's nuclear facilities. [India is also extremely independent and does not want to be part of any NPT or any form of nuclear restrictions. The country has also proven to be a model for peaceful nuclear power and wants recognition].

China

Who's coming: President Hu Jintao

What they want: Great-power status. China sees this as an opportunity to depict itself as a responsible world power. But the Chinese president reportedly agreed only to attend if the United States does not embarrass him following his visit by declaring China a "currency manipulator." Economic issues as well as Iran's nuclear program will likely be on the table when Hu sits down with Obama for a bilateral meeting, but both sides have agreed to respect each other's "core interests."

Egypt

Who's coming: Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit

What they want: For the world to focus on Israel. The delegation is expected to criticize Israel's nuclear program. Egyptian diplomats will also continue their push for an Arab-Israeli peace agreement.

Israel

Who's coming: Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor

What they want: Not to be the center of attention. In light of a recent East Jerusalem settlements row with the Obama administration, Israel is looking look to keep a low profile in Washington. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would not attend the summit for fear of a joint Egyptian-Turkish verbal assault on Israel's secret nuclear weapons arsenal. [Israel's 200+ out of 300+ nuclear warheads were acquired from the former Apartheid white-supremacist South Africa. South Africa is now an al-Qaeda target].

Pakistan

Who's coming: Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani

What they want: Nuclear cooperation. Pakistan expects considerable U.S. assistance in its fight against Taliban fighters in the country's restive Northwest Frontier Province. Chief among Pakistani wishes is a U.S.-Pakistani nuclear agreement, similar to the one the U.S. has offered bitter rival India -- though the Obama administration seems cold to the idea.

Turkey

Who's coming: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

What they want: To set the record straight. The Turkish government is furious about a pending House of Representatives resolution that labels the 1915 massacre of Armenians a genocide, and wants the Obama administration to lobby against its passage. Turkey will also discuss its apparent reluctance to endorse sanctions against Iran with the United States. [Turkey also has a long standing dispute to be a part of Europe than Islamic Asia].

South Africa

Who's coming: President Jacob Zuma

What they want: To demonstrate stability. In their bilateral meeting, Obama will be anxious to hear how Zuma plans to help resolve the ongoing power-sharing dispute in Zimbabwe between President Mugabe's ZANU-PF party and Prime Minister Tsvangirai's MDC party. Also, look for Zuma to assure Obama that he will be able to ease the tension that has gripped South African society in the wake of the murder of white-supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche. [Israel's 200+ out of 300+ nuclear warheads were acquired from the former Apartheid white-supremacist South Africa. SA is now an al-Qaeda target].