Larry Johnson — What is Going On in Syria?

Looks like Trump is reversing Obama's policy on Syria and focusing on destroying ISIS rather than "Assad must go," just like he said he would. This means that the DoD now has control rather than the CIA. Under Obama the Pentagon was furious because the CIA was arming "moderate rebels" that turned many of their weapons over to Al Qaeda and ISIS,  the terrorists that the military was fighting. That seems to have abated.

No Quarter Usa Net
What is Going On in Syria?
Larry Johnson

Tass Pentagon, CIA heads demand to increase pressure on Moscow over Syria - media

Top military and intelligence officials in U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration want to increase pressure on Moscow by expanding support to militants fighting in Syria after the agreement was reached with Russia on the ceasefire in Syria on February 27, the Wall Street Journal online newspaper said on Tuesday.

The publication called Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Marine General Joseph Dunford and CIA Director John Brennan an "alliance of Russia hawks in the cabinet."

According to the daily, at the last meeting in the White House Obama’s top advisers expressed extremely bellicose views towards Moscow.…

Killing the baby in the crib.

Tass
Pentagon, CIA heads demand to increase pressure on Moscow over Syria - media

Starting With The Basics ... Explaining Fiat Currency Operations To A DoD Lobby That Either Doesn't Understand .... Or Worse

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Our core task is to explain fiat currency operations to at least 10% of our electorate. Until we reach that stage ... does anything else matter ... any more than pissing into the wind?





The following article contains the tired old argument about "money."

"Retiring the A-10 fleet will save a lot of money, and these days saving money is a necessity, not an option."

Doing The Math: Saving A-10s By Cutting F-35s

As long as the proverbial TINA is still in charge of policy, how does one dig into the operational details, without first clearing the Pink Elephant from the room, to reduce the fog and get a bit more clarity on context? First things first!

For those who want "MMT" to go "farther," why not first solidify step one? First, get an adequate threshold % of the electorate - and the leaders they elect - to simply be AWARE of the most basic operational details of a fiat currency system? Say, 10% of voters? That's in the range of 15 million people familiar and comfortable with fiat currency operations. Until then, since data is meaningless without context, it doesn't matter how much data you dig into if you misread context from the get go.

The only thing worse are those Control Frauds who actually may understand .. but purposely mislead their fellow citizens. There's no doubt that such frauds also exist, throughout the K-Street MICC lobby, and also within Congress (and the electorate too - lets be honest).

Where to start? How simple can we make a prerequisite consensus, beyond which most discussions are premature? Here's one brief reiteration of what's been said countless times the last 9 years ... (since I 1st met Warren Mosler).

***

We've been on a "fiat" currency system since 1933.

Tell me. How, exactly, does one "save" fiat? aka, Public Initiative? And, should we EVER leave initiative unused?

If politicians are going to discuss "money," they should at least be aware of the operational details. You don't send soldiers into the field who can't disassemble/reassemble their weapons in the dark - precisely because they then know what operations are and aren't possible. Similarly, you don't let politicians set policy who can't understand the 1st thing about fiat currency operations. Good lord!

We set objectives, assign roles, and pay each other with "liquid" chits called our national currency. That allows a growing Policy Space and Agile Policy - things you need for national security and national resiliency.

The main responsibility is to avoid irrational levels of inflation (nowhere in sight) or deflation (a current reality). Oh .. and set Desired Outcomes worthy of this electorate. That, and don't allow extreme, class-based wealth disparity. That's like letting Generals hoard all the weapons .. and expecting a functional army (or economy).

Of course, to do that, we need an electorate that can select leaders who listen to all, enunciate Desired Outcomes, and NEVER TELL PEOPLE "HOW" TO DRIVE DISTRIBUTED INNOVATION.

***

While that terse approach may resonate with SOME DoD staff, the same message will have to be stated 1001 different ways, with different words, before the growing diversity of people in this electorate get the message. We clearly have over 14 million people to recruit .. just to get to 10%.

Federal Gov't delivering millions of gallons of gasoline to NY. WTF...das Frei MarKet didn't do it????

The Department of Defense is trucking 12 million gallons of gasoline (that's a lot of gas) to New York. Until now there has been no gas. In other words, the Federal Gov't is supplying gas.

Where was the "invisible hand" of the free market? Where were the suppliers anticipating conditions as a result of listening to the perfect information supplied by the perfect, all-knowing market?

I just had to post this hysterical comment that Rob Parenteau put on my Facebook page. It's hilarious.

Wait, Mike, you mean das Frei MarKet, with its illustrious and ever innovating Invisible Hand, didn't deliver the goods already? WTF? Must be price controls or sumpin inhibiting all those entrepreneurs from buying and selling and bartering and trucking all that fuel from transnational oligopolistic oil companies into place in near perfect anticipation or at least nearly complete knowledge of future demand schedules. And now, back to Atlas Slouched.

I'm sure Libertards and conservatives will be all over this with lame excuses like it was gov't regulation or some other crap that blocked the ability of businesses and entrepreneurs to supply gas.

Succession Plan for the USA: How to Re-purpose the Institutional Momentum of the DoD, Intelligence & Finance Industries

Defense, national security & finance industries have dominated US policy direction for decades, and large parts of the significant budgets of each of those three industries have become SECRET, outside the awareness of our supposedly democratic electorate. Can we survive this institutional momentum? Of course we can! But ONLY if we maintain a robust model for evaluating situations which may easily change faster than our public comprehension can follow.

  Humility & ability to explore the meaning of data streams outside our present understanding is perhaps the #1 requirement for national survival.

To gain perspective, let's wander afield, than come back to our present situation from another angle.

There are countless examples of past species & empires, whose evolving methods failed to help them survive successive challenges.  When a given aggregate fails to cross the next "chasm," the root causality is most evident NOT in the wrong moves it makes, or even in the "right" moves that seem obvious in hindsight.  Root cause always lies one step further back in the causality chain, at the level where institutional momentum caused subsequent decision patterns to become inevitable, and a foregone conclusion.

The root causality of aggregate failure always stems from inability to innovate on an aggregate-wide scale - i.e., an inability to spawn alternate methods and then actually select & propagate their use, widely enough & soon enough. The survival of our current national aggregate depends on the same process affecting every known species - whether molecular, cellular or social.

The issue of sustaining & increasing adaptive rate rules the lifespan of every species or culture. If we can use adaptive process control in defined applications, then why not apply that same talent to our most pressing policy demands, which are make-or-break for our national progress and survival?

In the USA too, our rate of adapting & enlarging our own methods will determine the duration of our republic. We can use past examples, such as failure of the Roman Empire, as guides, but must adapt those lessons to our own, unique circumstances. Above all else, we must constantly scale up our aggregate-wide analyses to encompass the increasing degrees of freedom which we have in choosing failure vs survival paths.

Every aggregate grows by painstaking creation & utilization of its internal institutions, from mitochondria within eukaryotic cells all the way up to the Pentagon, CIA & NSA within the USA. Once you look upon each institution - no matter it's setting - as a component in an organized, evolving system ... then the specific details get very boring, very quickly, from our net perspective. 

Yes, they all play a necessary but not sufficient role, and the tactical details are important at the tactical level. Nevertheless, they're all just components that are devoid of meaning outside their responsibility to their host. The ongoing role any institution plays in the adaptive process of its host falls into very predictable patterns.

The aggregate's task of successfully coordinating those subordinate patterns I call the "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task." The US-DoD currently masters this task more proficiently than any other cultural institution on earth.  However, just by doing so it is always on the brink of being able to destroy the very aggregate it serves, just as Roman militarism slowly dissolved the republic that harbored it. 

Compared to DoD officer-training, the level of strategic comprehension of staff in all levels of local, state & federal congresses is past the point of being a national embarrassment and ongoing calamity. That level of institutional decline in our democracy can only occur after prolonged, systemic neglect by a detached, dissasociated & increasingly inept electorate. It's our own fault. How do we recover from this increasingly distributed hangover? Let's take a look at the basic premises which every organized aggregate uses.

Interchanges between institutions & aggregates.

By definition, all newly evolving institutions shepherd dramatic increases in resource throughput, and thereby create their own positive-feedback loops within their aggregate. Keeping that simple rule in mind helps us place any and all information about institutions as tactical details, curious but potentially distracting from the aggregate survival strategy. All existing institutions are needed, at least transiently, but none EVER fully speak for the aggregate.

Yet whole aggregates constantly find themselves with their own, institutional tigers by the tail, and therein face their greatest dangers. There are always future resource streams to pursue, and infinite numbers of additional internal tiger-tails to grab. Static measures of local "value" don't guarantee you'll survive transitions, only agile transaction chains will guarantee that. Survival defines a dynamic value-path, where the only purpose of any local or momentary value metric is it's use in keeping the aggregate close to a constantly emerging survival path. Face it. We are "Context Nomads," wandering through an unfolding, unpredictable future.

It's when we get too absorbed with any transient, institutional-tiger that we over-adapt to an inevitably fleeting situation. When that happens, excessive pursuit of any given example of institutional momentum can take us too far off our unpredictable, adaptive path.  When that happens, our aggregate agility declines, and we lose access to the future.

Internal checks & balances smoothing transition between tiger-tails.

Surviving aggregates invent timely, context-specific checks & balances to survive. Their task is to design catalysts to herd their multiple, emerging institutions into productive vs unproductive interactions. Yet how exactly do they get all emerging institutions to cooperate? What are the internal signals for adjusting very dynamic tolerance limits? It boils down to extracting some distributed signal that is a reliable indicator of net aggregate agility or resilience.  That has to be done by aggressive trial and error, since most combinations of individual & institutional behaviors - no matter how locally impressive - are dead-end diversions from the aggregate survival path.

Never bet the farm? That's one useful rule. Keep a very long return path? That's another good rule. If a statistical or probability model of all existing resource streams is visualized, it becomes far easier to remember that most income-patterns produce local as opposed to global maxima or minima. Simply put, the approach you use to accumulate personal wealth may well preclude survival of your descendents. How do you mitigate that threat? By producing agile citizens and institutions, able to QUICKLY undo any unpredictable dead-end we've previously explored.

Never let examined, distributed trends box your aggregate into instances where the farm is already bet, and return paths are dangerously constrained?   That sounds vague & daunting, but it has to be done.  How?

Adaptive direction is best estimated as a time-weighted average of the net rate of changing outcomes. This is reflected in the corrected, net-present-value calculations used in investment schemes. If you're beginning to wonder why looking ahead is beginning to sound like common sense, don't feel alone.  Why on earth don't we follow that same logic when investing in policy, and also for investing in aggregate agility and resilience?

Now recall that aggregate behavior is all statistics, and mistakes are inevitable, not just possible. Given all this, why are we so sophisticated about engineering, mathematics, or sequestering local resources, and so pathetic about investing in aggregate agility? Why are there no investment forums on investing in democracy, or in a "more perfect union?" We've done that before, and can obviously do it again, so the question translates to "why aren't we making the effort?"

How to invest in emerging methods for scaling our rate-of-coordination?

It's here that we can return to looking at our own, national aggregate in a new light. For centuries, philosophers advised that "to know the truth, ask 'why' 5 times in succession." Iterative questions about causality peel back the institutional momentum that dominates aggregate decision-making at any given time.

In the case of the Roman Empire, the subtle, internal inversion from a stakeholder-driven military to military-dominated stakeholders is offered as one clue to empire collapse. From our perch, however, it's a bit comical to visualize military leaders increasingly adept at mastering the complex interplay of multiple forces and logistics support throughout whole regions - while remaining simultaneously blind to the analogous factors changing the fabric of their own nation!

Yet today in the USA, are we doing any better? Or are we only living out a bigger example of the same process? Has our inversion from stakeholder-driven fiat finance to fiat-dominated-stakeholders already triggered inevitable dissolution of the USA? Is our demise now only a matter of time?

That depends on how aware, perceptive and responsive our electorate is. If US policy must become more agile every year, are WE capable of re-designing the distributed methods that guarantee a successful aggregate? Can we generate the social catalysts that will generate newly agile methods, year after year? Sure we can!  It's a question of whether parents actually want this outcome for their children - and whether the children want it whether the parents will or not.

Sometimes, when a distributed train of thought is taking too long to board at a station, emerging imagination just hops on board and leaves without it. It's called uncovering options by exploring them, before they're fully understood. Our current US culture is rapidly losing moxie & innovative steam in part because we're not giving our youth shoulder enough practice at solving challenges.

If the DoD formally develops discernment through rigorous officer training, then why isn't citizen training and far more professional politician briefing our #1 priority? For us, a simple question arises, one that should be asked in the "citizen training process" of every person in every institution. "Can our aggregate survive over-domination of public policy by YOUR institution?" 

Our ability to improve that citizen-training, I predict, will define the culture of the USA more than any other process we use. At present, we're training citizens to store massive amounts of information, with negligible practice at selecting what little is needed to improve aggregate outcomes.  The result is citizens who are less comfortable taking responsibility for change.

To tune further capabilities from a changing aggregate, there's always something we should be doing differently, and some unpredictable surprises about things we no longer need to do. Why don't we find more time to practice coordination?

Answering that question requires staging, sequencing & linking of a few conceptual tenets - aggregate success, the 1st derivative of aggregate success, and the 2nd derivative of aggregate success.

1) Defining Dynamic Aggregate Success. Model the spectrum of conflicting institutional lobbies that guide & constrain our aggregate path.  View that spectrum not as static walls, but as a vibrant plasma that should be agile enough to sample many outlets, before settling on the outlet that - with reasonable certainty - looks like part of a net, adaptive path for our aggregate.

2) Methods for exploring aggregate options.  A model of the spectrum of methods by which aggregate agility is managed and increased. View that spectrum of methods as also not static, and rather as a dynamic list of catalyst techniques for generating cooperation, no matter the situation.

3) Methods for improving, not just maintaining our coordination methods.  A model of how an adequate supply of emerging social catalysts is spawned.   With a model, we can better manage our own social-catalyst logistics, so that social innovations will be available to our, hopefully still vibrant list of lobbies.  This boils down to a simple re-statement of evolutionary theory, ironically generated by our own Marine Corp, as a tenet of war campaign theory.
a) Success follows the quality & pace of distributed decision-making.  
b) We generate pace by the very act of distributing decision-making.

Note, with social disparity, we're already half way to aggregate failure.  Perhaps if we practiced staging, sequencing & linking of those 3 tenets, alone, we'd keep a higher proportion of our growing aggregate aware of aggregate conditions? It wouldn't be that hard to find out!

The answer seems to be that we simply don't discuss & practice coordination enough, by any measure.  We're heroically overworked individually, simply because we're not investing enough in coordination.

We could be evolving even faster. So far, we rarely even get to levels 4 & 5 of philosophical questioning, because things change so rapidly. Perhaps in another 100 years or less, however, real-time, public analysis of those steps will be required even in everyday life, not just in the DoD. At present, wider practice of even the first 3 steps might revitalize our culture. With that, perhaps a higher proportion of our citizens and policy staff would remain more aware of what their entire range of constituents has to offer, now & in the future?

Who knew that DoD was Zen?   I have no idea whether the CIA & NSA are even half that smart.  As a start, they're too secretive!   Perhaps if we focused more on our own, OpenSource institutional agility, would we ever need to worry about the stupidity of active Knowledge-Disparity, i.e., keeping secrets from ourselves?  If we instead just practiced improving our own, aggregate agility, other cultures would always be so far behind that they'd pursue us through Cargo Cult responses posing no threat to us.   That seems like a more audacious goal to set for ourselves.

It's our own neophytes, conned by the superficiality of their own perspectives which most often kill our aggregates, through pathologically naive, institutional momentum.  Such neophytes, by definition, fail to factor the time-averaged, rate of change of aggregate options, most of which lie beyond the personal awareness of all individuals.

Youngsters initially always fail to allow for the inevitability that they, themselves - or their greatest imaginations - may be evolutionary mistakes and an aggregate dead-end. Get over it. It happens. When it does, it's still a service to your aggregate, even if only as a warning example, no matter baffling.

How to acknowledge & recover fast enough from our ongoing trials & errors is a more dire answer to pursue. Given changing contexts, everything is eventually a mistake, so the only crime is prolonging mistakes after they become one.

Can we survive our next transition well enough to spawn further transitions?   It boils down to discounting tradition enough to generate more of it.  A tradition of audacity demands expanding - not constraining - our own traditions.