America is a global dictatorship.

9/11 was an attack on America. War on Terror was US policy. Yet 88% of those who laid down their lives for War on Terror were non Americans who couldn't vote. When you die for a regime that won't let you vote that is dictatorship.

Deaths directly caused by War on Terror

Does Terrorism Exist?

Google defines Terrorism to mean:

the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

This does not say that violence and intimidation of civilians, but species unlawful. This means that lawful violence and intimidation of civilians is not Terrorism. This already seems wrong.  

There is also the problem of how do you find out if violence and intimidation is lawful or unlawful. 

Consider for example the French Resistance use of violence and intimidation against the Nazis. Was this  legal or illegal? By the laws of the Nazi occupation it was obviously illegal. But in the defence of France we would say that it was legal.

But now consider the exact same situation of Afghan violence against the American invasion of Afghanistan. Is this legal or illegal? By the laws of the American occupation it was obviously illegal. But in the defence of Afghanistan we would say that it was legal.

So legal/illegal is not clear so the Google definition is not very good. Equally the idea that you can ever use violence and intimidation against civilians legally seems wrong too. It's a very bad definition.

Terrorism has always just meant the use of Terror to control people. This means that 9/11 was an act of terrorism. But it also means that the "shock and awe" of the US invasion of Iraq was also Terrorism. The US meant nothing but to intimidate the Iraqis with violence.

Things like Hiroshi were also nothing but the use of violence against innocent civilians with the single purpose of forcing political change. They were acts of Terrorism.

Indeed all the world's biggest terrorist attacks have been conducted by Britain and America. Britain and America are the World's number 1 terrorists.

This is clearly demonstrate when you look at relative death tolls. The entire number of British people killed by Terrorism since 9/11 is about 55. Toasters have killed more people in Britain than Terrorists.

Now consider how many people the British army has killed in the pursuit of its political goals since 9/11. I don't need to look it up: it is more than 55. So Britain is the greater Terrorist.

So Terrorism does exist but unfortunately the greatest terrorists are the West. Now since this is all the pursuit of political goals such a fact is not very helpful for the pursuit of Western political aims.

As a result the West does not accept any definition of Terrorism that points the finger at the West's use of violence and intimidation to progress its own interests around the globe.

So the West changes the definition to mean something which supports its political goals. But in so doing as we have seen they destroy the meaning of the word.

So these days there is no such thing as Terrorism, cos to make sense of Terrorism is to realise that the West is the biggest terrorist.   

SRH & Recursion

SRH Recap: needed a name for the particular issue that self-reference brings problems. Godel Incompleteness, Turing Halting Problem, Tarski Truth theorem, Russel's Paradox all derive from self-reference.

• Godel's statement says that "I am not provable"
• Turing Halting Contradiction says: "Loop forever if I Halt"
• Tarski says "I am false"
• Russel's Paradox is: make a set from all the sets which say 'I do not belong to myself''

In each case there is some formal expression of "I". And that proves utterly catastrophic because by negating the statement we have a contradiction. "This is True" initially appears fine but it opens the door to disaster "This is not true" by simple negation blows everything apart.

My first recognition of this was in thinking about a machine that could be self-aware. In essence it must be a machine where the state was fed into the input so that it could classify its own processing. In other words have some idea what it was doing. The state in such a system will conform to a fractal with fixed points. It will be otherwise meaningless. It was that realisation that for a system to be meaningful it must process not itself but its environment which raises the SRH. Awareness of "self" is a myth. Much later I read that  Buddha concluded the same: that all things are actually non-self. (That is not to reject the self, just to point out that if you are processing it then it is not yourself).

So I crudely concluded that in some way Self-Reference is flawed. And have never progressed to define clearly what way that is. I've guessed that perhaps a complete theory of SRH requires self-reference itself so rendering it impossible.

So recursion. With recursion you define a function in terms of itself. This will not halt unless you add a condition to the function that enables a branch at some stage that returns a non recursive value. Consider this silly example:

function Sum(n) {
   if (n==0) return 0
   return n + Sum(n-1)
}

Print Sum(10)

This returns 55. It simply sums all the numbers up to n that is calculates n(n+1)/2. It would regress forever except the (n==0) test pulls it out and returns the absolute value 0 (not defined in terms of itself). But recursion is powerful. Consider this variety of top using just * and - operators:

function Top2(n) {
   if (n==0) return 2
   return Top2(n-1)*Top2(n-1)
}

It computes 2^(2^n).

You could write with much more verbose loops and state using only * like this:

function Top2(n) {
    double product1 = 1
    for i = 1 to n
        product1 *= 2
    next
    double product2 = 1
    for i = 1 to product1
        product2 *= 2
    next
    return product2
}

Many recursive functions can be written in "for loops" like this. But there are functions like the Ackermann function that can only be computed through recursion. It is more powerful than basic program loops.

So the concept of computability revolves around recursion. Any computation that can be done it is hypothesised can be computed with a recursive function. 

In this blog I want to look at recursive functions that include fixed points (FPs). FPs have become important in the understanding of SRH (but it isn't complete yet).

Suppose the following identity holds:
R(x1) == x1

It means that all levels of this recursive function collapse and it becomes a non-recursive function at x1!

Fixed points break recursion.

Indeed for a Recursive function to Halt it must have a fixed point. You write a halting recursive function by checking for this fixed point and returning a fixed value. 

Its actually a little bit more complex because our Top2(x) only has non integer complex fixed points. Numerically I found two: 0.824679-1.56743i, 4.24218+2.09484i. Its beyond my math to understand why.

However the simple function Top2(x)-2 has a real fixed point at (0,0). I don't have time to complete this thought.

But recursive functions collapsing to non-recursive functions at fixed points is how Rainbow Tables work to break hashing algorithms. Its one things that significantly improved Turing's Bombe at Bletchley Park.

Once a dynamic function comes back to a value it has already had then it enters a loop and that effectively forms something like a fixed point. We'll call that a fixed series. A fixed point then is just a special case of a fixed series with a single member. Once looping we know the algorithm will never halt for that value and is undecided.

While recursive algorithms are written to branch at some stage to end the recursion and provide a fixed value, not all recursive algorithms will escape infinite loop. Sometimes that branch will not be executed. Consider a failed Sum() function which never stops cos the condition n*n is always >= 0.

function FailedSum(n) {
    if (n*n<0) return 0
    return n + FailedSum(n-1)
}

Print Sum(10)

However a recursive function written entirely in terms of recursion will always loop forever.

function InfiniteRecurse(n) {
    return InfiniteRecurse(n-1)
}

However in some cases a meta process can examine the code (like a self-awareness) and determine a non-recursive solution. Consider this apparently infinitely recursive function.

function InfiniteRecurse(n) {
    return InfiniteRecurse(n-1)/InfiniteRecurse(n-1)
}

For n=1 it tries to determine the value of 0/0. And that means for any value of n>1 the value is undefined. But indeed for values n<1 the output of the function is 1. So inspection by a meta-process can establish a non-recursive equivalent function in this case.

True/False is often mapped to functions with 1/0 binary output. When defining these in terms of themselves you can get alternating results. In the case of "I am false" we start assuming it is true, which then tells us it is false, which means it must be true. By returning to the same value, we know the recursion loops forever. The 4 example above are of this type. 

Allowing some flexibility with binding variables (for simplicity) then take the 4 paradoxes above:

Godel: Let there be a function Provable(x) which is 1 when statement index x is provable otherwise 0. But what of this statement with index g:

1-Provable(g)

If statement g returns 1 then it is not provable. So statement g is true but outside the proving system of the logic (incomplete). Or the proving system can prove a false statement (inconsistent).

Likewise Turing: Let H(f,x) decide if program index f halts for value x. We can use this to write program T(x) which uses knowledge about itself to break H. 

function T(x) {
    if H(T,x) then T(x)
    else return 1
}

T(x) is definitely a valid function which H(f,x) must be able to compute. But if H(f,x) decides that T halts then it doesn't halt and vice versa. So Turing concludes that H(f,x) cannot exist.

Likewise Tarski: Let T(x) return 1 if statement at index x is true else 0. What about the statement with index t: 1-T(t). When this statement returns 1 it is false. Effective "I am false."

Finally Russel. TODO

In each case being able to define something in terms of itself has caused problems. I'm racing through this cos of time. But initial motivation was just to note that when we talk about self-reference we are talking about defining something in terms of itself. Which is also recursion, which is the basis of the concept of computability.

Grasping & Suffering

 

This is a simple diagram of how things are

I commented a few posts ago that we can watch the news and hear about someone dying in a foreign country and it means almost nothing. As I write this someone here has the NEWS on, and they just causally referred to people having died in a crush at Kabul airport. I think these nameless people will never be mentioned ever again: their death is completely irrelevant to the Western media. We assume that their death is traumatic to their friends and family, and especially themselves. As they were crushed and realised that they were in danger, and then the fear of realising that this may well be the final moments, and then the processes that actually killed them come into play and their struggle to survive giving way to acceptance and collapse of their physical bodies. A really difficult time for them. But I was actually drawing that picture above while the news mentioned that people had died. What a completely different experience I was having to them. But we both inhabit the same world. We just have completely different perspectives on it and see completely different part.

So this is the world. There are billions of perspectives on this, and billions of things going on, but the one that matters is our own.

But we do recognise this is problematic. what is the connection between myself and my perspective. Why should my perspective be so important to me, and other people's perspective be so important to them. Why for instance was the description I gave above so important to the people who died in Kabul but not to me?

Well the trivial answer is that I was not the one who died. But this is not quite right. Suppose we discover that one of those who died was our partner. It's not me whose died and yet suddenly its important to me.

A sceptic would say well it's not you who died, but its your life that just got turned upside down as you no longer have a wife. It's still your perspective.

Often people now switch to motherly love. A mother discovers that their child is involved in the crush.

The sceptic says well it's the fact it's their child that matters.

But then the mother rushes into the crowd to save their child and is crushed.

The sceptic says they were stupid. What they wanted to happen was save their child and come out alive, but they made a mistake and lost both.

But then we discover that the mother dived on to the child to cover them and save them and the child survived but they sacrificed their life. And they intended this to happen.

There comes a point where even the hardest advocate of self-perspective has to challenge this belief that everything is done from self-perspective. It can be that sometime people sacrifice themselves because they see things from someone else's perspective and that other perspective will do instead of their own.

The classic example of this is the soldier dying for their country. They very most probably have no idea what the perspective of their leaders is, they are just prepared to accept this perspective instead of their own and lay their life down. 

In the diagram above this changing if perspective and view point is moving that red spot of "gripping" outside the locus of my own perspective and into another perspective.

Its actually quite common.

When we watch a film and we fall in "love" with the lead character or deeply identify with a character we actually move our red spot of gripping so that we are drawn along by that person rather than ourselves. When we leave the cinema we may well drag this person around with us for a while. The same when reading a book or hearing a tale about someone. Heroes are like this. We see the world from the perspective of the hero for a while.

If we look at the diagram above we see the  unbounded expanse of reality. This is vaguely believed in. I live here you live there and the boundaries are just like garden fences. Indeed we base our physical layout of houses to reflect this inner model of the world.

I guess some people don't believe in "the world." Everything is either me or you. Other people accept a middle worldly realm that is not me or you but which lies between us. Perhaps we can call the Nature. It doesn't really matter it is all just boundaries on the basic universe we believe in.

Now in "normal" thinking I AM. I am everything within that boundary of me. This idea is part of me. If the idea is rubbish in some way so am I. This passion is me. This hunger is me. And it extends into the world. That leg is part of me. And even outside the body so that this car is part of me. That wife is part of me.

Equally other people have the same attitudes to their space. I am everything within that boundary of me. This idea is part of me. If the idea is rubbish in some way so am I. This passion is me. This hunger is me. And it extends into the world. That leg is part of me. And even outside the body. That car is part of me. That husband is part of me.

If you damage or are disrespectful to anything in my realm then you are disrespectful to me directly. 

But this is ever so slightly wrong. The point is that nothing is YOU. ALL you have is a grasp on things. You can grip hold of this feeling, or that idea, or this leg, or that car or that woman/man.

Liberation is nothing more than realising how easy and effortless it is to let go that grip on some part of the world.

Take a real situation. Someone takes a baseball bat to our car. I saw this done once.

So obvious first fact. I can get the car fixed or replaced it under insurance. This illustrates just how easy it is to let go. I just get another.

But perhaps I have a stronger grip on this particular car. Perhaps I worked for ages to get that car. I have a strong grip cos of all that time and effort. Well not any more, you are now gripped to a smashed car and that is what hurts. It's not the smashing of the car that hurts, its the fact we are gripped a smashed car. And we don't want to let go, even while it is no longer the beautiful car it was but has suddenly changed into something we don't want. We still want to grip a beautiful car and that is not happening anymore. That grip to what we thought and expected and and desire is blinding us to what is really happened.

You see people starting to have a fight and friends say "let it go, he's not worth it." This is great advice,. Just let go it's not worth what you thought anymore.

So we grieve our car and we let go. This is the right process. How hard we grieve is linked to how hard we are gripping.

But chances are things get more complex. We start to think "who did this?" There is a "you" out there is who did this. In fact "they" are just a grasping to another region of the world, but we don't see that. We see somebody out there in the world, a "you", a physical being who opposes our physical being of "me". And we start to raise anger at the person who did this. We are digging the pit, we must later escape from, ever deeper.

Okay its a reasonable thought. It might be useful to find out who did this because they are clearly not happy. And finding out whether we can do something to make them happy would be useful. Perhaps we did something wrong to them and didn't realise. Perhaps they have other problems and you just happen to be the victim of their anger. It's often hard to find out the real answer to these things, but knowledge does no harm and will help you make the right choices.

Of course this is not really how we often think. We want that knowledge to (1) protect ourselves from it happening again (2) to go in search of that person and harm them. The situation is getting worse and the suffering and mistake is spreading.

I have a little thought around about now which is "generosity". I think: "I  don't really understand their motives, but I really hope they got what they want." Perhaps if they want more we can work on it. Generosity always helps.

But often the rabbit hole keeps opening up and we fall further and further. Perhaps it triggers a depression and self doubt. And who knows where all this goes.

But it all rotates around the fact that we have a grip on that car. That is all. And we don't want to let go. We believe by holding on something good will happen. And even when nothing good is coming and we are angry, upset, depressed and starting to do unhelpful things we still keep holding on like our very life depends upon it.

See the last post. Jesus on the cross whose life really did depend on it did not hold on to anything. Buddha also on the night of his enlightenment faced all the threats and desires that could be thrown at him and he did not hold on to anything.

Perhaps we think if I let people walk all over me they will lose respect and my social standing will fall and people will abuse and steal from me and I will end up starving and killed. First thought here is that this may happen. There is a risk in letting go. But the point is that the risk is always worth it. Did Jesus think he would resurrect? If he did then where was his worry in death? And this is where it gets subtle. On one hand we must not believe in nonsense. If I don't eat I will starve and die. Buddha learned this. yet we must not eat just for fear of dying. With the attitude that all that matters is life then we may as well live on a life support machine. Ultimately, and correctly, we eat because we have compassion for our bodies that need food. We eat for the exact same reason we give food to a hungry dog we find abandoned in the street. Out of kindness. That is the true reason. So if Jesus had saved himself from the cross he would have done it for the same reason he healed all those people to save them from suffering. But he didn't because he had a greater task that afternoon to end all grasping at self so that he could be free from the mortal body.

We will be tested. We will be tempted. And each time we just need to make the wise decision when to let go. When this becomes effortless we are free and there is no longer anything for the world to harm. If I am not here then how can what happen here harm me.

It's exactly like selling a house and hearing some time later that the house has burned down. It doesn't affect us, we no longer has a grip on that house. But we feel sorry and compassionate for the one who does grasp at it. When fire sweeps through a house that we do have a grasp on we have compassion for our self in the exact same way, and we also realise that we can just let go too so that we no longer live, or grasp there. Not living there how can it hurt us?

This is it. When we ungrip from our own interests and grip onto others to help and be compassionate we are proving to ourselves that there is no real fixed permanent and immutable me.

There is a me, but its "over there" now. Just as I can see someone over there suffer and it does not affect me as much as when that suffering is over here. If I go over there then my own suffering is not so great.

The truth here is that I am not really myself. That illusion that my own interests are SOOO important just comes from my choice to grasp at my world.

When Buddhism talks of reincarnation this is what it means. We take rebirth when we grasp at a "me". When I decide to grasp eternally and unbreakably to myself then I am born and I will suffer and die. But if I weaken that grasping so that I can let go and even grasp at others then I am no longer limited to just myself. I become free of being here or there, I am no longer bound to a particular existence. There is no longer a fixed self I must return to. I have no home I am at home everywhere. If this house burns down  it is just one house of billions. How different that attitude to being bound to a particular address which is fine most of time but then when it burns there is suddenly total catastrophe. The same is true of death.

So the illusion of self simply occurs in grasping at myself. Its not that myself does not exist and more or less than another person. But that grasping at this one and making it "me" and "my only home" and concern (being selfish essentially) limits me to just this self and that binds me to death.

Some reading that may be inclined to think of something like "out of body experience" (OBE). This is not correct.

If we think about OBE we have people reporting being able to see things outside their body. I remember hearing one doctor saying that a patient who had been dead came back to life and reported a "near death experience." In that experience she left her body and looked back at her dead body on the bed being resuscitated and because she was near the ceiling she was able to tell the doctor about some books on the cabinet. He looked and they were there. Regardless whether this is possible it is not the point above.

The issue of grasping and ungrasping the world is all played out "as the world is" without having to invent anything else.

If OBE exists then we can just as easily grasp at that. It's the grasping that is the point. It is not about souls or whatever moving around outside bodies or not. Its not a physical thing and it does not mean that anyone moves. Its instead just about who we chose to grasp at. I am me and you are you, but whose perspective do I identify with is the point. Once I can see the world as though through your eyes, or more to the point I take what you see through your eyes as seriously as I do my own, then I am no longer grasping at myself.  

Passion of Chris and Non-Self

 

Obviously there are problems with making huge claims and interpretations as I'm about to do. Jesus' suffering on the cross is massive, far greater both physically or historically than I can imagine and I am just a drop in the great ocean of this. However we are never-the-less a part and play our part.

Is Christianity different or similar to Buddhism? Can a Christian be a Buddhist and vice versa without conflict? Important questions that many tackle.

I woke this morning with a simple perspective. What did Jesus go through in those last days? He was disbelieved, insulted, rejected, mocked, tortured and killed. These are all our greatest fears. But at the same time he was deeply trusted and loved by others. There were people who wanted him dead, and people who would have died for him. What a contrary thing people en masse are. This is what we all face. No one is universally loved and respected and no one is universally hated and rejected. This means that everyone even God experiences a mixed reception from the world.

Buddha's story is usually sanitised into this pure loved transcendent peaceful being. But in his life his mother died soon after childbirth, he gained the hate and disappointment of his father and entire family for abandoning his princely duties and leaving the palace. He gradually rejected people and people gradually fell away from him as he pursued his path ever deeper. Finally even the 6 ascetic monks who had agreed to attend to him in his path of fasting and self mortification gave up on him when he abandoned this and ate the rice pudding. Finally he faced the entire army of hate and fear summoned by the great demon Mara. And when they could not raise any weakness in him they turned to the daughters of Mara who tried to lure him away from the path with every thing attractive and lustful and still he was not distracted and Mara accepted defeat. Essentially Life threw literally everything at Buddha and he was not distracted from his true nature of peace, love and grounding. So its not as graphic as Jesus' passion but the path was the same.

So how did Jesus and Buddha deal with all this turmoil going on around them?

They both abandoned themselves.

This sounds like cowardice, disloyalty, suicide. And this is exactly the point. The great illusion, the great attachment at the heart of our lives is the deepest belief that if we abandon ourselves we will die. We will lose something so precious that it is worth fighting to the death for.

Jesus and Buddha both show us that after abandoning this false self in fact we Live! That is the great secret at the heart of the universe.

Now whether Jesus rose again physically or just spiritually is the great theological debate. But for now is it enough to know that abandoning the false self, the self we think is us, is enough for ever lasting life.

Of course this can be complete misunderstood. This does not in fact mean that you kill yourself if you want to live. That is ridiculous. Why did Jesus need to be crucified for that. He could have just thrown himself off the walls of Jerusalem.

 Now the point--apart from fulfilling the scriptures (and not going into Jewish theology here)--is that Jesus had to suffer all the other things at other people's hands and not retaliate and save himself.

“He saved others, but He cannot save Himself. He is the King of Israel! Let Him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in Him." [Matthew 27:42]

Well the question I'm asking here is: what self would he have been saving? His mortal useless physical self, or the Greater Immortal Self? Well you don't need to save the immortal self do you. So if you want immortality you must not be tempted to save the mortal physical self.

And its not about actually saving something you will have to show afterwards, it about having the attitude of not saving. Being free from having to save something. 

But all of us in that situation would not have the faith and would take any exit. Imagine the relief when we cry out and declare that we were wrong and we submit to Rome and the Sanhedrin and accept their judgements and teachings and promise not to cause dissent or encourage people to question and challenge authority in future. Imagine the relief when the soldier runs off to Pilate and returns with an order to have you taken down and released. You can have your own life back again and live a peaceful life. But then the day of old age, illness and  death comes and you realise you were given back a rotten apple that was slowly decaying and was going to rot into nothing in your hands and you were tricked. This is the work of the Devil. This is what both Jesus and Buddha were fighting.

So to gain that immortal self we have to let go the temptations of the flesh and the desire for an easy and normal life. This is attachment to a fake self.

But we don't  need to start a war with the world. The actual final move to release is almost imperceptible. Its just the most gentle letting go our once hard grip on ourself.

That self we think is us, that we think is at the centre of our lives and which everything that happens happens to; that self which we protect from insult and injury; that self that we think people like or hate; that self that somehow has to be the intersection of all the things that we see in our life; which must somehow unify our life with a solid fixed and distinct thing: that self is a myth. It doesn't exist. Some people will like us, some will hate is and there can be no self that is both likeable and hateable at the same time. There is no fixed entity of a particular type. But protecting and holding on to this thing like it was there is the source of all the struggle and all the passion and suffering in our lives.

Mind/Body Problem + Meditation

Funny how this seems to have gone out of fashion. Its not like there is a consensus yet on the problem. Is what was said about Death the actual answer?

Quick racap.

So Descartes observed that the natural world is always composed from parts. Anything you chose can be broken into parts. However the self is indivisible. There is just the atom of Self. This is the same self he deduced must exist because everything can be doubted except that there is doubter. In fact this is a type of SRH argument (if you look back in the blog). I believe that unity is what Kant calls the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.

Another way to arrive at this problem is with the issue of freedom of choice. Looking at a body you can see all the nerves firing and organs functioning all causally. One thing is caused by another. Yet when we apply it to our own experience we don't see our self being forced to do things by causes but rather we seem to be the origin of action. We have choice. It is this way in which we originate our actions that is the whole source of morality, sin and suffering in all religions.

In Buddhism for example there are both ways of thinking. There is cause and effect which is absolutely central to ending suffering. Buddha explains that literally all phenomena have a cause. The phenomenon of suffering thus has a cause, and so we can end it. But at the same time we are held accountable for our actions and poor decisions lead to bad outcomes. A King visits him one day and Buddha expounds his teachings to him. After he has gone Buddha says "he is done for." Buddha knew that the King had killed his own father to assume the throne. This act had been so ignorant and had caused such an indelible imprint that the King would not be able to gain liberation in this lifetime. But without freedom what chance do we have to be liberated other than by luck.

The answer to this is simple but subtle. The world is just the way it is. That is true for us all and you would be foolish to suggest the world was any other way than what it is. The whole problem comes from seeing the way it is in the wrong way. Of being confused about the way it is.

Importantly this mistake is more than an intellectual misunderstanding it is a matter of the heart also. We think and feel about the world wrong. We have the wrong moves within our heart and pursue the wrong things the wrong way.

What is that mistake? It is grasping for things with our hearts too much.

This is the same mistake as mentioned about Death and Ego. That anchor that we have thrown into our lives, that belief we have in being "our self" is a matter of self love and attachment and grasping.

So how does self attachment and love lead to the Mind/Body mistake?

Let us repeat that core fact: the world is just the way it is. All problems arise in looking and interacting with it it wrong.

So lets look at how things are. There are distinct senses: we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. And what the West misses out we process all this stuff into things which we think about giving us the 6th sense of Mind. Importantly get clear that this is all there is. There is nothing "out there" that doesn't fit into one of these areas of experience.

There are some fuzzy areas like memory. I imagine what I saw yesterday. I'm not quite sure myself whether that counts as seeing or mind. Its a mixture of both. Our memories can be very vivid. Dreams also. And that experience when we are reading, where we forget completely about the world and actually live the experience we are reading about. Afterwards we have no recollection of "our" world and seem to remember having been through what we were reading. This is not seeing with our eyes, but its hijacking the process of vision with our mind to create "visions". Hallucinations are the same process of our mind hijacking our vision process. When we day dream it is the same. We image the life we want, or perhaps we imagine what frightens us, and we live that as though it is coming through our senses.

Meditation is absolutely critical for getting clear on all this. Meditation is the simplest but hardest thing we can do. In its basic form we just need to observe some object closely without breaking our attention. When our attentions drifts we pull it back as soon as we notice. And we just do that a bit every day, day after day. Meditate through the excitement, through the boredom, through the "what is the point" and the "why am I doing this?" and the "I want to do something else", through the ... whatever comes up we just meditate through it and keep our mind on the object. That is all.

The most common object is the breath. We carry that with us everywhere, we can't get away from it and while we are breathing we know we are alive. we can close our eyes, forget our smells and tastes and sounds and most importantly forget our mind and our thoughts and just feel the sensation of the breath. We don't think much but we do use the mind to be "clear that we are breathing in, and breathing out" as Buddha says in the Anapansati Sutra. Just a little bit of mind, and gradually reducing level of mind. Obviously when we start a huge amount of mind. Lots of: I need to do this tomorrow, Wow I hate that person did they really do that, Can't wait for the end of meditation I want to watch TV... oh I'm supposed to be watching the breath let me get back to that. This is normal and it quietens down slowly over many days and weeks and months.

We can/should also meditate to purify our hearts. Mind is not just about physical feelings and sensations its about emotional feelings and intentions. As we watch we see that our mind is disturbed ultimately by what we feel. Suppose the neighbour starts mowing the lawn. That is not by itself a distraction. It's just a sound to begin with. We might not even notice it if in deep meditation on the breath. But if we do notice it, very quickly our mind steps up, judges and decides what it is. And then we are in trouble cos that starts thoughts. And if we then start to feel emotions like annoyed then it really becomes a distraction. And what comes with the initial feeling of annoyance? Lots and lots of energetic thoughts. "Why did they have to do it now?", "That is just typical can't the neighbour mow at a normal time like everyone else", "I bet they didn't even need to mow the lawn, can't they just chill out like me and be peaceful" (note the irony its not the neighbour who is not peaceful, it is me). And then this triggers the memory and we start to think more elaborate thoughts. "That is it. This is the last time that neighbour annoys me and messes up my peace. I'm moving house. No wait that would mean the neighbour wins. Right I'm going to start making noise when they are sunbathing so they know what it feels like." and so it goes on. But this is actually the absolutely best stuff to meditate on. So we get a grip and look at the clouds of dust and dirt that have been blown up inside us and we return to watching our breath and it all settles again. Though it isn't fast until we have lots of practice at focusing on our breath. Once we get back to the breath we can then even enjoy looking at all the stuff that just went through our minds, examine it and see what a real mess we have in there. Eventually we can enjoy seeing this stuff, like our own little soap-opera inside that we don't really need to care too much about. we can always return to our breath and it just goes away.

Now when we start to get to the point where we can always just return to our breath and the mess in our heads reliably starts to calm down we realise we have other choices than to just get dragged in when things like anger distract us. Most importantly if you are also following Buddhas Teachings (and most meditation these days doesn't give you full teachings as well - which is like being put on Prozac without ever examining why you are struggling) you will observe that the true nature of all this mental stuff is that it is temporary. There is no feeling or thing in our minds that has been there since we were born and will survive our death. That is a good and a bad thing to realise. It means that no happiness will ever last, but it means neither will any sadness. If we see that firmly we are really entering the neutral space that I need for the Body/Mind problem.

Before that sounds depressing--never finding lasting happiness--once we start to put down the temporary feelings and comings and goings of our mind: the endless changes of feelings and thoughts the constant striving to pursue that good feeling we just had (as Avici sampled into his song Levels: "Ooo oo something I get a good feeling yeah, you know a feeling that I never never had before") once we realise that good feelings and bad feeling come along and then go away, we realise we don't need to hold onto them. And that is the key moment when a new feeling happens called Joy. Now this Joy does not come and go in the same way as the other feeling. It is rather that when the other feelings go, they leave room for Joy. Usually that is described as: once the clouds go the sun can shine. This is linked to Jhana and that is a huge other subject. But once we are at least aware there is a neutral space then we have what we need to grasp Body/Mind.

So in the neutral space we can just let things come and go. This is the way the world is.

Objection I hear. But the world is not made of thoughts and smells and sights and sounds it is made of things. If I eat just thoughts and tastes and smells I will die. I need to eat real food.

And this is absolutely correct. The world is just the way it is. I am not saying anything here that is not just the way it is. But what is the actual difference between eating a real plate of chips and having the sights, feelings, smells, tastes, sounds and thoughts of eating a plate of chips? They are identical!

Well very slightly different. Normally we will just casually think "I am eating chips, whatever, now time to think about something else." But that is actually just a thought of eating chips. I spoke in previous blogs of the "ship" we drag around with us. It is just a fixed statue of eating chips. Its not the actual event right now of eating chips. If we actually stop while eating chips and look at what is going on we will see a bewildering load of stuff. That is if we just look at the way the world is, rather than casually what we think it is, we get a totally different view. They are both "eating chips" in a casual way, but the person experiencing their senses while they are doing it is really doing it! How ironic given that at the start of this paragraph the person messing around with sights and tastes looked like they would starve! They are the ones really living and the person who just "eats chips" on Monday and "eats chips" on Friday and just "eats chips" the same way every time, they get bored of "eating chips" and they get bored "of life" and they die inside. That neutral space is the key to living. This is what the religions are in search of. Life!

So as we look at the way things are: where is the Body now? It's not so clear. I can feel my legs and my arms hanging beside me. I can see my body. If I look in the mirror I can see my eyes. I can look straight into my own pupils to see that they are the black holes out of which I look, or into which light goes (which of these is true used to be a real heated argument). But like "eating chips" this is all just senses and thoughts. When I pick up an apple I can feel it in my hand, and I can see it, and I can think a number of things. I can think "I have an apple in my hand" or I can think "there is a weight in my hand and I can see a red globe in my hand." both are actually fine. If I am handing out dessert I will probably go for the former thought as I need to give someone an apple, but I can still examine the sensations as I do it. The point of this is to show how fluid our thoughts are. The idea "there is an apple" is not so fixed. Its useful. It may be the answer to a question, and it may be part of what I have to do, but its just a thought as well and we can put it down and think about it differently or even something complete different. Thoughts are quite fluid. And that applies to the Body. We can examine it in many different ways. There is no single thing called "the body." As Descartes observed it has many parts, not just physically but also in how we experience it.

We can certainly see that when an apples comes into contact with our hand we feel something. And this is observing how our sense experiences are caused by interaction with the world. But is it so weird now to just look at an apple touch our hand, and at the same time get the feeling of something touching our skin. We are just watching what is going on. As said at the start we are just watching the way the world is.

And now what of Mind? We had a good definition of the mind above. It is all the processing and thoughts that come with our senses. Indeed everything in this blog entry, all the exercises and descriptions are actually mind being applied to what we experience. When I say "feel the apple in your hand" what I am doing is asking the mind to direct itself at the feeling of the apple. Or if you have no actual experience then imagine it. That is all mind.

Do we still have the Mind/Body problem? Yes we do but it lies now just in Descartes belief that the Mind is centred around something. when we says the Mind is indivisible (in fact it feels like a single point in space at the centre of experience), or we say that Mind is somehow separate from our Body what we are doing is looking at the point we have placed the anchor in (as described in previous blogs). That feeling of Mind "being something" comes from holding on to it. We have a grasp of it, a clenched fist holding onto it like a rugby binding, or when we grab some ones arm, or we grasp for something we want on the shop shelf, or we get hold of some food we want. In all these cases we are making contact with a thing and where we hold it is the point of interest. Likewise we have a strong grasp of the world, as if it might slip away from us if we let go. That point where we have the world held onto that appears as the point at the centre of the world that looks out at all our senses and into the outside world that is full of other people. That anchor point is actually just a choice. We can let go with training. We won't die if we let go. We won't even lose anything. It will make no difference at all. Except that we will no longer be dragging a ball and chain with us through the world and life. We will be free. But to really get here we need to just let the world be exactly as it is and we do that by entering that neutral space. I say "entering" the neutral space, this is how it may seem. But really it is an escaping from the cage of non neutrality that we have been stuck in/to. 

Warning the first thing we do to get free is just throw everything away. Quit our job, end our relationships, give up everything and just do nothing. This is okay, but its just the same grasping problem in return. You can indeed let go of something by throwing it away. Because in the West we hold so unbelievably tightly Eckhart Tolle does suggest throwing forcefully away. But in space when you throw away it has an equal and opposite reaction. So we turn around and try and get back by throwing away the emptiness we have created and so we end up oscillating. With practice we get better at just uncoupling and drifting along, calmly just side by side things. Indeed two objects drifting side by side on the same path through space are indistinguishable from two object coupled together. We can just let go through the easiest of touches with practice.

So Body and Mind is not a real problem. If we just look carefully and easy at the world just as it is, we will see for our self how things are and the problem will seem irrelevant after a while.

The Imperial case against Capitalism

People in the West are familiar with warfare. Our history is dominated by WW2 and before that the even more bloody, for us, WW1. And you might be forgiven for thinking these were the only wars that happened. Few people today realise the scale of warfare that the West has been involved in. We vaguely know of the Boer War against the Dutch in South Africa and the Crimean War against the Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars against the French. Few know of the three Anglo-Afghan wars that preceded the current 20 year conflict. Then there were the Opium Wars with China. And the war with America. And all this in the last 300 years. And before that we were continually at war with the Ottoman Empire going all the way back to the mediaeval Crusades.

It turns out that there are only 22 countries that have been spared war with the UK. Namely Monaco, Mongolia, Marshall Islands, Mali, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Kyrgyzstan, Ivory Coast, Andorra, Bolivia, Belarus, DemocraticRepublic of Congo, Burundi, Central African Republic, Guatemala, Chad, Paraquay, Vatican City, Tajikistan, Sweden, Uzbekistan and Sao Tome and Principle. And 7 of barely the size of towns or cities. So there are only 15 proper countries in the whole world of well over 100 countries that the UK has not invaded at some stage. In terms of todays population that is  272,873,050 people or 3.5% of the world. So the UK has invaded and tried to exert dominance over something like 96.5% of the world's people. If people actually want peace that UK was never your answer it seems.

And these were not sporadic military engagement. UK is always at war. In the last 100 years there has not even been a single break in fighting, with British soldiers engaged in some battle somewhere throughout the world for the whole of the last 100 years. A graphics here details the engagements.

Something else we know about the UK. Britain held the world's largest Empire covering 1/4 of the Earth's land surface and about 1/4 of the world's people. The Sun never set on the British Empire was the accolade often attributed. Is it a coincidence that 400 years of war resulted and maintained the world's largest Empire?

And another coincidence to think about. Capitalism and in the Industrial Revolution both started around the same time in Georgian Britain around 300 years ago.

If we think of the Roman Empire we think of warfare also. It seems that Empire mean wars. And the converse I also suggest seems to be true: wars mean Empires.

In the UK we are brought up on a diet of WW2 being about the destruction of an evil political system called Fascism and particularly the killing of Hitler and the end of Nazism. It is told as a noble crusade of Good against Evil. The war began with the invasion of Poland by Germany. Britain saw this as an act of aggression and so nobly sacrificed itself and declared war on Germany and WW2 began. With the help of the Russians and Americans, Germany was defeated and a great evil was removed from the world.

This story never sat too well with me. Wasn't it rather hypocritical for a country like Britain who had been at war with the world for centuries, invaded almost everyone and developed a huge empire to be criticising Germany for invading Poland? It wasn't unilateral either. Russia invaded at the same time as Germany in a power sharing agreement called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Yet Britain never mentioned any hostility against Russia for their surely equally evil invasion. Rather one sided. And to illustrate that Britain had the interests of Polish at heart they even gave Poland freedom away to the Soviets at the end of the war (sarcasm). It seems that Churchill did not fight WW2 (and it was Churchill alone, the rest of the UK wanted peace) just to rid the world of evil. Usually the Holocaust gets mentioned here, but the Holocaust began in 1942 and the scale wasn't really appreciated until the end of the war. No one ever suggests it was why the war was started.

British interests are also very partisan. In 1943 Bengal faced a famine but Churchill needed the food for his military effort and refused to release food for the Indians. The result was millions* starved to death. Churchill's initial and infamous reaction was "they deserved to die for breeding like rabbits." This was no throw away line, he considered Indians inferior human beings and he hated them. Not Churchill's fault, such thinking was quite usual at the time as we see with his adversary Hitler and his attitude to Jews, Russians and other Eastern Europeans.

* a quick note on death counts. A number of different methods are used. For instance when establishing the size of massacres against American Indians the US government requires official documents and reports from actual witnesses of individual deaths before adding them to the tally. Obviously this method will arrive at the lowest possible value. Meanwhile when establishing the size of the Nazi Holocaust bull park figures based on estimation, at least rounded to the nearest million, like "6 million" are accepted. Likewise when establishing war crimes against civilians like Hiroshima and Dresden the official figures are much more stringent and also reject figures from the ground. For example Google gives 25,000–35,000 as the death toll from Dresden while the official German emergency services missing persons report was over 120,000 and some estimates give 250,000. There were no bodies to count the fire burned so ferociously that everything was vaporised. In this case the lowest possible figure seems to have become established. So death counts can be a factor of 5 out, or even 10 in the case of Dresden. Majdanek concentration camp is another example. When soldiers first liberated the camp the rumour in the camp was that half a million had been killed there and news reporters gave this value. The first official estimate was 360,000 in 1948 and has been steadily revised to around 78,000 now. Again initial official estimates were out by a factor of around 5 and rumours out by 7. Stalin's killing sprees are yet another example. 20 million was the initial figure. Historians now range as low as 2 million now. Again a factor of 10 out. Obviously every single death is always a tragedy but death toll figures are nevertheless used to highlight the significance of events and these figures are often incredibly unreliable so you pick and chose the figures that suit your perspective.  

So the defeat of Evil doesn't work as a narrative. What does work is that Hitler and Mussolini spoke of creating an Axis between Berlin and Rome to challenge the Axis of London and Washington.  A Y-Axis, so to speak, for the X-Axis that existed. It would have been a 2-dimensional world with the Fascists in Eastern Europe and the Capitalists in the West. The fascists envisaged a power sharing agreement. They did not understand the British Empire or its mentality. Britain shares power with no one. You do not become the world's largest Empire by sharing power. The reason a battle between Churchill and Hitler in Europe became a "World" war was that Germany began to attack the British Empire. And the British Empire was ordered to protect itself thus making it a global conflict. It was ultimately an Imperial Battle. A war that came from Empire. WW2 fits perfectly into the long history of Britain developing and protecting its Empire.

Now not all conflict is so overt. Few people realise the scale of covert operations. The James Bond type operations have an even greater extent than the official ones. There is no country or people on Earth who have not been affected by British and American covert ops.

A brilliant example of just how much covert action goes unreported and unnoticed was revealed on the BBC 6 o'clock news in early 2011. David Cameron was still apparently deliberating over the official UK position in Libya. Yet on the news a live report from Libya with soldiers moving behind the journalist captured the unmistakable "move, move, move" call from a soldier in an upper class British accept. This was not a Libyan but an British soldier. Early the next morning No. 10 announced that the SAS had been deployed in Libya. Presumably the pretence that they had nothing to do with current events had to end. This also raises questions about why the journalist never said anything. They would have know there were SAS right behind them, Journalists respect the secrecy of covert ops and so no one ever knows quite what is going on.

The Coup in Iran in 1953 seems to have been a watershed moment for the CIA. A documentary called "Coup 53"--while about the British operation to re-establish the Shah of Iran after the people revolted against British rule--has a segment that details how the British MI6 taught the CIA how to destabilise a country very simply through covert means and gain the political upper hand without a costly military campaign. When Eisenhower heard about this it completely changed the US mode of operation and it began secret operations to destabilise countries all round the world.

A 4 minute edited clip from Coup 53 where they discuss the covert MI6 operation to destabilise the government of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh in Iran and redevelop support for the Shah. Given that the Shah was seen by most Iranians as a corrupt puppet of the West this was quite an achievement. The actor Ralph Fiennes recreates an interview from a recently discovered transcript with MI6 operative Norman Darbyshire. 

Link

Now this is the pattern you will see throughout the latter part of the C20th and beyond. The West has control of a country through a ruling royal family or dictatorship. When eventually a revolution deposes this corrupt official the West then intervenes with covert military action to either re-establish support of the Western puppet or if that fails throw the country into civil war so that no one can benefit.

Most recently we saw this in Syria. Once the West had secured a stronghold in Iraq they then started to move into surrounding countries. The Syrian Civil War officially started in 2011. The CIA officially started operations in 2013. One problem with covert operations is that they are secret. Secrecy is a doubled edged weapon. It means that intelligence is protected from falling into the hands of the enemy, but it also means that no one trusts you and in "so called" Democracies that is critically important to rule by the people. If you want people to trust you you need to be honest. As a result of secrecy its hard to know exactly what is going on, but its a small step of imagination to think that CIA operations in Syria really began in earnest as soon as Iraq fell. CIA scouts looking for groups who oppose the government, making connections, making promises, routing money and weapons, supplying training, and most importantly spreading propaganda-- all the things the CIA do. CIA for instance pay for anti-government pirate radio stations in countries they want to topple, or help the government with propaganda in countries they want to support. For instance releasing global press releases so that the "world" believes what the CIA wants them to believe. Psyops it is called. The game of controlling and expanding an Empire is complex and far reaching.

Psychology is critical to power. Alexander the Great won a battle simply by fooling Oxyartes--the King of an impenetrable citadel called the Sogdian Rock in modern Afghanistan--that he had winged infantry. Such is the power of psychological warfare.

Now one thing I need to add here is the key propaganda tool used by an Empire (any Empire) and that is having an Enemy. An empire that is always just attacking other countries starts to look bad, and the people in that empire start to become war weary, ask why all this money is being spent and the leaders lose control. The simplest way of maintaining support and making overt aggression look like defence is having an enemy. It can take many forms. I believe the Romans thought non-romans were uncivilised barbarians and that being invaded and added to the Roman Empire was in their good. Indeed there is some truth to this. What have the Roman's ever done for us jokes Monty Python. Being in the Roman Empire gave you peace (from those outside the empire) and technology. But it came with a cost. You had to pay for it all with taxes to Rome and you were not free but governed from the Imperial Capital Rome. America is a bizarre place. You have Mel Gibson in Braveheart giving the immortal line, "they will never take our freedom" while sitting at the heart of an Empire that is at war across the globe against people who want their freedom but who the USA thinks need to be defeated and brought into the Empire. People want to be free to govern themselves. That is established. When an empire has to fight, it is always to subdue that desire for freedom. We see that in Afghanistan right now. Like it or not the Taliban are now free from US rule. That is a great day if you are Taliban, and no one can take that from them, not even the CIA pro-Imperial propaganda that fills all our news feeds at the moment. Someone should have a Taliban giving that Braveheart speech just to illustrate this point.

If its not bringing civilisation to people (selected by the Empire) its protecting them from other empires. At one point US Empire was protecting Europeans from the Nazis. As soon as they were defeated the US was protecting Europeans from Soviets. When that ended the US was protecting Europeans from Terrorists. There is only one thing common to all this and it is the presence of the US Empire. An Empire will always galvanise support by having an enemy so that those in the Empire look outwards rather than critically inwards. That way we don't seen the steady march of The Empire over our own freedoms.

So were the Soviets an actual threat. Who really knows. But if you look at it there is no evidence for it. All the while it was the Americans having all the wars. Korea, Vietnam to start with and all the covert operations mentioned above. The US tries to make us believe the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. But US propaganda never told us why. Why have a difficult 10 year war with a country that already supports you? Well there is video of Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking to the Taliban (then the Mujahedeen) in 1979 telling them to keep fighting. And he later admitted that the CIA had destabilise the country deliberately to draw the USSR into a destructive war. The truth is that the Afghan government invited the Soviets in to help fight the Taliban. When we compare the truth with what our media tells us we see just how heavily the CIA controls Western "free" media. I call it the Imperial Press. Its an obvious feature of an Empire that it generates pro-Imperial press for its people. That is no criticism its an obvious thing that will happen. What is more surprising is just how well they do it and how few questions the people ask. Take the example here. Did anyone really believe the USSR invaded Afghanistan? It simply makes no sense. Afghanistan was on the Russian side already. Yet people in Empires seem to just believe what they are told without question, and Empires reply upon this subservience to prosper. Certainly members of the military must not question too deeply. You see them in the NEWS struggling with what they do, because it makes no sense. But there is a kind of religious faith amongst many service men that even when it makes no sense, just keep on fighting. It does make sense, you are Imperial Storm Troopers fighting to hold and expand an empire just the same as soldiers throughout history have done. Very simple. That is warfare.

Another obvious case of the USSR being no threat was that you could count their nuclear weapons on one hand until the 1970s. It was the rapid growth of the US nuclear arsenal that prompted the rest of the world to follow suit. USA was the aggressor. Yet The US Empire suggested all along that they were simply defending themselves from the USSR. Simple and basic lies.

I suppose I should quickly address the other great bogey-man: Hitler. Was Nazism a threat? I was brought up to believe that Hitler wanted to rule the world. Well whether he did or didn't it occurred to me at the time: isn't that what Britain is already doing? If its good for Britain its good for Hitler. And I was told if Germany had won the war we would be speaking German. But aren't they speaking English. So again what is good for Britain is good for Germany. And so it goes on. The only thing we have against Hitler is the Holocaust. And yet Britain had a similar sized Holocaust in Bengal at the same time. Which has led me to think the German Holocaust, where most people died of  starvation, was in the main really just caused by the war just as the Bengal Holocaust was. Whether there was significant death in the much more controversial gas chambers is quite another story that I don't think should be confused with the main mass starvation of people. But all that aside Germany never claimed to want to rule the world. They simply wanted to join forces with the British Empire to have an Empire of their own rather than live in slavery to the British and French under the Versailles agreement. No need to make out that Hitler was a good guy at all, but he and Germany were certainly a chip from the same block as everyone else around: just looking to extend an Empire.

Now I mentioned the link between all this Imperialism and Capitalism. You will note that the Imperialists have so far have destroyed Fascism and done a good job destroying Socialism and Communism. CIA operations around the world have destabilised every single democratic socialist country in Earth. Of those that are resistant like Cuba and North Korea the US has imposed crippling sanctions. It can do this because Global Empires first and foremost control trade. All of Britain's wars were not so much to gain land as to control trade routes. This means you can tax and sanction and that gives you control of the world. Much better than old empires that just controlled land. And there have been some overt military actions against Socialism. The most famous being Vietnam. America had literally no reason for that war other than to stop Vietnam becoming Socialist.

Its not enough to apply military and economic means to crush socialism there is much Psyops too. The main argument you will hear for Capitalism is that it nay be flawed but all the other systems don't work. If the don't work you may wonder why the US has spent the last 100 years working so hard to destroy all the other systems. They are clearly viable and popular else you wouldn't need to stop them.

So why does the US hate all other systems so much. Why must America and Capitalism be the only way. The film Team America: World Police captures this mentality perfectly. America appears to be the only option. Well obviously this confers enormous power to the US when everyone believes it represents freedom and its the only way. That in itself stops people asking questions and controls their minds. And yet even people brainwashed within the empire can see that Saudi Arabia is a quite different Islamic Extremist ideology and the Taliban too. They may even know that the US supports both  Saudi Arabia and at least used to support the Taliban. We wait to see whether current affairs in Afghanistan are just the start of new Taliban cooperation with the US Empire. But perhaps the most important reason that the US hates other systems is that many Nationalise Industry. This means they take industry out of the market and give it to the Nation. A billion billion words have been spent arguing why this is a bad idea but they are almost all CIA Pysops.

Capitalism is the floating of assets on stock markets so that investors can buy and sell them. This way companies raise cash. They can also raise cash from banks. In both cases the wealth can share their wealth with industry. But like with Empire this comes at a cost. The wealthy demand either interest or dividends on their lending. As a result the savvy investor can generate a continual Return On Investment. In Jane Austin stories this is what is referred to as an "income." And it is this income that Capitalists men had attached to then which made them such attractive marriage prospects for women in her books. But there is an obvious issue with this. Why should the wealthy be rewarded for being wealthy. Why when you already have money should that money enable you to get even more? It results in a "positive feedback." In Capitalism the more money you have the more you can get. This seems ridiculous especially for the poor who do not have money to invest and end up doing all the work that ultimately supplies the wealth that is paid to the rich. This is all bad enough when confined to a country. But when the Internationally Rich start buying up your nation's assets the people end up working for money that is immediately lost from the country in interest payment and dividends. You also end up with foreigners sitting on the boards of your companies and making decisions that may benefit the Rich Investors but which may not benefit the people of the country. So powerful are these Rich International Investors that most of the decisions in a country can start to be made by these people instead of the democratic governments, and the sheer amounts of money they have can be used to bribe politicians and steer political campaigns. This was most powerfully illustrated by the East India Company that started trading in Bengal and went on to rule the whole of India. The owners of such companies are powerful enough to finance armies and start wars. And this is where we are at with the US Empire. It seeks to control countries through Capitalism. Buying and profiting from assets in other countries, steering their boards of directors, influencing local politics and if all that fails using their people in government to legalise sanctions and wars against belligerent countries.

Not surprising many countries have fought back and firstly by kicking out the Imperialist Capitalists. They nationalise key industry to ensure that it is run only by the people of the country and to ensure that all profits of that industry are enjoyed within the country. Sure there is corruption but it is within the country and by the Trickle-Down economics everyone benefits. Also moving against a corrupt leader in your own country is just part of the normal process of politics and is much easier than moving against corrupt international finance where you have no control. So in every way making local economics and politics your first priority benefits everyone except the international rich investors who cannot profit from you. A quick word to their people in the Empire and in no time you find sanctions and CIA activity in your country. This is the pattern and this is why standing up to the Empire is so difficult.

Now there are of course benefits to free trade. Being able to sell what you are good at on international markets gives you access to all the goods produced in other countries. But it has a cost too. You must price everything on international markets and that will put much of your home grown business out of work. Why buy home made china plates when you can buy mass produced plastic ones for a fraction of the price? So your economics gets skewed by international trade. It makes you vulnerable to famine also. International mass production of food like US corn will destroy your local food production. In the event of a rise in corn prices your country will go hungry. This kind of economics only works if you have another strong means of income that you can use to buy food. It great for UK where we control the world's finances through London or the US which cheated its way to get the Reserve Currency status. But for most countries its a precarious path. there are benefits and costs. So a sensible government that nationalises critical industry to protect itself, but opens the door to trade as well to get the best of both world's is what you want. But it is not what The Empire wants. It hates protectionism, it wants complete free trade (except when it suits it in sanctions) to drive prices down (for import) and enable investors to buy up and profit from everything profitable (Capitalism).

Now this is all a well oiled and established pattern. If any of this is new where have you been. And if anyone ever reads this far into the blog completely well done. It's an unedited monster post.

Recently I heard about Bolivia. In Iain Stewards excellent BBC Rise of the Continents he briefly covers the Lithium deposits in the Salar de Uyuni thought to be the world's largest lithium deposit.

This sounds like a government that puts its own people first, respects their lives, ways of life, and livelihoods. The ideal government that people in the West have been praying for. was it true?

Well the country that has been kept secret from us by the Imperial Press but its true. Evo Morales and Bolivia's Remarkable Success Story. Without external influence the people elected a leader who put them and the country first. Unthinkable in the West.

However given everything that has been said above, and the centuries of history of the Capitalist Empire to learn from, we can predict very accurately how this went for Bolivia.

The people will elect and love a socialist leader who closes the border so the Imperialists can't buy up and exploit the nations resources for their own gain. Funnelling raw materials and money out of the country as though the assets never belonged to the country in the first place. This is basically theft. It used to be done by sending an army down and simply taking what they wanted, massacring anyone who got in the way. But that is old school Roman style Imperialism.

The leader will nationalise the industry so that the government controls the finances and the profits remain within the country. If the government becomes corrupt the people will elect a new leader. If the leader collapses democracy there is a civil war again and a new democratic leader takes office. This is the normal cycle.

But this never happens. The CIA start operations to find a potential leader who will open up the country to Capitalist Investors and agree to give control of the industry to foreign investors. They then fund demonstrations and unrest and propaganda campaigns to interfere with the existing government and tarnish it in any way. If a government is reasonable and slow to react, strategies may even include "False Flag" attacks where protestors attack themselves to make it look like the government is being heavy handed, thus justifying an escalation of violence. This is what MI6 showed the CIA how to do in Iran in 1953. Its not difficult to make life very difficult even for the best and most reasonable government.

The critical mistake is when a leader decides to disband democracy or declare martial law to stop the rise of foreign interests. The leader thinks its in the interest of the country, but it is easily sold as dictatorship. Chants for "freedom" become ever louder and what freedom means is an open door to foreign interests and the sale and exploitation of the country by The Empire. This is how it has worked for 70 years or more, time and again.

So after hearing about Bolivia on that BBC program I searched the internet for "bolivia CIA coup" hoping things might be different for the Bolivian people. You will see in the list above it is one of the only countries that has been spared a UK invasion. I don't know how it fared under Reagan and his intense CIA military operations in South America. The answer is obvious. Of course the empire is trying to break Bolivia. That much Lithum is too great a prize for any Empire not to want to steal.

US Backed Coup ends Democracy in Bolivia 

Taken alone you might believe the press. But seen in the context of 70 years of oppression of any country that has profits that the International Capitalists want it is just business as usual.

In Africa they say "please let it not be oil." This is not because the people won't benefit from oil, its because The Empire will arrive and destroy your country while it extracts the oil and the profits.

Its a great irony that the country that walks over every person on Earth speaking of freedom is really only there just to take what they want and then leave. The US makes no secret of this. US always says that "it works in US interests." They can't be accused of lying. Biden said of the Afghanistan exit this week that the war "no longer served US interests." That is all they were ever there for "US interests." It seems weird that the Imperial Press has people saying that the US has betrayed them. It never has anyone's interests at heart other than the US. It was no secret. I personally don't believe people are hat stupid. People ask for the US Empire to come in because they have their own agenda and the US may be useful. But if you call upon a bigger rat to remove your current rat you have only really made the problem worse. Though no one actually asked for the US to invade Afghanistan (unlike the Soviets who were asked). They just invaded as Empire are wont to do. The question that remains of that war is what did the Capitalists want from Afghanistan. They have invested $2t in Afghanistan they are not going to turn away without getting a return on that. But what could that return be? We will have to wait and see. Perhaps it is just the bigger prize of controlling the area adjacent to China and Iran both of which hold riches the Capitalists want.

So there concludes a length trip  through the last 400 years of history and the rise of the British Empire with all the wars that involved bringing us to the C20th and the handing over of operations to the US Empire and MI6 passing on its techniques to the CIA in Iran in 1953.

Hopefully anyone reading this, for which it is a new perspective, will be armed with an extra way of seeing press reports and world events.

p.s. This differs a lot from current internet trends. Everyone agrees that we, the people, are not free but quite how we are controlled and imprisoned is not clear. In its most puerile version the story is that the Democrats are seeking to control us and the Republicans are seeking to free us. Well that may or may not be true in America bit for people outside America this has been going on for longer than America has even existed. America is just a colony of the British Empire which with help from France gained its independence from that Empire. It however went on to create its own and Britain has collaborated ever more with this growing empire.

The other narrative that is very common is that it is Socialism that seeks to spread across the world and enslave us, while Capitalism is fighting back to free us. This is ironic since Capitalism came first (17th-18th century) and it was Socialism that was invented (19th century) to try and free non-capitalist people from the power and enslavement of giant factory and industry owners. The idea that Socialism and especially Communism is about just dictatorship is an idea actually promoted by the CIA. There are many dictatorships that are not Socialist for instance Saudi Arabia. If a Socialist country is a dictatorship that is a coincidence and the people will want to remove that dictator. The irony here, that I hope has been explained in enough detail above, is that is most cases dictators only survive popular uprising because of Western support. Most Dictators are great friends of the West because they usually agree to open up the nations industry and business to foreign ownership for which they get a carte blache to do whatever they want. See Saudi Arabia as a prime example where the dictatorship is more brutal than anywhere else in earth but the press leaves them alone. For the Imperial Press to leave you alone requires high level agreements. The dictators we hate are the ones who challenge the West like Hitler or Hussein. Its this obvious double standard that complete rips apart the US narrative of desiring freedom and protection for the people of the World.

The Empire, or US led coalition AKA the US  ruled imperial coalition, works in its own interests and those interests are the enrichment of the wealthy international capitalists oligarchy that seek to plunder the globe.