Pentagon moving to increase US troop numbers in Iraq soon

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said Friday it was moving to increase the number of American forces in Iraq and announced that U.S. forces have killed the Islamic State’s finance minister. “We are systematically eliminating ISIL’s cabinet,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said.

I think Trump will have a mandate to make those in the Arab world take care of their own, or pay us to do it for you. I wonder if Trump knows how quickly relationships can change? I mean he had to maintain his image to keep people coming back to his buildings with his name on it. Is he going to keep that image, or become a leader.

In other words, is Trump going to put his name on this country or not? Would a leader?

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recommendations on ways to increase U.S. support for Iraq’s ground fight against IS are going to be discussed with President Barack Obama soon.

So muster up some cash Congress, if you got some kind of war to fight, or not. But let’s face it, this election might be the most important one you let happen–you need to commit yourself to something more than throw Obama out of the WH.

The Constitution has done that part for you, so who are you fighting? Not a big fan of the Constitution, eh?

“The secretary and I both believe that there will be an increase in U.S. forces in Iraq in coming weeks, but that decision hasn’t been made,” Dunford told Pentagon reporters during a briefing. He did not say how big that increase might be.

Yes Republicans, Obama hasn’t made that decision yet. Do you want Trump to do it? The answer maybe something voters need to listen to before the Middle East explodes, and not after, when it is out of our control.

One may say that we never had control in the first place. The difference between Shia and Sunni Arabs have been deemed unsolvable according to Islam, and, from what I have heard, climate change is taking away their water, neither which the Republican’s base believe we have control of.

I am just not sure Trump is saying that. That is the problem when living inside a bubble.

Source: Pentagon moving to increase US troop numbers in Iraq soon – Yahoo News

The Latest: Trump Says ‘I Don’t Care’ About Iowa Dispute

Trump, who on Wednesday was accusing Cruz of election fraud and calling for an Iowa do-over, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he’s so focused on the Feb. 9 contest in New Hampshire that “I don’t care about that anymore.”

Don’t care?

Wait a minute, Trump is helping to elect the next POTUS and he doesn’t care? #fail

Source: The Latest: Trump Says ‘I Don’t Care’ About Iowa Dispute – ABC News

Pattern Recognition: Entryways

Eventually Washington realized that a road that could be used to speed troops’ journey north could be used equally to speed troops’ journey south.

I am not a military person, so I am not sure what Washington’s strategy for invading Canada turned out to be, but I imagine that he decentralized his expeditionary forces along the border, and made every effort to win the hearts and minds of the locals. This strategy is also what I think the people on Thoughtfaucet are recommending Zillow implement.

Zillow, the real estate portal, purchased Diverse Solutions.

A portal is an entryway, but, in this case, I don’t think Zillow is local. It may be that the portal is located between two markets, one local one foreign, and the foreign investors behind global players such as U.S. Bank, the bank I tried to go through in mortgaging my property, are view by the locals as taking over.

As a global player, U.S. Bank wanted nothing to do with me, even when we offered a CD that would cover the mortgage. I was only “saved” by a local financial entity.

But the banks, such as U.S. Bank, did go for the high valued property, as that which we had to sell to settle my wife’s estate. And I think they got most of the high-valued property for a song.

From that song and dance my wife had to go through in selling her mother’s house, it sounds to me like the locals used the portal as a “Bayley Hazen Military Road” for quick access into the money market of a foreign country, but now the locals are angstiest. They didn’t learn from Washington, and now the flow has reversed.

So, if my assessment of Washington’s action to implement his strategy for invading Canada was correct, Thoughtfaucet are calling on Zillow to decentralize, and win the hearts and minds of the locals (real estate sales force). Once they win the hearts and minds of the local, Zillow won’t be viewed as an existential threat.

Web technologies such as that provided by Diverse Solutions and others, can very easily become a means for real estate agents to submit data directly to Zillow should trouble ensue with more formal access to the various MLS databases. In some ways, it might turn out to be more efficient for Zillow for this to occur anyway.

So in the end (a narrative to get from here to there using the ways and means outlined in the quote above) Zillow hires a gatekeeper, such as those on Thoughtfaucet, to open or close the portal like a faucet and, according to the magnitude of the perceived threat (small), everyone lives happily ever after.

The foreign object is now local (at least next to the border), and the locals could take advantage of the foreign object’s position in the world, a position that is getting stronger as the square foot of living space gets smaller due to climate change.

There is so much movement in the world, due to climate change, that the locals could ask, why not let at least some of that movement land here (local)?

Maybe because “here” is where politics and diplomacy starts, and our area might not be ready for either.

Nice!

Wait! Invade Canada????

via Pattern Recognition: Entryways – Thoughtfaucet.

Chart of the day: Why GM and SAIC naturally decided to pair up

Pretty obvious, actually.

Far short of merger, but the same logic holds:  you are weak where I am strong and vice versa.  Why not ally and crush all opposition on global basis.

This would-be globally integrated enterprise as a preview of globalization’s coming attractions.

From an Economist story on Chinese carmakers.

via Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Globlogization – Blog – Chart of the day: Why GM and SAIC naturally decided to pair up.

What Tom is describing is called a  “Cheap Trick” (Tempo, Venkatesh Rao).

Cheap Trick: In the Double Freytag model, the moment when a key insight turns around the trajectory of increasing entropy in a deep story. A cheap trick follows the exploration phase. The notion of cheap trick is essentially identical to Clausewitz’ notion of coup d’oeil (strike of the eye). Cheap tricks provide elegant, organizing insights that allow a decision-maker to make temporary and local sense of a high-entropy mental model. Cheap tricks also provide a window of opportunity for high-leverage decision-making.

The cheap trick in the deep story between GM and the Chinese corporation is defined in these words: “…you are weak where I am strong and vice versa.” In the exploration of the automobile market in both economies (east and west) have become so complex and the increase in what is not known is so great that the relationships in the narrative within the market has begun to spike into a Cheap Trick, to release both complexity and that what is not known.

A Cheap Trick is strategy, and in Tom’s example, the way (logic, of  the strategy) is defined in the words, “Why not ally and crush all opposition on a global basis.”

A cheap trick is strategy, but not the final strategy, so what is known about this Cheap Trick is that it is flawed. As Venkatesh says on page 77 in his book Tempo, “Every such insight is flawed, since it is based on excluding some part of reality as noise.”

What GM is excluding from some part of reality as noise is the fact that China is monopolizing the market around a benevolent leadership that is centralized. The reality is that the east (China) moves to a different tempo than the west (USA).

While the cheap trick and the logic behind it might be the same, GM and China (if one can distingush one as western and the other eastern anymore) have completely different Liminal Passages.

With different liminal passages, but with a need to achieve the same tempo (if harmony is desired between the east and west) the liminal passages have to merge. To merge the liminal passages, the separation event need to need to happen at a time that gives retrospection a chance to reach the same level in the deep story.

Once the same level has been reached in the deep story, the relationship between the east and west can grow deep together, if not close. Otherwise the east and west need to orient themselves within the same OODA loop, which is not easy if the relationship is not close in mind nor deep in heart.

The centralization of an authoritarian benevolent leadership that is represented in the phrase: “Why not ally and crush all opposition on a global basis” seems to be what is dividing most of the customers in the American market, and what both sides divided seem to not want.

The Tea Party (TP) and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) both seem to agree we need less centralization and neither are acting in a benevolent manner. While most Americans are not either TP nor OWS, the logic that binds these two is distintive American, i.e. they want freedom to act and freedom to decide.

It may prove hard to sell cars in such a divided market that is together on this one issue, the decentralization of the market into one deep passage that benefits only themselves.

It could be that the Cheap Trick that GM and China are using isn’t flawed in its logic, it is flawed in the end that both GM and China are equally moving towards, as they combine the means (resources) to that end.

As we are living within the “valley” of that Cheap Trick (we are obviously past the “sense making” of that trick) it may be that GM’s decision to centralize into one monopoly to rule the market together with a  benevolent China, will give the US customers cars that we need (cars that will not destroy the economies of the world) instead of what we want (cars that give us freedom).

However, giving us choices only of what we need has never worked out that well in America. It is going to be hard for GM and China to build cars China needs and the US wants, when considering the resources (means) used.

4GW

John Robb was talking the other day, and Zenpundit  later expanded, about how to enter into another’s OODA loop. I suggested one way of positioning inside another’s loop, but I have thought of another. You can enter into another’s OODA loop through flux. Flux is when your position is within another’s, in such a way that the image of Ying/Yang is displayed. It can be said that you are in the position of Ying/Yang with another. This is an insurgency (incumbent/insurgency) position called Fourth Generational Warfare (4GW).

Call it what you want, Fourth Generational Warfare or a Fourth Generational World, this is a civil war, as we become connected, because of Globalization in Communication, like never before.

Well, maybe not unlike before. There could have been 3 more or less other cycles, so this could be the twelfth or thirteen, but who knows? In fact, this 4GW stuff is probably what happens when the world historically becomes connect on a globe scale. Maybe in a Rome-Countrymen-lend-me-your-ear type connection.

The problem is that there is no 5GW to go forward towards a future worth living. Of course there actually is 5GW, but it is without ethics, and it is ethics that a movement like Ying/Yang is structurally built out of. Therefore, a 5GW world is a world without structure and without structure a thing doesn’t exist.

What’s so terrifying about 4GW is that neither the incumbent nor the insurgency has an advantage over the other; they simply move one country, or another, this way or that. They are perpendicular forces (Ying over yang is the exponent that defines the structure of the insurgency) that just steer the movement one way or the other. Think General Sherman here, as he marched across the South in a most un-American maneuver. At least un-American for, at the time,  an American North and South.

But I would say we have choices:

• We could continue to build a middle class, so the 1% incumbent force doesn’t over-power the 99%.
• We could go back to 1GW, which is happening on our southern border.
• We could go back to 2GW, which is happening on our northern border.
• We could continually engage in 3GW, as the US has been in Iraq and Afghanistan, to mention just a few.
• Or we could just continue to be terrified, as a war without ethics approaches.

It should be noted that the problem isn’t that the ethics of the American middle class has changed, as Paul Krugman’s graph shows us it hasn’t. If the ethic of the 99% had been the one changing so much, then there would have been big spikes in the addition/  subtraction of resources. The problem is that the ethics of the 1% is in constant change, as they “get religion” through the regulation of the market place, or lose their faith in the square.

Dunbar on the Middle East

As I have posted before, war is developing East and West between un-like people, but is being fought, North and South by like-people. The Middle East is a good representation of this phenomenon.

Arabs divide themselves as to those East of Egypt and those West of Egypt. I don’t know what this division is based on, but if I understand correctly, they believe those East are un-like those of the West. Genetically they are all Arabs, it is simply the part of genetics that is programed from the advantage the Arab takes from their environment that makes them different, East and West.

I don’t know that much about the environment on the East and West of Egypt, but the difference seems to be in the logic in the movement of Arabs, and those other peoples who lie East and West of each other. Those people North and South have similar environment, in which it gets colder the farther north you go and warmer the farther south. This phenomenon repeats itself  inversely at the southern hemisphere, where there are land masses. Because the world spins, pressure ridges form north and south that separate those east and west (think oceans as inverse ridges). The difference between the two, east and west, are caused by the environments that forms as the word spins.

Those of the East seem to follow the Eastern logic of the benevolent leader, while those of the West follow the logic of the strong father. They have taken on this logic because of the particular advantage it holds to the environment they observe.

The Eastern logic is more linear, while the Western is more non-linear. The benevolent leader forms attractive and repulsive forces that produce friction when they “slide” by one another. On the other hand, the strong father forms forces, of command and control, that are perpendicular to each other. The friction in the strong father is controlled by the vertical force of command.

Within the logic of the strong father, perpendicular forces form an area called a plane. This creates an exponent (area squared)  in the movement.
The exponent is commanded by the vertical perpendicular force, and controlled by the horizontal perpendicular force.

The Eastern logic forms forces of attraction and repulsion, which are added and subtracted linearally. The logic of a benevolent leader forms a sum of forces, which create the potential for movement when the sum is not zero. When the sum of the forces in the Eastern society are not zero, a center of gravity forms that attracts or repulses outside forces.

In the Middle East the forces of benevolentness are fighting the strong fathers. What this means to those of us in the USA is that the strong fathers will fight with the weapon they have always used, the price and availability of oil. We will see how those East and West in the USA react. We are becoming a society of benevolent leaders, but there is still some sentimental logic of the strong father in place.