Sarko: "casse-toi pauvre con!" (Sarko: get the f. out asshole)

ONN

Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports

China Eats Crow over faked photo of rare antelope

Pour les naturalistes non taxidermistes il y a une enigme a resoudre: la Chine voudrait nous faire croire que l'environnement de son capitalisme oligarchique est en parfaite symbiose avec le charme de la nature. Tout d'abord allez sur le lien et cliquez sur l'image pour savoir si la photo a ete photoshopee (modifiee sous Photoshop). Sur la photo vous verrez un troupeau de gazelles avec un train.
Il y a 5 indices qui peuvent nous laisser croire que cette photo a bel et bien ete retouchee par un logiciel graphique. Le premier indice qui saute aux yeux c'est le troupeau de gazelles qui ne semble pas etre inquiete par le bruit du train. Sur la photole troupeau est rectiligne, bien droit, avec un chef de fil habituellement. Or en theorie lorsqu'il y a des bruits etrangers, il n'y a plus de chef de troupeau et les gazelles partent dans tous les sens.

Et je vous laisse lire les 4 autres indices pour faire fretiller vous neurones.

Le pire dans l'histoire c'est que cette photographie a figure parmis les 10 plus images impressive des medias chinois en 2006.

PS: en Chine il y a des antilopes, pas africaines, mais tibetaines.

Transexuals in Iran

The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush

Il parait que Bush fils aurait viole une personne... By Jackson Thoreau opednews.com Early one Saturday afternoon in July 2003, I made a simple phone call to Margie Schoedinger, a Texas woman who filed a rape lawsuit against George W. Bush in December 2002. I expected to leave a message on a machine, so I was caught a little offguard when Schoedinger answered. She, too, sounded somewhat surprised I had called, saying she hadn't heard from many other reporters. But she talked to me for a few minutes about the legal action. "I am still trying to prosecute [the lawsuit]," said Schoedinger, a 38-year-old African-American woman who lived in the Houston suburb of Missouri City. "I want to get this matter settled and go on with my life." Well, Schoedinger hasn't gone on with her life. In fact, three months after I spoke to her, she died in an apparent suicide. And this matter remains unsettled. When I asked her in July 2003 about the lack of media coverage, Schoedinger said she wasn't seeking publicity. She said she did not even know about a December 2002 article in the Fort Bend Star, the only U.S. mainstream media outlet that covered this story, to my knowledge. The Fort Bend reporter, LeaAnne Klentzman, said she even went to Schoedinger's home and talked to a man there, who said she could not come to door. While I reached and spoke to Schoedinger on my first attempt, maybe she wasn't ready to talk back in December. Anyways, Schoedinger said she was surprised the case wasn't covered more because "it is true......People have to be accountable for what they do, and that's why I'm pursuing it." To be sure, Schoedinger's accusations - which include being drugged and sexually assaulted numerous times by Bush and other men purporting to be FBI agents - are bizarre and hard for most people to believe. But her story fits in with those told by a growing number of people who say they were used as guinea pigs or whatever by members of the CIA or another U.S. agency who wanted to test out the latest mind-controlling drug or just have a strange form of release. And her death - let's just say government agents have made murders look like suicides before. In her court petition, Schoedinger said police in Sugar Land, another Houston suburb where she said some assailants linked to Bush attempted to unsuccessfully abduct her from her car shortly before the 2000 election, refused to take a report or do anything about that incident. She filed a lawsuit against the Sugar Land department and said that in preparing its defense, Sugar Land police found out that she dated Bush as a minor. I didn't get a chance to ask Schoedinger about that tie and didn't meet her in person, but her driver's license listed her as being 5-foot-8 and weighing 125 pounds, for what that's worth. The Fort Bend Star story quoted a Sugar Land police captain saying his department had no record of any complaints by Schoedinger. All he had to do was what I did - go to the Fort Bend County Internet site and do a simple search on Schoedinger's name in the area of civil court records. I found the lawsuit Schoedinger filed in December 2000 against Sugar Land police, and it even had numerous responses by the department's attorneys in that case. Just wait. This story gets stranger. When I started asking Schoedinger about certain details of the case, such as alleged surveillance at her home and if she was still legally representing herself, she politely ended our conversation. "I need to see what has been written," Schoedinger said. "I feel like it's best for me to end our conversation." Obviously, she had learned to be careful about what she said and to whom she said it. I could understand her being leery about talking about her situation with a stranger over the phone. But I remember being puzzled by Schoedinger's attitude after hanging up the phone. I wondered that if she had made up such a wild story, why she didn't come up with something a little less outlandish, in which people couldn't necessarily dismiss her as a kook. I wondered why she didn't seek publicity to at least provide some form of protection. I've long learned that being as public as possible is one of your best defenses against rogue intelligence agents. But she didn't even seem to want any media to cover her story. I told several writers I knew, some of whom tried to contact Schoedinger. None succeeded, as far as I know. I remember thinking, "I hope she doesn't wind up on the wrong side of a gun." And sure enough, in late September, Schoedinger did. The Houston Chronicle wrote a bare-bones obituary that stated only that Schoedinger "expired" on Sept. 22, 2003, and her burial was at Houston Memorial Gardens. I called the Harris County Medical Examiner's office, and a clerk told me the cause of death: a "suicide" by a "gunshot wound to the head." I hung up amid bombs going off in my mind. For one, using a gun to commit suicide is predominantly executed by males, according to psychiatrists and other sources like pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co. Women are more likely to overdose on drugs, although the number of gunshot suicides among women has increased in recent years. Besides Pravda and Internet ezines - one of whom referred to Schoedinger as "deranged" - I haven't seen stories on this strange death of a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the U.S. president and wound up dead nine months later. I can't say I'm surprised. Or even angry. I don't know what the hell to think. All I know is I was one of the last - if not the last - reporters to speak to Schoedinger, and she didn't sound "deranged" to me in July 2003. She sounded like someone who had gone through something weird and was trying to sort it out. She sounded like someone who wanted the truth to come out. And now she's dead. If this had happened to Clinton when he was in the White House, do you think the story would have been covered non-stop on FOX, CNN and the right-wing talk shows? Do you think we'd have reporters asking Clinton and his people about this death in press conferences? Is FOX unfair and imbalanced to the point of being "deranged?" There are some more odd twists to this case. I also found a 2002 criminal case related to Schoedinger in which Christopher Schoedinger, her husband, allegedly struck her. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to a year in jail. Christopher Schoedinger had also filed for divorce. Then since 1997, Margie Schoedinger had filed for at least five assumed business names for various ventures - including a communications firm, health and beauty business, travel agency and publishing company. Could a "deranged" person start all those businesses or even know how to file a lawsuit? Schoedinger's lawsuit can still be viewed on the Fort Bend County site at http://ccweb.co.fort-bend.tx.us/localization/menu.asp - then go down to the bottom and click on civil court. Then type "schoedinger" in the plaintiff box and click search. You should find another lawsuit she filed against Sugar Land police, as well. I can really understand media members being intimidated, even frightened, of the Bush administration. As I've detailed before, these are not Boy Scouts running the show. The Schoedinger death is just the latest in a string of strange ones surrounding the Bush family - Bush biographer J.H. Hatfield, Sen. Paul Wellstone, Sen. Mel Carnahan, and others that are detailed on various sites, including at http://members.boardhost.com/gwbush/msg/362.html . For the record, I contacted Bush's media office about Schoedinger and have yet to hear back. Now that I live in the Washington, D.C., area, I can go down to the White House in person and try to get someone to speak to me about this case. As expected, I haven't had much luck with the Fort Bend County and other Texas authorities. So maybe I'll stand outside the White House, holding a sign saying, "Who killed Margie Schoedinger?" and passing out copies of my column on the case. It would make about as much sense as anything else in this matter. For all I know, maybe Schoedinger did kill herself. Maybe she dreamed up a lot of this stuff. But I don't know, am I "deranged" to think it's weird that in this mass-media, detailed-information age, so few people are even asking any questions about how a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the president could be dead less than a year later? Jackson Thoreau is an American writer and co-author of We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House. The updated, 120,000-word electronic book can be downloaded on his Internet site at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/ebook.html. Citizens for Legitimate Government has the earlier version at http://www.legitgov.org/we_will_not_get_over_it.html. He can be contacted at jacksonthor@yahoo.com or jacksonthor@justice.com .

An Errant Satellite Is Gone, but Questions Linger

WASHINGTON — Videotape of the Navy mission to shoot down a dying spy satellite made available Thursday shows an interceptor missile ascending atop a bright trail of burning fuel, and then a flash, a fireball, a plume of vapor. A cloud of debris left little doubt that the missile had squarely hit its mark as the satellite spent its final days orbiting more than 130 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

A different kind of doubt still lingers, though, expressed by policy analysts, some politicians and scientists, and not a few foreign powers, especially China and Russia:

Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the risk of a half-ton of frozen, toxic rocket fuel landing who knows where has passed? Or should they be worried about the latest display of the United States’ technical prowess, and see it as a thinly veiled test for a shadow antisatellite program?

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who personally gave the order to go ahead with the satellite shootdown Wednesday, told reporters in Hawaii on Thursday that he was prepared to share some details of the operation with China to ease its concerns that the debris might still prove dangerous. Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the commander of American forces in the Pacific, has reached out to several nations in the region to explain the mission, as well.

Addressing the diplomatic concerns, senior officials dismissed questions raised by the Chinese and the Russians, and echoed by some arms control analysts, about whether the episode was really a test of space weaponry. They pointed out that the missile used in the operation, the Navy’s SM-3 interceptor, was designed to counter a limited ballistic missile attack and had to be reprogrammed for this unexpected task, the likes of which the authorities are unlikely ever to face again.

In missile defense, an interceptor must find a red-hot enemy warhead as it arcs on a relatively short ballistic path, a task often described as “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” This time, the target — much larger then a warhead, almost the size of a school bus — was circling Earth predictably about 16 times a day.

It was still a bit of a long shot. The fuel tank that was the bull’s eye was only about 40 inches across.

And although the United States has hit test targets in space before — including a satellite destroyed in 1985 in a demonstration of an antisatellite weapon launched from a fighter jet — the successful demonstrations have been relatively few and far between.

What Wednesday’s successful strike in space conclusively proved was not infallibility but a robust and flexible military capability that can be cited by either side in what no doubt will be the ensuing debate.

The mission was conducted from Navy warships. So the United States can move this capability at will over three-quarters of the globe.

The missile-defense interceptor was converted to an antisatellite capability in little more than a month. No expensive research and development program. No battles with Congress over money. No starting from scratch on white boards in some laboratory.

This demonstration of military agility has to cause any adversary to pause.

“This was uncharted territory,” said Gen. James E. Cartwright of the Marines, who is vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The technical degree of difficulty was significant here.”

General Cartwright noted that important elements of the nation’s missile defense system had been used, in particular the sensors.

“That was the key piece that we would take from the missile defense system,” he said.

To ready the missile-defense rocket for the mission, he said: “We added a lot of instrumentation. We made some modifications to the software to be able to go after a satellite.”

In somewhat theatrical language, the mission was hailed by Riki Ellison, president of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, one of the more energetic groups promoting the development of ballistic missile defenses.

“The factual reality of using deployed missile defenses to destroy a falling satellite or a ballistic missile or even a meteor from space that would risk human life is an achievement for mankind,” a statement from the organization said.

Yet, even the successful mission in no way proves that the United States is safe from nuclear attack, or that it can do what it wants in space.

Mr. Gates, at the start of a weeklong series of meetings in Asia, said that the debate over whether the United States’ missile defense system worked was “behind us” but that issues remained about exactly what types of missile threats the system could be used against.

“The question of whether this capability works has been settled,” Mr. Gates said in Hawaii after a tour of the destroyer Russell, which participated in the satellite operation. “The question is against what kind of threat, how large a threat, how sophisticated a threat.”

The White House and the Pentagon said the hazard posed by the failed National Reconnaissance Office satellite was from its hydrazine fuel. It may be 24 to 48 hours before officials can state with certainty that the fuel tank was punctured and that the hydrazine is no longer a threat.

But Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said, “The geopolitical fallout of this intercept could be far greater than any chemical fallout that would have resulted from the wayward satellite.”

Mr. Markey said: “The Bush administration’s decision to use a missile to destroy the satellite based on a questionable ‘safety’ justification poses a great danger of signaling an ‘open season’ for other nations to test weapons for use against our satellites. Russia and China are sure to view this intercept as proof that the United States is already pursuing an arms race in space, and that they need to catch up.”

The Chinese warned Thursday that the United States Navy’s action could threaten security in outer space. Liu Jianchao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference in Beijing that the United States should promptly share data about the passage of the remaining pieces of the satellite.

“China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” Mr. Liu said, according to The Associated Press.

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Hawaii, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.

Social Skills VS Technology

By Steven Rix (aka politiquesusa)

In my last essay we found out that learning was a social skill. Now let's see the relation between social skills and technology. I also updated the essay, it was a casual conversation between Morris Berman from Dark Ages in America and I.

The human being is the only specie that learns by social skills. At least, that's what we are supposed to do but in this new age technical world, we have been losing the most essential basic things in our life for at least 3 reasons:

- The specialization of skills that require more technical involvements. Everything is cloistered nowadays, and it's harder to evolve. Jumping through different skills does not correspond anymore to the evolution and the demand of our world. And whenever it is not cloistered, it is harder to find a job because we remain superficial. Also who wants to hire a guy that knows about philosophy or sociology? We live in a technical world. And if you want to change your career in brand new fields, it won't take you only a few months to achieve such a performance.

- The lack of time in our life: we spend more time at work than personal time. People, when they get home from work, are worn out or wind up, they prefer to trust television networks, instead of finding the information for themselves. It might reduce our own intellectual convictions; they are often subject to propaganda or lies. In the US the culture of media networks is unhealthy. Media wants to convince you, there is no open space to conventional discussion and if you don't agree with them it is the highway. There is also the imperialist culture from the media: they want to be the center of interests. We barely know what's going on in the rest of the world, and when we know something about it; it often dissimulates an imperialistic reason.

- The familial explosion with divorce rates in Europe and the USA. How can you teach your dysfunctional kid good manners when he cannot even deal with the divorce of his own parents? The kids have all the chances to be dysfunctional because their parents (conventionally it has a union between a male and a female and it should be kept this way) give the kid different skills with their gender; in short this is why the dual function of parenthood is essential to the psychological normal development of the kid. If you remove the male or the female from the nurturing process of the kid's teenage years, then all efforts will be lost. Most of people will prefer to deal it with psychology while it is not even the place of psychology; it means we adapted our tools of thinking to the evolution of our civilization, and that's not good because we are losing our own values, we are not in control anymore.

Even the tribes from Sri Lanka know how to deal with their own life. Most of their health problems are solved by drinking 6 glasses of water everyday without eating anything for 1 hour. We used to do that in the western world, didn't we? Water (the human being is made with 75% of water) should be part of our daily life. It can cure many diseases (IE arthritis, sinusitis, diabetes...etc) but the western world prefers to deal with conventional chemical medicine when it's usually too late.

The list of our social skills that we have lost through the so-called “greatest” emancipation of the western culture is horrible. It is no even a paradox in fact, we preferred to dominate technologically without worrying about the true nature of the human being; the human being became more like an accessory for technologies, and his role and values are lost. It's going to be harder to go backwards and get out of this spiral.

I believe one of the most important values that we lost is called PATIENCE. Today we take everything for granted. We got the credit-cards to help us buying anything on impulse. And most of the times we don't even need it. Also there is this obsession to replicate something with the same objects. When one object works fine, why not buying another one? There is no more pleasure in saving money and get only the things we really need. Technologically we might believe we are at the edge but it's not necessarily true. In the western culture when we buy our little technical devices, we want them to work right away and if we can't, there is always the technical support to help us. In Japanese culture by contrast, they love it when its super super complicated technologically. The more the device is complicated and the better the chances of sales (welcome to the consumerist world) is going to explode. So what does that tell us? Our materialistic needs have to be satisfied right away. There is no more understanding to take the time to comprehend the different technical features of a device. I have seen the marketing example of the new PDA Sony Clio. Its capabilities were very complicated, the product sold like crazy in Japan but it completely failed in the USA and in Europe too. It's only one example, but you can see at least the referential between the human being and his social skills in the place of the technological world. It's pretty bad; we never abolished slavery, we are the slaves of the technical world.

Well, this wd require a very long answer. What comes to mind (briefly) is the distinction Robt Redfield made between the technical order and the moral one. The tech order, supposedly, makes progress over time. The moral order--no evidence for that, obviously. This distance between the two is creating ever-greater problems for us, so that now the US is (correctly) viewed by much of the rest of the world as a baby with a bazooka in its hands. Even then, there is evidence that tech advances are not advances--e.g. recent New Yorker discussion of digitalized knowledge impacting infant brains so that they are unable to think in deep or complicated ways, i.e. forever. A huge subject, in any case.

Thanx for writing-
mb

Indeed it is a huge deep subject that cannot be solved just in one day because it takes into consideration lots of knowledge and investigations in retrospection to the achievement of the human being, but I think it would be a good subject of discussion to find out where we are right now in this world. Maybe an easiest way to contemplate the mind of the human being is a little initiation to philo-anthropology (I don't know if anybody heard about this new school of thought), I happened to discuss with the father of philo-anthropology, he's now in his 80s, a very modest guy whose intellectual lucidity always amazed me. This guy had a tremendous impact on my life, he met people like the philosophers Heidegger or Sartre, and he even translated the writings from Erasmus on the authentic manuscript.

To keep it "simple" (because nothing is simple) historically there was a time called "Erudition". Back then there was a precious desire to learn and read everything because Europe had sunken previously into the civilization shipwrecking for more than 7 centuries under the rigid biblical laws of the Inquisition in France, and Spain and other countries. Progressively, since knowledge was graduating exponentially, the human being realized he had to make clear choices on the destiny of his life, and started to look into more specific fields than an average vision on the existence of his daily life. This period is very important because it is the time that some of the social skills (the basic ones such as DIY skills) started disappearing. In other words it means that through social complexity, we lost basic tasks for our primary and even secondary needs. For example, there was a time that the human being was trying to balance knowledge (intellect) with sports (physic). Nowadays you can't even find that anymore in any society, the western term mostly often used is something like "geek" or "nerd". Another example: our western Democracies. In a true Democracy people elect a President according to their wishes. Nowadays our western Presidents try to tell us what to do. In the ancient Greece of Athens, the voices of the people were clearly represented; it was not represented by the 1% of the US population for sure. Of course things were not working out quite well over there, the human being had different functions between masters and slaves, but again I don't think this ever changed in our actual societies. So the human being did evolve for sure, but did he really evolve from himself? (Conditioning VS true learning). And if not, then why all these little things from the past that were so obvious to the human mind are completely omitted nowadays? These are the kind of questions you have to answer yourself for your own sanity, whether people think they are "conservators" or "liberals".

A friend of mine who conducts studies in neurology told me that the closest computer language to the brain is the C language. C or more generally C++ language is difficult; you have to learn oriented objects, then the MFCs and other foundations before writing a code. We can reproduce lots of complex tasks but technologies especially public technologies want to simplify our way of life. Technologies are supposed to be good, that said we need to understand why within 2050 there may be statistically almost 50% of the population with the Alzheimer’s disease. This is why we should not keep everything so simple in life. There has been a sort of robotisation in our lives without even acknowledging it. The most famous example I could find is the conversation in the south of the US when 2 acquaintances start speaking in a formal way. They start talking and they know for sure what word is going to follow (it's like "Hey how is it going?" then "just chill in' pal"). I've never been able to explain that, and I am not even sure that you may see what I mean. It's more like a "conditioning" or associative way of speaking. Well I took the US example but there are many other examples in other cultures.

In philosophy, everything we do in life is for our offspring. What are we going to tell our grandchildren when they'll find out that we exhausted the Earth from it resources, destroying everything into a global warming? We are good to pre-empt (a soviet term that does not even exist in international laws to mask an illegal invasion in a country that had no WMD) a war in Iraq or denounce a genocide in Darfur, but we can't even look at ourselves in the mirror, or maybe we tend to go religious for some of us because we look unconsciously into ways of being forgiven. For sure we keep repeating history; the human being does not know how to justify his existence without imposing his visions (foremost materialistic) to the rest of the world. That might tell us how miserable the Human Being on Earth is, and how macabre he is to come up with religious myths. While the universe is expanding without an end, the reason of the human being and his psycho-politics has been shrinking to an atrophied brain in the western world.

How oil burst the American bubble

By Michael T Klare

The economic bubble that lifted the stock market to dizzying heights was sustained as much by cheap oil as by cheap (often fraudulent) mortgages. Likewise, the collapse of the bubble was caused as much by costly (often imported) oil as by record defaults on those improvident mortgages. Oil, in fact, has played a critical, if little commented on, role in America's current economic enfeeblement - and it will continue to drain the economy of wealth and vigor for years to come.

The great economic mega-bubble arose in the late 1990s, when oil was cheap, times were good, and millions of middle-class families aspired to realize the "American dream" by buying a three (or more) bedroom house on a decent piece of property in a



nice, safe suburb with good schools and various other amenities. The hitch: few such affordable homes were available for sale - or being built - within easy commuting range of major metropolitan areas or near public transportation. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, for example, the median sale price of existing homes rose from $290,000 in 2002 to $446,400 in 2004; similar increases were posted in other major cities and in their older, more desirable suburbs.

This left home buyers with two unappealing choices: take out larger mortgages than they could readily afford, often borrowing from unscrupulous lenders who overlooked their overstretched finances (that is, their "subprime" qualifications); or buy cheaper homes far from their places of work (the "exurbs"), which ensured long commutes, while hoping that the price of gasoline remained relatively low. Many first-time home buyers wound up doing both - signing up for crushing mortgages on homes far from their places of work.

The result was metastasizing exurban home developments along the beltways that surround major American cities and along the new feeder roads that now stretched into the distant countryside beyond. In some cases, those new homeowners found themselves up to 80 kilometers or more from the urban centers in which their only hope of employment lay. Data released by the US Census Bureau in 2004 show that virtually all of the fastest-growing counties in the country - those with growth rates of 10% or more - were located in exurban areas like Loudoun County, Virginia or Henry County, Georgia.

At the same time, cheap oil and changing consumer tastes - pushed along by relentless advertising campaigns - led many of the same Americans to trade in their smaller, lighter cars for heavy SUVs or pickup trucks, which, of course, meant only one thing - a significant increase in oil consumption. According to the Department of Energy, total petroleum use rose from an average of 17 million barrels per day in 1990 to 21 million barrels in 2004, an increase of 24% - most of it being burned up on American roads.

Let the good times roll (into the exurbs)
In 1998, when the bubble was taking shape, crude oil cost about $11 a barrel and the US produced half of the petroleum it consumed; but that was the last year in which the fundamentals were so positive. American reliance on imported petroleum crossed the 50% threshold that very year and has been rising ever since, while the cost of imported oil hit the $100 per barrel mark this January 2 for the first time, an all-time record (though the price was once briefly higher, as measured in older, less-inflated dollars).

When that steady price climb, combined with growing dependence on imported petroleum, was translated into the new exurban landscape the economic bubble began to shudder. As a start, there was that ever-increasing outflow of dollars needed just to pay for all those barrels of crude and the resulting surge in America's foreign-trade deficit.

Consider this: In 1998, the United States paid approximately $45 billion for its imported oil; in 2007, that bill is likely to have reached $400 billion or more. That constitutes the single-largest contribution to America's balance-of-payments deficit and a substantial transfer of wealth from the US economy to those of oil-producing nations. This, in turn, helped weaken the value of the dollar in relation to key foreign currencies, especially the euro and the Japanese yen, boosting the cost of other imported foreign goods and so threatening to fuel inflation at home.

Meanwhile, two critical developments kept the cost of oil rising: a dramatic increase in global demand, largely driven by the emergence of China and India as major consuming nations; and a pronounced slowdown in the expansion of global supply, due mainly to a dearth of new discoveries and recurring political disorder in key oil fields already in production. This meant that American energy consumers - including all those long-distance commuters with crippling mortgages and gas-guzzling SUVs - had to compete with newly-affluent Chinese and Indian consumers for access to ever more costly supplies of imported petroleum. Something had to give.

As the oil import bill kept rising, the value of the dollar kept falling, and inflationary pressures kept building, the country's central bankers responded in classic fashion by raising interest rates. This naturally resulted in substantially higher monthly payments for homeowners with variable-rate mortgages. For many families already stretched to the limit, this would prove the final blow. Forced to default on their mortgages, they then precipitated the subprime crisis by, in effect, puncturing the bubble.

Even then, the economy might have had a chance had that crisis not come in tandem with the $100 barrel of oil. By December, consumers were cutting back on nonessential purchases, producing the most disappointing holiday retail season since 2001. When questioned, many indicated that the high cost of gasoline and home-heating fuel had forced them to economize on Christmas gifts, winter vacations, and other indulgences. "If gasoline prices go up, that means there's less to spend on everything else," said David Greenlaw, chief US fixed-income analyst at Morgan Stanley.

The high price of gasoline was bad news for another pillar of the economy as well: the auto industry. While Japanese companies were busy rolling out hybrid vehicles and small, fuel-efficient conventional cars, Detroit stuck doggedly to its now-obsolete business model of producing large SUVs and light trucks, which had, in recent years, been the source of most of its profits. Once the price of oil went stratospheric, of course, Americans predictably stopped buying the gas guzzlers, signing what looked like an instant death certificate for an improvident industry.

In 1999, for example, Ford sold more than 428,000 mid-sized Explorer SUVs; in the first 11 months of 2007, the equivalent number was 126,930 Explorers (and even that puts a gloss on the corpse, as November was one of the worst months in recent automotive history). An auto industry in decline naturally means that many ancillary industries will be facing contraction, if not disaster.

Popping the bubble
Then came January 2. Although oil retreated from the $100 mark by the end of that day on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the damage had been done. Stocks on the New York Stock Exchange plummeted, suffering their worst loss on a New Year debut since 1983. Gold, meanwhile, soared to an all-time high - a sure indication of international anxiety about the vigor of the US economy.

Since then, stock market panics have hit major financial centers around the world. Only a dramatic last-minute decision by the Federal Reserve to reduce overnight lending rates by three-quarters of a point before the markets opened on January 22 averted a further, potentially catastrophic slide in stock prices. Many analysts now believe that a recession is inevitable - possibly a long and especially painful one. A few are even mentioning the "D" word, for depression.

Whatever happens, the American economy will eventually emerge from this crisis significantly weaker, largely because of its now-inescapable dependence on imported oil. Over the past decade, this country has squandered approximately one and a half trillion dollars on imported oil, much of which has been poured down the tanks of grotesquely fuel-inefficient vehicles that were conveying drivers on ever lengthening commutes from the exurbs to employment in center cities.

Today, a large share of this money is deposited in so-called sovereign-wealth funds (SWFs). Americans should get used to that phrase. It stands for giant pools of wealth that are under the control of government agencies like the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. These SWFs now control approximately $3 trillion in assets, and, with more petrodollars pouring into the petro-states every day, they are projected to hit the $12 trillion mark by 2015.

What are those who control the sovereign-wealth funds doing with all this money? For one thing, buying up choice US assets at bargain-basement prices. In the past few months, Persian Gulf SWFs have acquired a significant stake in a number of prominent American firms, giving them a potential say in the future management of these companies. The Kuwait Investment Authority, for example, recently took a $12 billion stake in Citigroup and a $6.5 billion share in Merrill Lynch; the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority acquired a $7.5 billion stake in Citigroup; and Mubadala Development of Abu Dhabi purchased a $1.5 billion share in the privately-held Carlyle Group.

These acquisitions are just a small indication of a massive, irreversible shift in wealth and power from the United States to the petro-states of the Middle East and energy-rich Russia. These countries, notes the International Monetary Fund, are believed to have raked in $750 billion in 2007 and are expected to do even better this year - and each year thereafter. What this means is not just the continuing enfeeblement of the American economy, but an accompanying decline in global political leverage.

Nothing better captures the debilitating nature of America's dependence on imported oil than President George W Bush's humiliating recent performance in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He quite literally begged Saudi King Abdullah to increase the kingdom's output of crude oil in order to lower the domestic price of gasoline. "My point to His Majesty is going to be, when consumers have less purchasing power because of high prices of gasoline - in other words, when it affects their families, it could cause this economy to slow down," he told an interviewer before his royal audience. "If the economy slows down, there will be less barrels of [Saudi] oil purchased."

Needless to say, the Saudi leadership dismissed this implied threat for the pathetic bathos it was. The Saudis, indicated Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi, would raise production only "when the market justifies it". With that, they made clear what the whole world now knows: The American bubble has burst - and it was oil that popped it. Thus are those with an "oil addiction" (as Bush once termed it) forced to grovel before the select few who can supply the needed fix.

Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. His newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, will be published by Metropolitan Books in April 2008.

Souvenirs of Abu Ghraib

NO COMMENT

Russia tracks rogue U.S. satellite, contains nuclear material

MOSCOW, February 15 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's Defense Ministry is closely monitoring a U.S. spy satellite that has gone out of control and may have nuclear material on board, a high-ranking defense source said on Friday.

"The Defense Ministry is using its space surveillance systems to track the satellite's movement in orbit," he said.

Russian military experts suggest the satellite could have an on board nuclear power source, a senior parliament member said.

Igor Barinov, first deputy chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, also expressed concern that the U.S. had made a unilateral decision to destroy the satellite.

He said that decisions, which could jeopardize collective security, "should be made taking into account all parties concerned and all countries involved in space research."

The U.S. Defense Department said Thursday it would shoot down the decaying satellite, which it earlier considered to be low risk. The department said the chances that the "uncontrollable U.S. experimental satellite" will hit a populated area are small, but "the potential consequences would be of enough concern to consider mitigating actions."

The satellite was launched in 2006 and malfunctioned almost immediately. On board is around 1,000 pounds of propellant fuel (hydrazine), a hazardous material.

President George W Bush has authorized the destruction of the satellite using a sea-to-air missile within the next few days.

Earlier the director of the Henry L. Stimson Center, which monitors space security and research Michael Krepon, said that the reasons given for shooting down the satellite were "unpersuasive," adding previous satellites that had gone out of control had not caused any damage.

"The president has decided to take action to mitigate the risk to human lives by engaging the nonfunctioning satellite," the Defense Department explained in a news announcement. "Because our missile defense system is not designed to engage satellites, extraordinary measures have been taken to temporarily modify three sea-based tactical missiles and three ships to carry out the engagement."

Several government agencies are involved in monitoring and planning for re-entry of the satellite.

A new force flexes muscles in Iraq

By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail

BAQUBA, Iraq - The Awakening Councils in Diyala province are stepping up their protests against the government in Baghdad.

The Awakening Councils, or the Sahwa as they are called, are a mostly Sunni Muslim force set up by the US to draw in resistance fighters into their ranks and aid US forces.

The Sahwa have been engaged in a growing conflict with the largely Shi'ite Muslim forces of the Iraqi government.

It was sparked off by the rape and murder of two Sunni women, allegedly by members of Shi'ite militia that are backed by the government. The Sahwa in Diyala province, just north of Baghdad, have been demanding dismissal of police chief Major General Ghanim al-Qureyshi, a Shi'ite.

"We demand the resignation of Qureyshi because he is sectarian, and every crime against Sunnis has been committed in his knowledge," Sahwa leader Abu Qutaiba told Inter Press Service (IPS). "We also want to put the issue of prisoners on the table of debate. Their cases should be reviewed by fair people. All prisoners were arrested on the basis of sectarian information."

Qutaiba added, "Prisons are filled with Sunnis while Shi'ites enjoy jobs, power and authority. We blame Americans for relying on false Shi'ite information, which serves the sectarian appeal and Iranian agenda. We want the truth to see the sun."

The government, far from rebuking the provincial police chief, has given him a promotion.

On February 11, hundreds of Sahwa fighters demonstrated in Baquba, 40 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, demanding dismissal of Qureyshi and threatening to quit their jobs as neighborhood guards if he remained. Many have since left their US$300 monthly posts in protest.

The demonstrations have drawn in people from all around Iraq's volatile Diyala province with streets filled with people hoisting protest banners. The Sahwa want to show they are a power that Baghdad cannot ignore.

A rally last Sunday led to armed clashes between Iraqi police and Sahwa members, in which three policemen were killed.

Abu Haider al-Katib, spokesman for the 1920s Revolution Brigades, the largest of the Sahwa components, told reporters that if their demands were not met, they would "take up arms" against the police "and US troops if they support the police".

"We want jobs, that have been denied to Sunnis," Abu Haider, another Sahwa leader in the city told IPS. "Americans and the Prime Minister [Nuri al-Maliki] promised that members of the Sahwa would be included as permanent Iraqi security forces. People want us to be official forces because they trust our seriousness in protecting our province. We restored life to streets and made people feel safe again."

So far only 10% of nearly 80,000 Sahwa members have been admitted into training for police and army jobs.

A member of a local Sahwa, referring to himself as Abu Noor, told IPS that their demands also included "an end to the licentious behavior of the sectarian police. From the time the militants left the streets, the police have behaved badly. We want the police and army to respect people. We want all Iraqis to feel that they are of great value in their country."

The Sahwa are clearly gaining power in areas like Baquba - a phenomenon which threatens the government, and its army and police forces.

Ahmed Ali, IPS's correspondent in Iraq's Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, IPS's US-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region.

Nouveau riche must follow the rules

By Ehsan Ahrari


The annual assessment of the Director of National Intelligence almost always captures top headlines. But the assessment of February 6 was the first in describing a possible collusion between Russia, China and Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)as a "financial threat" to the US. When one gets away from the sensational headline, the gist of the story is that the United States is afraid that these actors "could use their growing financial clout to advance political goals ..."

But one must keep in mind that OPEC, China and Russia - since they are the owners of billions of reserves in US dollars, which OPEC and Russia have earned through oil and gas trade, and which China is spending in acquiring secure energy sources - are also worried about the continued weakening of that currency and



are actively and openly discussing the likelihood of using either a basket of currencies for their respective payments or completely switching over to the euro.

It is also well-known that China and Russia view their highly visible financial status as a political tool, which they will use to maximize their interests. All countries do this. The United States has been a master in this realm. If anything, China and Russia seem to be developing their future courses of action by keenly studying those of the United States. But none of those actors are likely to take any action that would damage America's global standing. Even if their political differences with the US were to push them in the direction of harming its interests, the interconnectedness of their economic interests in a highly globalized economy would serve as the chief deterrence.

Ensuring ready access to secure sources of energy has been one of the vital interests of the United States. That objective also serves as one of the constants in America's presence and interests in the Middle East. When the US became one of the chief targets of the Arab oil embargo in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, it even threatened to capture oil fields in Saudi Arabia through military action.

The United States relied heavily on Western oil companies for the supply of not only its own energy needs but also those of other industrial countries. It might not have played a direct role in the significance of futures markets in the international energy transactions starting in the early 1980s, but it did not take any action to undermine their role either. It did sanction the role of long-term energy contracts between oil-producing countries and Western multinational oil corporations, for they guaranteed against haphazard price fluctuations.

In other words, America's energy policies have fully complemented its global interests, as they do now. The energy policies of China and Russia are no different in that regard.

The international dimensions of China's energy strategy include: seeking oil and gas reserves in Asia and the Middle East (Iran supplies 14% of China's oil imports and Saudi Arabia exports 17% of China's oil needs); Africa (Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo), Latin America (Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador), and Central Asia (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan). China already imports 64% of Sudanese oil production.

Regarding Central Asia, according to one source, "China is setting up extensive railway linkages over two different routes to oil-rich Central Asia. The connectivity to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan will enhance the competitiveness of Chinese oil companies bidding for energy assets in those countries ..."

China is fully aware of America's dependence in West Africa. A dispatch of the January 28 China Post notes, "West Africa already provides 17% of US oil imports." Since the United States is keen to ease its reliance on Middle Eastern energy, its dependence on West Africa is likely to rise to 25% by 2015.

The second dimension of China's energy strategy is the establishment of pipeline networks involving Iran, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia. The chief driving force of China's oil pipeline strategy is that 80% of its energy supplies pass through the Strait of Malacca, which can be easily blocked. Besides, America's warships maintain a large and constant presence. Reliance on overland pipelines reduces China's vulnerability.

Thinking the unthinkable
Not that China expects a hot conflict with the US. It is all part of its contingency planning and its attempts to cover all bases, including "thinking about the unthinkable". In this context, one has to understand how significant Myanmar's offshore Shwe gasfield reserves have become for China.

Both China and India competed for this, but Myanmar chose to sell it to China. China intends to build pipelines connecting Myanmar's west coast to the mainland by 2010. Even though the size of this gas reserve is not that significant compared with China's enormous energy needs, the proximity of that country to China enhances its importance.

The third characteristic of China's energy strategy is to proactively seek oil reserves in far-off places, sign joint-venture or production contracts with those governments and make generous offers to construct infrastructure as "icing on the cake". Such arrangements are especially popular in African countries, where they are direly needed. In the West, China's energy proactivism is derisively referred to as "energy mercantilism".

The final characteristic of China's strategy is energy cooperation with Russia in upstream as well as downstream operations. The chief architect of Russia's energy strategy is President Vladimir Putin. Even as a strategy, it is only a small part of Putin's overall "vision" for his country, which, in his view, is constantly mistreated by the United States. He accuses Washington of overstepping Russia's national borders "in every way ... in the economic, political and cultural policies it imposes on other nations".

In Putin's assertion of Russia's position, energy has become an important factor. Russia has the world's largest gas reserves and the third-largest oil reserves, and he has decided to use them to enable his country to emerge as a superpower. For that reason, he decided to increase state control of Gazprom - Russia's largest energy company and the largest extractor of natural gas - and to complete state control of pipeline networks that deliver fuel to the West.

Another aspect of Putin's energy strategy is to enhance the role of Russia-backed, rigid, bilateral, private, long-term supply contracts. The unstated but enormous outcome of Russia's policy is whittling away the importance of liberal US-based oil markets that are also dominated by the US dollar.

One must also examine the nature of cash reserves for China, Russia and OPEC states to understand why any possible collusion among these actors might not necessarily be harmful to US interests.

China's cash reserves in May 2007 were reported by CNN as follows: "With $1.2 trillion in reserves, most of it in dollar-backed assets, China plans to launch the world's largest investment fund. It could play havoc with the US economy." It says an influx of funds in the first three months of 2007 "boosted China's foreign reserves to $1.2 trillion - an Everest of money that towers over reserves held by any other nation." These numbers have only gone up in 2008.

According to a report in the February 1 edition of the Boston Globe, "Russia accumulated $157 billion in its oil proceeds fund, one of 40 or so sovereign wealth funds worldwide with a total of $2.5 trillion under management."

Regarding OPEC income, the Energy Information Administration - "the data bank of the US Department of Energy" - estimates that members of OPEC earned $675 billion in net oil export revenues in 2007, a 10% increase from 2006. Saudi Arabia earned the largest share of these earnings, $194 billion, representing 29% of total OPEC revenues. On a per-capita basis, OPEC net oil export earning reached $1,147 billion, an 8% increase from 2006. Based on projections from the Energy Information Administration January 2008 Short Term Energy Outlook, OPEC net oil export revenues could be $850 billion in 2008 and $783 billion in 2009.

Legitimate - not malevolent
Given the vast sums of dollar reserves, it is perfectly legitimate for OPEC as well as for Russia and China to seek the "best possible means" to sustain the value of their final accumulation. There is nothing perverse or malevolent about such actions.

An important characteristic of the American political scene is that phrasemakers describing a phenomenon or a change of a given time - especially when it is of a major import - capture the public's attention. Then the public perception that revolves around that phrase accepts it as the "real thing". US columnist Charles Krauthammer coined the metaphor "unipolar moment" when the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States survived as the lone superpower.

That phrase became the anchor for all the specialists and analysts who saw the United States as the unassailable superpower whose military forces could not be challenged and whose economic prowess would not be seriously daunted. The phrase unipolar global order also came into vogue.

However, after the United States faced a seemingly indefatigable insurgency in Iraq, the phrasemakers started to gather around the metaphor "nonpolar" world, with the United States "too strong to stand on the sidelines, but too weak to implement its agenda alone".

What is closer to reality is that there never was a unipolar moment when the US could implement its agenda alone. Its involvement in Iraq only underscored a reality that existed all along, but was ignored by all those who were swept away by the fact that the Soviet Union imploded and the United States survived. However, that reality had little relevance to America's supposed "absolute" power to do anything it desired.

Since the United States has faced challenges, such as the high-tech bubble bursting, deficits rising, the Iraq war going sour, the shine on the American model has dimmed, and the unipolar American moment is deemed over. This is in part a casualty of the George W Bush administration's political and economic policies, in large part the result of global economic changes that are shifting wealth elsewhere.

In this moment of pessimism, one tends to misread the conventional political activities of Russia, China and OPEC to maximize their respective economic payoffs as potentially damaging to US interests. Even if their antagonisms toward the United States were to push them in the direction of harming its interests, the interconnectedness of their economic interests in a highly globalized economy would serve as the chief deterrence.

The economic realities of a globalized world are more brutal about harming the interests of all major actors, if one or more of them is tempted to become too self-centered about promoting just its own interests. As much as the globalized world is changing, that particular reality has remained and will remain unaltered.

Ehsan Ahrari is professor of Security Studies (Counterterrorism) at the Asia-Pacific Center of Security Studies. Views expressed in this essay are strictly private and do not reflect those of the APCSS, the United States Pacific Command, or any other agency of the US government.

Iran tests sounding rocket, unveils first homemade satellite

How can we measure the international role of Iran?

TEHRAN/MOSCOW, February 4 (RIA Novosti) - Iran successfully launched on Monday a sounding rocket as a preliminary step toward sending its first homemade research satellite into orbit, national media said.

Iran's state television earlier reported that Iranian scientists had built the Omid (Hope) research satellite under a project that took 10 years to complete. The satellite was unveiled on Monday during an official ceremony and may be launched by March 2009.

"We need to have an active and influential presence in space," said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who attended the rocket launch and the opening of the first national space launch center.

A sounding rocket, also called a research rocket, is an instrument-carrying craft designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight.

Iranian media gave no details about the rocket, called Kavoshgar-1, but some experts believe it could be a variant of the Shahab-3 missile, which has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,200 miles).

Iran's official news agency IRNA said the Omid advanced research satellite had been designed to operate in a low earth orbit and provide a variety of scientific data.

Iran's space program, along with other technological advancements in the country that have potential military applications, has been received warily by Western powers which suspect Tehran of secretly developing nuclear weapons.

Sinah-1, the first Iranian satellite, was built by Russia and launched on October 28, 2005 on a Kosmos-3 booster rocket from North Russia's Plesetsk Space Center, making Iran the 43rd country to possess its own satellite.

However, Iran still hopes to become a satellite-launching nation.

A day at the beach in China

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Is capitalism a polymorphous destroyer of codes, and what is the relation between capitalism and schizos?

Here are 2 contradictions:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution

Jonah Peretti



This article demonstrates the psychological link between one-dimensionality and advertising.



In the time that it has taken to write and publish this paper, Internet shopping has entered mainstream culture. Every major corporation in the world has a web site offering product information, interactive advertisements, and, increasingly, the ability to buy products on-line. Discount books (www.amazon.com), pizza delivery (www.PizzaNet.net), stocks (www.schwab.com), and just about anything else you can imagine (virtumall.com) are available for purchase in cyberspace. Internet based commerce exemplifies and extends the trends in capitalism that this paper attempts to elucidate. In particular, World Wide Web shopping accelerates the rate at which a shopper can acquire products. The only thing that separates an advertisement from a purchase is a couple of mouse clicks. My central contention is that late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities. The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation.
Connecting capitalism and identity formation requires extensive contextualization. A considerable portion of this essay is spent wading through the murky waters of Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Evaluating competing theories of identification is essential to my project. What is meant by identification? This preliminary question informs my discussion of how identification functions in the media saturated world of late capitalism and, more importantly, the issue of how identities can be fostered that resist the logic of commodification.

1. Capitalism and Schizophrenia


I focus my discussion of identification by comparing two contradictory texts. The first is the groundbreaking essay by Fredric Jameson, entitled, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (1983). The second is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's controversial book Anti-Oedipus (1983). Jameson's essay and Anti-Oedipus present two distinct perspectives on how subjects form identities within late capitalism. Although very different, both texts approach identification through an analysis of schizophrenia and capitalism. To further explore these two themes, I place these texts in conversation with each other and with other texts that focus more narrowly on psychoanalytic studies of contemporary visual culture.
Jameson associates postmodern aesthetic and cultural movements with the psychoanalytic category of schizophrenia. Borrowing from Lacan, Jameson defines schizophrenia as "the failure of the infant to accede fully into the realm of speech and language" (Jameson 118). The schizoid neonate fails to fully acquire language, and as a result cannot individuate, because the infant must enter into a social/linguistic field to develop an ego. Jameson writes that:

schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the "I" and the "me" over time (119).

According to Jameson, the schizophrenic lacks a personal identity, is unable to differentiate between self and world, and is incapable of experiencing continuity through time.
There are several reasons why Jameson associates these attributes of schizophrenia with postmodernism and late capitalism. In many respects the media culture of the late twentieth century simulates schizoid experience. The rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewers sense of temporal continuity. To use the same words that Jameson uses to describe schizophrenic experiences, the images that flash across the MTV viewers' retina are "isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence." This postmodern montage can have the effect of disorienting the subject, and may contribute to the egolessness that is characteristic of schizophrenia.
Jameson is concerned that the emerging postmodern art forms will lack the subversive, critical function that modernist art served. "[M]odernism was oppositional art," asserts Jameson. It "did not go well with overstuffed Victorian furniture, with Victorian moral taboos, or with the conventions of polite society" (123-124). As modernism lost its subversive nature and became canonized (i.e. Picasso, Elliot, Sartre, etc.) it is unclear weather postmodernism filled in as a radical social/political movement. By destroying the distinction between high and low art, postmodern culture was able to integrate itself into the capitalist mass culture. MTV can serve as our example once again. For all its sexual explicitness, MTV fails to shock, and contributes to capitalist culture more than it threatens it. Thus, Jameson concludes that "postmodernism is closely related to... late capitalism" (125). Where modernism often attacked the bourgeois society from which it emerged, postmodernism "replicates... reproduces... [and] reinforces... the logic of consumer capitalism" (125). Jameson leaves open the possibility that "there is also a way in which [postmodernism]... resists" the logic of capitalism (125). Nevertheless, he reveals his Marxist background and modernist leanings through his skepticism toward the political potential of postmodernism.
Jameson links schizophrenia to postmodernism, and postmodernism to consumer capitalism. He is saying, in effect, that contemporary capitalism has extended the symptoms of schizophrenia to the masses in the form of postmodern culture. His formulation sees both postmodernism and schizophrenia as cultural forces that scramble and confuse. The schizophrenic confusion destroys the possibility of critical perspectives, such as those found in modernist traditions. In a fragmented cultural milieu, capitalist, consumer culture can thrive unopposed. When Jameson diagnoses our culture as schizophrenic, he is telling us that our culture is not fully human. A schizophrenic culture fails "to accede fully into the realm of speech and language." (118) Like the schizophrenic, such a culture is rootless, separated from history, and outside of "human time" (119).
Like Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari see correspondences between capitalism and schizophrenia, although they conceptualize the relationship quite differently. This difference stems in part from the philosophies of the authors. Where Jameson is a Marxist with modernist sympathies, Deleuze and Guattari could be classified as postmodernist, or poststructuralist. Jameson would certainly consider these author's work to be part of (schizophrenic) postmodern¹ cultural production. Furthermore, Jameson is a modernist intellectual who studies postmodernism while Deleuze and Guattari can be described as postmodernist theorists. Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari discuss the relationship between schizophrenia and capitalism, a postmodern sensibility is always lurking in the background.

Deleuze and Guattari react strongly against the Freudian and Lacanian treatment of schizophrenia. In characteristically playful and combative language they warn us of Freud's distaste for the schizophrenic:
For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers --"an undesirable resemblance" (23).

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Freud does not like the schizophrenic because s/he is a direct affront to Freud's psychoanalytic system. The schizophrenic has not developed an ego, or gone through the Oedipal process of individuation. Thus, the schizoid is "somewhere else, beyond or behind or below" the Oedipal triad that is so central to Freudian analysis (23). The schizoid has no "me" and hence does not have an unconscious that is preoccupied with the Oedipal drama of daddy, mommy, and me.
In attempts to cure schizophrenics, Freudian psychoanalysts have often tried to lead the schizophrenic down the road to ego formation, and normality. This has often meant forcibly imposing the Oedipal cycle, which is supposedly characteristic of normal psychic development. Melanie Klein is perhaps "the analyst least prone to see everything in terms of Oedipus" (Deleuze and Guattari 45). Nevertheless, even she was unremitting in her attempts to oedipalize her psychotic patients. When a psychotic child named Dick came to see her for therapy she encouraged him to play with toy trains. Deleuze and Guattari quote Kline's first person account of the session:

I took the big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them 'Daddy-train' and 'Dick-train.' Thereupon he picked up the train I called 'Dick' and made it roll [toward the station].... I explained: 'The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy' (qtd. in Deleuze and Guattari 45).

Kline's statements terrified the kid, causing him to run into a closet to hide. Klein responded to this by saying that "[i]t is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy" (45). No matter what behavior the child exhibited, Klein imposed an Oedipal interpretation. The purpose of this treatment was to make the disjointed and incoherent behavior of the patient coalesce into a normal (i.e. Oedipal) identity formation.
Deleuze and Guattari see this kind of treatment as a form of terrorism. In the course of such treatment "[a]ll the chains of the unconscious are...linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier (i.e. Oedipus)" (54). Indeed, they assert that schizophrenics who are treated this way often digress into autism, which has unfortunately been associated with schizophrenia. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the analyst and the psychiatric ward that make the schizoid sick, and turn him/her into a silent and psychologically unproductive autist. The healthy schizoid has an essentially productive (un)consciousness. S/he does not fantasize. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari assert, s/he produces and makes the real.
This production of the real is fundamentally incongruent with Freudian and Lacanian models of the unconscious. Freud and Lacan see the unconscious as symbolic, fantasy laden, and dramatic ­­ filled with semiotic puzzles and ancient Greek theater. Hence, for both authors desire is associated with lack. That is to say, desire desires that which is fantasized, repressed, wished for, or absent. Desire is engaged entirely with that which is lacking and needs to be represented. Hence, "desire gives way to a representation" of that which is lacking ­­ the phallus, the Oedipal escapade, the ideal "I", etc. (54). The schizoid, on the other hand, is incapable of experiencing lack. For him or her the unconscious is always productive and never fantastical. Desire itself produces the real and creates new worlds.
The Freudian unconscious is too unproductive and otherworldly to entice the schizoid into normality. It has nothing to offer the schizoid. Hence, the schizoid scrambles, decodes, and reconfigures the psychoanalytic dialogue ­­ transfiguring signifiers into the real, and refusing to be Oedipalized. Schizophrenics "escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions...[they are]: orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories)" (Seem xxi). Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic will not be trapped by the power-laden and despotic webs of signifiers that saturate society and psychoanalytic practice.
It is the schizoid's ability to scramble and decode that Deleuze and Guattari associate with contemporary capitalism. Like the schizophrenic, capitalism can insert itself anywhere and everywhere as a decoder and scrambler. Although,

[o]ur [capitalist] societies exhibit a marked taste for all codes ­­ codes foreign and exotic...this taste is destructive and morbid. While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric, or residual function (245).

Mobile, flexible capital is capable of inserting itself into any cultural milieu. In countries as different as Japan, Brazil, France, and Kenya, capitalism is able to take advantage of the local symbolic order (Harvey 1989). The forms that capitalism takes in these various countries reflect the symbolic order that the capitalist machine has plugged into. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari do not characterize the capitalist machine as monolithic or unitary ­­ it does not have an "I", an ego, or a unified identity. It works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers that create territories and limit exchange. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that "[c]ivilization is defined by the decoding and deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production" (244).
It would seem that Deleuze and Guattari are making a move similar to Jameson's by asserting that schizophrenia resembles and is associated with the logic of late capitalism. "Yet it would be a serious error," assert Deleuze and Guattari, "to consider the capitalist flows and the schizophrenic flows as identical, under the general theme of... decoding" (244). Capitalism "produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars" but the schizos are not salable. (245) Indeed, the schizophrenic is locked up in institutions, and turned into a "confined clinical entity" (245). If the schizophrenic really exemplified the culture of capitalism, why aren't schizos celebrated as heroes and heroines in contemporary capitalist society? Deleuze and Guattari conclude that:

schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit....Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death (246).

As capitalism decodes and deterritorializes it reaches a limit at which point it must artificially reterritorialize by augmenting the state apparatus, and repressive bureaucratic and symbolic regimes. The schizophrenic never reaches such a limit. S/he resists such reterritorialization, just as s/he resists the symbolic and despotic territorialization of the oedipalizing psychotherapist.
Thus, Deleuze and Guattari disagree with Jameson's argument that schizophrenia reinforces and contributes to the hegemony of capitalism. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari see the schizophrenic as capitalism's exterminating angel. For them the schizo is a radical, revolutionary, nomadic wanderer who resists all forms of oppressive power. They believe that radical political movements should "learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs" (Seem xxi). Schizophrenic sensibilities can replace ideological and dogmatic political goals with a radical form of productive desire. This "desiring-production" brings the unconscious into the real, and unleashes its radical world-making potential. Productive desire need not be solipsistic, and includes the "group psychosis" induced by radical postmodern artistic creations and political movements. Neither is desiring-production limited to clinical schizophrenics. Desiring-production marks the schizophrenic potential in everyone to resist the power of despotic signifiers and capitalist reterritorialization.
Deleuze and Guattari see schizophrenia as a central part of a subversive postmodern politics with the radical potential to bring down capitalism. Jameson's view could not be more different. For him, postmodern schizophrenic culture "replicates," "reproduces," and "reinforces" the logic of capitalism (Jameson 125). How can we resolve this contradiction which transverses the divide between modernism and postmodernism and highlights the fundamentally different political sensibilities of these two groups? It is a contradiction which causes us to question how psychoanalytical concepts and capitalism resist and reinforce each other. Most importantly, it is a contradiction that informs our reaction and resistance to consumer capitalist culture.

2. Identification and Late Capitalist Visual Culturee


Hoping for some insight into a possible resolution to this conflict, I turn to Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Jean Laplanche. I use Lacan to show the importance that images play in the process of ego formation and identification. Barthes' work helps to extend this analysis to capitalist culture. He explains how media images act as Lacanian mirrors that cause identity formations to be ideologically laden. Laplanche's work adds a much needed temporal dimension. Laplanche's theory of time provides a tool for understanding the contemporary acceleration of visual culture and its impact on identification.
Lacan's concept of the mirror stage describes the process by which the schizoid, polyperverse infant first gains a sense of having a unified identity. Lacan asserts that this experience of identity formation "leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito" (1). The Cartesian concept of the self, grounded in the self-evidence of the Cogito, assumes that the ego is pregiven, requires no formation process, exists before the world, and even goes so far as to posit the self as the analytic precondition to the world's existence. Lacan's work refutes this view by demonstrating that the neonate is forced into a world of already existing social and semiotic structures. The newborn must be inserted into this linguistic order and can only gain an ego in relation to this order. As Jameson told us earlier, there is no "self", "ego", "I", or "me" without language.
Perhaps the first semiotic stepping stone on the road to ego formation is the recognition of one's own reflection: the "Ideal-I". Lacan describes the process whereby an infant first comes to recognize itself in a mirror. Before this point of identification the child does not conceptualize itself as a physically and psychologically bounded individual. If it is shown a mirror, it will not recognize itself, and will take little interest in the light bouncing off the glass. This changes sometime after the infant's sixth month when an identification occurs. Identification is "the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image," or imago (2). When the child recognizes its own image "the I is precipitated in a primordial form" which Lacan refers to as the "Ideal-I" (2). In this way, ego formation begins with a misrepresentation ­­ the neonate mistakes itself for its reflection.
The reflection is a "mirage" which represents an "exteriority in which...[the child's] form is certainly more constituent than constituted" (2). That is to say, the child's image is merely a single component of the child's being that metonymically represents the child as a totality. The ideality of the image "contrast[s] with the turbulent movements that the subject feels to be animating him" (2). The bounded and coherent symmetry of the visual image, an image which serves as a (mis)representation of the child, is utterly incongruent with the polyperverse, schizoid nature of the little "hommelette." Nevertheless, the force of this misrepresentation is undeniable, and marks the establishment of "a relation between the organism and its reality" (4). Thus, it is at the mirror stage that the neonate first realizes that it is one object among many. At this point, it is able to compare the way the imago of it's own body relates to other images in the exterior world.
The child is normally exceedingly happy with its new imago ­­ often laughing and smiling at the reflection. The situation changes however, when the fictional nature of the imago becomes apparent to the child. The child begins to realize that the "Ideal-I", with which it was so jubilant to identify, is in fact incongruent with the child's more complex constitution. This results in "the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy" (5). That is to say, the child becomes alienated from the "Ideal-I" and begins to see it as another, competing subjectivity. The love for the "Ideal-I" gives way to jealously and fear of competition. This is the point at which humans first learn to desire the other, which in this case is the idealized imago of ones own body. By linking desire with alterity, the child moves beyond the mirror stage into the world of "socially elaborated situations" that force the child to reconcile its own ego with the desire of the other (i.e. that which is lacking), and social, linguistic, and symbolic constraint.
This is how Lacan explains ego formation and the subsequent identification and alienation with idealized (mis)representations. The story is useful in the present context for two reasons. First of all, it details how the schizoid comes to identify with an imago and develops an ego. Secondly, the conception of the mirror stage has been used extensively by media critics to explain the force images have in the regime of consumer capitalism. The mirroring that Lacan describes happens when a woman looks at idealized images in a fashion magazine, when a teenager stares at a poster of a rock star, or when the man on the street gazes up at the Marlboro man on the billboard. Such examples are omnipresent in this media saturated society.
Roland Barthes experiences the pleasure of the Lacanian mirror when he visits the cinema: "In the movie theater, however far away I am sitting, I press my nose against the screen's mirror, against that "other" image-repertoire with which I narcissistically identify myself" (Barthes 348). Barthes' short essay, "Leaving the Movie Theater," illustrates how visual culture lures viewers, producing pleasure, but also communicating and transmitting ideology.

I am glued to the representation [in the film]. The historical subject, like the cinema spectator I am imagining, is also glued to ideological discourse... the Ideological would actually be the image-repertoire of a period of history, the Cinema of a society (348).

The viewer "narcissistically identifies" with an image-repertoire that defines the ideological content of a period in history. Barthes connects the pleasure of a Lacanian identification with ideological indoctrination. Like all Lacanian identifications, this filmic experience produces a misrecognition. The viewing subject, "glued" to the screen, mistakes himself or herself for an ideologically laden "image-repertoire." In this sense, the very process of ego formation reinforces the logic of a capitalist society.
Barthes implies that understanding the image-repertoire of a society will elucidate the types of (ideologically laden) subject formations possible within that society. What, then, is the image-repertoire of late capitalist society? Paging through a fashion magazine such as Vogue or Elle, we encounter a variety of radically different images: some models are child-like, some are butch, some are waifs, some are tattooed, some wear elegant party dresses, some lounge in torn jeans. Closing the magazine and taking the TV remote in hand, we encounter a similar visual cacophony. The viewer is encouraged to identify with cops, thieves, surfers, businessmen, princes, paupers, house wives, and athletes, to name but a few. Indeed, on MTV all of these characters may make an appearance in the course of a two minute video. Newspapers, movies, billboards, and video games also