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<DIV><FONT size=2>Given the religious inclinations of Bush, it's more like a
battle</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>between two sects of fundamentalists, each pursuing
Armageddon</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>in their own way.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Given the long-standing relationship between the Bush and bin
Ladin</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>families, it's also a spat between boyhood
friends.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Being a predator is hard work- a tiger makes a kill once for
every 20</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>times it hunt.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>If our leaders had kept their eye on the ball and had hunted
Osama</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>down, we would have fewer problems. Perhaps a regime
change will</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>return us to the correct path.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>No group produces more than 5% or so of alpha animals, so if
you</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>iterate decapitation enough times, the other side will run out
of leaders.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=HowlBloom@aol.com
href="mailto:HowlBloom@aol.com">HowlBloom@aol.com</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=paleopsych@paleopsych.org
href="mailto:paleopsych@paleopsych.org">paleopsych@paleopsych.org</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, July 18, 2004 3:15 PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [Paleopsych] Jihad and the petri
dish--Osama's reproductive strategy</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><!--StartFragment -->Bear with me if I posted this before, but
it's something I wrote up for paleopsych that I think was sent while our
listserv was down. Howard <SPAN class=text>
<P class=MsoNormal>Has anyone noticed that the current World War between
militant Islam and the Western Way of Life is actually something so basic even
a bacterium could understand it?<SPAN> </SPAN>It's a battle of
reproductive strategies.<SPAN> </SPAN>Specifically it's a battle of what
population biologists call r and k strategies.<SPAN>
</SPAN><o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>One definition of the r strategy is this.<SPAN>
</SPAN>You're up against the threat of a swift and hungry
predator.<SPAN> </SPAN>You mate with as many females as you can, keep
them pregnant constantly, use them as serial baby incubators, and put very few
resources into each child.<SPAN> </SPAN>Why?<SPAN> </SPAN>So you
can have as many kids as possible.<SPAN> </SPAN>The gamble goes like
this.<SPAN> </SPAN>The more kids I shove out there, the more are likely
to survive.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN>The opposite strategy is k.<SPAN>
</SPAN></SPAN>One version of the k strategy (the let's-konserve strategy) is
this.<SPAN> </SPAN>Have very few kids but put a huge investment into
each one.<SPAN> </SPAN>This only works when you can be pretty sure each
kid will survive.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Predators--like wild dogs and large cats--lions, tigers,
cheetahs--top of the food-chain dominators--tend to use the k
strategy.<SPAN> </SPAN>They don't have to face death at the hands of
bigger enemies, but do have to teach their young an awful lot to turn them
into good hunters.<SPAN> </SPAN>If an adolescent cheetah hasn't learned
her hunting skills well enough to bring down one big kill out of every four
she tries, she is dead.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Prey--like the mice, voles, and other rodents that even big
cats and wild dogs hunt down as quick snacks--go for the r
strategy.<SPAN> </SPAN>Breed like rabbits and hope that 4 out of every
12 pups survive.<SPAN> </SPAN>Cheetahs often have just two cubs at a
time.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Right now we Westerners dominate the worldwide food
chain. We've opted for k. But Osama bin Laden has declared
openly that he's going for the r strategy.<SPAN> </SPAN>He's said that
his form of Islam honors women.<SPAN> </SPAN>It keeps them off the
street, out of public sight, out of careers that might distract their
attention, and keeps them pregnant so they can have between seven and
seventeen children each.<SPAN> </SPAN>Men in Osama's privileged position
can also have four wives at a time.<SPAN> </SPAN>And they can add to
that advantage by wife-trading.<SPAN> </SPAN>They can divorce one wife
and bring in another, running through as many wives as Osama's dad
did.<SPAN> </SPAN>Bin Laden senior, with his 54 children, had eleven
wives.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>We in the Western World, on the other hand, are having
fewer kids than would be needed to replace our current population.<SPAN>
</SPAN>What are we doing with those kids?<SPAN> </SPAN>We're investing
in them hugely.<SPAN> </SPAN>These days we're doing far more than
educating<SPAN> </SPAN>the hell out of them.<SPAN> </SPAN>We're
also accessorizing them with ability-extenders--the equivalent of mega-arms,
macro-legs, super-eyes, and tele-ears.<SPAN> </SPAN>We are giving them
appendages it would have taken evolution 200 million years to develop...cell
phones, digital cameras and videocams built into those phones, laptops,
Google, instant access to the fastest-growing library in world history--the
World Wide Web-- cars, cheap airline tickets, ubiquitous video displays, and
the imagination-extenders of X-Boxes, Sony Play Stations, and Nintendo
sets.<SPAN> </SPAN>We're turning our kids into digipedes--creatures with
newly-invented cyber-senses and digi-limbs.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>That's precisely why Osama says we will fall as victim's of
our own blindness, obesity, and decay.<SPAN> </SPAN>"We love death more
than you love life," he says.<SPAN> </SPAN>To paraphrase his
communiqués to the Ummah of Islam, "We can afford to sacrifice as many as 250
million of our believers even if you strike us with your nuclear
weapons.<SPAN> </SPAN>The blood of our martyrs will only strengthen the
1.75 million of us who remain."<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>You and I are very different, says Osama.<SPAN>
</SPAN>You, he says, are cowards.<SPAN> </SPAN>You quiver when one of
your soldiers is killed and his body is dragged through the streets of
Somalia.<SPAN> </SPAN>You cringe when the warriors of holiness cut
off a single head.<SPAN> </SPAN>You speak of exit strategies, Osama
sneers, when a mere thousand of your soldiers have died in Iraq.<SPAN>
</SPAN>Osama says he can whip us right left and center.<SPAN>
</SPAN>Again, to paraphrase his speeches, "Our religion tells us to put
ourselves into the battle and to kill and take the chance of being
killed.<SPAN> </SPAN>We know that your corruption will do away with the
brief wisp of putrescence you call a civilization.<SPAN> </SPAN>But our
God has ordered that your destruction shall not be left to your
rot.<SPAN> </SPAN>It shall not be left to your lack of manners and of
decency.<SPAN> </SPAN>Our<SPAN> </SPAN>God has ordered that your
sinews and bones be severed by the swords of our sons, by the fire and
flame of our students-turned-to knights, and by the hellstorms delivered to
you by our teenage heroes."<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Osama inspires with the poetry of the r strategy, the
poetry of a rodent reproductive passion.<SPAN> </SPAN>In his own
words:<SPAN> </SPAN>"By Allah, it is either victory or martyrdom and
only those whose life span has come to an end will be killed, so his family
will miss him, only for his soul to be, as our Messenger (peace and mercy be
upon him) said, to be in the bellies of green birds that roam freely in heaven
as they please, then head towards lanterns suspended with the throne of the
Most Compassionate. There is no comparison between the two vicinities, the
vicinity of his family and the vicinity of his lord.<SPAN> </SPAN>So
dear youth of Islam everywhere, especially those of the neighborhood, where
the duty upon you is conclusive, dear Muslim youths in the Arabic peninsula,
and in Egypt and greater Syria, dear youths of Rabia’a [an Iraqi poetess
born in 717 ad] and Mudhr, dear grandsons of Salahuddine, dear knights of
Mohammed the Conqueror, dear Fedayeen of Umm Al-Fida and Aleppo, and the lions
of Muan and Al-Zarqa, and the brave of Azad, the heroes of Assir, Hashed,
Madhaj and Bakil, let your supplies be continuous so that you may rescue the
land of the two rivers."<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Osama's betting on lots of kids.<SPAN> </SPAN>We're
betting on few.<SPAN> </SPAN>Osama's betting on small investments in
each body he sends into battle.<SPAN> </SPAN>Osama's betting that as one
Egyptian contemporary of bin Laden's said way back in the early 1980s when al
Qaeda was just beginning: "Islam is a tree that feeds on blood and grows on
severed limbs."<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>Osama is betting on the strategy of homicidal plague
bacteria-- Yersinia pestis --bacteria that bet on flagrant, fast
reproduction--bacteria that put their chips on the r strategy.<SPAN>
</SPAN>We are betting on the strategy of elephants--the k
strategy.<SPAN> </SPAN>This is far more than what Osama says it is when
he uses Samuel Huntington's words and declares that: "this struggle is a
religious and a doctrinal one and that the clash is in fact a clash of
civilizations."<SPAN> </SPAN>It is more than what Osama calls, "a
rare opportunity…and a priceless one…to sharpen the faculties of the Ummah
and to break its shackles, in order to storm forward towards the battlefields
of Jihad."<SPAN> </SPAN>And it is more than Osama's "decisive war", the
war he says has opened "a crossroads" in history.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>It is a war between two ancient reproductive strategies in
a new environment, a global, cyber-niche..<SPAN> </SPAN>But primitive as
it is, it is also a war between two different views of darkness and of
light.<SPAN> </SPAN>I choose to believe that the light is that of the
Western religion of human rights, women's rights, gay rights, democracy, free
speech, secularism, and science.<SPAN> </SPAN>Osama believes the light
lies in the purity of a seventh century vision that muzzles minds and tears
the tongues from the mouths of blasphemers. <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>In the end this is a fight to see:<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN>v<SPAN> </SPAN></SPAN>whether
humanity can continue its technological,<SPAN> </SPAN>philosophical, and
artistic-mindleaps and soul-expansions <o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN>v<SPAN> </SPAN></SPAN>or
whether our race cowers beneath clouds of nuclear soot and the veils of burqas
and trudges back to what it experienced from 550 ad to 1100 AD--a Mad-Max dark
ages.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal>It is a war to see which reproductive strategy can grab the
new cyber-global niche--this new wireless planet.<SPAN> </SPAN>It is a
war to see which strategy can mobilize speed, conviction, whacko-cleverness,
extremely long-term thinking, and implacable, adamantine
persistence.<o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN>Does either of our presidential candidates, Bush or
Kerry, have a clear vision of just how desperate and critical this war of two
colonies of organisms in the petri dish of our planet is?<SPAN>
</SPAN>Does either have the persuasive and poetic capacity to turn a nation of
couch potatoes and self-hating critics into a nation of secular humanist
saviors...saviors of the fast-track experiment in the reinvention of mass
mind, of personal passion, and of human powers that we call our
civilization?<SPAN> </SPAN></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN>Howard Bloom</SPAN></P></SPAN>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 PTSIZE="10"
FAMILY="SANSSERIF">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global
Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st
Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York
University; Faculty Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder:
International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of
Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big
Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society,
Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society,
International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member:
Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For
information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer Principle: A
Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see
www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution
of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV>
<P>
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