PREPARE FOR CHALLENGES OF THE COMING EPOCH!
Opportunist Crisis Management
Is No Solution for Today
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
WIESBADEN, April 9—The most positive and forward-looking development of the past week occurred at the annual meeting of the European Geophysical Union in Vienna April 4-8. Coordinated teams of scientists presented their research on various warning signs; taken as a whole, this work will probably very soon make it possible to predict major earthquakes in time to evacuate people in the relevant areas and bring them to safety. The conference, which was attended by over 10,000 scientists from 96 countries, had unusual urgency in view of the recent series of earthquakes in Japan, and the expectation of new great earthquakes in what is called the Pacific Ring of Fire.
One of these teams, led by Dimitar Ouzounov of Chapman University in California, and including representatives from Japan and Taiwan, a staff member from NASA's Goddard Institute, and Michel Parrot, who had worked on the French Demeter satellites, presented its thesis under the title: "Integrated Sensing, Analysis and Validation of Atmospheric Signals Associated with Major Earthquakes." The team's approach consists of integrated assessment of various physical parameters (thermal infrared radiation, electron concentration in the ionosphere, radon activity, air temperature, and seismic developments) that were associated with major earthquakes. They use satellites and ground monitoring stations that record the interaction of processes in the lithosphere, atmosphere, and ionosphere.
Another team, led by Gerald Duma of Vienna, which included Friedemann Freund of NASA's Ames Research Center, presented its findings in a panel titled "New Findings on the Influence of Solar Processes on Global Seismicity," with breakthrough results on the relationship between solar activities and changes in geomagnetic processes prior to great earthquakes.
Even though the ability to predict earthquakes reliably, using complex methods of measurement, is regarded as extremely controversial by most seismologists, who deal exclusively with analysis of data after an earthquake, there can be no doubt that these geophysicists themselves are in the process of breaking through the previous limitations of science. However, all the scientists who proceed from the assumption that earthquakes could, in principle, be predicted, agree that this branch of science is suffering from downright criminal lack of funding.
Lyndon LaRouche, who, with a team of young scientists, has been studying for quite some time, the relationships among long-term cycles in the galaxy, changes in solar activity, and geodynamic influences on seismic events on Earth, stressed the urgency of integrated global cooperation, in view of the expected increase in great earthquakes over the next two to three years. A BüSo-TV video team attended the Vienna conference, and will be presenting a series of interviews and analyses in the next few days, at the BüSo website.
A Methodological Fault Line
Interestingly, the same fault line appeared at this conference that can be seen on just about any topic today: the irreconcilable methodological contradiction between those who claim that clear scientific assertions can only be made after the fact, using the methods of statistics and systems analysis, and those who, based on their understanding of dynamic processes, are quite well able to make appropriate hypotheses about the future. This fault line applies to all areas: to seismologists, economists, politicians, and philosophers.
For example, in economics nowadays, it has dawned on a host of analysts and commentators, that the euro's days or months are numbered. After Portugal, if also Spain, and then Italy, Belgium, and France have to resort soon to the European Union's rescue fund, then this fund will have to be replenished with even more billions in taxpayers' money. But there is another category of economists, including this writer, who recognized, long before the birth of the euro, its fatal birth defects. They have been proved right: The Eurozone will break apart very soon.
On the same day that the European Central Bank (ECB) changed its interest rate policy because of the constantly increasing inflation, raising the base rate to 1.25%, Portugal became the third country to "slip under" the European rescue parachute. This shows the whole dilemma of the ECB: the impossible balancing act between the attempt to keep the completely bankrupt European banking system alive by hyperinflationary monetary pumping, while reducing this inflation with a Brüning-style austerity policy that wrecks the countries that are indebted to the banks.
Portugal won't get a cent out of the EU80 billion, which in reality will pour into the coffers of Spanish, British, German, and French banks. The ECB, the European Commission, and the IMF are meanwhile playing the same game that the victorious powers at Versailles did in 1919, demanding that their austerity dictates be fulfilled, regardless who is in Portugal's new government. Just how absolutely dangerous and incompetent this policy is can be seen in the case of Greece, which bowed to the dictates of the ECB and the Brussels EU bureaucracy, and whose economy and social peace have now been destroyed, and which now, just one year after the famous rescue package was passed, is so bankrupt that ECB President Trichet was forced to concede that the debt "restructuring" he had so recently vehemently rejected—meaning a partial write-off—is coming.
The reason that governments, representatives of the political establishment, and "experts" of all stripes are now almost always completely off the mark in their evaluations, is that we have reached the end of an era. This change of epochs will be no less fundamental than, for example, the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. The epoch of the last 600 years of universal history, during which large parts of the world have been largely dominated by oligarchic structures, of which the so-called globalization of the last 20 years has been the high point (or low point), will in any case cease to exist. If mankind does not succeed in replacing these oligarchic structures with ones that are oriented toward the common good, we will plunge into a new dark age.
Representatives of the establishment have made so many errors of judgment because the axioms of their thought still derive from the epoch that is now ending. Most politicians, economists, etc., have as little understanding of the challenges of the future as the medieval scholastics, who argued over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, knew about the techniques of book printing or Johannes Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation.
The failings of the political class are further aggravated by the fact that the much-vaunted "ability to achieve consensus," i.e., ingrained mediocrity, excludes any capacity for scientific thinking. Imprisoned in the axiomatic world of yesterday, most politicians are desperately fixated on public opinion polls, and are trying to save their position in the power structure by relying on crisis management, from one moment to the next.
Then there are those intellectual johnny-come-latelies such as Jürgen Habermas and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who have only very belatedly realized that Brussels is a monster; that the population was never consulted about its decisions; that the European integration process is a dead end; and that the various talk shows, always with the same talking heads and the same hodge-podge of incompetent opinions, increase people's disenchantment with politics; or that the Brussels bureaucracy is pursuing a new version of McCarthyism against its critics. Where were these gentlemen in 1990-92, when the euro was forced on Germany as the price for reunification, or from December 2007 to April 2008, when the Lisbon Treaty implemented a quasi-coup d'état, without a single article in the mainstream media saying so?
The New Epoch as a Renaissance
It is highly possible that the next epoch of mankind will not be a dark age, however; that through a renaissance in art and science, we will bring the political and economic order of this world into harmony with the actual laws of the universe, and the new epoch will be more in accord with reason and man's cognitive abilities. We may well reach the stage of development that the Russian scientist V.I. Vernadsky described as the dominance of the Noösphere.
For this to happen, it would be highly beneficial for the representatives of the churches to learn that the Creation that is worth preserving is not the closed system of the Club of Rome, but rather that the divine plan of Creation is expressed in an anti-entropic, evolving universe, in which the role of man is to act as imago viva Dei, in the living image of God, by replicating the principal attribute of God the Creator by further developing Creation. And Creation is not limited to planet Earth, but encompasses the entire universe, as is said in Genesis 1.
For us in Germany to contribute our part to make sure that the new epoch is dominated by reason, and that we finally put behind us mankind's childhood diseases such as oligarchism, monetarism, and a misunderstanding of nature as Mother Gaia, we need to have a debate about the real nature of the universe of which we are a part.
