Knowledge and Planning

by Puck T. Smith on Sunday, December 26, 2010 at 11:41am

There are resources that exist right now that are not recognized as resources therefore they are not taken into account when calculating the availability and allocation of resources.

In the 19th century the main sources of artificial light was whale oil(1). Had some central planning supercomputer been available at that time then its calculations on the problem artificial light would have been confined to maximizing the production of whale oil. The resources required to discover other sources of light would not have been made available because they would have been misallocated to other uses based on incomplete information.

Centralized planning would only work if the knowledge of initial inputs were complete. That is impossible. It is for this reason that weather forecasting, for all the computing power being thrown at it, is impossible beyond a few days. In order to extend forecasts further than that would require knowledge of the temperature, barometric pressure and humidity of every single point on Earth. Again, that is impossible.

The same dynamical system principles apply to all forms of predictive calculation: only if you have complete knowledge of initial inputs can you extrapolate future behavior. Such complete knowledge does not exist. It becomes even more problematic when some of the inputs are not even recognized as inputs in the first place, e.g., if you don't know about kerosene it could not be factored into the artificial light problem.

This process was first quantified by Edward Norton Lorenz(2), though others, such as Friedrich Hayek(3), had already approached it prior to Lorenz. Lorenz demonstrated the impossibility of accurate future calculation using a relatively simple system comprising only three variable. Considering that there are far more than three variables involved in the dynamical system we call society--some of which variables have not been identified let alone quantified--to think it is possible to accurately predict the future and calculate resource allocation based on those predictions is the height of hubris.

Such calculation can only be made when the allocation decisions are distributed to those with the most complete knowledge of the inputs, those who are most affected by the consequences of the decision making process. Even then the calculations are at best approximations. When errors are made in a distributed system the effects are minimized and local. When those decisions are centralized and enforced by coercion the consequences of error are maximized and global.

References:
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_oil

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_N._Lorenz#Work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor

4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek#Work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

OK, Ron, here's your chance

Rep. Ron Paul, Chairman, Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee

Jurisdiction: Domestic monetary policy, currency, precious metals, valuation of the dollar, economic stabilization, defense production, commodity prices, financial aid to commerce and industry.

http://republicans.financialservices.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1458&Itemid=43

Crash JP Morgan! Buy Silver IV

To everyone who is like I was till today, a virgin, believe me, it feels wonderful the first time...

Crash JP Morgan! Buy Silver III

Widespread Silver Bar Shortages

As of today, there are no longer any regular wholesale supplies of the 1 ounce through 100 ounce silver rounds and bars available for immediate delivery. It may be possible to locate incidental quantities of some product, but most wholesalers are now promising two to four weeks delivery to allow time for the silver to be fabricated.

More...

Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver II

US Mint record sales due to Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver Viral Campaign? | USA Live Headlines
www.usaliveheadlines.com
In what seems to be quite a surprise to many watching the US Mint is reporting record sales numbers of 2010 American Eagle Silver Bullion coins this November. The last record was set in May of 2010 with a sales number of 3,636,500. This November the United States Mint under the authority of the U.S.

Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver.

I am now the proud owner of 20 of these...
...and 20 of these.

I bought the buffaloes about a week and a half ago. I bought the others today. I wanted more buffaloes, but they were sold out. After I bought the others today they started advertising them as sold out as well,\.

I wonder is this or this might have something to do with it.

Oh, and if the Tea Party people had any understanding of economics they would be all over this. Progressives, too. You want to reign in Wall Street? Word is if 1/3 third of the adults in this country bought a single one once silver coin, going for about $30.00 today, JP Morgan would be forced into bankruptcy.

It's more fun than voting.

Definitions are everything

And herein is always the rub. We can only discuss god if you define god. I can't define "notness" (though the kabbalists sure as heck tried), I don't need to since you're who's saying what isn't obvious is. Define this god phenomenon and we can talk about if what you defines does, or even can, exist.

From A Friend on Facebook re: Tom Woods

"Obviously, I am dedicated primarily to freedom. I'm interested in privacy, freedom, human decency, free speech, freedom of expression, and I'm against war, bullying, bigotry, and the rape of small children. In these things I am apparently different from Poor Tom, who contributes financially to the Catholic Church in full and certain knowledge that the Catholic Church as a matter of policy encourages priests to rape small children and as a matter of policy covers up investigations, going to such lengths as recently invoking a treaty between Belgium and Vatican City for the purpose. As a gleeful Roman Catholic, Poor Tom presumably supports and endorses the Church's pogroms against Jews, crusades against the Albigensians, crusades in the Holy Land, Reconquista of Spain, invasion of the New World and wholesale rape, pillage, mass murder, and plunder of those places, burning of libraries, and ongoing violent brutality. Poor Tom must be assumed to support and endorse the Church's Holy Inquisition and its burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, for which the Church has never apologised. I surmise that Poor Tom believes all these things because he is very publicly Roman Catholic. Wikipedia notes, "He was associate editor of The Latin Mass Magazine, which advocates traditional Catholicism, for eleven years."

Galatians 5:15

An Argument for the Inviolability of Property

This is an excerpt from a longer exposition on economics and politics which I'm still outlining.

In a Robinson Crusoe situation where it takes one day's labor to procure one day's resources one may be willing to do without for a day in order to improve one's method of procurement. If one is subsisting on fruit with either a thick stem or heavy rind one may decide to do without food one day and use the time not spent gathering and consuming fruit to fabricate a sharp stone tool which would enable the procurement of one day's food in half a day. One deems the present sacrifice acceptable for future gain. From that one period of time expended every subsequent day produces half the value of that single day. In two days one would have recovered all one had given and every day after one gains half as much again.

Given now the surplus time, one could choose to work all day to procure twice as much food in anticipation of future need or use that time for leisure or further utilization of resources and time to increase productivity, comfort and surplus time. In this way one has alone converted time, energy and resources, each exclusively controlled, into items of subjective material value to oneself. In this way one has created wealth to which no other can have claim as no other contributed to its production and accumulation. Wealth so acquired can scarcely be considered other than inviolable. Its disposition is subject to none but the owner.

A Brief Meditation on the Tea Party

Electoral politics are immoral or at least futile. I have no illusions that the net effect of the recent elections will ultimately produce anything more than some wonderful entertainment for my inner cynic. However, I do think the Tea Party is articulating something important. The middle class, what's left of it, is losing faith in the state and the state has run out of options for pacifying them. It is in its death throes. I think people sense it on an intuitive level, but they haven't realized it consciously, yet. The Tea Party is that intuition grappling with uncertainty. The next few years are going to be the process of the intuition and impulse evolving into understanding.

Statism is Dead Parts 1 Through 5

Testing something...

Testing something...
http://dev.tzimzum.net/
http://www.tzimzum.net/
http://tzimzum.net/

Hugh Masekela - Coal Train Live

Eric Dondero

Doooonnnnndeeeerrrroooooo!!!!

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.

You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood.

May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you.

You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed, drooling, meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod.

Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved.

I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid.

Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me.

After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative post was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.


RON PAUL is raising MMMMMMMMMMIiiilllllllliioonnssss. Mmmmmmiiiilllliioonnnnnssss and mmmmmmmiillllliioonnnnnsss of dolllllaaaarrrsss. Bwah ha ha ha ha. Now at last the time has come to unleash the the r3VOLution. Arise my fellow libertarian minions! Arise! No longer must we hide our true selves as we walk among the people. Show yourselves, stand up and be counted! For now at last our time has come, and we shall rule the earth!!

And what is the first thing we shall do once we seize the reigns of power? I will tell you. We will give Dondero a wedgie.

Market Relationships and Wealth Creation

Market relationships are not just about economics, they are how people relate. There is always an exchange of value when two people interact, whether emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or, yes, economic. Most people expect to derive more value than the give else they'd not have the interaction in the first place unless force or coercion is involved. In that happy situation where two people exchange value voluntarily each walks away with more than they gave and wealth has been created.

Things I've Found July 29, 2010

Just Think- Sam Harris part 1 of 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHOiF-dFEg




Just Think- Sam Harris part 2 of 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG72wpp_mLM

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Without Firing A Single Shot: Voluntaryist Resistance and Societal Defense
by Carl Watner

[I]n August 1915, Bertrand Russell published an article in THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. He wrote: "Let us imagine that England were to disband its army, after a generation of instruction in the principles of passive resistance as a better defense than war. Let us suppose that England at the same time publicly announced that no armed opposition would be offered to any invader, that all might come freely, but that no obedience would be yielded to any commands that a foreign authority might issue. What would happen in this case?" First of all he noted that if England disbanded its army and navy, any would-be invader, such as Germany, would be hard-pressed to find a pretext for invasion. Suppose, however, that a German army invaded an England where no one offered violent resistance? After evicting the King from Buckingham Palace and taking over the Parliament building, what would the Germans do if all the existing British officials refused to cooperate?

Some of the more prominent would be imprisoned, perhaps even shot, in order to encourage the others. But if the others held firm, if they refused to recognize or transmit any order given by the Germans, if they continued to carry out decrees previously made by the English Parliament and the English government, the Germans would have to dismiss them all, even to the humblest postman, and call in German talent to fill the breach.

The dismissed officials could not all be imprisoned or shot; since no fighting would have occurred, such wholesale brutality would be out of the question. And it would be very difficult for the Germans suddenly, and out of nothing, to create an administrative machine. Whatever edicts they might issue would be quietly ignored by the population. If they ordered that German should be the language taught in schools, the schoolmasters would go on as if no such order had been issued; if the schoolmasters were dismissed, the parents would no longer send the children to school. If they ordered that English young men should undergo military service, the young men would simply refuse; ... . If they tried to take over the railways, there would be a strike of the railway servants. Whatever they touched would instantly become paralyzed, and it would soon be evident, even to them, that nothing was to be made out of England unless the population could be conciliated. ...

In a civilized, highly organized, highly political state, government is impossible without the consent of the governed. Any object for which a considerable body of men are prepared to starve and die can be achieved by ... [nonviolent] means, without the need of resort to force. And if this is true of objects desired by a minority only, it is a thousand times truer of objects desired unanimously by the whole nation.

http://www.voluntaryist.com/forthcoming/withoutfiringashot.php

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How To Vote For Liberty
by Joe Sobran

http://voluntaryist.com/nonvoting/vote_for_liberty.php

---

This song always makes cry.

Samhain at Four Quarters Farm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK76IQD8sF0

Bradley Manning

A 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, PFC (formerly SPC) Bradley Manning was arrested by the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command in May 2010. Manning was detained without charge for over a month in a military jail at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. In early July, he was faced with two charges of misconduct: "transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorised software to a classified computer system" and "communicating, transmitting and delivering national defence information to an unauthorised source". The maximum jail sentence is 52 years.

http://www.bradleymanning.org/

The Story of Your Enslavement

Fighting for America's Tax Dollars

I don't think it can be explained any better than this...

HOWARD ZINN: “Holy Wars”

I might disagree with his economic ideas, but that seems sort of minor compared to the things we agree on.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem

Cause Void knows she isn't, not if she ever cries out Maranatha!



I already knew this having spent 10+ years as a fundamentalist, but it is interesting to hear it from the son-in-law of R. J. Rushdoony of all people...

In order for most of today’s Christians to escape physical death, two-thirds of the Jews in Israel must perish, soon. This is the grim prophetic trade-off that fundamentalists rarely discuss publicly, but which is the central motivation in the movement’s support for Israel. It should be clear why they believe that Israel must be defended at all costs by the West. If Israel were militarily removed from history prior to the Rapture, then the strongest case for Christians’ imminent escape from death would have to be abandoned. This would mean the indefinite delay of the Rapture. The fundamentalist movement thrives on the doctrine of the imminent Rapture, not the indefinitely postponed Rapture.

Every time you hear the phrase, "Jesus is coming back soon," you should mentally add, "and two-thirds of the Jews of Israel will be dead in ‘soon plus 84 months.’" Fundamentalists really do believe that they probably will not die physically, but to secure this faith prophetically, they must defend the doctrine of an inevitable holocaust.

This specific motivation for the support of Israel is never preached from any fundamentalist pulpit. The faithful hear sermons – many, many sermons – on the pretribulation Rapture. On other occasions, they hear sermons on the Great Tribulation. But they do not hear the two themes put together: "We can avoid death, but only because two-thirds of the Jews of Israel will inevitably die in a future holocaust. America must therefore support the nation of Israel in order to keep the Israelis alive until after the Rapture." Fundamentalist ministers expect their congregations to put two and two together on their own. It would be politically incorrect to add up these figures in public.

The Unannounced Reason Behind American Fundamentalism's Support for the State of Israel

I wonder what they will be saying when the children of everybody who was alive in 1948 have expired of old age and Jesus still hasn't come back...

Another Day In Paradise

Here is a graph of my employers aggregate IP transit. I work for an ISP in DC. Many of our customers are government agencies, NGOs and the law firms that service them. It's interesting to see the effect of the Snowpocalypse on our traffic.



The Federal Government is closed again today, so I'm enjoying another day of working from home. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Petty Tyranny

America, where are you now?

City of King Declares State of "Emergency"

On February 5th, Stokes County, NC was hit pretty hard by a snow and ice storm. Downed trees and widespread power outages plagued the county, but Cliff and I were looking forward to a primitive, powerless, technologyless weekend. Much to our chagrin, our power was restored after just 5 short hours of gas log heat, and hand cranked emergency radio listening.

DSC_7164 This morning, the sun shone brightly. The ice and snow which once covered cold branches and power lines began to slink back into the ground in a shimmery display of ice crystals and light. The weather was relatively warm, and pleasant - especially considering 12 short hours before it had been a cold, rainy, icy, snowy mess.

So. Needless to say, when we got a call from Cliff's brother, Chad, about a state of "emergency" being declared right down the road, we were shocked.

"WHAT?! ....... In STOKES county?........"

Evidently Chad and his family were out at the local Mexican food joint for an afternoon lunch in the small town of King, NC. Chad noticed the waitress posting signs about a "curfew" and not being "allowed to sell alcohol" until further notice. He learned that the City of King had sent law enforcement officials to local restaurants and business owners to inform them that no one was allowed to be out of their residential homes between the hours of 12:00am-5:00am, effective immediately.

Read it all here...

Anarchy in Real Life

Dedicated to Jonathan Blaque

Excerpted from Butler Shaffer

I am often asked if anarchy has ever existed in our world, to which I answer: almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation. Social pressures, unrelated to statutory enactments, influence our behavior on crowded freeways or grocery checkout lines. If we dealt with our colleagues at work in the same coercive and threatening manner by which the state insists on dealing with us, our employment would be immediately terminated. We would soon be without friends were we to demand that they adhere to specific behavioral standards that we had mandated for their lives.

Should you come over to our home for a visit, you will not be taxed, searched, required to show a passport or driver’s license, fined, jailed, threatened, handcuffed, or prohibited from leaving. I suspect that your relationships with your friends are conducted on the same basis of mutual respect. In short, virtually all of our dealings with friends and strangers alike are grounded in practices that are peaceful, voluntary, and devoid of coercion.

This is just too weird

OK, first I stumbled across this...

SENATE BURGLARY: CIA DOMESTIC BLACK-OP TEAM ARRESTED
ALL 4 INVOLVED IN SENATE HOMELAND SECURITY BREAKIN CIA “N-O-C” AGENTS

CIA PROGRAM MAY HAVE TRAINED DOMESTIC “DEATH SQUADS”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Last week’s breakin at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in the New Orleans Federal Building was more than it seemed, much more. All of the 4 arrested had been trained by the CIA and, possibly, Israel. One arrested, Stan Dai, is listed as an Operations Officer of the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Program and a known expert and lecturer on, not only surveillance but explosives training, assassinations and “false flag operations.” If you wanted a plane to crash, an enemy to get sick and die or a building to blow up, Dai would be the man to know how to make it happen. Problem is, his skills were being used as part of a criminal conspiracy inside the United States against members of our own government.
Read the rest...

"Great," I think, "pure Alex Jones, black black helicopter, wack-a-doodle, interwebs nonsense." However, I started looking around to find something like a snopes.com refutation and what do I find but this...

Lindsay Beyerstein notes that one of the four men arrested, Stan Dai, has past ties to Washington national security think tank, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. From the bio that accompanied his 2005-2006 Phillips Foundation College Leaders Program award:

STAN DAI, Lisle, Ill., attends The George Washington University majoring in Political Science. He is editor-in-chief of The GW Patriot, an alternative conservative student newspaper, a Club 100 Activist of Young America’s Foundation, and an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies.

FDD executive director Cliff May says Dai was part of an FDD summer terrorism/counterterrorism program for undergraduates in the summer of 2004. "He was one of our students six years ago," May said by email. "He was a serious student then. Sounds like he’s got himself in a heap of trouble now."

He said it was his understanding that after graduation, Dai went to work at National Defense University, although he wasn't sure in what capacity.

"We haven’t been in touch with him in recent years," May said.

Dai, an immigrant from China, was president of the Conservative Student Union at George Washington University.

In 2008, he was assistant director of an intelligence community "center for academic excellence" at Trinity Washington University.

"Stan Dai was a junior program administrator for one year in a grant-funded program at Trinity Washington University," Ann Pauley, media relations director at Trinity Washington University. "The program was called the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) and was one of several similar programs created with federal funding through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence following the September 11 attacks. The purpose of the program was to introduce students in liberal arts colleges to concepts in intelligence studies and potential careers in intelligence. Mr. Dai has not worked at Trinity since October 2008 when the grant ended. Trinity’s ICCAE program also ended at the same time."

Read the rest...

And this...

Some highlights from Stan Dai's bio:

B. Career History
• Mr. Dai has been involved in JSA since 2001: after attending summer school at Yale, he founded the JSA chapter at Naperville North, served in various Midwest region positions, and was a resident assistant at Georgetown.
• Mr. Dai was the first Assistant Director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C.
• Prior to that, he served as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program.
• Mr. Dai graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the George Washington University. He was the editor-in-chief of The GW Patriot, an alternative conservative student newspaper, a Club 100 Activist of Young America’s Foundation, and an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies.

Read the rest...

What to make of it?

I don't know.

"Religon Is A Virus That Attacks The Minds of Children"

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush
JAMES A. HAUGHT

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Read it all here.

Speaks for itself