I started poking around in the Book of Isaiah today, the transcription of the vision of the eponymous prophet. The book is basically an argument by Yahweh that he is the Lord of the Earth, he is undefeatable, and he needs his chosen people to spread his kingdom across the world.
This is a petulant god:
Isaiah 1:11 “I am sick of your sacrifices,” says the LORD. “Don’t bring me any more burnt offerings! I don’t want the fat from your rams or other animals. I don’t want to see the blood from your offerings of bulls and rams and goats.
12 Why do you keep parading through my courts with your worthless sacrifices?
But he’s got good things planned for us:
Isaiah 2:4 The LORD will settle international disputes. All the nations will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. All wars will stop, and military training will come to an end.
And sometimes he’s downright gooey:
Isaiah 54:10 For the mountains may depart and the hills disappear, but even then I will remain loyal to you. My covenant of blessing will never be broken,” says the LORD, who has mercy on you.
11 “O storm-battered city, troubled and desolate! I will rebuild you on a foundation of sapphires and make the walls of your houses from precious jewels.
This really makes me think of the game Black & White, a little gem from Lionhead Studios. In this game, you were a god. You controlled a small tribe of people, whom you had to encourage to build and develop their land, and to worship you. You also had to defend them from attack by encroaching gods, and to convert the other gods’ followers into yours. All with the help of your adorable giant creature pet (e.g. a monkey).
What a terrifying possibility! Is Isaiah’s God some kind of pan-dimensional adolescent, His face pock-marked with singularities, playing out an intricately constructed game, as detailed as is appropriate for His nearly limitless intelligence? Hopefully the game has transitioned into a different mode of play, because He’s doing pretty poorly according to his initial win condition. How long before He grows bored and hits reset to start a new game?
So, Obama is in India, as the NY Times points out, to “lift longstanding restrictions on exports of closely held technologies”. It shouldn’t take a huge effort to read through the unfortunate lede-burying going on. Couple that with the recent well-publicized sale of arms to Saudi Arabia* and draw the straight line.
The “high tech” industry is one of the few remaining robust American manufacturing sectors, and one of the only ones with a product that retails in the hundreds of millions of dollars. For a country starving to death thanks to oil imports (which constitute somewhere around 50% of the US trade imbalance) and non-existent manufacturing, a quick-fix tour peddling arms to unstable, nuclear-armed, war-prone regions of the world is clearly too good an opportunity to pass up.
The Times also points out that this is Obama doing his necessary kowtowing to prove to American business (i.e., the war industry) that, humbled by his defeat, he is fully prepared to be their lackey:
Still, one of Mr. Obama’s main audiences in many ways seemed to be America’s chief executives, many of whom spent the recent campaign accusing the White House of being antibusiness and pouring money into the coffers of Republican candidates and groups that aimed to defeat the Democrats.
…“It’s unprecedented,” [Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric] said in an interview, praising Mr. Obama for talking up trade, a politically risky move for a Democrat. “I don’t remember President Bush ever having a mission like this. I think it’s quite rare and I hope the first of many.”
Luckily the vicious skull-fucking and skin-melting will be reserved for our children's generation, along with the catastrophic drought and infrastructure collapse. God rest ye merry, gentlemen. You're doing the Lord's work.
* Thanks to Saheli for pointing out the excellent “War is Business”.
Some thoughts by my friend Jarl on the G20 protests in Toronto:
Some say that the the throwing of bricks through the windows of banks by the youthful “anarchists” allows the protest movement against the G20 to be divided. This is not true – there isn’t any such unified movement. At least not one that was apparent at the demonstration on Saturday. There was no single reason which could make sense of why all the different groups were at the demonstration. Tibetans for a Free Tibet, pro North-Korean Trotsky-ists, Labour Unionists, an Iranian communist group and its opposition in the form of the homegrown Bolshevik Tendencies communist group, some Vietnamese groups, Tamil support groups, an anti-seal hunting group, Indigenous rights groups, walked alongside many other groups that I didn’t register. And there were many people who came not as a part of any group but for any number of reasons. And we should not forget to include all the “crazies” that these demonstrations unleash. Why do they all come? We should not disavow any of them – yet. The most salient division which the demonstration manifested was, however, between the police and everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »
I haven’t talked about oil in a while, mostly because ever since the ol’ economy took a big shit and died it hasn’t been a big issue – oil consumption drops with other kinds of consumption (fewer trucks delivering goods, fewer people driving and flying around, fewer people heating their pools with a hundred curling irons, etc.), so things have been pretty slow for the past few years. Snazzy graph from EIA:
Nevertheless, though things have slowed, that doesn’t mean our wild-eyed blubberings about peak oil are now completely mitigated. Quite the contrary; the problem was quite real, and remains. I read the other day that when OPEC recently trimmed their output in order to encourage the oil price back up around $100/bbl after it collapsed down to the $40s, the level they ratcheted down to was still an incredible 97% of capacity, leaving a whopping 3% margin of spare capacity – at the low end of productivity.
So we should be expecting news like we got last week from the US military, which announced that it expects a major shortfall in oil production in the next two years, and a serious crisis by 2015. By then, they expect a shortfall of 10 million barrels a day – that is, something like 12% of global oil consumption. As an exercise, just try to imagine the effect this will have on the price of oil.*
We’ll pause to note the irony in the US military – the largest single consumer of oil in the world, at about 400,000 bbl/day – making this announcement. They haven’t announced exactly what they’re going to do about it. Maybe if we fought a couple of more wars it would help. Fortunately, it seems like the economy is going to be lying in the shitter and weeping for a bit longer, which might buy us some time.
In the meanwhile, to make up the shortfall, I advocate going back to doing what we were doing before: sending teams of ferocious, hook-wielding men in boats to kill thousands of whales for their oil-rich blubber. I’ve already done my part by canceling my contributions to Greenpeace.
* Put a few hill giants and evil wizards into your scenario for good measure, just to spice it up.
Yes, the world does hate you. Both the developing and developed world.
Your government won’t get you out of the hole you’re in. You need to do it yourselves. Take to the streets, damnit! Make it known, LOUDLY, that you disagree with past and current policy. Let the average Iraqi know that there are right-minded people in your country, people who do not condone such barbaric behaviour. Let them know you’re not a nation of airheads fed on a diet of inane TV and biased reporting, glorying in the destruction you wreak on weaker nations. Do it for children otherwise they’ll be the ones being shot at next.
This kid has just discovered a candy store, one I’ve been wishing for since I came to San Francisco: digital newspaper archives, going back to 1869, of the San Francisco Chronicle.* Here’s a piece of flavor, a quote from William Coleman, head of the second Vigilance Committee. If you’re unfamiliar, the Vigilance committees were fascinating bits of early San Francisco history, spontaneous, but extremely well-organized and orderly, expressions of public wrath against corruption and criminality. In this case, the group that Coleman spoke for formed to deal with one James Casey, a felon and apparently low character elected to the position of district supervisor. Casey responded to allegations of ballot-stuffing (and other criminality) by newspaper editor James King by waiting for King and shooting him in the chest. He then surrendered himself, confident of the protection of the authorities. Unfortunately for him, the vigilance committee speedily formed (with two thousand men swearing the oath), and in a matter of days “encouraged” the sheriff to give up Casey, tried him, and hanged him. Quoting Coleman:
Who made the laws and set agents over them? The people.
Who saw those laws neglected, disregarded, abused, trampled on? The people.
Who had the right to protect those laws and administer where their servants had failed? The people.
The people are the power; it is theirs by birthright, and when they delegate it, it is expressed and implied that upon wrongdoing the servants shall be pushed aside, formally or informally, and their places promptly filled by other and better agencies.
Enough to make any anarchist teary-eyed.
* Unlinkable without an SF Library card, unfortunately.
This New York Times article on the subject of the mash-up culture, and its origin in deconstruction’s implied nihilism, is a pretty close parallel to my previous post on the subject. Although the author it quotes, Jaron Lanier, seems to favor a technological rather than philosophical culprit as the main antagonist: “[S]ince the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
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