Category Archives: Thoughts About the World

History, observations, and trying to understand the world

Meaning and Purpose

Meat Suit

Meat Suit

The meaning: I am a biological entity that’s a natural bi-product of the world and universe in which I exist. We humans literally are “a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The meaning of my life is to experience the ability to perceive and the interaction with that perception’s ramifications, also known as experience. My meaning is the experience of this limited life that I get to live. I get to think and live, the meaning is the experience.

The purpose: “The purpose of life is a life with a purpose.” A fundamental question must be asked by those seeking purpose, “What is important?” Your family, your community, your planet? Pursue purpose purposefully, enjoy happiness when it is found in the oddest of places but pursue purpose fully. Open you eyes and see, open your mind and see further.

There are no gods, no kings, no masters in choosing what you do, just influences by other humans and interaction with human systems or human interaction with natural systems. We are cogs of change, for good and for evil, we are pieces of bigger systems likes individuals in a family or a group in a polity or a nation in a geopolitical system (or an individual in a world system). We are each others destinies but we are distracted and blinded by control and influence mechanisms, like entertainment or archaic ideas of control. We live in a world built on thousands of years of grinding and constant societal change and evolution, most of us blindly moving through life without much context of our civilization’s experience and the way in which it’s past affects us.

We stand on the precipice of the future unfolding. Those that live are at the crest of a continually crashing wave of time. Our time is unfolding before our eyes and it’s us that wield this thing, this destiny of us together. The future of human life use to be controlled by others, thought by many that some better version of humanity was steering and guiding us and leading the rest of us like some controlling architect of an unknowable universe guiding our species into the future. But those days are dead, exposed to reality, the ideas of a day far gone.

We, alone in our environment (local, planetary, cosmologically) guide the sway of destiny with billions of others together, we are living in a revelation, the fruit of knowledge that whispers to us that we are the captains of our life the masters of our ships of destiny. The fruit of the tree of knowledge has been bitten long ago and our eyes slowly throughout time opened to a reality that has been unfolding. We are small, incomprehensibly so but we are free within our biological and technological limitations, we are free much like the cap of the pyramid is free of its base. Our foundations, our yesterdays guide us (sorry I started typing, but this feels like a different argument and different tangent).

If we are free to create our futures, what do you wish to create? What world would you help to build?

If we are constrained by our history what should we be seeking to subvert? If we are products of our birth what should we see in ourselves that our patriarchs are unable to tell us? If we are born of nation-states then what portions of our own history are being obfuscated? Where do I exist within the current system? Can I move out of the current paradigm? These have been (are) a few of my questions, good luck in finding yours. Always remember answers are speed bumps to more honed questions.

 

Free

bombed library

We exist within the cultural makeup of the world and society around us. We, for the most, part don’t get to immediately choose the path that we want to take. We’re pushed and prodded by everything from the beliefs of our parents to thousands of hours of forced public schooling, from the laws on the books to the cultural taboos that guide our daily decision making process.

No one can guarantee anybody else’s freedom in this existence as freedom is not given by anybody, freedom is hard and dirty work but it’s possible to push the bounds of culture and to break through the mentality of control to snap the chains of the enslaved mind. You must sacrifice for anything worth having but even if you risk it all and sacrifice, nothing is guaranteed.

No matter what prison constrains me I shall be free, for freedom exists first in the mind of the liberated. Humans are born equal but few are born free. No matter what anybody says I cannot be someone’s property, they may believe it but property in its essence cannot revolt or subvert, just through the experience of cerebration that natural by-product of a human being existing expresses individuality and freedom to choose in whatever limited capacity there may be.

So learn how to choose what you want your experience to be, that’s what trying new things and education is for. We are born into a world of other peoples shit; their hang ups, society’s taboos, the dogmas of fools, and the rationality of the greedy. To find your own voice as the world around you screams, is to sing the song of emancipation.

Like the man said, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.” So sing mother-fucker, sing! Sing the song of your own liberation.

Black Sites and GITMO

Picture from Wikipedia

Picture from Wikipedia

I’ve been going through articles on the UC Davis Guantanamo Testimonials Project and reading about what GITMO detainees went through. It is a project dedicated to collecting the testimonies of those who have been involved with dentition at Guantanamo Bay in their own words. I’m trying to learn about something that terrifies me, I want to stop reading the articles but I feel drawn into the testimonies of prisoners and jailers alike and I want to bear witness to the history they have to tell.

One of the testimonies was about an innocent man – there are a lot about innocent people, just look at the list of names of the detained and see how many have been released – but this guy was snatched up and tortured for eight fucking years. Eight years of his life were taken away, by a government of separate sovereignty than his own and sent to a faraway land (if this happened to US citizens on the regular we’d be at war or we’d at least send in Bill Clinton). This guy is a Kuwaiti and elements of the US government hears about him and somehow suspects him of terrorism, snatches him off the street, throws him in jail, and then sends him to Guantanamo Bay Cuba to be tortured for 8 years of his life.

Shit’s brutal.

A court heard his case in the US and the judge said that there wasn’t enough evidence to have him locked up in the first place, much less put him into the most notorious High Value Target (HVT) detention facilities ran by the most powerful empire (or Super Power what ever language you prefer) in the world to be tortured and detained for almost a decade. It’s scary to think about how much power over the lives of others some people have. And there are tons of article similar to this one about lots of different people on the site, not just detainees but soldiers and civilian alike all confirming what went on, what goes on there.

This terrifies me and it’s not just the idea of being locked up and tortured for being nothing more than, in a lot of cases of the detainees, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s the understanding that there’s an entity in the world that claims to represent my interests that’s powerful enough to put people from all over the world anywhere they want and treat them with torture to gain information. GITMO isn’t a just a jail it’s a processing center. It’s a place where you go if the US really suspects you of terrorism. It is a processing center that controls your life until it determines whether or not it’s through with you. The places you go if the US really really thinks your guilty – guilt determined by means that don’t work (aka torture) – are called black sites, black because they’ll be redacted with black ink as soon as the printer ink dries. These are dark holes officials in the US government throw people to be tortured away from the peering eyes of its own citizenry and the world. All without a hearing, all based on the principle of guilty until proven innocent veiled in obscure readings of the law, it freaks me out.

I’m so thankful I am not any of these people, the guards, the interrogators, but especially the ‘detainees’. We should call them what they really are, victims of a powerful faceless system that represents a small segment of the human population and it has the power to determine who is an enemy by a secret and ever changing set of criteria with ‘no meaningful insight’.

These are the stories I’m really afraid of. When I got home from Afghanistan I remember telling my mom, “When I was younger, I remember being scared of ghosts and demons, now that I’m home I know there are scarier things that go bump in the night, like a human being with an RPG.” Yeah and big-damn governments that could chose to call you an enemy because you aren’t the way it thinks you should be.

Just a side note, here is a video of Christopher Hitchens agreeing to be water boarded. Very informative for those who have never seen what water boarding is really like.

Choke Points and Chessboards

So I asked, “Why has the US occupied Afghanistan for so long?”, other than the emotional reasons that are spewed at us on a regular basis. What is really at stake for the US and allies in occupying Afghanistan and what is there to gain for those that push the chess pieces of civilizations? A sketch of the geo-political situation began to draw out in my mind after reading a lot on the subject (histories of the region, discussions on US grand strategy, learning about political alliances, and foreign investment) studying maps (historical and modern political maps of the world and region, resource maps, and topographical maps), taking classes, and having a vested interest, that the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq was way bigger than a “war against terrorism” or a “war for oil.” It looks like it is a war for ‘regional stability’ (a term that seems to mean ‘within the United States or NATOs sphere of influence’). Regional stability = weapons contracts, land-grants, constitutional or dictatorial influence, and priority of business contracts to those companies that have been chosen by the ruling class to manage and exploit the resources within their grasp.

The US is conducting ‘secret wars’ all across the globe. In Africa SOCOM (Special Operations Command) is operating at high capacity to maintain or strengthen region stability (governments and militaries under the sphere of the US). In Yemen (i.e. global choke point “Bab-el-Mandeb”) the US is launching drone strikes from Djibouti to combat ‘terrorists.’

These terrorists are people fighting against the current government of Yemen which is influenced by “western” capital and investment. In Afghanistan and Iraq the sitting governments were toppled and new ones were put into their place. Now its further collapsing and ‘Balkanizing’. Look at a map and you can see that it is not only the resources of those countries that are important but their strategic location. Iraq at the head of the Persian Gulf and sharing the southern border of Iran. A major buffer state to Israel, the Saud regime, major deployment bases in Turkey, and the entire Persian Gulf has been a traditional mercantile ‘choke point’ since the incursion of the Portuguese monopolistic merchants in the 15th century. Afghanistan shares the Eastern boarder of Iran, shares a boarder with the former countries of the former USSR (and haven’t chosen a side in the unspoken undeclared Cold War simmering), It also shares a small boarder with China (potential future contender and current whispered rival) and Pakistan, which sits on the northern border of one of closest allies in the region, India.

All of these wars have been ascribed the same name “Global War on Terror” and assigned the same enemy “Al-Qaeda” (and a laundry list of affiliates) but these are only a few of the conflicts that are taking place now where the US is playing a major role (in personnel, equipment, economy) and has chosen to back some people against other people. This is always a dangerous game because many of the issues of the old wars, the wars of global dominance, have not been resolved, and many other strong powers have their fingers in some of the same pies as the US does but with similar intentions as the US.

What do you think?

 

Link to Tom O’brien’s Pirate and Smugglers History class lectures