30th
Tomorrow’s War and Tomorrow’s War
JOE LIEBERMAN: “I was in Yemen in August. And we have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence. We’re working well with the government of President Saleh there.
I leave you with this thought that somebody in our government said to me in the Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face.”
“…dangerous events, whether intentional or accidental, are facilitated through an increase in ease and access. To the extent that more and more people in less and less formal and visible settings are able to engineer biological systems, the possibility of predicting the form and timing of such dangerous events, and thereby preventing them, becomes intractable. In certain respects, DIY biology is a ‘black swan’ waiting to happen: it portends events whose probability might seem low, but whose negative impact is likely to be quite high.”
—via Nature | Commentary
Enough quotes, though. The conversation about security is pointless: heated opinions about total lies. In the face of uncontrollable risks and impossible odds, there is little that humans can do in 2010 to make Earth into a Safer Place, by any definition. Something in Lieberman’s latest channeled material struck a deep chord in me: “Tomorrow’s War” and the cold inevitability that he was right, and always would be.
Dolphins swim, cat sleep, monkeys war. I do read a lot of history. I don’t see a lot of exceptions. We are herd primates who mobilize via speech and symbol to make war with rival herds. Any language, timeframe, or spot on the globe, you’re likely to find a conflict in process among human beings. I submit that this state of affairs might not be changing anytime soon. I also submit that it has to, and furthermore, that we can make it happen in our own lifetimes.
From Antonin Artaud to Mahatma Ghandi to Grant Morrison, the creative mutants who decided to test out the limits have all discovered the same thing: they got way further than they expected to. The focused individual has a stunning amount of personal power within their grasp once they really start reaching for it. Exceptional conspiracies are run by exceptional people — but the truly exceptional humans are one-man armies. This not a hypothetical or exaggerated description, and Nigeria is proof enough.
For all the discussion about security and terrorism, it’s funny that nobody will discuss the biggest White Elephant I’m aware of in 2009: the fact that terrorism works and has a repeatable model with a proven track record. That’s problematic stuff. Henry Okah and the total victory of MEND in Nigeria is heavy, heavy data that doesn’t get brought up often enough.
The pin-up art of violence is a universal language. It’s not like every other military on Earth isn’t just as crass and explicit in promoting their raw hardware as a statement of their power. At first I wrote “symbol of their power,” but that’s a bit like saying a toaster is a symbol for toast. Mao was very clear on where political power originated: from the barrel of a gun precisely like the one that Henry Okah is holding in the Ghostface Killah Militia shot above. The problem, of course, is that guns kill people and cause, on average, more problems than they are capable of solving.
Insert metaphor that ties all this together. General words of encouragement, colorful description of hopeful future horizons. Token admission that future mutants with psychic superpowers might be so dangerous it creates a nightmare dystopia. Strong statement that the benefits outweigh the risks, followed by an open-ended concluding sentence that sounds deeper than it actually is. Curtains. Finis.
