I’m reading the new NLR. I have to say that it possesses most things that I find lacking in grad school — attention to political economy, an interest in understanding lived reality, and politically interested — so, I am reading it instead of wondering what exactly is up in Hegel’s exegesis of the family (hey, people, he’s giving a universalistic, philosophical argument for a contingent social formation! hey! hey hey!). I found Mike Davis’ article on the 2008 election to be very good. Davis proceeds by first analyzing the shifts in electoral makeup that allowed Obama to win — some of which were pretty significant — and then tying these into broader socioeconomic trends; this is done somewhat in the light of the thinking of VO Key and Walter Dean Burnham which posits the notion of a “critical election,” an election that represents a fundamental shift in voting behavior. Davis ultimately comes to argue that Obama’s win does not meet such standards, but is significant for other reasons. It’s all nicely done. Most striking of the article, though, was a short section on Obama’s administration as the “Silicon Presidency”:

But if the central bankers and financial morticians are still ceded reign over the ruins of Wall Street, Obama has allied with technology icons to lay the cornerstones of an economic renaissance based on massive public investment in ‘Green Infrastructure’. So far this is the flagship idea of the new Administration, the one that owes least to Clinton precedents and most closely resonates with the idealism of the campaign’s volunteers and the expectations of supporters in the big tech centres. The near constant presence of Google ceo Eric Schmidt at Obama’s side (and inside his transition team) has been a carefully chosen symbol of the knot that has been tied between Silicon Valley and the presidency. The dowry included the overwhelming majority of presidential campaign contributions from executives and employees of Cisco, Apple, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Ebay.

But the promise of Green Keynesianism may turn out differently than imagined by radical economists and environmental activists. A fundamental power-shift seems to be taking place in the business infrastructure of Washington, with ‘New Economy’ corporations rapidly gaining clout through Obama and the Democrats while Old Economy leviathans like General Motors grapple with destitution and welfare, and energy giants temporarily hide in caves. The unprecedented unity of tech firms behind Obama both helped to define and was defined by his campaign. Through his victory, they have acquired the credit balance to ensure that any green infrastructure will also be good industrial policy for their dynamic but ageing and cash-short corporations.

There is an obvious historical analogy. Just as General Electric’s Gerard Swope (the Steve Jobs of his day) and a bloc of advanced, capital-intensive corporations, supported by investment banks, enthusiastically partnered with Roosevelt to create the ill-fated National Recovery Administration (nra) in 1933, so too have Schmidt and his wired peers, together with the ever-more-powerful congressional delegation from California, become the principal stakeholders in Obama’s promise to launch an Apollo programme for renewable energy and new technology.

Il y a ainsi une politicité sensible d’emblée attribuée à des grandes formes de partage esthétique comme le théâtre, la page ou le chœur. Ces «politiques» suivent leur logique propre et elles reproposent leurs services à des époques et dans des contextes très differents. Pensons à la manière dont ces paradigmes ont fonctionné dans le nœud art/politique à la fin du XIXe siècle et au début du XXe. Pensons par exemple au rôle assumé par le paradigme de la page sous ses différentes forms, qui excède la matérialité de la feuille écrite: il y a la démocratie romanesque, la démocratie indifférente de l’écriture telle que la symbolisent le roman et son public. Mais il y a aussi la culture typographique et iconographique, cet entrelacement des pouvoirs de la lettre et de l’image, qui a joué un rôle si important à la Renaissance et que les vignettes, culs-de-lampe et innovations diverses de la typographie romantique ont réveillée. Ce modèle brouille les règles de correspondance à distance entre le dicible et le visible, propres à la logique représentative. Il brouille aussi le partage entre les œuvres de l’art pur et les décorations de l’art appliqué.

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Hattip to Qlipoth.

So I have been trying to make my reading more conducive to later writing. That is to say: I am trying to work toward a collected body of research that I can use to give evidence in articles. It is an interesting process — though one that I am not so sure, really, has much point — that is very time consuming. I think the problem is that I tend to read things twice instead of once: I read an article one time through and then I go back to draw out my quotes. Instead, I ought to read things through with my notebook and jot down my thoughts as I go along. Otherwise the impulse fizzles and thought runs aground, and trying to rekindle it or get it back on course by flipping through the marked up pages of books I’ve already ready is as irritating as it is tedious.

The place I am storing most this research is a Wikindx. The interface is nice enough, though it is tedious entering in the quotes etc. And since I have yet to make use of the research yet amassed — whether intentionally or in passing — I am beginning to wonder if my time wouldn’t be better spent picking my nose.

The real problem seems to be the precision of my retention. I read things and get the general import but do not remember precise facts. In books where there is an index in the back, this isn’t a great problem. But not all my books have indices; nor do I have all the books I’ve read. Which is why I started this project in the first place. I figure I will give it six months and see what happens: if it produces anything other than annoyance, I’ll keep it up.

Given the ever increasing media consolidation in the United States (and abroad), studies of how political and corporate interests bend, twist, or otherwise distort news coverage are taking on greater importance. Noam Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions offers a thoroughly researched and ranging treatment of political news coverage ranging from the Vietnam war to the late 80s, the time the book was published. And while the events investigated may seem like ancient history to the flightly attention-spans of our (media-trained) eyes, they are not yet resolved and the historical imbalance of news coverage accorded to them remains to be corrected, which, one can surmise, will entrain a needed shift in public opinion.

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Nice little flash video on Geoff Lawton’s permaculture project in Jordan that ‘greened the desert’ is up at The Sietch.

…a post I made about four months ago regarding depleted uranium, here’s a link to a ten minute film on youTube that explores the issue as well. Thanks to the Largest Minority.

Over the last fifteen years the militaries of the United States and its allies have scattered radioactive dust onto the territories of the countries they have occupied. This dust results from the use of depleted uranium (DU) arms, which saw their combat debut during the first Gulf War and have been used ever since. That the directors of these militaries have done so knowingly is undeniable—if we may cite their continued efforts to suppress and cover-up evidence of the effects of DU as evidence—but their intent in irradiating swaths of the earth demands effort to understand, as the effects of DU are so abominable that to unleash them seems to broach madness.

It may be seen as darkly comic to future historians that the first widespread use of nuclear arms came after the Cold War’s epic fear-mongering. Or the fact may perhaps be made to make a bitter sort of sense, a confirmation of the truth of Mutually Assured Destruction. In any case, during the first Gulf War the US military, along with at least the British, shelled and bombed the deserts of Iraq with depleted uranium rounds, which though lacking the trademark mushroom cloud scattered bits of radioactive dust that have a half life of 4.5 billion years. Gulf War Syndrome, the name give to symptoms displayed by servicemen returning from this war, has been shown to result from exposure to DU. Iraqi civilians exposed to DU dust, such as children who play the husks of tanks ‘killed’ by DU arms, are prey to the entire spectrum of diseases that are known to follow radiation exposure: leukemia, monstrous birth-defects, multiple instances of cancer. These things have been repeated during the war in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and during the second Gulf War, as has been well documented, and likely in Somalia as well, but the situation there remains so unstable as to make treatment of radiation sicknesses difficult to document—time will tell.

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Via Histomatist

War is about to change, in terrifying ways. America’s next wars, the ones the Pentagon is now planning, will be nothing like the conflicts that have gone before them. In just a few years, US forces will be able to deal out death, not at the squeeze of a trigger or even the push of a button, but with no human intervention whatsoever. Many fighting soldiers - those GIs in tin hats who are dying two a day in Iraq - will be replaced by machines backed up by surveillance technology so penetrating and pervasive that it is referred to as “military omniscience”. Any Americans involved will be less likely to carry rifles than PlayStation-style consoles and monitors that display simulated streetscapes of the kind familiar to players of Grand Theft Auto - and they may be miles from where the killing takes place.The real aim, however, is not to expose flesh-and-blood Americans on the ground, but where possible to use robots. That way there will be no “body bag problem”; and in any case machines are better equipped than human beings to process and make use of the vast quantities of data involved…

Much of the hardware and software already exists and the race to produce the rest is on such a scale that US officials are calling it the “new Manhattan Project”. Hundreds of research projects are under way at American universities and defence companies, backed by billions of dollars, and Donald Rumsfeld’s department of defence is determined to deliver as soon as possible. The momentum is coming not only from the relentless humiliation of US forces at the hands of some determined insurgents on the streets of Baghdad, but also from a realisation in Washington that this is the shape of things to come. Future wars, they believe, will be fought in the dirty, mazy streets of big cities in the “global south”, and if the US is to prevail it needs radically new strategies and equipment…

In one sense, robots are not new: already, armed drones such as Predator, “piloted” by CIA operators from screens in Florida, have been responsible for at least 80 assassination raids in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan (killing many civilians as well). Defence contractors have also developed ground-based vehicles capable of carrying cameras and weapons into the battlefield.

But this is only the start. What will make the next generation different is that they are being designed so that they can choose, all on their own, the targets they will attack. Operating in the air and on the ground, they are being equipped with Automated Target Recognition software capable not only of comparing signals received from new-generation sensors with databases of targets, but also of “deciding” to fire guns or launch missiles automatically once there is a good “fit”. Automated killing of this kind hasn’t been approved by anyone yet, but it is certainly being planned. John Tirpak, editor of Air Force Magazine in the US, expects initially that humans will retain the last word, but he predicts that once robots “establish a track record of reliability in finding the

right targets and employing weapons properly”, the “machines will be trusted to do even that”.Planners believe, moreover, that robot warriors have a doomsday power. Gordon Johnson, a team leader on Project Alpha, which is developing robots for the US army, predicts that, if the robot’s gun can return fire automatically and instantly to within a metre of a location from which its sensors have detected a gunshot, it will always kill the person who has fired. “Anyone who would shoot at our forces would die,” says Johnson. “Before he can drop that weapon and run, he’s probably already dead. Well now, these cowards in Baghdad would have to pay with blood and guts every time they shoot at one of our folks. The costs of poker went up significantly. The enemy, are they going to give up blood and guts to kill machines? I’m guessing not.”’

Recent research leads me to believe that this may be because machines are more tolerant of toxins than flesh and blood you or I; and that each one of these aluminum monsters would line the pockets of the military-industrial complex, and perhaps spawn all manner of jeu vidéo franchises. More on that to come.

1. Monbiot has a fine article on emerging technology that will soon mean that many of us will be tagged and monitored for the purposes of public safety. Perhaps the real panopticon will be built one brick at a time, and will not be so participatory—well, at least, voluntary, after all. The two technologies that make up the bulk of the article are identification chip, one type implanted under the skin, the other in the proposed ID Card for Britain. Monbiot teases out a whole slew of possible abuses. Please read it.
2. One possible effect of the ID chips that Monbiot didn’t consider, and that is already occurring in America, is the National Animal ID Program(NAIS). Apparently it is being instated already. In brief: every livestock owner in the United States will now have to insert a chip into his or her pet, feedstock, or whatever else and report to the government on its usage. One wonders: what could be the motivation? A consolidation of agribusiness powers? Another layer of leverage against smalltimers?
3. The final analysis of these steps will have to concern contracts: it all comes down to contracts. We should know who is getting paid by whom and when. That is what NAIS is: another profit sector for one more corporation. That is how neoliberal government works works; that is policy.