Saint Jobs In Perspective

Been a bit swamped with work - and building a mud hut for my daughter - for the last week but even up to my elbows in mud and straw I knew about the iPhone 4S release and the death of Steve Jobs. As for the iPhone 4S, well, I think that the weird obsession with changing the shape of the damn phone by many tech commentators was totally ridiculous, embarrassing even. I mean, who cares? Clearly not consumers who are snapping up the things in record numbers - 1 million in 24 hours apparently. Apple hasn't staged its remarkable rise from the edge of the grave about 15 years ago by being stupid. They know that there's no point in adding too many new features in an annual refresh cycle because people won't notice ten new things. But do a few awesome things and people will go ga-ga. Besides the dual core chip and shmancy new 8-megapixel camera, etc, the introduction of the Siri personal assistant AI program is the game-changer this time and that is what is selling the phone in such big numbers. Of course, one doesn't want to over-step in the prediction department but it seems to me that Siri is going to be much bigger than most analysts have, initially, realized. Remember when the iPhone 2 came out - way back in 2007 (only four years ago!) - and we all went berserk for the cool touchscreen scrolling. It was a whole new way to relate to your computer (and a smartphone is just a small computer that happens to make phone calls). Well, introducing natural language processing along with an AI that understands context ("remind me to pick up the milk when I leave work", "Text my mom and tell her that I'll be there this weekend.") is a whole new way of interacting. From the demos it already looks pretty amazing and my guess is that Apple will make it work in a way that Google hasn't for the simple reason that Google's model is to throw innumerable ideas at the wall to see if they stick - Google Wallet, Google Voice, Google Plus, Google Goggles, etc. Apple picks its next big thing and pushes hard on it. My guess is that once Siri is established and running smoothly on the iPhone 4S we will see it rolled out to the iPad, Mac computers and the Apple TV. It will have some significant knock-on effects that we can't yet envision - just as we couldn't, when Apple came out with the iPod, know that it would lead to iTunes, etc.

I know that is a bit of a nerd-gasm that seems bereft of political analysis but it's actually a prologue to my thoughts on the death of Steve Jobs. So, please grant me a small measure of forbearance.

First off, the elevation of Jobs to sainthood is a bit nauseating and most of what people on the left are saying is true - as much as anything, Apple pioneered the outsourcing to Asia of component manufacturing to take advantage of sweatshop conditions. That reality is underlined by the fact that Jobs' chosen successor, Tim Cook, was the man most responsible for setting up those "supply & distribution chains" in Asia. And it's absurd to think that Jobs came up with all the tech ideas that are now key to Apple's success or even that they originated within Apple's research and development department (Apple actually does very little R&D compared to other tech companies). But to say that is a bit besides the point - individuals always invent tools and generate ideas in the context of a socially generated need and on the foundation of work by others (somebody invented the computer and then the graphical user interface for which a mouse was a tool that made sense, Apple commercialized these advances. Einstein came up with relativity in the context of a series of well-known problems and partial solutions around the turn of the century). All knowledge and all inventions are first and foremost social. But it's also silly to just pretend that Jobs existence didn't matter (or Einstein's for that matter). In a world where a tiny elite get to make the key decisions in politics and industry, most of the time their decisions do make a difference and the fate of companies, industries and nations can be decided by the brilliance or foolishness of the leader. This is a particularly inefficient way to run society, of course, and makes the world prone to a lot of avoidable disasters - even if it weren't for the fact that the profit dynamic often benefits from avoidable disasters. And it's not the only dynamic - masses of people do still struggle to make their voices and ideas heard, scientists toiling away in their thousands do generate new devices and ideas to provide technological advances. But the hierarchical and undemocratic nature of our society gives undue weight to the role of "leaders".

And the dramatic turnaround of Apple from its near-death experience in the late 1990s cannot be separated from the return of Steve Jobs to the helm. He was a master at finding the cutting edge of useable - not beta - technology; connecting it to popular desires and fantasies about technology; understanding the importance of "stylish" and ergonomic form factors (basically bringing fashion or the car industry model of annual design changes into the computer world) that meant that their products "just work" without complicated user's manuals; and then he understood, or came to understand, how to integrate it into a total, monetized and convenient ecosystem. Before iTunes started carrying movies - and, of course, they aren't the only ones any more - I would go to the considerable trouble of downloading pirate films simply because it was the only way to get movies online. Hollywood and the music industry refused to offer its films and music online, fearing the loss of control (and profit). The arrival of iTunes smashed first the music industry's distribution model and then the film and television industry as well. Granted, both industries have learned to profit from the new model (with Apple dipping its fingers into the pie now) but we forget that this simply didn't exist ten years ago. Just the other day I was talking to a musician I know about download cards that indie musicians sell at shows. No longer are they saddled with cases of CDs in their basement or car trunk. Take home the download card - or go onto your iPhone or iPad and type in a few numbers and ba-da-boom you have the album on your phone. With iCloud it will instantly exist across all of your Apple devices. That is a significant advance. It wasn't that they invented anything new per se it was that they knew how to meld together established technologies towards disruptive ends. Apple is now a behemoth with a total ecosystem that is awe-inspiring, particularly now with the introduction of iCloud and the deep integration of Siri into iOS.

Back to the hagiography of Jobs, of course the media is drooling over him. He was the perfect capitalist: modest in appearance, a family man who shunned ostentatious displays of wealth, and a "self-made man" who was outcast from the garden of Apple and then returned as a mature man to save it again. The blood and guts, as always, are disappeared - we don't hear about the ruthless competition and the tens of millions spent on litigation to disrupt competitors (the ongoing patent war with Samsung, for instance, has reached ludicrous proportions). And we don't hear much about the toiling workers in Chinese sweatshops who are denied the most basic rights and are paid a pittance in order to sell the glorious iPhone at a low cost to North American and European consumers. I don't pretend to know the demographics of the people mourning Steve Jobs with flowers and sticky notes outside of Apple Stores around the world - are they rich, middle class, working class, etc? Beats me. My guess is that in, for instance, China, there aren't a lot of workers taking flowers to mourn Steve Jobs. They have bigger fish to fry. But to lots of people in North America he is a symbol of something, even if it is a manufactured symbol and that is interesting to me. And - while I'd rather people identified with Occupy Wall Street (and Boston, and Chicago and Toronto, et al) - I'm not willing to just write people off who look to Steve Jobs as dupes. In many ways he represented the hope that the world can be changed - even if it was primarily via tech gadgets - and I, for one, am not willing to shit on that hope.

Dirty Oil Has More Freedom To Move Than People

Free ride for dirty oil, border checks for people. But which is more dangerous?

It's one of those typical injustices of capitalism that money, capital and dirty, earth-destroying, toxic oil products, have more right to cross borders and move around the world than do people - often including people who are trying to flee the impact of toxic oil products or governments who repress their population to protect foreign money and capital. So, we shouldn't expect any different sort of behaviour from the Canadian and American government in relation to their own populations. And that's exactly what they're doing.

As Canada and the US try to push forward with their multi-billion dollar pipeline of liquid death, it seems the US is also trying to find ways to put up fences and surveillance cameras along the 6,400 km border that we share. Why? For national security, of course - which means restricting the movement of people. It's worth noting that the security of the Keystone I pipeline and the rogue oil that passes through its innards is rather less secure than would be the border. In one year of operation the pipeline that was supposed to only have one spill every 7 years had twelve. This high rate of spillage is consistent with the experience of pipelines in Alberta with speculation that dirty tar sands oil is highly corrosive, compared to other forms of oil.

Despite its relatively recent construction, Alberta’s hazardous liquid system had 218 spills greater than 26 gallons per 10,000 miles of pipeline caused by internal corrosion from 2002 to 2010, compared to 13.6 spills greater than 26 gallons per 10,000 miles of pipeline from internal corrosion reported in the United States to PHMSA during that same time period. This rate of spills due to internal corrosion is sixteen times higher in Alberta than in the United States. [page 9]

Of course, it doesn't help that TransCanada, the builders of the pipeline, are apparently willing to use cheap, second rate steel and is petitioning the Canadian government for the right to abrogate existing laws on steel thickness, as well as maximum pressures allowed within the pipe. It has to be said that as a result of past practices, TransCanada have been ordered to dig up whole swathes of pipe for replacement.

TransCanada is digging up 10 sections of a new, $5.2 billion crude oil pipeline, including one in Missouri, after government-ordered tests identified possibly defective steel may have been used in the construction.

And if you think that a couple of people sneaking across the border to sell pot in North Dakota is worth laying on fences, cameras and motion detectors (as opposed to, say, de-criminalizing marijuana) then you ought to lose your mind over the fact that oil leaks in the mid-west drain into the soil, which then sinks into the Ogallala aquifer - an underground sea that provides 30% of the groundwater for US agriculture as well as drinking water to populations stretching from Texas up to South Dakota. The health of millions of people could be directly affected by poisoning this key water source - not to mention the economic impacts. Of course, the Tory government believes people who oppose this "national security" disaster in the making are "extremists", including the Official Opposition, the NDP. This only demonstrates that the no price is too high for Canadian and American workers to pay in order to ensure that the Tories' buddies in the oil industry make fat profits. It doesn't matter of indigenous communities suffer high rates of birth defects downstream from tar sands projects. It doesn't matter if the drinking water of the entire mid-west of the USA is poisoned, ultimately leading to tax payer funded clean-up. And if you think any different, then you are an "extremist". However, spending billions to stop a few people from sneaking across a border that's supposed to have been opened since Free Trade, that's rational.

US Sacrificed Aid Agencies That Help Children To Kill Bin Laden

If you ever had any doubt that the hunt to locate and then kill Osama bin Laden was about anything other than vengeance and demonstrating to the world that Captain USA always gets his man, this latest revelation ought to dispel that. First, it was revealed by the UK Guardian newspaper in July that the CIA used a phoney-NGO vaccination program inside Pakistan to locate bin Laden, the prelude to his execution by US Special Forces. The collateral damage of that ploy are now becoming clear with a major aid agency, Save the Children, being forced to shut down operations inside Pakistan because of suspicion of the involvement of NGOs in the illegal assassination.

Furious aid workers say the CIA's reckless use of aid work as a cover by spy agencies has threatened the safety of genuine aid workers and endangered multimillion-pound programmes to help Pakistan's poor.
Save the Children has 2,000 employees in Pakistan and assisted 7 million people in 2010, half of whom where caught in massive floods while the remainder benefited from long-term development programmes.After the security threat in late July, those activities slowed or juddered to a halt.

Now, there are all sorts of critiques one can make about the role of NGOs in the developing world but it is clear that the callous use of the cover provided by western aid agencies working in Pakistan to carry out a revenge mission of more than dubious legality, which would definitely have an impact on the lives of thousands of children, is not only obscene but a true testament of America's arrogance an inhumanity. After nearly a decade of firing missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles into rural and isolated villages, in order to smash a movement whose roots lie in the desire for liberation from imperialism, it is hardly surprising that they would put the work of thousands of aid workers at risk without nary a thought nor a word of apology afterward.

Of course, all of this was so infuriatingly unnecessary. Having created bin Laden with money and weapons and political support for promoting the move conservative forms of resistance to the Soviet invasion, the Americans subsequently left Afghanistan to tear itself apart as former mujahideen fought over who would rule the poverty-stricken, war torn country. Certainly those warlords were corrupt and brutal but the real problem was that the US only cared about defeating their enemy, the Soviet Union, and not about providing the kind of development resources that would have reduced the kind of scarcity - particularly after the withdrawal of military and financial aid during the resistance - that causes civil wars when combined with heavily armed populations.

If that disillusionment in his former masters wasn't enough, the US war against Iraq in 1991 provided the final proof to bin Laden that the US was no friend of Muslims - unless they were immediately useful (a point worth remembering these days in Libya). It was America's abandonment of Afghanistan after it had served its purpose and its brutal war against Iraq - waged from the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia - that created bin Laden the enemy of America. But even this needn't have ended up in the massacre of 9/11, the subsequent war in Afghanistan and the present, dangerous deterioration in relations between the US and Pakistan. After bin Laden declared his jihad against the USA and had organized the first attacks on the US - on US embassies in three countries in 1998 and on the USS Cole, a destroyer anchored off of Yemen in 2000 - the Taliban offered both before and after 9/11 to give up bin Laden for trial but the USA wasn't interested in any sort of negotiations or anything short of absolute surrender.

Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban’s last foreign minister, told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview that his government had made several proposals to the United States to present the al-Qaeda leader, considered the mastermind of the 2001 attacks, for trial for his involvement in plots targeting US facilities during the 1990s.
"Even before the [9/11] attacks, our Islamic Emirate had tried through various proposals to resolve the Osama issue. One such proposal was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference [OIC]," Muttawakil said.
"But the US showed no interest in it. They kept demanding we hand him over, but we had no relations with the US, no agreement of any sort. They did not recognise our government."

And once 9/11 had taken place, war was needed to restore American prestige, even if it ended up killing many dozens of times the number of innocent people as died in the World Trade Center (and, while the war against Iraq clearly had no relation whatsoever to 9/11 it caused the premature deaths of perhaps a million people, compared to the 3,000 who died in New York City). This latest atrocity in the interest of America's imperial prestige, at a time of declining American power, will only add fuel to the fire of anti-Americanism and weaken their position in Pakistan and beyond.

Nobody Says "F*** You" Like Israel

As vile and racist as the regime is, you have to give them points for sheer chutzpah. Having denounced the Palestinians at the UN for not being serious about peace, Israeli PM Netanyahu has agreed two days later to build another 1,100 illegal buildings in occupied East Jerusalem. Of course, this has always been the strategy of Israel, ultimately emanating from the ultra-colonialist doctrine of Ze'ev Jabotinsky known as the Iron Wall. Basically, Israel will be so bad ass, so murderous and just plain crazy with a plentitude of American-bought weapons that the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians - the whole damn planet - will shut the hell up and do what Israel says. Unfortunately for the Palestinians what the state of Israel says is "fuck off and die", which isn't a very good place to start negotiations. And when Netanyahu says that negotiations must start from a perspective of "no preconditions", what he really means is that the only precondition is that the Palestinians will perform the above-noted-act of dispersal.

Unfortunately for Israel, the "we're-too-nuts-to-be-messed-with" line isn't carrying the same weight. Previously, they used the horrors of the Holocaust (which the Palestinians had nothing to do with) to justify their murderous, genocidal behaviour. Increasingly that doesn't hold much water - except with John Baird and the Harper Tories. Now there is no justification, just that they will kill whoever crosses them (and "crossing" them is broadly defined). But the Middle East is changing rapidly and Israel's actions have isolated it internationally, outside of the United States. With Turkey preparing a case against Israel's blockade of Gaza and threatening to escort aid ships with Turkish navy vessels and Egypt's post-revolution Prime Minister openly musing about the end of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Israel is in danger of digging its hold deeper. Nor can it count on the power of the US to unilaterally discipline countries like Turkey, Egypt or even Saudi Arabia. The wave of revolutions have put everything on the table. Hell, the Saudis are even going to let women vote and run for office (well, insofar as anyone can vote or run for any office that has any power). And the rise of a dynamic and wealthy China, which doesn't demand the same fealty to every twist and turn of its foreign policy as the USA and Europe, has undermined America's power as a more attractive ally. The result is that while, in the past, Israel's "fuck you" was accepted, if grudgingly by everyone in the neighbourhood (bar, perhaps, Hezbollah), more and more of the world is replying back "no, fuck you." That will ultimately be to Israel's detriment.

Israel okays new buildings in east Jerusalem - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

Video: "The Collapse Is Coming... Goldman Sachs Rules The World"

I have to say that it's not often that people at the heart of the stock market casino come out and tell the truth about the operation of the system, so kudos to this trader, though it is a remarkably cynical worldview. If he's right that the institutions who run the world - Goldman Sachs and the other big banks, hedge funds, etc - don't give a damn that the crisis that they've generated is going to destroy "the savings of millions of people" I would suggest that we need to vote out these institutions. Oh, that's right - they're not subject to democratic control...