Obey the Giant and Colombo

Something i saw today got me thinking of Colombo, and does Colombo even have a ‘counter culture’ movement? Does Colombo have meme’s? Do we get taken up with random shizz that don’t mean anything in particular? Of course we do, various teledrama phrases spring to mind like ‘I know the law putha’ anyone remember that? Could that chap be Colombo’s Giant?

I think there is mass scale sick to deathness with political BS. Its always been there sure, but with the war over poor people are expecting to get richer, this is clearly not happening. I think people need to be woken up, the economics of their situation be made aware to them. I’m not saying the government isn’t trying, but it isn’t trying hard enough. Corruption is there, cronyism is there, Hambantotism is also there.

Andre the Giant Has a Posse was a poster/street art campaign that was started by Shepard Fairy. Was watching Exit through the Gift Shop and finally found the bloody meaning behind the Andre the Giant posters. My earlier suspicions were confirmed, it doesn’t really mean anything.

But it doesn’t have to actually. The fat face with the look of a man trying to size you up for dinner with the word OBEY written in big think lettters is nothing short of Orweillian. The concept behind it is really interesting. Fairy (far as i know that IS his real, not figurative, name) borrowed the picture off some tabloid and stuck the OBEY motif to it and then stuck it on several walls in an around LA. This took for some inexplicaple reason and soon thousands of people were sticker bombing the US with Andre.

To quote Shepard Fairy from the movie

“Even though the Andre the Giant sticker was just an inside joke and i was just having fun, i liked the idea of.. the more stickers that are out there the more important it seems, the more important it seems, the more people wanna know what it is, the more they ask each other and it gains real power from perceived power’.

An A the G movement site has this to say

The Giant project isn’t a sales pitch, it’s an experiment in phenomenology, prodding the collective psyche with something inexplicable, creating an illusion of a secret society…What Fairey hoped to get across was that Giant uses the same propaganda techniques that try to sell you cigarettes, movies and presidents.

Funnily enough, Fairy did use the same skill set to sell a president. And people bought it too. The Obama posters were probably some of the coolest pieces of election campaigning i’d ever seen, but like a lot of people now i think Obama was just same same, with marginally different skin tone.

So why get worked up over nothing? Its a psychological blip. Something constantly in your face that you don’t know the meaning of, that you’re driven by curiosity to get to the bottom of it sort of like one of those itches under the skin your nails can’t get at. Hopefully in the process you end up becoming a little more aware of your surroundings.

“Once you examine it, there’s nothing left but the aesthetics of a process. If people realize, ‘I was manipulated by that,’ then maybe, like the domino effect, they’ll say, ‘What else am I being manipulated by, that I’m not questioning?’”

The message is in the medium. All this is a very novel, surrealistic approach to social activism. You don’t point and shoot, you just sort of create a jarring affect and hope it leads to something.

…say, ‘Question Authority,’ or ‘Stop Racism.’ You just get a pat on the back from the people who agree with you already, and the people who don’t agree with you don’t even think about it. So for me it’s just about creating an individual dialogue process that can expand into people trying to interpret it, and asking someone else, and then there’s two people talking about it. Something just going on that people can’t pigeonhole along with everything else.”

Obey the Giant is a meme that came out of a counter culture movement. The anti corporate, anti commercial, anti paid advertising one. It slowly morphed into a subset of corporate culture anyway vis a vis the Obama posters and Fairy’s ‘Black Market’ graphic design firm.

There may be something there in Colombo for a potential sticker bombing campaign. But i’m thought bouncing I suppose. As the three wheel dudes know; Life is rainbow.

The Burden of Barrack

It’s beginning to occur to me that Obama must be feeling rather put off by winning the peace prize. In the beginning I thought the whole thing was a publicity stunt of some sort initiated by colluding Western powers. But my conspiracy theory hormonal surge has dulled now, as it usually does, in the face of other emerging trains of thought.

Giving Obama the peace prize is like clapping the big ugly dark dude who just walked into your school heartily on the back and giving him an award for being nice. You know he’s got the potential to be bad. And you know that eventually, given the conditions of the school and its internal dynamics (now that’s phrase you never heard in school), he will be bad. Now imagine that same bloke commanding the fear and submission of all the teachers and imagine his father having enough money to buy ten schools like that and donate it to charity. This dude could run amok and do anything he wants. If unchecked, what will follow is a lot of stolen lunches,  broken noses, stolen test papers, lunch money and a host of other things. Beware the big, rich guy that turns bully.

The Nobel Committee saw this potential disaster unfolding. And how did they see this? Oh just by randomly taking things like the intensification of forces and violence in Afghanistan, the buildup of tensions among emerging superpowers, G-bay, conflicting international policies and Iraq into consideration. None of these situations are particularly heading in a ‘peaceful’ direction.

Not to say that Obama had non-peaceful intentions, but his earlier almost too idealistic rhetoric was starting to give way to a more ‘pragmatic’ bush type approach to conflict. He was slowly beginning to see that things may be just a little bit tougher to fix than he imagined, if he wasn’t planning on using a gun.

And, just a like a guy who set out to pluck apples and found out that the tree is taller than he thought it was, he will contemplate climbing it (the hard way) or chopping through the trunk in order to get at the fruits (going on the warpath). It’s a presumably an easy choice to get wrong for someone sufficiently stressed and distanced from morals and ideals as one is likely to get when caught up in the thick bureaucracy of the red tape jungle, probably what happened to Bush (but let’s not go into that).

So now what the Nobel committee has done is suddenly come on up right behind Obama while he was secretly giving vent to evil thoughts of cutting down the apple tree and surprise him by surrounding him with a horde of happy teary eyed people all applauding him and heartily congratulating him for being the savior of all apple trees, everywhere in the world.

And they’re still watching him. The stature of the Nobel Prize is at stake. The Western world has bestowed its most sought after honor upon its potentially biggest hero. Thereby giving Obama the potential of becoming the world’s biggest zero as well. I mean sure, Bush was mean and he didn’t care much for peace; but at least he was open about it and was in your face, people knew where they stood with Bush.

But Obama, if he does nothing spectacular, will become just a pretender, and that’s far worse than being a villain. The Nobel committee, to boot, will have to explain away a massive embarrassment and deal with arguably irreparable damage as well if he goes moron. So the trust it has placed on Barrack is telling.

(insert heartfelt comment about world peace and trust in Obama’s integrity, to end this post on a audaciously hopeful note, no i never get tired of that quip. )

Cheers to DeeCee for inspiring me with her forwarded e-mail which contained a number of similar cartoons. Yes, Mondays don’t rock in my nick of the concrete woods.

Knee Jerk Peace Prize

v for victory. or peace?

I never thought i’d live to see the Nobel peace prize become just another meaningless Mahindapattama or a ‘Dr’ Mervyn Silva badge, but Yesterday Barrack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for ‘extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples’. He will join the ranks of recent peace prize winners such as Mohammed El-Baradie, Al Gore, Mohammed Younus, Martti Ahtisaari etc.

Most peace prize winners’ achievements are quantifiable; at least based on albeit broader guidelines. But Obama seems to simply have won this based on what he is best at; rhetoric. No wonder the conservative right is all up in arms about it, just turn on FOX news and see.

What peace he has brought to the world remains in the words of his panoramic speeches. And in the meanwhile, civilians continue to be bombed in Afghanistan, detainees continue to be held unjustly in G-bay and ruthless suppression continues to occur against the Palestinians in the Middle East.

The Economist asks this audacious question,

…is the award premature? Although the prize may be given in the spirit of encouraging Mr Obama’s government, it might have been better to wait for more solid achievements. With so many good intentions, and so many initiatives scattered around the world (and an immensely busy domestic agenda, including health-care reform and averting economic collapse), Mr Obama appears to be racing around trying everything without yet achieving much.

It has a point. Obama currently is talking like a Jack of all trades but is yet to become the master of even one.

According to Nobel’s wishes the award must go to ‘the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’

Obama’s work, though commendably full of very ‘prize worthy’ words, are yet to materialize in any concrete action. They should have waited another year or so to see if he would deliver. After all, all the other winners had to show concrete results before being awarded anything…

Obama’s Plan; Just Glitz and Glam?

So what has Obama done so far? Where is this ‘change’ that has been going around apparently for the whole world to see? Only change I see is a darker tone of skin in the white house.

People are still dying in Iraq, casualties have only increased lately including those of US soldiers. Violence has exacerbated in Pakistan, the Taliban has expanded its control. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are no better. Sure, you may say that the 100;1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths officially still happened during Bush’s last days but Obama was still president elect, and in the name of humanity, he could have said something or raised a protest. Reasonably supposing that he really knew what was going on.

The UN security council was going to pass a motion, simply a statement condemning the Israeli attacks, but even a mere statement against the war crimes being committed by Israel was vetoed by the United States. This was the same United States whose public was caught up in the wave of ‘change’ and ‘Rebranding America’ etc. Obama didn’t even raise a finger in protest. Hiding behind his ‘presidential elect’ status to absolve himself of any responsibility.

His flumbering beginnings in handling the ‘Financial Crisis’ have proven inadequate to say the least. The much harped about G20 produced nothing less than ‘heroic hypocrisy, unreliable sums, weak promises, meaningless language and self-serving commitments other than a very few worthwhile achievements’ (read more of Miles Saltiel’s report). His ‘stimulus’ packages have drawn widespread criticism from many economists (big names like Krugman and Stiglitz) as being extremely inappropriate given the current banking system.

It is increasingly looking like the boom-bust cycle will need to run its course until markets make their own recovery and Keynesian style hole digging and re-filling stimulus plans may or may not get us there quicker, but they will not work in the US is pumping its money into largely inefficient and loss making banks.

Also, where is the inquest into what happened in the Bush years? Where is all the war crime and 9/11 conspiracies that need to be investigated? The advent of Obama and his main calling card ‘change’ served the most effective purposes of brainwashing the world community into forgetting all about the previous years of US rule. It had the effect of making them think that ‘hey, here’s a new guy, let’s just forget the old guy, let’s change and move on’. But that change itself was insubstantial and mostly made up of clever and emotionally appealing rhetoric. And those of us who expected some actual substance from the man after he gained office will soon be sorely disappointed.

Brand America

I came across this interesting debate on the economist. Carried out between Mr. Mark Medish (MM) proposing the notion that American shine is still intact and Prof. Kishore Mahbubani (KM) opposing the notion. There were many interesting points raised with a LOT of interventions by readers which contributed to a very diverse flavor of a discussion.

When it comes to America, i have often been jokingly accused by friends to be anti-American. Which im obviously not. But what i am is an anti-corporate-greed, anti-inequality, anti-suppression and anti-war crime type of bugger. And sadly, during my formative years, America has seemed to me to be a country that leans toward exemplifying most of which i morally stand against.

But first, what is Brand America? MM argues that there are two Americas, not one. One is America the country, the other is America the Idea. The American idea is an idea of freedom, equality, justice and leadership. Which are extremely noble sentiments IMO.

This ‘leadership’ role though, also in my opinion, seems to have been confused to a certain degree with ‘dominance’ by the many participants in the debate. Like America needs to be in the forefront of everything in order to preserve its ‘brand value’. Which i think is wrong. You don’t have to squash everybody else to be a leader. Taking the lead means guiding everybody else when they cant see. Not hoping that they cant see so that they can be guided. IMO again.

Moving on from that, what was noticeable was the strong rhetoric coming from the proposing side and the equally strong facts coming in from the opposing side. One may thing that facts trump rhetoric any day. But we are talking brand and perception here. People are not only influenced by facts, they are also influenced by sights, sounds, the look of the thing and how they perceive things. Most of which are non-quantifiable.

Also, the Brand that is America, a political/ economic superpower, seems more shaken than ever. And that’s it. It is America’s super power status that is in danger here. And I say what the hell? just because you’re not a superpower does not mean that you still cant be a great nation right?

On devolution of power (which seems inevitable) a fact also brought up by KM dealt specifically with the ‘historical aberration’ of 200 years of European domination followed by American domination before which (from year 1 to 1820) the biggest economies in the world were India and China alternatively. And he says that it is only a matter of time before they ‘resume their natural place’.

The superiority of America as a ‘democracy’ seems unanimously agreed upon but its economic superiority? not so much.

It is my opinion that every empire collapses eventually. From the Egyptians to the Romans to the Brits and now, to the Americans. It’s like the countries of the world take turns to dominate each other, the decider being nothing other than who comes off on top after the inevitable conflicts/ war.

Check out the debate. I’d love to hear your views.

Obamania!

I think there is something very wrong with the hype surrounding Barack Obama and his forthcoming inauguration. The whole thing seems to me more fitting to a totalitarian dictatorship than a great democracy, more like a monarch’s coronation or a Roman general’s triumph than a swearing-in ceremony for an elected president.

Take the cost of the event for starters: $160 million (ten or eleven times what it cost to inaugurate Clinton and Bush). Hardly what taxpayers fork over their hard-earned cash for, is it? And then consider that there will be 40,000 security personnel at the inauguration – more than the number of troops the US has serving in Afghanistan. The outgoing President has even declared a ‘state of emergency’ in DC. Kathryn Muratore got it right on LewRockwell.com when she said:

Welcome to the inauguration of the “leader of the free world.” You may only enter the city through these designated roads and transit systems. You will only have access to the inauguration after passing through a security checkpoint, where you will be treated with suspicion. There will be thousands of armed men surrounding you at the ceremony and parade. But, hey, that’s the price of freedom!

I’m sure that if the founding fathers could see it, they would be absolutely sickened.

And of course, it isn’t just the event that is the problem – it’s… (read more)

Tom Bowman for adamsmith.org

My sentiments largely echoed. I do not really think Obama is going to make any significant change except to change whatever inefficiencies that exist the US’s existing methods in the pursiut of global economic dominance. I think a more comprehensive change is needed in the system itself to put the world in a brighter path for the future. Otherwise we’ll just end up in a worse position than we are now in another 70 years or so. (assuming we’ll get out of this one without any major wars/disasters) I’ll be very surprised for instance, if he turns out to be another Andrew Jackson. Fingers crossed though. I’ve blogged about this guy way too much already.

Number 44

Damn! That was fast. And well, you could say I was an Obama supporter if you like. Personally I don’t think things would have been a lot different in many areas even if Mccain came into power but well Obama was, interesting. The man is full of theatrics and I was kind of expecting a nail biting finish. Instead he just breezes through.

I will not give you a blow by blow of it since you’re probably already plugged in to CNN from morning or something. Still wish I could’ve stayed back at home though. It’s great entertainment. Probably the last bit of drama that we’ll get in a while. And that’s what this race has been so far, super entertainment! I’m sorry it’s over. I guess we can all go home now.

Obama. Huh. He’s got the hype alright. But if people are imagining him to be a Jack Black in high school and shake everything up in the While House then I think we’re all in for a bit of an anticlimax. Nope, now it’s going to be back to the old routine of bill passing and legislation. A bit scarier ‘cos the democrats seem to have an overwhelming majority now. Personally I’m more concerned about the war. Destabilization the Middle East and South West Asia has to stop. Human rights violations in the Gaza strip have to stop. Give me a president who will change that.

Change A Coming??

We are just a few days away from the US presidential elections people and Obama just launched a half hour television commercial. Later on we are going to be all about how Obama, probably the candidate with the toughest chance at winning, grabbed the oval office by the sheer power of a stupendous marketing campaign. Probably the most effective in the history of the presidential elections since time immemorial etc. etc.

But is this chap really going to win? I remember asking indi about this once. Back when Obama had just managed to catch up with Hillary in the democratic primaries and was struggling to maintain a marginal lead, when it looked unlikely that he would do so, and when many a pundit was talking about how Hillary will just rise back up after a ‘temporary setback’. Indi seemed pretty confident that he would win the primary, and I think that he’s pretty much confident that he’s gonna pull off the presidential campaign as well and personally, I think I’m with him. (Indi, I hope you don’t mind the airtime and content.)

But is Obama really going to make a change? Is he really going to turn the world as we know it upside down? Or will he have more of a ‘Sarkozy affect’ (my own term) and simply strengthen politically the power of America and take practical positive steps to push forward the economy? Time will tell I suppose.

                                                                                       
Meanwhile, ominous notions of John F. Kennedy-esque assassinations circulate (and I don’t mean dumbasses like these). JFK was a reformist, possibly the best thing that happened to the States in the context of genuinely ‘wholesome’ global policy. Obama seems to have built his campaign on top of reformist pro-change rhetoric (As for his foriegn policy, well, McCain just may be striking a soft spot or two IMHO), will he practice it?  And if he does, will he have to pay for it? After all, as a friend of mine said, he’s just the president. Or will be, if McCain doesn’t win, or the ‘aliens’ decide to grab him or kill him with oh say, two bullets before the elections.

Big Brother

The Island wants you to live! Linc, The Company is after your son! Hiro, the virus! It was unleashed in the future by The Company. You need to save the bloody world. Again.

The Big Brother is watching you. Wiretapping is scary…they are LISTENING!!!

Damn. What is this thing about popular culture that simply ices your testicles? Or at least my testicles cos ‘The Company’ (pronounced with full emphasis on the capitals and the inverted commas) is all I’ve been hearing about lately. ‘The Company’ is unleashing a virus, ‘The Company’ wants you dead. I mean, ‘Lost’ is a Robinson Crusoe-esque shipwreck (ok, planewreck if you will) story and it turns out that the very island they are stranded on has got a hidden agenda, and uses all the stranded people as pawns to achieve its goals. I’m talking about an Island here. I mean it’s an inanimate object.

I don’t know exactly why, but the notion that there is a higher unseen entity controlling your every move and attaching strings to you every way you turn, has reached a level of mainstream popularity that to me is quite novel. Think about it, not so long ago it was only the stoners, the UFO people, and my A/L english master who waxed lyrical about ‘hidden agendas’, things that are ‘not what they seem’ and ‘they have got you fooled’ etc.

I was, and am one of those people mind you, no not a stoner or an english master. Well correction, not always a stoner, and as for the UFO’s well, all I can say is that i believe in the possibilityof aliens existing. Another post on that maybe  But i’ve always been a conspiracy nut. If being intrigued by a possible conspiracy makes me a nut.

Someone once told me that the American people were being ‘prepared’ for a black president. He was of course referring to the black president seen in the first season of 24. This post 9/11 trash TV show if you ask me. The first season was great and Elisha Cuthbert was hot but then the whole thing got boring. Kind of noticed that the black president disappeared rather quickly in the following seasons too, I don’t know, maybe Obama should watch out.

‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’ is a great book. And a must read for all you ‘Company’ skeptics and fanatics out there. It sets out the true story of an ‘Economic Hitman’ working for big corporations involved in exploiting mainly third world/developing counties. Read that, and you’ll get some good insight into how the whole thing worked (this mainly concerns the mid to latter decades of the 20th century), and possibly get an inkling as to how modern mega-powerful corporate interests work too.

Popular culture reflects general sentiment among the larger public. So this is really where Wall Street meets Main Street, inside people’s minds. People are increasingly suspicious about big organizations and corporate interests controlling goverments and are increasingly wondering how much privacy and control they really have in their lives. Obama is popular in the polls and Obama is the one promising to cut down the power of Big Organizations. The world is caught in a Big Brother frenzy.

All that of course is primarily in the Western world right? You may ask or you may not. Here is SL, we peacefully navigate our ways through the occasional military checkpoint and avoid the occasional drunk driving rap by refusing to ‘blow the balloon’ and casually slipping the ‘ralahami’ a few hundred bucks. But nevertheless, we too are caught up in the whole global corporate game. Just how do we think we are funding our war? Just how do you think those politicos are getting their filthy hands on billions of dollars? This money has got to come from somewhere right? And the people giving it to us obviously know we are not going to pay them back. So what have they already reserved as collateral? Our natural resources? Our UN votes? Its anyone’s guess. Existing governments can simply sell the country’s soul to the devil (read, The Company) and temporarily live it up and then transfer the debris of their spoils on to the poor chaps who come into power next (who will probably in turn carry on with the grand traditions of the first) but I digress.

So has capitalism fuelled this and presented to us a world where governments are mere pawns on a chessboard ruled by the multinationals? I don’t know, I haven’t found out yet, I’m still waiting for Lost Season 5, and the rest of Heroes season 3 and Prison Break 4.

Outsourcing, Obama’s Folly

There’s a lot of American outsourcing going on. And not just to Mexico. In addition to Sri Lanka, there’s Vietnam, The Philippines, Malaysia, I’m not too sure about Pakistan but there’s definitely India. Gazillions of Indians work in call centers, and there are more queuing up. Lots of labor availability means lower wages (by US standards), meaning lower costs, translating into higher profits/lower prices. Mostly the latter due to high competition in developed markets.

Hell man, they’re even outsourcing war right now. And not just to American firms it seems.

And now Barrack Obama wants to stop all that. He wants to provide Americans with jobs he says, but is outsourcing really the demon of unemployment to developed nations like they seem to think?

I would say no. Outsourcing is great for the economy, its ‘spreads the wealth around’ (one of Obama’s axioms as a matter of fact, but I think he was talking in a more local sense as opposed to a global one). But then you’d argue that it may be okay for the global economy, but is it alright for countries taken individually? More importantly, is it good for America? Cos people in the US are losing their jobs to Pakis, curries and brownies faster than you can say ‘Joe the Plumber’.

I would say yes it is. Here’s why.

• Importing labor means outflow of foreign exchange translating into more demand for American exports. Cos the dollars that go out have to eventually end up back in the US right? So this will fuel American industry and actually increase employment there.

• Regular American consumers pay less for services due to reduced prices of goods and serviced whose functions have been outsourced to other countries, leaving them with more disposable income which they will in turn channel towards other industries making them more prosperous increasing employment there as well.

So Americans can only get more prosperous. Sure we’re looking at a group of immediately affected former white collar workers without jobs, but in the longer term, the US and everybody else, would be far better as a result of outsourcing, which after all is probably one of the most visible affects of globalization on the planet.

America, to prosper again will need to focus its energies on those industries I which it is strongest in. The credit collapse seems to have blinded everyone onto thinking there’s something wrong with everything in the damn economy. That’s not the case here. It’s funny; they forgot the one thing that the great guru of modern American free market economic policy, Milton Friedman, advocated when he preached a free market policy approach; ‘Regulate the Banks!’ and look where they are now. Friedman never really offered a concrete explanation as to why, of all industries, only banks needed to be regulated, but I’m pretty sure we can all see firsthand what can happen when the heavily intertwined and confused financial industry, like a Gulliver after a bit too many drinks, hurls on the Lilliputian economy of the world. (for a simple and informative look at at how the subprime crisis happened click here).

I sure hope Obama is just saying that to get the votes in man, cos if he wins and really does do away with outsourcing, all that’s gonna do is cripple the American, and the global, economy a little bit more.