The hexagram Shih is a guide to proper conduct in the face of adversity. It is inevitable that we sometimes face trials and challenges in life. How we prepare ourselves, by whom we are led, and how we conduct ourselves during these “wars” determines whether we are victorious or not. The I Ching counsels us to follow the example of a first-rate army.
A truly powerful army always consists of a number of devoted soldiers who discipline themselves under the leadership of a superior general. If he has achieved his position through force, the general will not last for long and he will lose the support of his army when he needs it most. If on the other hand he has become a leader through superior conduct and even-handed treatment of this fellow soldiers, then his power is well consolidated and it endures.
So it is with us. Only by conducting ourselves humanely and with persevering balance can we have a genuine influence in trying times. There is always the temptation to be led into battle by our egos, but we are guaranteed a humiliating defeat if we turn our inferiors loose in this way. A superior person achieves victory in the same fashion as a superior army: by putting his inferior emotions under the guidance of his superior emotions, and by proceeding cautiously, modestly, and with the continual goal of achieving peace and detachment.
You are advised to prepare for a trial now. Your chances of success will be determined by how you conduct yourself within and without. If you remain alert, modest, just, and independent, all will go well. If you are gentle and humane, you will have the allegiance of those around you. Advance cautiously when the time is right, and when it is not, do not allow your ego to stand in the way of retreat and disengagement.
Remember that the ultimate victory in any battle comes when we regain our inner independence, our neutrality, and our equanimity. These can only be won by placing our inferiors under the leadership of our superiors. Do this now, and success will be yours.
Muhammad Danish Qasim is a Pakistani student at Iqra University’s Media Science and is also a filmmaker. This year, Qasim released a short film entitled The Other Side, a 20-minute narrative that “revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical effects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan.” A two-minute video trailer of the film is embedded below. The Express Tribuneprovided this summary of the film, including an interview with Qasim:
The Other Side revolves around a school-going child in Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan. The child’s neighborhood gets bombed after the people of the region are suspected for some notorious activities. He ends up losing all of his loved ones during the bombing and later becomes part of an established terrorists group who exploit his loss and innocence for their own interests.
On the reasons for picking such a sensitive topic, the film-maker said, “Most of the films being made right now are based on social issues, so we picked up an issue of international importance which is the abrogation of our national space by foreign countries.”
When asked how this film on terrorism will be different from all the others that have been released since 9/11, he said, “The film takes the audience very close to the damage caused by drone attacks. I have tried my best to connect all the dots that lead to a drone attack and have shot the prevailing aftermath of such attacks in a very realistic and raw manner.”
In particular, “the film identifies the problems faced by families who have become victims of drone missiles, and it unearths the line of action which terrorist groups adopt to use victimised families for their vested interests.” In other words, it depicts the tragedy of civilian deaths, and documents how those deaths are then successfully exploited by actual Terrorists for recruitment purposes.
We can’t have the U.S. public learning about any of that. In April, Qasim was selected as the winner of the Audience Award for Best International Film at the 2012 National Film Festival For Talented Youth, held annually in Seattle, Washington. Qasim, however, along with his co-producers, were prevented from traveling to the U.S. to accept their award and showcase their film because their request for a visa to travel to the U.S. was denied. The Tribune reported: “Despite being chosen for the award, the filmmakers were unable to attend the award ceremony as their visa applications were rejected twice. ’If we got the visa then it would have been easy for us to frame our point of view in front of the other selected youth filmmakers,’ Qasim said.” And:
“I believe the most probable reason for the visa denial was the sensitive subject of my film,” says Qasim. He recalls that when the visa officer asked about the subject matter of the film, he suggested making changes in the letter issued by his University upon hearing that the film dealt with terrorism and drone attacks.
“Although I made the changes to the letter according to the visa officer’s recommendation, they still rejected the visa and did not disclose the reason for it,” says a disappointed Qasim.
According to Qasim, “NFFTY is considered to be the biggest event for young film-makers of the world. Film schools as well as potential Hollywood producers attend the event in order to interact with young, talented film-makers. I’m disappointed that my team, especially my crew members Atiqullah, Ali Raza Mukhtar Ali and Waqas Waheed Awan, who made the film possible with their hard work and support, missed out on a major opportunity to represent Pakistan on an international forum.”
Although it’s not proven why the visa was denied — the U.S. government, needless to say, refuses to comment on visa denials — this case is similar to that of Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who had sued the CIA on behalf of civilian drone victims and was also denied a visa to travel to the U.S. to attend last month’s Drone Summit in Washington; the Obama administration relented and permitted him to travel to the U.S. only once a serious outcry arose. The Bush administration also routinely excluded Muslim critics of U.S. foreign policy from entering the U.S.
Banning filmmakers, lawyers, political activists, and scholars from entering your country out of fear of their criticisms is the behavior of an insecure, oppressive nation. It’s also natural behavior for political leaders eager to maintain an impenetrable wall of secrecy around their conduct.
Just to underscore how extreme is the Obama administration’s reflexive secrecy in such matters: yesterday, ABC News‘s Jake Tapper asked National Security Advisor Tom Donilon whether the U.S. Government compensates the innocent victims it kills outside of Afghanistan, and Donilon simply refused to answer (“I’m just not going to go there”). There’s no legitimate reason that this information should be concealed, but for a government that views disclosure as inherently unnecessary, that is enamored of its own secrecy power for its own sake, and that is desperate to prevent its citizens from knowing what it is doing, this sort of imperious decree of secrecy is the natural course (for an even more egregious case, see this amazing summary from the ACLU’s Ben Wizner on how Obama DOJ lawyers defend the U.S. government’s secret, definitively Kafkaesque, unappealable no-fly and Terrorist watch lists).
That the U.S. is routinely killing innocent civilians in multiple Muslim countries is one of the great taboos in establishment media discourse. A film that documents the horrors and Terror brought by the U.S. to innocent people — and the way in which that behavior constantly strengthens the Terrorists, thus eternally perpetuating its own justification — threatens to subvert that taboo. So this filmmaker is simply kept out of the country, in Pakistan, where he can do little harm to U.S. propaganda (as usual, U.S. government claims of secrecy based on national security are primarily geared toward ensuring effective propagnada — of the American citizenry). Isn’t it time for another Hillary Clinton lecture to the world on the need for openness and transparency? “Those societies that believe they can be closed to change, to ideas, cultures, and beliefs that are different from theirs, will find quickly that in our internet world they will be left behind,” she so inspirationally intoned last month.
A federal district judge, the newly-appointed Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York, issued an amazing ruling: one which preliminarily enjoins enforcement of the highly controversial indefinite provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last December. This afternoon’s ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by seven dissident plaintiffs — including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Birgitta Jonsdottir — alleging that the NDAA violates ”both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
The ruling was a sweeping victory for the plaintiffs, as it rejected each of the Obama DOJ’s three arguments: (1) because none of the plaintiffs has yet been indefinitely detained, they lack “standing” to challenge the statute; (2) even if they have standing, the lack of imminent enforcement against them renders injunctive relief unnecessary; and (3) the NDAA creates no new detention powers beyond what the 2001 AUMF already provides.
As for the DOJ’s first argument — lack of standing — the court found that the plaintiffs are already suffering substantial injury from the reasonable fear that they could be indefinitely detained under section 1021 of the NDAA as a result of their constitutionally protected activities. As the court explained (h/t Charles Michael):
In support of their motion, Plaintiffs assert that § 1021 already has impacted their associational and expressive activities–and would continue to impact them, and that § 1021 is vague to such an extent that it provokes fear that certain of their associational and expressive activities could subject them to indefinite or prolonged military detention.
The court found that the plaintiffs have “shown an actual fear that their expressive and associational activities” could subject them to indefinite detention under the law, and “each of them has put forward uncontroverted evidence of concrete — non-hypothetical — ways in which the presence of the legislation has already impacted those expressive and associational activities” (as but one example, Hedges presented evidence that his “prior journalistic activities relating to certain organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban” proves “he has a realistic fear that those activities will subject him to detention under § 1021″). Thus, concluded the court, these plaintiffs have the right to challenge the constitutionality of the statute notwithstanding the fact that they have not yet been detained under it; that’s because its broad, menacing detention powers are already harming them and the exercise of their constitutional rights.
Significantly, the court here repeatedly told the DOJ that it could preclude standing for the plaintiffs if they were willing to state clearly that none of the journalistic and free speech conduct that the plaintiffs engage in could subject them to indefinite detention. But the Government refused to make any such representation. Thus, concluded the court, “plaintiffs have stated a more than plausible claim that the statute inappropriately encroaches on their rights under the First Amendment.”
Independently, the court found that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the NDAA violates their Fifth Amendment due process rights because the statute is so vague that it is virtually impossible to know what conduct could subject one to indefinite detention. Specifically, the court focused on the NDAA’s authorization to indefinitely detain not only Al Qaeda members, but also members of so-called “associated forces” and/or anyone who “substantially supports” such forces, and noted:
Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on their vagueness challenge. The terms upon which they focused at the hearing relate to who is a “covered person.” In that regard, plaintiffs took issue with the lack of definition and clarity regarding who constitutes an “associated forces,” and what it means to “substantially” or “directly” “support” such forces or, al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
. . .
The Government was unable to define precisely what ”direct” or “substantial” “support” means. . . .Thus, an individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so.
Perhaps most importantly, the court categorically rejected the central defense of this odious bill from the Obama administration and its defenders: namely, that it did nothing more than the 2001 AUMF already did and thus did not really expand the Government’s power of indefinite detention. The court cited three reasons why the NDAA clearly expands the Government’s detention power over the 2001 AUMF (all of which I previously cited when denouncing this bill).
First, “by its terms, the AUMF is tied directly and only to those involved in the events of 9/11,” whereas the NDAA “has a non-specific definition of ‘covered person’ that reaches beyond those involved in the 9/11 attacks by its very terms.”Second, “the individuals or groups at issue in the AUMF are also more specific than those at issue in § 1021″ of the NDAA; that’s because the AUMF covered those “directly involved in the 9/11 attacks while those in § 1021 [of the NDAA] are specific groups and ‘associated forces’.” Moreover, “the Government has not provided a concrete, cognizable set of organizations or individuals that constitute ‘associated forces,’ lending further indefiniteness to § 1021.” Third, the AUMF is much more specific about how one is guilty of “supporting” the covered Terrorist groups, while the NDAA is incredibly broad and un-specific in that regard, thus leading the court to believe that even legitimate activities could subject a person to indefinite detention.
The court also decisively rejected the argument that President Obama’s signing statement – expressing limits on how he intends to exercise the NDAA’s detention powers — solves any of these problems. That’s because, said the court, the signing statement “does not state that § 1021 of the NDAA will not be applied to otherwise-protected First Amendment speech nor does it give concrete definitions to the vague terms used in the statute.”
The court concluded by taking note of what is indeed the extraordinary nature of her ruling, but explained it this way:
This Court is acutely aware that preliminarily enjoining an act of Congress must be done with great caution. However, it is the responsibility of our judicial system to protect the public from acts of Congress which infringe upon constitutional rights.
I’ve been very hard on the federal judiciary in the past year due to its shameful, craven deference in the post-9/11 world to executive power and, especially, attempts to prosecute Muslims on Terrorism charges. But this is definitely an exception to that trend. This is an extraordinary and encouraging decision. All the usual caveats apply: this is only a preliminary injunction (though the court made it clear that she believes plaintiffs will ultimately prevail). It will certainly be appealed and can be reversed. There are still other authorities (including the AUMF) which the DOJ can use to assert the power of indefinite detention. Nonetheless, this is a rare and significant limit placed on the U.S. Government’s ability to seize ever-greater powers of detention-without-charges, and it is grounded in exactly the right constitutional principles: ones that federal courts and the Executive Branch have been willfully ignoring for the past decade.
There is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A 2010 study found that 4 percent of a sample of corporate managers met a clinical threshold for being labeled psychopaths, compared with 1 percent for the population at large. (However, the sample was not representative, as the study’s authors have noted.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.
The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted as much nearly three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called “The Fable of the Bees.”
“Private Vices, Publick Benefits” read the book’s subtitle. A Machiavelli of the economic realm — a man who showed us as we are, not as we like to think we are — Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By “pride” Mandeville meant vanity; by “luxury” he meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side, as we’d say, was fraud: “All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.”
In other words, Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.
I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.
There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “job creators,” a phrase begotten by Frank Luntz, the right-wing propaganda guru, on the ghost of Ayn Rand. The rich deserve our gratitude as well as everything they have, in other words, and all the rest is envy.
First of all, if entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. Entrepreneurs use wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits. It’s neither party’s goal to benefit the other, but that’s what happens nonetheless.
Also, entrepreneurs and the rich are different and only partly overlapping categories. Most of the rich are not entrepreneurs; they are executives of established corporations, institutional managers of other kinds, the wealthiest doctors and lawyers, the most successful entertainers and athletes, people who simply inherited their money or, yes, people who work on Wall Street.
MOST important, neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists — and artists and scholars — who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in different rewards. A single mother holding down a job and putting herself through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A person who takes out a mortgage — or a student loan, or who conceives a child — on the strength of a job she knows she could lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes as much risk as someone who starts a business.
Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we’re going to tax, and how much; what we’re going to spend, and on whom. But while “job creators” may be a new term, the adulation it expresses — and the contempt that it so clearly signals — are not. “Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.
Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn’t think it did so on its own. Smith’s “hand” was “invisible” — the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville’s involved “the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician” — in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, “Vice is beneficial found, / When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.”
I’m starting to believe that large bureaucracies (corporations or governments) are in fact a new form of artificial life. Where we humans are made of individual living cells, corporations are made of individual living persons. Just like individual cells don’t understand why a person does the actions it does, individuals in corporations don’t understand why the bureaucracy does what it does. It’s all the result of processes that are bigger and more convoluted than any person can understand, even CEOs or VPs who are supposedly in charge…In a sense, large corporations are the first form of artificial intelligence.
…Arms sales to the regime in Bahrain proves he’s more supportive than ever of the Arab Spring and democracy, just as his failed effort to keep troops in Iraq meant He Ended The Iraq War, his unprecedented war on whistleblowers demonstrates his commitment to open government, increasedanti-American sentiment in the Muslim world shows he nobly restored America’s standing in the world, and his relentless civilian-killing drone assaults prove the merit of his Nobel Peace Prize.
No idea — no matter how large, universal in application, or critical to the survival or betterment of the world — has any meaning or value unless it is promulgated by a 24 year old who has done exactly three things in life:
1. Spent junior high and high school locked in a bedroom learning to code;
2. Spent college locked in a lab practicing variations of code, and
3. Spent his early 20’s locked in a startup writing code.
I’m 53. When I was 20, it was perfectly clear to me that Earth was in the gravest kind of danger, but I couldn’t prove that to you. I intuited with certainty that the very matrix of human life — the soil, air, and water upon which we live and from which we draw every single bite or sip of sustenance and every breath of air — was entering the death throes that would make it impossible for the 4.5 billion people who then lived on the planet to go on doing so. But if you asked me to back that up, I couldn’t do it very convincingly.
Today I can. And if you’ve ever read a newspaper, you can, too. You know beyond any reasonable doubt that:
Human carbon emissions from now 7 billion humans are warming the globe at a rate that will cause at least a six degree Celsius rise by the end of the century (or possibly much sooner because of tipping effects as populous nations like India and China rapidly and vastly increase their carbon energy use and emissions);
That warming is already thawing, and will tip to thaw at an exponentially increasing rate, the world’s permafrost, which holds locked in frozen place staggering quantities of methane, a warming gas many times more lethal to the atmosphere than CO2;
Over half the qualified atmospheric scientists on Earth say that fatal-to-our-species damage has already been done, and the rest generally believe we have at most a few years to began the massive program of reversal which is nowhere in sight;
The carbon currently being absorbed by the ocean from the atmosphere is causing changes in chemistry (principally but not limited to increased acidification) which virtually all qualified ocean scientists say will destroy all remaining coral reefs on Earth within a couple of decades;
Those reefs harbor 25% of the biological diversity on the planet, said diversity being understood by life scientists to be the key ingredient in the sustainability of life;
The oceans are essentially fished out, with the apex predator species like the great bluefin tuna, upon which all lesser species depend, depleted by 98% and still being fished, most other large stocks like cod fished to a point that they cannot meaningfully regenerate, and nations like China massively ramping up trash fisheries like bottom-trawling — which ravages the ocean floor permanently and from which over 80% of the catch is discarded as dead garbage — and the fishing of Antarctic krill, upon which tiny remaining stocks of other apex species like whales utterly depend;
Every major ocean has swirling within it a many millions-of-square-miles gyre of both large and microscopic plastic which is being ingested by every form of marine life and grotesquely altering their hormones, endocrine systems, and even DNA;
This combined chemical change, vacuuming of diversity, fishing-to-zero, and toxification of life will lead to an ocean not only devoid of life but incapable of regenerating or sustaining life, eradicating billions of years of evolution;
Soil scientists almost universally agree that loss of arable soil to erosion, pollution, and soil exhaustion from industrial agriculture practices is proceeding at a rate that guarantees mass famine and starvation within this century;
Fresh water scarcity and water-borne disease, already the greatest cause of human disease and death on the planet, are growing at a similar rate. Two billion people today drink from dirty puddles. Corporate lockdown of water resources is underway, and it’s generally agreed that the world’s first water war will take place within the decade.
Any one of the things I’ve just described, which you can confirm in five minutes using a handy browser and search tools built by 20 year old coders, would be catastrophic. Taken together, with their synergistic effects imagined, they paint a picture of species, humans, about to snuff themselves — and perhaps to take the entire planet with them on their way out.
This was, as I said, intuition and conjecture a few decades ago. Today every element of what I’ve described is largely agreed upon by the scientists qualified to speak to it. Use your browser if you don’t believe me.
By now a crushing depression may be settling over you, or ought to be. Sorry! But the gravity of the situation is, well, grave. The answers to questions like The Big Philosophical Questions: The world’s a mess. Why shouldn’t we worry?, which run mostly in the vein of “Things are great, people are coming out of poverty, prosperity is rising!” are true. However, it’s simultaneously true that species self-extinction is underway. And none, not one, of the massive and quickly scalable solutions needed to stop that is in place, under serious development, or considered a matter of sufficient urgency by the governments and corporations that currently fund, organize, and implement solutions at that scale.
‘Lo, there’s an answer!: let humanity — many or most of whom understand or intuit to some degree the desperation of the moment — fund, organize, and implement those solutions themselves. How? Use the internet to bring them to the conversation, use software to disseminate all this information, and organize them in self-selecting groups to promulgate tiered solutions quickly. In other words, fix the world with the very kinds of software tools that 20-something coders have demonstrated can do these kinds of things at scale.
How could you get the entire population of the planet to such a conversation? There is an absolutely proven means: music. Two billion people watched the first Live Aid concert in 1985 (and donated ~$200M in 24 hours). Two billion people watched Al Gore’s 7/07/07 climate concert from Rio (but were given no substantive website or way to engage the next day). Over 80,000,000 people in the U.S. alone watched Hope for Haiti, a quickly organized and not especially well-publicized telethon after the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, and they donated ~$70M in three hours.
And that kind of thing occurs every single time humans are brought together with music around a natural disaster or some other form of suffering and dysfunction: they come, they stay, they pour money from their wallets in the billions to relieve people who are hungry or who’ve lost their homes to a hurricane or cyclone or tsunami.
So, to recap, these things are absolutely known: We’re going to hell in a fiery handbasket. Effective solutions will require planetary unity and broad participation. We have the catalyst (music) and the infrastructure (software) that could create both. If you gave those to humans, they’d pour enormous time, energy, and money into using them.
The world, then, is trying to fix itself with the internet. I’ve been trying for a long time to sell that idea to every web billionaire, venture capitalist, Marc Bodnick, Charlie Cheever, Adam D’Angelo, Dustin Moskovitz, Sean Parker, Matt Cohler, and other member of their ilk in the Valley. I have the talents necessary to understand it and to explain it to them, and you, in five minutes. I can give you a totally solid hint of it all in a 57 second video –
or a very robust understanding of it in a five minute one —
But I can’t code. So the responses, when I get any at all (which is rare), go like the one I received on Sunday from a partner at Greylock: “Thanks for your note. Unfortunately we are pretty specialized these days and really investing in software-based IP services where founders have technical skills. Therefore I don’t see a fit for us. Good luck with your venture. ”
In other words, “You’re not a 24 year old coder, your ideas have no import. Go ‘way.”
That idea holds sway only in Silicon Valley. But the Valley is, to an extraordinary degree, the keeper of the gate for the coming world — a world which, if tens of thousands of scientists educated at Stanford and Harvard right alongside the Valley’s coders and VCs have a clue what they’re talking about, is going to be hot, fiery, hungry, and torn asunder by war.
Brian Browne Walker
is a preposterous fool and
also the author of seven books
published in over a dozen languages
around the world, including translations
of I Ching, Tao te Ching, Hua hu Ching,
and Art of War. All are available in
iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle,
Nook, and iBook versions here, and in paper
editions here.
