Ocean Vagrant III

0730 Monday 7^th March, 2011

A gigantic sunrise this morning, the sun out of a clear sky in the east turned a floating city of cumulus livid red and orange. Sailing due west on the auto wind vane, 50 miles west of Essaouira. Yesterday we got into a very unfriendly waving match with some Moroccan fishermen, who didn’t seem to realize that we had at least as much to lose from a prop wrap as they did from a busted line. Beating down the coast for three days into wind, if we don’t get a wind shift soon I’ll be reduced to prayer. We have a persistent high over Madeira ruining our entrance to the tradewinds. But now we’re heading into the squalls and lightning under the city of cumulus, so something’s going on.

Tuesday 8^th March 2011

How does that old blues tune go? Rolling and tumbling all night long? The wind at 34 knots over a ragged sea, so sleeping in the forward bunk felt like being in a tumble dryer. We’re trying to make Las Palmas but the wind’s stuck on the nose still.

Back to MIT:

As I was saying, we didn’t do the MIT Equilibrium state. Whether or not it would have been possible, we actually made a decision to do the exact opposite. Or was it us?

As Abdul Ghani, the old Indian Mafioso in Shantaram, says: The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards… The evil men are the power–the rich men, and the politicians, and the fanatics of religion–whose decisions rule the world, and set it on its course of greed and destruction. There are only one million of them, the truly evil men, in the whole world. The very rich and the very powerful, whose decisions really count–they only number one million. The stupid men, who number ten million, are the soldiers and policemen who enforce the rule of the evil men. They are the standing armies of twelve key countries, and the police forces of those and twenty more. In total, there are only ten million of them with any real power or consequence. They are often brave, I’m sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down or abandon them, in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars… And the hundred million cowards… they are the bureaucrats and paper shufflers and pen-pushers who permit the rule of the evil men, and look the other way. They are the head of this department, and the secretary of that committee, and the president of the other association. They are managers, and officials, and mayors, and officers of the court. They always defend themselves by saying that they are just following orders, or just doing their job, and it’s nothing personal, and if they don’t do it, someone else surely will. They are the hundred million cowards who know what is going on, but say nothing, while they sign the paper that puts one man before a firing squad, or condemns one million men to the slower death of a famine… This formula–the one million, the ten million, the hundred million–this is the real truth of all politics’

Perhaps Abdul Ghani is right, it certainly seems so. The one million make the decisions and the 6 billion livestocked rest follow… well, like livestock.

But it was a decision. And Abdul Ghani’s ideas are certainly close to the SuperClass. I don’t know whether it’s evil, but it’s certainly primitive thinking. It does seem likely that one million is a good approximation of the number of people making the decisions that affect us all and control most of the resources. Abdul thought it had always been so, since the beginning of civilization. There I think we part company, because we have a way of measuring inequality in wealth and it is at extremes now, especially in the US and the rest of the developed world. It is the Gini Coefficient. Corrado Gini was an Italian Mathematician who developed a way of understanding income or wealth inequality in a given society: The Gini Coefficient. It works like this. If all the wealth in a society is divided equally amongst the population, the GC is 0, if one person has everything and the rest nothing, then the GC is 1. Naturally no actual society has a situation like that, but in real countries you end up with a number between zero and one. For example Sweden has a GC of 0.23, while the US is above 0.4 and extremely unequal countries like Nigeria are at 0.70. What the Gini Coefficient shows is that since the late sixties inequality has been growing across the developed world (with the notable exception of Scandinavia) so that it is now at extremes.

The question is: how do these extremes of inequality and the existence of the SuperClass affect our  posture, in the military sense of readiness, as we meet an environment unique in human history? We decided to do the exciting version where we see how many species we can force into extinction before it’s us. And we’re not doing badly, hell 40% of the plankton’s gone already. Is Abdul Ghani right when he says ‘This [formula] put the world at war, and this formula has the power to impose the peace’? It’s hard to see how the recent decisions of the SuperClass are leading us away from climate catastrophe.

Wednesday 9^th March 2011

I’ve started to read Generation Kill by Evan Wright. It’s the story of First Recon – the special forces of the US Marines, as they enter Iraq at the beginning of the war. What is striking about these young men (19-35) is their complete disconnect from the patriotism of WWII. They are there for a variety of reasons, but very few have anything to do with patriotism. Most are from poor or dysfunctional backgrounds. Their lives are dominated by the language and vision of video game and music culture.

There is a moment when Sgt Espera sums up the excesses of the US way of life which puts it perfectly:

‘Fifty percent of Americans are obese dog. You know what obese means, right? Fat as a motherfucker. All these other countries nobody’s fat. Think about this shit, dog? How does a motherfucker get fat? You gotta sit on the couch and do nothing but eat and watch TV all day. White trash, poor Mexicans and Blacks, all obese as motherfuckers. See, the white man has created a system with so much excess that even poor motherfuckers are fat.’

But what strikes me most about them is a kind of ‘New Asceticism’ – they live with nothing but their gear. It makes the 80s disco luxury of Abramovich  look like what it is. For example, this is his new boat. I mean, it’s so special forces. Excess is obsolete, dog.