Reflection in oil

Upon researching the backgrounds of the members of some my most favorite bands, I recently ran across this essay written by Serj Tankian of System of a Down (site doesn't seem to work in Firefox).

"This essay was originally published on systemofadown.com, but was promptly removed by Sony.
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Understanding Oil
By Serj Tankian
9/13/2001

The brutal attacks/bombings this week in New York, and Washington D.C., along with threats of attacks there and elsewhere in the country have changed our times forever. While the mass media concentrates on the details of the destruction, and the blanketed words of politicians, I will attempt to understand and explain the events from the fence. BOMBING AND BEING BOMBED ARE THE SAME THINGS ON DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE FENCE.

Terror is not a spontaneous human action without credence. People just dont hijack planes and commit harikari (suicide) without any weight of thought to the action. No one in the media seems to ask WHY DID THESE PEOPLE DO THIS HORRIFIC ACT OF VIOLENCE AND DESTRUCTION?

To be able to understand the answer to this, we must first look at our U.S. Mideast Policy. During most of the 20th century, U.S. businesses have worked on attaining oil rights and concessions from countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. After WWI, secret back door deals by our State Dept. yielded oil rights from then defeated Turkey to fields in what is now Iraq and Saudi Arabia, in return for looking the other way at a crime against humanity, the Genocide of the Armenians by the Turks. Oil profits have been the motivating factors behind many attempts at counterinsurgency of democratic regimes by the CIA and the U.S in the Middle East (such as Iran in the 1950s, where the Shah replaced the Prime Minister who refused to give up oil rights to the U.S., and since the people couldnt deal with the Shah, an extremist government headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini ultimately prevailed). During the Iran-Iraq war, America supplied both sides with weapons and advice. These are not the actions of a rich superpower wanting peace. Lets not forget that Saddam Hussein, before being Americas vision of the Anti-Christ, was a close ally of the U.S., and the CIA. So what was the firm belief system of consecutive American administrations that caused all this to occur ? PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST WILL LEAD TO HIGHER OIL AND GASOLINE PRICES. Lets not also forget the power of the Arms industry, disguised as defense, that still sells billions of dollars of weapons to the area. Therefore it has not been in the short-term economic interest of the U.S. to foster Peace in the Middle East. Using the above reasoning, the U.S. has encouraged extremist governments, toppled democracies, as in the case of Iran to replace it with a monarchy, rigged elections, and many more unspeakable political crimes for U.S. businesses abroad. Lets not also forget the Red Scare. During the war between the then Soviet Union and Afghanistan, the U.S. armed and supported the Taliban, a fundamentalist Muslim organization, and allowed them to export opium and heroin out of their country to pay for those weapons. Therefore the Taliban rose to power and control with the help of the U.S.A. Today, the bombing of Iraq still continues, no longer covered by the media, the economic embargo still remains, killing millions of children, and recently, while the world and the U.N. General Assembly have cried out to bring in peacekeeping forces into Israel and Palestine, to end the escalated war and recent assassinations, the U.S. has vetoed the rest of the Security Council and has halted the possibility of peace, there, in the most volatile place in the world.

People in Serbia, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan to name a few have seen bombs fall, not always at military targets and kill innocent civilians, as the scene in New York city yesterday. The wars waged by our government in our names has landed smack in the middle of our living room. The half hour of destruction closed down all world financial markets, struck the central headquarters of our military, and had our leaders running into bunkers, and our citizens into fear and frenzy. What scares me more than what has occurred is what our reactions to the occurrences may cause. President Bush belongs to a long generation of Republican Presidents who love war economies. The media has only concentrated on the bombings, if you will, and what type of retaliations are looming for the perpetrators. What everyone fails to realize is that the bombings are a reaction to existing injustices around the world, generally unseen to most Americans. To react to a reaction would be to further sponsor the reaction. In other words, my belief is that the terror will multiply if concrete steps are not taken to sponsor peace in the middle east, NOW. This does not mean that we should not find the guilty party(s), Bin Laden, or whoever they may be, and not try them. Put simply, as long as a major injustice remains, violence precipitates to the surface of life.

Native American folklore, the Bible, Nostradamus, and many other major religious beliefs point to this era with the visuals of yesterdays disasters, and conditions of ecological disasters we experience daily in our lives today. War, rumors of war, famine, long burning fires, etc., are at our doorstep. We can prevail over this possible vision with the power of the human spirit, understanding, compassion, and peace. ITS TIME TO PUT OUR NEEDS FOR SECURITY AND SURVIVAL, ACHIEVED ONLY THROUGH PEACE, ABOVE AND BEYOND PROFITS, ESPECIALLY IN THESE TIMES.

SOLUTION:

The U.S. should stop sidestepping the U.N. Security Council, and allow U.N. Peacekeeping troops and missions to the Middle East. Stop the violence first.

Stop the bombing and patrol of Iraq.

With todays gains in the use of alternative fuels, develop them to full usage with autos and other utilities, to make the country less dependant on an already depleting natural reserve, oil.

By initiating peace, we would have already shaken the foundations of support for Bin Laden, and/or all those that sponsor activities like those we saw yesterday, and break the stronghold of extremists on the world of Islam. On the other hand, if we carry out bombings on Afghanistan or elsewhere to appease public demand, and very likely kill innocent civilians along the way, wed be creating many more martyrs going to their deaths in retaliation against the retaliation. As shown from yesterdays events, you cannot stop a person whos ready to die. "

It raises some interesting points that I don't beleive have been answered even now, almost 5 years later. Why does the American majority not wonder why these people decided to attack the U.S.? I know that if I was going to give my life for a cause, I would have to beleive it to be a pretty important one. But the media always seems to gloss over these points and make these terrorist out to be madmen with no reasoning whatsoever. While I do not agree with their methods of making a point, I do beleive that there is a point to be made.


Anyways, Tool recently released a new album entitled 10,000 days. At first listen I didn't like it as well as their older stuff (ahem, Aenima), but it is growing on me, as their older songs did. So eventually I may like these songs better. We will see...

Over and out.

Gaming Industry Musings

Last night I had my first nightmare in a very long while. This was a recurring nightmare when I was a kid. It was of those where you wake up paralyzed. I won't go into the details as dreams rarely seem to make sense when retold. It was just strange as I was mentioning to someone earlier about how I hadn't had a nightmare in several years.


Anyway my main reason for posting today is to share my opinions on the state of the gaming industry. I see a few problems (See pic above....) that could be fixed that would make the end-user experience much better. It seems that everytime a new game is announced, that they are trying to recreate the wheel each time. Often a game can have an excellent concept, but then be executed so poorly. Many times that I see thins problem has to do mainly with problems in the engine of game. There have been so many good engines created, like the Source engine with it's Havok physics, to the Unreal engine. Other companies can license these engines to use in their games, but often don't. For what reason, I don't know. Perhaps the price is too large. It would be nice if there was a company that focused mainly of producing an engine and then reselling it to game developers, who will focus on making a game playable and fun. This also might help develop some standards in the game industry that will make installing/troubleshooting problems with games much easier.

Another problem I see is when a game concentrates only on the story, or the graphics. This can make an otherwise great game crap.

Another idea I daydreamed about one day was to develop an easy to use platform where you could implement a basic version of your game. Just a robust toolset and framework that will allow people who concentrate on games to realize their vision before investing millions of dollars in developing it. This wouldn't have to look pretty, or have the best performance, but it would allow for developers to see if their concept will work practically. This will also allow a small group of people to demo their game to managers/companies who can then develop it into a full fledged game.

It's not that I think the gaming industry as a whole has failed, but it saddens me to see such a potentially good game be ruined by poor controls, gameplay, or visuals. Let the storyteller concentrate on the story, while letting interface people concentrate on the interface. Let the engine be robust before other start working on graphics and such, so there's no need to change everything later.

I think Steam is a good step in this direction, but it is still proprietary and has many, many problems. Just look at some of the mod's using the Steam engine. I downloaded the new chapter of Half-Life2 and it was under 100MB. If I bought another game that had this much gameplay, it would probably come on several CD's. I like the ability to only sorry about one underlying system for all my games, rather than 100 different engines all with their own little tricks to get everything working how I want it. DirectX and OpenGL are another example of a step in the right direction, but more modularized components would be great for the gaming system.

Now of course, not having worked in the gaming industry for even a minute, I do not know the internal politics and difficulties that would be involved in implementing my ideas. But, I do end up dealing with a lot of the problems that other end users experience. I shell out $60 for a game that has been hyped up, but then am horribly disappointed by a seemingly simple annoying "feature", that was left in the game in order to ship by some arbitrary deadline. I figured the gaming industry would have evolved beyond these problems seeing as it is bigger than the movie industry. Many people will avoid a company in the future if they have problems with a product such as a DVD player or computer, but these same people cannot seem to even remember who produced the game they just bought for $60. How are they expected to avoid games from problematic publishers?

Now I see these problems the most on cosole games as opposed to PC titles, but it does effect every peice of the gaming market to some extent. I do hope that the Nintendo Wii will be a step in the right direction, and from what I've seen so far it looks like it will. The Wii looks like the best investment to me, with a lower price-point than any other console and even more so compared to building a new PC. It will also open up some opportunities for inventive gameplay, especially when you have some friends playing with you. I will even prefer some of the more "Kid-Friendly" games than the more "Mature" titles if they offer better controls and gameplay. Plus, they are making Duck Hunt 2, which is awesome.