This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

You really have to hand it to them. It made me feel like a naive rube, in from out of town. I never would have thought of that. You’re about to blow up the world oil market. But first, you tell your friends and let them cash in. Imagine the scene inside the White House where the rats dashed for the telephone to call their brokers. Dashing or sidling away. “Excuse me for a moment. I must attend to an issue.”

Sounds like a great gig. Follow the big ape around and wait for the information to fall out like boogers from his nose. Just plain, simple, honest, hard-working Americans with a financial interest in the war. I don’t wish to be a prude or come off as a godless communist. But I’m calling bullshit on profiting from the war. Using Wall Street like a personal FanDuel. Using insider information to tilt the scales. And where she stops, nobody knows.

Then suddenly, the issue of opening the straits of Hormuz isn’t as pressing. Today or tomorrow, soon. I’ll sell out at $150 per barrel and then…no harm, no foul. Peace! Makes me feel like a country boy gone to the city for the first time. It just never would have occurred to me to use the human crisis of my country and my countrymen as a money-making opportunity. Give credit where credit is due. It takes stealing the pennies from a dead man’s eyes to a whole new level.

The worse things become the better off they are for themselves. That’s why Pete Rose isn’t in the Hall of Fame. Sooner or later, the temptation arises to bet against your own team. Just this once! Until next time. If the crisis is resolved, oil prices will recover and the largesse will evaporate like snow on a sunny day. But if the crisis is prolonged?

Talk about your evolutionary disappointments. A species that will sell itself into war for personal pride or personal profit. The unseemliness of it. Hoping for peace, but if war should come, why not make the best of it? And I feel so embarrassed because I didn’t even see it coming. Of course, it’s obvious. It’s brilliant! Manipulate a crisis to manipulate the markets. It’s better than a part-time job. “Hey Kids! Sell Grift!” That useless information has real worth!

I wonder if the Administration understands that every time they brag about the success of the campaign or the negotiations. They set themselves up for failure. All the Iranians have to say is “What negotiations?” The administration must prove progress. Making it advantageous for the Iranians to stall. So the public bellicosity campaign adds to the profitability. “We’re going to huff and puff and blow your house down! Then we’re going to do it all over again!”

Little Marco Polio, a man with big shoes to fill, privately says the war will go on another four to six weeks. Just the other day it was going to be over in hours or days. It is an answer which translates to: “I don’t know how long this war will go on.” As if the war has gotten out of hand and little Marco is tired and resigned to whatever happens next. The war faction, the peace faction, and the profit faction. What do you do with an ally who keeps attacking Iranian nuclear sites? An ally doing their best to widen the war. Trump says no strikes on Iranian power facilities. “Oh, did you mean those?”

In response, the Houthis have now joined the war. Militarily, so what? But from an irritation level, the  Navy ships will now have a new project. It’s only money, right? Speaking as a momentary bit of carbon on a backwater planet on the bad side of the universe. I’m disgusted to call myself a human being at this point. “God created man because he was so disappointed in the monkey.” – Mark Twain

A war crime. A Nuremberg-style crime against humanity. Thousands of humans dead for no reason. Hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Private profits to be made! War as a profit center. Public service as a cash spicket.  

A Shakesperean tragedy about a mad king and his cast of merry marauders. A sad saga of Caligula and his horse, or Nero and his Bic lighter. From a mountaintop to the valley deep. The uncertainty and vicissitudes of war. Covered in the smell of defeat while perfumed in victory.

Wait! The rest of the market wasn’t supposed to go down 800 points! “Oh shit, if the markets melt down, we’ll lose everything.” Little Marco makes it clear we’re not adding ground troops. We’re just sending troops for fun, just in case. Little Marco is trying to pull out. Trump wants out too, but only if he can claim victory.

Look Ma! I made millions from the death and misery of others!

“You do not become a ”dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
― Vaclav Havel

It is like your paltry race–always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn’t got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing–that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it–only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Morel Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine time out of ten he prefers the wrong. There shouldn’t be any wrong; and without the Moral Sense there couldn’t be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to the bottom layer of animated beings and is a shameful possession. Are you feeling better? Let me show you something.”
― Mark Twain