I watched this film 2 days ago. It has minimal dialogue, and is primarily a visual experience, although there is some backing classical music. In this way it reminds me of Koyaanisqatsi.
There are a few disturbing scenes, the worst of them all an interview with a mother and her child. There are also some interesting scenes where the wells are being capped, with people working in a literal continuous face spray of oil. I won't completely ruin the movie for you, give it a watch.
The most famous scene is @ 50m in, the first clip in this compilation (not the original music, but fitting). Here Werner Herzog is narrating:
Two figures are approaching an oil well. One of them holds a lighted torch. What are they up to? Are they going to rekindle the blaze? Has life without fire become unbearable for them? Others, seized by madness, follow suit. Now they are content. Now there's something to extinguish again.
The context here is that the person lighting the fire works for the company that is extinguishing and capping the wells. In reality, he's not doing this for job security, or because he is fulfilled by continually extinguishing the same well fires. From what I've researched, this is a controlled burn to prevent accumulation and pressure buildup of gas-phase well products. The burn continues until it's safe to proceed with the capping operation.
It's funny to think about if this person actually was creating their own work. This is something that really happens, at least where I've worked, in almost literally the same way. Creating "fires" and requesting more head count to help solve the problem is a common technique for empire building. I've been in project planning meetings where someone proposed 60% growth of their team for a single project (+12 headcount for a team with a current size of ~20). Ignoring the fact that these were "justified" by exaggerating the scope of the work, there was also a failure to understand (or simply to ignore) Brook's law.
These interactions also had an element of bargaining in them, where there would be negotiations about which team's reqs could be borrowed to support such a massive effort, or could the requester shave the request down by 10%. This of course led to incentives to highball on the initial request, because you could always pretend you would have to work really hard to figure out how to function with the reduction.
But now, to a slightly less tenuous connection.
nth time
Now it's the USA's nth time in the Middle East on oil-adjacent business. I'm not sure we'll ever know true motivations for this war overseas contingency operation, but, I absolutely despise the fact that
still works. It's almost as if people carved out a good 2 decades of their memory, forgetting the cost in human lives, sanity, resources, and peace. I legitimately wish to speak with someone who has a coherent argument for why this war should be waged that doesn't involve "WMDs". Because, as the White House admits, Iran's Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated - and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News:
Screenshot for posterity
And no, I don't buy that they've made the facilities operational again in the intervening 8 months, given that it took 15 years after Stuxnet was discovered for the USA to be worried again, enough to do something about it.
nukes required
Nuclear weapons are unfortunately an essential possession for any state that wishes to have a seat at the big table. For proof of this, examine the conflicts since the last nuclear weapon was used. There are no direct conflicts between nuclear powers, at most, proxy wars. And states without nuclear weapons are trivially pushed around.
Nuclear weapons are existential for a state in this way, by having them, they can call their own shots, instead of being clients of their geopolitically-aligned nuke-having neighbor. They're also existential in the MAD aspect, that if they are used, they almost certainly lead to the end of the state. In this regard, it's an absolute joke that the USA would think Iran possessing nuclear weapons is a threat to the US. Not only do they not have ICBMs capable of striking the US, but their total arsenal would be miniscule compared to the US's thousands of nuclear weapons.
world police
Now before you paint me as a sympathizer of the government of Iran, I will acknowledge that a nuclear weapon in that institution's hands is more dangerous than in the hands of other institutions. And, I believe in general, the people of Iran are not treated correctly by their government, and largely do not consent to the existing rule.
This is the tricky part of course. Generally we think it's right for the strong to protect the less strong, and when necessary, using force is ok to accomplish justice. But we've seen how well the "bomb you into freedom" technique employed by the US has worked in the past. And it's hard to believe that the US' true motivation is to liberate people, or even to improve their lives and make them safer. Especially when you have tools grandstanding with "cHecK oUt mY tOtAlLy aWesOmE AI" (I can guarantee you this is just a massive MySQL database), which uses decades old data to blow up a building full of children.
Yeah, it's hard to get on the "USA world police" train.
