The letter P
Bill Quirk, whose cousin played Bud on Flipper, taught me semaphore. I am not sure if semaphore is the same as wigwag. * I am sure both used flags. Ship to ship, ship to shore, hilltop to hilltop, or tower to tower. We, as scouts, had to prove basic proficiency in either Morse code or semaphore. I forgot most of it within minutes of taking the test and never picked up the flags again.
And why would I? Still, the business of the community was communications, and I had questions about everything. The way you got answers was by asking them. Will that be cash or credit? Or do you want fries with that?
If you break it, you own it. If you own it, you must service it. Are you going to hang around and do that? Oh, hell no. Smash and grab, and away we go. Remember? I didn’t think so, that’s how Jackie Gleason started his show. I wonder if I can easily find the exact words Colin Powell said about Iraq, after he got punked on the WMD thing, in front of the United Nations of Petroleum.
No, we do not own it. We do not even admit we smashed or grabbed it, do we? Even when we are recorded saying just that. We drove oil prices up and stopped Iraq from whatever it was we enabled them to do, including cutting oil deals on their own.
And, if you cannot rig the production of something, you can mess around with finance, marketing, and distribution. I always loved the word slurry. I worked almost a full year in petrochemical construction right out of high school. The stuff you can run through a pipeline? About anything you could imagine. I remember a Bond flick where they put a man in a capsule and put him in the pipeline. I can barely stand an MRI.
And then there is stovepiping:
“The most common types of intelligence collection, and to some extent processing, which are commonly found in "stovepipes", include signal intelligence (SIGINT), imagery intelligence (IMINT), and human intelligence (HUMINT).”
“In intelligence gathering, stovepiping is the presentation of information without proper context. It can be caused by the specialized nature or security requirements of a particular intelligence-collection technology. Alternatively, the lack of context may come from a particular group in the national policy structure that chooses to present only information that supports certain conclusions.” Wikipedia
I have a lot of questions about the Cold War HR pipeline, and the Anglo/American empire that created petro-everything, including petrofascism, and petrocracy even. I see a lot of what I want to know buried under layers of tribalism and religious fanaticism. There is a lot going on underground. There always has been.
I recall in old movies they would put their ear on the tracks or to the ground to hear if a train or horses were coming. I listen to the plumbing. I know what one means: one means yes. I get answers to lots of questions I haven’t even asked yet.
*A quick search revealed wigwag to be a single flag system based on morse code, whilst Semaphore uses two flags positioned to represent letters or numbers, not one of which I remember.
P is for pipeline. P is for petroleum. P is for permawar.