That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

...

My country must stand with yours and with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions.

"Let's be honest, the real interest in this kind of story is to see some devastating cataclysm wipe mankind out ... My point was simply to write a book where you don't spoil that beauty and pleasure at the end."

...National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger quipped that Latin America is a "dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica." But Kissinger also made that same joke about Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand...

Douglas Feith, former Pentagon undersecretary, suggested that, after 9/11, the U.S. hold off invading Afghanistan and instead bomb Paraguay, which has a large Shi'ite community, just to "surprise" the Sunni al-Qaeda.

[T]he introduction of a new spelling system for the national language, [was] inaugurated in 1972–73. Officially, this policy was justified as a way to open up a common print market with Malaysia. But the real motive behind it was to mark a decisive break between what was written under the dictatorship and everything written before it. One had only to read the title of a book or pamphlet to know whether it was splendidly modern, or a derisory residue of Sukarnoism, constitutionalism, the revolution, or the colonial period. Any interest in old-orthography materials was automatically suspicious. The change was sufficiently great that youngsters could easily be persuaded that ‘old’ printed materials were too hard to decipher, and so not to be bothered with.

The effective result was a sort of historical erasure, such that the younger generation’s knowledge of their country’s history came largely from the regime’s own publications, especially textbooks. Needless to say, the decades of anti-colonial activity against the Dutch largely disappeared. The revolution was renamed the War of Independence, in which only soldiers played significant roles. The post-revolutionary period of constitutional democracy was abruptly dismissed as the creation of civilian politicians, aping Western rather than Indonesian ways. All this had some comical aspects. For example, the brave but hopeless Communist rebellion against the Dutch colonial regime in 1926–27 was described as the first of a series of treasonable Communist conspiracies culminating in October 1, 1965.

In the decade after Suharto’s fall, some tentative rewriting of textbooks has occurred, but in general inertia prevails. Many once-banned books have been republished (anachronistically, in the Suharto spelling), but the market for these books is basically limited to students and intellectuals. The general ignorance of the past is probably greater than at any time in the last century.

What is it W.S. Merwin said? "The story of each stone leads back to a mountain." Which is a great quote, and it's as true for the film as it is for anything. If you take me, he said humbly, as the mountain, and you take it all the way back, the stone is Jack Wheeldon and his buddies beating the crap out of me on the playground at Lathrop grade school in Painesville. On the other hand, I went out on the road, and I hung out with people who society would have called desperate characters, or bums, or lost causes. These were men—and very, very occasionally women, but mostly men—who could have taken terrible advantage of me! I was a little kid, and green as grass, and they could have done that. But everybody was kind to me. Everybody was helpful to me. Everybody gave me their wisdom. You're riding in a boxcar, and a guy says, "Hey kid, don't dangle your legs out. When it hits the grade, that door's gonna slam shut and take your legs off at the knee." Well, Jesus Christ, who the hell ever thought of that? And I saw guys on the road with stumps, and I thought about that. If anything would damp the anger, it would be good grace visited on me by total strangers like that.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, ruling powers in the Middle East have slowly and haltingly labored to bring tribal populations into the fold, with mixed success. Where tribes and tribalism have remained powerful, the state has remained weak. The Ottomans attempted forced sedentarization of the tribes, weakening tribal authorities by disrupting settlement patterns and replacing tribal sheiks with smaller cadres of favored leaders who became conduits for patronage. The colonial powers after World War I faced a different problem: the threat of nationalist urban elites opposed to foreign rule. In an effort to counter defiant urban leaders, they empowered rural tribes on the periphery. In Iraq, the British armed the tribes so that the sheiks could maintain order in the countryside and balance the capabilities of the nominal local governments operating under League of Nations mandates. Thus, the tribal system that Ottoman rule sought to dismantle was revitalized by British imperial policy, and the power of the nominal Iraqi government was systematically vitiated. In 1933, Iraq's King Faisal lamented, "In this kingdom, there are more than 100,000 rifles, whereas the government has only 15,000."

Twenty years after the Historikerstreit, more than 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the time is ripe for a comprehensive new understanding of the age of violent nationalism, of the twentieth century's politics of ethnic segregation, expropriation and extermination. But contrary to Nolte's obsession, such attempts should not begin with the October Revolution in Russia, because that only leads to the historically optimistic illusion that the repugnant aspects of the twentieth century can be reduced to the major totalitarian dictatorships and that they can be cleanly distinguished from all that we now view as progress and success.

For example, it was in fact Republican France that invented the selection criteria later used as the basis for the so-called "Deutsche Volksliste" (German ethnic list) in the areas of Poland annexed by Germany. In 1919, the population of the reclaimed Alsace region were sorted into four groups: full, three-quarter and half French, and Germans. On this basis, Alsatians were accorded full, limited or zero civil rights. In the case of those belonging to Group IV (the Germans), the French authorities ordered expulsion over the Rhine bridge. This was followed in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, negotiated under the leadership of France and England, as the first major case of ethnic homogenization anchored in international law. It ended the Greco-Turkish War with the forced exchange of sections of the population.

The post-war order established by the Potsdam Conference of 1945 was merely an updating of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 along national lines, tacitly including the results of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In 1946, Chancellor Willy Brandt commented on the victorious powers' expulsion policy under the headline "Hitler's Spirit Lives On". In 1947/48, it was the ceding British colonial power in India which set in motion the process of population transfer based on religious criteria between the Indian Union and what was to become Pakistan. In south-eastern Europe, too, twelve million people were uprooted by a resettlement project devised by British strategists and codenamed "Operation Balkans". And the parallels continue. Without additional details, no one could say where and under which circumstances the following twentieth-century story told by a survivor took place: "The man in uniform ordered us to follow him to the station. My elderly father died on the way there, one of my five children froze to death during the journey." (It was in 1940 during the Sovietization of eastern Poland.)

Karzai was duly installed in December 2001, but intimacy with US intelligence networks failed to translate into authority or legitimacy at home. Karzai harboured no illusions about his popularity in the country. He knew his biological and political life was heavily dependent on the occupation and demanded a bodyguard of US Marines or American mercenaries, rather than a security detail from his own ethnic Pashtun base. There were at least three coup attempts against him in 2002–03 by his Northern Alliance allies; these were fought off by the ISAF, which was largely tied down in assuring Karzai’s security — while also providing a vivid illustration of where his support lay. A quick-fix presidential contest organized at great expense by Western PR firms in October 2004 — just in time for the US elections — failed to bolster support for the puppet president inside the country. Karzai’s habit of parachuting his relatives and protégés into provincial governor or police chief jobs has driven many local communities into alliance with the Taliban, as the main anti-government force. In Zabul, Helmand and elsewhere, all the insurgents had to do was 'approach the victims of the pro-Karzai strongmen and promise them protection and support. Attempts by local elders to seek protection in Kabul routinely ended nowhere, as the wrongdoers enjoyed either direct us support or Karzai’s sympathy.'

Nor is it any secret that Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has now become one of the richest drug barons in the country. At a meeting with Pakistan’s president in 2005, when Karzai was bleating about Pakistan’s inability to stop cross-border smuggling, Musharraf suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his sibling under control...

[N]ever have such gaping inequalities featured on this scale before. Little of the supposed $19 billion 'aid and reconstruction' money has reached the majority of Afghans. The mains electricity supply is worse now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite TVs, average Kabulis 'suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.' As a result, hundreds of shelterless Afghans are literally freezing to death each winter.

Then there are the NGOs who descended on the country like locusts after the occupation. As one observer reports:

A reputed 10,000 NGO staff have turned Kabul into the Klondike during the gold rush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves. They take orders only from some distant agency, but then the same goes for the American army, NATO, the UN, the EU and the supposedly sovereign Afghan government.

Even supporters of the occupation have lost patience with these bodies, and some of the most successful candidates in the 2005 National Assembly elections made an attack on them a centre-piece of their campaigns. Worse, according to one us specialist, 'their well-funded activities highlighted the poverty and ineffectiveness of the civil administration and discredited its local representatives in the eyes of the local populace.' Unsurprisingly, NGO employees began to be targeted by the insurgents, including in the north, and had to hire mercenary protection.

Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’. The number of such cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale; they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its identity and many of the core precepts of its religion.

Mr. Kedrosky, 40, has learned to take clear positions. Many of his fellow B-listers have "too many hands," he says. "They're always saying, 'On the one hand, on the other hand.'" As he sees it, punditry is "like pounding a volleyball back and forth. You just have to remember which side of the net you're on. If you all stand on the same side, you don't have a game."...

Many minor leaguers take a methodical approach to getting recognized. They don't just stand on the patio of the "Today" show, shouting pithy remarks at Al Roker, hoping to be discovered. Instead, they invest in promoting themselves and honing their skills.

This year, more than 1,000 people paid between $760 and $1,995 to buy ads in the Washington-based "Yearbook of Experts," which TV bookers turn to for guests. In New York, the Learning Annex, an adult-education program, hired a former producer from CNN and a BET Radio Network producer to teach would-be pundits such skills as "how to design an irresistible hook" and "how to build up your profile."

In Racine, Wis., Don Crowther runs 101PublicRelations.com, a company that sells audio CD seminars priced from $39.95 to $79.95. Mr. Crowther says tens of thousands of people have bought his pundit-related products, with titles such as "How to Get Booked on 'The View.'"

He advises wannabe pundits to get face time and experience on local newscasts first, and to woo station decision-makers. One tip: "Send three-dozen doughnuts to the newsroom with a card that says, 'Thanks for considering me for your upcoming shows.'" Do such blatant ploys work on jaded news professionals? "They tend to roll their eyes," Mr. Crowther says. "But they eat it and they remember you."

Others suggest befriending A-listers, so they will recommend you to bookers if they're unable to make an appearance.

The idea of segmentation, of internal competition, is perfectly suited to an environment where this quarter’s, this year’s returns are paramount. But even corporations that are more developed along these lines, more mature in the ruthless arts, know that you still need your sales division to cross-subsidise your research and development. Like many late adopters, it seems that publishers are falling over themselves to throw out babies with the bathwater, in the race for a better return to feed the giant maw of their global parent this quarter, this half, this year. I would liken a literary novelist’s first three or four books to the R & D phase. Publishers disagree.

Newspapers – and this is the point I am trying to reach – are no different. Where I work, at John Fairfax, the idea used to be that the classifieds would cross-subsidise the opinion page. The big-selling Saturday paper, with its car and house ads, would cross-subsidise the lower-selling Friday and Monday papers. The purpose of a new lifestyle section, a magnet for advertisers even if its content was light in substance, was to keep afloat the parts of the paper that people actually read, such as news and, yes, book reviews.

But this has changed. Now, every day and every section must fend for itself. This is fine for the Saturday motoring section. Not so good for the books pages. HarperCollins and Readings Bookshop aren’t as big advertisers as Ford and Toyota, believe it or not. And if you’re part of the advertising sales staff who really run the newspaper, what would you rather sell? A $10,000 glossy ad to Holden, which you can do in five minutes, or a $250 ad to a second-hand bookstore, which might take you a week in cajolery and coercion, if not outright begging?

It used to be understood that the Holden ad in the magazine would pay for the book review pages – but no more. And this is why we at the Sydney Morning Herald now have our book reviews wrapped inside a section promoting new theatre shows, new movies, new restaurants, new homewares. Because the advertisers rule, and books must seek homewares display ads for shelter and succour.

[She] delights in the incongruities of his later years, such as his spectacularly unlikely affair with the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri or his 1986 arrest during a reading in a pub for unpaid parking fines. On that occasion, a group of drinkers rescued him from the divvy van, with Doc Neeson from the oz-rock band The Angels opening the door and saying, ‘Step out, comrade!’ While the Tactical Response Group tried to quell the developing riot, two working-class legends enjoyed a quiet beer in the back bar.

Circumcision and other forms of male genital mutilation have always been a puzzle. The ritual mutilations can leave the man vulnerable to infection and even death. So why do some societies insist on such a risky ritual for their men?

There may be an evolutionary explanation, according to Christopher Wilson, of Cornell University in New York, US. It could function to reduce a young man's potential to father a child with an older man's wife, he says...

In some forms of mutilation, the handicap to sperm competition is obvious. There is subincision, for example, where cuts are made to the base of the penis. This causes sperm to be ejaculated from the base rather than the end, and is performed in several Aboriginal Australian societies, says Wilson.

In some African and Micronesian cultures, young men have one of their testicles crushed.

A flag-lowering ceremony overnight at the Tallil air base, 300 kilometres south of Baghdad, marked the moment Australia handed over its operational role to the Americans...

Not everyone is pleased the Australian troops are leaving.

"We are against … American forces in the area because they are using weapons while the Australians didn't do anything harmful against the people all the time they were in the province," said teacher Hassan Mohsin, 32.

"I think the return of the Americans to the city will cause many problems. They will make many arrests," said shopkeeper Abdullah Muzhir.

In general, the Brits act as though the government is their business and they have every right to meddle in it. Americans, by and large, display no such self-assurance. To the contrary, we seem to believe, deep in our hearts, that the business of government is beyond our provenance. What accounts for the difference? My wife, whose family hails in part from England, has a theory: unlike us, the Brits don’t confuse their royalty with their civil servants, because they have both, clearly labeled. Acknowledging the universal desire to defer, they channel that desire, wisely, into the place where it can do the least harm, a kind of political sump.

The flat, laborious wordiness signals that this is avant-garde stuff, to miss the point of which would put us on the level of the morons who booed Le Sacre du Printemps. But what is the point? Is the passage meant to be banal, in order to trap philistines into complaining about it, thereby leaving the cognoscenti to relish the irony on some postmodern level? Or is there really some hidden significance to all this time-zone business? The point, as Auster's fans will tell you, is that there can be no clear answers to such questions; fiction like City of Glass urges us to embrace the intriguing ambiguities that fall outside the framework of the conventional novel. All interpretations of the above passage are allowed, even encouraged—except, of course, for the most obvious one: that Auster is simply wasting our time.

The tendency to exaggerate the impact of technological innovation follows from an artifact of historical consciousness. When we cannot conceive what life would be like without e-mail, say, we correctly note the pervasiveness of the new technology, but we may incorrectly assume that the things we now do through e-mail could not have been done in other ways...

In 1897, to move mail around the city, Manhattan started to equip itself with an island-wide system of underground pneumatic tubes, which soon extended from 125th Street as far as the Brooklyn General Post Office. Through the nineteenth century, the pneumatic tube had developed roughly in step with the telegraph and then the telephone. For a long time, indeed, pneumatic tubes seemed promising—perhaps they could shunt people around as well as mail—although, ultimately, it was the telegraph and the telephone that flourished, becoming the ancestors of the electronic communication systems we use today. Yet, had there been a century of continuous improvement, who knows what benefits a dense and speedy system of message tubes might have brought? A man working on Eighty-sixth Street could send a scribbled note, chocolates, and a pair of earrings to his girlfriend on Wall Street. To have left your wallet at home could be a mistake remedied in seconds. It’s a safe guess, anyway, that, while aware of a distant past containing such figures as postmen and delivery boys, we would be unable to imagine life without the pneumatic tube.

A study of news during the American Revolution by a graduate student of mine, Will Slauter, provides an example. Will followed accounts of Washington's defeat at the Battle of Brandywine as it was refracted in the American and European press. In the eighteenth century, news normally took the form of isolated paragraphs rather than "stories" as we know them now, and newspapers lifted most of their paragraphs from each other, adding new material picked up from gossips in coffeehouses or ship captains returning from voyages. A loyalist New York newspaper printed the first news of Brandywine with a letter from Washington informing Congress that he had been forced to retreat before the British forces under General William Howe...

Londoners had learned to mistrust their newspapers, which frequently distorted the news as they lifted paragraphs from each other. That the original paragraph came from a loyalist American paper made it suspect to the reading public. Its roundabout route made it look even more doubtful, for why would Washington announce his own defeat, while Howe had not yet claimed victory in a dispatch sent directly from Philadelphia, near the scene of the action?...

Le Courrier de l'Europe, a French newspaper produced in London, printed a translated digest of the English reports with a note warning that they probably were false. This version of the event passed through a dozen French papers produced in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Switzerland, and France itself. By the time it arrived in Versailles, the news of Washington's defeat had been completely discounted. The comte de Vergennes, France's foreign minister, therefore continued to favor military intervention on the side of the Americans.

In the 1990s, however the situation changed radically, first for tobacco and then for DDT. The tobacco industry was faced with the prospect of bans on smoking in public places driven primarily by concerns about the health effects of passive smoking. Realising that such restrictions would prompt large numbers of smokers to quit, the industry sought, once again, to cast doubt on the scientific research. Given its bad, and well-deserved reputation, it was evident that a campaign focused on tobacco alone was doomed to failure. So the industry tried a different tack, an across-the-board attack on what it called “junk science” about environmental and health hazards. Its primary vehicle was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a body set up by PR firm APCO in the early 1990s and secretly funded by Philip Morris...

TASSC had an advisory board ... but the real work was done by an activist named Steven Milloy... TASSC and its website junkscience.com attacked the environmental movement across the board, on everything from food safety to the risks of asbestos. The result was that advocacy pieces dismissing the scientific evidence on the health dangers of passive smoking, for which Phillip Morris was paying, appeared to be just part of the general campaign against “junk science”.

One of the issues Milloy took up with a good deal of vigor was DDT, where he teamed up with J. Gordon Edwards... Edwards' attacks on Rachel Carson moved from the LaRouchite fringes of the political spectrum to become part of the orthodoxy of mainstream Republicanism. By the late 1990s, the tobacco industry's fight against restrictions on passive smoking was clearly headed for failure. Milloy switched his primary focus to climate change. He collected money from Exxon and other fossil fuel companies. This switch only made DDT more useful as a rhetorical stick with which to beat environmentalists.

At worst, the rules explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances, a particularly dicey concept given an enemy that does not wear a uniform and hides among civilians. Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights. The chain of command was particularly frustrated by insurgents fleeing after attacks from roadside bombs, called improvised explosive devices. The notes from Army agents who later investigated the shootings said the battalion leaders, Balcavage and Knight, worried that the snipers had "let a lot of guys go after IED explosions." The snipers called these fleeing, sometimes unarmed Iraqis "squirters." Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.

The truth is, most allegations about Iran's role in Iraq and the region are unfounded or dishonest. Iran was responsible for ending the recent fighting in Basra and calming the situation after Iraqi parliamentarians who backed Prime Minister Maliki approached it. The Iranians, never close to Muqtada or his family, were so annoyed with Muqtada and his presence that they reportedly ordered him out of Iran where he had been living in virtual house arrest anyway since arriving six months earlier. Iranian officials and the state media clearly supported Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government against what they described as "illegal armed groups" in the recent conflict in Basra, which is not surprising given that their main proxy in Iraq, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council dominates the Iraqi state and is Maliki's main backer.

Hard enough to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into blame. One obvious result of this is the tendency of ex-radicals to become very conservative indeed, a tendency satirised by Edmund Wilson in his quip about John Dos Passos: "On account of Soviet knavery / He favours restoring slavery". Dos Passos was not the only American Marxist to pole-vault the cold-war liberal centre and land in the arms of William F Buckley's high conservative National Review. Initially claiming that he still believed in the end of working-class emancipation, former Trotskyite Max Eastman quickly turned on "mush-headed liberals" who "bellyache" about civil rights; for former beat critic and latter neoconservative Podhoretz, homosexuality was a death wish and feminism a plague.

Above all, the reality that neocons felt mugged by was the moral inadequacy of the poor. Kristol's manifesto On the Democratic Idea in America blamed the free market for encouraging unreasonable appetites in the working class; as Robert Nesbit put it, "to allay every fresh discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh expectation".

But mad as he is at the Times, and NPR, Mamet is mostly mad at the Jews. All around him, his landsmen, being intelligent people, are marrying the girls and guys they like, without regard to race or religion. And more and more often, they are declining to buy literal or figurative Israel bonds. They are coming to be Jews in much the same way their neighbors are Unitarians or yogis or yachtsmen. That is to say, their Jewishness belongs to the personal sphere. It is not a sign of radical demarcation from the world around them. They have for the most part no interest in being Hebrew-speaking Amish. And this drives Mamet crazy.

The Jews Mamet depicts in his book are downright anti-Semites, full of self-hate and slavishly eager to please Gentiles. But unless Mamet knows a very different class of Jews from those I know, this is sheer fantasy. Why is Mamet indulging in it?

If David Mamet were an institution, it would be easier to understand. Shtetl institutions wouldn't exist without the shtetl, and so those institutions, and the people who staff them, have an interest in keeping the shtetl walls high and strong.

France finally exploded in May-June of that year, making it an uncommonly memorable and beautiful summer. We were preparing the first issue of The Black Dwarf as Paris erupted on 10 May. Jean-Jaques Lebel, our tear-gassed Paris correspondent was ringing in reports every few hours. He told us:

'A well-known French football commentator is sent to the Latin Quarter to cover the nights events and reported: "Now the CRS [riot police] are charging, they're storming the barricade - oh my God! There's a battle raging. The students are counter-attacking, you can hear the noise - the CRS are retreating. Now they're regrouping, getting ready to charge again. The inhabitants are throwing things from their windows at the CRS - oh! The police are retaliating, shooting grenades into the windows of apartments…" The producer interrupts: "This can't be true, the CRS don't do things like that!"

"I'm telling you what I'm seeing.." his voice goes dead. They have cut him off.'

The police fail to take back the Latin Quarter now renamed the Heroic Vietnam Quarter. Three days later a million people occupied the streets of Paris demanding an end to rottenness and plastering the walls with slogans: Defend the Collective Imagination, Beneath the Cobblestones the Beach, When the finger points at the moon the IDIOT looks at the finger, Commodities are the Opium of the People, Revolution is the Ecstasy of History.

When Obama refused to passionately and angrily distance himself from Wright, CNN commentators labeled him soft, passive, and unassertive. During the Pennsylvania primaries, when Obama took the offensive and ignited the critical, and many say "negative," campaigning against Clinton, he was accused of losing his "Cool Hand Luke" aura and Zen calm and was instead "lashing out" under the strain of critical inquiry after failing to deliver the decisive "knockout blow" during the crucial final stretch. When Obama talked about "transcendence" and "moving forward" as a means of bridging the racial divide, his authentic Blackness came under review by doubting spectators because he sounded too conciliatory. However, as of this week, due to Wright's most recent comments, Obama was urged to abandon reconciliation, and instead "passionately denounce" his former Pastor as to not appear both too soft or too radical.

In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended - the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars - and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only" 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC's European-based fleet. LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that - even in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack - they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a "Sunday punch," massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That "bitterness" is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That "divisiveness" is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement's job is to "organize discontent." And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

Hilberg understood that murdering a swathe of the population consisting of several millions of people scattered over an entire continent required not a group of demoniacal sadists but an army of bureaucrats on the staff of administrative bodies, registrars to control identification, police for segregation, railway officials for transport and paramilitary organisations to whom groups of victims would eventually be assigned for the actual business of extermination. And so to begin with, Hilberg did not study the memoirs of the few survivors, but turned his attentions to the copious amounts of material on the perpetrators. Hilberg famously interpretated a piece of writing which is familiar to everyone: the train timetable. Here the word Jew never once appears, only an ominous 'L' which signalised that the transport carriages that were so tightly packed on the outward journey would be 'leer' or empty on returning. This 'L' contains the precise amount of explicitness allowed - and guaranteed - by the bureaucratic form of expression.

Or look at how Ferguson describes the British Empire's conscious policy of mass starvation of Indians in the 1870s and 1890s. In reality, severe natural climate disruption hit India, and there was massive crop failure. The British viceroy - Lord Lytton, appointed because he was Queen Victoria's favourite poet - declared that grain shipments to London must continue, by force if necessary. The institutions that Ferguson presents as Britain's glorious gift to India - the railways and telegraph lines - were in fact used more efficiently to steal and ship out India's food, so Londoners could enjoy them over breakfast. Some gift.

And even this was not enough. Lytton went further and declared all relief efforts illegal. The result? One journalist noted that the train lines of India were strewn with "bony remnants of human beings" begging for grain. "Their very eyeballs were gone ... Their fleshless jaws and skulls were supported on necks like those of plucked chickens. Their bodies - they had none; only the framework was left." Some 29 million innocent people died, a crime worthy of Stalin and Mao.

But where does this figure on Ferguson's balance sheet? He dedicates a few dry lines to it. To give some sense of perspective, he gives almost as much space to describing a statue of the Prince of Wales that was made out of butter. He then minimises the crime, chiding anybody who compares it to Nazism ("the intention was not murderous") and demanding to know "would Indians have been better off under the Moghuls?" (Yes, actually.)

Before we leave, we visit the office of Dr. Mahmoud al-Madhoun, the hospital's director. He hands us plastic bags filled with bullet fragments he has taken out of his patients. All have the dates, the types of wounds, and the names of the victims printed neatly on the outside. Of the 1,206 killed and wounded, he says, 655 were under the age of eighteen. He cannot understand why soldiers would fire at children.

"In thirty years of practice," he says, "I have never treated a patient who died after being hit by a rock."

Fifteen British sailors and Marines were seized by Iran in internationally disputed waters and not in Iraq’s maritime territory as Parliament was told...

Newly released Ministry of Defence documents state that:

— The arrests took place in waters that are not internationally agreed as Iraqi;

— The coalition unilaterally designated a dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Gulf without telling Iran where it was;

— The Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ coastal protection vessels were crossing this invisible line at a rate of three times a week; It was the British who apparently raised their weapons first before the Iranian gunboats came alongside...

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, repeatedly told the Commons that the personnel were seized in Iraqi waters.

The MoD, in a televised briefing by Vice-Admiral Charles Style, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, produced a map showing a line in the sea called “Iraq/Iran Territorial Water Boundary”. A location was given for the capture of the Britons inside what the chart said were “Iraq territorial waters”. But the newly released top-level internal briefing accepts that no such border exists.

The report, addressed to Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, blames the incident on the absence of an agreed boundary and a failure to coordinate between Iraq, Iran and the coalition.

Under the heading “Why the incident occurred”, the report examines the history of a border that has been disputed since a treaty between the Persian and Ottoman empires in 1639.

Professor Robert Springborg, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, said yesterday that it was negligent to fail to clarify with the Iranians where the notional boundary was.

Bugs provoke the immune system into fighting cancer
Deliberately infecting people with the bacterium that causes listeria could increase their ability to fight cancer

Corn-based film foils food poisoning bugs
A novel packaging film made from renewable materials such as corn residues, could help stamp out Listeria and other food-borne bugs

[T]the festival owes its name to a brazen piece of political subversion that has since transcended its context to become one the most durable practical jokes in Australian history:

One of the federation jubilee events of 1951 was an Aboriginal theatre production called An Aboriginal Moomba: Out of the Dark...

When a name was needed for Melbourne’s new festival, Bill Onus, president of the Australian Aborigines League and a performer in the earlier jubilee event, suggested ‘Moomba’ to the Melbourne City Council. The name had been successful for the theatre production and the council believed it to mean ‘let’s get together and have fun’.

The official history relates that the good citizens of Melbourne proceeded to moomba their brains out by the Yarra each March and - a clear indication of how self-assured white middle-class society was in the mid-20C - it wasn't until the late sixties that anybody bothered to consult further on the etymology of "moomba" and it was discovered that the whole thing was a big prank. It turns out that in certain local Aboriginal languages "moom" means "buttocks" or "anus" and "ba" can mean either "at", "in" or "on". "Moomba" can therefore be translated into the vernacular as "up your bum".

In the anti-colonialist era following World War II, European masters began the process of returning lands to their original inhabitants.

What distinguished the Jews from other such people was that they had been expelled and forced to live in exile while the land they had lived in for 1500 years endured occupation for two millenniums. Their lives dependent on the whims of their rulers for countless years, they had shed tears in little European or North African villages when concluding the Passover service with the phrase "Next year in Jerusalem". But no longer: they were finally able to return and so did many Holocaust survivors and other persecuted immigrants.

Yes, the Jewish people's return to their ancestral homeland was an unprecedented event.

We are not claiming Labor would not have won the election had it not been for the ACTU campaign. Had the ACTU relied on a Labor-led campaign against WorkChoices, and not independently campaigned in marginal seats, it is more than likely Labor’s appeal to working families and the ACTU’s media campaign would have produced a broadly similar result. What we do claim, on the basis of this modelling, is that seats targeted by the ACTU produced significantly larger swings, and their campaign appears to have added to Labor’s margin of victory.

In America, politics in recent years have been shaped by greater mobilisation of the union vote for the Democrats under a reformist AFL-CIO leadership that won office in 1996 (and their new rivals in the ‘Change to Win’ coalition). Union mobilisation of the vote is an offshoot of political unionism that has tried to respond to the declining capacity of industrial unionism (because of low union density and limited union impact on wages) and to the recognition that genuine political allies and legal change are increasingly necessary for organised labour’s revival. As Margaret Levi (2003) has made clear, the union movement depends not only on a strong shopfloor presence but on a favourable legal and political environment as well. Better laws are critical to the labour movement’s long-term hopes, both in the United States and in post-WorkChoices Australia...

Australia’s compulsory voting system means there is relatively little research on mobilisation campaigns. Moreover, if voters are obliged to vote, there is little need to develop vast grass roots networks to mobilise them. Yet the YRAW campaign appears to be an example of the success of such a strategy. The decline in union density means, almost automatically, a weakening in political influence—both in a diminished voter bloc and perceptions of weakness that embolden opposition. Like the American labour movement, the ACTU has offset its declining natural constituency by more strongly mobilising its remaining membership, renewing it in the process. And so the tactics the ACTU employed during the 2007 election were much closer to those of a grass roots mobilisation than to the simple increase in resources, or targeted promises, that accompany other marginal seat campaigns. This is important both in highlighting the continuing power and importance of the union movement in Australia, and in opening up the possibility of the broader significance of electoral mobilisation by social movements. Perhaps the era of activist electoral politics is not yet dead, but waiting to be remobilised.

Tom Gross, a media affairs columnist for the National Review Online, said there was a major difference between a shoah and the Shoah.

When Joel and Ethan Coen first approached me in the autumn of 1983 to cut Blood Simple, it had been almost thirty years since I had last worked in film. That was on a largely forgettable entertainment called The Mad Weekend with Alistair Sim and Basil Radford and directed by Geoffrey Milestone. Geoff was a small man both in stature and talent and was known, rather uncharitably, both at Ealing and at Rank, as "the wee McKendrick." Still, he seemed pleased enough with my work and introduced me to a friend of his, the American director George Marshall, who was about to begin shooting Beyond Mombassa.

At George's suggestion I moved to New York, took an apartment, and worked for less than a week on the picture before Marshall decided that my cutting was "too damned Prussian" and replaced me with Jack Tuttle. Due to a union rule my name remained on the film while Jack went on to make a mess of things; he was a dear man but no editor, and this brings me back to the Coens. They were huge fans of Beyond Mombassa and wanted me to cut their first picture. I explained my involvement in the Marshall film and didn't hear from them again for several weeks, when Ethan called to inform me that Jack Tuttle had passed away in 1962 whilst cutting another Coen favorite, Operation Fort Petticoat. The boys glumly reiterated their offer.

I decided to accept, with mixed feelings due to the circumstances, and under two conditions: that I be left alone in the cutting room, and that I not be asked to read the script before starting in cutting. Since, throughout my career, this second condition has been the subject of some contention, I shall try to explain it here.

I've never thought much of the motion picture scenario. It has its uses, I suppose, as a rough sort of guide to the actual shooting of a movie - and of course the thesps need a vade mecum from which to memorize their lines. But beyond this, the utility or interest of a motion picture script seems nil. It is not a literary artifact, not having been written for publication and therefore never attracting the grade of author who would merit it. Scenarists are inevitably amateurs, boobies, and hacks. Their scripts are invariably shoddily bound and shot right through with errors of spelling and punctuation - not to speak of the lapses of taste. At best the scriptwriter is a student of writing rather than a writer per se; he is like a child scraping away at his scales on the violin. No sensible person would listen to this grating chatter by election, and I am far too old to feign enthusiam for such recitals. As for whatever information is required for film editing, the script contains no more than the footage itself - less, in fact. The footage will sort itself out for the discerning editor, and those of us who understand the art of the image juxtaposed need not concern ourselves with the original intent of the chap - frequently a nephew of the producer - whose scribblings give us, at many times remove, our raw material. No, it is the organization of moving images that is the very art of cinema, and true authorship resides in the hand that wields not the pen, but the razor.

Given a free hand on Blood Simple, I was rather proud of my first cut, but when I screened it for the lads they responded to the action scenes with silence and to the dramatic scenes with their alarming asthmatic laughter. They took the picture away and, along with a friend of theirs named Don Wiegmann, made rather a mess of things I'm afraid, but due to union rules my name remains on the picture.

I didn't hear from them after the screening and had to see the finished film two years later at the local cine in Hove, so I was surprised to get the call to cut their second effort, Raising Arizona. It was from Joel this time, who went to great - one might say sickening - lengths to assure me that they had got on with me personally and respected me professionally, but this time their offer was conditional on my reading their script before commencing work. The script might give me, Joel said, a fix on which characters were central and which peripheral, and a firmer grasp of the order of the individual scenes. Michael Balcon had given me much the same speech before booting me off The Bells of Rhymney's and it had sounded no more persuasive then. So once again an opportunity foundered upon this point which I still considered a matter of principle; I turned down the lads' offer and also their next, for Miller's Crossing, which bore the same condition. No regrets.

I must say, however, that in watching that picture I was struck that the lads had matured somewhat. There was less of the bellowing and rum carryings-on that had so branded Raising Arizona the work of amateurs; the actors had been issued proper suits, the settings had been designed with a measure of restraint, and the characters spoke in a normal tone of voice and were sensibly covered in medium shots instead of the leering close-ups I had been given on Blood Simple. There were even frequent over-the-shoulder shots. I like an over-the-shoulder; it lets you know that the other fellow is still in the room and hasn't wandered off to do God knows what. Yes, all told the lads' third picture seemed a step up, if from an abysm.

I'm not sure why the Coens called me on their fourth picture, Barton Fink; our last conversation had ended with sharp words on both sides. At any rate, they were still asking me to work on condition of reading the script, which was still an impossibility; at this juncture, however, I made the concession of allowing them to tell me the story of the picture before I started work. This left them satisfied if not pleased, and they proceeded to narrate a tale which, to my mind, seemed crushingly tedious. I kept my impressions to myself though, as I attach little importance to scenario, and agreed to do the job, the more since I learned that their cinematographer would be Roger Deakins. Deakins I knew to be an able chap of good family in Chiswick (I had the good fortune to be acquainted with his gran) and I assumed that under his steadying hand the Coens would carry on with restraint.

T'would not be so. The footage I was given marked a return to the Borstal sensibility of the boys' earlier efforts - entire scenes covered without a proper camera angle, tattiness of setting and wardrobe, and actors once again encouraged to bellow and banshee. I made what sense I could of the footage, of which more later, but the strange sequel to my relationship with the Coens was that they asked me to write this introduction to the published scripts of Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink. I accepted only when they agreed not to review my remarks prior to their publication here. This I demanded on suspicion that they were soliciting my thoughts merely because they found it amusing to have their scenarios introduced by someone who had never read them, and if such were the case, I intended to disappoint them. For I then judged it a matter of principle to read the scripts, it being absurd to comment upon them otherwise, however banal I might precognosce them to be. Upon dancing through the two scenarios, though, I was surprised to discover something of interest.

Certainly neither manuscript caused me to revise my low opinion of the scriptwriting form. However, what is odd and even unique in the case of the Coens' scripts is that, inept though they may be, in my judgment they prove superior to the films based upon them. The malformed thoughts contained in the scripts that follow are at least here intercepted prior to their being mucked about by the silliness of the Coens' camera work. The Miller's Crossing scenario, whilst unable to propose concrete solutions to the problems of mobsterism and the bootlegging of alcohol in the 1920s, at least raises those challenging issues. And Barton Fink contains clever insights on certain artistical and Semitic themes. Pity that these somewhat promising beginnings should be so brutally strangled by their own parents. And by, I might add, the palsied hand of the film editor.

But I did not complete my account of my work on Barton Fink. At the outset the Coens were once again as good as their word, leaving me alone to impose what order I could on their unruly footage. But when I showed them my first cut, the screening ended in silence, and finally all they could find to say was that they'd been hoping for an editing style more along the lines of Beyond Mombassa. I gritted my teeth and explained to them - again - the nature of my involvement in that film. Perhaps my irritation showed; I am a film editor, after all, and not a diplomat or nuncio. At any rate, after the picture was taken away the Coens fiddled it with a friend of theirs, Michael Berenbaum. Perhaps the lads just wanted a bit more of the Hebrew point of view. I myself don't care for what they've done, and don't recognize much of my own in the picture now, save for my name in the credits - the good old rules and regs.

Roderick Jaynes
Hayward's Heath, Sussex
April, 1991

By the time he landed it, Frank had a contract from the University of Chicago Press to publish a book based on his dissertation. His interviewers seemed amazed by this, he recalls, and the main question they had for him was: How did he do it?

This annoyed him. ("I was, like, 'Well, it's a quality book, that's how.' ") So did the fact that, having flown in at his own expense, he was given to understand that he had no real chance at the job. At the end, the interviewers asked if he had questions for them.

"Yeah," he said. "Let's go around the room and each of you tell me: If you had to be a vegetable, what kind of vegetable would you be, and why?"

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

For me, the main lesson is this: from the time the general public embraces the rebels, the victory of the rebellion is assured.

That is an iron rule: an insurgency supported by the public is bound to win, irrespective of the tactics adopted by the occupation regime. The occupier can kill indiscriminately or adopt more humane methods, torture captured freedom fighters to death or treat them as prisoners of war - nothing makes a difference in the long run. The last of the occupiers can board a ship in a solemn ceremony, like the British High Commissioner in Haifa, or fight for a place in the last helicopter, like the last American soldiers on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon - defeat was certain from the moment the insurgency had reached a certain point.

Ensconced in the world of the Robert Taylor homes, Sudhir comes to see a major gap between the lived reality of the people and the scholarly-media images of them. Sociological categories such as anomie (even anarchy) and the culture of poverty do not capture the rule-based lives of these cast out Americans. Capital fled the ghetto,­ industrial investment dried up with globalization (and the factories remain as abandoned mausoleums), and retail investment rushed to the suburbs leaving space for small family shops (bodegas) whose economic survival is premised upon the sale of liquor, the lottery and the prevention of petty theft. Humans abhor a social vacuum, and into this wasteland came not only the drug-profit fueled gangs but also "off the books" entrepreneurs and community leaders. They provided a measure of order: the policing is done by the gang soldiers and the women who emerge as building leaders. These gangs became the "de facto administration" of the buildings, and even as the leader "may have been a lawbreaker, he was very much a lawmaker as well." Drug sales funnel jobs into the neighborhood, and to earn the trust of the residents, the drug kingpins become the main social welfare agency (they are assisted by women like Ms. Bailey who, in a patron-client way, distribute goods that they leverage out of local businesses). There are some startling revelations here, when Sudhir reports how families pool their resources to survive: if on one floor, an apartment has a fridge and another has a shower, if one has an air conditioner and another has a working toilet, the families simply use each others' utilities and treat the floor like one big house, with their families as one large joint family. The elements of social solidarity are all over these spaces, and Sudhir is keen to show us this. The vision of social devastation has to be altered or else a sense of futility sets in when policy makers turn their eyes to the ghetto.

Back in 2003, Kristol was also quite certain, almost touchingly so, that the Bush administration would be well served by relying on Iraqi exiles:

"KRISTOL: We have tens of thousands of Shia exiles [who] have come back to help contribute to the liberation of Iraq.

"ELLSBERG: I'm afraid the people who propose this war have failed one lesson of intelligence history, which is not to rely too much on the knowledge of people who have left the country... The people who've come to this country may very well underestimate the desire of those people not to be governed by foreigners."

This lesson of history goes back a long way. Book II, Chapter XXXI of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is titled "How Dangerous It Is to Believe Exiles":

"It ought to be considered, therefore, how vain are the faith and promises of those who find themselves deprived of their country... such is the extreme desire in them to return home, that they naturally believe many things that are false and add many others by art, so that between those they believe and those they say they believe, they fill you with hope, so that relying on them you will incur expenses in vain, or you undertake an enterprise in which you ruin yourself... A Prince, therefore, ought to go slowly in undertaking an enterprise upon the representations of an exile, for most of the times he will be left either with shame or very grave injury."

The Weekly Standard's archives show Kristol has published quite a few articles on how political correctness in elite U.S. universities is strangling the teaching of the Western canon. And you can understand where he's coming from: While Kristol himself received a PhD in government from Harvard, it obviously was during a period when radical multiculturalists had completely expunged Machiavelli from the curriculum. When will the PC brigade ever learn? Teaching Toni Morrison starts wars.

As national president of the Australian Labor Party[, Tom Burns] ... played a key role, with Gough Whitlam, in reforming and modernising the party in the early 70s, to the extent that it took office federally in 1972.

Part of this effort was the skilful crafting of a report into alleged branch-stacking when Paul Keating was seeking pre-selection for the Sydney seat of Blaxland in 1968. Burns claimed that some of the so-called voters rested beneath tombstones in Bankstown Cemetery and that "it should never happen again", but allowed Keating to keep his pre-selection and launch his political career.

It was a speech that had an audience ... interrupting him with sustained applause ... as he decried “the culture of dependency” fostered by government social programs, the looming “demographic disaster” of unchecked entitlement programs, the looming threat of Asian economic supremacy, the perilous threat of “Islamic jihadism,” and the urgent need to unleash the American entrepreneurial genius by “taking a weed-whacker to government regulations.”

Beijing was defiant yesterday in the face of its most embarrassing Olympic crisis so far, sparked by the US director Steven Spielberg's announcement that he is quitting as an artistic adviser to the 2008 Olympic Games because of China's continued support for its oil-rich trading partner Sudan.

Across four experiments we found that power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how others see the world, how others think about the world, and how others feel about the world. Priming power led participants to be less likely to spontaneously adopt another’s visual perspective, less likely to take into account that another person did not possess their privileged knowledge, and less accurate in detecting the emotional states of others.

Here’s a description of Hell they never give you: a huge room full of all the people you hate most, and they’re all having a wonderful time.

Yes, it’s all smiles and sunshine here at CPAC: lively young ladies with skillfully applied layers of makeup are here to greet you at every turn and correct your every confusion. Hopelessly earnest collegiate nerds hand out Mitt Romney stickers and hope against hope that John McCain has some sort of campaign trail meltdown: perhaps it will occur to him that the last 30 years have all been a fever-dream brought on by bad fish paste, that he is still in some VC labor camp wearing a tin can around his head, and he will savagely turn on his campaign manager with a broken bottle while at a Kiwanis breakfast. High school kids with bad moustaches pal around in hopes that toadying up to the rich kids will be their ticket to an easy future. On the walls are banners for the dregs of conservative thinksmanship: Town Hall, the ACU, Human Events, the YAF. (The National Review is conspicuous in their absence; they probably think CPAC takes much-needed revenue away from their Cruise the Caribbean with Rich Lowry promotion.) And up front, where no one can touch them – their natural state, as the Market intended, are the big men. Up there, in the first few rows, are the bosses, the people for whom America is shitbox and change drawer, the living embodiments of The Man.

On the way in, bracing the driveway entries to the Omni but kept far from the entrance by irritated-looking cops, were the abortion protesters. Their color posters of mangled fetuses were held up proud and loud in fear that the throngs of right-wingers inside might be paying a little too much attention to lining their pockets and not enough to their pet topic, the atomic holocaust of tomorrow’s Christians. My cab driver, a scarred-up vet who confesses solidarity with the protesters on the abortion issue but is also a lifelong democrat, shrugs in an almost embarrassed way – as if his earlier self-identification as a pro-lifer places him humiliatingly in the company of these fanatics. Once I check in, the atmosphere of gregarious paranoia only increases: there are cops and security people everywhere you look, and long lines through metal detectors and pat-downs by mean young cops and men with earpieces, who all seem to have only recently graduated from high school. I have another moment of panic as they paw through my briefcase, turning all my electronics on and off and opening all the containers: I do, after all, have a lot of pills in there. But God bless the lobbyists for the pharma industry: every goddamn one of them is at least putatively legal, and who’s to say I don’t actually have prescriptions? Other than me, of course, and I’m not talking. At least not after my next round loosens all the muscles in my tongue.

Abe Lincoln rose to power on the basis of the idea of free labor; slavery was wrong because it prevented workers from gaining the rightful rewards from their efforts, and, for the same reason, workers ought to be able, by the dint of their labor, to end their dependency on others by rising up through the ranks to middle-class status. Emancipation and the Homestead Act represented the crowning achievements of Lincoln's Republicanism. Both would be abandoned by the political party that Lincoln helped to establish.

To chart how this took place, Beatty takes the reader on a long, and worthwhile, tour of American jurisprudence. It begins in New Orleans in 1869 with a man named John A. Campbell. The city's filthy and unsafe slaughterhouses had been the subject of extensive negative publicity in the papers. In response, the city passed what it called "An Act to Protect the Health of the City of New Orleans and to Locate the Stock Landings and Slaughter Houses." The act gave a private company the right to rent space to the city's butchers, who had previously been scattered throughout the city and, completely unregulated, had practiced their trade with little regard for the public's health.

The displaced butchers sued. Campbell, an embittered former Confederate who had once served on the U.S. Supreme Court (and wrote a concurring opinion in Dred Scott, the infamous decision that treated slaves as property rather than as citizens), rallied to their defense. One might think that a Southern conservative would have attacked the Civil War amendments for their ringing defense of equality. But Campbell had a better idea. Weren't the butchers being enslaved because they were forbidden to practice their livelihood as they best saw it, he wondered? If no person shall be deprived of their rights without due process of law, weren't those same butchers the subject of unequal treatment? Campbell embraced the Fourteenth Amendment in order to crush it. Once businessmen could claim that economic regulation deprived them of their property without due process of law, the result would be the perpetuation of economic inequality rather than the promised equality between the races.

Campbell also played an important role in the development of substantive due process: the idea that the courts could judge a legislative act not only on the basis of whether it met the test of fair procedure (such as treating everyone equally), but also whether its substance was worthy of judicial approval. Since the Constitution itself is mostly about procedures, to judge on substance means to compare a particular law to some extra-constitutional standard which the Constitution is then stretched to embody. Conservatives of the period had no doubt what such a standard should be. The right to own private property, and to dispose of it as one sees fit, they believed, is inherent in nature and endowed by God. "Things regulate themselves.., which means, of course, that God regulates them," the economist Francis Bowen argued. If that was true, then all social legislation could be held unconstitutional on substantive grounds; Bowen's Harvard colleague, J. Laurence Laughlin, objected to the very use of the word social, as if there were no such thing as a common good capable of trumping the economic rights of those who owned property.

Once substantive due process entered into judicial reasoning, it was only a matter of time before corporations came to be considered persons and thus brought under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. The way this occurred forms one of Beatty's most fascinating vignettes. This revolutionary doctrine, it turns out, owes its construction not to any elected politician, nor even to any judge who, however protected from public scrutiny by life tenure, was at least originally appointed by a president elected by the people. The culprit was a Supreme Court reporter named John Chandler Davis. The court reporter summarizes legal opinions in the form of headnotes. In one such headnote, Santa Clara County v. South Pacific Railroad Co., which dealt with the issue of whether the state of California could tax property owned by the railroads, Davis summarily proclaimed the new doctrine: corporations can be treated as persons under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Thus without argument or opinion on the point," Justice William O. Douglas would write much later, "the Santa Clara case becomes one of the most momentous of all our decisions ... Corporations are now armed with constitutional prerogatives."

The smoldering core of Romney's vomitous offering can perhaps be found in his passing remarks on Europe. Again, in one sense, this was just a crowd-pleasing throwaway: a good Eurobash always gets the CPAC froth flowing. But in a deeper sense, it cuts right to the corroded heart of the matter, right down to the vicious, primitive, genocidal racism that has shaped and driven so many of the policies of Western elites for centuries. In the midst of a long diatribe about liberal "attacks" on "American culture," Romney pauses for a glance across the Atlantic, to evoke a hideous nightmare that could soon be America's future:

Europe -- Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That's the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.

By "demographic disaster," Romney simply means that there are more non-white people in Europe than there used to be. To Romney and his fellow elites, this fact in itself constitutes a genuine "disaster." Although the population of Europe is still overwhelmingly white (much more so than the population of the United States), even the smallest dilution of racial purity across the continent is to be lamented, decried – and rolled back. Here of course Romney is channeling fearmongers like Martin Amis, Mark Steyn, and Christopher Hitchens, whose trembly sexual panic in the face of hot-blooded, fast-breeding darkies would be comical, if it were not so sinister – and so useful to the warmakers and global dominationists in the ruling elite.

In the summer of 1945, Japan’s leaders had two strategies for negotiating an end to World War II: to convince the Soviets (neutral at the time) to mediate, or to fight one last decisive battle that would inflict so many casualties that the United States would agree to more lenient terms. Both plans could still have succeeded after the bombing of Hiroshima; neither plan was possible once the Soviets invaded. From the Japanese perspective, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese-held territory was the event that dramatically changed the strategic landscape and left Japan with no option but to surrender unconditionally. The Hiroshima bombing was simply an extension of an already fierce bombing campaign.

What makes his "the saddest story" is a great moment of promise betrayed. In the bloodbath of the Civil War, two measures -- the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead Act, which took effect on Jan. 1, 1863 -- offered a radical vision of freedom, citizenship, and economic independence by ending slavery and providing cheap land for settlers in the trans-Mississippi West. It was a vision that would give national footing to Lincoln's America and enable the United States to stand apart in the 19th-century Atlantic world. Unfortunately, the promise steadily gave way before the twin engines of racism and industrial capitalism, leaving a very different society by century's end.

"Engine" does indeed seem the proper metaphor. The central relationship of America's betrayal, in Beatty's view, was the alliance between government and business: an alliance that makes a mockery of the notion that the 19th century was an age of laissez-faire, and one that established the foundation of an emerging state capitalism. The central institutions were the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, which whittled away the promises of freedom, citizenship, and independence for ordinary Americans and instead handed them over to the corporations. And the central vehicle of this truly revolutionary transformation was the great engine itself, the railroad.

If there is a threat that should concern Jews — and everyone else — it comes from a different direction. We have attached the memory of the Holocaust so firmly to the defense of a single country — Israel — that we are in danger of provincializing its moral significance. Yes, the problem of evil in the last century, to invoke Arendt once again, took the form of a German attempt to exterminate Jews. But it is not just about Germans and it is not just about Jews. It is not even just about Europe, though it happened there. The problem of evil — of totalitarian evil, or genocidal evil — is a universal problem. But if it is manipulated to local advantage, what will then happen (what is, I believe, already happening) is that those who stand at some distance from the memory of the European crime — because they are not Europeans, or because they are too young to remember why it matters — will not understand how that memory relates to them and they will stop listening when we try to explain.

In short, the Holocaust may lose its universal resonance. We must hope that this will not be the case and we need to find a way to preserve the core lesson that the Shoah really can teach: the ease with which people — a whole people — can be defamed, dehumanized, and destroyed...

[I]f history is to do its proper job, preserving forever the evidence of past crimes and everything else, it is best left alone. When we ransack the past for political profit — selecting the bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach opportunistic moral lessons — we get bad morality and bad history.

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What I'm going to say about Sputnik is that it was a great achievement of Soviet socialism, and that it was for that very reason a great setback for human expansion into space; that it started the culture wars which are still shaking our world; and that it's why most of you are, like me, functionally innumerate.

Mike Huckabee

Campaign soundtrack: Anything by the Rolling Stones

Because I was generally unknown, I was free to gamble with material, and there were a few evenings when crucial mutations affected my developing act. At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, I played for approximately 100 students in a classroom with a stage at one end. The show went fine. However, when it was over, something odd happened. The audience didn't leave. The stage had no wings, no place for me to go, but I still had to pack up my props. I indicated that the show had ended, but they just sat there, even after I said flatly, "It's over." They thought this was all part of the act, and I couldn't convince them otherwise. Then I realized there were no exits from the stage and that the only way out was to go through the audience. So I kept talking. I passed among them, ad-libbing comments along the way. I walked out into the hallway, but they followed me there too. A reluctant pied piper, I went outside onto the campus, and they stayed right behind me. I came across a drained swimming pool. I asked the audience to get into it—"Everybody into the pool!"—and they did. Then I said I was going to swim across the top of them, and the crowd knew exactly what to do: I was passed hand over hand as I did the crawl. That night I went to bed feeling I had entered new comic territory. My show was becoming something else, something free and unpredictable, and the doing of it thrilled me, because each new performance brought my view of comedy into sharper focus.

People are resistant to change. During the industrial revolution, British textile and agricultural workers destroyed the new labour-saving machines, as they saw them as threatening their jobs and the world they were comfortable with.

Of course, their predictions of doom turned out to be inaccurate — the introduction of those machines was the beginning of a massive spurt of economic growth that raised the wealth and living standards of the working class.

("The Northern Territory emergency intervention and the Prime Minister’s speech on reconciliation just days before he called the November 24 Federal election has prompted two Nyoongar men to nominate for the Senate as independents. Former ATSIC Commissioner Eric Wynne and Southwest Aboriginal Land and Sea Council Senior Project Officer Kevin Fitzgerald are campaigning on Indigenous issues, water conservation, housing, health, education and employment."

See also)

Micro parties offer a diversity of philosophical choices, ranging from socialism to libertarianism. They represent everyone from dope smokers to sporting shooters, from opponents of immigration to supporters of carers. Yet they face considerable difficulty getting their messages heard. Earlier this year, for instance, a newly formed micro party, Hear Our Voice, had a policy launch in Canberra. The news media who turned up included a Herald photographer and a local commercial TV crew. But before the TV crew finished unpacking their gear, a call from their news editor redirected them to a nearby house fire.

Think of that phrase -- "manifest destiny." A key doctrine in what I am calling American fundamentalism. It remains an inch below the surface of the American belief system. What's interesting is that this sense of special mission cuts across the spectrum -- right wing/left wing, liberals/conservatives -- because generally the liberal argument against government policies since World War II is that our wars -- Vietnam then, Iraq now -- represent an egregious failure to live up to America's true calling. We're better than this. Even antiwar critics, who begin to bang the drum, do it by appealing to an exceptional American missionizing impulse. You don't get the sense, even from most liberals, that -- no, America is a nation like other nations and we're going to screw things up the way other nations do.

A couple of years ago, Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ rendered in profoundly fundamentalist ways, most terribly, the death of Jesus as caused by "the Jews," not the Romans...

And then that film was featured at the United States Air Force Academy. Its commanders made it clear that every one of the cadets, over 4,000 of them, was supposed to see that movie. Repeatedly over a week, every time cadets went into H. H. Arnold mess hall, they found fliers on their dinner plates announcing that this movie was being shown. I saw posters that said: "See the Passion of the Christ" and "This is an official Air Force Academy event, do not remove this poster."

As a result of that film, there was an outbreak of pressure, practically coercion, by born-again evangelical Christians aimed at non-Christian cadets and, in a special way, at Jews. This went on for months and when the whistle was blown by a Jewish cadet and his father, the Air Force denied it, tried to cover it up. Yale University sent a team from the Yale Divinity School to investigate. They issued a devastating report. The commander at the academy was finally removed; the Air Force was forced to acknowledge that there was a problem.

Rather than, for instance, arguing for the elimination of New Deal social programs, today's message machine will slap together rickety claims of a Social Security crisis and have its yawpers run around scaring people, offering as the cure a "saving Social Security" plan that coincidentally means privatization. Rather than arguing, in time-honored GOP fashion, that the wealthy should pay less taxes, conservative yawpers will run around advocating an "IRS reform" to simplify the complicated tax forms that we all hate filling out -- coincidentally by eliminating graduated tax rates. In short, conservatism now functions by fooling the public with a succession of Trojan horses...

Such performances, of course, demand a certain indifference to the notion of truth (i.e., high-level conservative columnists often don't believe what they're saying), and a cavalier attitude toward looking like an idiot (i.e., they never expect to fool all the people, all the time)... And as you move down the scale from the best-connected and highest-paid ones, through the medium players like the Charles Krauthammers and Peggy Noonans, past the Thomas Sowells and Cal Thomases, ever downward toward the pickle-barrel solons at the National Review Online and the Weekly Standard -- indeed, down through the bottom of the barrel and into the pickle-soaked dirt beneath -- the intelligence and cunning falls away in stages, and you're able to see the same conservative arguments-of-the-week made ineptly, by bozos who know very well what they're supposed to be for or against but don't have a clue how to make it seem reasonable to sane Americans.

Like the Young Republicans at the Rick Santorum rally who tried to support 2005's Strengthening Social Security plan by chanting "Hey-Hey, Ho-Ho, Social Security has got to go," it's easy to track the disinformation shell-game by watching these people, because they're essentially honest: As true-believers, they see their job as spreading the received wisdom that they get from the GOP message mains, and in contrast to slick word-splitters like Gerson, will happily take conservative arguments to their natural, but completely ridiculous conclusions. It's one thing, for instance, when Harvey Mansfield of the Harvard Department of Government appears in the Wall Street Journal editorial section trying to float the notion of a president's inherent dictatorial powers during wartime. But when Mark Noonan of Blogs For Bush gives his version of the same argument, literally advocating a return to a 13th-century model of government with George Bush as king, the Unitary Executive Theory is, in effect, prancing around on the front lawn in its underwear, with jammy hands and a Kool-Aid moustache. Having experienced Noonan, one may never again picture Harvey Mansfield with his pants on.

It's a rather paradoxical situation. We live in a world where the goodwill and reputation of a handbag manufacturer is aggressively protected by the full force of the law, but really important labels like "democracy", "rationality" and "liberalism" are available for the taking by anyone who fancies them. If someone wants to claim that they are destabilising a democratically elected government in the name of democracy, or passing laws telling women what they can wear on their heads in the name of feminism, then there is literally no legal recourse available to stop them.

And they'll be in the company of the Indian firm DRDO, which is boasting a new line of mobile multi-barrel rocket systems, that can be fitted with six different warheads at a range of 30 kilometres and "neutralise" an area 700 metres by 500 metres. In other words, everyone in the area, which is as big as 70 football pitches, is incinerated. What do you say when the salesman shows you that? Do you go: "Yes, but have you got it in blue?" Or there's the good people of Raytheon, manufacturers of Patriots and Sidewinders and Paveway missiles, whose latest factory is in Derry, set up after the IRA ceasefire. Somewhere in Raytheon's prospectus it must have said: "Now we've got these idiots to see the stupidity of trying to get their way through weapons, we can finally build our weapons factory."

It was Raytheon software that guided a missile on to the building in Qana, Lebanon, last year, killing 28 civilians. For efficiency like that, in 2006 they conducted sales of $20.3bn.

The Ahmadinejad circus at Columbia reminded me of when Daniel Ortega spoke there in the 1980s. This was back when the mighty Nicaraguan state was threatening not only all of Central America, but the peace-loving United States, so his visit to New York was rightly compared to Hitler or Tojo trying the same con job. I was on the Columbia campus the night of Ortega's appearance, but couldn't get into the hall, as it was standing room only. But there was an entertaining show outside the hall, where pro-Sandinista students and activists were exchanging insults with rightwing students, at times actually trying to engage the rightists in political discourse. A complete waste of oxygen. The highlight came when several members of Columbia's football team chanted the Pledge of Allegiance several times. Once they were finished, a few young women yelled at them, "Win a game! Then we'll talk!" This was when Columbia had the longest losing streak in all of college football, and the taunt clearly stung the jocks as they suddenly dropped the patriotic posturing and explained how their coaching staff was killing them with bad play-calling. The young women laughed and laughed, and the football boys stomped off into the night, muttering about how unfair it all was.

You have to see it to believe it, the effect that Fred Thompson has on certain crowds. Reporters who describe his public appearances as "bland" and "uninspiring" and "vague" and "blurry" do so because they're looking for the wrong thing; they're looking for theatrics, for fire and brimstone, for that candidate who can get crowds howling for blood. What Thompson inspires is something much more appropriate for Americans of the TV age: He gets audiences purring in a cozy stupor... While voters often leave Giuliani events wondering if they should hand this seemingly crank-mad Catholic the nuclear football, Thompson crowds walk out with the dazed smiles of recovery-room zipperheads, looking like they've just had their brains removed and couldn't be happier about it.

In his stump speech, the hulking Southerner paces the stage wearing a fatherly expression, giving a Gregory Peck-like pensive rub of the chin from time to time and hypnotically tossing out soothing ruralisms like "ain't" and "wadn't" that descend upon his audiences of besieged Decent Folk like gentle snowflakes. The pulse rate in the crowd goes down, not up. The gritted teeth and wizened anger lines around the eyes of these taut, white Silent Majority faces loosen and relax. Whereas minutes before they were collectively certain of imminent attack by an evil confederacy of Al Qaeda and Mexicans and queers ("What should society's position be on deviants?" one Iowan wonders at a Thompson event) all inspired to violence by their envy of the Decent Folk's shimmering new trucks and almost-new big-screen TVs and prized displays of Christian collectible figurines, they now feel if not safe, then soothed, in the right tent, at least. And their hearts flutter as this humble actor who gave up a big career on TV for them -- for them! -- tells them a story they like, a story about a world where America is still the good guy and no changes need to be made for things to turn out just fine in the end.

When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it seemed as if this strategy was working. To take the most extreme case, Sri Lanka counted only 17 cases of malaria in 1963. But by 1969, things had once again gotten out of hand: 537,700 cases were counted. Naturally, the rise had many causes: Political and financial pressure led to cutbacks on spraying, stockpiles of supplies had been used up, low rainfall and high temperatures encouraged mosquitoes, a backlog of diagnostic tests to detect malaria was processed and testing standards became more stringent. But even with renewed effort, the problem did not go away.

Records uncovered by entomologist Andrew Spielman hint at why (Mosquito, p. 177). For years, Sri Lanka had run test programs to verify DDT’s effectiveness at killing mosquitoes. But halfway through the program, their standards were dramatically lowered. “Though the reason was not recorded,” Spielman writes, “it was obvious that some mosquitoes were developing resistance and the change was made to justify continued spraying.”

But further spraying led only to further resistance, and the problem became much harder to control. DDT use was scaled back and other pesticides were introduced—more cautiously this time—but the epidemic was never again brought under control, with the deadly legacy that continues to this day.

Instead of apologizing, the chemical companies went on the attack. They funded front groups and think tanks to claim the epidemic started because countries “stopped” using their products. In their version of the story, environmentalists forced Africans to stop using DDT, causing the increase in malaria. “It’s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident,” complains Tim Lambert, whose weblog, Deltoid, tracks the DDT myth and other scientific misinformation in the media.

The strident paranoia about Tariq Ramadan is not fake, but the source of it is obviously not Tariq Ramadan. There is is indeed a sincere and utterly demented belief that something called 'the West' faces an existential challenge from something called 'Islam', but the cause of it is not Islam. The cause of it, dare I say the root cause of it, is not merely a rationalisation of the alliance with American imperialism. It is an awareness of how fragile the 'West' really is, how threatened it is by its inner tensions and recurring crises, and how incapable it is of dealing productively with its problems. The prickliness and belligerence of these commentators hardly suggests a great deal of confidence in 'the West', after all. And what is there to be afraid of? In its worst possible light, the actual military threat from various Islamist groups is puny. There is no economic threat to US dominance besides capitalism's own inherent tendency toward secular crisis. The EU isn't going to acquire cohesion overnight, and China has a long way to go yet. The Muslim countries are all handily under lock and key with guns, gaolers, torture equipment and bombers supplied by America, where they don't simply occupy. Culturally, America is becoming asinine and in some cases decidedly on the verge of Streicherism, but if the challenge is supposed to be low-tech video signals from Osama, I wouldn't sweat it. It isn't an external challenge that is producing this crisis, any more than decadent liberals lacking moral clarity caused it. It was there, brewing all along: the economic turmoil, the racist retrogression, the erosion of cultural hegemony, even the inability of mainstream ideology to handle the 'feminisation' of discourse (in which "political correctness" is seen as linguistically emasculating, thus restraining the necessarily "robust" response to the enemy of the month), all of it is entirely, er, indigenous. Still, as a totem is clearly necessary, by all means blame Osama. If you can't blame Osama, blame Tariq. Hell, fuck it, blame me. I killed Kennedy, wounded Reagan, had unsatisfying sex with John Leslie, and crashed Diana's car. I did it all, and now I'm behind the Islamic plot. Dialogue with me is utterly useless: I don't expect you to talk, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.

Without a doubt, one of the pioneers in Brian's industry is Wernard, the proprietor of a leading marijuana garden center in Amsterdam. Now a professorial-looking fellow in his 40's, Wernard was present at the creation of the Sea of Green, working with expatriate American growers (and their seeds) to perfect the indoor cultivation of marijuana. On Saturday afternoon, he offered a packed hall of gardeners—a surprisingly eclectic group that included, besides the expected array of aging and aspiring hippies, several middle-aged farmers, grad students and even a few sport-jacketed retirees—an informative slide lecture on its history and development.

What is perhaps most striking about the recent history of marijuana horticulture is that almost every one of the advances Wernard covered is a direct result of the opening of a new front in the United States drug war. Indeed, there probably would not be a significant domestic marijuana industry today if not for a large-scale program of unintentional Federal support.

Until the mid-70's, most of the marijuana consumed in this country was imported from Mexico. In 1975, United States authorities began working with the Mexican Government to spray Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, a widely publicized eradication program that ignited concerns about the safety of imported marijuana. At about the same time, the Coast Guard and the United States Border Patrol stepped up drug interdiction efforts along the nation's southern rim. Many observers believe that this crackdown encouraged smugglers to turn their attention from cannabis to cocaine, which is both more lucrative and easier to conceal. Meanwhile, with foreign supplies contracting and the Mexican product under a cloud, a large market for domestically grown marijuana soon opened up and a new industry, based principally in California and Hawaii, quickly emerged to supply it.

At the beginning, American growers were familiar with only one kind of marijuana: Cannabis sativa, an equatorial strain that can't withstand frost and won't reliably flower north of the 30th parallel. Eager to expand the range of domestic production, growers began searching for a variety that might flourish and flower farther north, and by the second half of the decade, it had been found: Cannabis indica, a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been cultivated for centuries in Afghanistan by hashish producers.

Cannabis indica looks quite unlike the familiar marijuana plant: it rarely grows taller than 4 or 5 feet (as compared to 15 feet for some sativas) and its deep bluish green leaves are rounded, rather than pointed. But the great advantage of Cannabis indica was that it allowed growers in all 50 states to cultivate sinsemilla for the first time.

Initially, indicas were grown as purebreds. But enterprising growers soon discovered that by crossing the new variety with Cannabis sativa, it was possible to produce hybrids that combined the most desirable traits of both plants while playing down their worst. The smoother taste and what I often heard described as the "clear, bell-like high" of a sativa, for example, could be combined with the hardiness, small stature and higher potency of an indica. In a flurry of breeding work performed around 1980, most of it by amateurs working on the West Coast, the modern American marijuana plant—Cannabis sativa x indica—was born.

Beginning in 1982, the D.E.A. launched an ambitious campaign to eradicate American marijuana farms. Yet despite vigorous enforcement throughout the 1980's, the share of the United States market that was home-grown actually doubled from 12 percent in 1984 to 25 percent in 1989, according to the D.E.A.'s own estimates. (The figure may be as high as 50 percent today.) At the same time, D.E.A. policies unintentionally encouraged growers to develop a more potent product. "Law enforcement makes large-scale production difficult," explains Mark A. R. Kleiman, a drug policy analyst who worked in the Reagan Justice Department. "So growers had to figure out a way to make a living with a smaller but better-quality crop." In time, the marijuana industry came to resemble a reverse image of the automobile industry: domestic growers captured the upscale segment of the market with their steadily improving boutique product while the street trade was left to cheap foreign imports.

The Reagan Administration's war on drugs had another unintended effect on the marijuana industry: "The Government pushed growers indoors," says Allen St. Pierre, assistant national director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "Before programs like CAMP"—the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, which targeted outdoor growers in California from 1982 to 1985—"you almost never heard about indoor grass."

The move indoors sparked an intensive period of research and development, including selective breeding for potency, size and early harvest, and a raft of technological advances aimed at speeding photosynthesis by manipulating the growing environment. Gardeners also learned how to clone their best female plants, thereby removing the unpredictability inherent in growing from seed. All these developments coalesced around 1987 in the growing regimen known as the Sea of Green, in which dozens of tightly packed and genetically identical female plants are grown in tight quarters under carefully regulated artificial conditions. Near the end of his lecture, Wernard flashed slides of several such gardens he'd tended: green seas of happy-looking dwarf plants holding aloft enormous buds that elicited actual oohs and ahs from the gardeners in the audience.

As Wernard was quick to acknowledge, authorship for the Sea of Green belongs to no one horticulturist but rather to hundreds of gardeners working independently in the States and in the Netherlands and then sharing what they'd learned, often in the columns of High Times and Sinsemilla Tips, a defunct quarterly that many growers refer to as "the bible." By 1989, their collective efforts had yielded exponential increases in the potency of American marijuana and earned the grudging respect of at least one D.E.A. agent, W. Michael Aldridge, who told a reporter on the eve of yet another crackdown (this time on indoor growers): "I hate to sound laudatory, but the work they've done on this plant is incredible."

As a consequence of the underlying mineral beds, the waters became saltier than the ocean.

In an effort to turn the Salton Sea into a tourist attraction, local politicians stocked the sea with salt-water fish like the tilapia. Fifty years after its formation, Salton Sea became a mecca for working class vacationers who could not afford Palm Springs. It was also popular with water-skiers and motor boat enthusiasts. ...[I]t became a symbol of the post-WWII good life. Vintage newsreels from the 1950s describe towns clustered around the Salton Sea as a kind of miracle in the desert.

Despite its dubious origins, the Sea evolved into an extremely important bird habitat. With “development” rampant all across California, migrating birds have made the Salton Sea area a key nesting place on routes north or south. In one of the film's many fascinating interviews, an environmentalist asks where the birds are supposed to go if their habitat is destroyed.

Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

Now what would Emerson have to say about my weeds? I had given them the benefit of the doubt, acknowledged their virtues and allotted them each a place. I had treated them, in other words, as garden plants. But they did not behave as garden plants. They differed from my cultivated varieties not merely by a factor of human esteem. No, they seemed truly a different order of being, more versatile, better equipped, craftier and more ruthless.

What garden plant can germinate in 36 minutes, as a tumbleweed can? What cultivar can produce 250,000 seeds on a single flower stalk, as the mullein does? Or travel a foot each day, as kudzu can? Or, like the bindweed, clone new editions of itself in direct proportion to the effort spent trying to eradicate it? According to Sara B. Stein's excellent botany, "My Weeds," Japanese knotweed can penetrate four inches of asphalt, no problem. Lamb's-quarter seeds recovered from an archeological site germinated after spending 1,700 years in storage, patiently awaiting their shot. The roots of the witchweed emit a poison that can kill other plants in its vicinity.

No, it isn't just our lack of imagination that gives the nettle its sting.

So what is a weed?...

Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well-adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or prairies—in "the wild." Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.

Weeds, contrary to what the romantics assumed, are not wild. They are as much a product of civilization as the hybrid tea rose, or Thoreau's bean plants. They do better than garden plants for the simple reason that they are better adapted to life in a garden. For where garden plants have been bred for a variety of traits (tastiness, size, esthetic appeal), weeds have evolved with just one end in view: the ability to thrive in ground that man has disturbed. And at this they are very accomplished indeed.

Organisational assets above the value of $400,000 are to be compulsorily acquired by Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) and transferred to a new entity, the Indigenous Economic Development Trust (IEDT), and then rented back at commercial rates to the same organisations from which the asset has been taken from.

In some cases this will make those organisations commercially unviable, leading to financial collapse and loss of Aboriginal jobs...

This is not about Aboriginal land in places like Arnhem Land: assets will be compulsorily stripped from Aboriginal organisations owning land and property up and down the Stuart Highway—Darwin, Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs—no matter how well run, no matter what the level of services provided, no matter what those assets are being used for.

The early targets appear to be urban-based Community Development Employment Programs (CDEP)...

The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR), in at least one instance, will be "resuming" an asset from an Aboriginal business which is being offered back for commercial rental to the very Aboriginal business from which it was compulsorily taken.

In many cases the assets have been built up over many years—in some cases decades. Some are jointly-owned assets. Some are leased to groups such as health services; some provide low cost housing. Some are funded through a combination of commercial income, commercial bank loans, soft government loans and government grants.

The latter factor seems to be the key. Any Aboriginal organisation that directly or indirectly received federal government assistance to acquire or pay off an asset—even in small part—now faces compulsory seizure of the entire asset...

The administration also greenlighted brash, modern-day forty-niners like Scott Custer and Mike Battles, a pair of ex-Army officers and bottom-rank Republican pols (Battles had run for Congress in Rhode Island and had been a Fox News commentator) who had decided to form a security company called Custer Battles and make it big in Iraq. "Battles knew some people from his congres­sional run, and that's how they got there," says Alan Grayson, an attorney who led a whistle-blower lawsuit against the pair for defrauding the government.

In fact, the 30 per cent rebate introduced in 1998 didn't achieve its objective. Its only effect was to provide an initial subsidy of about $2 billion to the mainly rich, who already had private health insurance.

The Government succeeded only in driving people out of Medicare after 2000 with the introduction of "lifetime" cover that imposed a penalty on those who delayed taking out private health insurance after the age of 30. This was reinforced by the "run for cover" advertising campaign, which implied that those who remained in Medicare despite the financial sticks and carrots to get out would be doomed to rely on a second-class public health system as they became older.

This wasn't pure propaganda. Federal funding for public hospitals has been squeezed and this has shown up in the form of greater pressure on hospital emergency centres and public hospital waiting lists for elective surgery.

Around the time of the second Johns Hopkins study, most of the Right started to desert the Iraq cause, especially in the US. Right-wingers could, after all, damn the execution of the war, and even confess to hubris; they could resort to the conservative tradition of realpolitik, sadder but wiser.

For Bone and the pro-war Left, such options weren’t available. They had established new identities through the ‘military humanitarian’ crusade; any acknowledgement of how much they’d damaged those they purported to help would have thrown their political personalities into turmoil.

In assessing the moral emptiness of such people, it should be remembered that the decision to bomb or not to bomb someone in the name of their own best interests is not a symmetrical choice. The weight of evidence must be overwhelming before such a course could even be contemplated. If a military intervention is undertaken purely because one estimates that the violence done will be numerically less than the violence which might otherwise have occurred, the effect is to deny the agency of those one purports to help and the worth of their individual humanity, as British philosopher Bernard Williams has argued.

In Russia's thousand-year history, few of its rulers have contrived to do the country so much damage, in so short a time, as Boris Yeltsin. Nevertheless, however the opposition might have protested, and whatever acute crises the country might have experienced, Yeltsin was forever stepping from the water bone-dry. He got away with everything - the destruction of the Soviet Union, the collapse of industry, a drastic fall in living standards, the lost war in Chechnya, and corruption scandals in his own family. Yeltsin, described ironically as a 'guarantee of instability', proceeded solemnly from defeat to defeat. He reached his 'peak form' in the period between 1991 and 1993. These were the years when he managed to transform himself from a communist reformer into a radical liberal, while retaining a significant number of his supporters. He further succeeded in crushing the opposition of his former allies and trampling on the first shoots of popular power, while preserving his reputation as a 'fighter for democracy'. At this time the career of Russia's first president was still in the ascendant. The shelling of the parliament was the high point of this career, and unquestionably represented Yeltsin's greatest victory. From this point, the trend was downwards. From 1993 Yeltsin was preoccupied mainly with hanging on to power, and his entourage with the question of what would happen to them when the ageing autocrat made his exit.

Some analysts have also seen Mr Putin as having the same broadly liberal policies as Yeltsin but only pursuing them in different ways and in a markedly changed Russia.

"Vladimir Putin is pursuing the democratisation policies of Boris Yeltsin. The only difference is that Putin rules in a period of economic growth," said Boris Kagarlitsky of the Moscow-based Institute on Globalisation.

When I learned of Boris Yeltsin’s death, I immediately recalled the old rule: say good things or nothing about the dead. Russia’s first president clearly deserved silence.

But it was difficult to keep silent. The telephone rang constantly as journalists called asking for comments. They had a hard day, as one after another they interviewed experts who took shelter in general and evasive answers. A local journalist would understand their motives, though. It was more difficult to deal with foreigners who could not understand why interviewees were at a loss for appropriate words. Besides, liberal canons required experts to pronounce a ritual phrase, “Yeltsin brought us freedom and democracy,” or something else in this vein. Naturally, several commentators from the Union of Right Forces did say these words, but most others could not.

Journalists kept asking suggestive questions: “Wasn’t Yeltsin's rule associated with freedom?” or “Didn’t Yeltsin give the country pluralism, elections, and freedom of the press?”

No, Yeltsin was not the one. He has no relation whatsoever to any democratic change in the country. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who accomplished all the reforms. Yeltsin just took advantage of new democratic conditions to unseat his former boss. The Soviet Union collapsed as collateral damage – 80 percent of its residents opposed the dissolution at a referendum, and residents of 12 of the 15 component republics, except for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, wanted to keep living in the Soviet Union.

Democratic freedom reached its peak in the spring of 1991, during the last months of Gorbachev’s rule. From that point, Yeltsin rolled back human rights and democratic freedoms. When he seized power and disbanded the Soviet Union government agencies in 1991 by exploiting the hard-liners’ attempt to topple Gorbachev, the international community hailed it as “a victory over communism,” although it was an act as illegal as anything the coup plotters did.

On the other hand, the newly elected Russian president was very popular at the time. Popularity gave him the moral right to act outside his formal authority in the emergency. But he kept using the same questionable methods to disband the Soviet Union by signing the illegal Belavezha Accords in 1991 and to order an armored assault on the Russian parliament in the fall of 1993, the parliament he had claimed to defend two years earlier.

As support for the president waned, he tightened his grip on power. Ordering tanks to shell the parliament building; attempting to introduce censorship, which met with stern resistance from the media; and adopting an undemocratic constitution that gave the president a wide range of arbitrary powers and reduced the parliament and the Constitutional Court to ornaments were logical steps in the policy that emerged in August 1991 and continues. Compared to Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin may be to blame only for being more consistent and persistent in his effort to eliminate what is left of Gorbachev-era democratic changes.

Bearden offered some pickup trucks for the pilot, and ISI accepted. Pakistani intelligence interrogated the captive for four or five days. Bearden passed through the usual CIA offer to captured pilots: "The big-chested homecoming queen blonde, the bass boat, and the pickup truck with Arizona plates." But ISI reported the Soviet officer declined to defect. Bearden contacted the Soviets and arranged for a handover.

The pilot's name was Alexander Rutskoi. Several years later he would lead a violent uprising against Russian president Boris Yeltsin."

History is just. Could people who a year and a half earlier had fought for a hyper-presidential constitution, unlimited executive powers and the use of tanks, really have failed to guess that once this mechanism was unleashed it would no longer stop of its own accord? For some psychologically incomprehensible reason they had been sure that if the parliament were crushed, demonstrators shot down, and the law treated with contempt, this would not affect their own rights. They found nothing reprehensible either in the fact that the armed forces were firing cannon shells in their own capital, or in the situation in which the representative branch had been made a senseless appendix of an executive power outside any form of control. It was only when they saw television news clips of tanks in Chechnya that they became indignant at the violence of the state and the arbitrariness of national leaders.

The paradox lay in the fact that this time, unlike the case in 1993, Yeltsin acted strictly within the framework of his constitutional powers. These powers had been defended in the first instance by the liberals Yegor Gaidar and Sergey Yushenkov. They, of course, had thought all these prerogatives would be used only against Communists and the left. Justice, however, triumphed. It was time at last to understand that all heads are equal before a police club.

This is the last throw of the dice for John Howard. He is doing one big favour for the mining industry which he has faithfully served in public life for the past 30 years by rolling back Aboriginal ownership of their tribal lands. Cynically, cruelly but utterly predictably, he’s doing it under the hypocritical colours of humanitarianism. (Very similar to the invasion and occupation of Iraq sold as “spreading democracy”). In his four terms as PM, he has starved indigenous health, education and housing of funds, abolished ATSIC and pointedly marginalised the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio. This particular pre-election pitch is aimed at Lateline viewers, readers of The Age and The SMH and ABC stalwarts, the demographic that constitutes Australian (small “l”) liberalism. These are the feeble-brained, hand-wringers who are congenitally incapable of separating the wood from the trees. They are types currently heard sobbing: “I’m no fan of Mr Howard, but at least he’s DOING SOMETHING!” Yes, he is: he’s giving the mining giants the leg-up they need to start exploring, digging and quarrying in indigenous lands in the Northern Territory and then elsewhere. He is being aided and abetted by Kevin Rudd’s craven behaviour. Instead of falling into line with Howard’s agenda, he should have demanded complete details of the plan, the highest-level briefing, sought face-to-face meetings with Aboriginal leaders, state premiers, police and army officers and taken the lead in a national debate. Instead, he mouthed pieties such as “I’m taking Mr Howard at his word” and “I believe the Prime Minister when he says he is responding to a national crisis” etc etc. Has anyone realised that these are almost the same words used by Kim Beazley when he backed Howard during the Tampa scam? By his pusillanimous approach, Rudd has vacated leadership on the tragic issue of rescuing Aboriginal communities and given Howard the opportunity to play his sickening Father of the Nation role. Paul Keating, you were right about the Rudd team of fixers, hucksters, flyweights and spineless opportunists.

The present perplexity of the fourth estate over the Labor Party's continued electoral buoyancy makes for an interesting study...

[R]evealing was the widely and oft-expressed view that Labor would take a hammering once the budget was brought down. When this situation failed to eventuate, at least one managing director of a polling company, commenting on his own company's research, was reduced to saying that the people will eventually get it right. Last Sunday's Insiders program on the ABC is another example of general (and seemingly genuine) puzzlement in our commentariat at what is going on.

Good morning, welcome to Insiders. And it's been another weird week in politics. The Government was out and about selling a Budget that was, by and large, well received, and the latest research put consumer confidence at its highest in 32 years, a neat juxtaposition with unemployment - the lowest in 32 years.

And at the same time, Kevin Rudd and Labor were under sustained attack from big business over its industrial relations policy. And yet the polls - all of them - either showed Labor maintaining its huge lead over the Coalition or building on it.

CASSIDY: Paul, good morning. I was talking before about a rather odd week and you wrote on Saturday about the insiders and outsiders.

PAUL KELLY, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR, THE AUSTRALIAN: That's right, Barrie. I think there's a mood of frustration and worry in the Government about the polls, and puzzlement as to how the polls can be turned around and I think politics is split at the moment between the insider and outsider view.

The insider view based on economic prosperity and the outsider view based on the mood of the country. Virtually each week we see new, very good economic figures for the Government: record levels of low unemployment, record consumer confidence, yet this is not translating into hard political support for the Government.

I think the signals on industrial relations are quite confused and complicated. My understanding of Labor's situation is this: Kevin Rudd believes that WorkChoices is the biggest single vote switcher from the Howard Government to Labor, therefore Kevin Rudd feels under no political or electoral pressure to make concessions at all, in fact just the reverse.

In his talks with business he's yet to be persuaded by business that there is a strong argument in terms of economic productivity for Labor to make further significant concessions.

So why does this gulf exist? Part of the explanation is that it has always been there, and has become more apparent once again. It was there in the three years or so after John Howard's — and Pauline Hanson's — victory in 1996 when senior journalists, along with other opinion makers ... simply didn't get what was fuelling the Hanson momentum...

Economic insecurity was the real issue. After trashing the Keating Government, the public was again given angst by the first and second Costello budgets. The commentariat was very slow to catch on to this and there was rarely any admission that material issues were of prime concern, partly because the late '90s was a period when the culture wars entered a new phase.

In other words, the Howard Government understood what was needed: some strategic backdowns on globalisation, a lot of money thrown at rural Australia, and fomenting cultural division in Australian society in the hope that attention could be diverted from the material, economic issues of state, over which division necessarily occurs. Labor assisted by blurring much of the difference it might otherwise have had with the Government, in both policy and rhetorical terms.

Meantime, the preoccupation of Liberal politicians was with establishing the Government's economic credentials. We might even allow ourselves to think that some of them believed that once the economic standing of the Government was established by sustained prosperity, they could come to rely less on the racism and other prejudices of the culture wars.

The trouble with this approach is that the Government has been too drawn in by its own party line (as ageing governments often are). It has come to believe its own propaganda about how good things are. The scandal is that many of the media's senior commentators have also swallowed the propaganda of prosperity hook, line and sinker...

Most tellingly of all, economic insecurity has resurfaced in the public's response to an industrial system of Howard's making. Already vulnerable to the relentless increase of overwork and unpaid overtime, Australians see that Howard's new system will exacerbate the problem. Collective bargaining rights are meaningless in a system that is prearranged to make collective bargaining ineffective. Despite their present disinclination to join a union — a trend that has now bottomed out — Australians generally express a gladness that unions are around.

And they know there is something nasty about Australian Workplace Agreements. Senior commentators don't or won't ask why we would need a special kind of individual contract to do what other individual contracts have done, but the public suspects there is something wrong with an arrangement that removes so many conditions of employment.

It is difficult to say how much of the commentariat's present stance is due to ignorance about the industrial legislation and how much it is due to the inability of contracted, individualistic and well-paid commentators, from the distance of their own orbit, to recognise the way the real world works.

[T]here is this gem from Lewis:

For a long time, the main enemy [of the Muslims] was seen, with some plausibility, as being the West, and some Muslims were, naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against that enemy. This explains the widespread support in the Arab countries and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its collapse, for the Soviet Union. These were the main enemies of the West, and therefore natural allies.

But where Lewis is wrong, of course, iis that the USSR wasn't seen as an ally by religious Muslim organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahhabis, and other fundamentalist and Salafi-oriented groups, all of whom were bitterly anti-communist. As I document in my book, Devil's Game, it was precisely because the Muslim fundamentalists were so anti-Soviet that they often got American support throughout the Cold War. The "Muslims" who joined with the USSR were the (often secular) nationalists, leftists, communists, Baathists, and Nasserists who were "anti-Western" because they saw the British and French as colonial masters. (Later, the United States joined that list, by virtue of its Cold War opposition to Arab and Iranian nationalism.)

Edison’s partial loss of hearing prevented him from listening to music in the same way as those with unimpaired hearing. A little item that appeared in a Schenectady newspaper in 1913 related the story that Edison supposedly told a friend about how he usually listened to recordings by placing one ear directly against the phonograph’s cabinet. But if he detected a sound too faint to hear in this fashion, Edison said, “I bite my teeth in the wood good and hard and then I get it good and strong.” The story would be confirmed decades later in his daughter Madeleine’s recollections of growing up. One day she came into the sitting room in which someone was playing the piano and a guest, Maria Montessori, was in tears, watching Edison listen the only way that he could, teeth biting the piano. “She thought it was pathetic,” Madeleine said. “I guess it was.”

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer's expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece--they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.

There are various ways you can [create a Jewish state in majority Muslim Palestine]. You can do it by killing off or expelling the majority population, till it is reduced to a manageable size, as in 1948. (And then you can even afford to give the vote to the remnant left behind, and proclaim yourself a democracy, because you have made sure that the natives are so reduced in number they can never democratically bring about any change in their status). Or you can do it by simply disenfranchising large numbers of the "undesirable" population in the land you claim for your Jewish state, as is the current situation for millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. These ugly means are not an unfortunate by-product of an Arab propensity for "terrorism" or "anti-semitism", forced upon unfortunate Zionists who would otherwise have preferred to peacefully coexist; they are absolutely intrinsic to creating a Jewish-majority state in Palestine. They are simply what you have to do in order to create a regime that favours one kind of people over another, in a land where the "other" people are the majority. Presumably, for Zionism, the end goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine is of such import that its benefits outweigh the "collateral damage" that this inevitably involves for the Palestinian population.

When you demand that Palestinians acknowledge the "right" of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, you are asking them to say that they too think Zionism is worth all this "collateral damage". You are asking them to acknowledge that it was and is morally right to do all the things that were and are necessary for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, even though these necessary things include their own displacement, dispossession and disenfranchisement. You are asking them to internalize the fact that they have less right to live freely on their own ancestral lands where they have lived in unbroken continuity for millenia, than an immigrant to the Middle East who, by an accident of birth, happens to have been born into a "preferred" religion.

While every nation's tragedies are unique, the fact is that the Palestinians are not the only people who have had their modern national consciousness shaped by catastrophe. African-Americans have been shaped by slavery, Jewish Israelis by the Holocaust, and present-day South Africans by apartheid. But Palestinians are the only people that are told they must recognize the "rightness" of the catastrophe that befell them. And we demand this because, in the U.S., Zionism is the prism through which we look at the Arab-Israeli conflict. For us, Zionism is worthy and normative, and it is very difficult for us to acknowledge that for the people who have been – and inevitably had to be – on the receiving end of it, Zionism is cruel, and violent, and racist. But try to imagine what you would think if you heard someone demand that – in the interests of reconciliation with their former oppressors – African-Americans must acknowledge not only that the slave trade existed, but that it had a "right" to exist. Or that black south Africans must recognize the "right" of apartheid to exist. Or Jews, the Holocaust. Just by describing the scenario, we can see that we would be demanding something grotesque. But we take it for granted that the Palestinians must do it; and condemn them for anti-semitism when they refuse.

Usually when you hear the Israeli government say, "Of course we want to talk, but first….", you are simply hearing excuses from a government that has no intention of ever entering meaningful talks with the Palestinians, and can always come up with one more precondition to ensure that they don't have to. But the demand, "first they must recognize Israel's right to exist", is a precondition of a different kind altogether. It goes much deeper than a desire to avoid negotiating, and arises instead from a need to avoid recognizing the original sin at the heart of Zionism, which is that it could be realised only by destroying the people already in Palestine.

...

If Israelis feel such a crisis of national legitimacy that they need someone to hug them and tell them that what Zionism has done to the Palestinians doesn't really matter, they'd better find a therapist to do it, because the Palestinians won't. No Palestinian is ever going to tell them, "You're right, I am a lesser breed of human being, of course your rights are superior to mine" which, from a Palestinian perspective, is essentially what recognizing the "right" of Israel to exist as a Jewish state in Palestine entails.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”...

Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

...

The first thing to understand about nutritionism ... is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the “ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture...

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

...

Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods. So fish, beef and chicken through the nutritionists’ lens become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients are on their scope. Similarly, any qualitative distinctions between processed foods and whole foods disappear when your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they contain (or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism program. In the years following McGovern’s capitulation and the 1982 National Academy report, the food industry set about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad, and by the late ’80s a golden era of food science was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat Bran — also known as 1988 — served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran’s moment on the dietary stage didn’t last long, but the pattern had been established, and every few years since then a new oat bran has taken its turn under the marketing lights. (Here comes omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can’t put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

Here's how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin: He found some contaminating mold growing on a petri dish of staphylococchi he had left standing by a window. The mold had sprouted there, on its own, and was destroying the bacteria. But this account understates the element of accident. Other scientists could never reproduce the discovery as Fleming recounted it because, as a matter of fact, penicillium won't usually grow that way. Someone finally discovered that the temperature of London at the end of July, 1928, when Fleming's discovery was made, had been exceptionally cool. This allowed a spore, floating up from the laboratory on the floor below, which was investigating fungi, to grow. Then, the temperature returned to normal, and that allowed the staphylococchi to grow. Penicillin, in other words, was as improbable as the "chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table," to quote Lautreamont's line which, in June of 1928, surrealists in Paris were proclaiming as an aesthetic principle. Probably Fleming never heard of André Breton, but they were brothers under the skin. As Le Fanu succinctly puts it, "The therapeutic revolution of the post-war years was not ignited by a major scientific insight, rather the reverse: it was the realization by doctors and scientists that it was not necessary to understand in any detail what was wrong, but that synthetic chemistry blindly and randomly would deliver the remedies."

A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It was largely uninhabitable—a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But along the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords protected from the harsh winds and saltwater spray of the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed upriver they saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and bluebells, and thick forests of willow and birch and alder. Two colonies were formed, three hundred miles apart, known as the Eastern and Western Settlements. The Norse raised sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy slopes into pastureland. They hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of parish churches and a magnificent cathedral, the remains of which are still standing. They traded actively with mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years—and then they vanished.

...

There was nothing wrong with the social organization of the Greenland settlements. The Norse built a functioning reproduction of the predominant northern-European civic model of the time—devout, structured, and reasonably orderly. In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in Hvalsey Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, following the proclamation of the wedding banns on three consecutive Sundays.

The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to grow hay to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down the forests for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To make houses warm enough for the winter, they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of turf, which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of grassland.

But Greenland’s ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure. The short, cool growing season meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn meant that topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents, like organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil resilient in the face of strong winds. “The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil than is grass,” he writes. “With the trees and shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep and goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland’s climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from occasionally heavy rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles from an entire valley.” Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields shrank; without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through the long winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies of wood, getting fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult.

The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock—particularly cows, which consumed an enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had contempt for the Inuit—they called them skraelings, “wretches”—and preferred to practice their own brand of European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen’s robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death.

...

[T]he disappearance of the Norse settlements is usually blamed on the Little Ice Age, which descended on Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds, ending several centuries of relative warmth. (One archeologist refers to this as the “It got too cold, and they died” argument.) What all these explanations have in common is the idea that civilizations are destroyed by forces outside their control, by acts of God.

...

It did get colder in Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn’t get so cold that the island became uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn’t adapt to the country’s changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman’s dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. “Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding,” he writes. “Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?” It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn’t eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.

Given the difficulty that the Norse had in putting food on the table, this was insane. Eating fish would have substantially reduced the ecological demands of the Norse settlements. The Norse would have needed fewer livestock and less pastureland. Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as raising cattle or hunting caribou, so eating fish would have freed time and energy for other activities. It would have diversified their diet.

Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren’t thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival. Food taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define a community. Not eating fish served the same function as building lavish churches, and doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural practices of their land of origin. It was part of what it meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which define and cement a culture are of paramount importance.“The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland’s difficulties,” Diamond writes. “The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.” He goes on:

To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.

Diamond’s distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate.

...

Rivers and streams and forests and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite thing, and societies collapse when they get so consumed with addressing the fine points of their history and culture and deeply held beliefs—with making sure that Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdotter are married before the right number of witnesses following the announcement of wedding banns on the right number of Sundays—that they forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover is gone.

When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland—crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers—which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.

Let's face it, public lands ranching is a peculiarly American form of social welfare. To qualify, you just need to get yourself a base ranch adjacent to some the most scenic landscapes in North America. Many ranchers came by their properties through primogeniture, a quaint medieval custom still common throughout much of the rural West. If you're a second son, a daughter or a latecomer, don't despair: you can simply buy a ranch with a grazing permit, like billionaire potato king JR Simplot did. It's easy. No background checks or means-testing required. A million bucks should get you started.

Rest assured, your public subsidies are guaranteed-by senate filibuster if necessary. Ranching subsidies are an untouchable form of welfare, right up there with the depletion allowance and the F-22 fighter. And guess what? It's guilt free. Nobody complains that your subsidies came at the expense of Headstart or aid to mothers with dependent children. Or that you take your profits from the subsidies and spend it on a case of Jack Daniels, a chunk of crystal meth, a night at the Mustang Ranch, a week at the roulette tables in Reno-or donate it all to Operation Rescue or the Sahara Club. (The most outlandish fables about profligate welfare queens have nothing on the average slob rancher.) Hell, do it right and somebody might even promote you as a cultural hero, a damn fine roll model for future generations.

The Western ranching fraternity is more homogenous than the Royal Order of the Moose: landed, white, male and politically conservative to a reactionary and vicious degree. It is not culturally, ethnically or racially representative of America and never has been. Shouldn't there be equal access to this federal grazing largesse, these hundreds of millions in annual subsidies to well-off white geezers? A creative litigator might be able to demonstrate that federal grazing policies violate the Civil Rights Act.

Strip away the Stetsons, bolo ties, and rattlesnake-skin boots, why should we view Western ranchers differently than the tobacco farmers of the Southeast? And what about their political benefactors? Is there are fundamental difference between, say, Max Baucus and Saxby Chambliss? Robert Bennett and Trent Lott? (Okay, Lott and Baucus have fewer bad hair days.) All annually raid the federal treasury to sustain industries that degrade the environment, ravage the public health and enervate the economy. Federal tobacco subsidies about to about $100 million a year; grazing subsidies may exceed a billion a year. No wonder there's so little congressional support for a single-payer health care system: passage of such a plan might actually force the Cow and Cigarette Caucus to choose between the health of the citizenry and their allegiance to political porkbarrel.

Some argue that the rancher is rooted to place, the he loves the land, holds a unique reverence for its contours, beauty, rhythms. The rancher, they say, is one of Wallace Stegner's "stickers," not an itinerant booster or commercial migrant, like the cut-and-run logger. He doesn't leave behind radioactive tailings piles or slopes of stumps in his wake, but gently tends and grooms the landscape, improving Nature's defects, year after year, generation after generation.

But take away the subsidies, the nearly free forage, the roads, the even cheaper water that magically appears from nowhere in the middle of the high desert, the tax breaks, predator control, abeyances from environmental standards and disproportionate political clout when any thing else goes against him, such as drought, rangefires, bad investments. Then charge them for the gruesome externalities of their "avocation" and then see how many stick around for the hardscrabble lifestyle that remains. Federal subsidies and political protection are the velcro for most of these guys, not the view of the Wind River Range.

[I]n the 1960s, Rumsfeld's ardor for a high-tech military was only stirring, a minor dalliance compared to his preoccupation with advancement. While few seemed to notice, the brash freshman made an extraordinary rush at the lumbering House. In 1964, before the end of his first term, he captained a revolt against GOP Leader Charles Halleck, a Dwight D. Eisenhower loyalist prone to bipartisanship and skepticism of both Pentagon budgets and foreign intervention. By only six votes in the Republican Caucus, Rumsfeld managed to replace the folksy Indianan with Michigan's Gerald Ford.

In the inner politics of the House, the likeable, agreeable, unoriginal Ford was always more right-wing than his benign post-Nixon, and now posthumous, presidential image would have it. Richard Nixon called Ford "a wink and a nod guy," whose artlessness and integrity left him no real match for the steelier, more cunning figures around him. To push Ford was one of those darting Capitol Hill insider moves that seemed, at the time, to win Rumsfeld only limited, parochial prizes -- choice committee seats, a rung on the leadership ladder, useful allies.

Taken with Rumsfeld's burly style that year was Kansas Congressman Robert Ellsworth, a wheat-field small-town lawyer of decidedly modest gifts but outsized ambitions and close connections to Nixon. "Just another Young Turk thing," one of their House cohorts casually called the toppling of Halleck.

It seems hard now to exaggerate the endless sequels to this small but decisive act. The lifting of the honest but mediocre Ford higher into line for appointment as vice president amid the ruin of President Richard Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew; Ford's lackluster, if relatively harmless, interval in the Oval Office and later as Party leader with the abject passing of the GOP to Ronald Reagan in 1980; Ellsworth's boosting of Rumsfeld into prominent but scandal-immune posts under Nixon; and then, during Ford's presidency, Rumsfeld's reward, his elevation to White House Chief of Staff, and with him the rise of one of his aides from the Nixon era, a previously unnoticed young Wyoming reactionary named Dick Cheney; next, in 1975-1976, the first Rumsfeld tenure at a Vietnam-disgraced but impenitent Pentagon that would shape his fateful second term after 2001; and eventually, of course, the Rumsfeld-Cheney monopoly of power in a George W. Bush White House followed by their catastrophic policies after 9/11 -- all derived from making decent, diffident Gerry Ford Minority Leader that forgotten winter of 1964.

Barely a year after moving next to the Oval Office (and contrary to Ford's innocent, prideful recollection decades later that it was his own idea), Don and Dick characteristically engineered their "Halloween Massacre." Subtly exploiting Ford's unease (and Kissinger's jealous rivalry) with cerebral, acerbic Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, they managed to pass the Pentagon baton to Rumsfeld at only 43, and slot Cheney, suddenly a wunderkind at 34, in as presidential Chief of Staff.

In the process, they even maneuvered Ford into humbling Kissinger by stripping him of his long-held dual role as National Security Advisor as well as Secretary of State, giving a diffident Brent Scowcroft the National Security Council job and further enhancing both Cheney's inherited power at the White House and Rumsfeld's as Kissinger's chief cabinet rival. A master schemer himself, Super K, as an adoring media called him, would be so stunned by the Rumsfeld-Cheney coup that he would call an after-hours séance of cronies at a safe house in Chevy Chase to plot a petulant resignation as Secretary of State, only to relent, overcome as usual by the majesty of his own gifts.

The members of the Stern Gang were ardent students of violence, self-declared Jewish admirers of Mussolini who steeped themselves in the terrorist traditions of the pre-1917 Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the Macedonian IMRO, and the Italian Blackshirts. As the most extreme wing of the Zionist movement in Palestine -- "fascists" to the Haganah and "terrorists" to the British -- they were morally and tactically unfettered by considerations of diplomacy or world opinion. They had a fierce and well-deserved reputation for the originality of their operations and the unexpectedness of their attacks. On January 12, 1947, as part of their campaign to prevent any compromise between mainstream Zionism and the British Labor government, they exploded a powerful truck bomb in the central police station in Haifa, resulting in 144 casualties. Three months later, they repeated the tactic in Tel Aviv, blowing up the Sarona police barracks (5 dead) with a stolen postal truck filled with dynamite.

In December 1947, following the UN vote to partition Palestine, full-scale fighting broke out between Jewish and Arab communities from Haifa to Gaza. The Stern Gang, which rejected anything less than the restoration of a biblical Israel, now gave the truck bomb its debut as a weapon of mass terror. On January 4, 1948, two men in Arab dress drove a truck ostensibly loaded with oranges into the center of Jaffa and parked it next to the New Seray Building, which housed the Palestinian municipal government as well as a soup-kitchen for poor children. They cooly lingered for coffee at a nearby café before leaving a few minutes ahead of the detonation.

"A thunderous explosion," writes Adam LeBor in his history of Jaffa, "then shook the city. Broken glass and shattered masonry blew out across Clock Tower Square. The New Seray's centre and side walls collapsed in a pile of rubble and twisted beams. Only the neo-classical façade survived. After a moment of silence, the screams began, 26 were killed, hundreds injured. Most were civilians, including many children eating at the charity kitchen." The bomb missed the local Palestinian leadership who had moved to another building, but the atrocity was highly successful in terrifying residents and setting the stage for their eventual flight.

It also provoked the Palestinians to cruel repayment in kind. The Arab High Committee had its own secret weapon -- blond-haired British deserters, fighting on the side of the Palestinians. Nine days after the Jaffa bombing, some of these deserters, led by Eddie Brown, a former police corporal whose brother had been murdered by the Irgun, commandeered a postal delivery truck which they packed with explosives and detonated in the center of Haifa's Jewish quarter, injuring 50 people. Two weeks later, Brown, driving a stolen car and followed by a five-ton truck driven by a Palestinian in a police uniform, successfully passed through British and Haganah checkpoints and entered Jerusalem's New City. The driver parked in front of the Palestine Post, lit the fuse, and then escaped with Brown in his car. The newspaper headquarters was devastated with 1 dead and 20 wounded.

According to a chronicler of the episode, Abdel Kader el-Husseini, the military leader of the Arab Higher Committee, was so impressed by the success of these operations -- inadvertently inspired by the Stern Gang -- that he authorized an ambitious sequel employing six British deserters. "This time three trucks were used, escorted by a stolen British armored car with a young blond man in police uniform standing in the turret." Again, the convoy easily passed through checkpoints and drove to the Atlantic Hotel on Ben Yehuda Street. A curious night watchman was murdered when he confronted the gang, who then drove off in the armored car after setting charges in the three trucks. The explosion was huge and the toll accordingly grim: 46 dead and 130 wounded.

For miles around in all directions the fertile Jezreel Valley, known as the breadbasket of Israel, is spread out before us, an endless vista of lush vineyards and orchards growing grapes, oranges, kumquats, peaches, and pears. It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful pastoral panorama.

The sight LaHaye's followers hope to see here in the near future, however, is anything but bucolic. Their vision is fueled by the book of Revelation, the dark and foreboding messianic prophecy that foresees a gruesome and bloody confrontation between Christ and the armies of the Antichrist at Armageddon.

...

As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We've done the math. That's the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."

When this will happen is another question, and the Bible says that "of that day and hour knoweth no man." Nevertheless, LaHaye's disciples are certain these events—the End of Days—are imminent. In fact, one of them has especially strong ideas about when they will take place. "Not soon enough," she says. "Not soon enough."

In 1977, when Zia came to power, 90 per cent of men and 98 per cent of women in Afghanistan were illiterate; 5 per cent of landowners held 45 per cent of the cultivable land and the country had the lowest per capita income of any in Asia. The same year, the Parcham Communists, who had backed the 1973 military coup by Prince Daud after which a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support from Daud, were reunited with other Communist groups to form the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and began to agitate for a new government. The regimes in neighbouring countries became involved. The shah of Iran, acting as a conduit for Washington, recommended firm action – large-scale arrests, executions, torture – and put units from his torture agency at Daud’s disposal. The shah also told Daud that if he recognised the Durand Line as a permanent frontier the shah would give Afghanistan $3 billion and Pakistan would cease hostile actions. Meanwhile, Pakistani intelligence agencies were arming Afghan exiles while encouraging old-style tribal uprisings aimed at restoring the monarchy. Daud was inclined to accept the shah’s offer, but the Communists organised a pre-emptive coup and took power in April 1978. There was panic in Washington, which increased tenfold as it became clear that the shah too was about to be deposed. General Zia’s dictatorship thus became the lynchpin of US strategy in the region, which is why Washington green-lighted Bhutto’s execution and turned a blind eye to the country’s nuclear programme. The US wanted a stable Pakistan whatever the cost.

...

From 1979 until 1988, Afghanistan was the focal point of the Cold War. Millions of refugees crossed the Durand Line and settled in camps and cities in the NWFP. Weapons and money, as well as jihadis from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt, flooded into Pakistan. All the main Western intelligence agencies (including the Israelis’) had offices in Peshawar, near the frontier. The black-market and market rates for the dollar were exactly the same. Weapons, including Stinger missiles, were sold to the mujahedin by Pakistani officers who wanted to get rich quickly. The heroin trade flourished and the number of registered addicts in Pakistan grew from a few hundred in 1977 to a few million in 1987. (One of the banks through which the heroin mafia laundered money was the BCCI – whose main PR abroad was a retired civil servant called Altaf Gauhar.)

As for Pakistan and its people, they languished. During Zia’s period in power, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had never won more than 5 per cent of the vote anywhere in the country, was patronised by the government; its cadres were sent to fight in Afghanistan, its armed student wing was encouraged to terrorise campuses in the name of Islam, its ideologues were ever present on TV. The Inter-Services Intelligence also encouraged the formation of other, more extreme jihadi groups, which carried out acts of terror at home and abroad and set up madrassahs all over the frontier provinces. Soon Zia, too, needed his own political party and the bureaucracy set one up: the Pakistan Muslim League.

This is key to an understanding of why the US ruling elite is reluctant to pull US troops out of Iraq. The reluctance or "difficulty" of leaving Iraq stems not so much from pulling 140,000 troops out of that country as it is from pulling out more than 100,000 contractors. As Josh Mitteldorf of the University of Arizona recently put it, "There are a lot of contractors making a fortune and we don't want that money tap turned off, even though it is borrowed money, which our children and grandchildren will have to repay."

Cravenness is bigotry's favorite nourishment, and cynics might expect the political class to gorge on it by blaming our imperial agony on the natives. In America, today, cynics rarely go wrong; and the air, indeed, is thick with talk of fainthearted hordes of Mesopotamian ingrates, who quail at the latest bombing and wail at the moon in exotic garb.

Not long ago, the achingly earnest Nicholas D. Kristof, a New York Times columnist whose only sin is to be more virtuous than you—and keep you informed of this in each and every one of his bromidic columns—reassured his readers that the trouble is not with the Muslims but with the Arabs. They are too violent and they give Islam a bad name. Well, that settles that. Funny, though, that in the last twenty years Americans have outkilled Arabs in a ratio in excess of one hundred to one. But there I go again, nitpicking, while Saint Kristof is back in Cambodia, rescuing teenage prostitutes one Pulitzer prize at a time.

Any nonrich, nonreligious person who has paid attention to politics since 1994, when the Goldwater/Gingrich Republicans took over Congress, and above all these past six years, has probably exhausted his or her capacity for indignation. The greed, the mendacity, the indifference, even hostility, to such notions as the common good or the public interest--the whole sorry record, reviewed in sickening detail by David Sirota and Mark Green, whose powerful books very much warrant their enraged titles and subtitles--have left many of us gasping.

We now have a bit of breathing space, thanks to the midterms. It's time to consider how the right got away with it and how to prevent it from happening again. The most useful of these books ... is Steven Hill's 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy. "To ponder the shortcomings of our political system is to court despondency," Hendrik Hertzberg observes in his foreword. The Electoral College, the Senate, the disenfranchisement of the District of Columbia, the two-party duopoly, the winner-take-all principle, partisan redistricting, 95 percent incumbent re-election rates, media concentration, Buckley v. Valeo, the K Street Project, voter turnout below 50 percent, shortages of voting machines and poll workers--this is a functioning democracy? If these travesties of logic and fairness promoted majority rule rather than prevented it, they would doubtless have been abolished long ago.

An honest and critically minded man could reconcile him­self to Napoleon as little as he can now to Stalin. But despite Napoleon's violence and frauds, the message of the French revolution survived to echo powerfully throughout the nineteenth century. The Holy Alliance freed Europe from Napoleon's oppression; and for a moment its victory was hailed by most Europeans. Yet what Castlereagh and Metternich and Alexander I had to offer to "liberated" Europe was merely the preservation of an old, decomposing order. Thus the abuses and the aggressiveness of an empire bred by the revolution gave a new lease on life to European feudal­ism. This was the ex-Jacobin's most unexpected triumph. But the price he paid for it was that presently he himself, and his anti-Jacobin cause, looked like vicious, ridiculous anachronisms. In the year of Napoleon's defeat, Shelley wrote to Wordsworth:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
If our ex-Communist had any historical sense, he would ponder this lesson.

The Military Services Institute, formed in 1878, was to represent and coordinate the interests and knowledge disciplines of what Jenkins calls the 'military progressives', those who were persuaded of the need for a professionalised officer corps, a standing army, military academies... the trouble was, they depended on Congress for appropriations but could not point to a single enemy that raised the need for a large standing army. What they sought to do therefore was to offer the state control over warmaking, using the sciences to derive laws akin to those provided by mathematics and mechanics. Far from being dangerous to liberty, they could show with copious example, standing armies were essential to it. What is more, by understanding the mechanics of conflict better, they could minimise the risk of war, as well as the risks of warmaking. It was necessary, of course, to engage in the inflation of threats (or the invention of them), since America's railway system, industry and agricultural surpluses all favoured its rapid defense in the event of an attempted invasion. General Emory Upton advanced some unique arguments: first, that America's military successes were impaired by excessive human and financial waste, a matter which would be remedied through science and professionalisation; and second, that there was a great propensity for internal commotion - Shay's Rebellion, the Whisky Rebellion, the Great Rebellion, the Rail Roads riots of 1877 - which would need to be crushed before it became a nation-wide insurgency so that democracy could prevail. Others wondered how much the immigrant communities really valued American interests, particularly given a conflcit with the societies from which they had emigrated. Further, it was argued that America's growing transportation and commerce internationally would make it more vulnerable to attack, and that to assert her rights as a trading nation, it would be essential to have the military werewithal to resist rival intimidation. And they offered the instance of China, a great civilisation, plundered and humbled by a cluster of imperial locusts. New York's growing financial prominence might well surrender to foreign conquest as the Yangzi Delta's manufacturing dominance once had.

While the patrician reformers converged with the military progressives in their empire-building tendencies, the crucial gulf between them was how they perceived military service itself. The reformers tended toward a romanticised view of volunteer warriors, and of the army as a place to emulate American heroes past. The military progressives knew that it could never be thus. They sought an army capable of defeating a large European or Asian power, which meant conscription - men would be forced to fight by drill, propaganda and the threat of the firing squad. What is more, the military leadership knew as well as the reformers did that the main examples of heroism past were less salutary than anyone would publicly admit: the war against the south having been won through the prodigious use of terror against the civilian population. There was one way, and one way alone, to get around this: if the ordinary soldier could not be a hero, the commander could. The future of romantic combat lay in the charismatic power of commanding officers.

I think in all of this, you have the essential ingredients for the transition from an increasingly challenged, polarised and crisis-ridden republic to an empire.

Eisenhower went on to suggest that such an arrangement, which he called the “military-industrial complex,” could be perilous to American ideals. The short-term economic benefits were clear, but the very nature of those benefits—which were all too carefully distributed among workers and owners in “every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government”—tended to short-circuit Keynes's insistence that government spending be cut back in good times. The prosperity of the United States came increasingly to depend upon the construction and continual maintenance of a vast war machine, and so military supremacy and economic security became increasingly intertwined in the minds of voters. No one wanted to turn off the pump.

Between 1940 and 1996, for instance, the United States spent nearly $4.5 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear weapons alone. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,000 deliverable bombs. None of them was ever used, which illustrates perfectly Keynes's observation that, in order to create jobs, the government might as well decide to bury money in old mines and “leave them to private enterprise on the well-tried principles of laissez faire to dig them up again.” Nuclear bombs were not just America's secret weapon; they were also a secret economic weapon.

...

To understand the real weight of military Keynesianism in the American economy today, however, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. The “defense” budget of the United States—that is, the reported budget of the Department of Defense—does not include: the Department of Energy's spending on nuclear weapons ($16.4 billion slated for fiscal 2006), the Department of Homeland Security's outlays for the actual “defense” of the United States ($41 billion), or the Department of Veterans Affairs' responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion). Nor does it include the billions of dollars the Department of State spends each year to finance foreign arms sales and militarily related development or the Treasury Department's payments of pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics). Still to be added are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed defense outlays. The economist Robert Higgs estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel (trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but-though an host of overjoyed
noncoms (first knocking on the head
him) do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments-
Olaf (being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds, without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightaway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but-though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skillfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat-
Olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ (of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you

This [an argument from a Washington Post article by Thomas Ricks] misses the bloody crux, the structure, the very moral economy of the American way of warfare. If forces are kept to a minimum and if force is proportioned to some threshold point beyond which you antagonize the population, you will, inevitably, suffer much higher casualties. If American soldiers winnow through a village, looking only for insurgents, they are much likely to be injured or killed than if they plow through the village in the balls out, mega-American way. And the soldiers know that. The American soldier has been trained to think that the preservation of his life is the prime objective. He has been raised in the spirit of McLellan, and advances with the firepower of Grant, which is why America always wins the wars that it loses. This is why the American soldier is good in a battlefield situation such as presented itself in WWII, or in the First Gulf War, and entirely sucks at counterinsurgency. And will always suck. Because the higher risk brings with it the question: what am I doing here? Since American interests have nothing to do with the Iraq war – it was commenced and continued solely to serve the vanity of a small D.C. clique – the only way to keep waging it as what it is in reality – the usurpation of American forces for mercenary purposes on the part of a power mad executive – is to wage it with as few American deaths as possible. The Bush doctrine converges with the Powell doctrine – overwhelming force = lucrative contracts to war contractors + lack of visible sacrifice to the Bush base.

The logic here is inexorable. Either a greater number of Americans die, or a greater number of Iraqis die. Americans have decided to pretend that the greater the number of Iraqi deaths, the more the Americans are winning. That, of course, is bullshit. Which is why the argument that the U.S. troops should stay in for humanitarian reasons is bullshit – the logic of American strategy will continue to maximize the number of Iraqi deaths, or it will have to face the repulsion of American public opinion as American deaths go racheting up. It won’t do the latter. The rulers actually fear the American population in their nasty, prolonged wars. Fear that the population doesn't want to fight. This is their worry. This is what they work at. Both parties, it goes without saying. This is what all the bogus talk about "will" is about.

They are afraid of us. Doesn't that imply that they have something to be afraid about?

Stab this war in the back.

On the afternoon of the day that we returned to Danang an important press conference was held at the Marine-operated, Marine-controlled press centre, a small compound on the river where most correspondents based themselves whenever they covered 1 Corps. A brigadier general from 3 MAF, Marine Headquarters, was coming over to brief us on developments in the DMZ and Khe Sanh. The colonel in charge of 'press operations' was visibly nervous, the dining room was being cleared for the meeting, microphones set up, chairs arranged, printed material put in order. These official briefings usually did the same thing to your perception of the war that flares did to your night vision, but this one was supposed to be special, and correspondents had come in from all over 1 Corps to be there. Among us was Peter Braestrup of the Washington Post, formerly of The New York Times. He had been covering the war for nearly three years. He had been a captain in the Marines in Korea; ex-Marines are like ex-Catholics or off-duty Feds, and Braestrup still made the Marines a special concern of his. He had grown increasingly bitter about the Marines' failure to dig in at Khe Sanh, about their shocking lack of defences against artillery. He sat quietly as the colonel introduced the general and the briefing began.

The weather was excellent: 'The sun is up over Khe Sanh by ten every morning.' (A collective groan running through the seated journalists.) 'I'm glad to be able to tell you that Route Nine is now open and completely accessible.' (Would you drive Route 9 into Khe Sanh, General? You bet you wouldn't.)

'What about the Marines at Khe Sanh?' someone asked. 'I'm glad we've come to that,' the general said. 'I was at Khe Sanh for several hours this morning, and I want to tell you that those Marines there are clean!'

There was a weird silence. We all knew we'd heard him, the man had said that the Marines at Khe Sanh were clean ('Clean? He said "clean", didn't he?'), but not one of us could imagine what he'd meant. 'Yes, they're bathing or getting a good wash every other day. They're shaving every day, every single day. Their mood is good, their spirits are fine, morale is excellent and there's a twinkle in their eye!'

Braestrup stood up.

'General.'

'Peter?'

'General, what about the defences at Khe Sanh? Now, you built this wonderful, air-conditioned officers' club, and that's a complete shambles. You built a beer hall there, and that's been blown away.' He had begun calmly, but now he was having trouble keeping the anger out of his voice. 'You've got a medical detachment there that's a disgrace, set up right on the airstrip, exposed to hundreds of rounds every day, and no overhead cover. You've had men at the base since July, you've expected an attack at least since November, they've been shelling you heavily since January. General, why haven't those Marines dug in?'

The room was quiet. Braestrup had a fierce smile on his face as he sat down. When the question had begun, the colonel had jerked suddenly to one side of his chair, as though he'd been shot. Now, he was trying to get his face in front of the general's so that he could give out the look that would say, 'See, General? See the kind of peckerheads I have to work with every day?' Braestrup was looking directly at the general now, waiting for his answer - the question had not been rhetorical - and it was not long in coming.

'Peter,' the general said, 'I think you're hitting a small nail with an awfully big hammer.'

Perhaps, as we claimed, the B-52s had driven them all away, broken the back of their will to attack. (We claimed 13,000 NVA dead from those raids.) Maybe they'd left the Khe Sanh area as early as January, leaving the Marines pinned down, and moved across 1 Corps in readiness for the Tet Offensive. Many people believed that a few battalions, clever enough and active enough, could have kept the Marines at Khe Sanh inside the wire and underground for all of those weeks. Maybe they'd come to see reasons why an attack would be impossible, and gone back into Laos. Or A Shau. Or Quang Tri. Or Hue. We didn't know. They were somewhere, but they were not around Khe Sanh anymore.

Incredible arms caches were being found, rockets still crated, launchers still wrapped in factory paper, AK-47s still packed in Cosmoline, all indicating that battalion-strength units had left in a hurry. The Cav and the Marines above Route 9 were finding equipment suggesting that entire companies had fled. Packs were found on the ground in perfect company formations, and while they contained diaries and often poems written by the soldiers, there was almost no information about where they had gone or why. Considering the amount of weapons and supplies being found (a record for the entire war), there were surprisingly few prisoners, although one prisoner did tell his interrogators that 75 percent of his regiment had been killed by our B-52s, nearly 1,500 men, and that the survivors were starving. He had been pulled out of a spider hole near Hill 881 North, and had seemed grateful for his capture. An American officer who was present at the interrogation actually said that the boy was hardly more than seventeen or eighteen, and that it was hideous that the North was feeding such young men into a war of aggression. Still, I don't remember anyone, Marine or Cav, officer or enlisted, who was not moved by the sight of their prisoners, by the sudden awareness of what must have been suffered and endured that winter.

"Well," the lieutenant said, "you missed the good part. You should have been here five minutes ago. We caught three of them out there by the first wire."

"What were they trying to do?" I asked.

"Don't know. Maybe cut the wires. Maybe lay in a mine, steal some of our Claymores, throw grenades, harass us some, don't know. Won't know, now."

We heard then what sounded at first like a little girl crying, a subdued, delicate wailing, and as we listened it became louder and more intense, taking on pain as it grew until it was a full, piercing shriek. The three of us turned to each other, we could almost feel each other shivering. It was terrible, absorbing every other sound coming from the darkness. Whoever it was, he was past caring about anything except the thing he was screaming about. There was a dull pop in the air above us, and an illumination round fell drowsily over the wire.

"Slope," Mayhew said. "See him there, see there, on the wire there?"

I couldn't see anything out there, there was no movement, and the screaming had stopped. As the flare dimmed, the sobbing started up and built quickly until it was a scream again.

A Marine brushed past us. He had a moustache and a piece of camouflaged parachute silk fastened bandana-style around his throat, and on his hip he wore a holster which held an M-79 grenade-launcher. For a second I thought I'd hallucinated him. I hadn't heard him approaching, and I tried now to see where he might have come from, but I couldn't. The M-79 had been cut down and fitted with a special stock. It was obviously a well-loved object; you could see the kind of work that had gone into it by the amount of light caught from the flares that glistened on the stock. The Marine looked serious, dead-eyed serious, and his right hand hung above the holster, waiting. The screaming had stopped again.

"Wait," he said. "I'll fix that fucker."

His hand was resting now on the handle of the weapon. The sobbing began again, and the screaming; we had the pattern now, the North Vietnamese was screaming the same thing over and over, and we didn't need a translator to tell us what it was.

"Put that fucker away," the Marine said, as though to himself. He drew the weapon, opened the breach and dropped in a round that looked like a great swollen bullet, listening very carefully all the while to the shrieking. He placed the M-79 over his left forearm and aimed for a second before firing. There was an enormous flash on the wire 200 metres away, a spray of orange sparks, and then everything was still except for the roll of some bombs exploding kilometres away and the sound of the M-79 being opened, closed again and returned to the holster. Nothing changed on the Marine's face, nothing, and he moved back into the darkness.

"Get some," Mayhew said quietly. "Man, did you see that?"

And I said, Yes (lying), it was something, really something.

The lieutenant said he hoped that I was getting some real good stories here. He told me to take her easy and disappeared. Mayhew looked out at the wire again, but the silence of the ground in front of us was really talking to him now. His fingers were limp, touching his face, and he looked like a kid at a scary movie. I poked his arm and we went back to the bunker for some more of that sleep.

The whole sordid business of the Holocaust conference, and earlier, the Holocaust International Cartoon Contest, would never have happened had the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, not run flagrantly racist cartoons mocking the prophet Mohamed, and had Western governments not dismissed the resultant flap as an over-reaction by a bunch of hot-headed Mohammedans. It's a free speech issue, the West's politicos said. You Muslims -- simmer down.

What a crock, retorted Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "In this freedom, casting doubt or negating the genocide of the Jews is banned, but insulting the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims is allowed." Bull's eye.

With the Jyllands-Posten scandal still resonating, Iran's largest newspaper, Hamshari, counterpunched. It would sponsor a cartoon contest to mock the Holocaust. If you can mock the prophet Mohamed, and say it's a free speech issue, then surely we can mock the Holocaust, and say the same.

As it turned out, the cartoons didn't do much mocking. They didn't present the genocide of Europe's Jews as a myth, or mock its victims. Instead, they explored the themes of Israeli brutality against the Palestinians, use of the Holocaust to justify anti-Palestinian crimes, and parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany.

Judge for yourself. The drawings showed: A vampire wearing a Star of David drinking the blood of Palestinians; Ariel Sharon in a Nazi uniform; three army helmets together, two with swastikas and one with the Star of David; a rabid dog with a Star of David on its side and the word Holocaust around its collar; a dove prevented from flying because it is chained to a Star of David; US president George Bush seated at a desk swatting doves; an Israeli asleep with three Arab heads mounted to the wall above his bed; an Israeli soldier pouring fuel into a tank from a gasoline can that reads Holocaust on the side; a razor blade in the ground, representing the illegal Israeli-built separation wall, bearing the word Holocaust; two firefighters, each with Stars of David on their chests, using Palestinian blood to extinguish flames issuing from the word Holocaust.

While the director of the exhibit correctly pointed out to a New York Times reporter that the drawings were anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish, the newspaper nevertheless ran the story under the headline "Iran exhibits anti-Jewish art." Conflation of Israel and Zionism with Jew, and therefore anti-Israel and anti-Zionist with anti-Jewish, is a handy howitzer to have around whenever you need to blow away opposition to Israel.

This month's conference was similarly described as anti-Jewish and while the conference certainly featured a cast of unsavory Jew-haters, not all the participants were of the same stripe.

Shiraz Dossa, an admirer of Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt, who teaches Third World politics at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, delivered a paper on the abuse of the Holocaust to justify the war on terror. Dossa calls the Holocaust a reality and says that "anyone who denies it is a lunatic." He accepted the invitation to speak at the conference to help Tehran make its point: That the West's commitment to freedom of speech extends only to insulting someone else's sacred cows.

Last point: If the real aim of the conference was to call the Holocaust into question, it would hardly make sense to assemble a gang of hacks, flakes and whack-jobs whose credibility is nil. On the other hand, if the aim was to show that free speech doesn't justify a repellent, silly, and disgusting display, inviting David Duke and his gaggle of misfits, was the right stroke.

Much has been made of The Daily Telegraph's calculated courting -- and subsequent criticism -- of beseiged NSW Young Australian of the Year Iktimal Hage-Ali.

But did the paper also know about her 22 November arrest and release without charge when they dubbed her the state's most promising young Muslim leader?

...

Crikey now understands that The Daily Tele did know, and they used this information to enact that most tabloid of tactics: build up a public persona for the sole purpose of then eating them alive.

According to Crikey sources, Tele attack dog Luke McIlveen rang Hage-Ali to ask her about the arrest on the same day that the paper ran his article portraying her as a victim of hardline Muslim bloggers who criticised her for drinking alcohol at the NSW Young Australian of the Year award ceremony...

The Tele, unable to resist the droolworthy combination of Islam and drugs, seems to have planned a sequence of events: praise Hage Ali and talk up her role as a young Muslim role model, break the story of her arrest, then run a poll that asks "Should Iktimal Hage-Ali be excluded from future government advisory roles?"...

Most cultural workmen are fighting a cold war in which they echo and elaborate the confusions of officialdoms. They neither raise demands on the elites for alternative policies, nor set forth such alternatives before publics and masses. Many intellectuals do nothing to fill the political vacuum; indeed, as they fight the cold war, they proclaim, justify, and practice the moral insensibility that is one of its accompaniments. Technologists and scientists readily develop new weapons; preachers and rabbis and priests bless the great endeavor; newsmen disseminate the official definitions of world reality, labeling for their publics the shifting line-up of friends and enemies; publicists elaborate the "reasons" for the coming war, and the "necessity" for the causes of it. They do not set forth alternative policies; they do not politically oppose and politically debate the thrust toward war. They have generally become the Swiss Guard of the power elite -- Russian or American, as the case happens to be. Unofficial spokesmen of the military metaphysic, they have not lifted the level of moral sensibility; they have further depressed it. They have not tried to put responsible content into the political vacuum; they have helped to empty it and to keep it empty. What must be called the Christian default of the clergy is part of this sorry moral condition and so is the capture of scientists by nationalist Science Machines. The journalistic lie, become a routine, is part of it too, and so is the pretentious triviality of much that passes for social science.

The thrust toward World War III is not a plot on the part of the elite, either that of the U.S.A. or that of the U.S.S.R. Among both, there are "war parties" and "peace parties," and among both there are what can be called crackpot realists. These are men who are so rigidly focused on the next step that they become creatures of whatever the main drift the opportunist actions of innumerable men brings. They are also men who cling rigidly to general principles. The frenzied next step plus the altogether general principle equal U.S. foreign policy of which Mr. Dulles has been so fine an exemplar. In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. In fact, the main content of "politics" is now a struggle among men equally expert in practical next steps -- which, in summary, make up the thrust toward war -- and in great, round, hortatory principles. But without any program.

Programs require that next steps be reasonably linked with principled images of a goal. To act toward goals requires that the next step be consciously worked out in terms of its consequences, and that these consequences be weighed and valued in terms of the goal. Lacking a program, the opportunist moves short distances among immediate and shifting goals. He reacts rather than inaugurates, and the directions of his reactions are set less by any goals of his own that by the circumstances to which he feels forced to react out of fear and uneasiness. Since he is largely a creature of these circumstances, rather than a master of independent action, the results of his expedient maneuvers and of his defaults are more products of the main drift than of his own vision and will. To be merely expedient is to be in the grip of historical fate or in the grip of those who are not merely expedient. Sunk in the details of immediate and seemingly inevitable decisions to which he feels compelled to react, the crackpot realist does not know what he will do next; he is waiting for another to make a move.

The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; it also confronts them with many new problems. Yet these, the problems of war, often seem easier to handle. They are out in the open: to produce more, to plan how to kill more of the enemy, to move materials thousands of miles. The terms of the arms race, once the race is accepted as necessary, seem clear; the explicit problems it poses often seem "beyond politics," in the area of administration and technology. War and the planning of war tend to turn anxiety into worry; perhaps, as many seem to feel, genuine peace would turn worry into anxiety. War-making seems a hard technological and administrative matter; peace is a controversial and ambiguous political word. So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe.

The official expectation of war also enables men to solve the problems of the economic cycles without resort to political policies that are distasteful to many politicians and to large segments of the American public. The terms of their long-term solution, under conditions of peace, are hard for the capitalist elite to face.

Some of them, accordingly, have come to believe that the world encounter has reached a point where there is no other solution but war, even when they sense that war can be a solution to nothing. They have come to believe this because those in control in each of the countries concerned are trapped by the consequences of their past actions and their present hostile outlook. They live in a world filled with events that overwhelm them. They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out -- except war -- which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war -- as they used to be. For they still believe that "winning" means something, although they never tell us what.

It is because of such bewilderment and frustration, based on the position and the interests of the power elite, that I assume that there have been and are in the U.S.A. and in the U.S.S.R. "war parties," risen who want war; and also "peace parties," men who do not want war. Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle. But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its "inevitability," want it in order to shift the locus of their problems.

In the 1950s, when the Cold War temperament was enveloping the thought and language of American politics, the sociologist C. Wright Mills derided what he called "the crackpot realism of the higher authorities and opinion-makers."Absurdities were cloaked in technocratic jargon and passed off to the public as brilliant insight or the fruits of sophisticated intelligence.

The ability of national-security experts to describe reality in arcane ways that ordinary citizens could not easily test for themselves, much less challenge, was a central element of power in the Cold War era and one of its most debilitating influences on democracy. "Crackpot realism" consumed trillions of dollars and built enough nuclear bombs to destroy life on the planet.

Huge, secret bureaucracies were created in government to discover the hidden "facts" about the dangerous world around us, especially the machinations of the Soviet empire, and to shape national-security policy accordingly. Much of this knowledge was considered too sensitive to share with the public, but provocative details were regularly communicated in the form of warnings about new "threats" that had emerged - deadly new missiles pointed at America or revolutionary stirrings in Third World countries said to beinspired by Moscow. The history of the Cold War is a series of such alarums, based on espionage and classified documentation, and of the subsequent events that refuted them.

Given the insular nature of American society, most citizens had little real knowledge of distant nations and no independent way to evaluate the government's description of reality. In the absence of clear contradictory evidence, people generally were prisoners of what the government authorities told them about the world. They accepted what the spies and analysts had discovered about the enemy, at least until the war in Vietnam devastated the government's authority. The alternative - questioning the president while the nation was atwar - seemed unpatriotic.

"Crackpot realism" has flourished right up to the present time and the Central Intelligence Agency was a principal source for it. As late as 1989, as Moynihan observed, the CIA reported that the economy of communist East Germany was slightly larger than the economy of West Germany an intelligence estimate ludicrously debunked a few months later when the East German regime collapsed and its citizens streamed westward in search of jobs, consumer goods and food. The following year, the CIA corrected the record by abruptly shrinking the threatening dimensions of East Germany by more than one third.

The same gross exaggeration was repeated; year after year, when the CIA made its estimates of the Soviet Union's awesome capabilities. The 1989 analysis claimed that the growth rate of the Soviet bloc exceeded western Europe's. But then the CIA had solemnly reported for four decades that the Soviet economy was growing faster than the U.S. economy - almost half again faster. The result, it said, was a formidable industrial power second-largest in the world and much larger than Japan, according to the CIA.

If that were true, this nation was an adversary rightly to be feared, since it had the economic capacity, not only to match the U.S. arsenal, weapon for weapon, but to achieve something the experts called "superiority." Hundreds of billions of America's dollars, even trillions, were devoted to forestalling that dread possibility.

Of course, it was not true. It was not true in the 1950s and it was especially not true in the late 1970s and early 1980s when America launched another massive arms buildup. Some journalists and scholars had been making this point about the Soviet economy for many years, pointing out the decay and malfunctioning that was visible despite the Soviet censors. But U.S. official authority and propaganda always succeeded in maintaining the enemy's strength.

When Gorbachev opened the Soviet society to full inspection, what western experts saw more nearly resembled a Third World country than a major industrial power. Its economy was a crude joke compared to the high-tech industrial systems of Japan, West Germany and the United States. The Soviet Union, aside from its size, was not second strongest in the world or third, probably not even fourth or fifth.

Americans, in other words, were propagandized by their own government for forty years. Were citizens deliberately deceived or were the CIA spies so befogged by their own ideological biases that they missed the reality themselves? This is one of the questions that a post Cold War debate might take up for closer examination.

[Henniger wrote:] One might have expected most of the disagreement to center on the doctrine’s assertion of a right to pre-emptive attack. Instead, Iraq’s troubles have been conflated with a general repudiation of the U.S.’s ability to abet democratic aspiration elsewhere in the world.

“Abet” by killing people. That’s what is being repudiated.

As stated, the doctrine’s strategy is “to help make the world not just safer but better.” Some conservatives have denounced the “better world” part as utopian overstretch. Beyond that, the document lists as its goals the aspirations of human dignity, strengthening alliances to “defeat” terrorism, working with others to defuse regional conflicts, promoting global growth through free markets and trade and “opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy.”

It is mainly the latter – the notion of the U.S. building the “infrastructure of democracy” that now, because of the “failure” in Iraq, attracts opposition across the political spectrum...

“Building the infrastructure of democracy” by killing people. That is what attracts opposition.

We are backing the country’s political mind into the long-term parking lot of isolationism, something fervently wished for at opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum.

“Isolationism” in this kind of talk means a reluctance to travel long distances in order to kill foreigners. Lack of enthusiasm for travelling long distances to kill foreigners will get you labelled a xenophobe.

Like the Europeans, we may talk ourselves into a weariness with the world and its various, unremitting violences. No genocide will occur on American soil, but the same information tide that bathes us in Baghdad’s horrors ensure that Darfur’s genocide will come too near not to notice. Too bad for them, or any aspiring democrats under the thumb of Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela or Islam’s highly mobile anti-democrats. We’ve got ours. Let them get theirs.

The utter fatuity of this barely merits notice, let alone contempt. Henninger wants to trick you into believing that if you’re not killing foreigners, you’re not relating...

Nobody who cares about effective, sustainable US policy or about effective promotion of liberty abroad can afford to let the Henningers of the world conflate “supporting freedom” and traveling a long way to kill foreigners. It is the most important lie they tell.

The first issue, one whose importance cannot be overestimated, is the American public's willingness -- indeed, I would argue its eagerness -- to defer to alleged "experts" in the foreign policy field. As I have done several times before, I must turn to Barbara Tuchman's masterful work, The March of Folly, for the explanation of what is wrong with this view:

Acquiescence in Executive war, [Fulbright] wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn "not upon available facts but upon judgment," with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge "whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve the overall interests as a nation."

...

The belief that government knows best was voiced just at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing, "We ought to all support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against." This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. "Foreign policy decisions," concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study, "are in general much more influenced by irrational motives" than are domestic ones.

I have argued this point many times over the last couple of years, and I remain utterly astonished at how resistant to this incontestable truth most people remain. The resistance can be seen even in the writings of many people who are deeply critical of our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The source of that resistance is easy enough to understand, even though the failure to acknowledge this truth is gravely and dangerously wrong. We prefer to believe that our leaders act rationally, and that they know what they are doing. Tragically, as the overwhelming debacle of Iraq has again demonstrated, neither of these propositions corresponds to the facts.

"One begins to suspect," Peters says, "that all too many on the left enjoy pitying Darfur as they wait in line for their lattes" -- not like the General, whose violent, blinding headaches of true empathy cannot be relieved by latte, but only by human gore, Jack Daniels, and the destabilization of the entire world:

The killing will never stop until we stop pretending that every dictator or junta seizing power is entitled to claim sovereignty over the millions who never had a voice in choosing their government. After the oppression of women, the sovereignty con is the world's greatest human-rights abuse. And for all of its damnable incompetence, the Bush administration understood that one great truth.

If this sounds familiar, it is not only because you once heard a bum screaming it in Tompkins Square Park, but because it was the lunacy du jour in the run-up to the Iraq War, when people like Lee Harris were talking about "the end of classical sovereignty," whereby nobody gets to call themselves a State unless we say they're a State.

...

This is why the General ... blames libs and latte-sippers everywhere for the dead/raped/tortured Africans, rather than the Bush Administration, which has some actual military means but has chosen to blow it all on destabilizing nations such as Iraq. In fact, Peters wonders why lefties haven't "formed a new Lincoln Brigade to take on Sudan's Muslims fanatics." I would seriously consider joining such a Brigade if the General will consent to lead it. The training sessions alone -- sequestered in our offshore quonset huts, watching the general snap the neck of a Thai prostitute, endless showings of Zulu -- would be worth the price of the ticket, I imagine. And once we landed in-country, we could always sell our allegiance to the highest-paying warlords, and thus give Sudan a real taste of American democracy.

Consider Warren G. Harding, dead last in the Schlesinger polls, next to last in the WSJ/Federalist poll. Historians have downgraded him for his scandal-ridden administration. But that can't be the only reason for his abysmal ranking: Harding wasn't personally corrupt, after all, and he never profited from his cronies' misdeeds.

Place that fault against his great merits: Harding presided over the dismantling of Wilson's draconian wartime controls, ushering in an era of prosperous "normalcy." (Is it the normalcy that presidential scholars hold against him?) Harding's good nature and liberal instincts led him to pardon the dissenters that Wilson had locked up, among them Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, imprisoned for making a speech against the draft. "I want [Debs] to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife," Harding said.

Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, hasn't fared much better in the polls: below average in the WSJ/Federalist survey, bottom 10 in the Schlesinger Jr. survey. Cal kept things entirely too cool for historians who like presidential drama: he slept too much, didn't do enough, and didn't talk enough. There was method to his muteness, though. As he put it, "Nine-tenths of [visitors to the White House] want something they ought not have. If you keep dead still they will run down in three or four minutes."

After six years of George W. Bush, a president bent on expanding executive power and redeeming the world through military force, the modest, unheroic virtues of a Harding and a Coolidge are easier to appreciate. There ought to be room at the top of the rankings for presidents who know when to keep quiet and who understand the limits of power.

But the museum, called the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education, is proving controversial on all sides. Mr Mahameed said his efforts had left him ostracised by friends and snubbed by his own brother. School officials in Nazareth have turned down his offers to host pupils. At the same time, Jewish leaders who at first praised his plans say the exhibit may do more harm than good by including a Palestinian flag and images of Arab refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes as war broke out when Israel was founded in 1948.

The Anti-Defamation League said Mr Mahameed had partly based his museum "on the false premise that the Palestinian people are paying the price for European guilt".

By including emblems of the Palestinian cause, Mr Mahameed was making an "inappropriate connection between the plight of the Palestinians and Jewish Holocaust victims", the league alleged.

According to [Yad-Vashem director Avner] Shalev this is "a systematic method that he is employing with the intention of destroying the moral basis for the existence of the state of Israel as a home for the Jewish people.

"Ahmadinejad wants to link together these questions of 'historical truths' and moral rights with the Israeli-Arab conflict so that this link will gnaw at global recognition of the moral right of a sovereign Jewish state in Israel."

...

Dr. Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ... explains what he believes is the reason that Ahmadinejad chooses to focus his efforts on the subject of the Holocaust: "The Holocaust has become the most classic example of genocide in the 20th century. As a result there is a natural empathy towards Jews as victims of the Holocaust.

"Those anti-Semites understand that as long as the subject resonates so deeply in the world – it will be much more difficult for them to harm Jews and the state of Israel, which was established as a direct or indirect result of the Holocaust."

Where Friedman made allusions to the superiority of economic freedom over political freedom in his defense of Pinochet, the Chicago group institutionalized such a hierarchy in a 1980 constitution named after Hayek's 1960 treatise The Constitution of Liberty. The new charter enshrined economic liberty and political authoritarianism as complementary qualities. They justified the need of a strong executive such as Pinochet not only to bring about a profound transformation of society but to maintain it until there was a "change in Chilean mentality." Chileans had long been "educated in weakness," said the president of the Central Bank, and a strong hand was needed in order to "educate them in strength." The market itself would provide tutoring: When asked about the social consequences of the high bankruptcy rate that resulted from the shock therapy, Admiral José Toribio Merino replied that "such is the jungle of ... economic life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to him, kills him. That is reality."

But before such a savage nirvana of pure competition and risk could be attained, a dictatorship was needed to force Chileans to accept the values of consumerism, individualism, and passive rather than participatory democracy. "Democracy is not an end in itself," said Pinochet in a 1979 speech written by two of Friedman's disciples, but a conduit to a truly "free society" that protected absolute economic freedom. Friedman hedged on the relationship between capitalism and dictatorship, but his former students were consistent: "A person's actual freedom," said Finance Minister de Castro, "can only be ensured through an authoritarian regime that exercises power by implementing equal rules for everyone." "Public opinion," he admitted, "was very much against [us], so we needed a strong personality to maintain the policy."

Take Rwanda. If you politicised sometime after that massacre as I did, you would have come to the topic bewildered by a blizzard of ethnic designations - Hutus, Tutsis and Twa - as if that explained what happened. As if it was a mere recrudescence of some ancient caste hatred or, well, often nothing even as specific as that. I even heard it referred to as "black-on-black violence". Indeed, according to Mahmood Mamdani (in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror) the use of that phrase goes back as far as the 1970s when it was used alongside "tribalism" to summarise the violence of the far right Renamo in Mozambique or the insurgency of the Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa. There were and are Hutus, Tutsis and Twa in both Rwanda and Burundi... [b]ut how distinct the Hutus and Tutsis really are or were is a matter of considerable debate. For all the talk of physical differences that one has heard, the years of intermarriage between the groups would have effaced that - it is a telling point that no one was killed in that genocide because of their 'willowy' physique or height or nose length: rather the genocidaires relied on the possession of ID cards or on information supplied by others in any particular village. Some argue that the Tutsis were an extraneous group that moved into Rwanda several hundred years ago, while others think these are fairly recent developments. But of what significance are these distinctions at any rate? It was certainly true that one Tutsi clan appears to have attained hegemony within a semi-feudal state before the arrival of colonial powers. But there were poor Tutsis and Hutus were involved in the ruling elite: what is more, one could be born a Hutu and die a Tutsi. The anthropologist Richard Robbins in Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism put it like this:

If we examine cases of purported ethnic conflict we generally find that it involves more than ancient hatred; even the ‘hatreds’ we find are relatively recent, and constructed by those ethnic entrepreneurs taking advantage of situations rooted deep in colonial domination and fed by neocolonial exploitation.

Hitchens’s casual attitude to facts is not compensated for by a corresponding precision with ideas, or any concern for the range, the richness, the complexity of Paine’s thinking. For example, we will not learn from Hitchens anything much about what Paine thought the rights of man actually were. ‘The great achievement of Paine,’ he tells us, ‘was to have introduced the discussion of human rights ... Prior to this, discussion about “rights” had been limited to “natural” or “civil” rights.’ I have no idea what this means. For Paine, the rights we have by virtue of being human – the rights of man – take the form of ‘natural’ rights, ‘civil’ rights, ‘political’ rights, and he discriminates between them with increasing care; but he would surely have been puzzled by the notion of human rights as something beyond, something different from, not ‘limited’ to, natural, civil or political rights. Hitchens seems similarly at sea in his brief discussion of Paine’s theory of revolution which he understands entirely in terms of ‘the sudden return or restoration’ of a lost golden age, holding Paine responsible (among others) ‘for the “heaven on earth” propaganda ... that disordered the radical tradition thereafter’. This is entirely to ignore the trajectory in Paine’s thought from a ‘full-circle’ theory of revolution as a return to the founding contract of society, to one in which ... revolution is represented as a new stage of social organisation made necessary by social, economic and intellectual progress.

There is little sign over the course of the book that Hitchens has paid enough attention to Paine’s ideas to notice how they develop. This above all is why it seems so inert. He asks us to admire Paine simply for the sake of the positions he takes on one issue or another, as these can be summarised in a sentence or two, but no political philosopher can excite us simply by his conclusions, skimmed from the top of the arguments they develop from, any more than we can admire poems on the basis of a one-sentence summary of what they ‘say’, in isolation from the process of saying it. Sometimes Hitchens is obviously impatient with Paine’s arguments: too dependent, in the early days, on the Bible, too preoccupied with supposedly out-of-date questions like the origin of government, to help us in the present. More often there is no sign that he has even noticed them. His brief pages on Common Sense, Paine’s justification of the American Revolution, do not notice how that book is tugged in two directions by the need to argue for the revolution in terms both of the rights of the colonists and of their greater political virtue as compared with the British. Thus he does not recognise in Paine’s later development how his attempt to build a theory of government on natural rights involves (almost) freeing himself from the classical republican tradition in which he had educated himself. Hitchens treats the distinction Paine makes so much of, between ‘society’ and ‘government’, as insignificant, and thus has nothing to say about Paine’s faith in civil society: in sociable economic exchange, and in the simple pleasures of sociability, as much more efficacious than government in preserving social order.

Which brings us to the "Sechin theory" -- that Sechin and his hardliner cronies, a group of generally anti-democratic, generally anti-Western, and generally low-foreheaded brutes known collectively as the "Siloviki," are trying to force Putin to remain by their side, in government, by binding him to them in blood. The idea here is that whatever thoughts Putin might have had about retiring to a leisurely life of giving speeches in Munich and sipping cappuccinos in Venice with Silvio Berlusconi will very shortly be off the table once he is tied, internationally, to a series of Stalin-like assassinations.

You remove Putin's options for a Western-focused dismount to his political career and you make it very attractive for him to consider a way around his term limit problem -- particularly when the alternative is remaining in Russia while one of his political enemies, perhaps a more "liberal" type like Dmitri Medvedev, comes to power. If a disgraced Putin stays in Russia that case, he risks becoming the target of future prosecutions and intrigues. Each killing along the lines of the Litvinenko business backs Putin further and further into that corner.

So the theory is that Sechin, who until now has always been known as a creature of Putin, acted independently in this case and ordered the Litvinenko hit as a pre-emptive strike against such possible 2008 presidential candidates as Medvedev and defense minister Sergei Ivanov, blocking their rise with Putin's presumed refusal to step down. He made it as messy as possible, causing maximum embarrassment to Putin, in order to apply pressure on his own political benefactor.

I don't have the space here to address every single reason why 9/11 conspiracy theory is so shamefully stupid, so I'll have to be content with just one point: 9/11 Truth is the lowest form of conspiracy theory, because it doesn't offer an affirmative theory of the crime.

Forget for a minute all those internet tales about inexplicable skyscraper fires, strange holes in the ground at Shanksville, and mysterious flight manifestoes. What is the theory of the crime, according to the 9/11 Truth movement?

Strikingly, there is no obvious answer to that question, since for all the many articles about "Able Danger" and the witnesses who heard explosions at Ground Zero, there is not -- at least not that I could find -- a single document anywhere that lays out a single, concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why. There obviously is such a theory, but it has to be pieced together by implication, by paying attention to the various assertions of 9/11 lore (the towers were mined, the Pentagon was really hit by a cruise missile, etc.) and then assembling them later on into one single story. But the funny thing is, when you put together all of those disparate theories, you get the dumbest story since Roman Polanski's Pirates.

...

RUMSFELD: But if we're just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam's fingerprints on the attack?

CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Don. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we're not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around.

BUSH: I'm a total idiot who can barely read, so I'll buy that.

What’s stunning about Bush’s encounter with al-Hakim is that it occurs precisely at the moment when critically important bridges are being built across Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite divide — bridges that al-Hakim is trying to blow up.

...

Hakim’s wrecking-ball effort is taking place in the context of unprecedented efforts by leaders of Iraq’s factions to create what many Iraqi leaders are calling a “government of national salvation.”

Such a government would topple and replace the ineffectual, clownish Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Supporters of the idea, who are getting ready to announce a National Salvation Front in Iraq, include rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, many of Iraq’s Sunni leaders in and out of government, representatives of the Iraqi resistance and perhaps even some important Kurdish leaders.

...

Even as the National Salvation Front takes shape, there is strong evidence that Sunni and Shiite clerics are reaching out to each other.

Two weeks ago, Muqtada al-Sadr demanded that Sunni clerics issue a fatwa, or religious order, condemning killings of Iraqi civilians by al-Qaida types and offering Sunni help to rebuild the domed mosque in Samarra that was destroyed in a bombing in February. It was that bombing that touched over the most severe phase of Iraq’s civil war, setting of a wave of reprisal killings among Shiites and Sunnis.

Since Sadr’s call, several leading Sunni clerics have done as Sadr asked, according to the Los Angeles Times, including top Sunni religious leaders in Basra, Nasariyah, Amarah and Samaweh. All four were associated with the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), the leading Sunni religious group in Iraq, which has close ties to the Sunni insurgency.

[S]ince game theory in general provides the analyst with so many opportunities to twist himself repeatedly up his own arse like a berserk Klein bottle, if a given real-world course of action appears to have nothing going for it other than a game-theoretic or strategic justification, it’s almost certainly a bad idea. Thus it is with that bastard child of deterrence, “credibility”.

...

The idea is that the war is costing huge amounts of money and lives with no real prospect of success and a distinct danger that it is making things much worse. However, to do the logical thing would send the signal to our enemies that we will give up if fought to a pointless bloody standstill. Therefore, for strategic reasons, we must redouble our efforts, in order to send the signal to our enemies that we will fight implacably and mindlessly in any battle we happen to get into, forever, in order to dissuade them from attacking us in the first place.

...

It is certainly true that one of the benefits of doing something stupid is that it saves you from having to spend money on maintaining your reputation as an idiot. However, is the reputation of an idiot really worth having?

It turns out that it can be proved by theorem that the answer is no. If the game of being a belligerent idiot with no sensible regard for one’s own welfare was worth the candle, in the sense of conferring benefits which outweighed the cost of gaining it, then everyone would want to get that reputation, whether they were genuinely an idiot or not. But if everyone wanted that reputation,then everyone would know that simply acting like an idiot didn’t mean that you were one, in which case it would be impossible to establish a reputation as an idiot in the first place. The point here is that it’s one of the more important things in game theory that a signal has to be a costly signal to be credible; like membership of the Modern Languages Association, a reputation in deterrence theory is something that is worth having, but not worth getting. People who use the word “signal” in this context ... don’t always seem to realise that they are explicitly admitting that the costs of being in Iraq are greater than the benefits.

The "new normalcy"

Ultimately, we may discover that the current state of flux is permanent. After the events of September 11, Vice President Richard Cheney said we should accept the many resultant changes in daily life as permanent rather than temporary. "Think of them," he recommended, "as the 'new normalcy.'"

You should take the same approach to the changes happening at your workplace. These are not temporary adjustments until things get "back to normal." They are probably the "new normalcy" of your life as a company. The sooner you can accept that these changes are permanent, the better you can cope with them all--and enjoy their positive results.

[I]f there's any justice, David Letterman will one day be recognized as the father of our era.

Like other great men, Letterman knew that Americans were dumb as rocks but still had their pride, so if you were going to feed them the intellectual equivalent of hogslop, you had better flatter their intelligence at the same time.

While genii such as Cecil B. DeMille managed this trick by festooning their slopfests with Biblical and historical trappings -- making anti-culture look like culture -- Letterman found a much cheaper, much more insidious angle: let the rubes in on the gag. Call the pet tricks "stupid," make the showbiz flash-and-rattle even stupider than it needed to be, and cheerfully represent yourself as the hollowest of hollow men, and the suckers would applaud not only your twaddle, but the label on the twaddle that said it was twaddle.

Thus we began to accept lack of sincerity as an American equity, if not a virtue. This threw commercial culture into reverse gear: stupid and ugly were no longer absolute negative virtues... Nowadays the only negative virtues have to do with being a Loser: indicted, dumped, disgraced. But with enough money and a sufficiently energetic image handler, I'm sure even Kevin Federline can come back from exile.

As a liberal baby-killing sodomite, I can accept moral relativism in most things, but it breaks my American heart to see public relations, advertising, and celebrity management unmoored from the verities.

With each passing election season the format for political coverage on TV morphs even further in the direction of sportscasting. Most of the networks on this election night quite baldly copied the NFL Countdown format... and the general topics of discussion -- who would win the big game, whose prospects for next year were better, which coaches needed to be fired, what halftime adjustments needed to be made -- were virtually indistinguishable from the real football shows...

Any reporter worth his AFTRA card can see that this is the same job, that there is absolutely no difference between pointing out that Indy has a soft second-half run defense and that the Knoxville and Nashville precincts, if they come in late, will come in hard for Harold Ford.

The thing that people should be concerned about isn't that the news networks are choosing to cover politics like a football game. It's the idea that both televised football games and televised politics might represent some idealized form of commercial television drama that both sports and politics evolved in the direction of organically, under the constant financial pressure brought to bear by TV advertisers. Both politics and sports turned into this shit because this format happens to sell the most Cheerios, regardless of what the content is. If you work backward from that premise, and start thinking about what the consequences of that phenomenon might actually be, your head can easily explode.

There were really only a few genuinely interesting things that happened on this election night, but all of them were blown off by the TV goons because they didn't fit into the winning-and-losing sports narrative. The Sanders win was one story, but another very interesting one was the Kent Conrad/Dwight Grotberg Senate race in North Dakota. This one was never in doubt, as Conrad completely wiped out Grotberg, but what was interesting was that both candidates agreed not to run negative campaigns and went to great pains to comport themselves like gentlemen in their public appearances. In a world where social responsibility actually played a role in editorial decision-making both candidates would have been extolled at length on the networks and celebrated for their positive contributions to the political atmosphere -- but given what a catastrophe a return to dignified campaigning would be for the TV news business, it's not at all surprising that these guys didn't even get their own blurb in the CNN baseline crawl.

...

McCain appears on CNN, broadcasting live from his Arizona office. He's got American flags on either side of him and you can almost see his boner straining against his pants. His smile is unseemly. He's talking about Republican losses and trying to look sullen, but he's not fooling anyone...

For what it's worth, the dual appearances of McCain and Obama on TV tonight marked the unofficial beginning of the 2008 presidential race...

It's not a coincidence that the early White House hopefuls were all herded on the air the instant the polls closed. Once the last vote is counted, the next story is the next race. All politics has to be contained within the parameters of that who's-winning narrative.

What the Congress actually does, how it actually spends its money, what happens in its committees -- it's all irrelevant, except insofar as that activity bears on the next presidential race. That's why the "experts" on these panels are so unanimous in their belief that the Democrats should lay low for the next two years and not push their subpoena powers. They all think pushing it in Congress would negatively affect the Democrats' White House chances. In other words, it's bad strategy for the next football game, just like Howard Dean's crazy antiwar stance was deemed "too liberal" for the gridiron by the same geniuses a few years ago -- even though history ultimately proved Dean right on that score, for all his other flaws.

Our national political press is narrowly focused, schooled in inch-deep analysis, and completely results-obsessed. It's a huge and expensive mechanism bedecked with every conceivable bell and whistle ... and designed to roam the intellectual range of a chimpanzee. It also has no sense of humor. When the Daily Show spoofed the networks with its "Midterm Midtacular," dragging the venerable Dan Rather out and coaxing a scripted piece of instant "homespun" analysis out of him (he said Hillary Clinton ran away with her race like "a hobo with a sweet potato pie"), the real journalists freaked out. Joe Scarborough led a panel of experts who denounced the show as not that funny; one guest compared Rather's bit to Muhammad Ali's crudely scripted appearances on Diff'rent Strokes, saying it was "awkward."

The reality is that Stewart's array of grotesquely pointless special effects and intentionally buffoonish commentary is an improvement on the real thing, and the real thing is an accurate reflection of our actual politics. Which means, basically, that we're fucked, stuck in an endless cycle of retarded lottery coverage -- 300 million people watching a bunch of half-bright millionaires in ties guess the next number to come out of the chute. I hope we're all insane. Otherwise, what's our excuse?

Matilda Betham-Edwards – the very name comes to us through a heavy chintz cloud of couture, the rustle of all of those chaperones in the Henry James novels – in her France of Today (1894) gives her readers some sage advice:

The traveler … is advised to take the train to Monaco, and, arrived at the little station, whisper his errand in the cab-driver’s ear, “To the suicides’ cemetery.”

Once you get there, you see first the public cemetery – which Betham-Edwards informs us is not really up to American standards … and then – “quite apart from this vast burial ground, on the other side of the main entrance, is a small enclosure, walled in and having a gate of open iron work always locked. Here, in close proximity to heaps of garden rubbish, broken bottles and other refuse, rest the suicides of Monte Carlo, buried by the parish gravedigger, without funeral and without any kind of religious ceremony. Each grave is marked by an upright piece of wood, somewhat larger than that by which gardeners mark their seeds, and on which is painted a number, nothing more. Apart from these, are stakes driven into the ground which mark as yet unappropriated spots.”

When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast - not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: "We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn't even get that many."

In 2006 Shanghai held a "millionaire fair," featuring displays of luxury sedans, yachts, a piece of jewelry priced at $25 million, and a diamond-studded dog leash valued at $61,000.

To be sure, the wealth that can afford such luxuries was not created by enterprising efforts of individuals with unique abilities or skills. According to a report by the China Rights Forum, only 5 per cent of China's 20,000 richest people have made it on merit. More than 90 per cent are related to senior government or Communist Party officials. The richest among them are the relatives of the very top officials who had used their position to pass the laws that have transformed state-owned industries into stock holding companies, and then appointed family members as managers. In this way the children of top party officials --China's new "princelings" --took over China's most strategic and profitable industries: banking, transportation, power generation, natural resources, media, and weapons. Once in management positions, they get loans from government-controlled banks, acquire foreign partners, and list their companies on Hong Kong or New York stock exchanges to raise more capital. Each step of the way the princelings enrich themselves ­not only as major shareholders of the companies, but also from the kickbacks they get by awarding contracts to foreign firms. To call this "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is a joke. Even capitalism is not the appropriate term. A Chinese sociologist has defined it as "high-tech feudalism with Chinese characteristics."

His message is that the "old" model of freedom under law is unworkable. The "relatively new phenomenon of mass-casualty suicide terrorism", we are told, demands a new approach.

But this does not ring true to British ears. Our response to three decades of IRA mass-casualty attacks was a phlegmatic disdain for the killers, combined, crucially if belatedly, with a willingness to address genuine injustice through negotiation. Blair would no doubt have claimed that we faced an irrational death cult driven by a twisted form of Catholicism and motivated only by an unreasoned hatred of our freedoms. But we are well aware that terrorism is a tool intended ultimately to influence public opinion and policy. We know just as well that the strategy aims to instil a degree of fear disproportionate to the actual increase in risk of harm. Even the well-confirmed risk imposed by IRA bombs was dwarfed by the ambient risk we face daily from unscary sources like accidents, disease and Ordinary Decent Criminals. Terrorists achieve this leveraging of low-level risk by their graphic and arresting means of death-dealing. It is our duty to retain a sense of perspective and overcome the temptation to panicky and ultimately counterproductive over-dramatisation. That means resisting the hysterical rhetoric bandied about by politicians irrevocably committed to the increasingly surreal Neo-Con view of the world.

Describing to Ngoc Hai the similarities between journalists and spies, An said, “Their food is information, documents. Just like birds, one has to keep feeding them so they’ll sing.”

“From the Army, intelligence, secret police, I had all kinds of sources,” An says. “The commanders of the military branches, officers of the Special Forces, the Navy, the Air Force—they all helped me.” In exchange for this steady stream of information, An gave his South Vietnamese informants the same thing he gave his Communist employers. “We discussed these documents, as the South Vietnamese tried to figure out what they meant. They had a problem. How were they going to deal with the Americans?” An then turned around and advised the Americans on how to deal with the Vietnamese. It was a high-level confidence game, with death hovering over him should he be discovered photographing the strategic plans and intelligence reports slipped to him by his South Vietnamese and American sources.

Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and aired for the first time in Astounding as 'Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind'), a perpetual motion machine known as the 'Dean Drive', a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren't 'abused', and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all -- 'science-fiction' -- 'psychology' -- Jesus Christ!'- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell's arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views -- an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.

One day, when we had become very friendly, I said to him, "Tell me now--how was the world lost?"

"That," he said, "is easy to tell, much easier than you may suppose. The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how.

"I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of 'total conscription.' Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to 'think it over.' In those twenty-four hours I lost the world."

...

"For the sake of argument," he said, "I will agree that I saved many lives later on. Yes."

"Which you could not have done if you had refused to take the oath in 1935."

"Yes."

"And you still think that you should not have taken the oath."

"Yes."

"I don't understand," I said.

...

"... If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three millions."

"You are joking," I said.

"No."

"You don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935?"

"No."

"Or that others would have followed your example?"

"No."

"I don't understand."

"You are an American," he said again, smiling. "I will explain. There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost."

One item of historical renown is the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948-9, and the magnificent, heroic flights of fuel and food by C-54s into Tempelhof airport to break the blockade...

Revisionist historians have long debunked this tale: Carolyn Eisenberg, one of the better historians of the Cold War, has through careful and forensic research through the diplomatic archives shown that in fact the blockade was in reality a part of the process by which American leaders (often to the immense discomfort and chagrin of Western European politicians) pursued the division of Germany. That pursuit brought with it blockade, counterblockade, heightened military tensions and the threat of nuclear war.

It’s awful. My in-box overflows each day with fresh “proofs” of how the WTC buildings were actually demolished, often accompanied by harsh insults identifying me as a “gate-keeper” preventing the truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking me “what I think about 9/11”. What they are actually trying to find out is whether I’m part of the coven. I imagine it was like being a Stoic in the second century A.D. going for a stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, with seeming casualness, whether it’s possible to feed 5,000 people on five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

While some BYU physicist rattles his brain over the intricacies of WTC #7's collapse, our government is dropping toxic gas on poor peasants in Colombia in attempts to eradicate coca production. While David Ray Griffin pens his next best seller, forests in Alaska and Appalachia are being obliterated in the name of corporate profit. While so many truth seekers attempt to convince us (how they can seek the truth when they already think they have all the answers is beyond me) that the Jews who worked in the WTC were told ahead of time not to come to work on 9/11, Lebanon is being invaded and destroyed by Israel.

Some of the black T-shirts told me they believed that if only Americans did the research there would be a mass uprising in this country and all the other things I was talking about would suddenly be on the table. But about a third of Americans already believes 9/11 was an inside job. I asked if they really thought "Do the Research" was a galvanizing slogan, to which I was corrected that the more popular slogan was "Ask Questions, Demand Answers".

Richard Aldrich's book on British intelligence, The Hidden Hand (2002), describes how a report for the Pentagon on declassification recommended that "interesting declassified material" such as information about the JFK assassination "could be released and even posted on the Internet, as a 'diversion,'" and used to "reduce the unrestrained public appetite for 'secrets' by providing good faith distraction material". Aldrich adds, "If investigative journalists and contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious, but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome."

Having gone to considerable detail to absolve my companions at the Italian Club of any suspicion of being blighted by, God forbid, an Arab mind, I might now reveal that they were the source of the most persuasive 9/11 conspiracy theory I had yet to come across. It was all about steel structures and impossible cell-phone calls and an unlikely hole in the Pentagon and a disappeared fourth, or was it fifth, plane. I was referred to Web sites and to American scholars who have organized to question the whole edifice of reasoning and evidence presented by the official investigation.

I thought Australian politics had become surreal when George Bush and John Howard were seen planting a tree together in Washington and a reporter from commercial television said the two men did it to show how deeply rooted their relationship is.

The Howard Government chose not to be represented at the Wave Hill commemoration, an event said to signify the birth of the Australian reconciliation movement. As Peter Garrett, Labor’s shadow spokesman on reconciliation, pointed out to me at the event: he has no-one to shadow. The fact that the Howard Government has no Minister for Reconciliation is one of its most commendably honest acts, but what does it mean in real terms? It means, according to Patrick Dodson, that there is no dialogue. I have a saying: if you want to see white Australia - and by white Australia I mean John Howard’s Australia, which obviously includes people who are not white - step over into black Australia, then look back. What you see is a government that has no regard whatsoever for the thoughts and opinions of the people with whom you are standing as fellow Australians...

In the book I have written with Tom [Uren] I quote cartoonist Michael Leunig as saying the difficulty in working in the Australian media at this time is that we are expected to be moderate in a radical age. I find it highly significant that the two people I consider to have been the most serious critics of the Howard government over the past decade, Robert Manne and Malcolm Fraser, are both classical conservatives. We have all watched the many attempts made to make it appear that both these men have 'turned' or 'gone to the left' when an examination of their records shows they are simply applying the same principles they have always applied to the changing world around them. In the course of this lecture I hope I can appeal to decent conservatives.

After family discussion regarding a commenter's threat of violence against our dog, Creek Running North has been taken offline.

[O]ne of the book's most interesting and useful ideas [is] that of "scale confusion". The authors explain how in physics, for example, the strong atomic force is irrelevant outside the nucleus, and gravity is irrelevant at tiny distances (until the very smallest). Things in general are only important at certain scales...

Scale confusion reappears in the book's final section, which seeks to apply our new cosmic insights to life right here, right now. "Since civilisations cannot behave like individuals and vice versa," the authors argue, "to describe individual acts as civilisational may be a kind of scale chauvinism (the logical fallacy in which a favourite size-scale is considered more fundamental than the others)." Politicians are incontinent scale chauvinists, always muddling concepts of individuals, families, nations and civilisations to deleterious effect.

There are remorseless attacks on this man by his critics. He reminds me of another man some 2000 years ago who had the worst interpretations put upon His kindest actions, yet He went on; who had His words warped, twisted, falsely reported, minimised, yet He went on; was slighted, even laughed to scorn when He gave of His very best, yet He went on.

The former PM makes an excellent point. White Australia has a very nasty habit of embracing Aboriginal culture when it suits, then stomping all over it when it thinks there’s cash or land involved.

...

For a start, it’s grossly offensive to Aboriginal people to name someone who is deceased (which is why place names have almost always been based on Aboriginal words, not individuals). But given that the average blackfella spends as much time worshipping the memory of Bennelong and his wife as they do handing out how-to-vote cards for John Howard, it probably won’t offend too deeply.

Because, you see, to quote the Herald, Bennelong was "the Aborigine adopted by the first white settlers." In other words, he was a ‘jacky jacky’. A blackfella who gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

It’s no coincidence that the first black man to help the white invaders has been immortalised by that most odious of institutions, the Bennelong Society. And it’s ironic that his wife is now being immortalised by that other great western institution, the shopping mall.

It’s a very ‘white’ thing to honour Aboriginal culture with the name of someone who helped decimate it.

Our first stop was Hawaii where I visited the kingpin of all provocateurs, including spies. None other than Fleet General Barney Google. He was all I had been told, sly, cunning, closed mouthed, bulbous nosed, smelling of musty top secrets and some foul smelling medicine that kept him going twenty hours a day in pursuit of the perfect spy mission. He talked haltingly with me but persuasively about our forthcoming mission. “By God, Bucher, I want you to get in there and be elusive, spy them out, spy out their water, look sharp for signs of electronic saline water traps. You will be going to spy out the DPRK. By the sainted General Bullmoose we must learn why they are so advanced in the art of people’s defense.”

...

Surely we had to find out how come such a newly created government could lead its peoples so quickly into the number one position. As we went about detecting this valuable information, particularly the oceanic salinity, density, ionic dispersion rate, humpback whale counts, both low and high protoplasmic unicellular uglena and plankton counts. This information was of the highest value to our own scientists for the development of war mongering at sea when no one was looking.

RT: It's the psychology of deceit and self-deception. When you start talking about groups, there are some very interesting analogies. Psychologists have shown that people make these verbal switches when they're in a we/they situation, in a your-group-versus-another situation.

NC: Groups that are simply set up for the experiment, you mean?

RT: It can be. You can also do it experimentally, or you can be talking about them and their group versus someone that's not a member of their group.

But you have the following kinds of verbal things that people do, apparently quite unconsciously. If you're a member of my group and you do something good, I make a general statement: "Noam Chomsky is an excellent person." Now if you do something bad, I give a particular statement, "Noam Chomsky stepped on my toe."

But it's exactly reversed if you're not a member of my group. If you're not a member of my group and you do something good I say, "Noam Chomsky gave me directions to MIT." But if he steps on my toe I say, "He's a lousy organism," or "He's an inconsiderate person."

So we generalize positively to ourselves, particularize negative and reverse it when we're talking about other people.

NC: Sounds like normal propaganda. Islamic people are all fascists. The Irish are all crooks.

RT: Yes, exactly. Generalize a negative characteristic in the other. Another thing that comes to mind with respect to the Iraq case: There's evidence suggesting that when you're contemplating something—whether or marry Suzy, for instance—you're in a deliberative stage. And you are considering options more or less rationally.

Now, once you decide to go with Suzy, you're in the instrumental phase; you don't want to hear about the negative side. Your mood goes up, and you delete all the negative stuff and you're just, "Suzy's the one."

TENNESSEE’S 7th What seems to have happened here is that, upon discovering that the white suburbs of Memphis did not contain enough people to constitute a congressional district, the gerrymanderers simply decided to also include the white Nashville suburbs. That Nashville is halfway across the state didn’t seem to matter at all.

Loudest of all is the Melbourne Herald Sun, who report today that "a storm of fury has erupted over Germaine Greer's criticism of Steve Irwin". In fact, the "storm" was induced by The Herald Sun's own journalists, jumping on the phone to extract whatever inclement weather they could muster from interested (or otherwise) parties. It was a piece whose opinion was decided with or without the phone calls, editorialising thusly:

The expat Aussie, known more these days for her regular bashing of her homeland...hit below the belt as she accused Irwin of sending the wrong message to kids.

This is interesting, for, two years ago, The Herald Sun led the witchhunt for Irwin, Jill Singer hooking in good and proper in an editorial headlined: "Dad's a Drongo". In contrast to Greer's "scathing attack", which at least had the temper to go the issue and not the man, Singer's piece referred to Irwin as "simple-minded", "Neanderthal", "a Tarzanesque, chest-beating reductionist", a "dangerous dropkick" and a "dill", before going on to declare that "this foolish pair" of parents were setting a lousy example indeed, their actions comparable to some of the world's more loathed personages:

Steve has a lot in common with his heroes. John Howard toughens up the babies of asylum seekers by locking them behind razor wire from the time they're born, while George Bush assures the world that Iraqi and Afghani babies must be bombed for their own good.

The piece went on to compare Irwin to Michael Jackson.

...

What's happened between then and now? Nothing much, really - Irwin never changed his approach to life, and, as far as I know, never issued anything close to an apology for the way he lived.

What's changed is that, today, he's dead, and death sells by the bushell.

But you can't sell a dead "drongo", so it's "hero", "legend" and "larrikin" all the way, and anyone who doesn't toe that line is a creep.

Red Ted, Play School and hidden agendas
Piers Akerman
...the harmless happy family content has fallen victim to the nauseating politically-correct agenda that drives so much of the ABC’s news and current affairs programming on radio and television.
— The Daily Telegraph, Red Ted, Play School and hidden agendas, 29th August, 2006

This is what had Piers searching out the commissars of political correctness [said Media Watch].

Baa baa woolly sheep have you any wool? Yes sir yes sir three bags full..one full for the jumpers and one for the socks and one for the little girl with holes in her socks.
— Play School, ABC TV, 23rd August, 2006

As Piers wrote, "You get the drift".

Black sheep are out…
But if black sheep have been magically erased, it seems likely that words such as "master", "dame" and "sir" have also been banned for fear of upsetting the sensitivities of the ABC's young audience.

We did sing "Baa baa woolly sheep", as part of a segment related to wool, on Play School, as Piers Akerman states in his article headed "Red Ted, Play School and hidden agendas" (The Daily Telegraph, August 29).
However, far from the traditional version of Baa Baa Black Sheep being magically erased -- along with the master and the dame and sir -- it was just 34 seconds later in the very same program we sang: "Baa baa black sheep, Have you any wool, Yes sir yes sir, Three bags full. One for the master, One for the dame, One for the little boy who lives down the lane."
When it comes to Piers's next article, as we say on Play School, he may need a grown-up to help him.

My point is this: in a grown-up society such as our own, the media cannot expect to get away with parading falsehoods as truths, or ignoring salient facts because they happen to be inconvenient to the line of argument - or narrative - that particular journalists, or media organisations, might choose to adopt on any given controversy or issue.

- Alexander Downer, speech to the National Newspaper Publishers' Conference, 28 August 2006

The Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, issued instructions to suppress a damning letter about the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the war, a former senior diplomat says.

Dr John Gee, an expert on chemical weapons, worked with the US-led weapons hunter, the Iraq Survey Group, after the war and wrote the critical six-page letter when he decided to resign in March 2004. In it he warned the Federal Government the hunt was, "fundamentally flawed" and there was a "reluctance on the part of many here and in Washington to face the facts" that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Gee recorded in an email soon after that "Downer has issued instructions it [my letter] is not to be distributed to anyone". He wrote to a colleague in the Iraq Survey Group that a senior official in the Office of National Assessments, the Prime Minister's intelligence advisory agency, had told him about Mr Downer's instructions.

- Sydney Morning Herald, "Weapons cover-up revealed", 31 August 2006

On the Sunday Arts program, host Helen Razer was interviewing film director Bob Weis about his documentary Women of the Sun — 25 Years Later, charting the stories of Aboriginal women.

Razer noted the film compared his family's history as Holocaust survivors to the contemporary situation of Aborigines in Australia.

Weis said he would like to make one more "conceptual leap", to which Razer replied "be my guest".

Indigenous actress Justine Saunders sat beside Weis and encouraged him as he said: "That while David Irving — the Holocaust denier — sits in prison … ", before he was cut off.

Mr Weis said yesterday he uttered the words "… the Australian Government …", but that did not go to air.

Razer hit the dump button, saying on air: "I can't possibly let you say that", before switching to pre-recorded audio.

Weis and Saunders allege Razer then said: "I will lose my job." This did not make it to air.

"Is it a job worth having?" Weis asked her, also off air, before storming out of the booth.

Weis yesterday revealed he was going to say: "That while David Irving — the Holocaust denier — sits in prison, the Australian Government put our chief Holocaust denier on the board of the ABC."

A blog devoted to issues in language, epistemology, metaphysics, and mind.

Did you hear the one about the sheep who tried to leave the USSR? They were stopped at the border by a guard. "Why do you wish to leave Russia?" the guard asked. "It's the secret police," replied the sheep. "Stalin has ordered them to arrest all the elephants." "But you aren't elephants." "Try telling that to the secret police."

[I]n full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.'s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at. I think those few seconds of madness, to use his word, were well worth a great deal of patient effort on my part.

At the millennial First Night Boston, someone did an art installation which filled a small hotel exhibition room with computers, so that people could watch to see if they failed.

It was interesting to see the people who were ringing in the new millennium watching a room full of junked computers. Or maybe they didn’t stay either. My husband said we had to get home by 11 in case the subway stopped running.

The McLandress Dimension, a short collection of articles attributed to one “Mark Epernay,” was published by Houghton Mifflin during the late fall of 1963...

...While his name was not yet a household word, McLandress had an impressive (if top-secret) list of clients among prominent Americans.

The work that defined his career was his discovery of “the McLandress Coefficient” – a unit of measurement defined, in laymen’s terms, as “the arithmetic mean or average of intervals of time during which a subject’s thoughts centered on some substantive phenomenon other than his own personality.”

The exact means of calculating the “McL-C,” as it was abbreviated, involved psychometric techniques rather too arcane for a reporter to discuss. But a rough estimate could be made based on how long any given person talked without using the first-person singular pronoun. This could be determined “by means of a recording stopwatch carried unobtrusively in the researcher’s jacket pocket.”

A low coefficient — anything under, say, one minute — “implies a close and diligent concern by the individual for matters pertaining to his own personality.” Not surprisingly, people in show business tended to fall into this range.

Writers had a somewhat higher score, though not by a lot. Epernay noted that Gore Vidal had a rating of 12.5 minutes. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Vidal responded, “I find this ... one finds this odd.”

...

Epernay enjoyed his role as Boswell to the great psychometrician. Later articles discussed the other areas of McLandress’s research. He worked out an exact formula for calculating the Maximum Prestige Horizon of people in different professions. He developed the “third-dimensional departure” for acknowledging the merits of both sides in any controversial topic while carefully avoiding any form of extremism. (This had been mastered, noted Epernay, by “the more scholarly Democrats.”)

And McLandress reduced the size of the State Department by creating a fully automated foreign policy — using computers to extrapolate the appropriate response to any new situation, based on established precedent. “Few things more clearly mark the amateur in diplomacy,” the reporter explained, “than his inability to see that even the change from the wrong policy to the right policy involves the admission of previous error and hence is damaging to national prestige.”

Serious journals devoted articles to debating the authenticity of the document. One prominent sociologist wrote a long article suggesting that it was so close to the real thing that one might as well take it seriously. At one point, people in the White House were reportedly making inquiries to determine whether Report from Iron Mountain might not be the real thing.

In the midst of all this, Herschel McLandress, who had retreated into silence for almost four years, suddenly returned to public life. In an article appearing in The Washington Post, the great psychometrician confirmed that Report from Iron Mountain was exactly what it claimed to be. He had been part of the working group involved in the initial brainstorming. He chided whoever was responsible for leaking the document. By no means were Americans ready to face the horrors of peace. He did not challenge any of the report’s conclusions. “My reservations,” McLandress stated, “relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public.”

In 1935, the population of West Papua was about 700,000. By 2000, however, the population was 2,220,034. Between 1980 and 1990 the average population growth was 3.34 per cent, well above the national level of 1.74 per cent. From 1990 to 2000, population growth of 3.22 per cent was recorded in West Papua, still well above the national level of 1.49 per cent for the period. It is true that migrants account for a significant slice of this increase in population, but that is the national trend throughout Indonesia.

With one simple tale, she summarised the process whereby people at work feel no connection with whatever they're producing. She was working on an assembly line, on which apple pies would emerge from an oven, then Smith and her colleagues would pick them up as they passed and place them in their boxes. Every single time, she said, as the pies approached, one worker who'd been there 20 years would flare his nostrils, look menacingly at them and snarl, "Here come the little fuckers."

I am in year 12 and thanks to Mr Packer's charity have been privileged to attend Ascham School as a boarder since sixth grade on a full scholarship. Without this gift I would have been relegated to a country high school and would not have experienced or learnt half as much.

I've actually read in The Daily Telegraph where a certain Imam from the Lakemba Mosque actually said that Australia's going to be a Moslem nation in 50 years time.

I didn't believe him at the time, but, you know, when you actually look at the birth rates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year, and that's on a guesstimate. You multiply that by 50 years: that's five million potential Australians we won't have here.

"We have to be careful," said the Chief Inspector. "The Chinese are very clever. If we let this Chinaman become a policeman here in Dublin, very soon all of the police in Ireland will be Chinese."

The Sergeant looked worried. "Including me?"

Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave. He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn't want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.

...

Even if Mr. Felt had mixed motives, even if he did not choose the most courageous path in attempting to spread what he thought was the truth, his actions might be judged by their fruits. The Washington Post said yesterday that Mr. Felt's information allowed them to continue their probe. That probe brought down a president. Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

I was ruminating, for no reason at all, on the legend of Cassandra. Beloved by Apollo, she was granted by him the gift of prophecy, to see the future with perfect clarity. However, for spurning the god's advances, she was cursed with the proviso that her prophecies would never be believed by anyone.

It occurred to me that if Apollo's original gift had been bona fides then his spiteful codicil would have been superfluous, because it follows naturally that a prediction, at least of events other than natural disasters and similar phenomena beyond human control, can only be accurate if it is not believed. Had the people of Troy accepted Cassandra's forecasts of doom, they would have acted to prevent these events from occurring, thereby making her prophecies false. A prophetess can only correctly perceive the future actions of people if these actions remain uninfluenced by that perception.

If I had the necessary theoretical grounding, I could perhaps proceed now to compose some monograph on pre-Homeric conceptions of the Uncertainty Principle, but, thankfully, I don't.

Reading through some neglected back issues of Interzone, I discovered in David Langford's list of brief obituaries that the number of the year of Christopher Reeve's birth (discounting the century) was the same number as his age at death, that is, fifty-five. Morbidly, I began to consider how the number of people of whom this would also be true would fluctuate over the years of any century.

In most centuries, including the 20th, and, for that matter, the 21st, there would be a significant peak at the beginning of the century accounting for the deaths of the very young. I would guess - students of infant mortality statistics should be able to make a better calculation - this peak would sharply decline at about '08 to a very low figure which would remain low throughout the rest of the century before rising again in the decades of the '50s to '80s (earlier centuries would have earlier inclines, but even in the 20th the impact of Third World lifespans on the average would bring the first appearance of a peak quite early). I was born in 1966, and so have only a moderate, and not extreme, chance of fitting into this numerological quirk myself - touchwood. After the '80s, the numbers steeply decline again.

Depressingly, the 20th Century is marked by a prominent peak in the first three years of the 1920s, these being the birth years of those who turned 20, 21 and 22 during the years of, respectively, 1940, 1942 and 1944. This spike is most noticeable for the populations of Europe and the Mediterranean regions, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia and North America, before disappearing almost entirely in these areas, although parts of South East Asia would have such a peak also appearing in the 1930s.