Those Who Cannot Learn from History Get All the Sweet Gigs II

In an otherwise sensible piece about the current fad in anti-internet polemics, Chris Berg managed to reveal himself as a right-wing hack before I'd caught the Institute of Public Affairs accreditation in the dateline:

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.

Jesus, what a pillock. The Luddites were active in 1811, and working class living conditions were abjectly awful for more than a century afterwards. The Luddites were supposed to overcome their "resistance to change" how, exactly? By telling themselves how much better off people would be come the 1950s, assuming they were white, Western and not very working class?

Senate Candidates Linkfest Two

FWIW

Links to parties running in other states included in previous post.

---

WA:

A – NATIONALS
B – CITIZENS ELECTORAL COUNCIL
C – CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY
D – NON-CUSTODIAL PARENTS PARTY
E – D.L.P. - DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY
F – LIBERAL
G – AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRATS
H – ONE NATION WA
I – FAMILY FIRST
J – SENATOR ON-LINE
K – CARERS ALLIANCE
L – AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY
M – WYNNE / FITZGERALD

("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)

N – CLIMATE CHANGE COALITION
O – SOCIALIST ALLIANCE
P – CAMPBELL / FISCHER / GRAHAM / GIBSON (The egregious Graham Campbell, former ALP member for Karlgoorlie, then disendorsed Independent, then unsuccessful One Nation candidate, and friends)
Q – UNENDORSED - ARMSTRONG / TAN (SECULAR PARTY)
R – WHAT WOMEN WANT
S – CONSERVATIVES FOR CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT
T – LDP
U – THE GREENS
UNGROUPED
MCNAUGHT, Richard - Electrician (No idea, though he appears to support euthanasia)
DABROWSKI, Edward - Electrical Engineer (ran for Family First in 2005 WA state election; apparently a dad's rights type)

---

SA

A – ONE NATION
B – (Secular Party)
C – CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY
D – AUSTRALIAN FISHING AND LIFESTYLE PARTY
E – THE AUSTRALIAN SHOOTERS PARTY
F – THE GREENS
G – NATIONAL PARTY
H – D.L.P. - DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY
I – LIBERAL
J – WHAT WOMEN WANT
K – AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY
L – CLIMATE CHANGE COALITION
M – CITIZENS ELECTORAL COUNCIL
N – SENATOR ON-LINE
O – SOCIALIST ALLIANCE
P – AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRATS
Q – FAMILY FIRST PARTY
R – LDP
S – (The famous Nick Xenophon and friend - will probably win)
Ungrouped
GLASS, Stewart - Photographer
DRUMMOND, Michelle - Business Coordinator (Ms Drummond uses the same ISP/hosting service as me - so good luck accessing her website. Social and enviromental progressive, ran as a Green in the past)

---

Tasmania:

A - WHAT WOMEN WANT
B - THE GREENS
C - (Steve Martin and friend. Yeah, I bet he never heard that one before)
D - AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY
E - D.L.P. - DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY
F - LIBERAL
G - (Dino Ottavi, Australian of the Year finalist 2004 and otherwise do-gooder, and friends. Third-placed candidate Chris Smallbane is former Secretary/Treasurer of the Tasmanian Catholic Education Employees Association)
H - (SECULAR PARTY)
I - LDP
J - CITIZENS ELECTORAL COUNCIL
K - FAMILY FIRST
Ungrouped: Nil (Thank God)

---

NT:

A - CITIZENS ELECTORAL COUNCIL
B - AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY - NORTHERN TERRITORY BRANCH
C - AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRATS
D - C.L.P. (Country Liberal Party - technically not the same as the Liberal Party)
E - THE GREENS
Ungrouped
ATKINSON, Bernardine M C - Secretary to Bishop (a pro-nuclear secretary to a bishop, to be exact)

---

Ooh, piccies!

Candidates Directory

Senate Candidates Linkfest

Mainland eastern states only. I suppose it's possible I'll be bored enough over the weekend to do the others, but I doubt it.

But it looks prettier here than on the board.

---

NSW:

A - LIBERAL/NATIONALS

B - CITIZENS ELECTORAL COUNCIL (Yay! LaRouchies!)

C - FAMILY FIRST

D - PAULINE (another little ego trip for Hanson)

E - CLIMATE CHANGE COALITION

F - SOCIALIST ALLIANCE

G - THE GREENS

H - WHAT WOMEN WANT {AUSTRALIA}

I - LIBERTY and DEMOCRACY PARTY (sodding Electoral Commission wouldn't let them call themselves the Liberal Democratic Party. We could have had a real LDP, just like Sweden, Japan, the UK and Russia.)

J - UNTITLED (SECULAR PARTY of AUSTRALIA)

K - HEAR OUR VOICE (GLBT party)

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.

L - SENATOR ON-LINE

M - DEMOCRATS

N - CONSERVATIVES FOR CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT

O - D.L.P. – DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY

P - UNTITLED (BEYOND FEDERATION - ABOLISH STATE GOVERNMENTS)

Q - THE FISHING PARTY

R - CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY {FRED NILE GROUP}

S - ONE NATION

T - NON-CUSTODIAL PARENTS PARTY {EQUAL PARENTING}

U - THE AUSTRALIAN SHOOTERS PARTY/AUSTRALIAN FISHING AND LIFESTYLE PARTY

V - UNTITLED; TINYOW, Walter & CHAN, Maria (I suspect this is to publicise the problems Mr Tinyow's been having with his builder.)

W - LABOR

X - SOCIALIST EQUALITY PARTY

Y - CARERS ALLIANCE

UNGROUPED

NADAS, Paula; policy manager (apparently the Greens candidate for the Queensland seat of Bowman in 2004)

LEVY, Curtis; director (of The President vs David Hicks for one. Apparently standing to campaign for Waltzing Matilda to become the national anthem;campaign to form basis of another doco)

NERO, Silvana; school teacher (your guess is as good as mine)

STEFANAC, Jennifer; caseworker

---

VICTORIA:

A - CCC, B - ON, C - AD, D - WWWA, E - SO, F - ALP, G - ASP, H - L/N, J - SEP, K - FF, L - LDP, M - CCE, N - DLP, O - CDP, P - Untitled (Secular Party), Q - CEC, R - NCPP, S - SA, U - G, W - CA

I - UNTITLED (ANARCHIST)

T - UNTITLED (perennial independent candidate Joseph Kaliniy and friend. Kaliniy ran for the 1997 Constitutional Convention as sole candidate for Democratic United Australian People for Monarchy)

V - UNTITLED (Mr and Mrs Klein - don't know what their story is)

UNGROUPED

WALKER, Norman; Mature Age Student (no idea)

O'BRYAN, Darryl; Plumber (no idea)

GROVES, Llewellyn John; Retired - ONE NATION WA (with this one and Pauline's United Australia Party shouldn't that be THREE NATION?)

SENER, Tejay M; Applied Physicist (Or here [Updated 22/11/2007])

---

QUEENSLAND

A – WWW, B – LDP , C – CCC, D – CA, E – SO, F – SA, G – FP, H – FF, I – AD, J – LN, L – ASP, M – G, O – ALP, P – AFLP, Q – ONWA, R – P, S – CEC, T – CDP, U – NCPP, V – DLP, W – UNENDORSED (Secular Party)

K – UNENDORSED – HACKETT-JONES/RIVETT

N – UNENDORSED – COUPER/BROWN (See also)

X – UNENDORSED – BAKER/FITZGERALD-BAKER (See also)

UNGROUPED

DUGGAN, John; Consultant ISO 9000 (got nothing)

LOW, Pilly; Hairdresser (got nothing)

REID, James Kenneth; Electrician (got nothing)

TRAVERSARI, Marsileo Mark (got nothing)

DeMARCHI, Leo; Electrician (see also)

PETERSEN, Robin; Electrician (got nothing)

---

AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY

A -ALP, B - AD; C - G, E - LDP, F - LIBERAL, G - WWW, H - CCC

D - NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT PARTY OF AUSTRALIA

Inside Spin at PRWatch

Still stuck on dial-up. Here's a link to an extract from Bob Burton's Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry on the Institute of Public Affairs' pristinely independent advocacy for privatising Telstra.

Round Up

More recent reading, mainly from the usual suspects. Blame my being forced to rely on dial-up access.

James Carroll interviewed at TomDispatch:

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.

Carroll also talks about the disquieting religicisation of the US military.

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.

Also at Alternet, Gavin McNett of Sadly, No! explains why following wingnut weblogs helps decode more mainstream right-wing rhetoric:

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.

Daniel Davies proposes the privatisation of Western values:

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.

Also amusing is Mark Steel's recent column on the 2007 London Arms Fair.

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.

Dennis Perrin had one of the better takes on the absurd flap over the Iranian president speaking at Columbia University:

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.

Here's Matt Taibbi on Fred Thompson:

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.

At FAIR, a comprehensive takedown by Aaron Swartz of the Rachel-Carson-Was-Worse-Than-Hitler nutjobs:

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.

Some historical pieces: Richard Seymour pointed me to this review by Dave Renton of Daniel Guerin's The Brown Plague, an account of his tours through Germany during the early part of the Nazi era; and Counterpunch provides Claude Cockburn's account of the Great Crash of 1929 and Vincent Navarro's examination of the Spanish transition to democracy after the death of Franco.

And speaking of Richard Seymour, I particularly liked the last paragraph of his recent post about the bizarre demonisation of harmless pomo academic Tariq Ramadan.

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.

The Sea of Green

From this 1995 article by Michael Pollan on marijuana cultivation, a fine illustration of the whack-a-mole absurdity of drug prohibition:

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."

Salton Sea Documentary

Louis Proyect reviews Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when water from a breached irrigation canal flowed into a salty geological depression in California's desertic Imperial Valley.

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.

Flooding and industrial run-off then transformed the area into an environmental basket-case and destroyed its status as a tourist resort. The film details this history, and looks at the eccentric community that continues to live on the shores of this American dead sea. Or, not quite dead:

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.

Lazy Linkage

Re claims of impending violent protests at APEC 2007, a brief statement of the blindingly obvious from Crikey!

Roger Gathman waxes lyrical on traffic jams.

Jon Schwarz on The Iron Law of Institutions.

Via Limited Inc., Michael Pollan's collection of articles on history, biology and agriculture. So far I can vouch that Why Mow?, No Bar Code (a piece on the Local Food "movement"), A Gardener's Guide to Sex, Politics and Class (a comparison of gardening books and nature writing) and Weeds Are Us are simply excellent.

From "Why Mow?":

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.

From "Weeds Are Us":

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.

And apropos of nothing, I think I'll be changing the subtitle here, as "Pointed missives thrown blindly into the void, there to pass unnoticed and unloved" is starting to bum me out. What I replace it with will probably change about once a day until I get bored enough with tweaking it to settle for what's there.

Humanitarian Intervention II

From yesterday's Crikey!

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...

If You Made This Up, They'd Call You A Hack

A gem from "The Great Iraq Swindle" in Rolling Stone.

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.

A US security company. In Iraq. Called Custer Battles. The fact that the company name was coined from the surnames of its dim-witted founders just makes it even funnier. I mean, if they'd chosen the name out of the blue they'd just be common-or-garden morons, but to put it together from their own names, and then totally miss the "Oh - wait a minute..." moment - that shows arrogant foolishness on an almost celestial level. Which is probably why they managed to bilk US taxpayers of millions of dollars and yet have their fraud convictions overturned on appeal.

Though uncredited, the Rolling Stone piece appears to have been penned by Matt Taibbi. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Ken and Guy

Two links essentially put here for my future reference; but you might enjoy them too.

Kenneth Davidson dissects our ludicrous two-tier but subsidised at both levels health insurance system.

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.

(On the other hand, the "lifetime cover" threat that you'll be penalised with higher premiums if you only start buying private insurance at a later age is based on the laughable assumption that government policy will never change.)

And Guy Rundle holds the war spruikers to account.

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.

Honeypot

Ah, that explains it. My friends who bothered watching remarked that there seemed an extraordinarily high percentage of loons asking questions in the forum that followed the ABC's broadcast of The Global Warming Swindle. According to Crikey!, at least fifteen members of the audience were from the Citizen's Electoral Council, a local branch of the LaRouchies. Crikey! has the video up for those who want to share the fun.

History's First Draft

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.

This is what Boris Kagarlitsky wrote in Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin in 2002, which is why it was odd to see this quote from him in the days following Yeltsin's death in an article published in, among other places, The Australian.

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.

Of course, this did sound remarkably like one of those overly qualified responses that border on sarcasm, allowing for some inexact translation. ("Why, yes, Mr Putin has just as much commitment to democracy as Yeltsin ever did.") Kagarlitsky's usual fortnightly column in the Moscow Times had been published shortly before Yeltsin's death, so he never bothered with an obituary in that venue. But a remembrance turned up elsewhere about a week later, suggesting his response to requests for comment in the immediate aftermath of Yeltsin's death was as "tactful" as it appeared.

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.

The dire consequences of Yeltsin's precipitous breaking up of the USSR are now obvious. Far from creating democracy, which is to say building on Gorbachev's reforms, the break-up spawned dictatorships, including some peculiarly nasty ones in Central Asia, ensured "ethnic civil wars erupted in central Asia and Transcaucasia, killing hundreds of thousands and brutally displacing even more, a process still under way" and "shattered a highly integrated economy and was a major cause of the collapse of production across the former Soviet territories, which fell by almost half in the 1990s. That in turn contributed to mass poverty and its attendant social pathologies, which are still, in the words of a respected Moscow economist, the 'main fact' of Russian life today." (Quotes from Stephen Cohen's 2006 article in The Guardian)

In 1993, as Yeltsin shelled his own parliament, the one he had famously climbed onto a tank in front of well after the tide had decidedly turned against the 1991 attempted coup, his attack on the "hardliners" inside, a considerably more bloody affair than the earlier putsch, was applauded not only by the liberal intelligentsia of Russia but by both the Russian and Western media. Later, as is so often the case, Yeltsin's crushing of democracy that day became rewritten as a defence of the same, when it was even remembered. Few of his obituaries, even those that managed a passing mention of the economic chaos that marked his term in office, could bring themselves to detail the violent coup that consolidated his power. The doctrinal system that applauded the neoliberal insanity of "shock treatment" that destroyed Russia's economy naturally also prefers not to acknowledge the manner in which those "reforms" were forced past the first democratically elected parliament in Soviet history.

I came across a nice example of this in Steve Coll's book on the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan, Ghost Wars. The book has all the flaws you'd expect in a Pulitzer Prize winner, including a tiresome tendency to bulk up the narrative with novelistic details, such as informing the reader of the job of the father of every person Coll mentions in the book. Amongst the irrelevant vignettes is the story of the last Soviet pilot to be shot down by the mujahideen, and then captured, and how the CIA ensured he was returned unharmed to Russia in order not to jeopardise the Russian troop withdrawal. (OK, that's probably more relevant than most of them.)

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.

And then Coll's punchline:

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

Why, yes, what an amusingly ironic anecdote. Except Rutskoi was the legitimately elected vice-President and the "violent uprising" was Yeltsin's impeachment by the parliament, swearing in Rutskoi as his successor, after the Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin's suspension of the constitution was, unsurprisingly, unconstitutional. If Coll's version is the gist, it's a gist of an interestingly lopsided kind.

(I remember the chill that came over me the first time I read the phrase "newspaper of record", the appalling notion that any newspaper could be so trusted that historians should leave to its journalists the first draft of history. It made me worry about the histories to be written. Robert Fisk recounted in his speeches publicising The Great War for Civilisation how when he had told Israeli journalist Amira Hass that he felt this drafting was the journalist's role she had replied "No, our job is to hold centres of power accountable for their actions." Sadly, most journos appear to have given up on taking either of these tasks seriously. The performance of the world's most famous "newspaper of record" in relation to the excuses for the Iraq War is an obvious illustration, as is their current parrotting of administration claims that the insurgency is armed by Iran. As Fisk quipped in his speeches: "They should just call themselves Officials Say.")

Eventually Yeltsin turned on the media and liberals who had supported him in 1993, as they reacted to the increasing unpopularity of his economic policies, his corruption, and the disastrous war in Chechnya. The courtiers of the media in places like the US might consider themselves lucky that they can belatedly follow popular opinion and start criticising their leaders without being heavied the way the Russian media was, but they should probably take note of where supporting thug and criminal regimes can lead you just for the salutary effect. Here's Kagarlitsky again, with my favourite quote from the book.

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.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering at the decided lack of topicality of this post, I would attempt to blame bouts of illness and weeks of intermittently pole-axed internet connection for the tardiness, but that would leave me exposed to Homer-like shouts of "Hey - that's a half-truth!"

A Winter's Rant

I don't know who makes Codral, or runs their marketing, but the "soldier on" advertising that reappears around this time of year, much as in some parts of the world swallows announce the arrival of Spring, always makes me want to find the individuals responsible and treat them each to a vigorous Glasgow kiss. Seriously, I do not need these cretins encouraging people to dose themselves up with symptom-suppressing drugs and drag their germ-ridden bodies into work; it is bad for their health and, more to the point, it is potentially bad for mine.

I only mention it because this year they've gone one better, simultaneously shilling a product the name of which permanently escapes me which supposedly boosts your immune system in order to make you less likely to catch a cold. You know, because there's so many about this time of year, like the one currently being exuded in your direction from some self-martyring idiot and disease vector who decided to "soldier on". That's very clever; I believe similar marketing tactics have produced good results for the arms industry.

It is of course important for bacteria and viruses to ensure their hosts stay at least well enough that they can be out and about passing their parasitic passengers on to new hosts. Bearing that in mind, the "suppress your symptoms and go to work" spruikers might want to give a thought to who it is they're really working for.

Humanitarian Intervention

Alex Mitchell, writing to Crikey!.

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.

On the Inside, the Roses Grow...

Tim Battin has some very good thoughts on the "baffling" disconnect between how the public and the pundits perceive Howard's chance of re-election.

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.

Well, indeed. Here's Barrie Cassidy's opening spiel - note the lovely give-away in the second paragraph:

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.

Gosh. Ordinary punters ignoring the opinion of the business sector - how terribly weird.

It's a very apt title, "Insiders", and not just because of the host's revolving door career, journalist to press secretary and back again. I can't bear the program but occasionally find it useful to remind myself of the average journo's paralysing incapacity to poke his head outside the hermetic bubble of establishment thinking.

Journalists interviewing journalists is always a good sign that you can expect no sensible insight - Insiders seems to have decided to make a totem of this truism with its weekly chat with the increasingly irrelevant Paul "the Duchess" Kelly. Coincidentally, his mouthing of the "baffling" polls concept served to underline exactly what was wrong with the forum in which he delivered 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.

Note the assumption here that the "insider" view is the correct one. Never mind that the outsiders are the ones who'll be deciding the election result. Never mind that the perception of good economic management is a product of the same bubble-thinking that leaves the pundits baffled by the polls.

How it works is amusingly demonstrated here:

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.

See, there you go. Rudd's (partial, temporary) refusal to cave in to business demands is driven by "political" and "electoral" considerations. If he had caved, he would have been swayed by a commitment to "economic productivity".

Back to Mr Battin:

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.

I'll pointlessly note in passing that it was only after Hanson spoke out against economic globalisation that Howard denounced her. His objections were notable by their absence while she was still only wittering on about "the Aboriginal industry" and Asians who "can't assimilate".

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.

Which is a polite way of saying that the pundits don't give a rat's arse about Industrial Relations because they don't give a rat's arse about workers, as is only to be expected from middle-class "professionals" whose meal-tickets depend on framing agendas in the manner preferred by their employers.

Some Links

Briefly, a (mostly glum) selection from stuff what I've been reading.

Richard Seymour and Tariq Ali on growing problems for Pervez Musharraf.

Four on Iraq: Michael Schwartz on the ongoing American attempts to formalise the takeover of Iraq's oil resources (Via Matt Taibbi); Nir Rosen on the Iraqi refugee crisis; "A Small War Guaranteed to Damage a Superpower", the preface to the paperback edition of Patrick Cockburn's The Occupation summarising the current situation in Iraq; Jeffrey St Clair on war profiteering.

Mark Ames on the Virginia Tech massacre.

Damien Love interviews Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride about Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind.

Those Who Cannot Learn from History Get All the Sweet Gigs

Robert Dreyfuss on Bernard "Huntington's Choreographer" Lewis writing in the WSJ.

[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.)

Dreyfuss doesn't mention it here, but one of the oddities of Lewis' failure to recall how the Islamic Religious Right was cosseted by the West as part of Cold War strategies to marginalise Third World nationalism and leftism is that these were policies he approved of at the time.

Dreyfuss' take down also notes that Lewis appears to be under the impression that the Taliban chased the Soviets out of Afghanistan, rather an important mistake for a historian to make, although not for those who like to pretend nothing of relevance has happened since the siege of Vienna.

Some Takedowns II

Doghouse Riley takes down Victor Davis Hanson.

Tim Lambert takes down John Berlau.

Matt Taibbi takes down the Cult of Yeltsin.

The Bones of Your Head

Today's historical oddity comes from Randall Stross' biography of Thomas Edison, as extracted in the NYT:

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.”

I wonder if Beethoven ever tried that.

The Persian Version

By Robert Graves

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.

H/t dogle in the Lenin's Tomb thread. Note that the Hellenophile Graves is here mocking in parody the euphemistic and self-exonerating language of official military histories and dispatches that glossed over the carnage of war as he experienced it while an officer in the trenches of the Great, later First World, War; the war that future historians will record as the defining event of the following century, the century of which we are still a part - don't kid yourselves. Feel free to click a link at random; that's how they were added. Gosh darn, I love subtextural culture wars!

Recognition

Lawrence of Cyberia clears up a concept that was always a little baffling - Israel's "right" to exist:

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.

Some Takedowns

Matt Taibbi takes down Tom Friedman.

Jim Riley takes down Frank Miller.

Chris Floyd (citing Johann Hari) takes down Mark Steyn.

Recent Reading: The Return - II

Roger Gathman at Limited Inc. recommended Michael Pollan's article in the New York Times, Unhappy Meals, a fascinating history of the rise and effect of nutritionism.

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.

Read it all.

Meanwhile, discovering that Mr Gathman had been a contributor at the Austin Chronicle, I dug up some of his old articles. In a review of a number of medical texts, I discovered this interesting tale of serendipity. The tale is well known; just how serendipitous the discovery was I had not known.

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."

Speaking of book reviews, while searching for ones of Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder I was taken with this summary of the argument of Jared Diamond's Collapse.

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.

You could, of course, just read the whole review, or even the book, which currently sits amongst my other volumes, mocking me with its two inch wide spine.

While on the environment, here's a great article from Jeffrey St Clair on the destructive impact of grazing on public lands. Being the kind of chap I am, I'll quote his snarky takedown of the Western myth that attaches to ranchers, rather than the more informative stuff.

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.

Also enjoyable is St Clair's angry piece The Withering of the American Environmental Movement.

If you're looking for angry, be sure to check out Roger Morris' mini-biography of Donald Rumsfeld, in two parts at TomDispatch. (Actually, it's pretty much everywhere.)

[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.

Ah, history.

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.

Also at TomDispatch I found the essay that Mike Davis has expanded into a book on the history of the car-bomb. (Part two here.)

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.

And if that leaves you insufficiently disturbed, try this rather old (but new to me) article by Craig Unger on Tim La Haye and the premillenial dispensationalists (also soon to be a book).

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."

Mr Unger recently produced a report on the people shilling for a war with Iran, From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq. Any thematic segue between that piece and the earlier one on Rapturism is hopefully entirely in your own mind.