Campanastan

And On The 8th Day, God Got REALLY Creative!

From the current Funny Tmes.

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” - Oscar Wilde

George W. Bush Library: Is 'The Pet Goat' There?

Here is Mike Luckovich's editorial cartoon from The Oregonian. 

What can I say? A picture is worth 1000 words, perhaps more in this case.

Wonder if there is a copy of The Pet Goat in the library?

Enjoy!

"One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." - President George W. Bush

Rocking the Boat: The Wife of Pi

Found this here.

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” - Yann Martel

Four More Years...Herding Cats in DC

Barry Blitt's cover of the current issue of The New Yorker.

Here is what Blitt said about the cover:

I’m allergic to cats—even pictures of cats make me wheeze. But I like the expression “herding cats” to describe organizing uncoöperative characters, and it’s also a nice metaphor for this President dealing with this particular Congress over the so-called fiscal cliff (among other things). So I took one for the team.

 

Enjoy!

"Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function." - Garrison Keillor

The Week Cover: The Faces of 2012

Love this cover from the 28 December 2012 - 4 January 2013 issue of The Week:

So who are these people?

Susan Rice is looking over the cliff; Gov. Chris Christie is hugging President Obama, who has just pushed Mitt Romney over the cliff; Gen. David Petraeus is hanging onto the branch; Hillary Clinton is greeting Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma/Mynamar; Kim Jong Un and Psy are in the back doing it 'Gangnam Style'; and Clint Eastwood is kicking the chair. 

"Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get." - George Bernard Shaw (from the issue)

Happy Thanksgiving and Black Friday Blessings!

That's the new Thanksgiving greeting in the USA.

Today's newspapers are the heaviest of the year:

The Gazette-Times:

Maybe I can pick me up a Ruger at Cabela's.

More:

Damn! No gun sales at The Oregonian!

Galahad is checking out BB&B:

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving (to my USA friends) and to everybody else - a great Thursday!

"Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving." - W. T. Purkiser

For Cat Lovers: 'I Could Pee on This and Other Poems by Cats'

Francesco Marciuliano, writer of the comic strip Sally Forth, has done us cat lovers a great service by penning, I Could Pee on This and Other Poems by Cats, a hilarious collection of poems attributed to cats.

I gave it to Mary Frances for our recent anniversary and we have amused ourselves at after-dinner tea by reading from it. Galahad (his slave name; feline name: K'sazytop-day) seems to enjoy it, too.

Some samples:

Nudge

Nudge
Nudge nudge nudge
Nudge nudge nudge nudge nudge
Nudge
Your glass just shattered on the floor

Work

They say there are 
Twenty-four hours in a day
But I'm only up for three of them
And two I consider overtime
 

I Lick Your Nose

I lick your nose
I lick your nose again
I drag my claws down your eyelids
Oh, you're up? Feed me!

O Christmas Tree

O please
O come on
O like you didn't know
What you were getting for Christmas
Before I ripped open all your gifts
O by the way
The tree looks better on its side
O I really do think so 

This Is My Chair

This is my chair
This is my couch
This is my bed
This is my bench
There is my chaise
There is my settee
Those are my footstools
Those are my rugs
Everywhere is my place to sleep
Perhaps you should just get a hotel room 

You can see where this goes.

"Cats would eat us if they could." - Mary Frances

Will "The Wrecking Crew' Wreck Your Memories of 1960s Rock 'n Roll?

Louie Shelton is the guy who played one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in all of rock 'n roll.

You say, 'Who? Which group was he with and what was the song?'

Shelton was with no group and the recognizable guitar riff is the opening of the Monkees' Last Train to Clarksville. Nope, not Peter Tork or Michael Nesmith - Louie Shelton.

Shelton was a member of a small (several dozen men - bassist Carol Kaye was the sole female) group of 1960s to early 1970s LA studio musicians known as 'The Wrecking Crew' who played on many of the top popular tunes of that era. The name was coined by the unofficial leader - drummer Hal Blaine - to refer to the young, jeans-and-T-shirt-clad musicians who were supplanting the older, coat-and-tie guys who claimed the younger generation was going to wreck the music business (and their careers, too). 

'What's the big deal?' you say. Certainly everybody knew that the Monkees were a 'contrived' group who did not play the instruments on their hits. And certainly vocal groups like the Fifth Dimension or soloists like Frank Sinatra used studio musicians on their recordings.

But groups who appeared to play their own instruments?

How about the Byrds? On the Mr. Tambourine Man single only Byrd Roger McGuinn played. The Grass Roots. Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Union Gap. And the Beach Boys. What? The Beach Boys! Yes, on the iconic singles Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, Good Vibrations, etc., some other people are playing. The beautiful 12-string guitar work on Sloop John B is not that of Carl Wilson but Billy Strange.

The extensive use of studio musicians to play the music of those who were supposedly playing their own is now no longer the well-kept secret it was for many years, thanks to books like The Wrecking Crew, by Kent Hartman.

Other well-known recording centers had their versions of the WC: Nashville had the A-Team; Detroit had the Funk Brothers; and Memphis and New York had their groups as well. 

The record companies used studio musicians because they wanted that 'perfect sound' on the records. They could record the instrumental tracks and then overdub the vocals later. The real group members could stay on tour and would not have to be brought back from the road to hit the studio. And I suspect the studio musicians, many of whom had their roots in jazz, were much better and not given to fits of pique and temper tantrums that could stall recording sessions and cost money. The studio musicians were, in a word, professionals.

Some, notably Glen Campbell (who toured with the Beach Boys), went on to fame and fortune as solo artists. Others labored in obscurity - at least as far the record-buying public was concerned - but became rich. Some - drummers Hal Blaine, Earl Palmer; sax man Steve Douglas; and keyboardist Leon Russell (who had a great solo career) - have even been inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame.

Hartman's book is very good. He discusses several of the WC members in some detail. There's a good recounting of Phil Spector and his 'Wall of Sound' in which he used members of the WC. 

By the mid-1970s the WC had virtually disappeared. Why? The demise of AM radio, the increasing length of songs, technological advances (synthesizers, drum machines), and groups who insisted on playing their own instruments all played roles.

If you are interested in the 1960s LA popular music scene you will enjoy this book. The only thing I missed was a comprehensive 'Where Are They Now?' section. That to me was a serious omission.

So am I disappointed? Just a bit. Surprised? Not too much. The music is still there as are the memories. I'll just read the album covers more carefully this time, and take the instrumental credits with a huge grain of of salt.

So 'The Wrecking Crew' has not wrecked my memories. The music is what counts, and it is still in my head. I've got the hearing aids to prove it (I was a late 1960s college DJ).

Finally this postscript. In the late 1970s through the mid-1980s I worked with a hydrogeologist named Ralph Patt.  He had an early career as a an accomplished jazz guitarist in New York City. He played with big bands, big names, and then worked as a studio musician till 1975. At that time, he grew tired (to put it mildly) of the popular music that permeated the landscape and the lessened demand for jazz guitarists. So he revived his 1952 geology degree and became a hydrogeologist. I guess he was a victim of NYC's version of the Wrecking Crew.

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” - Decca Records’ rejection letter to The Beatles, 1962.

Gus Speth Speaketh...

I got all this from Tom Swihart's excellent Watery Foundations blog. In a recent post 

, Swihart mentions that Speth, Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, founder of the World Resources Institute, etc., is writing a book, America the Possible: Roadmap to a New Economy.

Speth is one of our foremost environmental lawyers and advocates.

These two passages struck me: 

It is simply unimaginable that American politics as we know it today will deliver the transformative changes needed. Political reform and building a new and powerful progressive movement in America must be priority number one. Above all else, we must build a new democratic reality—a government truly of, by, and for the people.

The most important prodemocracy reform is to undermine the power of money in our elections and in lobbying. The emphasis of campaign finance reform should be on encouraging small donor contributions and public funding of elections—the democratization of campaign finance itself.

Amen!

Looks like a book worth reading.

Be thankful that I did not title this post 'Also Sprach Speth'.

"In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem." - George Carlin

Read Timothy Snyder's 'Bloodlands'...If You Dare

I just finished Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, a book describing, in painstaking detail, the murder of over 14,000,000 people in the region between what is now central Poland to western Russia and north to the Baltic Sea and south to the Black Sea.

That region is what Snyder calls 'bloodlands'. On the accompanying map the bloodlands are the areas with the diagonal lines (from Anne Applebaum's review).

The slaughter occurred during the period 1933-1945 when Hitler and Stalin were murdering Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, et al. These people did not die because of war, but because deliberate decisions were made to murder them.

The book is one of the mist difficult I've ever read. But I am glad I did. Here is the Preface.

From the homepage:

Americans call the Second World War "The Good War". But before it even began, America's wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens — and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.

Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlandswill be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history. 

Unforgettable and compelling. And did I say 'disturbing'?

But so necessary.

‎"No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. In the twenty-first century, we see a second wave of aggressive wars with victim claims, in which leaders not only present their peoples as victims but make explicit reference to the mass murders of the twentieth century. The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence." - Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 399-400.

The Content of Our Character...

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr ,,who would have turned 83 yesterday. I have come to appreciate and admire him (and all the civil rights workers) by reading Taylor Branch's brilliant trilogy of the civil rights era: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65; and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68.

What thoroughly amazes me were the toughness, resiliency, and resolve of the civil
rights workers, and how they honored King's insistence upon nonviolent resistance. Along with King, the names of heroes such as John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Rosa Parks, Coretta King, Septima Clark, James Meredith, Andrew Young, Marian Wright, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Bevel, Bob Moses, et al., are forever burned in my mind. Similarly, I shall not soon forget place names like Selma and Montgomery, or people like Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond, and their ilk.

As I read the aforementioned books, cringing at what humans can do to each other, one thought haunted me: what would I have done had I been a Southern white person during that time (I am actually half-North Carolina Scots-Irish WASP)? I've concluded that I probably would not have been one of the segregationist ringleaders, but certainly would not have risen to the defense of the oppressed. I probably would have (very quietly) supported their cause, but not done anything to jeopardize my comfortable middle-class lifestyle (see the quote below). Certainly Northerners were no better than Southerners when it came to desegregation; recall the Boston busing "incidents" of the 1970s.

Another thing also amazes me: how much the Southern poor whites ("poor white trash") and blacks had in common. Both were horribly oppressed, but skillful politicians kept the poor whites riled about the "uppity Negroes". If the two groups had united, there would have been hell to pay.

Here is King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

 

 I do have a few interesting memories about that period, as I was a student in Virginia (College of William and Mary) from 1966-1970. Just after I arrived in Virginia, Sen. Harry F. Byrd died - he was the scion of the infamous Byrd (members of the FFV) political dynasty in Virginia, and the whole state mourned his death. What I remember most about that time is the characterization of Byrd by a local columnist:

"Never was there a man who so dragged his feet through the sands of time."

"I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr., 28 August 1963

Hug a Librarian! It's Banned Books Week, 24 September - 1 October 2011

Banned Books Week! Something to celebrate! Go read a banned book, or one people are trying to ban, this week. Read (or see Truffaut's film of) Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

 Hug a librarian. Gladly - I'm married to one and she's quite gorgeous!. 

Can't think of a good banned or challenged book to read? Here is a list.

From the ALA BBW site:

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.  Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.  BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings.  Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections.  Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association; American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores.  It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. In 2011, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; National Coalition Against Censorship; National Council of Teachers of English; and PEN American Center also signed on as sponsors.

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, please see Calendar of Events, Ideas and Resources, and the new Banned Books Week site. You can also contact the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedomat 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4220, or bbw@ala.org.

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to." - Laurence J. Peter

Clinton's Chilean Caper: Funny Times at the New York Times

 
What a cute couple!

Someone's head must have rolled over this one. Thanks to the Borowitz Report.

 "All the news that fits." - word play on the NYT's slogan

William Easterly's Unpublished Review of Dambisa Moyo's 'Dead Aid'

Economist William Easterly (The White Man's Burden) wrote this review of Dambisa Moyo's controversial book Dead Aid two years ago. The review was commissioned by the London Review of Books which declined to publish it.

He recently posted this on Facebook and his WWW site. It's a powerful piece, like Moyo's book, so much so that I thought it was worth posting here.

Download Moyoreviewforlrbjune2009

Enjoy!

"There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment." - Paul Theroux, referring to Bono (Paul Hewson), "The Rock Star's Burden", The New York Times, 15 December 2005

Honoring King, Remembering Dixie

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr , who would have turned 82 earlier this month. I have come to appreciate and admire him (and all the civil rights workers) by reading Taylor Branch's brilliant  trilogy of the civil rights era: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65; and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68.

What thoroughly amazes me were the toughness, resiliency, and resolve of the civil rights workers, and how they honored King's insistence upon nonviolent resistance. Along with King, the names of heroes such as John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Rosa Parks, Coretta King, Septima Clark, James Meredith, Andrew Young, Marian Wright, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Bevel, Bob Moses, et al., are forever burned in my mind. Similarly, I shall not soon forget place names like Selma and Montgomery, or people like Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond, and their ilk.

As I read the aforementioned books, cringing at what humans can do to each other, one thought haunted me: what would I have done had I been a Southern white person during that time (I am actually half-North Carolina Scots-Irish WASP)? I've concluded that I probably would not have been one of the segregationist ringleaders, but certainly would not have risen to the defense of the oppressed. I probably would have (very quietly) supported their cause, but not done anything to jeopardize my comfortable middle-class lifestyle (see the quote below). Certainly Northerners were no better than Southerners when it came to desegregation; recall the Boston busing "incidents" of the 1970s.

Another thing also amazes me: how much the Southern poor whites ("poor white trash") and blacks had in common. Both were horribly oppressed, but skillful politicians kept the poor whites riled about the "uppity Negroes". If the two groups had united, there would have been hell to pay.

Here is King's "I Have a Dream Speech":

 

I do have a few interesting memories about that period, as I was a student in Virginia (College of William and Mary) from 1966-1970. Just after I arrived in Virginia, Sen. Harry F. Byrd died - he was the scion of the infamous Byrd (members of the FFV) political dynasty in Virginia, and the whole state mourned his death. What I remember most about that time is the characterization of Byrd by a local columnist:

"Never was there a man who so dragged his feet through the sands of time."

Got a Few Hours to Kill? Read The Globe and Mail's WikiLeaks Piece and Reader Comments

So if you have some time on yours hands, my good friend Loring Grren suggests reading this excellent piece in Toronto's The Globe and Mail.

But don't stop there. Here's what Loring adds:

The Globe and Mail seems to have a higher cut of participants in their comments group. As a group, Globe and Mail responders are not obscene and most seem to have spent more than a couple of seconds contemplating their ideas.... and that's quite unusual. There are, at this moment 171 comments on this story and many more second tier replies.  They pretty well cover the full circle of thought on this interesting and developing story.

I can attest to the quality of the comments; I've read a few of them. Wish I had a few hours to kill.

"I don't look at what third-rate or fourth-rate officials say." -- Silvio 'Studs' Berlusconi, Italian Prime Minister

Chris Hedges Laments The 'Death Of The Liberal Class'

You are probably thinking this post has something to do with the results of the recent election. Actually, it doesn't, but it is the title of the new book from journalist Chris Hedges. He spoke about it on NPR's 'Talk of the Nation' yesterday; read the story here.

So what is the book's subject? Try this:

From organizing workers to preventing war to making the economy more  green, journalist Chris Hedges argues that, for decades, liberals have surrendered the good fights to corporations and ruling powers.

In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges slams five specific groups and institutions — the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia — for failing Americans and allowing for the creation of a "permanent underclass."

Hedges says that, for motives ranging from self-preservation to careerism, the "liberal establishment" purged radicals from its own ranks and, as a result, lost its checks on capitalism and corporate power.

Strong words! Hedges posits that the the increasingly disaffected working and middle classes may resort to violence.

A recent trip to Camden, NJ, the poorest city (per capita beais) in the USA, produced this:

When you get up and see the human cost of what this has done — these foreclosures, these bank repossessions, the fact that one in eight Americans and one in four children depend on food stamps to survive," Hedges says, it's clear the system has failed.

But how is that the fault of, say, the universities?

Hedges describes a "kind of withering of the humanities" in which the liberal education that would normally ask broad questions and challenge structure and assumptions has become corporate. Academic departments now carry the burden of raising their own funds. "This is pretty hard to do if you're in the classics department," Hedges notes.

Hedges says he also faults the "purging within economics departments and business schools of people who challenged what I call the utopian vision of globalization — the idea that somehow the marketplace should determine human behavior and guide human activity."

He says that dynamic is to blame for turning elite, Ivy League universities into, essentially, vocational schools.

Not a pretty sight at all. An important and, I suspect,  controversial book.

"Universities no longer train students to think critically, to examine and critique systems of power and cultural and political assumptions, to ask the broad questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. These institutions have transformed themselves into vocational schools." -- Chris Hedges

Last Chance! Celebrate National Newspaper Week, 3-9 October 2010!

Remember newspapers? Well, we're celebrating what's left of them this week, 3-9 October 2010. The WWW site is pretty lame.

Cartoonist Robert Ariail has his own take on the shape of things to come.

 

Who'll keep tabs on our governments and corporations and hold their feet to the fire? Internet sites and blogs can help, but investigative reporting takes nuts-and-bolts journalistic skills snd resources.

We'll miss them when they are gone.

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." --Thomas Jefferson

'Eat, Pray, Loathe'...Oops! 'Eat, Pray, Simper'...Or Maybe 'Eat, Pray, Shop'...

From the perspicacious David Zetland:

We ran into the Eat, Pray, Love women (EPLs) when were were in Ubud, Bali. It was sad enough then, seeing single middle-aged women trying to discover themselves...

 

....but this is getting out of control:

 


"In this book, the author's only explanation for her pathetic simpering twattery is that she is "as affectionate as a cross between a Golden Retriever and a barnacle". This is supposed to tell us why her sex life resembles pollen in a strong breeze." -- Fiona, atgoodreads

Bullshit, Education, Democracy, and Crap Detection: Still Relevant after 40 Years

Over forty years ago, while an undergraduate, I became enamored with the premise that educators had one solemn task: to teach students to be 'crap detectors' (aka 'critical thinkers').Over the years I had forgotten who said that (John Holt?) or where I read it (certainly not Reader's Digest).

Even Google searches were no help - until last week, when a blog post from Stager-to-Go titled, Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection, appeared. It identified the source as the book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. What an appropriate title for a late 1960s book - no wonder it caught my eye!

From the blog post:

Back in the late 1960s, Neil Postman wrote extensively about how educational quality and a healthy democracy were dependent on each citizen having a highly sensitive “shockproof crap detector in their survival kit.” The classic book he co-authored with Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, (Delacorte Press, 1969) discusses crap detection as fundamental to learning. This work is as timely today as it was forty years ago.

Postman delivered a paper, Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection, at the 1969 annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English:

Download BS_speech_Postman

You can also read the speech at the original blog post.

This speech is more relevant today than ever before, especially its premise that a healthy democracy requires a quality education to enable citizens to detect crap.

I recall once telling my students that it was my job to teach them to be crap detectors. The looks I got!

"So any teacher who is interested in crap-detecting must acknowledge that one man’s bullshit is another man’s catechism." -- Neil Postman

Leonard Pitts Opines on 'The New Jim Crow'

Leonard Pitts, Jr., is one of the most thoughtful columnists around today. His recent column deals with the 'war on drugs' and its disproportionate effect on young African-American males. The ffect is insidious: African-American men incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses are saddled with felony records, which allows them to be legally discriminated against when it comes to employment, educaton, housing, voting, etc. The result: a new racial legal caste system.

Pitts notes that African-Americans and whites use and sell drugs in roughly equal percentages, which means that in terms of sheer numbers, whites far outnumber African-Americans in terms of drug use and distribution.

This 'legal caste system' is explored in a recent  book by attorney Michelle Alexander titled, The New Jim Crow. Here she is discussing her book:

 

 

I'll close with a couple e of revealing quotes from Pitts' column:

"You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks.The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while appearing not to." -- Richard M. Nixon, as quoted by H.R. Haldeman, supporting a get-tough-on-drugs strategy

'They give us [black people] time like it's lunch down there. You go down there looking for justice, that's what you find: just us. " -- Richard Pryor

BP Testifies (in Our Dreams!)

The curren issue (7 June 2010) of the  The New Yorker  has another great cover by Barry Blitt.

 

Read Steve Pendlebury's timeline of BP oil spill quotes.

"You do survive these things. I'm not advocating don't care about it hitting the shore or coast and whatever you can do to keep it out of there is fine and dandy,but the ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is."--Rush Limbaugh on his radio show

Jackie Remembered

Sixty-three years ago today, on a cold Tuesday in Brooklyn, Jack Roosevelt 'Jackie' Robinson took the playing field in a game against the Boston Braves at Ebbets Field. He was to face Johnny Sain, one-half of the legendary "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain" pitching duo of the Braves.

Jackie didn't do so well that day: grounded out, flied out, hit into a double play, reached on an error. But his feat went far beyond what he did at the plate or in the field. He became the first African-American to play in a major league baseball game, and entered the history books. Whether we knew it or not, the USA's civil rights era began that day.

Jackie Robinson was a great athlete, but he proved to be an even greater man. At the tender age of 8, in 1956, I saw him play against the St. Louis Cardinals and Stan "The Man" Musial at Ebbets Field. He was nearing the end of his Hall of Fame career, but still went 2-for-4. My father attempted to explain to me the significance of what he had done, but I was too consumed with hot dogs and cotton candy to comprehend. Later, I understood, and realized that what Robinson had done helped free us all. He is now one of my all-time heroes, right up there with Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jackie left us at the all-too-young age of 53. What he endured no doubt contributed to his early death.

Arnold Rampersad wrote an excellent biography, Jackie Robinson. Read it. It's not just about a sports hero, but a hero for us all.

"There is not an American in this country free until every one of us is free." -- Jackie Robinson

Gendercide: The Worldwide War on Baby Girls

This is the cover story of the 4 March 2010 issue of The Economist. Not a pretty sight.

Read the online story.

The first few paragraphs:

Xinran Xue, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

Interesting to see the three South Caucasus countries right below China.

Gruesome stuff.

Maybe we get the US anti-abortionists to speak out against this.

Nahhh...

‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it." -- Chinese woman, quoted in the story

Honoring King, Remembering the South

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would have turned 81 earlier this month. I have come to appreciate and admire him (and all the civil rights workers) by reading Taylor Branch's brilliant  trilogy of the civil rights era: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65; and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68.

What thoroughly amazes me were the toughness, resiliency, and resolve of the civil rights workers, and how they honored King's insistence upon nonviolent resistance. Along with King, the names of heroes such as John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, Rosa Parks, Coretta King, Septima Clark, James Meredith, Andrew Young, Marian Wright, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Bevel, Bob Moses, et al., are forever burned in my mind. Similarly, I shall not soon forget place names like Selma and Montgomery, or people like Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond, and their ilk.

As I read the aforementioned books, cringing at what humans can do to each other, one thought haunted me: what would I have done had I been a Southern white person during that time (I am actually half-North Carolina Scots-Irish WASP)? I've concluded that I probably would not have been one of the segregationist ringleaders, but certainly would not have risen to the defense of the oppressed. I probably would have (very quietly) supported their cause, but not done anything to jeopardize my comfortable middle-class lifestyle (see the quote below). Certainly Northerners were no better than Southerners when it came to desegregation; recall the Boston busing "incidents" of the 1970s.

Another thing also amazes me: how much the Southern poor whites ("poor white trash") and blacks had in common. Both were horribly oppressed, but skillful politicians kept the poor whites riled about the "uppity Negroes". If the two groups had united, there would have been hell to pay.

Here is King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

I do have a few interesting memories about that period, as I was a student in Virginia (College of William and Mary) from 1966-1970. Just after I arrived in Virginia, Sen. Harry F. Byrd died - he was the scion of the infamous Byrd (members of the FFV) political dynasty in Virginia, and the whole state mourned his death. What I remember most about that time is the characterization of Byrd by a local columnist:

"Never was there a man who so dragged his feet through the sands of time."

 How true!

I recall going on field trips to areas in the rural South and being "bold" enough to enter the "Colored" bathrooms or drink from the "Colored Only" water fountains. To me it was a game; I had little realization or understanding of all the hatred and oppression embodied in those few simple words. And I am now embarrased to admit that my roommate (a Jew) and I (a Yankee) had a Confederate flag in our dorm room. Sure, we used it to cover holes in the wall, but that's a lame excuse - we could have used a psychedelic poster or a peace symbol, not a heinous symbol anathema to millions.

One recollection, though, is humorous. I was playing with the W & M marching band at the Southern Governors' conference in Williamsburg. As we stood at attention, Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia came by and started scurrying among us, chattering away, grabbing at our instruments and asking if we would play "Dixie". Finally, our stoic band director, Charles Varner, could restrain himself no longer and quietly but firmly said to Maddox, "I'm afraid we don't know 'Dixie', Governor, but we would be glad to play 'Marching Through Georgia' for you." That stopped Lester dead in his tracks, and he frowned and walked away. After that, for me, ol' Chuck's stature zoomed upwards.

We all have a huge debt to Dr. King and his followers. They were all remarkable, courageous people.

"We will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968   

Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University

Happy New Year! ¡Prospero Año Nuevo!

Gaye Tuchman, a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, has recently published Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University.

As the title implies, the nonfiction book details the efforts of a state research university to improve its academic standing and enter the realm of elite state universities. It's a poorly-kept secret that Wannabe U is, in fact, Tuchman's employer, the University of Connecticut.  

Here's a news article about the book by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed. There are a number of interesting comments in response to his article. 

If you want to sample the book, here's a scanned copy of Chapter 1:

Download WannabeU

The synopsis from the book's WWW site:

In most debates over its future, the university is represented—by both its critics and its champions—as a secular temple for learning, a sacred space freed from the more mundane concerns that trouble other institutions. But lately this lofty image looks increasingly tarnished, especially with regard to public research universities. There, a new class of administrative professionals has been busy working to make colleges as much like businesses as possible. In this eye-opening exposé of the modern university, Gaye Tuchman paints a candid portrait of these wannabe corporate managers and the new regime of revenue streams, mission statements, and five-year plans they’ve ushered in.

Based on years of observation at a state school, Wannabe U tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators wander from job to job and reductively view the students as future workers in need of training. Obsessed with measurable successes, they stress auditing and accountability, which leads, Tuchman reveals, to policies of surveillance and control dubiously cloaked in the guise of scientific administration. Following the big money to be made from the discoveries of Wannabe U’s researchers, Tuchman probes the cozy relationships that the administration forms with industry and the government.

Like the best campus novelists, Tuchman entertains with her acidly witty observations of backstage power dynamics and faculty politics, but ultimately Wannabe U is a hard-hitting account of how higher education’s misguided pursuit of success fails us all.

I suspect many of my academic colleagues would decry the types of change that Wannabe U is attempting to implement. It's no surprise that academics are among the biggest whiners around, despite the fact that many of them have the closest thing our society has to 'lifetime jobs' (as yours truly does).

What amazes me about academics is that they pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of change - in science, engineering, medicine, the humanities - but are themselves highly resistant to change at their own institutions.

Having said that, it's good to remember that not all change is necessarily good, or well thought out.

Campanastan's Minister of Education has been instructed to digest this book and regurgitate a summary. Your President-for-Life is looking forward to reading her synopsis.

"The purpose of education is not to make men carpenters, but to make carpenters men." -- W.E.B. Du Bois

"Never mistake activity for achievement." -- John Wooden

Campanastan Wants a REAL Knowledge Center, Too!

In early November 2009 my wife Mary Frances, a professional librarian and Campanastan's Minister of Information, and yours truly, President-for-Life, got an inside tour of the University of Nevada-Reno's Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center. Our tour guide was Carol Parkhurst, Senior Director, University Libraries.

Why post about a library?

Two reasons:

1) this is not about a library - it's about a model for the evolution of libraries; and
2) Campanastan needs superior access to knowledge and a place to house and distribute the knowledge our citizens discover and appropriate from others. 

[Disclosure notice: Carol Parkhurst and her husband, hydrogeologist extraordinaire Steve Wheatcraft,  have been very good friends of your President-for-Life for close to 30 years. I take partial (50%) credit for introducing them to each other; I was the best man at their wedding and Steve fulfilled the same role at ours.]

Since the Minister of Information is the expert I asked her to write about the UNR KC. She could not refuse such a request.

In November we toured the University of Nevada-Reno Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center.  The tour guide was the person responsible for this remarkable entity—Carol Parkhurst, Senior Director, University Libraries.  Both Carol and I have been in librarianship for a long time and have seen the naming fashions come and go.  Often these trendy names for libraries (e.g., information center, learning center and knowledge center) are just attempts to attract non-library users.  But the UNR KC has achieved something special in my mind—it is a true, physical and functioning knowledge center. 

Besides being gorgeous—all its appointments tasteful, functional and coordinated—it is designed to integrate all the various information accessing technologies available to us today.  Remember that books are a technology just as nettops are a technology—the key is to get the entire format product line to provide a whole, seamless experience in information access to the user.  UNR KC does that.  Books are very much in evidence, but they flow in the physical space to connect with computers and other media so that information may be discovered and extracted (or created).  A multiple-story edifice with almost 300,000 square feet of usable space, it contains expertly-organized computer areas, media production services, social interaction areas of various types, clearly-marked, well-lighted bookshelves and supports these products and services with state-of-the-art (and more) backend processes.

The whole exceeds the parts, which should be a goal of libraries.  Carol Parkhurst was able to bring prodigious attention to detail together with an overall vision to create this true knowledge center.  Congratulations!

You get the picture. This is an extraordinary resource. What's incredulous is that more attention (as of early November 2009) has not been paid to this feat. I suspect it will eventually; the KC has been open just a little over a year.

Your President-for-Life especially liked the multi-story publication 'warehouse' at the back of the KC, where about 660,000 little-used documents are housed and retrieved remotely - all in about 10-15 minutes after a request is made.

Here are some videos of the UNR KC. Take a look at the slide show of the KC's construction.

Campanastan wants one of these.

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." -- Samuel Johnson

Believe in a Supreme Being? Why You Can Embrace Evolution

150 years ago today, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, considered by many the most important scientific treatise of all time.

The title was later shortened to The Origin of Species.

Read/listen to this story on NPR.

I am not a religious person but I do believe in a Supreme Being. I see no conflict between evolution and creation. I believe the  6 days of creation alluded to in the Bible are not to be taken literally, but meant to make a point.

In fact, I think evolution supports the concept of a Supreme Being. Why? Because it is a thoroughly ingenious way to propagate life. Any old supreme being can wave his/her arms and produce dinosuars on the spot. But to come up with a such a subtle means to create life, starting with a chemical soup and single-celled organisms to produce dinosaurs, whales, birds, reptiles, insects, apes, trees, flowers, sea scorpions, human, etc., is truly special. Now that's a Supreme Being!

In fact, I was pleased to learn of this quote from one of the leading clergymen of Darwin's day, who sent this repsonse when Darwin sent him a copy:

 

"It's just as noble a conception of God to think that he created animals and plants that then evolved, that were capable of self-development, as it is to think that God has to constantly create new forms and fill in the gaps that he's left in his own creation." --Rev. Charles Kingsley, a leading Church of England clergyman, commenting on Darwin's book

Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations

I just finished a remarkable book (the title of this post) about an even more remarkable woman - Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). Georgina Howell's book is generally accepted as one of the best of the Bell biographies.

By any measure, Bell was extraordinary. Whatever she chose to do - designing gardens, Alpine mountaineering,  writing, translating, exploring the Middle East, learning languages, etc. - she did it very well. At age 18 she became the first woman to achive a First in History at Oxford.

She was born into a wealthy English family. She used her family's money to finance her expeditions to the Middle East. 

You would have expected someone like Bell to be an ardent feminist and supporter of women's suffrage. But she was opposed to the latter. Howell suggests that she was really a patrician, and was annoyed enough that lower-class men had been given granted the vote, so why compound the problem and grant lower-class women the vote as well? 

She's been called many things, among them: Queen of the desert; Queen of Iraq; female Lawrence of Arabia. Modern day Iraq is largely the result of Bell. She had as much to do with fomenting the Arab Revolt of WWI as did T.E. Lawrence, albeit from behind the scenes.

She committed suicide in Baghdad, dismayed that the Iraq she helped create was unraveling. Wonder what she'd think of things now.

Whether you admire intrepid, intellligent and unconventional women, wish to learn more of recent Middle East history, or just savor a good biography, I recommend Howell's book.

"...the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it --nor can they." -- Gertrude Bell

"Why will promising young Englishmen marry such fools of women?" -- Gertrude Bell, to a young colleague and his bride at a luncheon in Baghdad

Celebrate Banned Books Week!

I almost missed this event! Fortunately, Mary Frances reminded me the other day.

From the American Library Association's WWW site:

Banned Books Week (BBW) [26 September - 3 October] is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the

importance of the First Amendment.  Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.  BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings.  Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections.  Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association; American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association;American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores.  It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, please see Calendar of Events and Ideas and Resources. You can also contact the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom at 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4220, or bbw@ala.org

While you're at it, give your librarian a hug. For me, I get to hug Mary Frances!

And celebrate the First Amendment and its guarantee of freedom of RAPPS!

I think I'll look for my copy of The Catcher in the Rye.  Fortunately, my high school was not staffed with idiots.

"All morons hate it when you call them a moron."  -- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 6

Happy 91st Birthday, Nelson Mandela!

Nelson Mandela celebrates his 91st birthday today. He is one of my all-time heroes, along with Jackie Robinson and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A remarkable man, who was "too busy to hate" after he was released from prison in 1990, he put South Africa on the road to true democracy when he was elected president in 1994.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

Two excellent books about him: his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom; and Nelson Mandela: A Biography by Martin Meredith.

Here is an NPR story about an audio book of Mandela's favorite folk tales.

The picture is from Bloomberg.com.

 "When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat." -- Nelson Mandela

Campanastan Ventures South: The Central America Report 1

 So did I drive to Reno or someplace?

No, I'm writing this from a Holiday Inn just a stone's throw from the Miraflores Locks on the banks of the Panama Canal.

My graduate student Evan Miles and I arrived yesterday after a trip through Houston on Continental Airlines.

We're both here to present papers at NGWA's Groundwater for the Americas conference. Here is a PDF of the program.

Evan and I are here until 10 June, when we will head to Managua to check on some water projects  by El Porvenir and Agua Para La Vida that were funded by the Ann Campana Judge Foundation (ACJF). We will also assess some potential projects.

After Nicaragua we will travel to Honduras to visit friends and explore some potential projects there as well. We'll fly home from San Pedro Sula on 20 June.

Below is a photo I took of Lago Alajuela (I'm pretty sure), the artificial lake that supplies fresh water for the locks of the Panama Canal. Madden Dam is visible.  

I am sure I don't need to tell you what an amazing feat the construction of the Panama Canal was. The engineering feat alone was remarkable, as was the health feat (yellow fever, malaria). Now consider all that was done 100 years ago! The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough is an exceptional book about all the difficulties faced by the Americans and the earlier French attempt. Something like 27,500 people died in the two efforts. I highly recommend the book.

Here are a few pictures of a Panama City suburb as we approached Tocumen International Airport and the main terminal itself. The Panamanian immigration, customs, and baggage handling operations were extremely efficient. But we had to fill out four forms: immigration,customs, tourist card ($5), and an affidavit regarding swine flu exposure (which no one collected from me).

It's been over 9 years since I visited here. Panama City was impressive then, what with all the big bank buildings and high-rise luxury condos and apartments. "Drogas," said my driver then, and he elaborated on how the high rises and office buildings were paid for by drug money and assorted money-laundering operations. If he was correct, then it looks like those businesses have boomed since 2000.  

And AT&T was right - my iPhone does work! 

I'll try to keep you updated as best I can.

"I don't want to go into history; I want to go into the Canal Zone." -- Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera, former Panamanian president who got the canal from the USA

Savages and Scoundrels: Paul VanDevelder Strikes Again!

A while back I wrote about friend Paul VanDevelder's landmark book, Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation. In it, he described the devastating effects of a government water project, the Garrison Dam, on Native Americans in North Dakota.

At the time Paul told me that his new book was on the verge of release, and it is now out: Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory.

He forwarded this recent review from a real heavyweight:

Here is a profound dismantling of the whole mythical edifice surrounding the westward expansion that shaped the republic. VanDevelder identifies our historical amnesia about federal Indian policy as a profound moral crisis that needs to be confronted, and after reading his book, it’s hard to argue with him. He’s spent a lifetime exposing some of the ruthless conduct that continued well into the 20th century, and his previous book, Coyote Warrior, really had an impact. Some have called Savages & Scoundrels a Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for the 21st century, and it’s an apt comparison. With the 1851 Treaty at Horse Creek as Exhibit A, VanDevelder unpacks the consequences of this broken treaty. It’s a shocking and passionate book, but one anchored in impeccable scholarship. [John Eklund]

Here is a synopsis from the book's WWW site:

 

What really happened in the early days of our nation? How was it possible for white settlers to march across the entire continent, inexorably claiming Native American lands for themselves? Who made it happen, and why? This gripping book tells America’s story from a new perspective, chronicling the adventures of our forefathers and showing how a legacy of repeated betrayals became the bedrock on which the republic was built.

 

Paul VanDevelder takes as his focal point the epic federal treaty ratified in 1851 at Horse Creek, formally recognizing perpetual ownership by a dozen Native American tribes of 1.1 million square miles of the American West. The astonishing and shameful story of this broken treaty—one of 371 Indian treaties signed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—reveals a pattern of fraudulent government behavior that again and again displaced Native Americans from their lands. VanDevelder describes the path that led to the genocide of the American Indian; those who participated in it, from cowboys and common folk to aristocrats and presidents; and how the history of the immoral treatment of Indians through the twentieth century has profound social, economic, and political implications for America even today.

You can read more reviews here.

Looks like Paul has another winner on his hands.

"The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives." — Native American proverb

The Economist Sends a Chill

Check out the cover of The Economist.

 

"China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese." -- Charles de Gaulle

The Gamble

Thomas E. Ricks was on yesterday's Morning Edition on NPR, discussing his new book, The Gamble . The book focuses on Iraq's 'surge era'.

Wish I could say his interview with Steve Inskeep left me with a good feeling, but I'd be lying. Ricks, who wrote the excellent Fiasco, thinks we're only about halfway through our time in Iraq. He notes that no one in Baghdad think that all the combat troops will be out by 2011.

Some snippets from the interview:

"The point is as long as you have American troops in Iraq, no matter what you call them, they are going to be fighting and dying," Ricks says. "The surge worked tactically — it improved security enormously. But it didn't succeed strategically, politically. And that was its larger goal."

Ricks argues that the Iraq war "was the biggest mistake in the history of American foreign policy," adding that "we don't yet understand how big a mistake this is."

He paints a bleak long-term picture for Iraq, where the country is no longer an American ally.

"It's not going to be a democracy, it's going to have a surprising level of violence, it's probably going to be an ally of Iran and it's probably going to be ruled by some sort of dictator, some sort of little Saddam," Ricks says.

One thing he mentioned really disturbed me. While giving a talk near Mill Valley, CA - that bastion of liberalism in Marin County - he told his audience he believed that if we drew down the troops too much, genocide would likely result.

The response from the "Gucci liberals"? "So what?" and  "Genocide happens all the time."

Enlightened comments from the same people who no doubt donate heavily to Darfur causes and decried our inaction during the Rwandan genocide. Wonderful.

"The events for which this war will be remembered have not yet occurred." -- Thomas Ricks, The Gamble, paraphrasing Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq

The New Yorker Injects Some Humor Into A-Roid's Plight

A-Roid gets The New Yorker treatment. Great cartoon ("Off Base") by Barry Blitt.

 

"And to be quite honest, I don’t know exactly what substance I was guilty of using." -- Alex Rodríguez , interview with Peter Gammons

Darwin and Lincoln: Co-Evolution?

Today we celebrate the 200th birthday of two giants - Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two gentlemen who made their marks in disparate fields. Both were born on this day in 1809.

I won't go into the usual details of their lives, except to say that both are still around, having enjoyed a renaissance of sorts.

Lincoln's popularity stems from a number of recent books about him - most notably, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and President Obama's fondness for and emulation of him. He's also arguably the greatest American president.

Darwin's resurgent "notoriety" stems from his theory of evolution, which is under assault from a number of the "usual suspects" who tout creationism, or its stalking-horse, intelligent design. 

His opponents are gaining ground in several places.

As an aside, I find no contradiction between a Supreme Being and evolution. In fact, I think it would be through evolution that a Supreme Being would demonstrate its infinite creativity. What an ingenious way to populate and speciate the Earth, and keep its poor humans guessing as to how it was done. Brilliant!

I recently read a review of a new book about both men, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. by Adam Gopnik.

Here is a bit of Josh Burek's review in the Christian Science Monitor:

Had they not shared the same birth date, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin would still merit comparative study as twin giants of modern thought. Both thrust upon mankind a new understanding of itself. That, at least, is the contention of Adam Gopnik in Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life.

Gopnik casts fresh and honest light on two figures distorted by years of excessive comment, quotation, and ideological appropriation. We miss the significance of their summits, Gopnik writes, if we focus on only emancipation and evolution. Each man’s larger legacy, in fact, is the distinctly modern means in which he delivered his argument.

And the last few paragraphs:

As thinkers, were Lincoln and Darwin really so alike? Gopnik sees both men as practitioners of induction, which rejects reasoning from first principles for the truth-coaxing power of close scrutiny of things as they are.

Induction is a powerful method, but Gopnik offers no critique. Has not reasoning from effect to cause, as Darwin did, sometimes missed the mark? For instance, Confederate leaders claimed advanced science proved “the Negro” to be inferior. (Darwin vigorously disputed this.) As a deductive thinker, Lincoln’s rebuke – indeed, his politics – radiated from the central sun of a single proposition: All men are created equal...

The apostle Paul says we see through a glass, darkly. By showing us the nature of law, Lincoln gave us a vision more spiritual. Darwin, instead, looked to the law of nature and offered a view more material. The flaw in Gopnik’s elegant book is that he doesn’t denote the difference.

I've heard that Darwin really sought to disprove the inferiority of "Negroes" through his theory.

These men had more in common than I imagined. Let's celebrate these two magnificent men!

“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears….” -- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." -- Abraham Lincoln, 19 November 1863, Gettysburg, PA

Dirty Diplomacy: Not Your Usual Ambassador

The subtitle of  Craig Murray's book Dirty Diplomacy is pretty descriptive and extremly accurate: The Rough-and -Tumble Adventures of a Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against Terror. It's not your usual memoir by a former ambassador.

The book was titled Murder in Samarkand in the UK.

Murray served as the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004. From the beginning he proved to be a thorn in the side of the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Uzbek government, headed by dictator Islam Karimov, who's headed Uzbekistan since 1991.

Karimov's a thug, but when Murray took office, he was 'our' thug who became a strategic ally in the War on Terror. He opposed Muslim extremists, and more importantly, let us use Uzbekistan soil for an air base (we've since been kicked out).

Murray almost immediately took issue with Karmov's repressive regime, known for murder, torture, and all the usual human-rights transgressions, much to the chagrin of the UK. He naturally did not endear himself to the Americans, whose main interest was keeping Karimov happy and glossing over his 'shortcomings'. Murray was appalled by this attitude and let his displeasure be known.

In short, he was sacked because he wouldn't shut up.

Murray readily admits his foibles. Although married with two children, he was a serial philanderer and an alcoholic to boot. He finally left Fiona, his wife of 20 years, for Nadira Alieva, 23 years his junior who was dancing in a seedy Tashkent club (read about her lap-dancing exploits). 

Here's a less-than-flattering account of their affair. Murray strikes me as a sad, even pathetic, figure.

I did enjoy the book and admired Murray's refusal to keep quiet and "play the game". He called them as he saw them.

He reminded me of Oskar Schindler, who rescued Jews during World War II despite nothing in his background to indicate that he would do such a thing, at great personal risk.

Murray paid the price, not just for speaking against wrongdoing, but also for making what seems to have been a very foolish personal choice.

It's a very good book. I highly recommend it.

As one reviewer put it, it's like a very funny version of a Graham Greene novel. Too bad it's nonfiction.

"The Uzbek people know only one word for Craig Murray: hero." -- Mohammad Salih, Uzbek opposition leader

Andrew Sullivan: Why I Blog

To celebrate its new design, The Atlantic, one of my favorite magazines, published an excellent article by Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, titled 'Why I Blog.'

Sullivan refers to the 'narcotic appeal' (I can vouch for that) of blogging.

And did he mention 'intoxicating' and 'gratifying'? Ohhh, yeahhh!

Read his blog The Daily Dish.

"Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake, it heralds a golden era for journalism." -- Andrew Sullivan on blogging, from the article.

Happy 90th Birthday, Nelson Mandela!

Nelson Mandela celebrates his 90th birthday today. One of my all-time heroes, along with Jackie Robinson and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A remarkable man, who was "too busy to hate" after he was released from prison in 1990, he put South Africa on the road to true democracy when he was elected president in 1994.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

Two excellent books about him: his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom; and Nelson Mandela: A Biography by Martin Meredith.

Here is what NPR said about Mandela.

 "I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." -- Nelson Mandela

Yale Environment 360: New Online Magazine

Yale University, fresh from its spectacularly successful Governors' Climate Change Conference (my bad!), has launched an online magazine Yale Environment 360.

The magazine will have opinion, analysis, reporting, and contributed articles.

The magazine is edited by Roger Cohn, formerly of Mother Jones and Audobon magazines. The inaugural issue features articles by Bill McKibben, Carl Zimmer, Denis Hayes, Carole Bass, Fred Pearce, and others. There is an interview with author Michael Pollan.

Give it a look.

Li'l Dick Gets His

Li'l Bush has his own show - why not Li'l Dick? If not a show, how about at least a book?

Your prayers have been answered! Check out Young Dick Cheney: Great American by Bruce Kluger, David Slavin and Tim Foley. It's yours for just $12.95 plus $4.00 S&H.

From the WWW site:

A wickedly funny faux-children's biography recounts Young Dick Cheney’s youthful lust for guns, oil, and the girl of his dreams.

He was born among the big skies and cow pies of the Great American West. And yet from these humble beginnings, he would grow to become the most famous, most powerful Dick ever to inhabit the Vice Presidency. In this often shocking, frequently touching, clearly unauthorized biography, faux journalists Bruce Kluger and David Slavin (National Public Radio) reveal the inspiring and sometimes even true story of Richard B. Cheney—frontiersman, freedom fighter, fatty.

Meticulously reported (including a footnote!) and lushly illustrated by renegade artist Tim Foley, this unprecedented, spell-checked triumph of painstaking conjecture brings to life the Dick nobody knows: a secretive yet sensitive boy from Wyoming with a shoot-from-the-hip, shoot-in-the-face style all his own. From his mischievous boyhood friendships, to his high-octane high school romance with the one girl who knew what made Dick tick, Young Dick Cheney: Great American is destined to be cherished by patriots and Democrats alike—a book that will captivate readers everywhere for months to come.

And how about these reviews:

If you've spent the last eight years gagging on Vice President Cheney and his hijinks, this should take the bad taste out of your mouth." — Lewis Black, Comedian/Host of Comedy Central's Root Of All Evil

"At last, as Bush/Cheney staggers toward its final throes, here comes a book that pries back the door on our secretive Vice President and delivers a double-barreled blast of satiric buckshot. I predict Kluger and Slavin will be greeted as liberators!" — Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post

"This book is a hoot, a big hoot—a page-turner and a side-splitter that is so irreverent, its authors will undoubtedly soon be in the Witness Protection Program. Hide this book, read it alone in the dark—and fall down laughing!" — Phil Donahue, talk show pioneer

"This is a funny book. (I mean, I’m not going to say it’s the funniest thing in the world. That I reserve for my own work.)" — Mel Brooks, writer/producer/director

"A must-have item for spring-break!" — Daily Kos

"Bring it with you to Gitmo." —Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann

"It's got lots of pitchers, so even I can reed it." -- G.W. Bush

Doug's Feith-Based Analysis: Another Slam Dunk?

Douglas J. Feith, former #3 man at Ronnie Dumsfeld's Pentagon, card-carrying neocon, and one of the main architects of the Iraq War, is making the rounds this week to promote his new book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism.

Feith, now a professor at Georgetown University, was "present at the creation" of the decision to invade Iraq, and his book is hailed as the first (of likely more) "insider" books, George Tenet's opus notwithstanding.

Steve Kroft interviewed Feith on 60 Minutes last Sunday. Feith is mainly unrepentant, but he is certainly not happy at the way things turned out. But his "unhappiness" seems to stem solely from the fact that a great many lives have been lost, not because of any false pretext for war and deception of the American public.

Kroft noted that Feith is donating the book's profits to a charitable foundation.

Feith makes the point that the Iraq War was not about WMDs, but to derail Saddam Hussein, i.e., a "preventive war", so we would not have to fight him later on his terms. So what was all that stuff about WMDs?

He's also been on NPR's Morning Edition this week - 8-9 April. You can read the story and hear his 8 April interview with Steve Inskeep here; this link leads to the 9 April interview, which deals with Feith and the role of Ahmed Chalabi.

Feith claims that the public's understanding of his role has been misunderstood. You think?

Read and listen to what George Packer says about Feith. One excerpt:

"The Iraq war was always a long shot," Packer says. "But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought."

Regardless of what you think about Feith, neocons, and the Iraq War, you ought to take the time to examine his contentions.

"Douglas Feith was the Michael Brown of the Iraq War." -- George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

Dinner With Mugabe

What with turmoil in Zimbabwe (more so than normal) because of the uncertainty surrounding the 29 March 2008 elections, it's apropos to post this item about Heidi Holland's new book, Dinner With Mugabe.

Two interviews, 30 years apart.

From the book's WWW site:

At a time when the world waits anxiously to see what will happen next in Zimbabwe - when there is little food in the country's shops, life expectancy is plunging and Zimbabweans are fleeing repression and unemployment - this book gets to grips with the man at the helm of a corrupt regime; the man behind the monster.

Holland's tireless investigation begins with her having dinner with Mugabe the freedom fighter and ends in a searching interview with Zimbabwe's president in December 2007, more than 30 years later.

Here is her Op-Ed piece from the 1 April 2008 New York Times, "Make Peace With Mugabe". In it, she details his megalomaniacal determination to seek retribution for the UK's short-changing him on the land redistribution issue. If his country gets destroyed, so be it. But isolating him is not the path for the West to take; he won't back down.

And the people of Zimbabwe endure unthinkable suffering.

Here is an article by Scott Baldauf from today's Christian Science Monitor asking what the West can do and a piece by Alan Cowell from the 6 April 2008 New York Times, in which he imagines a future for Zimbabwe.

"Every revolution evaporates, leaving behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy." -- Franz Kafka

Lester Brown's Plan B 3.0 Saves the World

Happy World Water Day!

Lester R. Brown, who's been around forever and productive that entire time, has just published his revised Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. He is President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).

No one has ever accused Brown of not thinking big.

Here is the Table of Contents (T of C), from where you can download the entire book for free. You can also buy copies on the WWW site.

“In late summer 2007, reports of ice melting were coming at a frenetic pace. Experts were ‘stunned’ when an area of Arctic sea ice almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week,” writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company).

“Nearby, the Greenland ice sheet was melting so fast that huge chunks of ice weighing several billion tons were breaking off and sliding into the sea, triggering minor earthquakes,” notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

These recent developments are alarming scientists. If we cannot stop this melting of the Greenland ice sheet, sea level will eventually rise 23 feet, inundating many of the world’s coastal cities and the rice-growing river deltas of Asia. It will force several hundred million people from their homes, generating an unimaginable flood of rising-sea refugees.

“We need not go beyond ice melting to see that civilization is in trouble. Business-as-usual is no longer a viable option. It is time for Plan B,” Brown says in Plan B 3.0, which was produced with major funding from the Farview, Lannan, Summit, and Wallace Genetic foundations, the U.N. Population Fund, Fred and Alice Stanback, and Andrew Stevenson.

“Plan B 3.0 is a comprehensive plan for reversing the trends that are fast undermining our future. Its four overriding goals are to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth’s damaged ecosystems,” says Brown. “Failure to reach any one of these goals will likely mean failure to reach the others as well.”

Continuing rapid population growth is weakening governments in scores of countries. The annual addition of 70 million people to world population is concentrated in countries where water tables are falling and wells are going dry, forests are shrinking, soils are eroding, and grasslands are turning into desert. As this backlog of unresolved problems grows, stresses mount and weaker governments begin to break down.

The defining characteristic of a failing state is the inability of a government to provide security for its people. Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Pakistan are among the better known examples. Each year the number of failing states increases. “Failing states,” notes Brown, “are an early sign of a failing civilization.”

“Even as the accumulating backlog of unresolved problems is leading to a breakdown of governments in weaker states, new stresses are emerging. Among these are rising oil prices as the world approaches peak oil, rising food prices as an ever larger share of the U.S. grain harvest is converted into fuel for cars, and the spreading fallout from climate change.”

“At the heart of the climate-stabilizing initiative cited above is a detailed plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020 in order to hold the future temperature rise to a minimum. This initiative has three major components—raising energy efficiency, developing renewable sources of energy, and expanding the earth’s tree cover. Reaching these goals,” says Brown, “will mean the world can phase out all coal-fired power plants.”

In setting the carbon reduction goals for Plan B, we did not ask “What do politicians think is politically feasible?” but rather “What do we think is needed to prevent irreversible climate change?” This is not Plan A: business-as-usual. This is Plan B: an all-out response at wartime speed proportionate to the magnitude of the threats facing civilization.

“We are in a race between tipping points in natural and political systems,” says Brown. “Which will come first? Can we mobilize the political will to phase out coal-fired power plants before the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible? Can we halt deforestation in the Amazon basin before it so weakens the forest that it becomes vulnerable to fire and is destroyed? Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Himalayan glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia?”

Although efforts have been made in recent decades to raise the efficiency of energy use, the potential is still largely untapped. For example, one easy and profitable way to cut carbon emissions worldwide is simply to replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs that use only a fourth as much electricity. Turning to more efficient lighting can reduce world electricity use by 12 percent—enough to close 705 of the world’s 2,370 coal-fired power plants.

In the United States, buildings—commercial and residential—account for close to 40 percent of carbon emissions. Retrofitting an existing building typically can cut energy use by 20–50 percent. The next step, shifting to carbon-free electricity to heat, cool, and light the building completes the transformation to a zero-carbon emissions building.

We can also reduce carbon emissions by moving down the food chain. The energy used to provide the typical American diet and that used for personal transportation are roughly equal. A plant-based diet requires about one fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat. The reduction in carbon emissions in shifting from a red meat–rich diet to a plant-based diet is about the same as that in shifting from a Chevrolet Suburban SUV to a Toyota Prius hybrid car.

In the Plan B energy economy, wind is the centerpiece. It is abundant, low cost, and widely distributed; it scales easily and can be developed quickly. The goal is to develop at wartime speed 3 million megawatts of wind-generating capacity by 2020, enough to meet 40 percent of the world’s electricity needs. This would require 1.5 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts each. These turbines could be produced on assembly lines by reopening closed automobile plants, much as bombers were assembled in auto plants during World War II.

In the development of renewable energy resources, Brown notes, we are seeing the emergence of some big-time thinking—thinking that recognizes the urgency of moving away from fossil fuels. Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas, where the state government is coordinating an effort to build 23,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (the equivalent of 23 coal-fired power plants). This will supply enough electricity to satisfy the residential needs of over 11 million Texans—half the state’s population. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but the earth’s wind resources cannot be depleted.

Solar technologies also provide exciting opportunities for getting us off the carbon treadmill. Sales of solar-electric panels are doubling every two years. Rooftop solar water heaters are spreading fast in Europe and China. In China, some 40 million homes now get their hot water from rooftop solar heaters. The plan is to nearly triple this to 110 million homes by 2020, supplying hot water to 380 million Chinese.

Large-scale solar thermal power plants are under construction or planned in California, Florida, Spain, and Algeria. Algeria, a leading world oil exporter, is planning to develop 6,000 megawatts of solar-thermal electric-generating capacity, which it will feed into the European grid via an undersea cable. The electricity generated from this single project is enough to supply the residential needs of a country the size of Switzerland.

Investment in geothermal energy for both heating and power generation is also growing fast, notes Brown. Iceland now heats nearly 90 percent of its homes with geothermal energy, virtually eliminating the use of coal for home heating. The Philippines gets 25 percent of its electricity from geothermal power plants. The United States has 61 geothermal projects under way in the geothermally rich western states.

The combination of gas-electric hybrid cars and advanced-design wind turbines has set the stage for the evolution of an entirely new automotive fuel economy. If the battery storage of the typical hybrid car is doubled and a plug-in capacity is added so that batteries can be recharged at night, then we could do our short-distance driving—commuting to work, grocery shopping, and so on—almost entirely with cheap, wind-generated electricity.

This would permit us to run our cars largely on renewable electricity—and at the gasoline-equivalent cost of less than $1 per gallon. Several major automakers are coming to market with plug-in hybrids or electric cars.

With business as usual (Plan A), the environmental trends that are undermining our future will continue. More and more states will fail until civilization itself begins to unravel. “Time is our scarcest resource. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize,” says Brown. “These deadlines are set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock.”

The key to restructuring the world energy economy is to get the market to tell the environmental truth by incorporating into prices the indirect costs of burning fossil fuels, such as climate disruption and air pollution. To do this, we propose adopting a carbon tax that will reflect these indirect costs and offsetting it by lowering income taxes. We propose a worldwide carbon tax to be phased in at $20 per ton each year between 2008 and 2020, stabilizing at $240 per ton. This initiative, which would be offset at every step with a reduction in income taxes, would simultaneously discourage fossil fuel use and encourage investment in renewable sources of energy.

“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport,” says Brown. “We have reached a point in the deteriorating relationship between us and the earth’s natural systems where we all have to become political activists. Every day counts. We all have a stake in civilization’s survival.”

“We can all make lifestyle changes, but unless we restructure the economy and do it quickly we will almost certainly fail. We need to persuade our elected representatives and national leaders to support the environmental tax restructuring and other changes outlined in Plan B. Beyond this, each of us can pick an issue that is important to us at the local level, such as phasing out coal-fired power plants, shifting to more-efficient light bulbs, or developing a comprehensive local recycling program, and get to work on it.”

We all need to educate ourselves on environmental issues. For its part, the Earth Policy Institute is making Plan B 3.0 available for downloading free of charge from its WWW site.

“It is decision time,” says Brown. “Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we have to make a choice. We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilization unravel, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that mobilizes to save civilization. Our generation will make the decision, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

'The Commission' by Philip Shenon: A Must Read

When I heard that Philip Shenon of the New York Times had written a remarkable book that probed and exposed much of the inner workings of the 9/11 Commission I snapped it up and read it in a few days. I was not disappointed.

It is aptly titled, The Commission: The Uncensored Historyof the 9/11 Investigation.

The book has been extensively reviewed - just Google the book's title and you'll find a plethora opf reviews and blog postings. Here's a book review from Shenon's employer, the New York Times.

Several weeks ago Shenon was interviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

Shenon calls the report the best-written government report in our lifetime and attributes this mainly to Philip Zelikow, the Commission's brilliant but abrasive executive director.

I won't provide a review of the book per se, but will simply list a few of the aspects (revelations?) that made the greatest impressions on me. That's a daunting task,  but here goes, listed in no particular order.

1. There is some evidence that Vice President Dick Cheney issued the airliner shoot-down order without the President Bush's approval or knowledge. Interestingly, the Vice President has no role in the military chain-of-command. If Bush was unable to issue the order, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was the next in line.
2. The lack of our response to the bombing of the USS Cole emboldened Osama bin Laden.
3. Prior to 9/11, the Bush Administration had little interest in terrorism or al-Qaeda, despite warnings from a number of people. National Security Council (NSC) Advisor Condoleeza Rice was a "Sovietologist" and more interested in missile defense systems. The infamous President's Daily Brief (PDB) of 6 August 2001, warning that al-Qaeda wanted to strike "in America", was essentially ignored.
4. CIA Director George Tenet had trouble telling the truth.
5. NORAD and the FAA were incompetent. Even the timeline of the events flummoxed them. 
6. So was the FBI. They dropped the ball - no question about it - and showed themselves to be a 'cops-and-robbers' outfit unsuited to ferreting out domestic terrorism. I shuddered when I read how "electronically" inept the FBI was - no Intranet, no e-mail. Former director Louis Freeh prided himself on how computer-illiterate he was. But there were some good guys: the field agents in Minneapolis and Phoenix whose warnings went unheeded; Thomas Pickard, Freeh's deputy director and the acting director in the months before 9/11, who was frustrated by Attorney General John Ashcroft's indifference to terrorist threats (according to one account, the two almost came to blows).  The Commission wanted to recommend a reorganization of the FBI to remove domestic terrorism from its purview and place it in an agency akin to the UK's MI-5. Director Robert Mueller successfully lobbied against that.
7. Attorney General John Ashcroft showed no interest in terrorism. His top two priorities were advancing the agenda of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and getting the Federal death penalty reinstated so he could execute Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. 
8. Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was in communication with both Karl Rove and Condoleeza Rice during the investigation. He was member of the Bush transition team and largely responsible for the Bush Administration's "preemptive war" rationale. There is some speculation that Zelikow did not reveal these ties when he was hired by the Commission.
9. In the final report, Zelikow was thwarted by staffers when he tried to insert passages that attempted to link Iraq and Saddam Hussein to 9/11.
10. The Commission's hearing in New York City was a debacle. It treated former Mayor Rudy Giuliani with kid gloves because it feared that any tough questioning of him would be perceived as criticism and create a backlash against it.
11. The National Security Agency (NSA), then headed by current CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, was extremely cooperative, and early in the process offered the Commission unprecedented access to its voluminous terrorist archives. Unfortunately, the staff was tardy in acting on this and didn't get to the archives till they were almost out of time. Even then, they did not devote nearly enough time to them. The archives contained evidence that Iran was related to 9/11. Shenon suggests that the reason the staff did not get to these archives was that the NSA was at Ft. Meade in Maryland, much farther away than the CIA, and the staff did not want to make the trip to Ft. Meade. This oversight was a serious failure on the part of the Commission.
12. The Jersey Girls, the four New Jersey 9/11 widows, who were relentless and tenacious in their efforts to get the government to form the 9/11 Commission and see that it did its job.
13. The partisanship and combativeness of Commissioner Max Cleland, who was bitter at having lost his Georgia Senate seat to Saxby Chambliss in an ugly campaign. He was eased off the Commission.
14. The thousands of dollars of checks written by the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the USA, that possibly were used to support two of the hijackers.
15. The intransigence of the Bush Administration.

I still greatly admire the work of the 9/11 Commission; it did an incredible amount of excellent work in a very short period of time. However, I am somewhat less enamored of its report.

Shenon has far more information on the book's WWW site. There are even Zelikow's email responses to Shenon's inquiries.

It's an incredible book, very well-written.

"The 9/11 commission has confirmed what we have been saying all along. The clear statements by this independent, bipartisan commission have debunked the myths that have cast fear and doubt over Saudia Arabia." -- Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi Arabian ambassador to the USA

Genghis Khan: Bum Rap from the West

Today's post is near to the heart of the Republic of Campanastan, which has its roots in the steppes of Central Asia.

If you're about the same age as Campanastan's President-for-Life, your schooling likely taught you that Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes were little more than barbarians who periodically swept across the steppes to pillage, rape and wreak havoc on "civilization". That's what I was taught. Now I realize that portrait of Genghis Khan and his people is little more than proof of the verisimilitude today's quote (see below).

I just finished a remarkable little book by Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. In it, Weatherford documents Genghis Khan (born Temujin, 1162; died, 1227), the rise of his empire, his death, and the fall of his empire after his death. He also describes some of the aspects of the modern world that can be attributed to this far-sighted man of the steppes.

He also notes how the West has promulgated a distorted view of the man and his people, and how the Asia of today is recognizing his legacy. Even the Japanese at one time claimed Genghis Khan was a samurai warrior who escaped to Mongolia after a falling out with a Japanese warlord.

This map, from Wikipedia's entry on the Mongol Empire, shows the extent of Genghis Khan's empire at the time of his death.   

After his death, the empire stretched all the way to eastern Europe and southward to encompass what is now modern-day China. They never really conquered the Arabian peninsula, India, or north Africa.

 

This map, from the same source, shows, in white, the approximate maximum extent of the Mongol empire, 1300-1405. The gray area is the Timurid dynasty.

Genghis Khan's grandson, Kublai Khan, is the one who received Marco Polo.

Genghis Khan and his successors were not just a bunch of warriors who reveled in making life unpleasant for others. Some their empire's common precepts were ahead of their time. Consider these principles:

• paper money
• freedom of religion
• primacy of the state over the church
• diplomatic immunity
• international law 

The Mongols did not force their culture on the people they conquered. Contrast that with the Romans, British, Spanish, et al. In fact, they were famous for combining the best aspects of their vanquished and spreading them throughout the rest of the empire.

Women also played a substantial role in the administration of the empire. Who do you think ran the empire when the men were off on military campaigns? Wives and mothers, that's who.

The Mongols' military tactics are still emulated in modern times. Weatherford suggests that the German's concept of blitzkrieg was taken from the Mongols' mode of attack. And the Russian campaign against the Germans in World War II (and perhaps Napoleon, too), where they "drew" the Germans deeper and deeper into Russia till their supply lines were too long, is lifted from the Mongols' successful tactics against the Russians along the Kalka River in 1223. Turnabout is fair play.

So my view of Genghis Khan has done a "180" since reading Weatherford's book, similar to how my view of Tamerlane changed after reading Justin Marozzi's book.

Maybe I should read about Attila the Hun next.

"Until lions have historians, hunters will be the heroes." -- Kenyan proverb

Lynne Spears' Parenting Book, Pulitzer Prize on Hold

Lynne Spears, budding humorist and ersatz mother of Britney and 16-year-old "mother-to-be" Jamie Lynn, learned that her parenting book, Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World, has been put on "indefinite hold" by her publisher, Thomas Nelson, of Tennessee. 

Actually, I think "infinite hold" is more appropriate.

Here is an article about the book's delay from Newsday. The picture is from the article.

Spears' book, which was to have "faith elements" (what kind of "faith"?) in it, was slated to be released on Mother's Day 2008. Thomas Nelson is a Christian publishing company based in Tennessee.

A company spokesman did not give a reason for the decision, but let me guess: her older daughter's a mess and her 16-year-old younger daughter just announced she is three months' pregnant.

Hmm....that might put the birth near Mother's Day. That would be a nice present for Grandma Lynne.

Spears' comments, upon learning of her younger daughter's pregnancy, were that Jamie Lynn had been "always conscientious" (about what?) and "never violated curfew".

My gosh - how did she get pregnant? Parthenogenesis, perhaps?

Lynne Spears' publicist, Ima Shill, noted that Spears was initially distraught because this meant "her book would miss the 2008 Pulitzer Prize nomination deadline" but that she is now okay with the decision because "she wants to spend more time with her family" and seek counsel from Dina Lohan, Lindsay's mother, who "has the wisdom and pharmaceuticals to deal with these things."

Shill noted that talks are underway to publish Spears' book in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Publishing magnate Y. Nott "Jack" Adogoff is personally negotiating the deal with Spears' legal representative, Dewey Screwum, who noted that Russian men are quite enamored of Spears, who finished third behind daughter Britney and comedienne-Botox spokeswoman Joan Rivers in this year's annual MILF awards.

Hugh G. Rection, a spokesman for Columbia University,which awards the Pulitzer Prizes, said that there was no problem with the delay and that they would gladly consider Spears' book in the fiction category whenever she decides to publish it.

"We know the Spears family, particularly the parents. An asset that Britney and Jamie Lynn both have is a great and dedicated mother." -- Dr. Phil McGraw to People.com, after learning of Jamie Lynn's pregnancy

"The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard." -- Steven Wright

Civility Engineer

"She flipped me off, so I cut her off."

"He dissed me, so I blew the motherf***er away."

How many times have you read about an act of violence initiated by rude or uncivil behavior that escalates into mayhem? Probably too many, I'll wager. We all know what "road rage" is, and we can now add "air rage". 

Enter Pier Massimo Forni, an Italian native and recent U.S. citizen. Dr. Forni is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore.

The accompanying picture is by Andy Nelson of the Christian Science Monitor(CSM). I used Richard O'Mara's 11 December 2007  CSM article as the basis for this post.

Forni noted some time ago the decline in civility, or growth in incivility, in the USA.

He also wanted to do something more relevant to the modern world than 14th-centuryItalian literature.

As a result, in 1997 he co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project, which seeks to assess the significance of manner, civility, and politeness in contemporary society. It also seeks to fathom the effects of politesse in more limited social conglomerations, such as the military and prisons. It has now become The Civility Initiative at JHU.

In 2002 he wrote a book, Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct, that has been published in English, German, and Italian. You can read the foreword here, and one of the 25 rules here.

Two Maryland counties have started "Choose Civility" programs, and the Howard County, MD, library ordered 2000 copies of his book. Similar programs have started in Ohio, Florida, and Minnesota.

Maybe Rudy Giuliani will become the national spokesman. Fageddaboutit!

So what does all this have to do with the "real world"? Forni states:

"Acts of violence are often the result of an exchange of acts of rudeness that spiral out of control. Disrespect can lead to bloodshed. By keeping the levels of incivility down we keep the levels of violence down.... If we teach youngsters in all walks of life how to manage conflict with civility-based relational skills, we will have a less uncivil society, a less violent one."

Forni also noted the connection between health and a person's level of stress. Increased stress, such as that caused by confrontation, acromony, etc., can lead to higher blood pressure.

Dr. Forni also has developed a broader view of civility. Instead of a person-to-person interaction, it is a growing respect for the environment and the acceptance by men of women as equals.  I'd expand the latter to include the acceptance of others as equals, without regard to gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or beliefs.

Forni also said something that really struck home for me:

"I think that the first part of our lives we spend searching for beauty. In the second part we seek to be useful. We tend to think of the ethical values of life. We seek goodness."

I don't claim to have spent the first part of my life seeking beauty (in the eye of the beholder, to be sure) but as for the second part of my life, Forni's assessment is spot-on.

"Never underestimate how poorly people can treat one another." -- Anonymous

Douglas Brinkley's 'The Great Deluge'

I've been meaning to blog about The Great Deluge for a few weeks. I finished the 700+ page tome during an itinerary from Tbilisi, Georgia, to Denver.  It's the only book I've read about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans and to say it made an impression on me is an understatement.

I cried, laughed, smiled, cringed, shook my head in disbelief, became very angry and very sad (mostly the last three emotions). Douglas Brinkley, former history professor at Tulane University who's now at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, has done a masterful job telling the story of New Orleans. It's a story of unimaginable stupidity, insensitivity, corruption, heroism, racism, ignorance, perseverance, fecklessness, and cowardice. 

A lot of people and organizations take it on the chin; others shone like stars. I made notes in the book of the "Good Guys" and "Bad Guys". The lists are incomplete and, within each list, there is no particular order.

Good Guys:

• U.S. Coast Guard. These guys were on top of things in a hurry and moved their assets out of New Orleans and set up shop on the high ground in Alexandria.
• Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. 200 boats plus pilots, saving people.
• Houston. They opened their city and hearts to the New Orleans folks, and treated them as though they were their own. Enough said.
• WWL and Garland Robinette. For staying on the air and giving people help and hope.
• NOLA Homeboys. Bunch of locals who were out there doing the dirty work.
• Mama D and the Soul Patrol. Ditto.
• Wal-Mart. They kicked in with a lot of free supplies. Within 24 hours.
• American Airlines. They were back at the airport within 24 hours, flying people out and supplies/rescuers in.
• New Orleans Times-Picayune. They kept people informed.
• New Orleans Police Department. Yeah, a lot of them bailed, but some hung in there and did Herculean work while their comrades fled.
• Various individuals. A lot of unselfish, brave, generous people without whom it would have been much worse.
• Various states. Places like Utah, Texas, California, and others kicked in, sending aid and rescue workers.

Bad Guys:

• Mayor Ray Nagin. What a cowardly, incompetent bozo! Hid in the Hyatt while the Superdome seethed. And they reelected him!
• DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. An insensitive lout whose mantra seemed to be "I wasn't aware of what was happening." What bullshit! His own agency, the U.S. Coast Guard knew the score. He should have been canned.
• FEMA Director Mike Brown. An incompetent dandy who seemed more concerned with his image then helping people. But he tried more than people gave him credit for. It's just that his bosses - Chertoff and President Bush, couldn't be bothered.
• FEMA. Yeah, once they got down there they weren't real efficient. Lots of red tape. There's one incident that tells it all: a group of rescue workers comes in from California, and FEMA makes 'em spend a day at a sexual harrassment workshop before allowing them to work. Are you kidding me? Sadly, no.
• President Bush. Seemed more concerned with not interrupting his vacation than learning what was going on. Or not going on.
• City of Gretna. For turning back people at gunpoint who were trying to cross the Mississippi to safety. A pox on your house, scumbags!
• New Orleans Police Department. 15%  (200) bailed out. The joke was that there were more New Orleans police cars in Houston than those of the Houston police. Others stole stuff.
• Red Cross. Dragged its feet.
• Individual looters and other assorted criminals. I'm not talking about the ones who stole to feed their families or  rescue loved ones. You know the ones I mean.

Good and Bad:

• Governor Kathleen Blanco. This was a tough one to call. She tried, but was just overwhelmed. In over her head, but kept plugging away. I feel more pity towards her than anger.

One thing was really obvious - how much people valued their pets and treated them like family. In general, when evacuation teams arrived, the evacuees were told they had to leave their pets behind. Some became extremely distraught, and some even refused to go. This is one lesson the agencies did learn: pets are very important. Next time it will be different. Well, maybe.

So what can we glean from this?

• Pets are very important.
• In times of disaster, bad bureaucracy plus presidential hesitation equals corpses (p. 411)
• If you have a disaster plan, you ought to follow it.
• It'll probably happen again, although not necessarily in New Orleans.
• Keep the goddamned buses out of the low areas, and don't berate people for not leaving when they had no means of escape.
• If  New Orleans had been mostly white and/or wealthier, this would not have been the disaster it was. Yes, racism was at work here.
• Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour, was a Republican and a favorite of President Bush; Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) had his house trashed in the storm. Louisiana had a Democratic governor and New Orleans was a relatively poor, mostly Democratic city. Guess who fared better when it came to prompt (and that's a relative term) assistance? 

"And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."  - President George W. Bush to FEMA Director Michael Brown, 2 September 2005.