A.J. Liebling, in the Sweet Science, his collection of boxing pieces from the early fifties, complained that the onset of tv had ruined boxing. In those distant days the camera, hungry for anything, filmed a plenitude of bouts. This had the odd effect of culling the sport, since tv viewers naturally wanted spectacles and stars. The old fashioned code of pugilism, the beerhall flavor of ambitious nobodies slugging it out on the circuit until some nobody made that magic transition into celebrity, was impossibly speeded up.

According to a story in Monday’s Independent, the same thing, improbably enough, is happening to Egyptology. The article is about the controversy surrounding the proposal of two French amateurs to sink a small hole in the floor of the great pyramid, send down a small camera, and look at a chamber under the floor that radar has revealed. The French guys claim that Cheops himself, in mummy attire, is stashed down there somewhere. The head of Egypt’s department of archaelogical matters, Zahi Hawass, has compared this to a proposal to drill a hole in the floor of the Chartres cathedral. Hawass claims that he wants to return Egyptology to the Egyptians. The French say that he is really in the back pocket of National Geographic. Indeed, he seems to have made some deal with NG for an exploration of the Cheops pyramid.

“Today, Egyptology is a worldwide science and there are almost 300 digs under way by archaeologists from 12 countries. These range from the hot- spots of Thebes and Giza - where scientists from half a dozen countries are at work - to Deir-el-Medina, where French archaeologists believe they have found an artisans' commune that, under Rameses III, staged the first-ever strike for better working conditions. "There is so much here that there is room for everyone," said Jean-Pierre Corteggiani of the French Institute for Oriental Studies, one of the academics supporting M. Dormion and M. Verd'hurt.

The French amateur team say Dr Hawass's hostility towards them is principally motivated by his links to National Geographic, which has funded several of his digs and to which they believe he may have offered filming rights to high-profile digs. "I don't care if he is funded by National Geographic or even by the Pope," said M. Verd'hurt. "He should not stop other people doing their work."
We like the finding of the first strikers – not something they are going to be publicizing on Fox, for sure. But the article’s author, Alex Duval Smith, has his hands on the television theme.

“Television has changed the face of Egyptology through its funding of digs and ability to raise the profile of individual scientists. Jean- Pierre Adam, an architect who specialises in Egypt at the French National Science Research Centre, says television has been bad for archaeology. "These days many researchers, even good ones, need to find a `scoop' and raise money for their work by signing contracts with television companies. The real graft of research - the anonymous hard work - has been bastardised."
Smith uses the example of Nefertiti – elevated to stardom in the States:

“One of the dreams of Egyptologists is to find Nefertiti's mummified remains. Last year Discovery Channel announced that Joanne Fletcher, a mummification expert from the University of York, had located Nefertiti among three female mummies found in 1898 by Victor Loret in Amenhotep II's tomb. Dr Hawass has rejected Fletcher's research as "pure fiction" and the work of "a new PhD recipient". Rivals suggest she rushed into the claim because Discovery Channel wanted a selling-point for its film.”

LI could, but will refuse, to draw parallels between this dispute and the conference over Iraq that Egypt just sponsored. Suffice it to say, the Bushies wanted a selling point for their own film.

November is flood season in Austin. This year the rain has bucketed down with the startling abandonment the skies took to in Noah’s day. Punishment for electing Darth Vader president – or at least v.p. – of a highly armed and dangerous hyperpower? You decide. LI went for a walk, the day before yesterday, around the Lake, and discovered the water was well above the pedestrian path in many instances. The radio and newspapers go on with a professional air about low water crossings, a term you never hear except in flood season, and one which the newcomer to town, trucking around in his Ford Explorer, is probably going to have no familiarity with.

If this were a Live Journal, I’d have one of the gloom icons turned on next to mood.

However, we at LI have found that gloom has a limit. Really. A monetary limit. According to Slate’s review of Richard Posner’s new book, the upper limit for gloom is priced at 600 trillion dollars.

Posner’s book is about massive catastrophes, like the earth being nudged by an asteroid. Here’s the graf that caught our eye:

“Consider the possibility that atomic particles, colliding in a powerful accelerator such as Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, could reassemble themselves into a compressed object called a stranglet that would destroy the world. Posner sets out to "monetize" the costs and benefits of this "extremely unlikely" disaster. He estimates "the cost of extinction of the human race" at $600 trillion and the annual probability of such a disaster at 1 in 10 million.”

600 trillion sounds rather jolly. Obviously Posner isn’t including lawyer costs, partly because, if the human race disappears, one assumes that lawyers will have nobody to sue. Of course, on one interpretation of the human race, it even includes lawyers. Which would mean nobody could sue anybody. Still, the sum is what? only one three hundredth of what has disappeared in terms of the U.S. budget over the last three years. It gives the accident a can-do air, doesn’t it?

Posner, apparently, began thinking along these lines after reading Margaret Atwood’s Orynx and Crax. We highly recommend that novel – in fact, in some review, we already have. Was that for the Chicago Sun Times? We forget.

LI always finds it puzzling that even smart weblogs, like Crooked Timber, seem to have a fan’s claustrophobic penchant for science fiction. Sci fi is fine, but it is sci fi, and the more it is recommended, the more we feel as though we were being transported back into the bedroom of some very smart fifteen year old boy. This kind of time travel we can do without. If that sounds snobby – well, you don’t get aesthetic criteria without snobbiness. We do not look down upon the idea that a story should revolve around a neat puzzle, but we prefer puzzles like: how is Raskolnikov going to free his mother from the burden of supporting him in St. Petersburg? Or how is Cousine Bette going to revenge herself on the Baron Hulot’s family? Or even, why does the map of Slothrop’s erections, plotted against London, exactly fit the map of the hits of the V2 rocket?

The latter is arguably science fiction-ish. However, it is also written. What we do not like about sci-fi is how it isn’t written – it is, rather, day dreamed, with writing being, at best, the accompanying mood music.

This is not, of course, universally true. Atwood’s book is an exception. And its distant precursor, H.G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods, is an exception, too. In fact, we think Wells’ sci fi work has been undeservedly neglected by critics who are scared off by the male adolescent rep of sci fi. Wells is one of the great English comic writers. He likes nothing better than to set some futuristic disaster in one of those shires of England where the merrie olde culture still belatedly lingers, poking its nose into everybody's business, and observe the consequences. His masterpiece on this theme is Invisible Man. In Food of the Gods, he imagines the kind of organic engineering that would lead to larger, much larger, Grade X larger, animals. The premise is that a mild mannered, bachelor scientist, Bensington, discovers a food supplement (“the food of the gods”) which he believes to have some extraordinary effect on the chemistry of organic growth.

This is how Bensington is stymied, at the beginning of chapter two:

“Mr. Bensington proposed originally to try this stuff, so soon as he was really able to prepare it, upon tadpoles. One always does try this sort of thing upon tadpoles to begin with; this being what tadpoles are for. And it was agreed that he should conduct the experiments and not Redwood, because Redwood’s laboratory was occupied with the ballistic apparatus and animals necessary for an investigation into the Diurnal Variation in the Butting Frequency of the Young Bull Calf, an investigation that was yielding curves of an abnormal and very perplexing sort, and the presence of glass globes of tadpoles was extremely undesirable while this particular research was in progress.

But when Mr. Bensington conveyed to his cousin Jane something of what he had in mind, she put a prompt veto upon the importation of any considerable number of tadpoles, or any such experimental creatures, into their flat. She had no objection whatever to his use of one of the rooms of the flat for the purposes of a non-explosive chemistry that, so far as she was concerned, came to nothing; she let him have a gas furnace and a sink and a dust-tight cupboard of refuge from the weekly storm of cleaning she would not forego. And having known people addicted to drink, she regarded his solicitude for distinction in learned societies as an excellent substitute for the coarser form of depravity. But any sort of living things in quantity, “wriggly” as they were bound to be alive and “smelly” dead, she could not and would not abide. She said these things were certain to be unhealthy, and Bensington was notoriously a delicate man—it was nonsense to say he wasn’t. And when Bensington tried to make the enormous importance of this possible discovery clear, she said that it was all very well, but if she consented to his making everything nasty and unwholesome in the place (and that was what it all came to) then she was certain he would be the first to complain.”

“One always does try this sort of thing upon tadpoles to begin with; this being what tadpoles are for.” This is what I mean by written. It is a simple sentence, a generalization that ends in a funny twist for a statement about biologists (it being, by this time, established that biology begins as a science just by excluding the idea of what something is “for”). However, the effect of “one” and “this sort of thing” is to give an airy familiarity to the generalization – as though the reader, too, was much engaged with tadpoles. Which sets us up for the come down in the second paragraph – for her Bensington meets the world, in the person of his Cousin Jane, and the world has distinct reservations about tadpoles, and would rather they stay where they were put by nature.

Bensington eventually hires an imbecile couple to feed his supplement to chicks. The results are disastrous, not only because giganticism within a avid and dimwitted creature like a chicken can lead to the endangerment of such edible critters as human babies if said chicken escapes the henhouse, but also because the couple have no neatness, and slop around the supplement – leading to its being eaten by rats, and sipped by wasps, etc., etc.

Wells, too, unlike most sci fi writers, has a sense of scientists outside of their dramatic role as the mouthpieces that must monologue on about conceptual puzzles. Wells shows them always bitching. And he shows them, mostly, concentrating upon the same trivialities that form the object of labor of most humankind. He has no mystifying respect for scientists whatsoever, which is nice. This is Bensington interviewing a couple to raise his experimental chicks:

“The eligible couple who were destined under Mr. Bensington to be the first almoners on earth of the Food of the Gods, were not only very perceptibly aged, but also extremely dirty. This latter point Mr. Bensington did not observe, because nothing destroys the powers of general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science.”

Of course, their dirtiness is the thing that leads to the first Food of the Gods disaster. Again, however, notice the attachment of the particular and the general in the last sentence. It is easy to see that Wells and P.G. Wodehouse come from the same generation.

Voltaire’s history of the reign of Louis XV begins with a study of the system of John Law, seen from the point of view of the civilizing process – or at least the domesticating process. Voltaire is at pains to put Law’s bubble in the context of the “habit of obedience” ingrained in the French under the reign of Louis XIV, comparing the troubles that the latter Louis faced, in his regency, from an upstart aristocracy, with the mildness faced by the regent, the Duc D’Orleans, even in the exercise of truly autocratic power.

We wanted to discuss this partly because of the neo-con meme about the supposed merits of the English enlightenment as opposed to the French enlightenment. There’s been a bit of a splash gathered around Gertrude Himmelfarb’s last book, which designs an intellectual history of the 18th century, absurdly enough, to reflect the anti-Gallic bias of the neo-con cabal. We thought the review of the book by Alan Ryan was oddly deficient. For one thing, Ryan confuses the Edinburgh Enlightenment with the English Enlightenment. This is unusual. For another thing, I didn’t feel his defense of the philosophes was very heartfelt. Yet it is obvious to me – as it was, in fact, to the Victorian liberals, like John Stuart Mill – that the French Revolution overthrew a system that was endemically unreformable, and that the philosophes did achieve the spreading of the enlightenment with profoundly good results. It is pretty easy to see this. Compare Czarist Russia or Prussia, before 1848, to the rest of Europe. Or simply read Conrad’s Secret Agent, a pretty profound reflection on the politics of a non-enlightened power – again, Czarist Russia.

Moreover, the root of what twentieth century liberalism has grasped centrally – the failure of central planning to forestall unexpected results, and its increasing confusion in dealing with them – is there, in nuce, in Voltaire. Consider this passage:

Finally, Law’s famous system, which seemed that it must ruin the regency and the state, actually sustained, in effect, both one and the other by consequences nobody had foreseen. The cupidity that it awoke in all conditions of the population, from the basest upt to magistrates, bishops and princes, turned away the attention of all minds from the public welfare, and from all political and ambitious views, in filling them with the fear of losing and the avidity of gaining. It was a new and prodigious game, where all citizens wagered one against the other. The obsessed players hardly quit their cards in order to trouble the government. And so it happened, by a prestige of which the hidden mechanisms could not be seen except by the finest and most practiced eyes, that a chimerical system gave birth to a real commerce, and played the midwife to the rebirth of the Indian company, established in the past by the celebrated Colbert, and ruined by the wars. In the end, if there were many private fortunes destroyed, at least the nation become more commercial and richer. This system enlightened minds, as the civil wars, in the past, had sharpened braveries. It was an epidemic sickness which spread itself in France, Holland and England. It merits the attention of posterity, for here it was not a question of the political interest of one or two princes that sent shockwaves through the nations; rather, the people themselves hurried into this madness which enriched some families, and reduced others to beggary.”

According to Ryan’s review, and the review of a few others, Himmelfarb’s big move is to replace reason, in the age of reason, with virtue – and make virtue the central theme of the English enlightenment, and the English enlightement the central national enlightenment. Reading this, a student of French history can’t help but be confused. Virtue was, of course, the central, and rather sinister, theme of the most radical French revolutionaries. The atheistic, Voltairian enlightment did, it was true, have an idea of virtue, but that idea was markedly heir to the old Aristotelian idea of virtue – it was pre-eminently social.

Again, according to Ryan, Himmelfarb, like many a neo-con, works to revive religion as a central and progressive bulwark and friend to the enlightenment cause. It is an oddity of this historiography that it drops a central Enlightenment term: fanatic. Whether it is Hume or Voltaire, the fanatic is that figure against which the enlightenment finds its tone. It is no accident that satire was the preferred form of the Enlightenment thinker, since it is by satire that the fanatic is disarmed. Voltaire’s ability to see the benefits of Law’s system, even as he accounts it a disaster, is just the proof that here is a perspective that has been cleansed of fanaticism – that attributes social virtue not to the virtue of individuals, but to their mix of virtues and vices, suitably ameliorated by those activities that would take them away from the sharpening bravery of civil war and religious strife. And how does one get to this point? By satire - by understanding both the humor of the discrepency between self-interest and moral claims, but that one understands the further humor of a pietistic horror that this is so -- the Misanthrope will always be the reference for this second level of vision for French Enlightenment figures. It is the same spirit that animates Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

"Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen" with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. "So we're surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice," the official said.”


Pangloss enseignait la métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie. Il prouvait admirablement qu'il n'y a point d'effet sans cause, et que, dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles, le château de monseigneur le baron était le plus beau des châteaux et madame la meilleure des baronnes possibles.

« Il est démontré, disait-il, que les choses ne peuvent être autrement : car, tout étant fait pour une fin, tout est nécessairement pour la meilleure fin. Remarquez bien que les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes, aussi avons-nous des lunettes. Les jambes sont visiblement instituées pour être chaussées, et nous avons des chausses. Les pierres ont été formées pour être taillées, et pour en faire des châteaux, aussi monseigneur a un très beau château ; le plus grand baron de la province doit être le mieux logé ; et, les cochons étant faits pour être mangés, nous mangeons du porc toute l'année : par conséquent, ceux qui ont avancé que tout est bien ont dit une sottise ; il fallait dire que tout est au mieux. »
-- Docteur Pangloss

There must be a certain quiet pride pervading the intellectual godfathers of Iraq’s Liberation this Thanksgiving week. So much has been accomplished! A freemarket mindset has been launched; a grateful people applaud the humane and just American army, as they secure mosques at prayer time and engage in massive urban renewal projects; and, as Doctor Pangloss might say, it has been demonstrated metaphysically that, since Iraqi leaders are necessarily made to subserve American interests, the best Iraqi leader has been put in place, and will be swept into office by the best combination of parties available to offer the best lack of competition in the best of all possible elections, coming up in January!

One’s heart thrills.

That malnutrition has now almost doubled since the invasion according to Iraq’s own freedom loving government, the best in the whole Middle East, is also, as we know, for the best. This will cull out those infants that might grow up to doubt the beneficence of having a low tax, laissez faire, low tariff economy, or one that is organized specifically to give the best price possible on the best gasoline available to the best SUVs driven by the planet’s premier human beings, the ever Christian, ever loving homo americanus.

We looked around at the metaphysico-cosmologico-theologists and their thoughts on the magnificent situation in Iraq. Here’s Johann Hari on the wonderful job the Americans did in dislodging the evil Sunnis en masse from their city of Fallujah – and I hasten to say that the evil of these Sunnis is only apparent, since they made the best possible target for the best possible firepower in the whole wide world, made in, or at least for, America!

I began to write a response [to a letter from a man whose parents live in Fallujah] - from the safety of my nice cosy flat - when the news came through that the military assault on Fallujah had begun. No matter what I wrote in my reply to Abdul, I couldn't shake off the memory of that American who ended up declaring during the Vietnam War: "We must destroy the village in order to save the village." Am I saying we must destroy Fallujah in order to save Fallujah? Is that the liberal-hawk position now? Have we sunk so far, so fast?

Tony Blair, Christopher Hitchens and most other liberal hawks have a firm answer to this anxiety. Look, they say, there are two forces at work here. On one side, you have a town - Fallujah - seized by Sunni militants who rally to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They speak only for the alienated 20 per cent of the Iraqi population who cannot bear the fact that the "stupid" and "dirty" Shia are about to assume power in a free election. They have imposed sharia law and Sunni supremacy within Fallujah; they bind women in burqas and stone them if they dare to walk the streets unveiled. They stand for the most barbaric and extreme of fundamentalisms and - in their clear public statements - dismiss democracy as a form of prostitution. On the other side, you have the US and Britain who - however imperfectly - are trying to hold a free and open election in just three months. How can anybody who believes in democracy throw up their hands and declare themselves neutral between them?”

Hari, who is a wobbly creature, finally comes down for killing a couple thousand Iraqis in Fallujah. And he has a marvelous metaphysico-cosmological reason to buck up his spirits, which droop, a bit, at the pix of limbless children, rather like Candide’s did in the aftermath of the Lisbon Earthquake:

“And, for me, there's another proviso. I backed this war because I believed most Iraqis would rather take their chances with an American occupation for a while than with Saddam and his sons forever. (This turned out to be right, unless you think that every Iraqi opinion poll has been mysteriously and inexplicably wrong).”

The idea of taking an opinion poll to justify razing a town is something new in the world. We wish we had thought of it!

Christopher Hitchens, who recognizes, when others don’t, that the war in Iraq is a perfect war in which every day perfection is piled on top of perfection, has not, so far as LI’s search has gone, commented yet on the splendors of Fallujah, or – and one can’t expect that this will ever be commented on – the stunning success of the occupation in getting rid of excess Iraqi children. But he did comment on Najaf in a debate a while back with Tariq Ali:


“At any rate, Mr. Sadr has now been isolated, discredited; his forces have been killed in very large numbers, without pity or compunction, I'm glad to say, by American and British forces.”

Like any metaphysico-cosmologico theologian, Hitchens has moments in which his prophetic vision seems to be less than perfect -- especially in consigning Mr. Sadr to oblivion (which means, for Mr. Hitchens, never being on tv again -- imagine! a fate worse than death). However, this is a mere triviality. The main point remains. Gratifyingly, the lack of pity or compunction has spread to all American and British military operations in the Iraqi paradise. Mr. Hitchens must be well pleased. Perhaps on his next tour in Iraq, he could get some souvenir – some tiny torn off hand, some terrorist’s foot – and bring it back with him. Pickled, these things make marvelous conversation pieces for D.C. dinner parties. Won't Sally Quinn be tickled!

Via Jim Henly, where there is a discussion of what “without compunction” means, there is a story in the San Francisco Chronicle that describes how the best of all possible armies is using the best of all possible weapons:

“Some of the heaviest damage apparently was incurred Monday night by air and artillery attacks that coincided with the entry of ground troops into the city. U.S. warplanes dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on the city overnight, and artillery boomed throughout the night and into the morning.

"Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, Md., the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."

Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.

Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."

Smells like Saddam’s own way of waging war! Showing that the occupying forces are truly adapting themselves to local customs. As we suggested in another post, surely the U.S. has contracted with the same mass grave diggers to get rid of the detritus that Saddam used. And propagandists suggest that the U.S. is not cooperating with local Iraqi enterprises! Shameful.

Yes, we all have much to be thankful for as we did into our turkeys this Thanksgiving. Oh, for a special treat – try using white phosphorus on the turkey! Yum yum, fries it in minutes! For best results, use a live turkey.

LI has been pondering our backlog. We’ve poured out at least a thousand posts over the last three years. Andre Gide liked to preen himself in his journal to the extent of revising and publishing it as he went along. What’s good for Gide is surely good for LI. Vanity is the writer’s better angel. In our case, we are going to publish, on Saturdays, selected former posts, exposing our track record in the hope that where we went altogether wrong and where we were presciently right amounts to evidence of real intellectual work. There is also, of course, the mad chance that some marvelous coincidences between past apercus and present disasters will leap off of the screen.

Here’s one we published on November 20,2001. The coincidence we like here is that: a., the same blank has been thrown up by the military in Iraq, and has been servilely acceded to by the U.S. Press, again showing the current vileness of the 4th estate; b., the sense that something wasn't quite right with the bombing in Afghanistan was later confirmed by what we know of Rumsfeld's plans in Nov., 2001 -- he didn't want to attack Afghanistan because he wanted a place to bomb, viz, Iraq; and c., again, the emphasis on the historic tie between Pakistan and the Taliban, a tie that has been systematically unexamined by the press even in the aftermath, when we know more about it.

”Steven Glover in the Spectator discusses what we didn't know and when we didn't know it in Afghanistan. Points for dispassion -- the current fashion in punditry seems to require that the writer bark, whine and growl on the page, and finally pee on his foes, all the better to show you his convictions. This has arisen from the point-counterpoint tv format for mixing together ideas and viewer interest, I suspect. Glover remarks that the press almost universally gave the Northern Alliance no chance, and credited the Taliban with a great, mystifying resilience. Both of those positions have been overturned by circumstances. He also claims that the bombing was much more efficient than the anti-war side gave it credit for being.

The latter is the only part of his article with which I have a problem. To assess how good the bombing is, one would have to get through the great blank thrown up by the American military. Actually, one would also have to have the desire to get through that great blank; given the servility of the press corps towards all things military since 9/11, this would be to expect supererogation on the part of some journalist, and honesty in his editor, which is the kind of fortunate conjunction we just haven't seen since, well, the high 80s. Those who did press into the country carried back pictures of kids and old people wounded by high explosives dropped continuously by American airplanes. Perhaps those high explosives did some military good in the beginning. And it might be the damage so inflicted on the Taliban was irreparable. One thing we can surely say about the Taliban is that it has no depth. Or rather, its resource was Pakistan. Cut off from Pakistan, it crumbled. Did the bombing hasten the collapse? If we rely on previous situations -- if we take Kosovo as a guide -- we'd have to say that bombing without let up a civilian population that is closely integrated with a military organization can lead to a military breakdown. But there might be a question of costs yet to arise -- because that kind of destruction can leave in its wake consequences that will bite our ass. There are advantages to processing territory by way of traditional soldiery that aren't considered by the TAC people in the Pentagon. One is that a population is more likely to consider its opponents honorable if they can see them.

In any case, it is worth pondering Glover's last graf:

"My feeling is that almost all of us - reporters, pundits, academics and politicians - know much less about Afghanistan than we think we do, and perhaps less than we give the impression of doing. Let us be frank: most of us had never heard of Mazar-i-Sharif until a few weeks ago, and yet we have been pontificating about its strategic significance as though we were familiar since childhood with the curve of its hills. In the absence of detailed knowledge, we have fallen back on theories and fragments of history about the Northern Alliance recycled by journalists who probably do not know what they are talking about. In short, we have been peering through a glass pretty darkly. The lesson I will draw from the rout of the Taleban is that none of us has much idea what is going to happen, and that the Sun�s celebrations may therefore possibly be premature."

Lately, our editorial service, RWG communications, is getting far fewer customers than it did this summer. We aren’t sure why – maybe it has something to do with the disgracefully untechy look of our site, which you can check out here. But we did recently get hacked – in a very curious way.

The case begins with our early flight back from Albany Wednesday. LI is not an early riser. Our preferred time of arrival in the realms of waking is around 9:30 a.m. In the order of pain, for us, having to get up at four to catch the six o’clock flight is the equivalent of an icewater enema. A real pain in the butt. So, we were stumblingly tired by the time we unlocked our apartment door here in Austin. We picked up the mail and actually opened all of it.

Now, usually we don’t open all of our mail – things that look like bills usually go to the trash immediately. If you start encouraging people to send you bills by actually opening them, you have only yourself to blame. We violated this life long precept because we were zonked. Which is how we came across an invoice from Psychiatric News. Psychiatric News is published by the American Psychiatric Association. Someone had placed two ads for RWG communications, at a cost of $1,700, with the Psychiatric News.

We squinted in disbelief at the salmon pink paper we held in our hand. The invoice was addressed to a Roger Wright. This, we surmised, was someone’s stab at guessing what the W in RWG stands for.

So, after refreshing ourselves with more winks than Ali Baba has thieves, we called up the APA. Monday we are going to receive copies of the contract that was apparently faxed to them from St. Joseph, Missouri.

Extremely odd doings. On the other hand, rather delightfully reminiscent of those departures from the ordinary that usually start a Sherlock Holmes story going. If anyone has any information about this case, please send an email to rgathman@netzero.net.

The American media coverage of Fallujah is the usual amalgam of bubble gum, nylon and lies. On NPR the announcer, describing the escape of Zarqawi, called him responsible for most of the insurgent attacks – he’s a regular mastermind of the crime in Gotham, apparently. Since the era of the crusade makes contradictions all right, the announcer went on to say that few foreign fighters were killed in Fallujah.

Elsewhere, the general in command of the destruction of the city was so wrought up by the killing and destruction that he announced that the back of the insurgency has been broken. See your tax dollars at work breaking spines on this site.

It is good to count the many ways in which this war is strictly about business. Since many who still argue for the occupation as a liberation have petrified themselves around the carcass of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, endlessly arguing the inarguable fact that Hussein was a criminal mass murderer while avoiding looking at what the liberators did, any time one can open up the can of worms, one should.

Foreign Policy in Focus has an article about one of the bright occupation ideas that the U.S. wants to foist on the Iraqi farmers. It should be said, the article has defects. The point of the article is diluted by spending time arguing that genetically engineered seeds are bad. And it would be nice to know if Bremer's changes in Iraqi laws continue to be legally binding. The general thrust, however, is this: Bremer and Bremer alone decided to change Iraq's intellectual property laws to bring them into compliance with the US policy on intellectual property laws. That's an astonishing breach of sovereignty.

LI loves to death the language that the Bremer crew used. Here is the order ‘accomodating’ Iraqi intellectual property law to the U.S. preferred standard: “Order 81 explicitly states that its provisions are consistent with Iraq’s “transition from a non-transparent centrally planned economy to a free market economy characterized by sustainable economic growth through the establishment of a dynamic private sector, and the need to enact institutional and legal reforms to give it effect.”

Give us neo-liberalism or give us death, as they used to say in the streets of Baghdad. The effect of this law will be to destroy, in one swipe, the system by which Iraqi farmers get seeds, replacing it with a system by which they buy the seeds from American agribusinesses. Iraq's pre-occupation IP laws protected the traditional system of Iraqi agriculture. While the liberal pro war faction has made a great deal out of "rescuing" the marshes on the Euphrates and the way the Americans are "reconstructing" Iraq, what is really going on in that reconstruction is not to the average Iraqi's benefit. The law the FP in Focus people have singled out is all about benefiting Monsanto, and nothing more.

It would be nice to hear an explanation of how wringing advantages out of Iraq for the U.S. economy amounts to a liberation from one of the so called left defenders of the thing, like Nick Cohen. But don’t hold your breath. These people devote their time exclusively to the noble struggle against fundamentalism – of the Muslim kind. You will never hear word one criticizing the series of deals acceded to by the exile puppets that the U.S. has put in charge of our Mesopotamian slaughter-house. There is a certain sense to the lack of comment -- these people have no influence whatsoever with the Bush White House, or even with Tony Blair. Their only influence, really, is to be talked about by people like LI, and to get on tv with the usual rightwingers to talk up the war.