Note: blogger was being uncooperative today, so I had to split this post into two posts. Sorry for the reading inconvenience.
Anyway, if you want to read this all the way through, you have to scroll down to the first post, more light on a dark subject -1.
Anyway, Nordhaus throughout his article is seeking, first, to quantify changes in lighting both in terms of the power of illumination and in terms of service, and then to extrapolate his results to a model for pricing technological change in general. He estimates that there was an improvement in lighting of a mere 0.04 percent per year from the Babylonian times to the nineteenth century – a period encompassing improvements in candle manufacture, but also significant decline in lighting technology and service after the fall of the Roman Empire – but that there was an increase by a factor of 900 between 1800 and 1992, with the increase coming out to 3.6 per year. And yet, he finds by traditional neo-classical pricing methods, the price of lighting has gone up. For instance, the price of lighting using electricity instead of kerosene from 1883 to 1993, can be weighted hedonically to show that, in terms of the price of fuels, kerosene has gone up 10 fold and electricity has gone down 3 fold. But “if the price index were incorrectly constructed, say using 1883 consumption weights and tracking gas/kerosene prices, it would show a substantial upward increase by a factor of ten.” Nordhaus points to the effect of this in figuring “true” prices, and hence, true standards of living. What is not read into the traditional construction of the price index is the “vast efficiency” of electric lighting.
Now what is interesting about this is how, subtly and silently, only positive externalities are counted, here. Since this is a week to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl, LI will take up other externalities in some later posts. The point here is that ‘forms of value’ pose a problem for all economists, not just Karl M.
Curious about how Karl M. might have read his bluebooks and penned his tomes, I went to another essay that builds upon Nordhaus’ work by Roger Fouquet and Peter J.G. Pearson on the Price and Use of light in the U.K. from 1500 – 2000. This is a treasure trove of light minutiae. For instance, the candle makers old enemy, the sun, does figure as a taxable entity in the British economy. Under Queen Anne, a window tax was instituted which had a real effect on the way houses were constructed – talk about your substructure effecting your superstructure! of course, the tax was instituted to pay for various wars (bemoaned by Swift) – tax and war being the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of economic history. Taxes, of course, shape a lot of economic activity – for instance, since the tax on lighting by fish oil was low, whale oil was, at one point, grandfathered in as an oil deriving from a fish – hence, one of the jokes in Melville’s taxonomy of the creatures in Moby Dick.
“In 1750, around 370 million lumen-hours seem to have been generated from about 3,000 tons of sperm and whale oil; and while whale oil made up nine-tenths of this total, sperm oil was about twice as effective in providing illuminating. By 1774, the oils (30% from sperm oil) generated just over one billion lumen-hours. And although lighting from sperm and whale oils fell back to less than 300 million lumen-hours in 1781, once hostilities [between the Americans and the British] ceased whale and sperm oil imports resurged, reaching more than 1.8 billion lumen-hours by 1787.”
However, by the time Marx got to England in 1850, the lighting industry had been revolutionized by the introduction of another fuel based on organic compounds: gas.
“In 1812, the Gas Light and Coke Company received the first charter to supply parts of London and, after eighteen months of errors in equipment investment and design, the market for gas-lighting grew quickly as prices fell. In 1820, gas lighting cost around £3,000 per million lumen-hours. By 1840, it had fallen to £1,000 and then, by 1850, to below £500 per million lumen-hours...
The dramatic cost decline was to generate the first of three phases of growth in the demand. Gas lighting rose ten-fold - from around 25 billion lumen-hours in 1820 to 250 billion in 1850. The growing wealth and associated desire for comforts, the accelerating industrialisation and the increased urbanisation of Britain were also factors driving the demand. Initial demand was for public street lighting, commercial establishments (especially shops), and some wealthy households. By the 1840s, middle class families were starting to use gas in their homes.”
Fouquet and Pearson confirm Nordhaus’ story of exponential improvement of lighting service and efficiency during the nineteenth century. The candle itself became a more reliable, more powerful instrument. And kerosene successfully competed with the ever volatile supply of whale oil to become a private illuminator of choice. A happy thing for the whale – whose own standard of living is not going to be captured in the price index charts, right? And whose elevation to a value and fall to a zero value is a story economists of all stripes can agree on. Unfortunately.
Marx lived long enough—he died in 1883 - to see the next wave of light technology, the largescale use of electric lighting – which, as with gas, began first as a public investment. As so often in technology, it is not private enterprise per se but the state that is the driver. However, LI’s hasty research has not turned up the lighting situation in Marx’s own house in London – whether he had a kerosene lamp or gas to do his work and read his Balzac (or Paul de Kock – like Leopold Bloom, Marx had an affection for this writer). I imagine I could deduce this out of his daughter Laura’s photoalbum, which was made in 1868, and published in 1970. Actually, the famous photograph of Marx is an indication of the Marx family’s better circumstances. In 1863, K.M.’s mother died, and he inherited from her – and a year later he was a legatee of Wilhelm Wolff’s estate, an old companero from the 40s years. The family was able, on account of this, to move to a bigger, better house – which most probably meant gas heat and lighting. So, unlike Goethe, when Marx was dying in his armchair, he could, actually, have gotten more light by simply turning a knob.
Which probably pleased him...
Sunday, April 23, 2006
more light on a dark subject - part 1
LI has has a good time reading some of the contributions to the Spivak fest being hosted on LS. In particular, if you have time, the Naked Gaze blog (another we have to totally put on our blogroll – we are totally behind on that project, sorry sorry sorry!) gives a nice history of the triangle, Spivak, Derrida, Marx (not exactly as cinematic as Jules et Jim, but what the hey). NG does one of those Derrida things, which Derrida got from listening to five year olds on swing sets – he repeats a set phrase over and over. In NG’s case, the phrase is: "Writing at speed". As the five year old discovers, this is a good way to induce vertigo – to disturb the rigid separation of sound and sense. And it works best with words that are odd words anyway, like your name, or the name of the sister you are trying to torment. Which is the point, although exemplifying that point treads a thin line between art and bugging the shit out of the reader.
That I bring in kids to talk about deconstruction, is not, by the way, a sneaky way of jabbing at J.D. Why do you think this site is named Limited Inc? When Marx’s friend Kugelman pointed out that the forms of value theory in the first edition of the first volumen of Das Kapital rather confused some people, namely some unnamed review, Marx sent him a famous letter (English and German in which he implied that, really, a child could understand it:
„... when we conceive by Value something in general, we must concede my conclusions. The unhappy man doesn’t see, that, if in my book there is no chapter on Value, the analysis of the real relationships that I give contained the proof and reference to the real relationships of value. The nonsense talked about the necessity of proving the value concept rests only on the most complete ignorance, as much about the subject matter that it deals with as the method of science. That any nation would kick the bucket if labor halted for, I won’t say a year, but merely a couple of weeks, any child knows. Just as they know that the different quantities of need corresponding to quantities of products require different, quantitatively determined amounts of collective social labor. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in specific proportions is not suspended through the specific form of social production, but instead, only its manner of appearance changes, is self evident. Natural laws cannot, in general, be suspended.“ (I’ve retranslated bits of this)
Well, it is a wise child that knows his forms of value. One wonders if Kugelmann’s eyes got a little wide at this evocation of the toddler economist. Mill says something quite similar in his own Principles of Political Economy:
“The conditions and laws of Production would be the same as they are, if the arrangements of society did not depend on Exchange, or did not admit of it. Even in the present system of industrial life, in which employments are minutely subdivided, and all concerned in production depend for their remuneration on the price of a particular commodity, exchange is not the fundamental law of the distribution of the produce, no more than roads and carriages are the essential laws of motion, but merely a part of the machinery for effecting it. To confound these ideas, seems to me, not only a logical, but a practical blunder. It is a case of the error too common in political economy, of not distinguishing between necessities arising from the nature of things, and those created by social arrangements.”
Further down in the letter, Marx says something that is rather erased in the standard translation: „The vulgar economist hasn’t the least idea that the real, daily exchange relationship and the value magnitudes cannot be directly identical. The wit [Witz] [not essence, or Wesen, as you will find in the English version] of bougeois society consists exactly in there being apriori no conscious social regulation of production.“
A remark which justly brings out the fact that problems of value haunt all economics schools. What value is is connected to how economists see their discipline: one in which there is an underlying, always arousable anxiety about its scientific status.
A famous exercise in the transvaluation of all values in orthodox, neo-classical economics is contained in a very sleek paper published in the nineties by William Nordhaus. Nordhaus’ paper is neat -- if one takes a deconstructive view -- partly because of what he does in it, and partly because his subject matter is shot through with scientific anxiety. The subject matter is the price of light. Specifically, the price of light since the invention of fire in the paleolithic age down to the halogen lamp.
Light, of course, is the supreme object of the supreme science, physics. The book I am translating by Silja Graupe demonstrates, with infinite care, following in the footsteps of Mirowski, how very much the economists of the 19th century, especially the founders of the marginal revolution, used physics as their base analogy for the creation of the central equilibrium model. And Graupe shows just how wrong the analogy is. Shelley, long ago, saw through the scientific armature of „political oeconomics,“ the maniac search for equivalents and variables, to the poetry at its core:
“We have more moral, political and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice: we have more scientific and œconomical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry, in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government and political œconomy, or at least what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we "let I dare not wait upon I would, "like the poor cat in the adage".”
Economics has few real jokes (Witz), but one of them is all about light: Bastiat’s little satire on the petition of the candle makers. It is an essay that still causes the port to shake in the glasses round the table at the University of Chicago. In fact, in 1868, Marx was writing about Bastiat. Nordhaus quotes the satire in his essay. It begins: “We are subjected to the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, who enjoys such superior facilities for the production of light that he can inundate our national market at reduced price. This rival is no other than the sun.”
Although it might seem a little odd to go from a reading of Das Kapital to the material concomitant of reading Das Kapital (myself, I have read it by 60 watt bulb, by florescent bulb, and even by halogen bulb, but not by gas or candle, by the light of which it was undoubtedly written), Nordhaus’ essay is in its own way a critique of the political economy that also seeks to ground economics in science. Light has the advantage of being a standard, a measure that is at the basis of other measures. So, Nordhaus ingeniously maintains, if we can look at the price of light down the millennia, we can get a sort of photographic negative that tells us about technological progress down through the years. And if we find that the prices, as they are computed in standard economics, do not give us this negative, then we have a good basis for recomputing those prices. Which (warning: Plot Giveaway) is just what Nordhaus finds. In fact, Nordhaus and his colleagues who advocated hedonic pricing to better reflect technological change won over a crucial player in the nineties economy, Alan Greenspan. LI won’t discuss, here, the way that Greenspan’s self interest in papering over inflation and the hedonic school’s insistence that qualitative change on a number of dimensions has to be reflected in the price index – that the prices have to be, oddly, hedonic prices – met in the mid nineties and allowed Greenspan to keep down interest rates when, according to traditional indicators, he should raise them (which James Galbraith rightly said was the best thing Greenspan did) – all of this is a well known story.
But … back to the charms of Nordhaus. One of the most charming things about the paper is the slightly mad Newtonian fervor in it. For instance: Nordhaus says that the earliest market for lighting fuel arose in Babylon, about 3000 B.C. At that time, the Babylonians were using sesame oil to light their lamps. Now, your average Babylonian laborer earned about one shekel a month. And Nordhaus figures that if that monthly earning was spent just on lighting, it would buy ten liters of sesame oil. BUT: big question: how much lighting power would it buy? Since, happily, physics has given us our standards of illumination, Nordhaus does a little experiment. He buys a terra cotta lamp – not Babylonian, but Roman, which doesn’t make too much difference, insofar as lamp technology had not progressed too far at this point – from Spirits, Inc, of Minneapolis Minnesota, which guarantees the provenance. He fills it with 100 percent pressed sesame oil and uses a wick from a modern candle. He found that one quarter cup burned for 17 hours with an average intensity of 0.17 foot candles.
I totally love this.
END OF PART 1
That I bring in kids to talk about deconstruction, is not, by the way, a sneaky way of jabbing at J.D. Why do you think this site is named Limited Inc? When Marx’s friend Kugelman pointed out that the forms of value theory in the first edition of the first volumen of Das Kapital rather confused some people, namely some unnamed review, Marx sent him a famous letter (English and German in which he implied that, really, a child could understand it:
„... when we conceive by Value something in general, we must concede my conclusions. The unhappy man doesn’t see, that, if in my book there is no chapter on Value, the analysis of the real relationships that I give contained the proof and reference to the real relationships of value. The nonsense talked about the necessity of proving the value concept rests only on the most complete ignorance, as much about the subject matter that it deals with as the method of science. That any nation would kick the bucket if labor halted for, I won’t say a year, but merely a couple of weeks, any child knows. Just as they know that the different quantities of need corresponding to quantities of products require different, quantitatively determined amounts of collective social labor. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in specific proportions is not suspended through the specific form of social production, but instead, only its manner of appearance changes, is self evident. Natural laws cannot, in general, be suspended.“ (I’ve retranslated bits of this)
Well, it is a wise child that knows his forms of value. One wonders if Kugelmann’s eyes got a little wide at this evocation of the toddler economist. Mill says something quite similar in his own Principles of Political Economy:
“The conditions and laws of Production would be the same as they are, if the arrangements of society did not depend on Exchange, or did not admit of it. Even in the present system of industrial life, in which employments are minutely subdivided, and all concerned in production depend for their remuneration on the price of a particular commodity, exchange is not the fundamental law of the distribution of the produce, no more than roads and carriages are the essential laws of motion, but merely a part of the machinery for effecting it. To confound these ideas, seems to me, not only a logical, but a practical blunder. It is a case of the error too common in political economy, of not distinguishing between necessities arising from the nature of things, and those created by social arrangements.”
Further down in the letter, Marx says something that is rather erased in the standard translation: „The vulgar economist hasn’t the least idea that the real, daily exchange relationship and the value magnitudes cannot be directly identical. The wit [Witz] [not essence, or Wesen, as you will find in the English version] of bougeois society consists exactly in there being apriori no conscious social regulation of production.“
A remark which justly brings out the fact that problems of value haunt all economics schools. What value is is connected to how economists see their discipline: one in which there is an underlying, always arousable anxiety about its scientific status.
A famous exercise in the transvaluation of all values in orthodox, neo-classical economics is contained in a very sleek paper published in the nineties by William Nordhaus. Nordhaus’ paper is neat -- if one takes a deconstructive view -- partly because of what he does in it, and partly because his subject matter is shot through with scientific anxiety. The subject matter is the price of light. Specifically, the price of light since the invention of fire in the paleolithic age down to the halogen lamp.
Light, of course, is the supreme object of the supreme science, physics. The book I am translating by Silja Graupe demonstrates, with infinite care, following in the footsteps of Mirowski, how very much the economists of the 19th century, especially the founders of the marginal revolution, used physics as their base analogy for the creation of the central equilibrium model. And Graupe shows just how wrong the analogy is. Shelley, long ago, saw through the scientific armature of „political oeconomics,“ the maniac search for equivalents and variables, to the poetry at its core:
“We have more moral, political and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice: we have more scientific and œconomical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry, in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government and political œconomy, or at least what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we "let I dare not wait upon I would, "like the poor cat in the adage".”
Economics has few real jokes (Witz), but one of them is all about light: Bastiat’s little satire on the petition of the candle makers. It is an essay that still causes the port to shake in the glasses round the table at the University of Chicago. In fact, in 1868, Marx was writing about Bastiat. Nordhaus quotes the satire in his essay. It begins: “We are subjected to the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, who enjoys such superior facilities for the production of light that he can inundate our national market at reduced price. This rival is no other than the sun.”
Although it might seem a little odd to go from a reading of Das Kapital to the material concomitant of reading Das Kapital (myself, I have read it by 60 watt bulb, by florescent bulb, and even by halogen bulb, but not by gas or candle, by the light of which it was undoubtedly written), Nordhaus’ essay is in its own way a critique of the political economy that also seeks to ground economics in science. Light has the advantage of being a standard, a measure that is at the basis of other measures. So, Nordhaus ingeniously maintains, if we can look at the price of light down the millennia, we can get a sort of photographic negative that tells us about technological progress down through the years. And if we find that the prices, as they are computed in standard economics, do not give us this negative, then we have a good basis for recomputing those prices. Which (warning: Plot Giveaway) is just what Nordhaus finds. In fact, Nordhaus and his colleagues who advocated hedonic pricing to better reflect technological change won over a crucial player in the nineties economy, Alan Greenspan. LI won’t discuss, here, the way that Greenspan’s self interest in papering over inflation and the hedonic school’s insistence that qualitative change on a number of dimensions has to be reflected in the price index – that the prices have to be, oddly, hedonic prices – met in the mid nineties and allowed Greenspan to keep down interest rates when, according to traditional indicators, he should raise them (which James Galbraith rightly said was the best thing Greenspan did) – all of this is a well known story.
But … back to the charms of Nordhaus. One of the most charming things about the paper is the slightly mad Newtonian fervor in it. For instance: Nordhaus says that the earliest market for lighting fuel arose in Babylon, about 3000 B.C. At that time, the Babylonians were using sesame oil to light their lamps. Now, your average Babylonian laborer earned about one shekel a month. And Nordhaus figures that if that monthly earning was spent just on lighting, it would buy ten liters of sesame oil. BUT: big question: how much lighting power would it buy? Since, happily, physics has given us our standards of illumination, Nordhaus does a little experiment. He buys a terra cotta lamp – not Babylonian, but Roman, which doesn’t make too much difference, insofar as lamp technology had not progressed too far at this point – from Spirits, Inc, of Minneapolis Minnesota, which guarantees the provenance. He fills it with 100 percent pressed sesame oil and uses a wick from a modern candle. He found that one quarter cup burned for 17 hours with an average intensity of 0.17 foot candles.
I totally love this.
END OF PART 1
Friday, April 21, 2006
homework tonight: v is to blank...
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should see V., and write about it.
So, last night LI did our duty. We’ve read many finely drawn theorizations of the movie. Here’s one, and here’s one. These people know their shit.
The way I saw the movie was influenced, a bit, by the recent re-translation of We. I just did the review for that and interviewed Natasha Randall (a lovely, talented woman who I aim to publicize to the extent I can -- read WE!) for Publishers Weekly. In We, D-503 becomes a free man, politically, as he becomes a slave, erotically, to the sexy I-330. I’m not sure if anybody associated with V ever read We, but the S/M subtext under the political message certainly influenced Orwell and Huxley, and presumably has crept into the dystopian genre. It is a sort of contingent conjunction, really – the original We is influenced less by the experience of Stalinism (it was written in the early 1920s), than by art nouveau decadence – that style that you find in Sologub’s Petty Demon and in Bely’s Petersburg. Those seem to be the major influences in We. Seeing Evie disciplined by V, then, didn’t surprise me. By this time, that motif is almost bound to pop up, rooted in the deep structure of dystopias. And to the marriage of Venus in Furs and The Rights of Man, I bring no impediment. The bride may now suck the blood out of the groom, or vice versa.
About the film itself: we definitely got a rush from it. Especially we liked the blowing up of the Parliament. As blowings up go, that was the shit.
Since this is a Wachowski brothers film, I was looking forward to some exemplary slo mo in the service of bloodshed, and I wasn’t disappointed. Usually, slow mo pisses me off. It is a detour around a big narrative problem, which is that people, even big people, can get easily hurt and die. Now if the big person is fighting, say, three little people, and the three little people are vicious and armed, the chances of death or injury dramatically increase. In the Iliad, when a hero is about to succumb to sheer material force, sometimes he is wrapped in a cloud or a mist by a god and rescued. However, if you had too much deus ex machina action in the Iliad, the battles would truly go nowhere. It would sap all the danger, and hence the dignity, from the poem. There’s a fate, a bare spot – much like the bare spot that makes Achilles vulnerable – that the Gods can’t hide. This is why we hate deus ex machina being thrown into a movie on an industrial scale – as happens in your standard action film. Slo mo is of course the easiest of all technical solutions. What was cool about the Matrix was that the W. brothers decided to make a film all about slo mo. They elevated avoiding an all too human truth by way of a gimmick into a meta-gimmick. Pretty brassy. This time around, the slo mo is connected with an old and pretty disused fighting style – sword play, of which we see bits on tv in the background in the film. And by the time we get to where we want the movie to let go –the climactic bloodletting – the movie has gained some cred by not endangering its superhero in some silly way, so we are in the mood to make allowances. Thus, we get some beautiful bloody wackings, in lovely slow mo. And this is a major lure for us, what we came for.
However, there was one surprisingly bogus moment at the very end. The movie closes on, of all things, Rolling Stones’ Street fighting Man. No way! The Matrix ended on the perfect Marilyn Manson song, God is in the TV. It was calling out there at the end to all the kids. But the Stones? That old clunker? Really, if we had to have something from the age of rock dinosaurs, why not Patti Smith’s Power to the People. Myself, I would have thought about Pavement, or, perhaps, the Tricky version of Public Enemy’s Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos. Or, moving up into the living world, how about Black Angel’s Manipulation. The latter would have been so bold I would definitely have creamed in my pants, but – alas, the Brothers W.'s music sense failed them. Too bad.
So, last night LI did our duty. We’ve read many finely drawn theorizations of the movie. Here’s one, and here’s one. These people know their shit.
The way I saw the movie was influenced, a bit, by the recent re-translation of We. I just did the review for that and interviewed Natasha Randall (a lovely, talented woman who I aim to publicize to the extent I can -- read WE!) for Publishers Weekly. In We, D-503 becomes a free man, politically, as he becomes a slave, erotically, to the sexy I-330. I’m not sure if anybody associated with V ever read We, but the S/M subtext under the political message certainly influenced Orwell and Huxley, and presumably has crept into the dystopian genre. It is a sort of contingent conjunction, really – the original We is influenced less by the experience of Stalinism (it was written in the early 1920s), than by art nouveau decadence – that style that you find in Sologub’s Petty Demon and in Bely’s Petersburg. Those seem to be the major influences in We. Seeing Evie disciplined by V, then, didn’t surprise me. By this time, that motif is almost bound to pop up, rooted in the deep structure of dystopias. And to the marriage of Venus in Furs and The Rights of Man, I bring no impediment. The bride may now suck the blood out of the groom, or vice versa.
About the film itself: we definitely got a rush from it. Especially we liked the blowing up of the Parliament. As blowings up go, that was the shit.
Since this is a Wachowski brothers film, I was looking forward to some exemplary slo mo in the service of bloodshed, and I wasn’t disappointed. Usually, slow mo pisses me off. It is a detour around a big narrative problem, which is that people, even big people, can get easily hurt and die. Now if the big person is fighting, say, three little people, and the three little people are vicious and armed, the chances of death or injury dramatically increase. In the Iliad, when a hero is about to succumb to sheer material force, sometimes he is wrapped in a cloud or a mist by a god and rescued. However, if you had too much deus ex machina action in the Iliad, the battles would truly go nowhere. It would sap all the danger, and hence the dignity, from the poem. There’s a fate, a bare spot – much like the bare spot that makes Achilles vulnerable – that the Gods can’t hide. This is why we hate deus ex machina being thrown into a movie on an industrial scale – as happens in your standard action film. Slo mo is of course the easiest of all technical solutions. What was cool about the Matrix was that the W. brothers decided to make a film all about slo mo. They elevated avoiding an all too human truth by way of a gimmick into a meta-gimmick. Pretty brassy. This time around, the slo mo is connected with an old and pretty disused fighting style – sword play, of which we see bits on tv in the background in the film. And by the time we get to where we want the movie to let go –the climactic bloodletting – the movie has gained some cred by not endangering its superhero in some silly way, so we are in the mood to make allowances. Thus, we get some beautiful bloody wackings, in lovely slow mo. And this is a major lure for us, what we came for.
However, there was one surprisingly bogus moment at the very end. The movie closes on, of all things, Rolling Stones’ Street fighting Man. No way! The Matrix ended on the perfect Marilyn Manson song, God is in the TV. It was calling out there at the end to all the kids. But the Stones? That old clunker? Really, if we had to have something from the age of rock dinosaurs, why not Patti Smith’s Power to the People. Myself, I would have thought about Pavement, or, perhaps, the Tricky version of Public Enemy’s Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos. Or, moving up into the living world, how about Black Angel’s Manipulation. The latter would have been so bold I would definitely have creamed in my pants, but – alas, the Brothers W.'s music sense failed them. Too bad.
forbidden zones among the statistics
Last year, the UN’s IAEA along with the WHO published a revisionist account of the Chernobyl disaster. It put the long term death toll estimate at 9,000, gave a much lower estimate of the radiation released from the plant than any previous one, gave a much lower estimate of the number of people involved in the cleanup of the disaster than any previous estimate, and dismissed 20 years of death and health impairment as so much psychosomatic folderol. It should be said that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency loves atomic energy. It is composed of believers. And the report was written as part of a campaign to de-demonize nuclear power. As Michael Flynn pointed out in a review of the report for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“But according to other observers, while the report seems to demonstrate that Chernobyl’s devastation is less dramatic than once thought, it can hardly be called “reassuring.” They argue that the report provides little solace to those still suffering from the effects of the accident and fails to accurately portray
its total impact. And they draw a sharp distinction between the actual report— which is composed of two draft studies, one on health consequences and another on the environment—and the report’s summary and press release, which they argue minimize and contradict the report’s findings. Richard Garwin, an internationally renowned physicist and IBM fellow emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, calls the report “deliberately misleading,” arguing that it overlooks evidence that contradicts some of its conclusions.”
Greenpeace attacked the report as a whitewash, and has recently published its own report, which estimates 11 times the death load. And the related TORCH report this month does a pretty nice job of sacking the IAEA’s report – which nevertheless will, of course, be quoted as the Bible on Fox news, and other sources of propaganda.
The IAEA report was greeted with hallelujahs by the conservative media and their spokesman in this country last year. As LI has pointed out before, the GOP and the Soviet hardliners converge in their feelings about the environment – whether nature was given to man by God or seized by the revolutionary worker, the main thing is that nature exists as a free resource and dump, a gold mine and a sewer. One of the great things about nuclear power, from this point of view, is that disaster is long term: the land around Chernobyl is contaminated for millennia, and the injuries done to the victims of Chernobyl space out over 20 to 40 years –well, except for the stillbirths and the deformities that die off quickly. In that time, a lot happens, and one can plausibly say, oh, that person died of smoking – never mind the history of fainting, the long stays in the hospital, the anemia, the impotence, the bowel trouble. And then you pick those things off. For instance, by chance, Belarus actually had a record of child birth deformities going back before the accident, so much research was done in the Soviet Union and by Belarussian researchers on the rise in birth defects. Similar studies have shown a brief peak in Downs syndrome in Germany, in the path of the wind driven fallout, and similar studies have shown jumps in spina bifida, for instance, in Turkey. Of course, the IAEA didn't even take into account - in its whole report -- the entire area affected by the fallout -- which by its own epidemiological method makes its figures simply wrong. Further, the IAEA demands a linear causal link which, of course, is very hard to show for accidents like this, that take place over long periods of time. If you set the parameters right, you can wish the disaster away. Time favors the liar -- especially the motivated, wealthy liar. Those who actually believe the IAEA should look at Belarus' fascinating and ongoing demographic disaster and ask what happened between 1987 and the present day. But such a question would be considered very, very vulgar by the physicists who composed the membership of committees like the IAEA, with their mandate to "calm public fears."
There was an interview with a Russian physicist, Yevgeny Velikhov, published by RIA Novosti that typifies this Frozen Belief set – the techno-millenarian belief that fits so well with economic systems based on profit or on a party’s command and control:
“Since the tragic day 20 years ago the physicists have been trying hard to defeat radio phobia, and prove to the people that atomic power engineering brings light and heat to their homes. Have they done all they could? The drawbacks which this industry had, and some of which were revealed by Chernobyl have been largely overcome. Nuclear power engineering has evolved incredible safety measures. I'd call some of them even somewhat excessive. In general, the experience amassed today by the physicists and designers, and the high safety standards of nuclear power engineering guarantee that accidents similar to Chernobyl will never repeat.”
A piece of boilerplate that could easily fit into a speech by Cheney.
Peter Neils of the Los Alamos Study Group cuts to the heart of the recent movement to revive nuclear power in this country:
“Nuclear power has never been economically viable without massive government subsidies. In the case of nuclear power, we have socialized the development, liability and waste disposal expenses while privatizing the profit, an absurd deal for the taxpayer. In fact, the market has already left nuclear power behind.”
However, it isn’t simply a question of the market – Chernobyl posed a question about what the economy is for in the first place. It poses the basic question of the social and planetary cost of our whole system. Just as the arms race in the Cold War presupposed, absurdly, that two systems – the West and the East – at one point in time had suddenly seized the right to defend themselves with the threat to end humanity itself (implying that we had reached a truly utopian moment, for only a utopia could be defended in such an absolute manner), nuclear power is the emblem of a systematic insanity of need which we will either confront or succumb to.
Given LI’s recent lurch to black humor, we’ll end with this bit about James Lovelock, the Gaia person. Lovelock, according to George Dvorsky’s blog, actually advocates more Chernobyls, showing that there is no political ecological niche that isn’t filled by somebody.
“Back in 2001, Lovelock told the Telegraph that we need nuclear power. He also asked the British government to revive atomic energy as an alternative to burning fossil fuels. He went on to downplay the Chernobyl disaster, claiming that it was not the industrial catastrophe that so many people made it out to be
Further, Lovelock noted his delight in the fact that diverse wildlife had once again returned to the 30km area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear facility. This is the area, of course, that remains off-limits due to radiation. “The wildlife of Chernobyl know nothing about radiation and do not fear it,” he says, “That they might live a little less long is of no great consequence to them.”
Inspired by this shining and radioactive example of passive environmental remediation, Lovelock argues that we should actually recreate similar situations elsewhere: “I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers.”
As Dvorsky says: “that’s a hardcore solution to the global warming problem.”
“But according to other observers, while the report seems to demonstrate that Chernobyl’s devastation is less dramatic than once thought, it can hardly be called “reassuring.” They argue that the report provides little solace to those still suffering from the effects of the accident and fails to accurately portray
its total impact. And they draw a sharp distinction between the actual report— which is composed of two draft studies, one on health consequences and another on the environment—and the report’s summary and press release, which they argue minimize and contradict the report’s findings. Richard Garwin, an internationally renowned physicist and IBM fellow emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, calls the report “deliberately misleading,” arguing that it overlooks evidence that contradicts some of its conclusions.”
Greenpeace attacked the report as a whitewash, and has recently published its own report, which estimates 11 times the death load. And the related TORCH report this month does a pretty nice job of sacking the IAEA’s report – which nevertheless will, of course, be quoted as the Bible on Fox news, and other sources of propaganda.
The IAEA report was greeted with hallelujahs by the conservative media and their spokesman in this country last year. As LI has pointed out before, the GOP and the Soviet hardliners converge in their feelings about the environment – whether nature was given to man by God or seized by the revolutionary worker, the main thing is that nature exists as a free resource and dump, a gold mine and a sewer. One of the great things about nuclear power, from this point of view, is that disaster is long term: the land around Chernobyl is contaminated for millennia, and the injuries done to the victims of Chernobyl space out over 20 to 40 years –well, except for the stillbirths and the deformities that die off quickly. In that time, a lot happens, and one can plausibly say, oh, that person died of smoking – never mind the history of fainting, the long stays in the hospital, the anemia, the impotence, the bowel trouble. And then you pick those things off. For instance, by chance, Belarus actually had a record of child birth deformities going back before the accident, so much research was done in the Soviet Union and by Belarussian researchers on the rise in birth defects. Similar studies have shown a brief peak in Downs syndrome in Germany, in the path of the wind driven fallout, and similar studies have shown jumps in spina bifida, for instance, in Turkey. Of course, the IAEA didn't even take into account - in its whole report -- the entire area affected by the fallout -- which by its own epidemiological method makes its figures simply wrong. Further, the IAEA demands a linear causal link which, of course, is very hard to show for accidents like this, that take place over long periods of time. If you set the parameters right, you can wish the disaster away. Time favors the liar -- especially the motivated, wealthy liar. Those who actually believe the IAEA should look at Belarus' fascinating and ongoing demographic disaster and ask what happened between 1987 and the present day. But such a question would be considered very, very vulgar by the physicists who composed the membership of committees like the IAEA, with their mandate to "calm public fears."
There was an interview with a Russian physicist, Yevgeny Velikhov, published by RIA Novosti that typifies this Frozen Belief set – the techno-millenarian belief that fits so well with economic systems based on profit or on a party’s command and control:
“Since the tragic day 20 years ago the physicists have been trying hard to defeat radio phobia, and prove to the people that atomic power engineering brings light and heat to their homes. Have they done all they could? The drawbacks which this industry had, and some of which were revealed by Chernobyl have been largely overcome. Nuclear power engineering has evolved incredible safety measures. I'd call some of them even somewhat excessive. In general, the experience amassed today by the physicists and designers, and the high safety standards of nuclear power engineering guarantee that accidents similar to Chernobyl will never repeat.”
A piece of boilerplate that could easily fit into a speech by Cheney.
Peter Neils of the Los Alamos Study Group cuts to the heart of the recent movement to revive nuclear power in this country:
“Nuclear power has never been economically viable without massive government subsidies. In the case of nuclear power, we have socialized the development, liability and waste disposal expenses while privatizing the profit, an absurd deal for the taxpayer. In fact, the market has already left nuclear power behind.”
However, it isn’t simply a question of the market – Chernobyl posed a question about what the economy is for in the first place. It poses the basic question of the social and planetary cost of our whole system. Just as the arms race in the Cold War presupposed, absurdly, that two systems – the West and the East – at one point in time had suddenly seized the right to defend themselves with the threat to end humanity itself (implying that we had reached a truly utopian moment, for only a utopia could be defended in such an absolute manner), nuclear power is the emblem of a systematic insanity of need which we will either confront or succumb to.
Given LI’s recent lurch to black humor, we’ll end with this bit about James Lovelock, the Gaia person. Lovelock, according to George Dvorsky’s blog, actually advocates more Chernobyls, showing that there is no political ecological niche that isn’t filled by somebody.
“Back in 2001, Lovelock told the Telegraph that we need nuclear power. He also asked the British government to revive atomic energy as an alternative to burning fossil fuels. He went on to downplay the Chernobyl disaster, claiming that it was not the industrial catastrophe that so many people made it out to be
Further, Lovelock noted his delight in the fact that diverse wildlife had once again returned to the 30km area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear facility. This is the area, of course, that remains off-limits due to radiation. “The wildlife of Chernobyl know nothing about radiation and do not fear it,” he says, “That they might live a little less long is of no great consequence to them.”
Inspired by this shining and radioactive example of passive environmental remediation, Lovelock argues that we should actually recreate similar situations elsewhere: “I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers.”
As Dvorsky says: “that’s a hardcore solution to the global warming problem.”
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
DEATH THREATS FOR DUMMIES
Recently, LI has noticed another blog trend that is passing us by. Apparently, if you are anybody nowadays in the blogosphere, somebody is threatening you with death. Ezra Klein published an account of how Malkin published the phone numbers of anti-recruitments students, and how these students got death threats. Then Malkin got death threats. On CT, some friend of one of the group is getting death threats.
And how about moi? Is LI chopped liver or something? Not only do we heartily approve of the anti-recruiting students, we heartily approve of the little tire slashing action engaged in by some of them. The spirit of the Boston tea party is not dead! Those who want to phone in death threats (no creditors please) should call us at 513-478-3699.
That said, it won’t do to just say, I want to kill you, or fuck you up the ass, or that kind of thing. So yesterday! Let’s have a little creativity among the death threat group. First, set the atmosphere. I’d recommend music for this. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has an excellent death threat song with a spaced out male voice going “Little Girls. I like little girls!” But if you are going to play yesteryear’s NIN, you really aren’t even trying. Suggestion: the gorier the death, the better. Why not a little power tool action in the background to give it that Leatherface atmosphere? Nothing says fear like a drillbit. On the other hand, don’t go overboard, or the neighbors will definitely complain. You do not want to be standing there, power drill in hand, pants to your knees, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club on stereo overdrive, explaining to a cop what you are doing. On the other hand, those death threaters who live far from human kind, in rural areas, don’t need me to advise them. You all are the pros. After all, I’m doing death threats for dummies, here.
Second, personalize the death threat. Calling LI and giving us a ho hum death threat is not going to cut the mustard. We recommend doing a computer search beforehand. Remember, stalkers, research makes all the difference between the yawning and the shitting in his pants response. For this, you have to put on your thinking cap. For instance, knowing LI lives in Austin, we recommend some local color. Like, someday, fuckwad, you will be walking out of Mean Eyed Cat and I’ll be there with my favorite knife, Betsy.
Third, of course, is don’t hog the line. Other death threateners might be trying to call too, you know. Plus, the cops can trace it if you stay on for, like ten minutes. Or so I believe from various crime dramas I’ve seen.
This has been a public service message from your friends at LI!
And how about moi? Is LI chopped liver or something? Not only do we heartily approve of the anti-recruiting students, we heartily approve of the little tire slashing action engaged in by some of them. The spirit of the Boston tea party is not dead! Those who want to phone in death threats (no creditors please) should call us at 513-478-3699.
That said, it won’t do to just say, I want to kill you, or fuck you up the ass, or that kind of thing. So yesterday! Let’s have a little creativity among the death threat group. First, set the atmosphere. I’d recommend music for this. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has an excellent death threat song with a spaced out male voice going “Little Girls. I like little girls!” But if you are going to play yesteryear’s NIN, you really aren’t even trying. Suggestion: the gorier the death, the better. Why not a little power tool action in the background to give it that Leatherface atmosphere? Nothing says fear like a drillbit. On the other hand, don’t go overboard, or the neighbors will definitely complain. You do not want to be standing there, power drill in hand, pants to your knees, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club on stereo overdrive, explaining to a cop what you are doing. On the other hand, those death threaters who live far from human kind, in rural areas, don’t need me to advise them. You all are the pros. After all, I’m doing death threats for dummies, here.
Second, personalize the death threat. Calling LI and giving us a ho hum death threat is not going to cut the mustard. We recommend doing a computer search beforehand. Remember, stalkers, research makes all the difference between the yawning and the shitting in his pants response. For this, you have to put on your thinking cap. For instance, knowing LI lives in Austin, we recommend some local color. Like, someday, fuckwad, you will be walking out of Mean Eyed Cat and I’ll be there with my favorite knife, Betsy.
Third, of course, is don’t hog the line. Other death threateners might be trying to call too, you know. Plus, the cops can trace it if you stay on for, like ten minutes. Or so I believe from various crime dramas I’ve seen.
This has been a public service message from your friends at LI!
a subplot from shame
Sad times at LI – even our faithful and long time reader, Mr. T., said about the post a couple of days ago: “the terms "common sense" and "manifesto" appeared in the headline - I could not proceed to read the post; those terms have a garlic-like effect on this vampire.”
LI’s frantic attempt to intervene in the discussion of the Euston Manifesto – our comments on threads, our two posts – seem to have been spoken in Hittite. We get so frustrated that nobody is ever outraged by LI! Nobody listens to us! The tears glisten. Is it because we have gone over the edge? Surely this is what goldbugs feel like -- those culty rightwingers who blame all of the world's ills on the retirement of the gold standard, in spite of the fact that the world is immensely more prosperous without the gold standard. So is our fight for re-democratizing foreign policy a sort of anachronistic re-enactment? Didn't the strong executive branch lead the Free World to victory in the Cold War?
No, and no. The key, I feel, to the spiral of global crises - the criminal neglect of the looming environmental crisis, in conjunction with the mafia like attempt to control the oil states in the Middle East -- goes back to a ‘legitimacy’ crisis. We cannot remain half monarchical and half democratic. A house divided against itself, etc. etc. The root of the evil done to us by the supposed missionaries of democracy began in their employment as flaks of fraud, and continues to this day as they defend with tooth and nail every sleazy move made by this regime. See the comic frothings, this week, of Hitchens in Slate. Yet the left-right battle about the Euston Manifesto goes on as if the Iraq invasion did not lay bare every seedy and disgusting pattern that has been going on for the last sixty years or so – with the Cold War creating a rotten pattern that keeps generating disaster.
Which is amply confirmed by the article we mentioned yesterday, by Langewiesche, who shows that: a, the U.S. was pretty thoroughly informed about what A. Q. Khan was doing, and b., that they connived to cover it up, once again converging the official American interest with a military tyrant, and once again distorting the American interest to the eventual hurt of who knows how many populations.
Langewiesche is sanguine about nuclear proliferation. He sees the obvious: the inability of the great powers to do without their missiles eventually makes the limitation of nuclear weapons nearly impossible. I should also add, as a caveat to the quotes I am going to give, that LI has always stood foursquare against the very term, WMD. That is a bogus category, a commercial category. Yes, the weapons companies and governments of the most developed countries will sell you the aircraft to deliver your atom bomb, but no, they are not going to sell you centrifuges, at least officially. As we have pointed out many times, oh so many times even we are bored, WMD are small arms. The biggest killers in the world are automatic rifles. That is it. WMD simply means – Western people can get killed. There is no moral high ground here, just a lot of low dealing.
Okay. On to the grafs. Langewiesche’s article in the Atlantic is actually the second in a series. The villain in the article, although never quite villainous so much as vain, is the father of Pakistan’s H-bomb, A.Q. Khan. LI loved this graf:
“The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West — an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role. The nuclear laboratory was nourished by a large and secret budget for which no accounting was required and from which Khan freely drew funds as if they were his own. One might expect that Khan's largesse would have triggered an investigation, but in Pakistan it did not. I have repeatedly asked people there if they ever wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth. One man close to the ruling military regime led by the current dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, tried recently to convince me that Khan's wife, Hendrina, came from a rich Dutch family, and that it was her money he was spending. But most people were straighter with me. They made it clear that my question was naive, and typical of an American abroad; they had not wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth because they had taken it as a given that he was skimming, like everyone else. A Pakistani parliamentarian made the point that some of the highest positions in the government today are held by people who are not merely corrupt and opportunistic but are the very icons of Pakistani criminality — people from families with a known history of murder, extortion, vote-rigging, smuggling, and fraud. He had once complained about this to Musharraf, who had advised him to be more realistic: Pakistan, Musharraf had said, is an imperfect society. The parliamentarian shrugged. Even the army is run like a real-estate racket, expropriating land from ordinary citizens and passing it on to officers for their personal gain. It is not by chance that Islamabad is a city of mansions, and that many of them are inhabited by retired generals. What was Khan's skimming compared with all that? And unlike the generals, who tended to lose every fight they provoked, Khan had delivered on his words.”
We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Aren’t we always here? Isn’t the man in charge Duarte? Or Rios Montt? Or Marcos? Or Suharto? Or Carlos Andrés Pérez? Aren’t these the streets of the City of Eternal Night, or Pandemonium, or the L.A. conjured up by Philip Dick? Really, this is a story that seems to have been some erased subplot of Shame. And Langewiesche is actually interested in the personality of Khan, all that cushioned vanity. In fact, it is a worldwide set. These people are perched on our shoulders, like very heavy buzzards.
Langewiesche cleverly decided that he needed a counterpart to Khan. He follows an obscure but persistent reporter for the energy mags, a guy I can sympathize with: Mark Hibbs. Hibbs is the man who put together the pieces of all the nuclear puzzles, finding that every connection led him to Pakistan. And he published his findings in Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, not exactly mags of record for most people. But apparently his findings kept driving this government apeshit. Especially since the U.S. was playing a game of pretending not to know what was going on. The same game the Americans played in the nineties, pretending not to know who was using who in the setting up of the Taliban and the quid pro quo between Al Qaeda and the ISI.
Which brings us to the post 9/11 era, when everything changed and then changed back, a war was declared against an impalpable object and the palpable object was encouraged to find a hiding place in a mountain somewhere. The era of diversion and bogus threats. This is the graf I really wanted to cull from the piece. By 2001, Khan’s sales to North Korea were finally getting America’s goat. They knew Khan dealt with Saddam H. before the Kuwait invasion. They knew he was selling to Iran. They knew that he couldn’t do what he was doing without the military being in on it body and soul. And the U.S. has been married to that military since the Reagan days – a marriage formed in the heat of anti-communist ardor, when the CIA was all for small, Islamicist groups hitting targets in the Soviet Union with bombs. So this is what happened:
“Khan was therefore dumbfounded, upon returning from a short trip to Dubai in 2000, when Musharraf, having called him in for a conversation, told him that he had been under surveillance by Pakistani agents and that there were concerns about financial improprieties. Financial improprieties? In the world of Khan the word had lost all meaning. There was no question of going to prison, but in 2001, just days short of his sixty-fifth birthday, A. Q. Khan was gently relieved of his command, forced to retire with honors from his cherished laboratory, and "promoted" to the position of scientific adviser to Musharraf. This last was a particularly nice touch. There is evidence that the exchanges with North Korea continued for at least another year. When the Bush administration finally decided to go public with its concerns about the North Koreans' nuclear-weapons program, it delayed leaking the intelligence information until late October of 2002, after Congress had given its approval for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The blundering that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. government condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan — which, as any reader of Hibbs would have known, was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America's most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists. Before the attacks on New York and Washington, Musharraf himself had accommodated Osama bin Laden, had supported the Taliban, and had used international jihadis against the Indians in Kashmir and beyond. But times had changed, and by October of 2002 Musharraf was Washington's friend, engaged in trying to suppress the Islamist idea by gunning it down. It was useful that with his move against Khan he had partially protected himself from revelations of Pakistan's trade in nuclear technology. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke with Musharraf, and afterward, when asked on ABC television about Pakistan's assistance to North Korea, said, "President Musharraf gave me his assurance in that conversation, as he has previously, that Pakistan is not doing anything of that nature … The past is the past. I am more concerned about what is going on now. We have a new relationship with Pakistan."
Which is the same as the old relationship, pusher to addict roleplaying. As LI has pointed out again and again, the Bush regime's mantra that everything changed after 9/11 is not only not true -- all events having a before and an after, a then and a then - but it is a special plea that we ignore the negligence before the attack and the truly puzzling inability to deal with the attackers afterwards.
LI’s frantic attempt to intervene in the discussion of the Euston Manifesto – our comments on threads, our two posts – seem to have been spoken in Hittite. We get so frustrated that nobody is ever outraged by LI! Nobody listens to us! The tears glisten. Is it because we have gone over the edge? Surely this is what goldbugs feel like -- those culty rightwingers who blame all of the world's ills on the retirement of the gold standard, in spite of the fact that the world is immensely more prosperous without the gold standard. So is our fight for re-democratizing foreign policy a sort of anachronistic re-enactment? Didn't the strong executive branch lead the Free World to victory in the Cold War?
No, and no. The key, I feel, to the spiral of global crises - the criminal neglect of the looming environmental crisis, in conjunction with the mafia like attempt to control the oil states in the Middle East -- goes back to a ‘legitimacy’ crisis. We cannot remain half monarchical and half democratic. A house divided against itself, etc. etc. The root of the evil done to us by the supposed missionaries of democracy began in their employment as flaks of fraud, and continues to this day as they defend with tooth and nail every sleazy move made by this regime. See the comic frothings, this week, of Hitchens in Slate. Yet the left-right battle about the Euston Manifesto goes on as if the Iraq invasion did not lay bare every seedy and disgusting pattern that has been going on for the last sixty years or so – with the Cold War creating a rotten pattern that keeps generating disaster.
Which is amply confirmed by the article we mentioned yesterday, by Langewiesche, who shows that: a, the U.S. was pretty thoroughly informed about what A. Q. Khan was doing, and b., that they connived to cover it up, once again converging the official American interest with a military tyrant, and once again distorting the American interest to the eventual hurt of who knows how many populations.
Langewiesche is sanguine about nuclear proliferation. He sees the obvious: the inability of the great powers to do without their missiles eventually makes the limitation of nuclear weapons nearly impossible. I should also add, as a caveat to the quotes I am going to give, that LI has always stood foursquare against the very term, WMD. That is a bogus category, a commercial category. Yes, the weapons companies and governments of the most developed countries will sell you the aircraft to deliver your atom bomb, but no, they are not going to sell you centrifuges, at least officially. As we have pointed out many times, oh so many times even we are bored, WMD are small arms. The biggest killers in the world are automatic rifles. That is it. WMD simply means – Western people can get killed. There is no moral high ground here, just a lot of low dealing.
Okay. On to the grafs. Langewiesche’s article in the Atlantic is actually the second in a series. The villain in the article, although never quite villainous so much as vain, is the father of Pakistan’s H-bomb, A.Q. Khan. LI loved this graf:
“The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West — an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role. The nuclear laboratory was nourished by a large and secret budget for which no accounting was required and from which Khan freely drew funds as if they were his own. One might expect that Khan's largesse would have triggered an investigation, but in Pakistan it did not. I have repeatedly asked people there if they ever wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth. One man close to the ruling military regime led by the current dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, tried recently to convince me that Khan's wife, Hendrina, came from a rich Dutch family, and that it was her money he was spending. But most people were straighter with me. They made it clear that my question was naive, and typical of an American abroad; they had not wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth because they had taken it as a given that he was skimming, like everyone else. A Pakistani parliamentarian made the point that some of the highest positions in the government today are held by people who are not merely corrupt and opportunistic but are the very icons of Pakistani criminality — people from families with a known history of murder, extortion, vote-rigging, smuggling, and fraud. He had once complained about this to Musharraf, who had advised him to be more realistic: Pakistan, Musharraf had said, is an imperfect society. The parliamentarian shrugged. Even the army is run like a real-estate racket, expropriating land from ordinary citizens and passing it on to officers for their personal gain. It is not by chance that Islamabad is a city of mansions, and that many of them are inhabited by retired generals. What was Khan's skimming compared with all that? And unlike the generals, who tended to lose every fight they provoked, Khan had delivered on his words.”
We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Aren’t we always here? Isn’t the man in charge Duarte? Or Rios Montt? Or Marcos? Or Suharto? Or Carlos Andrés Pérez? Aren’t these the streets of the City of Eternal Night, or Pandemonium, or the L.A. conjured up by Philip Dick? Really, this is a story that seems to have been some erased subplot of Shame. And Langewiesche is actually interested in the personality of Khan, all that cushioned vanity. In fact, it is a worldwide set. These people are perched on our shoulders, like very heavy buzzards.
Langewiesche cleverly decided that he needed a counterpart to Khan. He follows an obscure but persistent reporter for the energy mags, a guy I can sympathize with: Mark Hibbs. Hibbs is the man who put together the pieces of all the nuclear puzzles, finding that every connection led him to Pakistan. And he published his findings in Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, not exactly mags of record for most people. But apparently his findings kept driving this government apeshit. Especially since the U.S. was playing a game of pretending not to know what was going on. The same game the Americans played in the nineties, pretending not to know who was using who in the setting up of the Taliban and the quid pro quo between Al Qaeda and the ISI.
Which brings us to the post 9/11 era, when everything changed and then changed back, a war was declared against an impalpable object and the palpable object was encouraged to find a hiding place in a mountain somewhere. The era of diversion and bogus threats. This is the graf I really wanted to cull from the piece. By 2001, Khan’s sales to North Korea were finally getting America’s goat. They knew Khan dealt with Saddam H. before the Kuwait invasion. They knew he was selling to Iran. They knew that he couldn’t do what he was doing without the military being in on it body and soul. And the U.S. has been married to that military since the Reagan days – a marriage formed in the heat of anti-communist ardor, when the CIA was all for small, Islamicist groups hitting targets in the Soviet Union with bombs. So this is what happened:
“Khan was therefore dumbfounded, upon returning from a short trip to Dubai in 2000, when Musharraf, having called him in for a conversation, told him that he had been under surveillance by Pakistani agents and that there were concerns about financial improprieties. Financial improprieties? In the world of Khan the word had lost all meaning. There was no question of going to prison, but in 2001, just days short of his sixty-fifth birthday, A. Q. Khan was gently relieved of his command, forced to retire with honors from his cherished laboratory, and "promoted" to the position of scientific adviser to Musharraf. This last was a particularly nice touch. There is evidence that the exchanges with North Korea continued for at least another year. When the Bush administration finally decided to go public with its concerns about the North Koreans' nuclear-weapons program, it delayed leaking the intelligence information until late October of 2002, after Congress had given its approval for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The blundering that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. government condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan — which, as any reader of Hibbs would have known, was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America's most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists. Before the attacks on New York and Washington, Musharraf himself had accommodated Osama bin Laden, had supported the Taliban, and had used international jihadis against the Indians in Kashmir and beyond. But times had changed, and by October of 2002 Musharraf was Washington's friend, engaged in trying to suppress the Islamist idea by gunning it down. It was useful that with his move against Khan he had partially protected himself from revelations of Pakistan's trade in nuclear technology. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke with Musharraf, and afterward, when asked on ABC television about Pakistan's assistance to North Korea, said, "President Musharraf gave me his assurance in that conversation, as he has previously, that Pakistan is not doing anything of that nature … The past is the past. I am more concerned about what is going on now. We have a new relationship with Pakistan."
Which is the same as the old relationship, pusher to addict roleplaying. As LI has pointed out again and again, the Bush regime's mantra that everything changed after 9/11 is not only not true -- all events having a before and an after, a then and a then - but it is a special plea that we ignore the negligence before the attack and the truly puzzling inability to deal with the attackers afterwards.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
i'm with stupid
Sometimes, it does seem like the American unconscious speaks not through our novels or songs, but in our cutesy tshirt phrases. Historians, looking at the Bush epoch, might want to apply the phrase I'm with Stupid. It will explain a lot about the national decline...
Often, LI is blinded by our rationality. For instance, because we believe that it is entirely irrational for the White House, even given that it is presently inhabited by the petulant, death spiraling child , to actually bomb Iran. As for other forms of military intervention, besides the odious and everpresent American use of small secret forces, forget it.
However, we have abundant evidence that Bush will engage in hugely irrational acts, and will be enabled in doing so by the American population. A population that still has not computed the enormity of the fuckup that was Tora Bora, or the meaning of Osama Bin Laden’s continuing happy existence. Requiring a terrorist to maintain a bogus war on terror, the Bushies have kept Osama bin Laden on tap – partly intentionally, partly accidentally. The accidental part is derived from the original conditions of our vanity project in Iraq: here, the war on terror reveals that underneath the feint, it is a war to recolonize the Middle East on the part of an American petro elite that believes it can reverse history and bring back the fifties. This is ironic, since the petro industry actually needs OPEC to keep prices up. But obviously, today’s oil execs are driven by the panic fear of the nineties, when the bottom dropped out of the energy market. The fear that oil prices will once again go down below the 20 dollar a barrel level drives all the petro-carnivores, the cancerous brood that nests around Cheney and has tied a tire around Uncle Sam’s neck and set it on fire. However, their overreach, using American tax dollars and American blood, has backfired big time – the pieces are not going to be picked up in the Gulf Region by some magical combination that leads us to victory. The question is, how is America going to deal with defeat? The war on terrorism is over – to put it in AEI terms: We Lost. All of which means this: dealing with the consequences of that systematic failure has overshadowed apparently peripheral problems, like bin Laden. In those shadows, those problems are building.
All of which leads us to the nuclear crisis we face – in Pakistan. Pakistan possesses both the bomb and a large and powerful constituency for Al Qaeda like politics. And what happened with the bomb and its technology in Pakistan is, shall we say, rather underreported. So we enjoyed the large article by William Langewiesche in the January Atlantic. Oddly enough, it hasn’t gotten a lot of publicity from our cursory survey around the Net – but then, it wouldn’t. The great and real problems facing the world – the environmental crises that are upon us (he says, in Austin, where the temperature today might just climb to 100), the economic crises that are upon us, and the strategic crises that are upon us are all silently exorcized by newspapers that are happy to be Good Leakers, God bless them every one.
Langewiesche’s article is about celebrity as much as it is about the bomb. Abdul Quadeer Khan, the Father of the Pakistan hydrogen bomb, was and is a celebrity of Bollywood proportions. It is his fame and what he did with it that makes the story fascinating on the human level as a sort of Rushdie tale – before Rushdie began repeating himself like some demon possessed clock that had learned it was funny to tell the wrong time.
Tomorrow, we are going to examine the article.
Often, LI is blinded by our rationality. For instance, because we believe that it is entirely irrational for the White House, even given that it is presently inhabited by the petulant, death spiraling child , to actually bomb Iran. As for other forms of military intervention, besides the odious and everpresent American use of small secret forces, forget it.
However, we have abundant evidence that Bush will engage in hugely irrational acts, and will be enabled in doing so by the American population. A population that still has not computed the enormity of the fuckup that was Tora Bora, or the meaning of Osama Bin Laden’s continuing happy existence. Requiring a terrorist to maintain a bogus war on terror, the Bushies have kept Osama bin Laden on tap – partly intentionally, partly accidentally. The accidental part is derived from the original conditions of our vanity project in Iraq: here, the war on terror reveals that underneath the feint, it is a war to recolonize the Middle East on the part of an American petro elite that believes it can reverse history and bring back the fifties. This is ironic, since the petro industry actually needs OPEC to keep prices up. But obviously, today’s oil execs are driven by the panic fear of the nineties, when the bottom dropped out of the energy market. The fear that oil prices will once again go down below the 20 dollar a barrel level drives all the petro-carnivores, the cancerous brood that nests around Cheney and has tied a tire around Uncle Sam’s neck and set it on fire. However, their overreach, using American tax dollars and American blood, has backfired big time – the pieces are not going to be picked up in the Gulf Region by some magical combination that leads us to victory. The question is, how is America going to deal with defeat? The war on terrorism is over – to put it in AEI terms: We Lost. All of which means this: dealing with the consequences of that systematic failure has overshadowed apparently peripheral problems, like bin Laden. In those shadows, those problems are building.
All of which leads us to the nuclear crisis we face – in Pakistan. Pakistan possesses both the bomb and a large and powerful constituency for Al Qaeda like politics. And what happened with the bomb and its technology in Pakistan is, shall we say, rather underreported. So we enjoyed the large article by William Langewiesche in the January Atlantic. Oddly enough, it hasn’t gotten a lot of publicity from our cursory survey around the Net – but then, it wouldn’t. The great and real problems facing the world – the environmental crises that are upon us (he says, in Austin, where the temperature today might just climb to 100), the economic crises that are upon us, and the strategic crises that are upon us are all silently exorcized by newspapers that are happy to be Good Leakers, God bless them every one.
Langewiesche’s article is about celebrity as much as it is about the bomb. Abdul Quadeer Khan, the Father of the Pakistan hydrogen bomb, was and is a celebrity of Bollywood proportions. It is his fame and what he did with it that makes the story fascinating on the human level as a sort of Rushdie tale – before Rushdie began repeating himself like some demon possessed clock that had learned it was funny to tell the wrong time.
Tomorrow, we are going to examine the article.
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