false friends

Every student of French or German is familiar with the phrase “false friends.” False friends are those words one comes across that look enough like some English word that the unwise student will assume that they mean the same thing. For instance, ‘aire’ – which, of course, means area in French.

LI sometimes thinks that this is the era of false friends in the political and moral sphere. If there is one thing that the neo-conservative movement has implanted like a bad seed in the sphere of political discourse, it is this parasitic creeping into figures and ideas that are good, liberal and humane, and the distorting of them for ends that are violent, oppressive, and exploitative.

Case in point: there is a heartening portrait, in the NYT today, of a woman who is subjecting Islam to a withering Enlightenment critique.

“Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.”
Sultan’s journey into sanity began with her experience in Syria:

“Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."”

A rational human being! or at least one whose search for another god begins in the right moral circumstances.

Yet I fear that Sultan is going to be adopted, lock stock and barrel, by those who have no real desire to criticize religion and every desire to promote and old and decayed colonial project: the breaking of a culture by dissolving its glue, so to speak. The difference should be clear – it is the difference between therapy and kidnapping. Alas, the school of kidnappers – the false friends – are all around us. So one can foresee, with a sinking heart, that her smart remarks comparing the reaction to oppression by the Jews and by the Muslims will probably not lead to an auto-critique by either group:

“Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."
…
Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.”

Hopefully, the AJC will hear her golden words on apartheid and the ridiculous sops
thrown to the theocratic party in Israel – for instance, the administration of the marriage laws by Orthodox rabbis, or the enforcement of Sabbath shutdowns of business, etc., etc. But why is it that we doubt that this will be the brunt of the message? It should be. We like Sultan’s title for her upcoming book, in any case: "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster." And we know how these things work. The thugs are already calling her up and threatening her. The liberals (moi, for instance) will point out that, indeed, the Moslem world does seem to be under assault by Western powers (Chechnya, Iraq). A divide will grow as absolute loyalty is demanded, even as the enlightenment moment is one of radical relativism. Etc. It is all so predictable.

Anyway, we wonder whether Sultan's book bears a title that will be bought in Kentucky, where the governor, your usual corrupt GOP autocrat, has decided to lift his popularity by pushing through a law mandating the display of the ten commandments in all state offices – hell, soon it will be tattooed on his kids’ faces. So, in the spirit of being a true friend to the assault on those religions that promote the idea of a personal God, there is another book that is, surprisingly, lodged in the best seller lists: "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why."
Last week WAPO profiled Bart Ehrman, the author of that little treatise. Once a fundy, Ehrman journeyed into the light by studying his Bible. In truth, we don’t actually believe his conclusion – that Jesus was a legend. Or, rather, legend and biography, in the ancient Meditteranean world, are interconnected in more complicated ways than are allowed by the American mind. Jesus’s legend is much like the legend of Tino Riini, the capo di capo in Sicily, in the 80s – testimony about what Riini did and when is scrambled, and would be even if Riini’s men didn’t help the process along by breaking the legs and torturing to death the testifiers.
“"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option -- legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.

Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ.”

Ehrman obviously doesn’t like fiction. Ourselves, we remember Oscar Wilde’s remark – or rather, the remark he attributes to a fictitious interlocutor – that he has never gotten over the death of Lucien de Rubempre. Unfortunately, in the current state of these United States, Ingersoll’s village atheism is more relevant than Wildean aestheticism.

the mission party, 03 -- a kegger!

We’ve spent three years watching a comatose anti-war movement spend its time begging Democrats to “lead an opposition.” This shows a fundamental misconception about the war.

[divertimento time]

Many think that the war is a foreign policy issue. Those people are always worried about the purpose of the war. Well, we long ago figured out that this was not a foreign policy issue, and we know the purpose of the war.

To explain this, some background.

When Bush was coming up through the sons-of-millionaire ranks, he landed, lucratively, on a sports franchise. But he wouldn’t be a Texas trust funder if he wasn’t aware that as he was making baby bucks with his franchise, his peers were bringing home double and triple that, leaving him, status wise, in the dust. Well, Bush took the higher road, of public sacrifice and shit, but it still burned a little bit, these CEOs and their money and perks.

So when Bush was elevated to the CC’s chair, he did what a CEO president does, and he amply rewarded the investor class. And just like a CEO – for instance, Dennis Kozlowski, after a busy couple of years making spurious profits, demands a little perk for himself, so did Bush. Kozlowski threw himself a two million dollar bash. Or actually, because he is a good, kind caring type, he threw it for one of his wives. And it was Roman themed, because Kozlowski, though an owner of an off shore company, had hung around NYC enough to meet uptown chicks who told him he had a roman profile and such, as he was stuffing hundreds in their panties. Actually, he has a classic fascist profile, but what is the diff?

Bush wanted his party, which is where Iraq came in. That was the party. And a great party it was. Everybody liked it.

Now, just as Kozlowski cast himself as a roman, Bush has a secret soldier side to him that is sort of cute. The purpose of the party was revealed on May 2, 2003. The purpose was so that Bush could say, Mission accomplished,.

Our CEO president loves to say mission. We won’t speculate overmuch about his love life, but let’s just say that we bet mission impossible has a place in it.

Everything was groovy. And the investors got another taste of sweetness, another huge theft of public resources in the form of a tax cut. The party was officially for the Iraqis, and this is where the trouble started. As Bremer has pointed out, Bush was pretty p.o.-ed that the people he threw his party for were not thanking him. And that was just the beginning of it. The natives are supposed to love parties – I mean, what else are they doing, herding sheep and shit? Bartending pays way more. But the Iraqis started getting in the way of the guests, started wolfing down the canapés and, frankly, setting fire to the tablecloths and shit.

This is where the Dems come in. Like any swank party, you have to have a pliable police force. That force is supposed to stifle calls from irate neighbors. The dems were perfect. Oh sure, like all cops, they made faces and rolled their eyes, especially when some of the guests poured white phosphorus on a major city, attacked its hospital, and scattered its people, all 200,000 of them, across the desert, and generally shot up the place, killing thousands. However, the cops were too thrilled with the people in that city anyway.

Actually, this is why Murtha was a big deal – as you will have noticed, he looks like a cop. He’s the weary, about to retire cop, and he says, enough is enough. This party has to end, and we have to go to Kuwait and only send out our planes on special occasions to drop bombs on wedding parties and shit. And everybody is like, Murtha is the chief but he’s getting old.

However, the good time is wearing down. Just as with Kozlowski, Bush must notice that his peers are suddenly, eerily silent. Not only that, but there are all these spitballs from respected conservative figures. Drop the ideological label – I think the last conservative in the U.S. died in 1948. But these guys are innovators, little lures cast out by the investing class. And as the investing class pulls the plug on the party, the tom toms beating in the press for what a great party it is, and how we have to do it for the next ten years or so, are going to go silent.

All of which means that if – if Bush really does have to stop his party in Iraq – the Mission party, man, you can just hear him moaning. I deserved that party! … well, if he has to wrap it up, first sign will be Rumsfeld resigning. And here is the prediction from our fearless party planning consultant –watch for the M word. That will come out of Bush’s mouth as he speechifies his undying gratitude to Rumsfeld for sure.

[back to our sponsor time]

Oh, here's our ps. Bush might feel bad about like nobody liking his party. But the upside is, he has raised the bar on parties. That is so for sure. Hilary, who is a status sniffer if there ever was one, is sure to throw herself a party if she gets elected. Not in Iran – she’s not nuts – but some little place where we can go in, liberate, kill a couple thousand and get out. Maybe Bolivia – a total party opportunity, and I believe we own their army!

party poopers on the Titanic

It is entertaining to see D.C.’s international thinkin’ set run like the three blind mice this morning, groaning about the Dubai port deal. It isn’t that the Friedmanites are wrong per se – it is just that this part of the deal – the deal in which the U.S. liquidates its manufacturing status, borrows money indefinitely to maintain the world’s largest consumer market, and adopts for domestic purposes your standard third world distribution of wealth – was supposed to go down a little smoother.

Stephen Pearlstein at WAPO, in four paragraphs, lays it out like an exasperated boiler room jack who has plugged your money into a black hole and is trying to tell you that th-th-th-that’s all, folks:

“Maybe it was possible to get away with this noxious blend of arrogance and ignorance when the United States was the world's only economic superpower. But now that we've become the biggest debtor nation in the history of civilization, we might want to give a bit more thought to whom we tell to buzz off.

It was more than a bit ironic that on the very day that Dubai Ports World threw in the towel and agreed to sell off its U.S. operations, the Commerce Department announced yet another record monthly trade deficit for January, putting us on course to exceed last year's record deficit of $724 billion. At this rate, we are adding to our debt to the rest of the world at the rate of $2,500 a year for every man, woman and child in America.

Where do you think that $724 billion comes from? Let me tell you: It comes from the people who have the dollars. And in case you hadn't noticed, tops on that list are the Japanese who are selling us all those cars, Arabs selling us all that expensive oil, and the Chinese selling us the shirts on our backs, the athletic shoes on our feet and all those computers and flat-screen TVs in front of our noses.

If these folks suddenly get the idea that we don't really trust them enough to do business with them, and begin acting the way human beings do when they get poked in the eye, you could be looking at 8 percent mortgage rates, 6 percent unemployment, $4 gasoline, a $1.50 euro and a 9000 Dow.”

Gee, Dad. Are you saying we can’t afford the war?

But of course, Americans, dummies that they are, don’t get the program. They don’t get that, as they are stripped of all the good things they used to get under the old social welfare regime that taxed, actually taxed, the wealthy and shit (the horror!), they are also stripped of the right to say peep about who in particular owns them. Unfortunately, the notices haven’t yet gone out in the mail. So the American people look at the joke called Homeland Security and go charging against scarecrows, and it is tut tut time for the think tankers. David Ignatius, who has been toured around the UAE by pro-American types just eager to use the sea of money coming in from oil revenues to do everything the pro-American way, can’t get over the ingratitude of the American people. And it is a little puzzling.

After all, the American people have been so grateful to Exxon that not a word in anger has been spoken as the company gouged out the biggest profit ever made by an American corporation – and in fact, the American people felt so grateful to oil companies that even as the oil giants have been cutting back on oil exploration and R and D -- you know, the alternative fuels that will either have to get up and running in the next ten years or bye bye Americans remaining wealth, plus the health of the planet - and, instead, raining money down to its stock holders -- even while this was going on, the American people, through the Gov, was larding these companies with 7 billion dollars in handouts The Minnesota Star Tribune interviewed an petroleum hack who produced some beautiful prose on this issue:

“Profits are soaring, and that's part of the reason the U.S. oil industry has encountered slippery times. Congress is investigating the Interior Department's decision to grant oil and gas companies a $7 billion windfall - reducing required royalty payments for drilling on government land. Meanwhile, the New York Times estimated that natural gas companies have shortchanged taxpayers by $700 million in royalties.

In an interview Thursday, Sara Banaszak, senior economist at the American Petroleum Institute, said tales of royalty windfalls and oversized oil profits present a distorted picture of an industry that needs huge amounts of capital to capture energy that's getting harder to find.

Q: Why can't natural gas companies pay royalties in full when you and I have to pay our taxes in full?
A: Many companies are disputing what's owed under a number of different royalty programs. I'm not an expert on the details on this, but it's complex. The idea of royalties is you get producers to produce where they might not produce or to keep a well open where they might otherwise shut down.
If you are a large company and managing a lot of exploration risk - trying to decide where to invest - you need to manage your income over the life of the program. A single offshore well will [cost] $1 billion. You're trying to decide where you're going to drill and not going to drill. If you decide to drill into an area, based on royalty relief, [and] then it's removed, it's changing the economics.
Q: Do you think the industry's behavior is inviting more regulation by slipping through loopholes?
A: Where's the loophole? That's my point. If the New York Times reporter's "loophole" is [what the industry sees as] the rules being changed on them, it's not a $7 billion loophole. It's a $7 billion royalty relief program.”

Royalty relief is relief for our royalty. So apt!

Never have so few pinheads in so little time pissed away so much – surely this will be on the tombstone of the American empire.

But now that LI has pissed to his heart’s content on the think tankers, let’s put in a good word for Bush. Lately, we are trying to be less ulcerous about the gang in the White House. And there is more good news today. Due to John Bolton’s single minded, and simple minded, crusade to keep Americans from ever being subject to an international court, the U.S. Military is having to abridge its traditional ties with Latin American militaries. Whenever a country signs on with the International Criminal Court, the official Bush policy is to ask that country to exempt the U.S. If they don’t officially do that, the U.S. cuts military aid. This policy brought forth a great deal of handwringing from Jackson Diehl, the WAPO’s uberhawk, in a column entitled A Losing Latin American Policy. According to deal, U.S. military aid to Chile is going to be terminated next month. In fact, “12 of 21 nations in Latin America have been suspended from U.S. military training and aid programs because of the ICC rule, including Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Uruguay.”

This is the best news of the day. Keep John Bolton – this is LI’s new cause. The U.S. military has been the biggest misery-maker in Latin America since Pizarro made a deadfall on the Peruvian coast. To think that the Americans are going to discontinue their deadly subversion of Latin American independence due to the pique of a noxious neo-con gives LI an unusual feeling of joy and peace. Unfortunately, the military is trying to water down the Bolton amendment to our military aid covenants. Don’t let them! Call the State Department (Condi’s number there is: 202-647-5291) and stand four square behind Bolton’s ultra American American ultraism. Are we going to abandon our Rebel in Chief now, at his hour of greatest danger? Hell no.

Ps -- another LI band pick for SXSW. Check out this Black Angels track, black grease. The chorus expresses LI's feeling post the Rumsfeld hearings: But I kill kill kill kill/I kill what I can, dear

oh oh

That Rice, trying to impose a liberal scheme on these here United States! Why, you can hear the wind whistle mightily in the nostrils of any number of C.S.A. Senators:

“SANTIAGO, Chile, March 11 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice indicated Saturday that the United States would look for ways to resume military assistance to Latin American nations cut off from aid programs because of their refusal to shield Americans from the International Criminal Court.”

This story does have a comic side, however:

“Officials traveling with Ms. Rice said that in meeting with President Evo Morales of Bolivia, she had emphasized the importance of cooperating on efforts to combat drugs despite his vow to end coca plant eradication programs. The newly installed Bolivian leader favors the legal cultivation of coca, the plant used to manufacture cocaine, but says he opposes cocaine and has agreed to let American antidrug officials remain in the country.

In a friendly but pointed gesture, he gave Ms. Rice a small guitar decorated on the front with real leaves from a coca plant in lacquer. Ms. Rice, perhaps not realizing that the decoration was from the plant that the United States has sought to eradicate, then smiled and strummed the guitar for television cameras. American officials said Bolivian leader was clearly trying to show how growing the plant that is made into cocaine is a part of his nation's culture.”

Like Bush, Rice clearly can’t resist a guitar.

My kingdom for BET

“… I left that working world for the altogether different working world of shaping the future, raising, rearing my girls to be citizens of the world and to make a difference, tough when our culture deifies Lil Kim.” – interview with the blogger for Atlas Shrugged.

As readers of LI know, we are happy to promote L’il Kim as a bad role model for Atlas Shrugged’s daughter, and anybody else’s. The woman makes me go smoky at the knees, and soon I’m pulling out my copy of the sonnets:

“When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
that she might think me some untutored youth
unlearned in the world’s false subtilties…”

Our correspondent in NYC, Tom, sent us a notice from the Washington Post

Our queen has condescended to star in a real life tv series on BET, risking the freakishness of the sheer voyeurism attaching to watching the pratfalls of the rich and famous – because she can. There’s a nobility that even the greedy, beady camera can’t degrade. It kills me not to have cable. Please, some reader more fortunate, watch it and report back to LI.

the war will not be pre-owned

First, a shout out to reader M.E., who sent a grad student our way for editing work. Remember friends (he said in dulcet tones), rwg communications does heavy editing, proofing, research, and other writing tasks. As the deadlines get closer for turning in dissertations, those wanting quick, thorough editing should definitely contact us. Write us at rgathman@netzero.net

Second… well, this is difficult. In 2003 and 2004, there was one belligeranti we loved to kick around above all others: Christopher Hitchens. Gradually, we lost interest, however – Hitchens as a propagandist ate into Hitchens as an essayist until the writing was all hollowed out. Mental corruption is as bad for a certain sort of writer as termites are for a wood framed house.

But we do have to recommend the article in Slate, since it represents the position on Iran (détente) that we have advocated at this little blog since we started. It even shows an admirable awareness that there actually is such a thing as a future. LI’s position is that the American irrelevance in Iraq -- a situation over which it has long had no control, – is ultimately dangerous, insofar as America is a very aggressive superpower. While the disconnect between real American powerlessness and the delusion that America is doing the moving and shaking in the Gulf has so far been papered over by the almost supernatural blindness of D.C., reality has a way of biting you in the ass in these situations. Our opinion is that the immediate withdrawal of American troops must be coupled with broader, radical changes in Middle Eastern policy. The one most necessary is to accept reality. The regional position of Iran as the strongest of the Shiite powers now stretching from Iran to Lebanon is reality. Another reality is that U.S. policy has systematically and perversely aided the Islamic revolutionary parties in Iran.

We were pleasantly surprised that Hitchens ends his article about Iran with this image:

“So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.
The aging mullahs might claim this as a capitulation, which would be hard to bear. But how right would they be? The pressure for a new constitution and genuine elections is already building. Within less than a decade, we might be negotiating with a whole new generation of Iranians. Iran would have less incentive to disrupt progress in Iraq (and we should not forget that it has been generally not unhelpful in Afghanistan). Eventually, Iran might have a domestic nuclear program (to which it is fully entitled and which would decrease its oil-dependency) and be ready to sign a nonproliferation agreement with enforceable and verifiable provisions. American technical help would be available for this, since it was we who (in a wonderful moment of Kissingerian "realism") helped them build the Bushehr reactor in the first place.”

While this fantasy of Bush doing the rational thing is unlikely (and the rapid rewiring of zombie brains, if this ever really happened, might lead to thousands of fatalities in the U.S.), it points to what should happen in the Gulf. The U.S. has taken a position – that Iran basically isn’t there, and that a fantasy Iran of our making is a-comin’ round the corner – that is a non-position. It is a classic instance of neuroses on the mass scale. And so, to go back to reality – to surrender – the U.S. will have to weave around it another fantasy. But it can very easily be done (as the promoter who nearly fell on the floor says in Highway 61). Nixon’s surrender in going to China is the great model.

And – just to get the taste of an approving link to Hitchens out of the LI mouth – we’d also recommend going to Jefferson Morley’s article about the Iranian media group, Rooz Online. We hope our friend Brooding Persian writes about this soon.

And finally, re the current climate of tension -- LI believes that the way in which to understand the Bush administration is to follow the lack of sacrifice. This is why we don't much believe the idea that the U.S. is invading, or even bombing, any time soon. To think that Americans are going to welcome another war, and a hike in the price of their gas by at least a dollar a gallon, even as the hurricane season this summer plays dice with more American cities -- well, we think the odds are against it. And while the Rebel-in-Chief is delusional, about the need for no sacrifice he is very realistic. If he can find some way to pre-own the war, to mount it without any immediate sacrifice, even if it means borrowing another trillion bucks -- he'd do it then in a heartbeat. But I don't think this war will be pre-owned.

hegelian approaches to tinkering

The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous man the world has ever known died without having an inkling that he was the most dangerous man the world has ever known. He wasn’t a politician, or a general, or a bandit, and the most publicity he ever received was when he was elected president of the American Chemical Association in 1944. His name was Tom Midgley. He was a tinkerer.

I know about tinkerers. LI’s old man was a tinkerer until he retired to the mountains of North Georgia (and, incidentally, cut off all relations with LI. But that is another story altogether). Who knows, he might have known Willis Carrier, since he worked for Carrier Air Conditioning, and Willis certainly knew Tom Midgley. In which case, yours truly has three degrees of separation from the most dangerous man the world has ever known. Gives me goosebumps.


Although elected president of the American Chemical Association, Midgley was not really a chemist. He was a mechanical engineer. However, his work for Dupont and GM – GM was, for all practical purposes, owned by the Duponts back in the 20s – resulted in two chemical/mechanical inventions.

The project he became famous for was getting the knocking out of the internal combustion engine. First, he pinpointed the source of the knocking. It was in the nature of the way the gas burned. Second, he experimented with additions to gasoline, until he came up with the perfect mix, tetraethyl lead. Called ethyl, you simply added it to gas and presto chango, no knock. Of course, that meant that you were adding lead to a liquid that burned and that left an exhaust. Necessarily, you increased ambient lead in the environment. And not just any environment, but that which surrounded roads. The heavily human environment. The government actually got concerned about this in the twenties, although there was no EPA back then, and in fact little regulation of even industrial safety. Still, headlines had been made when the news got out that a number of Dupont employees had gone clinically insane and died due to lead poisoning while researching tetraethyl lead. The news leaked out even though Dupont nearly buried the news, since Dupont owned the lab the men got sick in, the town the men lived in, the hospitals the men were sent to, and the cemetery where the men were buried. In other words, in something like a libertarian dream, the state’s role was taken over entirely by a private corporation. Unfortunately for Dupont, one of the happy beneficiaries of this arrangement escaped the embrace of Dupont and got to a non-Dupont owned hospital in Pennsylvania.

This meant that ethyl had to be defended. A Yale professor, Yandell Henderson, became the additive’s chief defamer. Now, Henderson was the kind of guy that, through the ages, tinkerers just hate – a smarty pants, a nosy parker, a pink professor, a nanny stater, an alarmist, practically a woman (In a review of Silent Spring published in 1963 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the reviewer concluded his dismissal of the book by writing that “Silent Spring, which I read word for word with some trauma, kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can not be done.”). But at the conference that, essentially, rubberstamped the use of ethyl, Henderson made a pretty good shot at summing up the social side of the issue: “The men engaged in industry, chemists and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance.”

By this time, Midgley had moved on to his next project. He’d been called upon to devise a safe refrigerant. At the time, GM/Dupont owned Frigidaire, the largest refrigerator maker. Unfortunately, there was a dirty little secret about the refrigerators they sold – they used methyl chloride. In 1929, in a Cleveland hospital, the fumes of methyl chloride had diffused through the duct system after an explosion in the x ray room, and it killed 125 people – one of those extensively unremembered industrial accidents. Midgley set to work and eventually discovered a whole family of refrigerants: the chloroflorocarbons.

LI takes these facts from Cagan and Dray’s invaluable history, “Between Earth and Sky”.

…
Now, here is where LI’s private history grazes against the elephantine hide of public history. The great freon scare of the late eighties was played out, in miniature, at the LI family dinner table. Since the public discussion of global warming has followed, as though by the numbers, the public health/environmental discussions of yore – the same resistance to facts and theories, the same industrial coalitions finding “skeptics” of “junk science,” the same inevitable gathering of real events propelling the discussion from stage one, denial, to stage two, re-visioning benefits, to stage three, expenses and convenience – with the same stage managers, the state and big business, plying the lies – I figure a look back is useful not only to recognize the patterns, but to uncover the dialectical figures that emerge from the patterns. Surely the tinkerer is as worthy of philosophical attention as the master and the slave. In a future post, LI will try to draw his philosophical lineaments.

PS PS – Speaking of industrial accidents nobody has heard of, the Prudhoe Bay leak (via brickburner) has gotten zip attention. Largest spill since 1989. And figures for how much was spilled are still coming in. See here. And here, for a description of the state of the art monitoring of leaks – this one was heard gurgling by an oil field worker. There you go – the money those oil companies spend to be green and greener! It just makes the whole board of the AEI terribly sad.

the Rosemary’s Baby of American conservatism.

Every day, LI says bad things about the Bush administration. Today, we are going to say something good about the administration. Good, that is, from the point of view of philosophical clarification. For it has struck us more and more strongly that the Bush administration is the Rosemary’s Baby of American conservatism. This is what it was all always about, all the ritual, all the preparation.

For sixty years, American politics, on the ideological level, has been a rigged fight between frauds. The right wing fraud went under the mask of wanting “smaller government.” The left wing fraud went under the mask of supporting “working families.” In actuality, there was no side that wasn’t for big government. The argument was really about the bonds between big government and its partners. For the most part, the right’s preferred partners were in the petro-chemical industry. Both sides fought for the defense industry, and the left wing laid dibs on the unions and information technologies. There is a small, vocal sector in the public who actually wants small government (although usually, when given a taste of it, they quickly vote back in the pork), but they are so negligible that their only real purpose is to make one side of the big government-big business combination respectable. Similarly, there is a small, vocal sector standing up for working people, but their purpose was to operate as plausible defenders of the various free trade pacts that liquidated American manufacturing.

LI has been reminded, reading about the attacks launched on Rachel Carson and the environmental movement, that the first property one "owns" is one’s body. Because it is inconvenient to the petro-chemical sector, this property has not only been routinely trespassed upon, but the sense that you have some right not to be a lodging place for untested chemicals that leach out from agribusinesses, chemical factories, and a thousand and one household products has had to be dulled in the average citizen. Not to speak of the average citizen’s exchangeable property – his land, for instance. The first suits filed against DDT were filed against government sponsored flights dumping oil and DDT mixtures on private land in the name of fighting various insects. And the most ardent supporters of this kind of state activity were conservatives – in fact, Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Benson, assured Eisenhower that Carson was a communist – and he was in a way right. Communism became opposing the state coalition with big business.

However, the ideological masks have, at last, left American politics a wilderness of blunderers. Interestingly, this comes at a time when two threats to the U.S. are converging. One is the increased dependence on foreign sources for oil, and one is the looming threat from global warming and the acidification of the oceans. The convergence of those threats have been met with the orgy of irrelevance that makes up most of the newspaper headlines, and all of this administration’s policy.

In the next couple of days, we are going to concentrate on Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker series, The Climate of Man, which is going into her book, to be released this month, Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

To give some sense of the material in the book, here’s a passage about the rapidly thawing permafrost zone:
“When you walk around in the Arctic, you are stepping not on permafrost but on something called the "active layer." The active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer, and it is what supports the growth of plants - large spruce trees in places where conditions are favorable enough and, where they aren't, shrubs and, finally, just lichen. Life in the active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one critical difference. Temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through a process known as cryoturbation, organic matter is pushed down beneath the active layer into the permafrost, where it can sit for thousands of years in a botanical version of suspended animation. (In Fairbanks, grass that is still green has been found in permafrost dating back to the middle of the last ice age.) In this way, much like a peat bog or, for that matter, a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon.

One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn't offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons.”

the archaeology of zombie talk

LI is fascinated by zombie talk. It is an idiolect of the hypnotized, a rare and precious thing.

Now, there are many patterns in zombie talk to choose from. We've written about the bogus analogies. We've written about the false claims. But --if we were to choose just one word to prospect out of the madness and moil of the last three years, the word would be “desperate.” This word pops up every time the weld between Iraq’s reality and the American description of it is jarred.

Here's a little travelogue for ya:

Back in June, 2003, when the first roadside bombs were killing American soldiers, Bremer said:

"Those who refuse to embrace the new Iraq are clearly panicking, they are turning their sights on Iraqis themselves," L. Paul Bremer said. "Today they have killed innocent Iraqis with the same disdain toward their own people they showed for 35 years."

Then, in August, as bombs hit Najaf, Rumsfeld, who back then was happy, as chief clown, to hog the spotlight on Iraq, said:

“As success during this period of transition continues to mount, the opponents of success and of a free Iraq may continue their desperate acts. But the outcome is not in doubt: Those who committed this act and who support violence in Iraq will fail.”

By October, 2003, Bush had, somehow, dropped the mission accomplished rhetoric. But mission was about to be accomplished soon, as in this description of those deadenders who by this time had mounted a quite extensive bombing campaign:

“Their desperate attacks on innocent civilians will not intimidate us or the brave Iraqis and Afghans who are joining in their own defense and who are moving toward self-government. Coalition forces, aided by Afghan and Iraqi police and military, are striking the enemy with force and precision. Our coalition is growing in members and growing in strength. Our purpose is clear and certain. Iraq and Afghanistan will be stable, independent nations, and their people will live in freedom.”

By then, desperation had become a normal White House response to any attack. This is from the Christian Science Monitor, 29 October, 2003, reporting on car bombings in Fallujah and the killing of the deputy mayor of Baghdad:

“This week's string of deadly attacks in some areas of Iraq has rocked Washington policymakers back on their heels and led to calls for a reassessment of the US military effort.
On Tuesday unknown assailants struck again in Baghdad, assassinating a deputy mayor in a hit-and-run shooting. A car bomb exploded in the tense city of Fallujah, killing at least four.
White House officials said the attacks showed that anti-US elements were desperate to stop steady progress towards Iraqi normalization. But they also admitted that the ferocity of resistance to the US occupation has taken them by surprise.”

In the Weekly Standard, on 25 November 2003, a summary of after mission accomplished Iraq stated: “Over the summer, as we were continuously assured by the administration that the bad guys were desperate and on the run, we could not turn on our television sets without hearing that "the noose is tightening." (Whether around Saddam's neck, or ours--nobody seemed to specify).”
By 12 February, 2004 Tom Friedman, a columnist who absolutely loves desperate as the word to describe the “terrorists” in Iraq, wrote:
The situation in Iraq is fast approaching the tipping point. The terrorists know that if they can wreak enough havoc, kill enough Iraqis waiting in line to join their own police force, they can prevent the U.N. from coming up with a plan for elections and a stable transfer of U.S. authority to an Iraqi government. Once authority is in Iraqi hands, the Baathists and Islamists have a real problem: They can't even pretend to be fighting the U.S. anymore. It will be clear to all Arabs and Muslims that they are fighting against the freedom and independence of Iraq and for their own lunatic ideologies. Which is why they are desperate to prevent us from reaching that tipping point. Their strategy is to sow chaos, defeat President Bush and hope that his Democratic successor will pull out.”
That desperation. Those terrorists, always working on a deadline, as the calm but implacable American machine swept them out of Iraq, and put in their place the Iraqi entrepreneur!
Friedman’s column came after the capture of Saddam Hussein, which signaled the complete and final victory of the Americans in Iraq. The military was on board with the desperate meme, too. This is from January 22, 2004, a dispatch by Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commanding general, 4th Infantry Division –

“Capturing Saddam was a major operational and psychological defeat for the enemy. But a more important result of his capture is the increase in accurate information brought forward by Iraqis allowing us to conduct numerous precise raids to kill or capture financiers, IED-makers, and mid-level leaders of the former regime. These groups are still a threat, but a fractured, sporadic threat with the leadership destabilized, finances interdicted and no hope of the Ba'athists' return to power.

The number of enemy attacks against our forces has been declining since a peak in November during Ramadan. And now their desperate attacks are targeting civilians; terrorist car bombs have killed innocent civilians and Iraqi police; ambushes attacked civilian supply convoys and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers, demonstrating the enemy's disdain for peace and prosperity in Iraq and for Iraqis. The enemy is focused solely on indiscriminate murder and promoting their own cause.”

You can tell – like a yoyo in a vacuum at the end of its string, Iraq was now calming down. Imagine, the enemy is focused on its own cause. No more ups and downs! As the AEI discovered a year later, we’d already won the war. Among the odd couplings in this war, none is odder than the embrace of the Baudrillardian view of reality by the hardcore right.

So time and our triumph marched on. Of course, people who are desperate are desperate for something. Fox news figured it out: the terrorists were desperate to derail democracy. The sabotage against the big democracy train has become very popular, and if a spokesman says desperate today, likely that derailing will occur in the next paragraph or so. In December, 2004, when the non-war, which we had won, seemed to be going on – like a play with no audience, really, except perhaps for the Iraqis, who persistently keep trying to edge into the American narrative, Scott McLellan put it best:
This [election] is an important first step in their future. And certainly, the security situation is an issue that we continue to address. There are challenges that remain, but the terrorists and the Saddam loyalists are being defeated and they will be defeated in the end. They're growing more desperate because we're getting closer and closer to a free and democratic Iraq.”
Desperation piled on desperation – obviously, those terrorists were not only using weapons obviously smuggled in from Iran, but prozac, probably from the same terrorist source. Bomb those prozac factories and the terrorists will have to face up to reality.

Desperation did take a curtain call for a while in 2005, while people in the know told us all about the amazing progress being made in Iraq. As for derailing democracy – keeping a majority who had voted in a free election from choosing their leader – why, that was now the job of our U.S. ambassador to Iraq. However, it wasn’t exactly “derailing” – call it more like jerking on a leash.

But the winds of freedom sweeping Iraq still hadn’t quite swept away the one or two terrorists left in the country yet. In a bold meeting of clichés, we have it on the word of
U.S Brigadier General Alston, (AP, 13 January 2006):

“He said the recent attacks, blamed mostly on extremists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, were part of an "attempt to discredit and derail the progress of the Iraqi people."

Alston has discovered the definition war – he should definitely rush back to the Pentagon to announce the results of his startling research. The enemy, he could tell them, actually opposes us. Imagine that! They must be desperate.

All of which gets us to the best use of desperate yet – General Pace’s interview on Tim Russert’s show, yesterday.

LI simply can’t get over the abyss revealed in Pace’s remarks – the abyss, that is, of sheer mindlessness in the Pentagon. In Rumsfeld’s search for the perfect lackey, he should have included some other job qualifications – for instance, not being a total redneck:

“MR. RUSSERT: What’s going on in Iraq?
GEN. PACE: Well, what happened in Iraq was you have the extremists who see that the Iraqi people are going to the polls and voting for their own freely elected government. The terrorists are becoming more desperate—so desperate that they destroy one of their own most sacred shrines in an attempt to cause civil war and strife.”

So, the shrine in Samara was the terrorist’s own shrine. Hmm, could it be that the military sees every Iraqi as a terrorist? Perhaps that explains their ‘desperate” air strike policy, unquestioned by the U.S. press, and a sign of desperation by deadending Americans if I ever saw one.

LI's taste in murder

Denis Donoghue, has penned a nice review of Denise Gigante’s book, “Taste: A Literary History,” in February’s Harpers. Donoghue considers the concrete sense, first – a sense that lies the tongue which is, as he felicitously puts it, “like a kingdom divided into principalities according to sensory talent” – for our bitter and sweet, our sour and salty are found in different areas of the tongue, the chemistry of the alien bodies we put in the mouth turned into its synaptic commentary by means of differently grouped sensors.

Gigante begins, too, with a primal scene of appetite and taste, this one taken from Paradise Lost:

“Gigante's point of departure is Milton's Paradise Lost. In Book 5, God sends the archangel Raphael to warn Adam that Satan is on the loose and determined to harm God's new creation, the human race. Adam doesn't seem especially perturbed; he is more interested in learning from Raphael what it's like to be an angel. He invites him to sit and share the sumptuous meal that Eve has prepared. Raphael accepts the invitation. This leads him to talk about food and to describe the angelic state. There is no reference to excretion; instead of evacuation, the angelic form of life has expression and eloquence. Raphael distinguishes angels from men and women, but he nonetheless says that a "time may come when men/With Angels may participate" and find

Later on, Raphael tells Adam that angels "live throughout/Vital in every part, not as frail man/In Entrails, Heart or Head, Liver or Reins." This suggests that angels are not dependent on mouths, tongues, and kidneys, even though they can assume human senses and choose whatever size, shape, and color they like.

Gigante notes that these passages in Paradise Lost were in the minds of the eighteenth-century philosophers of Taste and were constantly alluded to. After the divisiveness of the British Civil War, the end of the Stuart monarchy, the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Act of Settlement (1701), it was widely felt in Britain that soothing images of national unity were needed. The first of these was the True-Born Englishman, who might be Whig or Tory but was ultimately an Englishman. Another image, companionable to the first, was the Man of Taste, an exemplar of moderation, politeness, and refinement.”

LI has long ago fallen from aus der Engel Ordnungen, and is no longer really a man of taste or a true born American – which might explain why we got such a cruel kick from this article in the Washington Post. Like any other People or Vanity Fair reader, we do love a good murder. Besides which, we used to play tennis almost every day in the old, dead teen years, and so witnessed the phenomenon of the brow beating tennis parent, the one with the little kids who were being taught to play a fun game with the ruthlessness with which you teach a puppy to pee on the paper. In the person of Christophe Fauviau this apparently found its logical conclusion:

“Christophe Fauviau, a self-described obsessive tennis dad, was a fixture at amateur matches throughout France in which his son and daughter competed. He often appeared at the start of sets with bottled water or cups of Coca-Cola for his children, as well as their rivals.

Sometimes those rivals became ill during the match. They complained they were seeing double; some passed out or collapsed. One fell asleep at the wheel of his car on the way home from a match he had forfeited to Fauviau's son because of sickness.”
Christophe, it appears, is a true narcissist for our time. A duly medicated French yuppie – tranqs follow income as surely as magnets attract iron – it was Fauviau’s habit to give his darling Valentine and Maxime that foot up by doping the waterbottles of their opponents with Temesta. Here’s what the trick felt like, to one of Maxime’s opponents:

“During the match, he suddenly began feeling dizzy. "I was seeing two balls coming at me," he recalled. He said Maxime's father asked him if his head was okay. After the game, Tauziede said, he collapsed in the shower. His parents took him to a hospital where he remained for two days. Doctors were unable to diagnose his illness, he said.”

All of which led to this:

“Fauviau's undoing began in 2003. On July 3 that year, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher, Alexandre Lagardere, played Maxime Fauviau in what was considered a friendly local match. The prize was a ham. Lagardere fell ill while they were playing and dropped out. He drove to a friend's house and went to sleep on a couch, abandoning plans for a night out.

Two hours later he awoke and tried to drive home. He crashed his car when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and died of his injuries. An autopsy found traces of Temesta in his system. Fauviau became a suspect when witnesses reported seeing him fiddling with Lagardere's water bottle just before the match.”

Once caught, however, our hero knew exactly what to do: blame his actions on his virtues. The virtue currently most worshipped in the world – ask our Rebel in Chief –is a high opinion of oneself. Given enough of this high opinion, you even have some to spend on other people. Yes, love love love – that is, of oneself, through other people:

“Fauviau, a slightly built man with a receding hairline and a pinched-looking face, testified in court, "When my children were playing, I was suffering. It was as if I were playing myself. I felt I was my child. I felt something crying inside me."
He said he arrived at his plan "little by little -- it was not sudden."”

Fauviau, after serving some tiresome sentence, should surely take his message to CEO retreats and think tanks, for there is an aching message there, a universal message… I think we can all sympathize with his agonies.

Which brings me back around to the man of taste. Surely it was this straw figure that De Quincey was mocking in the best essay ever written about homicide, Murder considered as one of the fine arts. It consists of a rather wild and wooly address given to a typical tasteful club: “The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.” Actually, Fauviau’s crime might be sneered at by De Quincey, since it lacks some of the characteristics of the great murders:

“People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed--a knife--a purse--and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.”

I for one would stick up for the poetry and sentiment, but it must be admitted that the grouping and design are rather poor.

De Quincey’s lecturer is given to great digressions that are so satiric that they almost don’t seem satiric, like a stain that fades into a fabric of the same color. So, of course, first he has to establish the moral boundaries, here:

Before I begin, let me say a word or two to certain prigs, who affect to speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in its tendency. Immoral! God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that people mean? I am for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all that; and I do affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of it,) that murder is an improper line of conduct, highly improper; and I do not stick to assert, that any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and so far from aiding and abetting him by pointing out his victim's hiding-place, as a great moralist[1] of Germany declared it to be every good man's duty to do, I would subscribe one shilling and sixpense to have him apprehended, which is more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for that purpose. But what then? Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and _that_, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated _æsthetically_, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.”

After more of this, our lecturer gets down to brass tacks, and as with any connoisseur, glances over the progress made by homicide over the ages, from the crude artistry of Cain to the more ingenious murders and assassinations of Christian times. Assassinations of statesmen and kings are rather boring, but there is a more delicate prey, and here De Quincey’s lecturer fixes, so to speak, his monocle:

But there is another class of assassinations, which has prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really _does_ surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For, gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.”

Truly, I can’t plead that my murderer, Fauviau, is a philosopher – but certainly I can claim that he is a murderer for the age of therapy, and a damn good one too.

Anyway, I could quote De Quincey's essay for ever -- it is one of my favorite pieces. If you haven't read it, dear reader, do.

PS -- A shout out to my readers in the Chicago area. If you aren't sick of my longwindedness yet, you can catch me in today's Sunday Chicago Sun Times book section opining about Kevin Brockmeier's new novel.

rachel, rachel

Rachel, Rachel

The Anti-Rachel Carson crowd is a surprising vituperative bunch. If you take an unpleasant stroll around the net, you can find plenty of apoplectic pesticide-ophiles, telling you things like “…today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them.” (which I got from Reason’s screed against Silent Spring). Seeing that number is like smelling the trace of the exterminator. Obviously, that many new cases would mean that soon, everybody would be infected with malaria. Actually, that figure talks about something different. As Reed Karaim explained in this summer’s American Scholar:
“But what about the 300 to 500 million people who "get" malaria annually? When most people hear that, I believe they think "new cases." (After all, you can't get it if you got it, right?) If that were true, then we would be in the middle of terrifying global epidemic. There are only 6.4 billion people on the planet, so we're all going to be sick within the next 13 years or so.

But that's not what the number means at all. Eline Korenromp, the World Health Organization analyst in Geneva behind the study cited when the figure is used, told me that the statistic is an estimate of "incidence of clinical disease episodes" of malaria in a year. In other words, it's the number of times people exhibited symptoms of malaria--not new cases, or even existing cases. The malaria parasite can be eliminated from the body with the fight treatment, but in certain parts of the world it persists in many people for years, and they face recurring symptoms. Others have the disease but show no symptoms. The World Health Organization, Korenromp says, has no estimate of how many new people catch malaria each year.”

This isn’t to say that DDT was not, once, a lifesaver, or that its use in small spraying – inside huts, or on mosquito netting – should be totally discontinued. Nobody, actually, says that. Carson was as sophisticated as any pesticide man about the reasons for using DDT, and the successes and failures of that use. Granted, she was not fair to the mosquito men in her work. There is a wonderful article by Malcolm Gladwell about the great anti-malaria campaign of the late fifties, here. He makes the point that it may have been the best funded anti-disease campaign the U.S. ever sponsored, at least outside of the U.S. He makes the further point that it was a great success:

“Beginning in the late fifties, DDT was shipped out by the ton. Training institutes were opened. In India alone, a hundred and fifty thousand people were hired. By 1960, sixty-six nations had signed up. "What we all had was a handheld pressure sprayer of three-gallon capacity," Jesse Hobbs, who helped run the eradication effort in Jamaica in the early sixties, recalls. "Generally, we used a formulation that was water wettable, meaning you had powder you mixed with water. Then you pressurized the tank. The squad chief would usually have notified the household some days before. The instructions were to take the pictures off the wall, pull everything away from the wall. Take the food and eating utensils out of the house. The spray man would spray with an up-and-down movement--at a certain speed, according to a pattern. You started at a certain point and sprayed the walls and ceiling, then went outside to spray the eaves of the roof. A spray man could cover ten to twelve houses a day. You were using about two hundred milligrams per square foot of DDT, which isn't very much, and it was formulated in a way that you could see where you sprayed. When it dried, it left a deposit, like chalk. It had a bit of a chlorine smell. It's not perfume. It's kind of like swimming-pool water. People were told to wait half an hour for the spray to dry, then they could go back." The results were dramatic. In Taiwan, much of the Caribbean, the Balkans, parts of northern Africa, the northern region of Australia, and a large swath of the South Pacific, malaria was eliminated. Sri Lanka saw its cases drop to about a dozen every year. In India, where malaria infected an estimated seventy-five million and killed eight hundred thousand every year, fatalities had dropped to zero by the early sixties. Between 1945 and 1965, DDT saved millions--even tens of millions--of lives around the world, perhaps more than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since.”

What it was not, of course, was a sustainable success. As Carson pointed out, patiently, DDT resistant mosquitoes will emerge and begin to dominate, by way of natural selection, given mass spraying. Which is of course what happened. The funding eventually ran out, the mass spraying itself ran into problems with the animals it was killing, and DDT resistant mosquitoes emerged. On the right, there is a sort of synergy between anti-darwinism and anti-Carsonism – the idea being that natural selection doesn’t exist. It does. So does extinction. It’s a jungle out there.

Gladwell is eminently fair to Carson:

“It was in this same period that Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," taking aim at the environmental consequences of DDT. "The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection," she wrote, alluding to the efforts of men like Soper, "but it has heard little of the other side of the story--the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts." There had already been "warnings," she wrote, of the problems created by pesticides:

On Nissan Island in the South Pacific, for example, spraying had been carried on intensively during the Second World War, but was stopped when hostilities came to an end. Soon swarms of a malaria-carrying mosquito reinvaded the island. All of its predators had been killed off and there had not been time for new populations to become established. The way was therefore clear for a tremendous population explosion. Marshall Laird, who had described this incident, compares chemical control to a treadmill; once we have set foot on it we are unable to stop for fear of the consequences.”

It is for spotting that treadmill that Carson will be forever relevant, and forever of interest to any political intellectual. Which is why other intellectuals can be grudgingly praised by the owners, pervayers, and maintainers of the treadmill – but Carson will always drive them nuts.

One more post about Rachel is welling up in me. And then I’ll turn to the New Yorker’s new environmental reporter, Elizabeth Kolbert.

Why we love him

"Part of my mission today was to determine whether or not the president is as committed as he has been in the past to bringing these terrorists to justice, and he is," Bush said at a joint press conference at the presidential place after more than an hour of private talks with Musharraf, an army general who seized power in a bloodless 1999 coup. "He understands the stakes, he understands the responsibility, and he understands the need to make sure our strategy is able to defeat the enemy."

Once again, our Rebel in Chief has upended the few, hardcore Islamofascist critics he has at home. “Making sure our strategy is able to defeat the enemy” – there will be gnashing of teeth as once again, he nails it. What a strategist! Those sniveling defeatists did not even see this coming.

But the liberal MSM, which as many in the Insta planetary system have been pointing out, have been lying about the greatest man to sit in the Oval Office since Jesus Christ, is not going to tell the story behind the story. So we will. As is well known, the President, like R. Austin Freeman’s famous detective, Doctor Thorndyke, is versed in the latest investigatory techniques, and they could barely hold him back on the plane over to Karachi. He knew his mission and he knew it well. As the plane went into Pakistan air space, Bush put on his parachute, double checked the radio receiver, and then he was off. Goal: find out about this Musharraf character.

A man of ominivorous intellectual appetite, our Rebel in Chief had learned several of the local dialects last week so he could get on the spot information. The mission reminded him of the old days, when he and Sly had gone off on many a black op, penetrating Hanoi, assassinating cadre in Laos, and in general winning the Vietnam war (before, of course, Ted Kennedy, directed by radio phone from Moscow, drowned the war at Chappaquiddick). It felt good getting back to mission strength, and as Bush donned his disguise – popping a betel nut in his mouth, adjusting his white beard and his turban, and putting one sandaled foot after the other – he wondered why he’d ever let this go. Of course, at the end of the mission in Nam, he’d accepted that he’d be more use off of the field – bankrupting small oil companies, being shoehorned by his Dad’s friends into an undeserved windfall with a baseball team, and of course illegally selling stock – all disguising the real trajectory of his life: to become a war president. Even then he knew it would be mano a mano with the dreaded Saddam. No wonder he had a few drink sodden and frankly coked up years there.

But that was long ago, and he couldn’t let regret cloud his mind now as he inquired about the democratizing process among the villagers. Quickly he learned that Musharraf was so popular that nobody in all Pakistan felt like there was any need for an election. This confirmed our man’s intuition: democracy, as he himself had learned in 2000, sometimes meant going beyond the mere fact that you lose an election to the higher fact that you know, in your gut, that you deserve to win. Bush smiled grimly to himself, as he made his way from one Waziristan village to another: Mush, as he liked to call him, would have been on the team in Florida.

But then there was this Osama character. Some memory loss thing, perhaps attributable to that night in Lubbock when he frankly went overboard smokin’ rock, scenes from his past in the Cambodian jungle seeming to lurk in the corners of that cowboy bar, perhaps that was the problem. In excellent Pashto, our Rebel in Chief made his discrete queries about the famous terrorist. He noted the Osama burgers joints that were popping up in every village center. He noticed the Osama informercial playing on many a tv set in the village night. He noticed the Osama look a like contest, the sign on one of the villages quaint Holiday Inns (One Night Only: Osama and his Merry Men), and the ads in the paper: terrorists wanted! It almost made him think of something. But at this point, the betel nut was really giving him a reminiscent buzz, so he decided to cut Mush some slack. After all, our Rebel in Chief himself really hadn’t done all that much about “terrorism” (Karl always used the quote fingers back in the Oval office). This wasn’t No Child Left Behind, where you had to pass some friggin’ test – this was Nam!

It was always Nam, in the end. Our Rebel in Chief radioed in – time to be picked up.

all hail rachel carson

LI has been puzzled, over the last couple years, at the elevation of George Orwell into some kind of template of the politically engaged intellectual. It isn’t that we dislike Orwell – on the contrary. But there really is nothing so ridiculous as the imitation of Orwell that gets imposed on us by the cult. A typical example the cult’s bizarre notion that Orwell is the very essence of what we are all to strive for, us penmen who do the easy task of scribbling in the margins of newspapers, is an essay in the American Prospect on Dwight Macdonald, written by John Rodden and Jack Rossi. No doubt honorable guys – yet the article is almost comic in its insistence that Macdonald is important because he is a pallid rerun of the ever beloved George.

The first graf tells us that the beloved clichés are going to be laid on here like the icing on a mafia wedding cake:

“IN 1958, WRITING IN THE JESUIT weekly America, the historian John Lukacs speculated whether Dwight Macdonald might become "The American Orwell." Noting that Macdonald's American "reputation is rising," Lukacs wrote that he was already known among British intellectuals "as one of the most interesting American critics of these times." In particular Lukacs lauded Macdonald's "lonely and courageous positions" in the mid-1940s-on Yalta, the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans-and argued that Macdonald's political stance "coincides with the often lonely positions taken by George Orwell amidst the leftist intelligentsia in Britain."”

Loneliness, of course, and courage – those are the words that are trotted out automatically whenever the Orwell catalyst is doing its work somewhere in the paragraph. A cliché can be defined as that verbal unit that does your thinking so you don’t have to – and by that standard, Rodden and Rossi have certain produced such a cognitive saving article that, with the spare brain space, they could have been solving first year chemistry problems.

The automatic alignment of certain words with Orwell – lonely, courageous, the “leftist intelligentsia,” contrarian (used later in the article), “a consistent opponent of Stalinism,” etc., etc. rolls over the reader, who has read all of these phrases before. Orwell keeps popping up to either crown something Macdonald does or to provide edifying contrast – even to Dwight’s birth: “Born into a wealthy upper middle class family class family much like that of Orwell…” I suppose if Macdonald had been born to a family of poor sharecroppers, his birth would have been unlike Orwell’s – but still, the Orwellian seal of approval would have been affixed.

All of which brings me to: Rachel Carson. Lately, LI has been thinking of intellectual interventions that actually produced immediate concrete results, and we were struck by the fact that so few people talk about the lonely, courageous Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring certainly influenced legislation that is with us every day, and produced, wholesale, the genre of environmental muckraking. And while Orwell certainly had to contend with the dirty dealings of the pro-Stalinist intellectual set, he never had to bear the brunt of the anger of a very well financed sector of the economy – the pesticide/agribusiness concerns – which still annually try to crop spray her in the journals of the right, part of which dribbles over into the neo-liberal organs we all know and love -- most notably in Tina Rosenberg's ignorant plea for DDT in the NYT mag a couple of years back, which implied that malaria control depends totally on massive amounts of an unsubstitutable pesticide with huge side costs (which are, of course, not mentioned), subject to studies that show infant mortality rates going up due to DDT in the breast milk, even as infant mortality rates go down due to the lessened number of malaria carrying mosquitoes.

While, in truth, my intellectual concerns are closer to Orwell’s subject matter – the nexus between literature, truth-telling and politics – lets face it, Silent Spring is a much more thrilling, and a more relevant book than 1984 ever was.

Oddly enough, the famous beginning of Silent Spring, the fable for tomorrow, which contained in a nutshell the kind of thing that drives the Delays of the world crazy, is even more relevant to the Soviet experience than the American. The difference, actually, is Silent Spring itself – there was no Soviet Silent Spring. Now, that is what I call an intellectual intervention – a book that makes a historic difference in a system.

So one reads, for instance, of the town in Carson’s fable:

“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there were now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”

And one thinks of the Aral Sea. As William McNeill shows, in his environmental history of the twentieth century, the two groups who promoted, as a form of manifest destiny, the deadly polluting of the environment in the 20th century were the Soviets and the American GOP.

William Burroughs was quite right to see the symbolic bond between pesticides and junk. But it was Rachel Carson, a woman who struggled just to survive as a biologist in the 30s and 40s, when it was not a field in which women were encouraged, and who had matters in her life that could make her vulnerable to the disgusting attacks of the corporations – for instance, she was a lesbian, which in 1961 was the kind of thing that could still get you arrested – and yet she just serenely kept on.
I think the usual idea about Carson is summarized by Marla Cone’s article, in the Columbia Journalism Review, about her continuing relevance:

“Oddly enough, when I began covering environmental problems in the mid-1980s, I thought that Silent Spring was an anachronism, important only as a reminder of people's profound ignorance about the environment during the post-World War II industrial age. I was starting kindergarten in September of 1962 when Carson published her epic warning about how man-made pesticides were poisoning the world. Oblivious to what Carson called the "elixirs of death," I grew up on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, in one of the nation's toxic hotspots, Waukegan, Illinois, and during the time when the "Dirty Dozen"--the ubiquitous DDT and other toxic chlorinated chemicals--were reaching record levels in all our urban environments, particularly around the Great Lakes. Yet by the time I was a teenager in the 1970s, the world's worst environmental problems had supposedly been brought under control. We had seen the Evil Empire and it was that of our fathers and mothers. We were the offspring of the clueless World War II generation that sprayed DDT and poisoned the Great Lakes and fouled the air. We were finding the solution to pollution.”
But I now realize that what Carson called the "chain of evil"--the buildup of chemicals in our environment--continues unbroken to this day. And even though the political firestorm Carson's book stirred up forty-three years ago burns with just as much intensity today, most of Carson's science remains sound and her warnings prescient. If we take a mental snapshot of what we know now about the dangers of chemical exposure, the questions still outnumber the answers. Yet one thing remains as certain as it was in 1962: we are leaving a toxic trail that will outlive us.”
Another irresistible graf from that article:
“When the manuscript of Silent Spring was serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, Carson was demonized. Chemical companies, and even some of her fellow scientists, attacked her data and interpretations, lambasted her credentials', called her hysterical and one-sided, and pressured her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to withdraw Silent Spring. Monsanto went so far as to publish a parody of Silent Spring, called The Desolate Year, in which famine, disease, and insects take over the world after pesticides have been banned.”

For all the loneliness and courage it takes to evoke Orwell, I can pretty much guarantee that the mention of that lifelong socialist will win you kudos in the conservative mags. But praise Rachel Carson and you will soon have an opportunity to find out all about loneliness and courage and being the object of unstinting vituperation.

I’m going to post about RC again, soon.

PS – for those who think Global Warming is not in our “economic interests” to try to prevent – and Global warming is just the kind of interaction between human made chemical agents and the environment that Carson understood so well – might want to take a gander at the future, displayed in this article in the WAPO. Of course, when it came to fighting for the brave lumberman against the horrible environmentalists, protecting those unnecessary owls, the right was all over the case. Now that the natural structure upon which the entire timber industry is built – the existence of forests – is under attack from a beetle who could only be operating because of the warming we’ve experienced over the last twenty years, let’s just say it isn’t going to worry the good folks at National Review, or the White House. The peculiar ideology of American conservatism, as we have argued often, is merely the extended phenotype of the petro-chemical industry. It is not synonymous, even, with the business interests of other industrial sectors.


“Millions of acres of Canada's lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.

The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.

"It's pretty gut-wrenching," said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. "People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It's now."”
Years from now, we will look back in disbelief: 500 – 700 billion in costs for a pointless war in Iraq; the inability to deal with a small group of terrorists, who, regrouping, were able to attack Saudi Arabia (one of those future coming attractions); and more than anything else, the Titanic like movement into an oncoming disaster, except in the Titanic’s case it was ice, and in our case it is the lack thereof.

At the province's Ministry of Forests and Range in Quesnel, forestry officer Pelchat saw the beetle expansion coming as "a silent forest fire." He and his colleagues launched an offensive to try to stop or at least delay the invasion, all the while hoping for cold temperatures. They searched out beetle-ridden trees, cutting them and burning them. They thinned forests. They set out traps. But the deep freeze never came.

"We lost. They built up into an army and came across," Pelchat said. Surveys show the beetle has infested 21 million acres and killed 411 million cubic feet of trees -- double the annual take by all the loggers in Canada. In seven years or sooner, the Forest Service predicts, that kill will nearly triple and 80 percent of the pines in the central British Columbia forest will be dead.”
Mad Max at the thunderdome. The deserts of Canada. No future for you.
The timbering spokesman barely gets in the usual industry jibe at the environmentalists, and he even makes an arguable point, beyond the inevitable pr cliché:

"It was the perfect storm" of warmer weather and vulnerable old trees, coupled with constraints that slowed logging of the infected wood, said Douglas Routledge, who represents timber companies in the city of Prince George

But it can’t happen here. There will be no effect on Florida, Las Vegas, Arizona, the Dakotas, Montana, Utah, all the populations, those booming Christian masses betting on real estate, who consistently vote the anti-green side. Right. We are as bugs awaiting the steamroller. Yes, with the market glutted with Orwells, perhaps it is time to invest in some Rachel Carsons. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

uncle sam's pretender

LI has had the type of day that would have shattered Dmitri Karamazov’s nerves. And about that, I will keep my mouth shut – dark is the grave wherein my hopes are laid, and like that. I do want to give a big shout out to Mr. T. from NYC – rescuing me from financial ruin. It is so nice not to be on the rocks.

So … given that I don’t have the energy to go ahuntin’ after our Rebel in Chief today – and given also that I’m getting an extraordinary influx of visitors, thanks to The Empire Burlesque, Tiny Revolution, and TheModernWorld – I think I’ll reprise a fortuitous bit of profiling I did a couple of weeks ago. I’ve noticed today that many are the pundits who are shocked by that Katrina video in which our Prez is paralyzed with the realization that, once again, events are going to be too big for him. These pundits have woven a campfire tale of the brave and bold President for years, and like kids telling a scary story, they fell for it themselves. They felt called upon to do so, since, given the events of 9/11, it was either myth or the dash of cold truth – that the Supreme Court had dubbed an incorrigible bumbler to be the Uncle Sam’s incarnation, and that the man flying around from place to place on 9/11, less like a President than some tourist who’d stumbled into the wrong country, was a what you see is what we got kind of proposition. Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, of course, is the veritable guide book to Uncle Sam’s incarnations. In the book, Uncle Sam incarnates himself in Eisenhower on the golf course, teasing Ike’s Vice President, Richard Nixon, with intimations of his b’ar hunting glory:

“In the aftershock of Uncle Sam’s transmutation, it is difficult even to hear a question, much less to grasp or answer it. One is always struck by a kind of inner thunder, a loss not so much of vision as of the coordinates of vision, and a loosening of the limbs as though in sympathy with the dissolution of the features of Uncle Sam’s current Incarnation. I say he went over to rinse off his balls and asked me about the Rosenbergs – but perhaps he had asked me long before, while watching his drive arc distantly toward the flag on the sixth green, for example, or even during the backswing, somewhere in that timeless era between the first snap and crackle of metamorphosis, Ike’s blue eyes flashing me a glance full of fear and trembling as the moment grew in him, and my own slow recovery from the awesome dazzle of this miraculous transubstantiation.”

Of course, if not privy to Uncle Sam’s descents upon earth, us mere citizens can watch the press reel back from the boldness, the courage, the likeability of the current Uncle Sam pretender. This is why the Katrina video is so, so cruel (in fact, I almost had a ping of sympathy for Mr. Bush), and why the handlers have tried to keep Bush as sealed away from any unscripted moments as though he were some pubescent Rapunzel, apt to fall for the first horny prince who came along.

But LI has already gone through the song and dance, so let’s quote ourselves, from February 4, 2006:

The farcical image of Bush as a bold leader, propagated by the press ever since we saw the real Bush, on 9/11, freeze and act with characteristic indecisiveness, is not so much political as psychopathological. It seems that the 9/11 attack hurt the country’s narcissism so deeply that we collectively -- or at least the media, on our behalf - decided that we have a bold, maybe even a reckless leader.

We don’t. We have a man with a character flaw as a leader. It isn’t a bad character flaw if, say, you are a bank teller. If you swing on a trapeze or lead a country supplied with 15,000 ICBM missiles, however, it can be deadly.

The flaw is this: Bush freezes up when meeting a crisis. We saw this plainly on 9/11. We saw this plainly with Katrina. And, I think, we saw this in the summer of 2003, when it became evident that Rumsfeld’s Iraq plan had failed and we needed new leadership if even a fifth of what Bush wanted to happen in Iraq was going to happen.

People who freeze up in crises do two things. First they lie. We know about the Katrina lies, Bush’s claim that nobody saw that the levees would bust when he had been informed 48 hours before Katrina that the levees would bust. We know about the 9/11 lies, the fight the Bush administration put up not to release the fact that Bush was informed, basically, that Al Q was ready to go soon. We know all about the lies in Iraq, from Mission Accomplished to the news about the thousand points of light in Iraq, an area in which American power is now pretty much irrelevant.

You'll notice that with Katrina, as with 9/11, Bush specifically flew away from the target area. This is a sad indication of the kind of behavior you would expect from someone who fails in crises. To use the military lingo, he doesn't have the guts to face up to these things.

The second thing people who freeze up in crises do is prolong. Having failed to address a situation at the crisis point, the person who freezes up can, by prolonging the situation, normalize it. A normalized bad situation melts the distinction between the moment of failure and all the failures that came afterward. So, for instance, it is normal for us to see Al Qaeda nesting in Pakistan, dabbling, according to the Bush people, in Iraq, blowing up a train station here, a synagogue there. It is so normal we don’t even think that Tora Bora was, uh, a fuckup, a massive fuckup, followed by the fuckup of not guarding the borders into Pakistan (lack of manpower being Rumsfeld’s m.o.), followed by the fuckup of allowing A.Q. and related Islamist groups to form a second power in Pakistan to the point where they are going to be that much harder to uproot. And of course the fuckup in Iraq, the prolongation of a pointless, pointless struggle. And the fuckup in New Orleans, the months of an emergency response that would have shamed Sri Lanka.

the trifecta fuckup

One of the constants going across the Rebel in Chief’s administration is what you might call the trifecta fuckup. A monstrous fuck up happens – say, the almost insane way we now know that the U.S. “cornered” Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, without putting troops along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan; then an excuse or a coverup will be made; and then, amazingly, the fuckup becomes a precedent for further fuckups. Since there were too few troops in Afghanistan to do the job right – why not put too few troops in Iraq, too?

The latest fuckup trifecta has roiled the Governor’s Association recently. Here's how it works. A monstrous fuckup happened – the response to Katrina that wasn’t. As we all know, and as the Bush report to itself says (which stoutly refused to point fingers – why worry about the past when we can proudly say that we have not fucked up the future?), the breakdown in that response was due, in large part, to not getting army units and national guardsmen in place in time. So, as in some textbook pool shot, we have, a, the fuckup, b, the subsequent excuse and coverup, and of course, c., the future fuckup building on a. In this case, we have the Bush administration cutting funding for the National Guard – naturally. A War Department that shells out its 200 millions gladly to Halliburton, in spite of its own audit that shows that Cheney’s company put on a squeeze that would have pleased Don Corleone’s heart, doesn’t have time for things as tawdry as keeping a standing National Guard going in a time when we all know that, due to rises in the temperature of the Gulf and the Atlantic, we are going to be going through much rougher hurricane seasons.

This was the topic at the Governor’s conference this year. From the WAPO story:

“Governors were united in their opposition to what they regard as cuts in Guard funding in Bush's fiscal 2007 budget as well as fears that the Pentagon has been slow to replace equipment that has been shipped to Iraq with state Guard units. Early this month, all 50 governors signed a letter opposing the new budget and calling on Defense Department officials to reequip returning units as quickly as possible.

…
Much of the focus was on the gap between the Guard's authorized strength of 350,000 and the budget, which includes money for 333,000 Guard troops. Bush and Rumsfeld said they are committed to funding the Guard at the fully authorized level. They also said the equipment sent to Iraq will be replaced and in many cases upgraded.”

In the what, me worry atmosphere of the White House, though, you can play monopoly with those promises, but don’t take them to the bank – they will bounce. The roulette wheel is spinning, and we do wonder what lucky city will take the hit come August or September. The trifecta fuckup means that, going into the future, the administration ramifies its incompetence on the political as well as the management level. After all, the black dot is most likely to fall on a Florida city – not good for Jeb, not good for the Bushes.

Well, but really, who but crazy Greenpeacers expect that the hurricane season will get worse? After all, it says in the bible that all of nature toiled and moiled in order to produce our Great President. But, hmm, what is this in this week’s Natural Gas Week?

“Even though the 2005 hurricane season was the worst season in 154 years, forecasts for the 2006 hurricane season are already signaling that the energy industry is in for another nail biter. And while natural gas prices might be depressed now over a glut of storage, futures traders say the chance of another hyperactive season in the Gulf is likely to keep prices elevated.

"The market has been so focused on lack of winter and growing storage that no one has been really paying much attention to what lies ahead with the hurricane season," one futures trader said. "The current glut of storage is more of a short-term situation, you have to look at longer-term supply issues as well. If we see anything even remotely similar to last year's activity in terms of damage and loss of production in the Gulf of Mexico, gas prices definitely will reflect it."
As scary as it sounds, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said there's no reason to expect any change in hurricane patterns in the near future. The number of hurricanes has been increasing since 1995 and such active seasons are expected to continue for the next 10, perhaps 20 years.

Mayfield has been very vocal in preparing the public and energy industry for what very likely could be an encore season. And a developing La Nina effect, could spell even more hurricanes in 2006, he said.”

With this administration, it is always that little bit extra one admires. The trifecta fuckup is nothing without a little New Orleans style lagniappe. Why are the water temperatures rising? The Natural Gas industry is going to tell you that it is all Ms. Nina. So is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – until it was caught. According to Greenwire, February 16:

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration yesterday backed away from a statement it had released after last year's bout of devastating hurricanes that dismissed linking hurricanes to global warming. NOAA posted a corrected statement on its Web site yesterday, stating that some agency researchers disagree with that view.”

As we know, the administration is strictly Lysenkoist when it comes to science. If, perchance, we were suffering from an atmospheric crisis that demanded higher levels of oil burning and more pollution from our coal burning energy plants, you know that we would be hearing about this crisis, in serious tones, daily – and the zombie crowd would wail. But the crisis we are suffering goes against the profit margins of the oil companies – hence, we have Michael Crichton’s environmental policies in place.

What is funny – what is ironic – is that as the temperatures go up, there is actually an economic system in place that is ideally suited to adapt to it. It is called – capitalism. The state could operate as easily to jumpstart a Green economy as it has to jumpstart and maintain a war economy, with the sustaining mechanism coming from the profit motive. In other words, standard 20th century capitalism -- not the libertarian wet dream, and not the Marxist vision of the armed proletariat.

But so it goes. Another sick joke. Another Lord of the Flies day in America.

PS -- re Lord of the Flies. Kerry would have been well advised to read that book in 04. It is often said, now, that the Bush administration is incompetent. Usually, this is taken to mean that the Bush people keep doing the same thing -- as in Iraq --even though that thing has failed in the past. But this is where the true, 12 year old emotional level of the Rebel in Chief becomes an important factor. As anyone knows who has taught twelve year olds, there is a type of twelve year old who will repeat an error exactly to show it wasn't an error. This is where a form of rationality -- the iteration of the correct procedure to do something - breaks down. In the old character-based psychology this kind of thing was called stubborness, or pride, or vanity. A recalcitrant twelve year old boy who knows that he is right in some higher sense will repeat, say, the wrong answer to the problem on a test in order to show he was right all along. The repetition of disastrous policies -- for instance, the repetition of using too few troops to achieve a military objective -- is not about some hope that this time we will get it right, but rather the desire to show that we were ever wrong in the first place. The phrase, "I'll show you" could be the motto of this administration -- that is why so many of its policies seem to exist just so they can be rammed down the American throat. In this way, mistakes are transformed into expected and desired outcomes. It is even better that Osama bin Laden escaped, for instance -- it would make a martyr of him to have taken him. He's powerless anyway. He's on the run. Etc., etc. The Fox news headline that is becoming legendary: "Civil War in Iraq: a good thing" is exactly pitched to the twelve year old mentality. Similarly, with the hurricane season of 06, the cuts in the National Guard are meant to show that the administration was right, right, right to respond as it did to Katrina.

So, throw out your Prince. The best book about the twelve year old mentality in power is Lord of the Flies.