Amolosh

Down the Meat Hole

2011-12-24T13:12:00.003Z

A Review of Some Books Recently Come My Way

Tim Flannery, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet (New York: Harper Collins)
Curt Stager, Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth (New York: St. Martin’s Press)
Lester R. Brown, World on Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: Norton)
Frances Moore Lappé, EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want (New York: Nation Books)
Thomas Keneally, Three Famines: Starvation and Politics (New York: PublicAffairs)
Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply (New York: New Press)

“By and large, it is painful to think.”

—Norwegian philosopher and ecologist Arne Næss (1912–2009)

If blissful ignorance is your cup of tea (or should I say, your poison), you’ll probably shy away from these books. That’s unfortunate, because if you read them your grandchildren, if any, might have slightly less reason to curse you one day.
     Global warming, acidification of the oceans, mass extinction of species, potentially toxic genetically modified foods, water wars, famine, the whole litany of environmental horrors . . .
     But in fact some of the news is good. First of all, we are we living in a time of scientific and technological progress to rival the 1850s and 1860s, when Clausius, Helmholtz, Joule, Kirchhoff, and above all Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, among many other remarkable investigators, were dispelling the dark of what the French call la nuit des temps (the night of ages).
    We also have before us a shining example of environmental success. The problem of cholorofluorocarbons (CFCs) destroying stratospheric ozone was tackled, largely because the United States to the lead in confronting the problem, and the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking. If this had not happened, Tim Flannery observes in Here on Earth, we would now be in the middle of a catastrophe, because ultraviolet radiation, from which ozone protects us, “penetrates cells, tearing apart DNA and disrupting metabolic processes.” Without the ozone, you could get a nasty sunburn in a matter of seconds.
     Moreover, our era is one of great ethical and humanitarian progress.
     I can’t argue the case in detail here, but let me simply mention that less than three centuries ago, in 1723, my own direct ancestor Johannes Augustinus Dreyer, aka Isacq d’Algué, resigned his post with the Stellenbosch magistrate’s court at the Cape of Good Hope at least in part because it obliged him to be present in an official capacity at executions by methods that included impalement and breaking on the wheel, not to speak of the facial mutilation of recaptured slaves by cutting off their ears and noses. Homosexuals, if discovered at the Cape, were simply ordered taken out to sea and thrown overboard, weighted down with rocks or cannon balls.
     Slavery was then practiced in almost every inhabited country. In England, hanging was the mandatory punishment for any theft of property worth more than five shillings. In China, the condemned were sometimes executed by a method called “slow slicing,” also known as “the death of a thousand cuts.” In Japan, execution by crucifixion and burning alive were commonplace; women and girls were routinely bought and sold--often by their own families--like any other kind of property.
     I am well aware of the objections to the notion that moral progress matches technological progress: the Shoah, Dresden, Hiroshima, the Gulag, 9/11 . . . But to suppose that the human superorganism “cares” who or how many pass under the wheels of Juggernaut, or how they suffer, is pathetic fallacy (as James Lovelock riposted to Richard Dawkins’s criticisms of his Earth system theory: “Gaia is alive in the same way that genes are selfish”). In the bleak light of hindsight, these monstrous, psychotic episodes are to be seen as learning experiences in the process of ethical evolution, and what is important now is that we are clearly learning from them. Gazing at our history in revulsion, we say, “Never again!”
     There may, indeed, will, of course, be an again, and again an again. But one day, perhaps, there won’t be.
     We’ve come a long way, and we’ve come along astoundingly fast. Right now we’re perhaps in the last lap of a race with ourselves. At issue: will our huge intelligence, charitable instincts, and innate biophilia win out, or will it be our equally endless stupidity, murderous instincts, and addictions to meat, gasoline, narcotics, and, worst of all, the bean counters’ bottom line?
     The key is the point Arne Næss makes: by and large, it’s painful to think. It’s easy enough to think “surgically,” about the Greenland glacier, say, or the rain forest, or whether what you plan to cook for dinner contains genetically modified organisms (GMOs). But thinking by and large means trying to think about everything, and the big picture is more terrifying by more than a few orders of magnitude than any of its parts.
     The authors of the books I draw your attention to here are seriously worried. But they also know that, in the words of the British moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, “pessimism is [a] cultural luxury that we can’t afford.” So they’re thinking by and large, and positively, as hard as they can.
     This may be painful, but it’s seldom boring.
     In Here on Earth, the distinguished paleontologist Tim Flannery (Australian of the Year in 2007) points to the “remarkable fact that despite our huge population, humans are one of the most genetically uniform of mammal species, there being more genetic diversity in a random sample of about fifty chimpanzees from west Africa than in all seven billion of us” (122). This is believed to be because an eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia about 70,000 years ago killed off all but a few thousand “breeding pairs of humans,” creating a genetic “bottleneck” through which the forebears of the whole human race had to pass. We are thus all of us very, very close relatives and given to making significant sacrifices for one another in the interests of the group, an instinct paradoxically blocked by the reflexive othering of others (i.e., racist/tribalist mentalities). The late Oxford biologist Bill Hamilton even came up with a mathematical formula for this: C < R × B, with “C being the potential reproductive loss of the one making the sacrifice, R being the closeness of the genetic relationship between the two, and B being the benefit the recipient derives.” In the real world, Flannery concedes, “things are not as simple as this splendidly crisp formula suggests,” but this was nonetheless the basis on which human communities were built. It was what sent countless soldiers over the ages to die for their “kith and kin,” as symbolized by their country’s flag. Once the group is clearly understood by a majority of people to be the whole human race—and it seems to me this goal is shaping in the distance—we should be in a position to move rapidly to implement a rehabilitative agenda for the planet like that so rigorously proposed by Lester Brown (see below).
   Flannery does a superb job of recounting the progress of the upright apes, our ancestors, who emerged in Africa some seven million years ago, through their progressive evolution of bigger brains (and then again, alas, to somewhat smaller ones: it is estimated that today’s human males have lost around 10 percent of brain mass, and today’s women 14 percent, compared their ice-age forebears), slaughtering and devouring our fellow creatures as, we went from place to place until “around eight thousand years ago, humans discovered the Caribbean Islands and the beasts [native ground sloths, monkeys, and giant guinea-pig-like rodents] vanished into the same black hole that had consumed their mainland relatives—the hole located between nose and chin in a human being. Humans ate them all, down to the last one.” Within 500 years of the arrival of humans (proto-Amerindians, roughly 13,000 years ago), North America had lost thirty-four genera of large mammals; South America lost fifty genera.
     Now, of course, teratoid corporations are mindlessly ravaging the world just as fast as they can to produce meat in hitherto unheard-of quantities. Perhaps mercifully, the creatures we anciently incorporated into the human superorganism to serve the hospitality industry have also lost brain mass—modern pigs, for instance, have as much as a third less brain than their wild ancestors.
Flannery believes we have it in us to beat the odds, restore the planet to a sustainable state, and survive into the unknown, perhaps amazing future. But not if we continue to “sit in our air-conditioned homes and eat, drink and make merry . . . without the slightest thought about the consequences of our consumption of water, food and energy.”
     In Deep Future, Curt Stager, a paleoclimatologist, looks back and forward in an attempt to envisage what the future might be like once we have greened Greenland, “one of the few places likely to benefit substantially from global warming.” He too is an optimist, and far-sighted enough to consider what thing might be like for humans after global warming has run its course and a new ice age inevitably looms in, say, 130,000 C.E. Stretching Hamilton’s equation for benevolence a bit, Stager even proposes we take into account the needs of our distant descendants by leaving coal deposits in the ground, because they might one day be essential to modify the climate yet again: “coal is both too valuable and too environmentally damaging to burn indiscriminately. It’s highest use is as a long-term climate protection device, not just cheap and dirty furnace food. Running power plants on it is like burning your house down around you because it’s cold outside.”
     Lester Brown offers a hard-nosed but deliberately optimistic set of goals in World on the Edge: stabilizing climate, eradicating poverty, and restoring the economy’s natural support systems. These, he notes, are mutually dependent: “Moving the global economy off the decline-and-collapse path depends on reaching all four goals.” To confront the problem, Brown proposes the creation of a Department of Global Security and literally go on the equivalent of a war footing. He even supplies a tentative budget. Saving civilization might perhaps be done for $185 billion annually. This compares with the annual U.S. military budget of $661 billion and a world military budget of $1,522 billion. Civilization would seem a bargain at the price, but don’t hold your breath.
     Frances Moore Lappé is even more of an optimist. But she is no Pollyanna. She knows only too well that you can’t play the Glad Game on Planet Earth anymore: that “what we’ve been calling ‘growth’ is largely waste and destruction”; that of the more than 80,000 chemicals used in the United States, the EPA has been able to enforce testing of only around 200, and that only five of these chemicals have been restricted or banned; that the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest polluter; that there is no such place as “away” to throw things you don’t want; that every 30 minutes, on average, a ruined farmer in India commits suicide . . .. Nonetheless, Lappé argues in EcoMind that solutions exist, are known, and within our reach.
     Thomas Keneally, an Australian of Irish descent, famous as the author of the book Steven Spielberg made into the movie Schindler’s List, offers exquisitely sketched case studies of three famines that foreshadow what might likely be expected worldwide in the decades to come: the Great Hunger that began in the mid-1840s in Ireland; the famine in Bengal in 1943–44; and the two waves of famine that devastated Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s. All three famines were rooted in failures of the imagination on the part of rulers, ranging from callous incompetence to deliberate genocide on the part of the Ethiopian Stalinist dictator Mengistu (currently enjoying his golden years in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe). Keneally tells what starvation is like, as the body starts to consume its own tissue, the organs deteriorate, the immune system collapses, and opportunistic diseases like dysentery and typhus step in to claim their harvest.
     Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto, in a journalistic tour de force that reads like science fiction, depicts the sorcerer’s apprentices of the private sector at work, with the intimate collusion of politicians and government bureaucrats, trying to save the world and make a buck. In a book, she tracks the astonishing history of Monsanto, the little company that could, and did, from Dioxin, PCBs, and Agent Orange through Roundup and Bovine Growth Hormone to GMOs and the patenting of genes.
     Consider only this: 300 milliliters—just three-quarters of a cup—of Roundup, once touted as biodegradable and environmentally harmless, is the lethal dose for an adult human. In fact, it’s a poison of choice for despairing Asian farmers (although you die horribly). Intensive use of it tends to sterilize the soil too. “It is hard to see how a total herbicide able to eliminate every kind of plant would spare the microbial flora essential for soil fertility,” Robin says. Experts say that Roundup, the world’s leading herbicide, has never been properly tested for its carcinogenic potential in humans.
     What it comes down to is: historical experience shows that businesses systematically practice deception; that regulators are frequently to be found in bed with those they regulate; that as a result toxic substances of all kinds have been released into the environment; that genetically modifying DNA is a broad-scatter process and there is no knowing what the effects of consuming the resulting food products may be over the long term: “the genetic material in food survives digestion and circulates through the body, fragments of plant RNA have been found swimming in the bloodstreams of people and cows. . . . substantial research suggests that not all genetic matter from food dissolves in the stomach and intestines,” the New Scientist noted recently.
     School systems throughout America are now faced with increasing numbers of children who are in one way or other simply defective—born broken, suffering from autism, autoimmune diseases, and a whole range of physical and mental problems. Is it merely coincidence that these children and their parents consume food derived from GM food crops and meat and dairy products from animals injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH, aka “crack for cows”), banned in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the European Union, but permitted in the United States? And in the longer term . . . well remember what happened with PCBs?
     One of the problems with all this is that we have to rely on experts. Very few of us have the technical knowledge to judge any of these subjects. And no one has the technical knowledge to pronounce authoritatively on them all. But who are the experts? “Research on GMOs is now taboo,” an Italian scientist told Robin. “You can’t find money for it.”
     In Scotland, Árpád Pusztai was doing research on transgenic potatoes at the Rowett Institute. Rats in an experimental group fed such potatoes were found to have “brains, livers, and testes less developed than those in the control group, as well as atrophied tissue, particularly in the pancreas and the intestine.” It seemed as though the rats’ immune systems were treating the transgenic potatoes as foreign bodies. Troubled, Pusztai went to the director of his institute, Professor Philip James, who was at first “very enthusiastic. . . .Then, suddenly, everything changed.” Pusztai was soon after summoned by James, with a lawyer present, and “told that his contract had been suspended, he would be dismissed, and the research team would be dissolved.” A torrent of denunciation was unleashed against him. As reported by the Guardian, the Royal Society itself blasted Pusztai’s research and established a “rebuttal unit,” the paper discovered, “to mould scientific and public opinion with a pro-biotech line and to counter opposing scientists and environmental groups.” What had happened? Pusztai’s collaborator, the Aberdeen University pathologist Dr. Stanley Ewen, later discovered that there had been intervention at the highest level. “Phone calls went from Monsanto to [U.S. President Bill] Clinton. Clinton rang [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair and Blair rang [Rowett Institute director Philip] James,” the Daily Mail was told by a former Rowett Institute staffer. Pusztai and Ewen were forced into retirement.
   By Robin’s account, such pressure has been brought to bear worldwide to legitimize GMO products: “in the United States now you can’t work in biology if you don’t accept funding from biotechnology firms,” one scientist told her. “That’s why I say we’re living in a totalitarian world, ruled by the interests of multinational corporations who recognize their responsibility only to their shareholders.”
     A French biochemist at the University of Caen told her: “In France, as in most industrialized countries, there is no interest and thus no money for laboratories to conduct epidemiological studies or scientific reassessments of the toxicity of the chemical products that have invaded our daily life. . . . [but] there is real urgency, because our bodies have become veritable sponges for pollutants. One finds attached to the entire genome of human fetuses, as I have been able to observe, several hundred toxic substances, such as hydrocarbons, dioxins, pesticides, residues of plastic and glue. These products, which were designed not to be soluble in water, accumulate and concentrate in our fatty tissue, and no one knows what their long-term effects may be.”
     Is all this true? I’m no biochemist. I only know what I read. But there it is.
     No doubt the sorcerer’s apprentices believe they’re doing good, feeding the world and all that. They make a living too, of course—in 2009, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant’s take-home compensation is reported as having been over $26 million. (Even so, things aren’t looking all that bright these days. In the fiscal quarter ended August 31, 2011, Monsanto reported a net loss of $112 million.)
So is it worth it to them? After all, they and their children have to live on the same planet as the rest of us. Maybe it’s time for a little thinking by and large, Hugh? You know the facts about your company much better than we do. Do you eat that stuff personally, knowing what you know? Do your kids drink rBGH milk, the kind with the extra pus, blood secretions, insulin growth factor, and antibiotics in it?
     Back in the days of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his brilliant colleagues thought there was just a slight possibility that setting off a neutron chain reaction might actually ignite Earth’s atmosphere, spelling finis to the human race, if not to life itself. Fermi is said to have offered to make book on the probability. But they went ahead and built the bomb anyway.
     You’d think that if there was even the remotest, tiniest chance . . .
     As Robin remarks of the ongoing proliferation of toxic and lethal chemical substances: “The reasonable solution would be to ban outright any molecule that presents the slightest danger to people and the environment. But instead, to satisfy the interests of the major chemical companies—and some would say, the interests of modern consumers—every effort is made to regulate dangerous substances only as much as necessary to limit the most obvious or immediate damage. For the rest, après nous le déluge.”
     Pogo famously observed: “We has met the enemy and he is us!” We’re so smart and bad we had to say it twice: Homo sapiens sapiens. Only us can beat us!
     But we’d better get started soon. Or, to put it bluntly, we won’t have a hope in hell.

The Wines of China

2011-06-22T12:58:00.001Z

Sent to the Western Land by Han-wu Emperor on 138 B.C., Zhang Qian found that “in the neighborhood of Wan people make wine with grapes. The done-well possess stores of up to 10,000 piculs and preserve the wine for scores of years. People drink wine habitually and the horses like to eat lucerne.” The emperor then started planting grapes and lucernes in fertile fields with the seed brought back by the envoy. “As the horses were introduced in great number, more foreign couriers came, and some of them would left the imperial palace and look at the boundless fields of grapes and lucernes.”
In the time of the East Han Dynasty, wine was still precious, which could be proved by the story of a bribery recorded in the Han’s History Sequels. A man named Meng Tuo from Fufeng bought the position of a governor with one dou of wine from the then Premier Zhang Rang.
Though winemaking technique was introduced into China in Han Dynasty, it was restricted within a small area, and it’s believed that grape cultivation no longer existed afterwards, which could be proved by the fact that wine was offered to emperors as contribute from frontiers from time to time. By the time of Tang Dynasty, the central China knew nothing about grapes, and the Tang’s Tai Emperor had to introduce grapes from the West Land. “The Tai Emperor occupied Gaochang and collected Maru grape seeds there to be planted in the Imperial Garden and made wine with the introduced technique. The wine is green, tastes cool and strong, with a flavor of Sihu. It’s the first time Chang'an people knew wine” (The New Book of the South, vol. 3). According to Song Dynasty’s classification book Cefuyuangui, vol. 970, the then Gaochang was 20 km east of present Tulufan, with uncertain sovereignty. By the time of Tang Dynasty, wine was so popular in the hinterland, that it’s mentioned frequently in Tang literature. Wang Han in his Liang’s Poem had “with wine in crystal and fluorescent cup, warriors are reluctant to get on their chargers.” Liu Yuxi, one of the most renowned poets of that period, admitted that “ being a native Shanxi man, I plant this jady fruit. Brewed into delicious wine, I cannot get enough of it.” Other poets sang wine too, and some foreigners in Changan run pubs in which western wine was sold.
Xu Guangqi of Ming Dynasty listed the grape varieties in the then China in his Farming Encyclopaedia: “crystal grapes; purple grape; green grape from Sichuan, just like the green grape from the West, also named hare’s eyes, sweeter than honey, the elite is without seeds; small grape from the West, as tiny as pepper . . . those from Yunnan are as big as dates.”

--Bijou Dreyer

Red Plenty

2011-02-12T13:18:00.002Z

I revive this slumbering blog to offer a plug for Francis Spufford’s wonderful new book Red Plenty (London Faber & Faber, 2010).

"Is it a novel? Is it non-fiction? It all depends on your definitions. It tells a true story, but it tells it as a story. Whatever you call it, it’s about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea - central planning via cybernetics - and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed. To give the economics some human depth, Red Plenty generates a miniature Soviet Union on the page, peopled by scientists and politicians, fixers and managers, dreamers and cynics."

Books banned in Virginia prisons

2009-12-05T20:43:00.003Z

A selection from the “Disapproved Publications List” of the Virginia Department of Corrections, September 2009:

Ulysses by James Joyce
Underboss by Peter Maas (1997)
Understanding Solid-state Electronics
Understanding the Struggle
United State Marine Corps Concepts & Programs 2007 (Pentagon)
Unleashing the Warrior Within (R. Machowicz)
Up Against the Wall, Teach
U.S. Armed Forces Nuclear, Biological & Chemical Survival Manual (D. Crouch)
U.S. Army Survival Manual
Valor of the Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone
Velvet Skin by Aishling Morgan
Venus School Mistress (Anon.)
Verlaine

Pandachucks

2009-12-05T13:21:00.034Z

Panda lovers are desolate because their beloved adolescent panda Tai Shan (pronounced "ty shawn") is soon to be deported to China, although he is a native American, born at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. All pandas are Chinese property, it seems. However, researchers at a gene-splicing facility in western Maryland (for security reasons, it cannot be named) report that a "beta" model all-American groundhog-panda hybrid is ready to roll. In the beta model, genes from a red panda (Ailurus fulgens) were spliced into those of a common American groundhog (Marmota monax), also known as a woodchuck or whistle-pig, caught dumpster-diving on North Market Street in Frederick, Md., creating the new Marmota fulgens americanus (photo). "We hope equally to succeed soon with a giant panda," an unidentified spokesman said. "We think this is totally cool! Groundhogs are actually much more intelligent than pandas--as we all know, they have some truly remarkable prognosticative skills--and the possibilities are huge!" There is even talk of engineering a "pandachuck" that will glow with fluorescent light, using new techniques developed at the University of California, San Diego (already shown to work in mice), making it much easier for future Punxsutawney pandachucks to see their shadows.

An unidentified spokesman for the People's Liberation Army contacted by Amolosh had no comment.

Nous sommes
le 15 Frimaire, An 218

Annie

2009-05-07T16:18:00.001Z

My grandmother, Anne Lavinia Bailey, born at Newlands, Cape Town, this day in 1871 and named for an aunt born in Dorset in 1827. Grannie Annie died on January 28, 1944.

The Gaussian Copula

2009-04-27T19:50:00.008Z

You've always wondered, I know. So here's Sam Jones's nicely nuanced account (link) of how Moody's and Standard and Poor's came to incorporate the fatal Gaussian copula default function formula devised by David Li (aka Xiang Lin) into their methodology for rating collateralised debt obligations. Hornswoggled by Li's "riot of equations, mathematical lemmas, arching curves and matrices of numbers" at a presentation "not a million miles from some kind of science fiction convention" into believing that they could gauge the interrelatedness of risks with mathematical certainty, the Masters of the Universe threw traditional prudence to the winds: "No need to spread your eggs across baskets if you knew the exact odds of your one basket being dropped. . . . CDOs built solely out of subprime mortgage debt became the rage. . . . using the magic of the Gaussian copula correlation model, and some clever off-balance-sheet architecture, high-risk mortgages were re-packaged into triple-A-rated investor gold. The CDO market exploded."

And the rest is history, as they say.

In 2007, David Li apparently moved back to China. His present whereabouts seem to be unknown.

Nous sommes
le 8 Floréal, An 217

Lingua Tertii Imperii: Des Führers Geburtstag

2009-04-20T11:08:00.017Z

Today is Hitler's birthday, an anniversary once celebrated in the Third Reich with religious intensity. As late as 1945, many Germans believed that come April 20, the Führer would unleash amazing secret weapons that would turn the war around. Ten days after his birthday that year, Hitler was dead, however, and the Nazi segment of the great nightmare of the twentieth century was over.

In his invaluable book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947; see link above)*, the philologist Victor Klemperer, who himself almost became a victim of the Shoah, argues cogently that it was through cunning distortion of the German language that Hitler bewitched his faithful. LTI's epigraph is from Franz Rosenzweig: "Language is more than blood."

We ought to reflect on what this might mean for us. What is language, and especially the various dialects of political correctness, Left and Right, and the frivolous bamboozlement of academe that one associates with names like Heidegger and Derrida, doing to us today?

If one thinks about it, Hitler could conceivably have been stopped without a preemptive war. What if, instead of bolting its gates, the United States had simply said to the Nazis in the 1930s: Sure, send us your Jews! We’ll take them all! And if you happen to have any other good people you don’t want, send them over here too! America would have benefited immeasurably, of course, as indeed it did from the talents of the handful of European Jews who managed to get here (Einstein, Segré, Schoenberg, Kurt Weill . . . and the list goes on) and the rug would have been pulled from under the Nazis’ feet. They would been shown up for what they were: a vile, ridiculous, and ultimately pathetic set of gangsters. If the United States (already long the number one industrial power and in many ways culturally dominant in the world) had resolutely rejected antisemitism in this way (and perhaps even mocked the Nazis as idiots for giving away such valuable human capital) in the mid 1930s, Hitler’s psychological base of support among Germans--and even his own self-confidence--would have been drastically undermined. In many ways, Hitler saw antisemitism as the strongest card he had (which is why the extermination machinery of the Holocaust would later be given priority even over the war effort). Moreover, by the very same magnificent act, the United States would have undercut the Comintern as well, because countless Jewish communists (Zinoviev, Litvinov, Pauker, Slansky . . . and the list goes on) would no longer fatally have imagined Stalinism to be the sole antidote to antisemitism.

And the unending catastrophe of Israel/Palestine might also have been avoided . . .

If the United States failed to act decisively against the Nazis in this way in the 1930s, it was largely because of the ingrained racism of a large part of the American ruling classes at that time. It was not for nothing that Hitler kept a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in his office.

And that racism too was nourished in innumerable ways by language.

*Translated by Martin Brady as The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook (London: Continuum, 2002)

Philogrobolized

2009-04-16T09:46:00.011Z

Mais un d'entre eulx . . . le plus sçavant, le plus expert et prudent de tous les aultres, un jour qu'ilz estoyent tous philogrobolizez du cerveau, leur dist:

"Messieurs, jà long temps a que sommes icy sans rien faire que despendre, et ne pouvons trouver fond ny rive en ceste matiere, et, tant plus y estudions, tant moins y entendons, qui nous est grand honte et charge de conscience, et à mon advis que nous n'en sortirons que à deshonneur, car nous ne faisons que ravassera en noz consultations . . . "

--Rabelais, Comment Pantagruel equitablement jugea d'une contreverse merveilleusement obscure et difficile si justement que son jugement fut dict fort admirable

Note also also Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart (1664), 3.26.212: "I find my Brains...metagrabolized and confounded"; Kipling, Stalky & Co. 119: " . . . we have metagrobolised 'em."

Nous sommes
le 27 Germinal, An 217

Péchés de vieillesse

2009-04-14T01:20:00.003Z

No. 1. Forgetting Tithonus:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes...

I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

Nous sommes
le 24 Germinal, An 217

Kozintsev's Shakespeare

2009-04-09T19:28:00.013Z

Have been watching Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet (or rather Gamlet, because Russian has no h--in the late great war they found themselves first allied with, then fighting the legions of one Adolf Gitler) and King Lear (Korol Lir). Both with screenplays by Pasternak, and Hamlet with a score by Shostakovich into the bargain.

They are superb, especially the Lear, infinitely superior to the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company production (with Ian McKellen absurdly costumed like a Cossack hetman and Cordelia a Hermès filly who has indulged in rather too many technicolor yawns, to use the Ozberts' phrase).

Kozintsev's Lear is almost certainly better than any English production, or at least any I know of.

Netflix has both of these Kozintsev films.

Nous sommes
le 20 Germinal, An 217

Life Upside Down

2009-04-06T10:26:00.016Z

I may, alas, have to give up Netflix. The trouble is that after indulging in its services over the past few years, I've reached the point where I have seen virtually all the available movies that I actually want to see. With too many of the titles I pick from among the remaining choices, I find myself switching off part way through. They simply aren't worth finishing.

The item at the top of my queue at present is Vicky Cristina Barcelona. "Long wait," says Netflix. Never mind. I don't really want to see it. To judge by his last few films, Woody Allen has lost his touch. He got old, it seems. Vicky etc. is only in the queue because my wife has decided to go to Barcelona and she wants to check it out.

I'm not going. I was in Barcelona in the sixties and seventies, and in any case, the age of travel is over, and tourism is a pain.

Most of the new stuff is imbecilic trash, so I watch old movies, viewed . . . jadis. Also on my list is Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965). I loved it when I first saw it, but do I really want to see it again now?

How about Bad Girls Go to Hell (Doris Wishman, 1966). Perhaps good for a laugh, but once again I may not finish watching.

One movie suggests my next move, Alain Jessua's La vie à l' envers (1964, released in the U.S. as Life Upside Down). "Jessua has never achieved the fame of Truffaut and Resnais, but he was at least their equal in talent," an IMDb (Internet Movie Database) reviewer writes. "In this, his finest film, he explores a young man's withdrawal from Parisian bourgeois life into a world of his own. Is the man going insane? By conventional standards, yes, but it's clear that the life he's fleeing is madder still." The protagonist in the end escapes from the quotidian lunacy into the world of the very, very small. We finally see him examining the texture of a wall with intense interest.

No, Netflix doesn't have it.

Nous sommes
le 17 Germinal, An 217

Vegetarianism, Anyone?

2009-04-03T20:36:00.014Z

This picture, which originally appeared on the cover of Patrick Duncan's Liberal Party magazine Contact 1, no. 15 (August 23, 1958), was taken at the Cape Town Municipal Abatoir that year (when Amolosh was involved in trying to organize a nonracial meatworkers' union). The pile in the background is entrails. The stuff in the foreground is tripe.

Things are less messy now, of course (at least I hope so). Nonetheless, as Kathy Freston notes (link above):

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;

● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;

● 70 million gallons of gas -- enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;

● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;

● 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;

● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;

● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions.

A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's transportation systems--that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level--local and global.

Nous sommes
le 14 Germinal, An 217

A Keats Mystery Explained

2009-04-01T10:55:00.014Z

Never mind the wretched G-20! There are more important things. After almost two centuries of suspense, it can now finally be told: the speaker in Keats’s sonnet "Had I a man’s fair form" (written ca. February 14, 1816, and addressed “To--”), is a bee.

Theocritus’s Idyll III has his lovesick goatherd (who also wonders if he is not perhaps funny-looking) say: “O to be that buzzing bee, and fly into your cave, / Slipping through the ivy and fern you hide behind” (trans. Anthony Verity [OUP, 2002]). Dr. Johnson comments, apropos of Pope’s imitation of Theocritus: “Theocritus makes his lover wish to be a bee, that he might creep among the leaves that form the chaplet of his mistress.” Keats has simply reversed the conceit. Here the bee regrets not being a man:

Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs
Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell
Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart, so well
Would passion arm me for the enterprize.
But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies,
No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell;
I am no happy shepherd of the Dell
Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes.
Yet must I dote upon thee--call thee sweet,
Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honeyed roses
When steeped in dew rich to intoxication.
Ah! I will taste that dew, for me 'tis meet
And when the moon her pallid face discloses,
I’ll gather some by spells and incantation.

Pope’s “First Pastoral, or Damon” alludes to Mt. Hybla, famous for bees and honey, and Leigh Hunt later wrote a book called A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla.

Nous sommes
le 12 Germinal, An 217

Muddy Rain over the Parthenon

2009-03-30T23:54:00.001Z

North African dust storms are creating muddy rain throughout Greece this spring.

Low Joints

2009-03-30T11:24:00.003Z

Les genoux sont les seins des jambes, c’est sans doute la raison pour laquelle ils me bouleversent tant.
--Lorette Nobécourt, La conversation (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1998), p. 178

If the knees are the legs’ tits
What are the ankles?

Of all the knees’ bits
the most erotic to me
is the anterior
meniscofemoral ligament
of Humphrey.

The larger posterior
meniscofemoral ligament
is quite inferior.

If the knees are the legs’ boobs
Is the pudendum the mug of the crotch?

Nous sommes
le 10 Germinal, An 217

The Aphorisms of Amalekos

2009-03-23T21:10:00.017Z

Amalekos of Kea committed suicide in 579 BCE, “probably at a hemlock social for superannuated geezers” (Rufus Aelianus, Realencyclopädie der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, suppl. 37B, app. III, p. 1007) in accordance with the island city-state’s famous constitution, which sensibly recommended that citizens not allow themselves to get any older than 65--a highly cost-effective early alternative to Social Security and Medicare.

Or did he??? A tantalizing hint in the Suda suggests that Amalekos may actually have skipped out and joined a caravan to Cappadocia with his boyfriend Alkaeos. In any case, the actual fate of this mysterious pre-Socratic postmodernist will doubtless never be known. However, a recently discovered manuscript found buried in the desert at the oasis of Oxytocin in Upper Egypt (“The rubbish mounds were nothing but rubbish mounds, but it’s always a pleasure just to be there!”--Rush) preserves a few of his apothegms, translated and annotated here by Scholiastes of Wikipedia:

Inside every genius there’s an idiot struggling to get out.

The idiot thinks he’s a genius but his mother knows he’s a moron. Still, he’d like to get out more. He’s sick of being her maternal gaze site! See also on this maybe Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), passim.

The sheep and the shepherd beg to differ.

Meaning unclear, but probably something to do with politics. In any case, who exactly is the “Other”--the sheep or the shepherd? See, if you must, Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

Hens don’t lay where they cackle.

In modern terms: Don’t believe Jim Cramer! Forget Geithner! The government is lying like a rug about inflation. It’s time to start overweighting Central Fund of Canada (symbol CEF), you idiots!

Too many cooks, so little time.

Your amuse-gueule is my death-in-the-pants, as Jerry used to say. Enough with the fast food already! That means you too, Nereia!

You can’t paddle twice through the same puddle.

There seems to have been a major drought in the Aegean area. Watering one’s asphodels was restricted to two hours a day. Contrary to what many foolish people think, global warming was actually already well under way BCE--although naturally no one knew about the hole in the ozone layer and stuff like that yet.

In wine is truth.

Actually, Alkaeos said this, around 600 BCE. Blatantly ripping it off is so always already a deessentializing move on Amalekos’s part! That said, these guys evidently drank a lot of wine.

Show me a poet and I’ll show you an arsehole.

Amalekos may have had a falling out around this time with the much younger Alkaeos. It is not clear why he uses English spelling though--probably just another deessentializing move.

Inside every idiot there’s a genius struggling to get out.

The genius thinks he’s an moron but his mother knows he’s a genius. Still, he’d like to get out more. (That’s the Ionian mother for you--what she gives with one hand she takes away with the other! Mothers can be annoying, can’t they! Yet we owe them so much. I find that especially annoying!)*

*The parallel here with the famous “Jewish mother” is obvious: in fact, there is reason to think that Amalekos’s parents may have been Edomite refugees--note the parallelism with Amalek, Esau’s grandson, who so totally pisses off the Lord of Hosts in the Bible: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam. 15:2-3). Cf. (always already!) the matriarchal subtext in the Ugaritic legend of Kirtu. And see also maybe, if you have the time, M. Weippert, “Semitische Nomaden des zweiten Jahrtausends,” Biblica 55 (1974): 265-80, 427-33.

Once were brewers!

2009-03-18T11:20:00.004Z

The Fourth Bridge

2009-03-13T13:08:00.005Z

Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.

--one of the questions from the Turing Test devised by Alan Turing to discover whether a hidden entity, such as a computer (or a blogger, for that matter), is sapient

A: Let us suppose the bridge to be the Fourth
(Not cantilevered above some Scottish firth,
Entraining passengers to Queensferry North),
Successor to First, Second, & Third on Earth.

First is what Tristram was so long a-doing;
Second is upgrowing at whatever age;
Third is, of course, the mystery of dying.
So what is Fourth, when do we reach that page?

The female simulacrum in the sealed room
Posts piping secrets through her handy slot;
Unhelpful demons, scheming in the gloom,
Wildly mistake the that that is for that that’s not.

So long as women puzzle--and men can be,
So long lives that; that that makes sense to me.

--Amolosh

Well?

Nous sommes
le 23 Ventôse, An 217

Intelligent Design for Dummies

2009-03-11T16:26:00.014Z

Is the universe a crapshoot? Did everything happen by accident? Are we all the result of some wacky chance-based theory like Darwinian evolution? Or is there evidence of an intelligent cause in the shape of an “unseen higher being”?

Atheist scientists themselves admit that things look as though they have some kind of purpose. In science talk, they have “high information content.” There’s tons of evidence for this. You just have to look for it. Look at a mouse. Or one of those tasty little brown birds. Or the Senate majority leader. Can we postulate that they came about due to blind, purposeless causes?

I don’t think so!

If you’ve been to the church of your choice lately, you perhaps know that to prove intelligent design (ID), we follow what is called the scientific method. You may even have learned about this in school. It has four stages, known as stages one, two, three, and four. First, stage one, we make an observation (O).

So here goes: all over the place, in just about every part of the universe, we find evidence of what ID scientists call “complex specified information” (CSI). This means (a) things are complex (complicated), and (b) they are specific--in other words, everything is what it is, and not another thing.

Take a computer, for example. It’s (a) complicated and (b) not another thing. What could be clearer?

And you thought doing science was hard!

Now we’ve got the observation, we make up an hypothesis (H) about it. This means, of course, we get an idea, google it a few times, kick it around a bit, and wonder how it would look on a bumper sticker.

OK! So, if things are complicated, could they have been designed by an intelligent designer???

Why not! Great hypothesis!

The third stage of scientific method is the experiment (E), or “science project” bit.

Could our dog have been intelligently designed? Can we prove it? If so, how? This is a tough one! She pees on her feet. If she were intelligently designed, she’d know to turn around and face uphill. No, actually, I think she may be missing a part. We’d better pick another experiment. How about a penguin. Look at the way penguins spend months standing in the snow and ice taking care of their egg. ID scientists call penguins “irreducibly complex” (IC), which means if you tried to rearrange them, it wouldn’t work. They’d abandon their egg. They’d pee on their feet. Their feet would ice up. The whole thing would be a total horror show!

Say you're like a materialist penguinologist, though, and you're observing a penguin, and you go, “Well, it looks like it’s intelligent but we can’t say it’s intelligent, because we’re not allowed to.” That’s just nuts! What’s more, it’s unscientific. Call it a miracle, call it some other bad name, but the fact remains that the materialistic view of penguins is retarded. Imagine building a penguin backwards (what’s called “reverse engineering”) and you’ll see what I mean. Start with the egg.

No, that can’t be right, because I mean penguins do start with the egg. Or, which came first, anyhow, the penguin or the egg?

But there’s no need to get into that--penguins are obviously totally IC. I mean, everyone likes them, but who understands them? I’m that way myself as a matter of fact.

After the experiment, we are ready to reach a conclusion (C). Ready?

Q: Could Darwin have been right in thinking everything happened by a series of random processes, which took billions of years? First you had fish, then dinosaurs, then people. Or perhaps the dinosaurs came before the fish, who knows.

A: In the first place, Darwin didn’t actually think this. He’s been misinterpreted. In any case, it appears he got most of his ideas from a beagle--and you know how “they” are! You can’t trust them with cats or other noncanine pets. And they tend to howl. I wouldn’t be surprised if they pee on their feet, like certain chocolate labs I know. Probably.

Darwin began by studying barnacles, which don’t seem very IC and are also quite different from penguins, even though they both live in the ocean. Anyhow, barnacles are normally hermaphrodites. But Darwin found that some barnacles were beginning to change. They were turning bisexual. He found tiny males hiding out in their shells, which he called “little husbands.” Yes, it's true! “The male organs in the hermaphrodites are beginning to fail, and independent males ready formed,” he wrote to his friend Joe Hooker (no, this was another Joe Hooker, not the one “hookers” are named after).

So Darwin found that even hermaphrodites could change if they really wanted to. They could become bisexual and hatch their own boyfriends. (Actually marrying them might not be legal in most states, thank God!) What’s more, the “husbands” could be independent males. Perhaps this could even happen with congresspersons! Starts to look like a plan, doesn’t it?

Thinking about congress led Darwin to earthworms. So he came up with this neat experiment to see if worms were intelligent, which he thought they were, based on preliminary observations: he made some fake “leaves” out of paper, and he found that the worms pulled them into their wormholes by the pointy part. “We may therefore infer--improbable as is the inference--that worms are able by some means to judge which is the best end by which to draw triangles of paper into their burrows,” Darwin inferred.*

Now there are many writers for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other so-called liberal media of that ilk who have never learned to do this. Maureen Dowdy is reliably reported not even to know what “infer” means. Charlie Cabbagehammer couldn’t tell one end of a fake leaf from the other to save his life! And as for George Will, well, he never really will, will he?

You see where we’re going with this? I mean if barnacles have way more interesting sex lives than most embedded journalists, what would even be the use of “evolution”? If earthworms are smarter than hotshot “talking heads” who actually appear on TV, did this just “happen” as a result of some kind of cosmic accident?

No way those creepo materialist scientists are going to make sense of swinging barnacles and nightcrawler geniuses! (But don’t tell PETA about them or they’ll feel obliged to start getting heavy with the live bait crowd, like they did with the fur freaks--and the vegans are spread way too thin on the ground as it is.)

Darwin speculated there might be things called “gemmules” that made it all happen, tiny particles that run around in the body doing good stuff--“early stem cells” would be one way of putting it, and we know stem calls are God’s own . . . I mean, ID. He explained this as what he called “the theory of pangenesis.”

He may originally have got the pangenesis idea from Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, who is famous for his belief in “the inheritance of acquired characteristics” and also, of course, for explaining why giraffes have such long necks. Lamarck was undoubtedly French, as you can probably tell from his name--a “very complicated moniker,” or VCM, in scientific terminology. Even so, he must have been a Republican, at least to judge by his attitude to capital gains.

But as we saw above, Darwin got most of his ideas from the Beagle (for some reason they always write it with a capital B).

However, there are some--and I’m not going to mention any names--who say Lamarck was the Beagle’s real name. (It would be a good name for a dog actually, wouldn’t it, especially if you pronounced it Lame-marck, like they do in Kansas and places like that, but what do they know?)

None of this matters though, because it turns out that Darwin was not really into Darwinism at all. “Thank God, I’m not a Darwinian!” he said. Darwin was like totally incredibly cool, and he definitely believed in ID on a personal basis. Although he never admitted it in public, some claim that he had, in fact, been “ID’d again,” as they say. Just like me!

It seems then that it was the Beagle who was really “into Darwinian evolution.” That dog hated freedom (and America and Christmas too, naturally). Most likely the nasty thing was just “into” Darwin for everything it could get! You know how greedy dogs are. They always want more lunch.

Moreover, there’s no evidence of beagles in the fossil record.

So anyhow, to wrap things up, here’s the conclusion (C) to our experiment:

Darwinism = O + H + E + C = IC + CSI = ID

Dang! Where does the VCM go?

--Bijou Psipsinoula

*C. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (London: John Murray, 1881), p. 90.

Preternatural biologist Bijou Psipsinoula gets her kicks out of torturing cute, helpless little creatures to death as slow-w-w-w-ly as possible, before partially eviscerating them to check for proof of ID. Then she stashes them under a bed. She never eats them. Why should she when this incredible felinocentric universe of ours contains an apparently unlimited supply of gourmet “Chef’s Blend” kibbles in a variety of exciting shapes and flavors?

Nous sommes
le 21 Ventôse, An 217

The Other Hitler

2009-03-09T11:06:00.003Z

Extracts from the Congo Diary of Rudolf Schicklgruber

July 27, 1922. Now that I am settled in here and have begun the inoculations, I have decided to start a little diary, as I always promised Mutti I would do. Nothing to report as yet.
July 28, 1922. All quiet in Guenonsville. The pygmies are really perfectly pleasant! Even though they do not know the purpose of the inoculations, they submit to them cheerfully. I suppose they are used to the pricks of jungle thorns.
August 1, 1922. In my spare time I play on my bandonion that Onkel (I refuse to call him Vati!) gave me--Jesu, beleibet meine Freude and so on. I am reading The Psychiatric Study of Jesus by Albert Schweitzer. What a good man! What good men!
August 3, 1922. I have been thinking of Adolf again. Did Mutti love him more than me? After all, he was the elder. I’ll never know, of course. But there was that episode when he dangled me by my heels from the fourth-story window of our apartment in Braunau and threatened to let go. “Rudolf, stop annoying Adolf!” Mutti cried. I wonder what she meant. All I did was quibble about giving him my marble collection.
August 14, 1922. I admit that I find it hard to get used to the pygmies’ moral life. They are so dreadfully free! And the pygmy women with their exposed breasts. Luckily, they are so small, they seem like children.
August 19, 1922. I wonder how Adolf’s Künstlerleben is working out for him? Was he really cut out to be an artist? Sometimes I think hanging out with that artsy bohemian crowd--Kandinsky, Klee, Schlemmer, Buber, and always, always that crazy Rosenzweig--led him astray. They were “modern,” so he wanted be modern as well (never mind Mutti, of course). They wanted to be artists so he wanted to be one too! I have come up with a phrase to describe this: peer pressure.
August 20, 1922. The Belgian officials came today for inspection--three palefaces in pith helmets (they like to imitate the British) with big notebooks. We passed, it seems--if I understood their French. The medical mission will be permitted to continue. Gott sei Dank! God! It would be nothing short of disastrous to stop the inoculations now.
August 22, 1922. The fact is I might easily have strayed onto that path myself. I remember gazing at Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer when I was a boy and thinking I wanted to be a painter too. Indeed, it might have happened if Dr. Freud had not taken me on as a patient. There was no room in his schedule, but he fitted me in between the Wolf Man and lunch. Probably he was taking time out from his lunch hour, the good man. I sometimes used to see the Wolf Man--Sergei was his name--in the waiting room when he emerged from the inner sanctum. “Few people realize it, but the Herr Professor is a lovely piece! Me too!” he once told me with a twinkle in his eye.* I always wondered what he meant. But perhaps I misheard. He was a Russian, after all.
August 30, 1922. In the war, it is true, Adolf took good care of me. When the other men in our unit wanted to string me up by my big toes, he intervened and saw to it that they only strung me up by my thumbs. That wasn’t so good! Sometimes even now I have trouble with the inoculations. But the big toes would surely have been worse!
September 3, 1922. Again, with the Belgians. Now they say we did not pass. New regulations have arrived from Brussels, it seems. So the mission must close. The pygmies are all distraught! And as for me, what future awaits me now? I cannot return to the Fatherland because of Vati (I mean Onkel).
September 4, 1922. I have come to a decision. The only thing to do is forge ahead, deeper into the jungle. To do good to one’s fellow creatures is surely the only consideration. But to who? The pygmies speak of a tribe of friendly apes beyond the volcano called bonobos who have never yet been inoculated! It is to them I must go. I am sure of it. It is also what Adolf would doubtless recommend if he were here. Dear, good Adolf!

*The Wolf Man “confessed the following transferences: Jewish swindler, he would like to use me from behind and shit on my head.” Freud to Sandor Ferenczi, letter dated February 13, 1910, quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 287. “Freud . . . called me ‘a piece of psychoanalysis.’”--Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, quoted in Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf Man and Freud (London, 1972), 150.--Ed.

Snakes and Ladders

2009-03-08T14:08:00.010Z

For Czesław Milosz

You claim to say how to pray to Someone who isn’t.
Tell me why not to talk to someone who Is.
All you know are speeches that elevate us.
What I don’t know are the sounds that never suppress me.

Airing them, in your view, we’re aloft with compassion;
sparing them, in mine, we’re alone with passion.
Your way seems straight and mine so sinuous,
but the steepest path between souls need not be the best.

Make no mistake about the nonsense
shaping rhetorical scapegoats from sighs
of sin in a void below, forefingers raised
for admonition, contrition, final admission:
God must have too much to do to hear supplications.
Share, rather, the voice of your world’s vibrations.

--Jon van Leuven

Jon van Leuven notes: "This mostly unrhymed sonnet is a response to [the Nobel Prize-winning Polish-Lithuanian American poet Czesław] Miłosz 's 'On Prayer.' . . . I was influenced by having recently fallen off a ladder in my garden and by gratitude to the snakes that kept field mice out of it."

Nous sommes le
18 Ventôse, An 217

Papillon de neige

2007-01-12T12:53:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
23 Nivôse, An 215

La figure humaine n'est pas faite pour être vue. Un visage est la vie intérieure d'un autre visage.

Le visage... est, dans les regards comme un oiseau entre les serres d'un oiseau.

Le visage... La figure est la lumière du corps humain, elle est la rose où se transforment en regards, tous les secrets d'un corps, sa vie profonde, l'action de la vie sur lui.

La figure : le visage est un firmament, azur de toutes les profondeurs accumulées..

Toute la lumière noire de la vie physique d'un corps est dans le visage, comme la lumière dans une forêt...

Le visage n'est pas pour être vu, mais pour se couvrir de regards.

La figure humaine... est une frondaison de transparences dont une lumière plus transparente ouvre les fleurs... Il est la profondeur qui porte des fleurs dans la profondeur des regards.

La figure humaine ouvre à mon visage une profondeur dans ses yeux...

Personne n'a vu une figure humaine. Le visage la cache. Elle est dans le regard comme la fleur dans une fleur... Visage qui a sa nudité dans les larmes.

La figure est un objet où le regard au lieu de voir, attend. Pourquoi ? Elle est l'azur dans le feuillage, la seule place du corps qui a une chance de durer. La figure sollicite l'image, elle a inventé la durée, la reproduction.

La figure est la fusion de la lumière et du regard.

Joë Bousquet

Joë Bousquet (Narbonne, 1897 - Carcassonne, 1950) est un poète français. Blessé en 1918, il reste paralysé et reste allité toute sa vie à Carcassonne.

Destiny

2007-01-03T10:40:00.000Z

DESTINY

A new poem by Jon van Leuven

No place is forever, not even a path.
Even if it leads on forever –
which can’t always be ascertained.
We need to look ahead, yet build the way,
and the way to the way, believing these will last
even when they no longer lead anywhere.
Stepping stones, pausing points, mere markers
of faith in the outcome are increments of infinity.

They take on a life of their own, whose sheer humility
helps them to endure while the end may not.
Their wear and tear appeal to what makes us human:
awareness of suffering and the urge to repair them
even though the repairs in turn are bound
to crumble and call for repairing. Ad infinitum.

This struck me on the trail to the hilltop,
disused and overgrown, its side walls split
by rain or roots at intervals, strewing rocks
so one hardly sees how to follow it further.
Ancient hoofprints, plodding in both directions,
show that ends exist, and indeed beginnings,
or did till lately. Possibly you yourself
forgot to pass through some day or night, sealing its fate.

Even Sisyphus wouldn’t know the start
from the sequel of fixing it, rolling back the rubble,
stamping the stubble, going to salvation’s trouble –
but for its being there, every inch, for the purpose.
Distinguishing, beat by heartbeat, a route from ruts
just filling up like time’s tooth feeding guts.

The Best and Worst Things

2006-12-18T11:09:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
28 Frimaire, An 215

British children say being famous is best thing in world. Here's their list of the best and worst things:

BEST

1. Being a Celebrity
2. Good Looks
3. Being Rich
4. Being Healthy
5. Pop Music
6. Families
7. Friends
8. Nice Food
9. Watching Films
10. Heaven/God

WORST

1. Killing People
2. Wars
3. Drunk People
4. Bullies
5. Illness
6. Smoking
7. Stealing
8. Divorce
9. Being Fat
10. Dying

Rallumez les Lumières !

2006-11-23T11:04:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
3 Frimaire, An 215

To note: the Israeli scholar Elie Barnavi's new book: Les religions meurtrières (138 pages, 12 euros; Paris: Flammarion, series Café Voltaire).
Barnavi's thesis? He has nine, starting with: 1. "Religion" is a portmanteau word; 2. All religions are political . . .
Religion--Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, even Buddhist (in Sri Lanka and Burma)--is the world's great, tragic political problem. The solution: "le jacobinisme à marche forcée et la défense “bec et ongles” de la laïcité. La République a des valeurs, des principes, des lois qui la constituent historiquement. Les respecter, c’est faire principe d’allégeance aux principes fondamentaux de la démocratie. Les refuser . . ."
In a nutshell: Rallumez les Lumières ! Rekindle the flame of the Enlightenment!

Just Practicing

2006-11-13T13:47:00.001Z

Nous sommes le
23 Brumaire, An 215

Just Practicing

for Alan Ansen

“most delicate hippopotamus of poets”
--Allen Ginsberg

In his old age home in Athens (Z writes),
“Alan reads Agatha Christie and the Trib
but can barely hold a pencil, far less write.”

“He says he wants to die
but insists on his flu shot, his glass of red
wine, and ice cream!! When I found him
napping at 10.00 am yesterday, he
told me that he was ‘just practicing.’”

Kerouac dubbed you “Rollo Greb”;
Burroughs, “AJ”; Corso, “Dad Deform”
--names I’d call dumb, didn’t you?
In Aegina you lectured on
“The Poetry of Auden, Ansen,
Eliot, Pound, and Yeats”:
we argued, pro and con.

I had an old house once, nearby,
--you could see the Parthenon,
and a pomegranate tree, amid
whose roots I found a brass pestle,
hidden by some long numbed kid.

They tore it down, the house.
An apartment building stands there now.

Envoi: Alan died yesterday, November 12, 2006 at 5:30 a.m. He had been moved to a clinic a week ago, after having suffered a stroke. He never came out of his coma. He will be buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Athens today.

--Peter Dreyer

Note: yerokomeio = old age home; polykatoikeia = apartment building.

Inflation under the Weimar Republic

2006-04-26T13:43:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
7 Floréal, An 214

German mark prices of Silver and Gold from January 1919 to November 1923:

Jan. 1919 Silver 12 Gold 170
May. 1919 Silver 17 Gold 267
Sept. 1919 Silver 31 Gold 499

Jan. 1920 Silver 84 Gold 1,340
May 1920 Silver 60 Gold 966

Sept. 1921 Silver 80 Gold 2,175

Jan. 1922 Silver 249 Gold 3,976
May. 1922 Silver 375 Gold 6,012
Sept. 1922 Silver 1899 Gold 30,381

Jan. 1923 Silver 23,277 Gold 372,447
May. 1923 Silver 44,397 Gold 710,355
June 5, 1923 Silver 80,953 Gold 1,295,256
July 3, 1923 Silver 207,239 Gold 3,315,831
Aug. 7, 1923 Silver 4,273,874 Gold 68,382,000
Sept. 4, 1923 Silver 16,839,937 Gold 269,429,000
Oct. 2, 1923 Silver 414,484,000 Gold 6,631,749,000
Oct. 9, 1923 Silver 1,554,309,000 Gold 24,868,950,000
Oct. 16, 1923 Silver 5,319,567,000 Gold 84,969,072,000
Oct. 23, 1923 Silver 7,253,460,000 Gold 1,160,552,662,000
Oct. 30, 1923 Silver 8,419,200,000 Gold 1,347,070,000,000
Nov. 5, 1923 Silver 54,375,000,000 Gold 8,700,000,000,000
Nov. 13, 1923 Silver 108,750,000,000 Gold 17,400,000,000,000
Nov. 30, 1923 Silver 543,750,000,000 Gold 87,000,000,000,000

A one-shot affair

2006-03-27T12:37:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
7 Germinal, An 214

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.

--Fred Hoyle, 1964 (emphasis added)

Check out the link. Please.
And while you're at it, visit http://www.dieoff.org

Germinal busting out all over!

2006-03-24T11:00:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
4 Germinal, An 214

We have reached the fatal month of Germinal, and the French have flipped their lids again. How sweetly ironic that the rioters chose today to sack the EHESS, or École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), source of so much of the postmodernist guff that has helped bring France to its knees. Present and past faculty have included Pierre Bourdieu, Cornelius Castoriadis, Annie Cohen-Solal, Jacques Derrida, Marc Ferro, Maurice Godelier, Jacques Le Goff, Jacques Mehler, Jean-Claude Schmitt, and Alain Touraine, among other learned blatherers.

On a not entirely unrelated topic, see (link) an excellent article in Spiked on the nonsense of "cultural heritage."

M-3 and the Tough Question

2006-03-17T12:08:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
27 Ventôse, An 214

On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M-3 monetary aggregate, which refers specifically to institutional money funds, large time deposits, repurchase agreements, and Eurodollars (see https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/discm3.htm).
Here's a sliver of what Robert McHugh, Ph.D., of the Financial Sense University has to say (in part--see link for the rest):

"It is official. A recession is coming. How do I know? Because this week new Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave an official warning to bankers about commercial real estate loans. That is always the kickoff to a recession. It is the starter’s gun, the national anthem before a ballgame, the opening hymn at a church service. . . .

"What is happening here? How does [ceasing to publish M-3] reconcile with the Bernanke announcement that bank commercial real estate lending will be curtailed?

"There are two ways for the money supply to grow. First is through the bank lending function. The more lending, the more spending, the more bank deposits, which is at the core of the money supply definition. The Fed has apparently decided to slow the velocity of money creation by slowing or shutting down lending. However, the Fed knows it needs money to buy financial markets and monetize our debt. The lending function is too much out of the direct control of the Fed. . . . the Fed wants to decide where money goes. So it will replace money created through the lending function with money created from thin air by the Fed itself. The way for that electronic money to enter the economy will be from the Fed directly buying something, or lending money to someone. In effect, the Master Planners will decide where fresh money goes. They will control more of the spending. But they cannot let us know this. Because it would be too easy to prove they are doing this if M-3 remains transparent. You would simply compare commercial and consumer loan data to the M-3 figures. If we saw debt declining but M-3 rising, voila, we would clearly see the Fed is directly pumping and funneling that money someplace, which would beg the tough question, where?"

Dybbukya & Co.

2006-03-14T11:13:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
24 Ventôse, An 214

George "Dubya" Bush's former top domestic policy adviser (he has just resigned) Claude A. Allen has admitted to shop lifting "clothing and cleaning products" worth $74.72 in a Gaithersburg Target store. He was still working at the time for the entity who will henceforth be known in these pages as Dybbukya.*

This, then, is the kind of person engaged in running the country under Dybbukya & Co.

It only made page B08 of the Washington Post today. That tells you something too.

*Webster's defines a dybbuk as "a wandering soul believed in Jewish folklore to enter and control a living body." Sounds just like the evil little sap!

Pollyanna creep

2006-03-11T12:16:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
21 Ventôse, An 214

On how the government fudges the numbers--and has been doing so for years--see Kate Welling's interview with the economist John Williams at welling@weeden (link). Samples:

"Real unemployment right now--figured the way that the average person thinks of unemployment, meaning figured the way it was estimated back during the Great Depression--is running about 12%. Real CPI right now is running at about 8%. And the real GDP probably is in contraction."

" . . . we are talking about a global crisis of unprecedented proportions, probably one that would lead to the collapse of the current currency system. . . . So the cures will have to be remarkable. They will have to convince people that things have changed. As crazy as it sounds, I think the only thing they will be able to do is to go back on some kind of gold standard."

Swinging cats

2006-03-09T13:28:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
19 Ventôse, An 214

"Long ago, Mark Twain said: 'A man who tries to carry a cat home by its tail will learn a lesson that can be learned in no other way.' If Twain were around now, he might try winding up a derivatives business. After a few days, he would opt for cats."

--Warren Buffett in Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s 2005 Annual Report

Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives* in the world total some $300 trillion, according to the Bank for International Settlements (see link). Another big fat nail in Homo Erectus's self-designed coffin!

*Derivatives are contracts, such as options and futures, that bet on the future prices of assets like currency, commodities, stocks, and bonds. Otherwise phrased: a crapshoot of humongous proportions that now ominously overhangs the entire financial structure of our poor planet.

Homeland Insecurity

2006-03-08T11:00:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
18 Ventôse, An 214

I nearly made a fool of myself that evening,
standing in the mansion’s entrance hall
with its chandeliers, Corinthian columns, vases
shimmering at the mention of vanished dynasties.
Since the professor seemed to be dropping names
I thought I’d sound a little hard of hearing:
Remarque? here on a lark a century ago?
Strange, I thought he was barely a baby or so...
But thanks to what must have been a long line
of visitors still sillier to the shrine
my host soon recovered his composure –
ah yes, you mean the middle name!
Maria’s been a source of some suspicion
even among us seasoned epicureans.
Certain critics claim that Rilke too
had bisexual leanings. One might doubt
this place, however, gave him cause to flout
more than a few new lines and feed his fame.
Thus reconciled, we joined the rest at dinner;
unlike the leukemic bard, I emerged no thinner.

Indisposed to let these beauties awe me,
though, and knowing well the works concerned,
questions in my mind began to gnaw me.
Why had such a literatus turned
to the frozen north for flickers of inspiration,
he who laid a continent at his feet
and changed his socks as readily as his nation,
itching to be the ultimate aesthete,
dreamed of warming the world to the invisible
shades of immortal Orpheus’ fabled plectrum?
Fact is, I find the notion rather risible
of hanging human hopes on a hole in the spectrum.
Maybe it was just the lack of light
in polar regions he aspired to test
before he got arrested in his flight
at the Universal Government’s behest
for using darkness unpatriotically.
Suddenly I felt sorry that old Rainer
hadn’t simply settled down erotically.
Fools rush out where angels wear eyeliner.

--Jon Cloud van Leuven

Note: The mansion in question is in a suburb of Gothenburg, Sweden. Rilke stayed there for a while around 1904 as the guest of a rich family.

PTL

2006-03-07T12:15:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
17 Ventôse, An 214

"Satan got into our computer."

-- Tammy Faye Baker, when asked who was responsible for fraud & tax evasion indictment of her and hubby Jim Bakker's PTL (Praise the Lord) Club, born today in 1942

Chimeric Visions

2006-02-25T21:52:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
7 Ventôse, An 214

“By injecting human embryonic stem cells into the brains of fetal mice inside the womb, scientists in California have created living mice with working human brain cells inside their skulls.”

--Rick Weiss, Washington Post, December 13, 2005, A03

In a Slovenian woods, Satan drives mice to hell:
see www.glirarium.org . . . slovenian-myth.html.
They meet him underground, he marks their ears.
There is no word on what a dormouse cares or fears!

In California, mouse immune systems were deceived
by injected human cells so young they were perceived,
the scientists surmise, as somehow “self,” not “other.”
Is it too soon to claim a lab mouse as your brother?

Human brain cells had been at some expense
induced to shine, emitting green fluorescence
by a venture-funded firm in San Diego, CyThera Inc.
So will they stand out, perhaps, if these mice think?

In every family’s future then, I see, far off, chimeras.
Your childrens’ children may have part-mouse mamas;
Satan may be your grandkids’ mouseherd in La Jolla.
(Just so you know, though, that’s pronounced “La Hoya.”)

The good news is that I’m no great shakes at vision.
At General Atomics Court,* they may get mice to fission
or fuse with what Miss Liberty thought she bought,
foolers around with stuff--Americans in short;

all we who take on thought, hoping to make a buck,
all we who play at words and sometimes give a f***,
all we who cannot hope to know what time will bring,
except it won’t be us, but quite another thing

--yet it may come to nought.

*CyThera Inc.’s address is:
3550 General Atomics Court
Building 2, Room 503
San Diego, California 92121 U.S.A.
Phone: 858-455-3708 Fax: 858-455-3962

From the hulks

2006-02-20T11:49:00.001Z

Nous sommes le
2 Ventôse, An 214

On Moral Imbecility

With 10,000 characters the mandarin supports the skies
and calms a distant emperor's fears;

With interminable forms the IRS fills Uncle's big fat tit,
mopping barbecue for K Street's endless lies;

With myriad bits of jargon postmodernists buy their peers'
flattering gratulations--and tenure too, with luck.

But how does it avail you even the tiniest bit,
dear future cadavers? Death doesn't give a f***!

Words are the magic that makes morons of us all.

Anywhere out of the world

2006-02-14T12:31:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
26 Pluviôse, An 214

N'importe où hors du monde

Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu'il guérirait à côté de la fenêtre.

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.

"Dis-moi, mon âme, pauvre âme refroidie, que penserais-tu d'habiter Lisbonne? Il doit y faire chaud, et tu t'y ragaillardirais comme un lézard. Cette ville est au bord de l'eau; on dit qu'elle est bâtie en marbre, et que le peuple y a une telle haine du végétal, qu'il arrache tous les arbres. Voilà un paysage selon ton goût; un paysage fait avec la lumière et le minéral, et le liquide pour les réfléchir!"

Mon âme ne répond pas.

"Puisque tu aimes tant le repos, avec le spectacle du mouvement, veux-tu venir habiter la Hollande, cette terre béatifiante? Peut-être te divertiras-tu dans cette contrée dont tu as souvent admiré l'image dans les musées. Que penserais-tu de Rotterdam, toi qui aimes les forêts de mâts, et les navires amarrés au pied des maisons?"

Mon âme reste muette.

"Batavia te sourirait peut-être davantage? Nous y trouverions d'ailleurs l'esprit de l'Europe marié à la beauté tropicale."

Pas un mot. - Mon âme serait-elle morte?

"En es-tu donc venue à ce point d'engourdissement que tu ne te plaises que dans ton mal? S'il en est ainsi, fuyons vers les pays qui sont les analogies de la Mort.

- Je tiens notre affaire, pauvre âme! Nous ferons nos malles pour Tornéo. Allons plus loin encore, à l'extrême bout de la Baltique; encore plus loin de la vie, si c'est possible; installons-nous au pôle. Là le soleil ne frise qu'obliquement la terre, et les lentes alternatives de la lumière et de la nuit suppriment la variété et augmentent la monotonie, cette moitié du néant. Là, nous pourrons prendre de longs bains de ténèbres, cependant que, pour nous divertir, les aurores boréales nous enverront de temps en temps leurs gerbes roses, comme des reflets d'un feu d'artifice de l'Enfer!"

Enfin, mon âme fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie: "N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!"

--Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose

Just in case you haven't seen them . . .

2006-02-12T10:16:00.000Z

Bound for Perdition

2006-02-11T18:20:00.000Z

Back to Utopia

2006-02-08T12:04:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
20 Pluviôse, An 214

Required reading: Harold Meyerson's article in today's Washington Post about how NAFTA promotes unemployment in Mexico. "In the pre-NAFTA days of 1975 . . . Mexican wages came to 23 percent of U.S. wages; in 1993-94, just before NAFTA, they amounted to 15 percent; and by 2002 they had sunk to a mere 12 percent," Meyerson notes. "The official Mexican poverty rate rose from 45.6 percent in 1994 to 50.3 percent in 2000. And that was before competition from China began to shutter the maquiladoras and reduce Mexican wages even more."

Wonder why there are eleven million Mexican illegals in the United States, whom geniuses in the Congress like Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin now want to brand as felons?

We can thank the naive utopian cult of the bitch goddess Free Trade, which ignores the fact that the human world is a vast network of interlocking conspiracies, all in the service of self, and ever will be.

Ancient Obesity

2006-02-08T10:22:00.000Z

Ugly Incoming

2006-02-07T10:51:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
19 Pluviôse, An 214

Bob says:

"The US Treasury recently went into technical default since its funded debt went above its legal debt ceiling. . . . On February 2, 2006 . . . it had debt of $US 8,198.6 Billion. . . . its legal debt ceiling is $US 8,184 Billion. The Congress is not acting to legally raise the debt ceiling and the financial mass media sure is not saying anything about it. . . .

"In 1987 American household debt was $US 2.7 TRILLION, 58% of the economy. Now it is $US 11 TRILLION, 87%. . . .

"America is borrowing at an annual rate of about 1 TRILLION US dollars per year from the rest of the world to maintain its current lifestyle. That alone, if it were to end, would put about a 10% dent in the US's GDP. It's going to get ugly."

Is anyone out there paying attention?

The Glamour of Grammar

2006-02-06T10:59:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
18 Pluviôse, An 214

Grimoire is an ancient French doublet of grammaire (often written long ago with one m) ; in the Middle Ages, the illiterate masses took the grammarian for a sorcerer ; a grimoire was a magician's text, a spell book; taken into English, the word became gramarye, signifying magic; but in a Nippon-like development, the r somehow transformed itself in English mouths into an l, thus giving rise to the word glamour, meaning charm, enchantment, magic.

Who now, alas, thinks of grammar as glamorous!

--Les Mots du français, by Albert Hamon, with thanks to Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart, correcteurs of Le Monde (see link)

The State of the Groundhog

2006-01-30T20:17:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
11 Pluviôse, An 214

Last year, when both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fell on the same Tuesday, Air America Radio observed, "It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a groundhog."

Plus ça change . . .

Meet Vernon Lee Evans Jr.

2006-01-27T10:43:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
8 Pluviôse, An 214

Meet Vernon

The first ever death row blogger. Vernon does not have Internet access, but if you send questions to MeetVernon@GMail.com, they will be printed out and mailed to him.

Make it quick. On January 9th, Baltimore County Circuit Judge John Grason Turnbull II signed a new death warrant ordering Vernon's execution in the week of February 6, 2006.

Update:

"Maryland's highest court postponed today the execution of convicted murderer Vernon Lee Evans Jr. . . .

"The state Court of Appeals issued several orders this morning granting defense lawyers' request for a stay in the execution. The court scheduled arguments in the case for May."

Baltimore Sun, February 6, 2006

The End of Nations, II

2006-01-26T12:12:00.000Z

So should we say good riddance or alas?

The End of Nations, I

2006-01-26T11:28:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
7 Pluviôse, An 214

I grew up in a world where Afrikaner nationalism was the most powerful force around, with its heroes, its statesmen, its poets. Now it is no more, dissolved in a swamp of money-grubbing, sports, and trivia.

The apparent victory now of Hamas in the Palestinian elections may well signal the end of Israel as a nation--not today, not next year, perhaps, but one of these days. And it's safe to say, probably, that there'll never be a Palestinian nation.

Even big nations like Russia and France--which used to call itself la grande nation--are now desperately worried about their identities.

King Farouk of Egypt reputedly once said mournfully, "Soon there will only be five kings left--the kings of spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, and England."

But will there in fact ever be another king of England?

The time of nations is over.

The Big Buyout

2006-01-17T10:23:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
28 Nivôse, An 214

The estimable Jim Jubak reports: "Last year private buyout groups raised a staggering $106 billion, the most ever and a 90% increase over 2004. This year stands a good chance of beating that record. . . . So much money has been raised for hedge funds and buyout funds that corporate management at any underperforming company is really under the gun. Improve your company's performance, the activist investors demand, or we'll improve it for you. . . . The amount of money raised for private buyout funds is staggering. In March, the Carlyle Group raised $7.85 billion for a U.S. buyout fund, the largest buyout fund ever--at that time. This month, either Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., now raising $10 to $12 billion for a new buyout fund, or the Blackstone Group looking for up to $13 billion for a new fund, will take the title."

This is good for investors, of course, but not necessarily for consumers. And it's certainly not good, I think, for U.S. labor and the environment: underperforming managements everywhere will be getting out the thumbscrews.

But sometimes managements "underperform" because they are actually human beings and try to balance profit against the well-being of their workers and the fate of the world. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and their ilk would like to get rid of these whimps and replace them with managers who know to put the bottom line first; and devil take the hindermost.

Here's a little coda from William Cowper’s “Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce, or, the Slave Trader in the Dumps,” in which a late eighteenth-century slaver confronted with the horrid prospect of abolition of the trade by the infant nanny state (in the shape of the British Parliament) puts up his tools for sale:

. . . a curious assortment of dainty regales,
To tickle the Negroes with when the ship sails,
Fine chains for the neck, and a cat with nine tails.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Here’s padlocks and bolts, and screws for the thumbs,
That squeeze them so lovingly till the blood comes,
They sweeten the temper like comfits or plums. . . .

On Moral Imbecility

2006-01-15T17:15:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
26 Nivôse, An 214

With 10,000 characters the mandarin supports the skies
and calms a distant emperor's fears;

With interminable forms the IRS fills Uncle's big fat tit,
mopping barbecue for K Street's endless lies;

With myriad bits of jargon postmodernists buy their peers'
flattering gratulations--and tenure too, with luck.

But how does it avail you even the tiniest bit,
dear future cadavers? Death doesn't give a fuck!

Words are the magic that makes morons of us all.

JFK's Rendezvous with Death

2006-01-08T10:56:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
19 Nivôse, An 214

In a new documentary, Rendezvous mit dem Tod: Warum John F. Kennedy sterben musste (Rendezvous with Death: Why John F. Kennedy Had to Die), the German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann contends that Lee Harvey Oswald was hired by Cuba to kill John F. Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson quickly understood the chain of events. "He didn't make this public because the geo-political situation was out of control," Huismann is quoted as saying in the newspaper Die Tageszeitung (January 6, 2006). "And Robert
Kennedy played along primarily because he feared that everything about the illegal activities of the Kennedys would come out in the process. So, many traces were eliminated. This cover-up led many people to believe that the CIA itself had a hand in it."

There's much more to it than that, though. I haven't seen his film yet, but Huismann evidently only has part of the story--and the lesser side of it at that. In fact, Castro and the anti-Khrushchev KGB collaborated to kill JFK. Khrushchev was steering the USSR on a course toward a Gorbachev-like perestroika (Gorbachev was a protégé of his) and had a far-reaching understanding with Kennedy that might have ended the Cold War--and the burgeoning Vietnam War along with it.

At the same time, Kennedy was locked in a struggle with his own National Security Administration to prevent the expansion of the Vietnam conflict. Our spooks had their own little plans for a new world order. See on this my blog "Crackpot Hubris" (June 27, 2005): "Gareth Porter's important new book Perils of Dominance (University of California Press) demonstrates in exquisite detail how national security officials nobody elected, led by Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, dragged the United States into the Vietnam War, lying blithely to their presidents when necessary in order to achieve this." JFK could perhaps have curbed their lust for war. LBJ could not.

Johnson believed that the plot behind JFK's murder had to be covered up because to expose it would be to play into the hands of those same KGB elements, perhaps precipitate Khrushchev's fall from power (which indeed happened, of course, the following year), and might even lead to World War III. The stakes were too high in his judgment, and he may have been right.

In having JFK murdered, the KGB was actually striking at Khrushchev and attempting to bring him down. Castro was just retaliating for the CIA's multiple attempts to assassinate him--commonplace gangster tit for tat.

Khrushchev knew exactly what had happened in Dallas, of course. And Fidel knows, it goes without saying. (Ever wondered why he always looks so smug?) Probably Gorbachev knows too. So why isn't he telling?

Someone informed me recently that the Russian mafia has infiltrated the Bush administration to a high level. To which one can only reply: So what else is new?

Perhaps we shall still see all this brought to light in our lifetimes. Or perhaps not. Incredibly, well before Gorbachev's rise to the leadership of the USSR, I submitted an article based on the work of Alexander Yanov to the New York Review of Books attempting to explain some of these things and accurately predicting that Gorby would implement Khrushchev's agenda. They wouldn't touch it and neither would anyone else.

What interesting times we live in!

Helicon Now!

2006-01-07T11:34:00.000Z

Nous sommes le
18 Nivôse, An 214

The Leaders of the Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose phantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

--Yeats

The Cytokine Storm

2006-01-06T11:20:00.000Z

17 Nivôse, An 214

With multiple cases of bird flu now in eastern Turkey and several deaths, you might want to start considering what to do if a pandemic occurs. It has been proposed that the severity of the 1918 flu pandemic was linked to the so-called cytokine storm, an overreaction by the immune system causing massive inflammation in the lungs (see attached link). This helps explain why deaths were so high among young adults--their immune systems simply worked better than those of older people. Certain nutrients and drugs may suppress the production of cytokines, although there is no firm proof of this. These include fish oil, green tea, borage oil, and cucurmin (turmeric). So may statin drugs like Zocor®. A drug called OX40 that might do so was developed several years ago by Xenova Research, but it seems that human trials have never been conducted and that there's no movement on this front despite the evidently impending disaster.

If you or your loved ones get bird flu, talk to your doctor about cytokine-suppressing agents like Zocor® or pentoxifylline.

Another Modest Proposal

2005-12-29T11:39:00.000Z

9 Nivôse, An 214

Many, many years ago, a young attaché newly posted to the British embassy in Baghdad was invited to a cocktail party shortly after his arrival, where he got to talking with a more senior diplomat. After some polite conversation, he asked: "And what do you think of the Iraqis?"

The older Briton looked around quickly and, seeing that no one was listening, replied with some vehemence: "They should all be put to the sword!"

This was told to me as a true story, sometime in the 1960s, although whether by the man in question or someone else I cannot now remember.

Dick Cheney Goes to Hell

2005-12-28T10:46:00.000Z

8 Nivôse, An 214

Ah, Cheney,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come:
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Cheney may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!*
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The Devil will come, and Cheney will be damned.
Oh I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul--half a drop. Ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him—O, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? 'T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!—
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

Were there a single soul to sponsor such respite,
It might have been. But there was not.

--Christopher Marlowe and another

*Slowly, slowly run, O horses of the night!

A Word to the Wise

2005-12-21T11:16:00.000Z

1er Nivôse, An 214

"Schacht doesn't realize it, but the concentration camps are my anti-inflation policy."--Hitler (quoted from memory), speaking of the head of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the man credited with curbing the mind-boggling inflation that crushed Germans after World War I. Schacht eventually ended up in Ravensbruck and Dachau himself.

So be careful, Ben Bernanke. Be very, very careful. And you too!

See also my previous post "The Coming National Bankruptcy" and the very interesting link there.

The Coming National Bankruptcy

2005-12-20T15:17:00.000Z

30 Frimaire, An 214

There's $25 trillion worth of U.S. Treasury paper out there! John Williams writes:

The regular, annual $3.5 trillion shortfall in government operations cannot be covered by Uncle Sam; the situation has deteriorated beyond any hope of a solution within the existing system. Raise taxes? Even a 100% personal income tax would leave a deficit. Cut spending? Spending cuts that would bring government fiscal conditions into some semblance of order would be so draconian as to be beyond any political possibility in today's environment. What remains inevitable--only a matter of time--is a national bankruptcy.
Such circumstances in the past--though no nation on earth has ever come close to experiencing the level of fiscal and financial fraud now being perpetrated on the American people--typically have been "cured" by revving up the printing presses and creating excessive quantities of money. The end result is a monetary collapse in a hyperinflation, with the currency becoming worthless.

The Evolution of the Vertical Smile

2005-12-20T11:11:00.000Z

30 Frimaire, An 214

Historiette en neuf tableaux pour comprendre pourquoi les femmes ont perdu le sourire.

(Click on the images!)

Pop Cavafy

2005-12-16T17:30:00.000Z

26 Frimaire, An 214

Amazingly, Cavafy is being turned into pop music! Rather as if T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound were to become a source of rap lyrics.
Sean Connery may even get into the act! H παράσταση αυτή θα παρουσιαστεί για πρώτη φορά στο Μέγαρο Μουσικής στις 20 Φεβρουάριου του 2006, πιθανότατα με την παρουσία του Sean Connery, ο οποίος έχει απαγγείλει την ''Ιθάκη'' στα αγγλικά και έχει αποδεχθεί την πρόσκληση....
Stick it in your pipe, scribblers: Το βιβλίο το διαβάζεις μια φορά, τη μουσική την ακούς κάθε μέρα.

Mrs. Jellyby redux

2005-12-16T12:47:00.000Z

26 Frimaire, An 214

OK. You've probably seen this, but if you haven't, read it. A truer word was seldom spoke!

Downstream from Disaster

2005-12-16T10:50:00.000Z

26 Frimaire, An 214

An important study from the University of Massachusetts's Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (link) reports on environmental and occupational exposure to cancer, noting: "Many Americans are exposed to multiple sources of carcinogens on a daily basis regardless of where they work. In 1991, the National Research Council estimated that one in every six Americans lived within four miles of a Superfund site. According to the U.S. EPA's website, 'the chemicals found at Superfund sites range from familiar contaminants, like arsenic, lead, mercury, and DDT to less familiar chemicals such as toluene, chloroethylene, and pentachlorophenol.' . . . From the late 1950s to the late 1990s, we disposed of more than 750 million tons of toxic chemical wastes."
Many carcinogens are found in common household products and in cosmetics.
It's not only cancer either. I was recently at a Christmas party held for special education teachers--therapists in essence--in the county in which I live. There were about 15 of them, all in the business of coping with the epidemic of autism and the myriad other mysterious complaints now affecting children, including acute mental and physical deficiences.
It struck me that there had been nothing like it when I was at school (true, that was in the middle of South Africa's Great Karoo) 50 years ago. Nothing like it at all. There were smart kids, there were dumb kids, there were a few sick kids . . . but that was about it.
Let's face it, we're downstream from disaster.

The Paraclete in the Heartland

2005-11-19T15:43:00.000Z

29 Brumaire, An 214

multa flagella peccatoris

Jesus showed up in a flash,
said an exceedingly senior old Jew
who knows very well what we do
whose rodeos bring in the cash.

Now He’s gone behind a gas station,
submerged in those seasonal catalogs;
gone, gone, it seems, to the dogs--
no thanks to the old generation!

Alleging malpractice and fraud,
they failed to come to Me first,
--untruths were told to the board,
confounding the bad with the wurst.

However, don’t beat yourself up--
the stings of the sinner are many
yet overrunneth his cup
and of danger there never was any!

Les ders des ders

2005-11-12T12:38:00.000Z

22 Brumaire, An 214

This may be the final winter for the veterans of what is called la Grande Guerre--the war to end wars--founding event of the long twentieth century (in which we still--isn't it obvious?--live). There are only six poilus left in France now, of the roughly 8 million Frenchmen who were mobilized in 1914-18, who suffered far and away the highest casualty rate of any army in World War I (according to one source, 1,358,000 of them died and 1,040,000 became permanent invalids). They are les ders des der--the last of the last--and they have all seen their one hundred and seventh birthdays. Let us remember then:

les marchands de canons
la mobilisation générale
la fleur au fusil, les Boches
le canon de 75, le bourrage des crânes
le tirailleur sénégalais
le fusillé pour l’exemple
le chemin des Dames
les salles à manger de Guillaume
l’ancien combattant, les gueules cassées
le traité de Versailles
les monuments aux morts
la fin

What the Birds Say

2005-10-21T10:50:00.000Z

Burning geese alive in Romania.

30 Vendémiaire, An 214

The men are here:
There's no plague worse.
Infecting Earth,
They are its curse.
O H5N1, spawn in our blood
and sweep them away
like Noah's Flood!

Candidates in blue and red

2005-10-10T10:25:00.000Z

19 Vendémiaire, An 214

Watching the debate last night between Virginia gubernatorial candidates Democratic Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and Republican former attorney general Jerry W. Kilgore, I was reminded of the original meaning of "candidate," which derives from the Latin candidus, "dazzling white." Candidates for public office in ancient Rome wore white to indicate that their intentions were pure. The candidate "donned a simple robe, without a tunic, elegantly distancing himself from the things of this world. But care was taken to ensure that this light garb made it easier to show scars got fighting for the Republic" (Ovid, Metamorphoses).
How far our modern candidates have come from this, rigged out like the lobbyists they are, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, slinging their weasel words, unscarred for the Republic in Richmond!
Russ Potts, a third candidate, was typically not allowed to join the debate. I hold no brief for him, but for the nonce, I link to his web site here.

Structures of Authority

2005-10-03T12:19:00.000Z

12 Vendémiaire, An 214

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.

--Noam Chomsky, Red and Black Revolution (1996)

A Life without Illusions

2005-10-01T10:35:00.000Z

1
Antonio Gramsci

10 Vendémiaire, An 214

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

--Antonio Gramsci

I suspect I have failed to do either!

Abelard

2005-09-30T10:47:00.000Z

9 Vendémiaire, An 214

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

--Peter Abelard, Letter 8 to Heliose

Recommendation: see www.abelard.org (link) for a curious British site with much to tell you about a multitude of things.

Greener Ideas

2005-09-28T10:48:00.000Z

Dienstwagen by Johannes Tiepelmann. Courtesy Spinnerei galerie, Leipzig.

7 Vendémiaire, An 214

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.--Hannah Arendt

Green Ideas

2005-09-28T10:37:00.000Z

The Streets by Johannes Tiepelmann. Courtesy Spinnerei galerie, Leipzig.

7 Vendémiaire, An 214

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

--Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures

The fly in the fly bottle

2005-09-26T12:45:00.000Z

Click on the image to enlarge it and read the text.

5 Vendémiaire, An 214

In the English-speaking world the great majority of books that have been published in philosophy in the twentieth century are like academic paintings: they show unmistakable talent and are professionally competent, the result of long processes of learning, application and work; everything in them is accurate, in its right place, and as it should be; but it makes not the slightest difference whether they exist or not.

--Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher

Miss Alabama on Eternal Life

2005-09-20T10:59:00.000Z

Fête de l'Opinion, An 213

I would not live forever because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.

--Miss Alabama, responding to a question in the 1994 Miss USA contest

Ivy on God

2005-09-19T19:11:00.000Z

Fête du Travail, An 213

"And he had such a personality," said Emily. "Such a superior, vindictive and over-indulgent one. He is one of the best drawn characters in fiction."

--Ivy Compton-Burnett, Pastors and Masters (1925)

Love Tentacle Drip Society

2005-09-18T17:17:00.000Z

Genre breakers galore!

Fête du Génie, An 213

The Love Tentacle Drip Society--check these creative spirits OUT!. Genre breakers galore! Like Tom Waits meets Laurie Anderson meets Radiohead meets the B-52's...primal beats, pots and pans, banjo, accordion, drums, xylophone, violin, upright bass, funny/sensitive/wacky vocals...mysterious and engaging! Damani Harrison from the Hook said: "This is possibly the most unusual music I've heard in Charlottesville. It sounds like it should be the soundtrack to a dark comedy or a sick psychological thriller. I imagine a song or two being the theme to Sling Blade 2 or possibly a remake of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (perish the thought.) Whatever, it was spacious and teetered on artistic brilliance with sheer comedic hogwash."

You know you're in South Africa when . . .

2005-09-16T13:04:00.000Z

30 Fructidor,
an CCXIII

 The police advise you not to stop if they wave you down in the middle of the night, but rather speed past them and drive to your nearest police station.

 You don't stop at a red traffic light, in case somebody hijacks your car.

 The Student Union demands that academic achievement shouldn't be a criterion for university acceptance because it's discriminatory.

 Landlords may not evict illegal squatters unless they offer them alternative accommodation.

 Protest-marching strikers trash everything in their path and that's okay, but a peaceful gay rights march is condemned.

 Post Office workers are videotaped opening the mail and stealing the contents, but the film may not be used in evidence, because the workers were not informed that they were being filmed and the filming is an intrusion on their privacy.

 A government Minister is caught driving her car with a forged license, but the case is dropped for "lack of evidence."

 A minister of religion who stole millions from overseas-donated funds for the oppressed, returns to the country to a hero's welcome and is officially welcomed by the government, represented by the Minister of Justice.

 Government ministers meet with masked gang leaders to ask their advice on how to reduce crime and violence.

 Scholars protest at the lack of schooling facilities by destroying school buildings.

 Two tourist athletes are murdered in their beds and the President says it won't affect tourism.

 The entire country sees a thug admit on TV news to murdering several people, but the police say they have no case.

 Votes have to be recounted until the right party wins.

 Your insurance is higher than the repayments on your car.

 You consider it a good month if you only get mugged once.

 Rwandan refugees start leaving the country because the crime rate is too high.

 The police ask you if they must follow up on the burglary you've just reported.

 You paint your car's registration number on the roof in large letters.

 Afrikaans TV programmes are separated by a Xhosa announcement of the following Afrikaans program, and a Zulu advert.

 A Minister is fired and returns the government cell phone, but keeps the G-number-plated BMW.

 The currency takes a dive, and the previous government gets the blame.

 A 45-year-old engineer gets replaced by a 25-year-old who cannot write his own name.

 The employees DANCE in front of the building to show how unhappy they are.

 10% of the city's population pays for everyone else's electricity and water supply, and get prosecuted if they refuse to pay.

 A murderer gets a 2 year sentence and a pirate TV viewer a 6 month sentence.

 The Constitutional Court declares the death sentence unconstitutional, but rules that abortion is okay.

 The prisoners strike!

 Crime actually DOES pay.

 People are allowed to reclaim land (for free) that's been bought from their forefathers.

 The government GIVES people houses, and they complain by setting fire to them.

 You can't even go on a business trip to Oz without somebody asking knowingly: "Oh, having a look around, are you?"

 You realise after watching the news on TV that nothing happened in the rest of the world.

 They bring in the innovative idea of selling scratch cards to alleviate congestion in post office queues.

 You are expected to carry a driver's licence that doesn't fit into your wallet.

 You have to prove you don't need a loan to get one.

 A shop clerk makes you feel as if he/she is doing you a favour by letting you buy from their shop.

 The fact that there is an election and people are standing in line waiting to vote is more important than the result of the election.

 The most popular vehicle is a 4x4 designed for driving in snow, (the reason for this may be the vast amount of mid-summer snow that you see in all Christmas decorations).

 People tell you that they wouldn't live anywhere else because the weather is so bad over there.

No local copyright. Email from an anonymous source.

Feuerbach in Babylon

2005-08-27T10:29:00.000Z

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

10 Fructidor,
an CCXIII

Consider this, Iraqis--and consider the Persians if you doubt its truth:

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

--Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

The Old Vegetable Neurotics

2005-08-16T17:05:00.000Z

29 Thermidor
an CCXIII

See the link below for a fascinating paper by Enid Bloch, "Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?"
In short, it turns out that he did.
As for the title of this post, it is that of John Harley's The Old Vegetable Neurotics: Hemlock, Opium, Belladonna and Henbane (London: Macmillan, 1869). And an excellent name for a senescent punk rock band, don't you think?

British ethnic humor

2005-08-13T14:50:00.000Z

26 Thermidor, an CCXIII

The countless jokes starting "An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman..." invariably seem to have been written by the Englishman. Here's one for you that reverses the pecking order:

An Irishman, an American, a Scotsman, and an Englishman are standing at the bar in the Queen's Head & Bicycle, boozing.
“I sometimes really think Yeats may be among the greatest of poets!” says the Irishman.
“How about Whitman?” says the American. “He’s great!”
“Little ye ken aboot it!” says the Scotsman. “Wha, that daft buckie Rabbie Burns’s the greatest!”
“Gimme n'effing break!" says the Englishman "It’syver John Lennon, or that slag wot won the Eurovision, or Sir Iqbal Sacranie! Whydja think they made 'im a knight? Know wot I mean? Take that yer mick bastard!” (Hits Irishman behind earhole with Newcastle Brown Ale empty.)

Another Roverick

2005-08-10T11:15:00.000Z

Roverick II

An oleaginous old beetle named karl
Might've spent all his days in the marl,
But by telling some lies
He helped poison the skies
That rebarbative coleopteran karl!

The Global Village

2005-08-06T17:59:00.000Z

19 Thermidor, an CCXIII

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following: There would be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
8 Africans
14 would be from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59 percent of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education and 1 would own a computer.
--Satyendra Chelvendra

The American Lesion

2005-08-06T12:23:00.000Z

Young Republican eats tie at the Old Ebbitt Grille, "just steps from The White House."

19 Thermidor
an CCXIII

College Republican National Chairman Paul Gourley
Has a recipe for the blue, proud and surly:
"Proven Leadership, Positive Vision,"
And eating tie with the American Lesion.

Note: This American Lesion has, as far as I know, no connection with the pop singer of that title. And vice versa.

Roverick

2005-08-06T11:15:00.000Z

Rove beetle: any of a family (Staphylinidae) of predatory beetles (Webster's)

19 Thermidor
an CCXIII

A smiley Svengali named Rove
Was reckoned a dab hand at the stove,
But yellowcake à la Plame
Quite blasted his fame,
That sporky staphylinid cove!

The One-Dimensional Kingdom

2005-08-05T11:16:00.000Z

The Saudi Reserve

18 Thermidor
an CCXIII

Essential reading this month: ex-CIA man Robert Baer's article "The Fall of the House of Saud" in the current Atlantic (link). "The United States and the rest of the industrialized world are . . . absolutely dependent on Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, and will be for decades to come," Baer says. "Losing Saudi Arabia would be like losing the Federal Reserve." The picture is not a pretty one. "Saudi oil is controlled by an increasingly bankrupt, criminal, dysfunctional, and out-of-touch royal family that is hated by the people it rules and by the nations that surround its kingdom." And the end is nigh, as they say. "Sometime soon, one way or another, the House of Saud is coming down," Baer concludes.
In this thing-worshipping world we've made, it's not just the Bush bunch that's to blame, up to the armpits though they are in the trough. Homo erectus (as I've noted before, it's time to ditch that "sapiens" crap) has in effect sold its birthright for a mess of cheap gas. "The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment," Herbert Marcuse wrote in One-Dimensional Man. This is the meaning of meaningless lives.

Poetry Translation Contest

2005-08-02T13:00:00.000Z

15 Thermidor
an CCXIII

OK, poets! Translate the following poem by the late Austrian poet Ernst Jandl (who would have been 80 today). He is said to be "virtually impossible to translate." Send your translations/interpretations to editor@signandsight.com by the end of August. "Submissions will be judged on their brilliance alone. We're not interested in anything that's been previously published but new and original approaches. The best poem will be awarded with a copy of Jandl's works and our favourites published online."

ottos mops

ottos mops trotzt
otto: fort mops fort
ottos mops hopst fort
otto: soso

otto holt koks
otto holt obst
otto horcht
otto: mops mops
otto hofft

ottos mops klopft
otto: komm mops komm
ottos mops kommt
ottos mops kotzt
otto: ogottogott

© Luchterhand

From Der künstliche Baum (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1970)

Here are my submissions, a limerick and a Japanese tanka, two traditional five-line forms:

I

otto's grotto

there was a young rascal named otto
who trained his pet pug in a grotto;
fetching apples and coal
was the primary goal,
but when puggy puked, omigodno!

II

wayne’s weimaraner

trouser-humping mutt
get yo’ rear in gear; fast butt!
phoo fruit, coke blunder
but dogs come back to chunder--
oh, shi-i-i-it!

“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”--Proverbs 26:11.

Priests

2005-07-31T11:56:00.000Z

13 Thermidor
an CCXIII

In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies of liberty.
--David Hume, Essays
Not all of them, of course. Just most.

Femmes à barbe

2005-07-12T10:56:00.000Z

Theresa

"Vous pouvez toucher, n'craignez rien
ça n'vous rest'ra pas dans la main,
Touchez, voyez qu'c'est pas des frimes,
Et ça n'vous coût' que dix centimes.

Refrain :

Entrez, bonn's d'enfants et soldats,
Tâchez moyen d'fair'ployer c'bras :
On f'rait plutôt ployer un ar-be !
C'est moi que j'suis... la femme à bar-be !"

Messidor

2005-07-10T14:52:00.000Z

Taking it easy!

22 Messidor
An CCXIII

I'm not really taking it easy, rather not inspired to blog. If you want something significant to read, though, click on the link for an interview with the Kenyan economist James Shikwati.

Crackpot Hubris

2005-06-27T10:16:00.000Z

9 Messidor
An CCXIII

Gareth Porter's important new book Perils of Dominance (University of California Press) demonstrates in exquisite detail how national security officials nobody elected, led by Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, dragged the United States into the Vietnam War, lying blithely to their presidents when necessary in order to achieve this. "Americans have assumed that the occupant of the Oval Office actually runs the show--that Presidents command the loyalty of their subordinates, exercise effective control over their Administration and make decisions that others faithfully implement. Perils of Dominance suggests that this model is largely a fiction. All three Presidents considered in this study [Eisenhower, Johnson, and Kennedy] engaged in a continuous struggle to retain the reins of authority. Of the three, only Eisenhower achieved even a modicum of success," Andrew J. Bacevich writes in his review in The Nation (July 4, 2005 issue).
Now once again we have been involved in a ghastly, disastrous war, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says could last as long as a dozen years (see today's New York Times). Of course, in this case we have a president who, unlike any of his predecessors in the past century or so, actually wanted war, but the parallels are otherwise all too evident.
Is it possible we could eventually learn something from all this? An important article in the May/June 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (link) argues: "Recent reports warn that China is aggressively building up its nuclear forces. Don't believe the hype."
Jeffrey Lewis explains "that China's nuclear arsenal is about the same size it was a decade ago. . . . China's 18 ICBMs, sitting unfueled in their silos, their nuclear warheads in storage, are essentially the same as they were the day China began deploying them in 1981. In fact, contrary to reports you might have recently read that Chinese nukes number in the hundreds--if not the thousands--the true size of the country's operationally deployed arsenal is probably about 80 nuclear weapons." That's about what Britain has.
Given that China is very likely to be the next threat deployed by the crackpot realists of the national security bureaucracy to cow the American people into a highly avoidable conflict, Porter's book and Lewis's article fall under the heading of required reading. Check them out!

The murder of Atefeh Rajabi

2005-06-18T15:34:00.000Z

Hanged.

30 Prairial
An CCXIII

You may have wondered what things are really like in Iran. Read for a start this story (link) of the public hanging last year of Atefeh Rajabi, an orphaned sixteen-year-old girl. Her offense: she had sex with unmarried men. (Having sex with married men would, of course, have been an even worse crime.)
The Islamic judge put the rope around her neck himself.

Watch out, Britannia!

2005-06-17T12:37:00.000Z

29 Prairial
An CCXIII

Jim Jubak notes: "Recent government figures show that the United Kingdom, which has been a net exporter of energy for the last two decades thanks to the huge oil and gas deposits discovered in the North Sea about 35 years ago, has become a net importer of natural gas in 2005. A government report projects that the country will lose self-sufficiency in oil in 2009. By 2020, the United Kingdom will import about 75% of its energy. From its peak at the end of the 1990s, United Kingdom oil production has already fallen by about 30%. . . . Oil analysts estimate that the United Kingdom has pumped between 50% and 75% of the available oil and gas in its North Sea fields. The remaining oil and gas is in smaller and more-remote fields that are more difficult and expensive to exploit. Peak-oil theories predict that production from a field will peak and start to fall long before all the oil is extracted, since the more easily pumped oil deposits are extracted first."

Einsteinizing Proust?

2005-06-17T10:48:00.000Z

In the highly entertaining blog of Le Monde's proofreaders Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart (which I recommend to anyone interested in French etymology), I find the following fascinating comment by one of their readers:
"Après renseignement, il s'avère que Proust était tout à fait au fait de la relativité d'Einstein....Il suivait la théorie de très près. 'A la recherche du temps perdu' ou 'le temps retrouvé' sont en fait de véritables illustrations de cette théorie scientifiques." But, the reader adds: "De là à Einsteiniser Proust ne nous égarons pas."

The Dervish of Dasein

2005-06-15T09:37:00.000Z

The Heidegger conspiracy is beginning to crack open big time! Emmanuel Faye's new book Heidegger: L'Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (link) shows how Heidegger effectively Nazified philosophy. "Heidegger emphatically restated essential tenets of National Socialist doctrine as his own philosophy: a folkish vision of the historical mission of the German people, the metaphysics of blood and soil, the role of the Führer as the sole law governing German life, and the right of the German Volk to expand its territory," observes the historian Kurt Flasch, quoted in yesterday's Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich).
I cannot do better than to reprise my blog of March 20, 2005:
What on earth are we to make of the huge and evidently growing influence today of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who pruned even his moustache "in his aggressive design to become Hitler’s doppelgänger" (James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry [Stanford University Press, 2005])? “The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law,” Heidegger proclaimed after the Nazis took power. He was soon disillusioned. "The objection to National Socialism is that it erred too little," he explained in the postwar gloom. "We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe.”
Nonetheless, Heidegger’s almost incomprehensible writings, dense with made-up words, struck Western philosophy all of a heap, teaching American academia in particular the wisdom of being as obscure as possible. Even today no one really knows what he was on about, notwithstanding the efforts of Jacques Derrida and the vast Heidegger industry to explain him. Heidegger would probably have been delighted. “Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking,” he astutely remarked (What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray [New York: Harper & Row, 1968], p. 6).
The Führer himself was evidently never taken in by the dervish of Dasein (BS Heideggerese for "being-in-the-world"). "Lucky are those who have the happy knack of being able to forget most of what they have been taught," he jeered in 1942. "Those who cannot forget are ripe to become professors--a race apart. And that is not intended as a compliment."
Heidegger, who had perhaps once hoped to be summoned to Berlin as Reichsmetaphysiker, even found himself under surveillance by the Gestapo. So it goes when you sup with the devil.

On Sixty-Fifth Birthdays

2005-06-11T11:46:00.000Z

for Wylie Sheldon

Most generous of men, when I was new
in exile (number two),
you lent me your flat and car keys,
then asked before going away,
(I think it was to Greece):
"Do you need money?"
That was the least of it--
You never spoke a single word of blame
for all the foolishness I after did.

Now, these years later, we've each taken a hit
I've lost my prostate; you've got bad knees
(damn Bay to Breakers!); Doxa, the bitch, was mean
(wisely no doubt); retirement came;
the mitochondria too grow scant--
better take lipoic acid and l-carnitine!
Well, here's a word from a brave old protestant:
Une rose d'automne est plus qu'une autre exquise.*

*Marguerite Yourcenar rightly calls this line of Agrippa d'Aubigné's (see link) "un des vers les plus délicieux de la langue française." They named him Agrippa (aegre partus) because he had been "born with difficulty [enfanté avec peine]."

Untrue North

2005-06-10T12:30:00.000Z

for George Dillon Slater

The pole has shifted:
the world is out of whack.
It’s time to set our compass
needles back.

Once I passed Auden on the street
in Kolonaki, his famous face mottled
like the prow of an old tanker
too long at sea.

I knew where he was bound
(for Allan Ansen’s place),
but found no words.
He didn’t know me.

Poetry makes nothing happen,
he said. Now the reverse is true:
Nothing makes poetry happen.
Everything bad is good for you.

The Great Wave

2005-05-24T14:18:00.000Z

5 Prairial
An CCXIII

I strongly recommend you read Jim Jubak on the long wave of secular inflation that threatens us (link). Jubak, one of the clearest heads in the money business, bases his argument not only on the reality of rising prices that we all face every day but on the impressive historical argument of David Hackett Fischer's 1996 book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (Oxford University Press).
"Adding the 2 billion consumers of China and India to the global economy is our century's equivalent of the population increases that Fischer posits as the cause of earlier price waves," Jubak observes. "This is a massive increase in global demand, and we're seeing the expected increases in the prices of food, fuel and other basic commodities. And we're seeing the stable of declining prices of manufactured goods that are typical of the first half of price waves."
"I think this price wave still has years to run, and when it ends and how it ends depends not on some mechanical theory of history but on the decisions we make now."
This seems irrefutable.

Blue Skies again come October?

2005-05-23T10:50:00.000Z

4 Prairial
An CCXIII

"Maybe 2004 was 1928," the perceptive Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times (link). "During the 1920's, the national government followed doctrinaire conservative policies. . . . In 1928 Al Smith, the governor of New York, was defeated in an ugly presidential campaign in which Protestant preachers warned their flocks that a vote for the Catholic Smith was a vote for the devil."
If 2004 was 1928, this must be 1929. Black Tuesday, 1929, the worst single day of the Great Crash, which would eventually take the Dow from an all-time high of 381 to a low of 41 in July 1932 (down over 89%! and it wouldn't recover for 22 years) was October 29.
Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" was the hit song of 1929: "Blue Skies smiling at me, / Nothing but blue skies do I see. / Never saw the sun shinin' so bright / Never saw things goin' so right."
October 29 falls on a Saturday in 2005. Nonetheless, it might be a good month to be out of the stock market.

The Lie Commonly Believed

2005-05-22T12:26:00.000Z

3 Prairial
An CCXIII

One of the noxious myths of our time is that the French did not fight in 1940. In fact 100,000 French troops died fighting, and the French Army inflicted greater losses on the Wehrmacht in 45 days than it would sustain on the Russian front in the entire second half of 1941. At Hannut in Belgium, in the first great tank battle of the war, 380 French tanks defeated the 680 tanks of the XVI Panzerkorps, backed by the Luftwaffe (see on this
Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legende--Der Westfeldzug 1940 [Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995]). The village of Stonne changed hands 17 times in three days--and 915 German war graves lie around it. De Gaulle, commanding the French Fourth Armored Division, smashed through the German lines at Abbeville, only to grind to a halt for lack of reserves. And one could go on and on. A new book, Comme des lions Mai-juin 1940: L'héroïque sacrifice de l'armée française by Dominique Lormier (see link), seeks to set the record straight.
They fought all right, but they were betrayed by the pusillanimous, reactionary, and deeply anti-Semitic political class who ruled France in that dark time. When the armistice signed by Pétain came into force on June 25, 1940, on the much-maligned Maginot Line, 45 of the 53 major defensive works, and 130 blockhouses, were in fact still fighting, and many finally surrendered only on July 7.
Sad that these men, whose courage made possible the Dunkirk evacuation, which saved 340,000 allied troops to fight another day, and who took a toll of the Wehrmacht that would seriously weaken it in its future battles, should now be regarded by so many numbskulls as having chickened out.
As Voltaire noted long ago, however, what is called history is simply the lie commonly believed.

Dixit Mbeki

2005-05-21T20:47:00.000Z

2 Prairial
An CCXIII

Stats SA, the South African government statistics agency, projects that around 4.4 million South Africans are unemployed--which is 26.9%. But ANC President Thabo Mbeki (who once as an excuse for his government's failure to provide victims with antiviral drugs floated the idea that the CIA had conspired with Big Pharma to create a phony link between HIV and AIDS) denies that this can be true--although he concedes that the agency followed international guidelines in coming up with the figure. "This is such a large number of people that nobody could possibly have missed the millions that would be in the streets," Mbeki protests.
It seems that the phony statistic is to be blamed on a truly diabolical combination of capital and labor: "Some employers believe that they will best serve their interests by projecting our economy as one that is mainly characterised by enormous job losses," says Mbeki. "At the same time, some trade unions believe [ditto]. They believe that in this way they will secure the best conditions for the protection of the jobs of their members, including the threat posed to these jobs by the competing interests of the unemployed, who are ready to take the jobs of those who are employed."
Got that?
To adapt a slogan from the South African AIDS activists who denounced Mbeki's earlier flight of fancy, one suspects that the 4.4 million are "as real as cANCer."

The Foetry Gefuffle

2005-05-17T11:25:00.000Z

Foetry: American Poetry Watchdog: Exposing the fraudulent "contests." Tracking the sycophants. Naming names.
"One of the most common ways American poets publish a book is through open competition at some of the best-known presses. Many publishers require an entry fee, usually $20 to $25 per manuscript. With hundreds or even thousands of entries, a lot of money is involved.
"And then it's a fair competition, right? Wrong.
"Over and over again, judges often select their students, friends, and even their lovers. Help us to stop this criminal activity."
So says the interesting Foetry web site (see link), target of much vituperation from the purportedly exposed. American poets are no doubt sitting up and taking notice, from shrinking violets to the bruisers at the World Heavyweight Poetry Bout of the Taos Poetry Circus.
As one who recently worked his way through a collection of U.S. poetry, I am struck by how stunningly unamusing most of it is. Where now are the likes of Pope and Swift, or even Ogden Nash or Samuel Hoffenstein (1890-1947), whose lines

Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Have a hospitable heart
Since our own delights must end
Introduce me to your friend!

(I quote from memory) struck me as so vastly better than Byron's soppy original when I first read them at the age of about 12 or 13 in the heart of the Great Karoo.
No, 99 percent of American poetry is still stuck in the mawkishness unleashed on the world by the Industrial Revolution, along with air pollution and global warming.
And don't point me to Calvin Trillin's awful political ditties in The Nation either! His heart may be in the right place, but how I wish he would stop!