''The evidence is massive,'' said Gavin Menzies of his theory. ''I've got it coming out of my eyes!'' His voice was filled with excitement, just as you'd expect from someone propounding one of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of history. A retired navy man with white hair, Menzies still has a hint of red in the eyebrows that frame his ocean-blue eyes. Dressed in a handsome sports jacket and tie, he cheerfully invited me into his stately Georgian house in the Canonbury section of London. What he had to say, his publicists had warned me in breathless e-mail messages, would make ''every history book in print obsolete.''
Menzies' book, ''1421,'' boldly asserts that the Chinese discovered America 70 years before Columbus. Riding the tube out to his house, I saw ''1421'' promoted on the billboards at the station stops, alongside Eminem's new album and J. Lo's latest movie. The London papers have feverishly debated Menzies' radical thesis since its publication in November; his book will finally arrive here in the New World later this week, accompanied by a huge publicity campaign from its American publisher, William Morrow.
''My wife, Marcella, and I were in Beijing for our 25th anniversary, in 1990, and we went to the Great Wall,'' he said, explaining the origins of his discovery. ''I asked when the section we visited was completed, and the guide said 1421. Later we went to the Forbidden City and learned it was completed in 1421.'' Menzies quickly discovered that a great deal of Chinese history gathered itself up in 1421, and he resolved to write a book. But the focus of his book changed as he learned more, especially after looking into the life of the eunuch admiral Zheng He. Zheng was also known as Sin Bao, and his seven major sea expeditions became legendary, even in the West, as the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.
''Zheng set sail in 1421,'' Menzies said. ''The famed Treasure Fleet junks were five times larger than Columbus's caravels. Each held a thousand men. Two years later, in 1423, seven ships returned. Then, in a decision that would change all of history, the Ming emperor ordered all the ships dismantled. He pensioned off the sailors. And he burned all the records.''
Traditional historians would agree with Menzies that in 1423 China abruptly abandoned exploration and turned inward after the Treasure Fleet returned from sailing no farther west than Kenya. But Menzies, a self-taught historian publishing his first book at age 65, says that he has found evidence proving that the Chinese didn't turn around after Kenya -- but rather rounded the Horn of Africa and discovered the New World.
At a time when big books must declare an end of something or a theory of everything, Menzies has accomplished both. His thesis upends the entire Western age of discovery, from Columbus to Cook, and shifts the achievements and adventure from Europe to Asia. Figures like da Gama and Pizarro are written off as war criminals and replaced with a peaceful Chinese trading mission that supposedly charted all seven continents (even the North Pole). As to America, Menzies says that he has found proof that the Chinese thoroughly explored the East Coast from what is now Florida to Rhode Island. On the West Coast, he argues, they sailed into San Francisco Bay -- humiliatingly running aground upriver near Sacramento. Another Chinese fleet checked out the center of the continent, especially Missouri, and at some point lost another ship in Kansas.
''It's either Wichita or Kansas City; I can't remember which,'' he said, pouring me some coffee.
Menzies is a charming man. He can zestily tick off one piece of suggestive data after another -- reports of Asian jade found in Aztec tombs, allegations of Chinese ideograms found on pre-Columbian pottery. He makes history sound like pure fun. This high-spiritedness, which infuses every page of ''1421,'' makes his book a seductive read.
All this helps account for his manuscript's success with publishers. He received an advance of more than $800,000 from Bantam, his British publisher. Foreign rights were promptly sold to 20 countries. His global book tour will take him to Oxford and Cambridge in England, Yale and Harvard in America and the top universities in Shanghai and Beijing. It's the kind of itinerary any established scholar would envy.
Yet despite Menzies' powers of persuasion, his scholarly methods will not satisfy everyone. Sitting at his dining-room table, Menzies explained that he had found San Francisco Bay on a 1507 map -- that is, decades before historians believe it was first reached by Westerners. Menzies owns a large replica of this map, which was drawn by Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer. It's a map I know very well, partly because of its fame as the first map featuring the word ''America.'' Only bare chunks of Florida, a few Caribbean islands, Venezuela and Brazil are visible on the map, because that was all that had been charted. On the Western shore, Waldseemüller just colored in some nice blue, bulbous mountains, like the ones a 10-year-old might draw. The mountains are mere place holders, no more literal than the fat-cheeked cherub named Zephir seen puffing along the coast. Menzies pointed at these cartoon mountains and said, ''You can see San Francisco here.''
I looked at the smooth curved line of the mountains' edge. To my eyes, there was nothing that remotely signified San Francisco. He smiled. I smiled. I wanted to say something, but he spoke before I could. ''Here's Los Angeles,'' he said, pointing at another part of the cartoon. There was something about his jolly audacity that was appealing. I felt that I should just listen to what else he had to say. Besides, it seemed rude to point out that along the length of those supposed mountains near pre-Columbian Frisco, Waldseemüller had written, in bold type, ''Terra Incognita.''
Sipping his coffee, Menzies said that although Waldseemüller had not seen America's West Coast with his own eyes, he had clearly benefited from seeing a Chinese ''master chart of the world.'' Nobody has ever seen this chart; Menzies just presumes that it existed. How did it come to Europe? Menzies has surmised the answer: it was carried by a 15th-century Italian traveler named Niccolò da Conti. He converted to Islam in order to move among the Arab merchants; arriving in Calcutta, he witnessed the arrival of Zheng's Treasure Fleet. (This is not disputed by scholars.) Menzies told me that da Conti must have hitched a globe-trotting ride, arriving in China in 1423. The next year, he argued, da Conti returned to Venice and had to sell his master chart to Dom Pedro, the king of Portugal's brother, to buy a pardon for converting to Islam. By the time Columbus sailed, Menzies said, he had surely seen copies of this map -- and used it to guide his first voyage.
''When he landed, Columbus was said to have made a great mistake, saying that he had encountered Chinese people,'' Menzies said. ''I think he did encounter Chinese people!''
For Menzies, connecting history's dots is easy. Other scholars aren't so sure. ''He's put five gallons in a half-pint pot,'' said a chuckling Felipe Fernández-Armesto, an Oxford professor and author of ''Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years,'' an acclaimed history text. ''What he doesn't understand is that maps at that time were as much acts of the imagination as cartography.'' Renaissance maps, Fernández-Armesto explained, were not meant to be read as A.A.A. printouts. Fernández-Armesto's disdain for Menzies is beyond rebuttal: ''It's not really worth my time. What's really interesting about it is that the book's taken off. It's like some Elvis fad!''
Fernández-Armesto was stunned at the book's P.R. blitz in Europe. Menzies appeared on every major TV program. His books were placed in every bookstore window. Menzies' media strategy in America this month will try to duplicate the same surge of enthusiasm and debate. ''I still don't understand how it happened,'' Fernández-Armesto said.
On a brisk, sunny morning, I met Menzies once again at his home, and we took a long constitutional into Canonbury's market area for several book signings. He explained that he had originally placed the book with a small academic press, but as his theory changed and grew, he eventually placed it with a mass publisher who understood the marketing challenge ahead.
''Our big problem was going to be British professors of history,'' he said conspiratorially, ''who would be completely brassed off at a novice upsetting the apple cart. We worried we'd be taken to pieces.'' Speaking with an unusual fondness for book strategy and financing, Menzies explained how in ''Phase 1,'' his publisher presold foreign rights. ''That would cushion a disaster if we published in England and got egg on our face.'' Phase 2 was timing British publication to ''the end of October, when booksellers send out their Christmas catalogs.'' Having presold it to the bookstores, Menzies said, ''the critics can come in and give it a snotty review, but the booksellers aren't going to pulp them. They're committed.''
Later that morning, back at his table, Menzies could sense my skepticism. ''How many books would you guess have been written about the Chinese discovery of the Americas?'' he said. Before I could answer, he bolted from the room and quickly returned. ''More than 6,000!'' He presented me with a bibliography published by two American academics, John Sorenson and Martin Raish, listing thousands of publications plumbing the kind of evidence Menzies specializes in -- reports of sunken junks, findings of Chinese cannons. The bibliography Menzies showed me is often used to support something called ''diffusion theory.'' Briefly put, this is an umbrella idea encompassing various alternative theories of America's discovery. Columbus (and Zheng He and Leif Ericsson) had a lot more competitors than most people think: Prince Madoc of Wales, the Zeni brothers of Venice, Jo-o Vaz Corte Real of Portugal, Poland's Jan of Kolno. The fact is, crossing the Atlantic was probably not as big a deal as Columbus-centric historians described it. Diffusionists may not be able to pinpoint who beat Columbus to the punch -- but they're sure someone did. And they may well be right. But if you scrutinize the evidence of any of these specific claims, they melt away. Which is why these theorists like to emphasize quantity over quality.
''The evidence grows by leaps and bounds every day,'' Menzies told me at his table. ''Come, you must come see this.''
We went to the third floor of his house, where he invited me to read through shelves of printed e-mail messages alerting him to findings of sunken ships and pre-Columbian shards of Chinese pottery. The sunken junks, especially, seemed to be multiplying like medieval chunks of the True Cross. According to Menzies, Chinese junks clog the harbors of every port town in the world. His original fleet estimate of 100 boats will be emended in future editions.
''New evidence suggests it was closer to 800 ships, making the population of the fleet bigger than all but one city in Europe,'' he said confidently. Many of those ships were lost, but others stayed behind, he said, establishing ''settlements in San Francisco and Vancouver Island.'' He paused. ''The entire country of Peru was a Chinese settlement.''
Trying to navigate a safe course through Menzies' evidence made Odysseus's voyage past Scylla and Charybdis seem like a breeze. I tried to follow one piece of evidence - the California junk - to its source.
''It was up the Sacramento River,'' Menzies said. A ship nearly the length of a modern aircraft carrier heading up a river? I've only skippered a Sunfish, and even I know that would be foolhardy. Menzies said there had been reports of finding medieval Chinese armor at the site. Great, but it turned out that the armor was found more than 20 years ago, lent out to a local high school and then lost.
I pressed on to the discovery of a pre-Columbian Chinese corpse in Mexico. ''Yes, yes, found at Teotihuacán.'' Who found it? ''The body was found by a Professor Niven.'' Could I contact him? ''He found it in 1911.'' A century ago? ''Oh, yes, but it's very exciting. Our real drive is to confirm it.'' Where's the body? ''It appears to be split up.'' Split up? ''We believe part is in Switzerland and part of it is in Sweden,'' he confessed. ''I've told my assistants, Track down the body and get DNA on it!''
On it went. The Kansas evidence was another presumed junk. The East Coast evidence turned out to be the squishiest of all. The Chinese astronomical tower and the Chinese writing, it seems, are the Newport Tower in Rhode Island and the Dighton Rock in Massachusetts. As an amateur historian of amateur historians, I have to say that the tower and the rock are two of the greatest Rorschach monuments in American history. At one time or another people have claimed the Newport Tower to be an Indian lookout, a Viking outpost, an Irish oratory. The Dighton Rock is covered in indecipherable scratches that are apparently of human origin, and you would be hard pressed to find a culture that hasn't claimed these petroglyphs as its own.
By connecting with the tower and the rock, Menzies has hooked into a great historical tradition: the obsessed amateur. Traditional historians try to ignore them, these gadflies who claim to know better than the experts. But it's not so easy. You can laugh aside the various Jans of Kolno, but one of these theories is occasionally correct. In the mid-20th century, traditionalists mocked the ideas of an obsessed Norwegian lawyer named Helge Ingstad. He was convinced that the Viking sagas about discovering ''Vinland'' were based on truth. A self-taught historian like Menzies, he traveled at his own expense to the eastern shore of Canada hoping to find evidence of landfall. Same methodology as Menzies', essentially.
One day in 1961, Ingstad found the ruins of a Viking settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. A crackpot theory suddenly became authentic history. Ingstad received numerous honorary degrees; when he died, he was hailed as a great archaeologist.
Amateurism is derided by professionals because it is so often wrong, but think of what paleontology or astronomy (or jazz or the Constitution) would be without them. It's quite possible that the Chinese came to the Americas in 1421. It's also likely that a mission devoted largely to trade would easily be forgotten in a few years. Exchanging textiles for pepper isn't quite as memorable as, say, an army on horseback armed with cannons eager to rape and kill.
Given the gossamer strength of Menzies' evidence, however, it is unlikely that history departments will soon be dressing him in Ingstad's garlands. But that hasn't stopped him from trying. While I was in London, Menzies received a speaking invitation from the Oxford Student Union.
Standing in a hall lined with flaking editions of Chaucer and Hobbes, Menzies gave his talk. ''Massive evidence, simply overwhelming,'' he said, prancing amid the massive overwhelmingness of it all. He reprised his stories of junks and jades. He talked of peculiar ''bowel afflictions among the Indians once thought to be unique to the Chinese.'' Then there is the matter of the Chinese chickens in South America. Menzies cited his own experience for knowing well ''how the morning call of the Asiatic hen's 'kik-kiri-kee' was markedly different from the 'cock-a-doodle-doo' of their European counterparts.'' Menzies suggested that somewhere in South America, the crew of the Treasure Fleet dropped off some of Admiral Zheng's chickens -- scoring another historical milestone with the first delivery of Chinese takeout.
After Menzies' talk, a man in a fine suit, presumably a scholar, raised his hand. I anticipated a rough question. But the gentleman, a pickled Oxford hanger-on (the kind who haunts every university town), asked: ''How do you talk without notes and without pause? It must mean you are right.'' Even the few skeptical questions from students became occasions to pick through more middens of evidence. At one point, Menzies claimed that more than 100 Peruvian villages in an area called Ancash have names linguistically linked to medieval China. ''They speak Chinese still,'' Menzies said, ''but cannot understand each other's patois.'' Verification is pending.
''Torrents of information are pouring in,'' Menzies later told me, explaining why he has hired ''a permanent team of people who can translate medieval Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese.'' A television series ''is coming out next year, and the Web sites are up and running.'' For a fee, interested readers can subscribe and gain access to Menzies' latest ''confidential'' postings of fresh evidence. The plan is to keep the book constantly updated; his assistants, Menzies promised, will be creating new editions of the book ''long after I'm dead.''
Last month, as part of his book tour, Menzies traveled to China. According to The Times of London, when he arrived in Nanjing, he was ''pinned down in the corridor of a Chinese conference hotel'' by admirers. Many Chinese academics were skeptical of Menzies' claims. But among the popular journalists and the pickled hangers-on in the big university towns, Menzies is a rock star.
A Chinese admiral now plans to build a replica of a Treasure Fleet junk, the way Spain built modern versions of Columbus's caravels 10 years ago, and sail it around the world. ''I have heard about this, and I am so excited about it,'' Menzies said in the cab back to London, marveling at the coincidences that will fuel sales of future editions. This year, China may launch its first manned spaceship, and in 2008 Beijing will be the host of the Olympics. The global markets are rejoicing in China's awakening, as it returns to center stage for the first time since Emperor Zhu Di dismantled the Treasure Fleet. China is coming out, and at the costume ball of pop history her most handsome escort is Cmdr. Gavin Menzies, late of Her Majesty's Royal Navy.
[Via NY Times]
Monday, June 30, 2008
The Food Chain: Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher
BANGKOK — At least 29 countries have sharply curbed food exports in recent months, to ensure that their own people have enough to eat, at affordable prices.
When it comes to rice, India, Vietnam, China and 11 other countries have limited or banned exports. Fifteen countries, including Pakistan and Bolivia, have capped or halted wheat exports. More than a dozen have limited corn exports. Kazakhstan has restricted exports of sunflower seeds.
The restrictions are making it harder for impoverished importing countries to afford the food they need. The export limits are forcing some of the most vulnerable people, those who rely on relief agencies, to go hungry.
“It’s obvious that these export restrictions fuel the fire of price increases,” said Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization.
And by increasing perceptions of shortages, the restrictions have led to hoarding around the world, by farmers, traders and consumers.
“People are in a panic, so they are buying more and more — at least, those who have money are buying,” said Conching Vasquez, a 56-year-old rice vendor who sat one recent morning among piles of rice at her large stall in Los Baños, in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer. Her customers buy 8,000 pounds of rice a day, up from 5,500 pounds a year ago.
The new restrictions are just an acute symptom of a chronic condition. Since 1980, even as trade in services and in manufactured goods has tripled, adjusting for inflation, trade in food has barely increased. Instead, for decades, food has been a convoluted tangle of restrictive rules, in the form of tariffs, quotas and subsidies.
Now, with Australia’s farm sector crippled by drought and Argentina suffering a series of strikes and other disruptions, the world is increasingly dependent on a handful of countries like Thailand, Brazil, Canada and the United States that are still exporting large quantities of food.
On a recent morning here in Bangkok, sweaty and heavily tattooed dock workers took turns grabbing 120-pound sacks of rice from a conveyor belt and carrying them on their heads to cranes that whisked the sacks deep into the hold of a freighter bound for the Philippines. Most of the one million tons of rice that leaves the dock here each year follows the same spine-crushing routine.
“I’ve been here 28 years,” said the assistant port manager, Suchart Wuthiwaropas. “This is the busiest ever.”
Powerful lobbies in affluent countries across the northern hemisphere, from Japan to Western Europe to the United States, have long protected farmers in ways factory workers in Detroit could only dream of.
The Japanese protect their rice industry by making it nearly impossible for imported rice to compete. The European Union severely limits beef and poultry imports, and Poland goes further, barring soybean imports as well.
Negotiators have been working for years to free trade in farm goods, but today’s crisis actually makes that more difficult for them. Food protests in places like Haiti and Indonesia that rely heavily on imported food have convinced many nations that it is more important than ever that they grow, and keep, the food their citizens need.
“Every country must first ensure its own food security,” said Kamal Nath, the minister of commerce and industry in India, which has barred exports of vegetable oils and all but the most expensive grades of rice.
But as the United States trade representative, Susan C. Schwab, noted in a telephone interview, “One country’s act to promote food security is another country’s food insecurity.”
International relief groups are trying to help people who can no longer afford food at today’s higher prices, but it is not easy. “We’re having trouble buying the stocks we need for emergency operations,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program in Rome.
Restrictions have delayed efforts to ramp up feeding programs in Somalia and Afghanistan. The food program had long purchased grain from Pakistani traders or national stocks. When Pakistan imposed a ban on most wheat exports this spring, the food program was forced to find a new supplier, creating months-long delays.
“We had to slow down the scale-up of our operation as a result of having to redesign our supply lines,” said Ramiro Lopes da Silva, director of transport and procurement. “That means on the ground there were beneficiaries that went without rations or went without full rations for a portion of time. In the case of Afghanistan, some didn’t get into the program.”
The current dispute over food exports highlights choices that nations have confronted for centuries.
One relates directly to trade: Is it best to specialize in whatever food grows best in a country’s soil, and trade it for all other food needs — or even, perhaps, specialize in services or manufacturing, and trade those for food?
Or is it best to seek self-sufficiency in every type of food that will, weather permitting, grow within a country’s borders?
The usual answer from economists, and the United States’ position for decades, is that the world benefits most if every country specializes in growing (or servicing or making) what it can most efficiently, and trading for the rest.
Rainfall and other limits make it prohibitively difficult for some countries to grow all their own food. “If Egypt had to be self-sufficient in food, there would be no water left in the Nile,” Mr. Lamy said in a telephone interview.
“If every country in the world decided it wanted to produce its own food for consumption,” Ms. Schwab said, “there would be less food in the world, and more people would be hungry.”
But relying on food imports becomes much dicier if other countries are prepared to shut off the tap.
An obscure rule of the World Trade Organization requires members to notify the agency when they restrict food exports. But there are no penalties for ignoring the rule, and not one of the countries that has imposed restrictions in the past year has complied, according to the W.T.O.
Japan and Switzerland are leading a group of food-importing nations so alarmed by restrictions that they are seeking an international agreement preventing countries from unilaterally limiting food exports. The agreement would be part of the current, already-rocky Doha round of trade talks, named for the city in Qatar where negotiations began.
But the proposal ran into a procedural snag right off: food export restrictions are such a new issue that they are only tangentially mentioned as part of the Doha round agenda, which is not easily modified.
In some of the nations concerned about shortages now, past policies have discouraged farming. From Indonesia to West Africa to the Caribbean and Central America, poor countries have frequently cut farm assistance programs and lowered tariffs to balance budgets and avoid charging high prices to urban consumers. But they have found that their farmers cannot compete with imports from rich countries — imports that are heavily subsidized.
As a result, steps that could have taken place decades ago, resulting in more food for the world today, were abandoned. These included changes like irrigation schemes and new crop varieties.
“The subsidies given by developed countries to their farmers have led to lack of investment in agriculture in developing countries” in Africa and elsewhere, Mr. Nath said.
To make matters worse, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund frequently pressured poor countries in the 1980s and 1990s to lower tariffs and to cut farm support programs, mostly to reduce budget deficits.
Indeed, the World Bank concluded in 2006 that not enough attention had been paid to the negative effects of its policy prescriptions on farmers in developing countries.
The current export restrictions, which mainly help urban consumers in poor countries, are the latest blow to farmers in the developing world.
Arfa Tantaway Mohamed, who grows rice on three-quarters of an acre outside the bustling town of Aga in northern Egypt, is frustrated at Egypt’s export ban, which is suppressing rice prices.
“For sure it has a negative impact,” said Mr. Mohamed, 50, as he smoked a Cleopatra brand cigarette during a break from working his fields, while 18 members of his extended family labored nearby.
Some countries reject the notion that restricting exports has pushed up prices on the world market, and point instead to higher prices for fertilizer, diesel and other farm expenses. India takes that position, but so does Thailand, in defending sharp markups in prices set by its Rice Exporters Association.
“The main cause of rising rice prices is the rising cost of rice planting,” said Surapong Suebwonglee, the finance minister of Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter.
India and other countries, as well as some nonprofit groups, are quick to point out that economic arguments — that countries specialize in the production of whatever they can make most efficiently — are unconvincing, as long as rich countries heavily subsidize their farmers.
In fact, negotiators have a rough framework for a possible compromise on agriculture in the Doha round talks, including deep cuts in farm subsidies.
One possible compromise not being discussed in the Doha round may be for countries to continue relying on trade for most food imports, but hold bigger reserves in case of crises. World rice reserves, for example, have plunged to 9 weeks’ worth of consumption, from 19 as recently as 2001.
But United Nations officials are wary.
“I would not object to building up reserves,” said Supachai Panitchpakdi, the secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. “But like foreign exchange reserves, some countries go to huge extremes.”
[Via NY Times]
When it comes to rice, India, Vietnam, China and 11 other countries have limited or banned exports. Fifteen countries, including Pakistan and Bolivia, have capped or halted wheat exports. More than a dozen have limited corn exports. Kazakhstan has restricted exports of sunflower seeds.
The restrictions are making it harder for impoverished importing countries to afford the food they need. The export limits are forcing some of the most vulnerable people, those who rely on relief agencies, to go hungry.
“It’s obvious that these export restrictions fuel the fire of price increases,” said Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization.
And by increasing perceptions of shortages, the restrictions have led to hoarding around the world, by farmers, traders and consumers.
“People are in a panic, so they are buying more and more — at least, those who have money are buying,” said Conching Vasquez, a 56-year-old rice vendor who sat one recent morning among piles of rice at her large stall in Los Baños, in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer. Her customers buy 8,000 pounds of rice a day, up from 5,500 pounds a year ago.
The new restrictions are just an acute symptom of a chronic condition. Since 1980, even as trade in services and in manufactured goods has tripled, adjusting for inflation, trade in food has barely increased. Instead, for decades, food has been a convoluted tangle of restrictive rules, in the form of tariffs, quotas and subsidies.
Now, with Australia’s farm sector crippled by drought and Argentina suffering a series of strikes and other disruptions, the world is increasingly dependent on a handful of countries like Thailand, Brazil, Canada and the United States that are still exporting large quantities of food.
On a recent morning here in Bangkok, sweaty and heavily tattooed dock workers took turns grabbing 120-pound sacks of rice from a conveyor belt and carrying them on their heads to cranes that whisked the sacks deep into the hold of a freighter bound for the Philippines. Most of the one million tons of rice that leaves the dock here each year follows the same spine-crushing routine.
“I’ve been here 28 years,” said the assistant port manager, Suchart Wuthiwaropas. “This is the busiest ever.”
Powerful lobbies in affluent countries across the northern hemisphere, from Japan to Western Europe to the United States, have long protected farmers in ways factory workers in Detroit could only dream of.
The Japanese protect their rice industry by making it nearly impossible for imported rice to compete. The European Union severely limits beef and poultry imports, and Poland goes further, barring soybean imports as well.
Negotiators have been working for years to free trade in farm goods, but today’s crisis actually makes that more difficult for them. Food protests in places like Haiti and Indonesia that rely heavily on imported food have convinced many nations that it is more important than ever that they grow, and keep, the food their citizens need.
“Every country must first ensure its own food security,” said Kamal Nath, the minister of commerce and industry in India, which has barred exports of vegetable oils and all but the most expensive grades of rice.
But as the United States trade representative, Susan C. Schwab, noted in a telephone interview, “One country’s act to promote food security is another country’s food insecurity.”
International relief groups are trying to help people who can no longer afford food at today’s higher prices, but it is not easy. “We’re having trouble buying the stocks we need for emergency operations,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program in Rome.
Restrictions have delayed efforts to ramp up feeding programs in Somalia and Afghanistan. The food program had long purchased grain from Pakistani traders or national stocks. When Pakistan imposed a ban on most wheat exports this spring, the food program was forced to find a new supplier, creating months-long delays.
“We had to slow down the scale-up of our operation as a result of having to redesign our supply lines,” said Ramiro Lopes da Silva, director of transport and procurement. “That means on the ground there were beneficiaries that went without rations or went without full rations for a portion of time. In the case of Afghanistan, some didn’t get into the program.”
The current dispute over food exports highlights choices that nations have confronted for centuries.
One relates directly to trade: Is it best to specialize in whatever food grows best in a country’s soil, and trade it for all other food needs — or even, perhaps, specialize in services or manufacturing, and trade those for food?
Or is it best to seek self-sufficiency in every type of food that will, weather permitting, grow within a country’s borders?
The usual answer from economists, and the United States’ position for decades, is that the world benefits most if every country specializes in growing (or servicing or making) what it can most efficiently, and trading for the rest.
Rainfall and other limits make it prohibitively difficult for some countries to grow all their own food. “If Egypt had to be self-sufficient in food, there would be no water left in the Nile,” Mr. Lamy said in a telephone interview.
“If every country in the world decided it wanted to produce its own food for consumption,” Ms. Schwab said, “there would be less food in the world, and more people would be hungry.”
But relying on food imports becomes much dicier if other countries are prepared to shut off the tap.
An obscure rule of the World Trade Organization requires members to notify the agency when they restrict food exports. But there are no penalties for ignoring the rule, and not one of the countries that has imposed restrictions in the past year has complied, according to the W.T.O.
Japan and Switzerland are leading a group of food-importing nations so alarmed by restrictions that they are seeking an international agreement preventing countries from unilaterally limiting food exports. The agreement would be part of the current, already-rocky Doha round of trade talks, named for the city in Qatar where negotiations began.
But the proposal ran into a procedural snag right off: food export restrictions are such a new issue that they are only tangentially mentioned as part of the Doha round agenda, which is not easily modified.
In some of the nations concerned about shortages now, past policies have discouraged farming. From Indonesia to West Africa to the Caribbean and Central America, poor countries have frequently cut farm assistance programs and lowered tariffs to balance budgets and avoid charging high prices to urban consumers. But they have found that their farmers cannot compete with imports from rich countries — imports that are heavily subsidized.
As a result, steps that could have taken place decades ago, resulting in more food for the world today, were abandoned. These included changes like irrigation schemes and new crop varieties.
“The subsidies given by developed countries to their farmers have led to lack of investment in agriculture in developing countries” in Africa and elsewhere, Mr. Nath said.
To make matters worse, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund frequently pressured poor countries in the 1980s and 1990s to lower tariffs and to cut farm support programs, mostly to reduce budget deficits.
Indeed, the World Bank concluded in 2006 that not enough attention had been paid to the negative effects of its policy prescriptions on farmers in developing countries.
The current export restrictions, which mainly help urban consumers in poor countries, are the latest blow to farmers in the developing world.
Arfa Tantaway Mohamed, who grows rice on three-quarters of an acre outside the bustling town of Aga in northern Egypt, is frustrated at Egypt’s export ban, which is suppressing rice prices.
“For sure it has a negative impact,” said Mr. Mohamed, 50, as he smoked a Cleopatra brand cigarette during a break from working his fields, while 18 members of his extended family labored nearby.
Some countries reject the notion that restricting exports has pushed up prices on the world market, and point instead to higher prices for fertilizer, diesel and other farm expenses. India takes that position, but so does Thailand, in defending sharp markups in prices set by its Rice Exporters Association.
“The main cause of rising rice prices is the rising cost of rice planting,” said Surapong Suebwonglee, the finance minister of Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter.
India and other countries, as well as some nonprofit groups, are quick to point out that economic arguments — that countries specialize in the production of whatever they can make most efficiently — are unconvincing, as long as rich countries heavily subsidize their farmers.
In fact, negotiators have a rough framework for a possible compromise on agriculture in the Doha round talks, including deep cuts in farm subsidies.
One possible compromise not being discussed in the Doha round may be for countries to continue relying on trade for most food imports, but hold bigger reserves in case of crises. World rice reserves, for example, have plunged to 9 weeks’ worth of consumption, from 19 as recently as 2001.
But United Nations officials are wary.
“I would not object to building up reserves,” said Supachai Panitchpakdi, the secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. “But like foreign exchange reserves, some countries go to huge extremes.”
[Via NY Times]
Ancient Olympiads Were More Like the Modern PGA Golf Circuit
The modern Olympic ideals differ dramatically from the way the games were actually played in ancient Greece, says a University of Maryland classicist who has heavily researched the Olympic past. The ancient games featured professionals with a “winning is everything” philosophy.
“Ancient Olympiads were more like the modern PGA golf circuit than the amateur ideal advanced for most of the 20th century,” says Hugh Ming Lee, a professor of classics at the University of Maryland. “The Greeks and Romans awarded honors to the most accomplished athletes and paid them for their efforts. These professionals traveled a competitive circuit. The Vince Lombardi notion of winning is much closer to the original Olympic spirit.”
Ancient athletes resorted to various “potions” to gain a competitive edge. “The dung of a wild boar was honored for the powers it conferred on charioteers,” Lee points out. “Even the emperor Nero tried it.”
Modern-day ‘Ultimate Fighting’ resembles the Greek’s pankration, where almost everything short of eye-gouging and biting was permitted. “If it weren’t for the nudity, the ancient games would have played well on modern TV,” Lee says.
The ancient Greeks played the games under a flag of truce to give athletes safe passage. The games offered a respite from war, according to Lee. The athletes ran the final race of the Olympiad in armor, perhaps to acknowledge the coming end of the truce.
[Via Science Daily]
“Ancient Olympiads were more like the modern PGA golf circuit than the amateur ideal advanced for most of the 20th century,” says Hugh Ming Lee, a professor of classics at the University of Maryland. “The Greeks and Romans awarded honors to the most accomplished athletes and paid them for their efforts. These professionals traveled a competitive circuit. The Vince Lombardi notion of winning is much closer to the original Olympic spirit.”
Ancient athletes resorted to various “potions” to gain a competitive edge. “The dung of a wild boar was honored for the powers it conferred on charioteers,” Lee points out. “Even the emperor Nero tried it.”
Modern-day ‘Ultimate Fighting’ resembles the Greek’s pankration, where almost everything short of eye-gouging and biting was permitted. “If it weren’t for the nudity, the ancient games would have played well on modern TV,” Lee says.
The ancient Greeks played the games under a flag of truce to give athletes safe passage. The games offered a respite from war, according to Lee. The athletes ran the final race of the Olympiad in armor, perhaps to acknowledge the coming end of the truce.
[Via Science Daily]
Sunday, June 29, 2008
10 Ways to Avoid Password Headaches
“Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.” (Clifford Stoll)
Passwords are the scourge of the digital age. Again and again, we are tortured by a multitude of passwords that force us to rack our brains for cryptic words like ch14zdo.
Get used to it, say computer professionals. You have a lot to be paranoid about. Password-based attacks are steadily on the rise. The threat of large-scale computer crime is very real, and stealing passwords is one of the easiest ways for a criminal to launch an attack.
So if you’re succumbing to password overload, follow these simple tips. They’ll help you protect and remember passwords without demanding a whole lot of mental might.
1. Personal password algorithm.
Create a formula for devising all your passwords. Pick significant dates and wrap them into acronyms that symbolize the event.
An example for picking a password for work might be choosing your fist day on the job. By taking the month, event, year, and day of the week you might end up with 11fdw05tue as a password. The 11 stands for the month of the year, November; fdw is short for “first day of work”; 05 represents the year; and tue means Tuesday.
2. Password pitfalls.
Avoid the obvious. Passwords such as someone’s surname, your birth date, or a word from the dictionary may be easy to remember, but they’re also very easy to break.
A computer is only as secure as its password, so don’t be lazy. Hackers have tools that can crack a 6-character password in less than fifteen minutes.
Each password should combine both uppercase and lowercase characters, and include a digit or two. Finally, your password should be at least six characters long, although the most secure passwords are thirteen or more.
3. Don’t be redundant.
Another popular mistake is using the same password for different purposes. If you use the same password for logging on to AIM, using the office network, and accessing your email account, one security breach leaves your entire password-protected life vulnerable.
4. For your eyes only.
You wouldn’t leave your driver’s license on the front steps to your home, or post your Social Security number at the corner store. So, why would you keep your passwords in easy view?
Password-covered Post-it notes litter office monitors everywhere. And even more hide underneath keyboards. Typically, as soon the network administrator changes the password, the yellow stickies get updated. This is a computer network manager’s nightmare. If you must use a cheat sheet, keep it where others can’t see it, like in your wallet or purse.
5. Buried treasure.
You can “bury” your cheat sheet even deeper. Try keeping passwords in address books, encoded as bogus phone numbers or names. If your work password is dava3231, list a fictitious work pal as Dave Avery 555-3231, or write your boss’s address down as 3231 Dave Ave.
6. Reading between the words.
Another thing to try is selecting a cryptic password by choosing a series drawn from the first letters of the words in a line from a poem or song. For example, “To be or not to be, that is the question…” yields tbontbtitq.
7. Rate your privacy needs.
Accept it, some applications and websites are about as important to password-protect as your trash. There is a big difference between someone surfing a website under your account name and someone sending your boss hate mails using your email account.
Rate the level of security for specific programs and websites. Then create a sliding security scale for the passwords you want.
8. By all means, safeguard your password.
At first, it may be difficult to remember your password. Did you substitute an “i” with a “1″ or did you use a “1″ to represent “L?” To help remember the password, use it immediately. Then log in and out several times the first day. Just don’t change it on a Friday or right before leaving for vacation. You could write it out several times on a piece of paper. This helps record it in your mind. Just be sure to shred the paper when done.
9. Avoid bizarre character combinations.
While character combinations such as dkFe*#21 might be hard to guess, they are also difficult to remember. I know these passwords are less susceptible to brute-force attacks, but such activity is already combated in other ways, such as limits on incorrect logon attempts.
10. Don’t change the password too frequently.
People are more likely to forget a password they will only use for a short period of time. And it’s not really necessary to change your passwords every week. A good average is 90 to 120 days, and I’m sure you can deal with this.
[Via Ririan Project]
Passwords are the scourge of the digital age. Again and again, we are tortured by a multitude of passwords that force us to rack our brains for cryptic words like ch14zdo.
Get used to it, say computer professionals. You have a lot to be paranoid about. Password-based attacks are steadily on the rise. The threat of large-scale computer crime is very real, and stealing passwords is one of the easiest ways for a criminal to launch an attack.
So if you’re succumbing to password overload, follow these simple tips. They’ll help you protect and remember passwords without demanding a whole lot of mental might.
1. Personal password algorithm.
Create a formula for devising all your passwords. Pick significant dates and wrap them into acronyms that symbolize the event.
An example for picking a password for work might be choosing your fist day on the job. By taking the month, event, year, and day of the week you might end up with 11fdw05tue as a password. The 11 stands for the month of the year, November; fdw is short for “first day of work”; 05 represents the year; and tue means Tuesday.
2. Password pitfalls.
Avoid the obvious. Passwords such as someone’s surname, your birth date, or a word from the dictionary may be easy to remember, but they’re also very easy to break.
A computer is only as secure as its password, so don’t be lazy. Hackers have tools that can crack a 6-character password in less than fifteen minutes.
Each password should combine both uppercase and lowercase characters, and include a digit or two. Finally, your password should be at least six characters long, although the most secure passwords are thirteen or more.
3. Don’t be redundant.
Another popular mistake is using the same password for different purposes. If you use the same password for logging on to AIM, using the office network, and accessing your email account, one security breach leaves your entire password-protected life vulnerable.
4. For your eyes only.
You wouldn’t leave your driver’s license on the front steps to your home, or post your Social Security number at the corner store. So, why would you keep your passwords in easy view?
Password-covered Post-it notes litter office monitors everywhere. And even more hide underneath keyboards. Typically, as soon the network administrator changes the password, the yellow stickies get updated. This is a computer network manager’s nightmare. If you must use a cheat sheet, keep it where others can’t see it, like in your wallet or purse.
5. Buried treasure.
You can “bury” your cheat sheet even deeper. Try keeping passwords in address books, encoded as bogus phone numbers or names. If your work password is dava3231, list a fictitious work pal as Dave Avery 555-3231, or write your boss’s address down as 3231 Dave Ave.
6. Reading between the words.
Another thing to try is selecting a cryptic password by choosing a series drawn from the first letters of the words in a line from a poem or song. For example, “To be or not to be, that is the question…” yields tbontbtitq.
7. Rate your privacy needs.
Accept it, some applications and websites are about as important to password-protect as your trash. There is a big difference between someone surfing a website under your account name and someone sending your boss hate mails using your email account.
Rate the level of security for specific programs and websites. Then create a sliding security scale for the passwords you want.
8. By all means, safeguard your password.
At first, it may be difficult to remember your password. Did you substitute an “i” with a “1″ or did you use a “1″ to represent “L?” To help remember the password, use it immediately. Then log in and out several times the first day. Just don’t change it on a Friday or right before leaving for vacation. You could write it out several times on a piece of paper. This helps record it in your mind. Just be sure to shred the paper when done.
9. Avoid bizarre character combinations.
While character combinations such as dkFe*#21 might be hard to guess, they are also difficult to remember. I know these passwords are less susceptible to brute-force attacks, but such activity is already combated in other ways, such as limits on incorrect logon attempts.
10. Don’t change the password too frequently.
People are more likely to forget a password they will only use for a short period of time. And it’s not really necessary to change your passwords every week. A good average is 90 to 120 days, and I’m sure you can deal with this.
[Via Ririan Project]
Christianity Is Flourishing in China
BEIJING -- The Rev. Jin Mingri peered out from the pulpit and delivered an unusual appeal: "Please leave," the 39-year-old pastor urged his followers, who were packed, standing-room-only on a Sunday afternoon, into a converted office space in China's capital. "We don't have enough seats for the others who want to come, so please, only stay for one service a day."
A choir in hot-pink robes stood to his left, beside a guitarist and a drum set bristling with cymbals. Children in a modern playroom beside the sanctuary punctuated the service with squeals and tantrums. It was a busy day at a church that, on paper, does not exist.
Christianity -- repressed, marginalized and, in many cases, illegal in China for more than half a century -- is sweeping the country, swamping churches and posing a sensitive challenge to the officially atheist ruling Communist Party.
By some estimates, Christian churches in China, most of them underground, have roughly 70 million members, about as many as the party itself. A growing number of those Christians are in fact party members.
Christianity is thriving in part because it offers a moral framework to citizens adrift in an age of Wild West capitalism that has not only exacted a heavy toll in corruption and pollution but also harmed the global image of products labeled "Made in China."
Some Chinese Christians say their faith is actually a boon for the party, because it shores up the economic foundation that is central to sustaining communist rule.
"With economic development, morality and ethics in China are degenerating quickly," prayer leader Zhang Wei told the crowd at Jin's church as worshipers bowed their heads. "Holy Father, please save the Chinese people's soul."
At the same time, Christianity is driving citizens to be more politically assertive, emboldening them to push for more freedoms and testing the party's willingness to adapt. For decades, most of China's Christians worshiped in secret churches, known as "house churches," that shunned attention for fear of arrest on charges such as "disturbing public order."
But in a sign of Christianity's growing prominence, in scores of interviews for a joint project of the Tribune and PBS' "Frontline/World," clerical leaders and worshipers from coastal boomtowns to inland villages publicly detailed their religious lives for the first time.
They voiced the belief that the time has come to proclaim their place in Chinese society as the world focuses on China and its hosting of the 2008 Olympics in August.
"We have nothing to hide," said Jin, a former Communist Party member who broke away from the state church last year to found his Zion Church.
Jin embodies a historic change: After centuries of foreign efforts to implant Christianity in China, the growing popularity of the religion is being led not by missionaries but by evangelical citizens at home. Where Christianity once was confined largely to poor villages, it's now spreading into urban centers, often with tacit approval from the regime.
It reaches into the most influential corners of Chinese life: Intellectuals disillusioned by the 1989 crackdown on dissidents at Tiananmen Square are placing their loyalty in faith, not politics; tycoons fed up with corruption are seeking an ethical code; and party members are daring to argue that their religion does not put them at odds with the government.
The boundaries of what is legal and what is not are constantly shifting. A new church or Sunday school, for instance, might be permissible one day and taboo the next, because local officials have broad latitude to interpret laws on religious gatherings.
Overall, though, the government is allowing churches to be more open and active than ever, signaling a new tolerance of faith in public life. President Hu Jintao even held an unprecedented Politburo "study session" on religion last year, in which he told China's 25 most powerful leaders that "the knowledge and strength of religious people must be mustered to build a prosperous society."
This rise, driven by evangelical Protestants, reflects a wider spiritual awakening in China. As communism fades into today's free-market reality, many Chinese describe a "crisis of faith" and seek solace from mystical Taoist sects, Bahai temples and Christian megachurches.
Today, the government counts 21 million Catholics and Protestants -- a 50% increase in less than 10 years -- though the underground population is far larger. The World Christian Database's estimate of 70 million Christians amounts to 5% of the population, second only to Buddhists.
At a time when Christianity in Western Europe is dwindling, China's believers are redrawing the world's religious map with a growing community that already exceeds all the Christians in Italy.
And increasing Christian clout in China has the potential to alter relations with the United States and other nations.
But much about the future of faith in China is uncertain, shaped most vividly in bold new evangelical churches such as Zion, where a soft-spoken preacher and his fervent flock do not yet know just how far the Communist Party is prepared to let them grow.
"We think that Christianity is good for Beijing, good for China," Jin said. "But it may take some time before our intention is understood, trusted, even respected by the authorities. We even have to consider the price we may have to pay."
[Via LA Times]
A choir in hot-pink robes stood to his left, beside a guitarist and a drum set bristling with cymbals. Children in a modern playroom beside the sanctuary punctuated the service with squeals and tantrums. It was a busy day at a church that, on paper, does not exist.
Christianity -- repressed, marginalized and, in many cases, illegal in China for more than half a century -- is sweeping the country, swamping churches and posing a sensitive challenge to the officially atheist ruling Communist Party.
By some estimates, Christian churches in China, most of them underground, have roughly 70 million members, about as many as the party itself. A growing number of those Christians are in fact party members.
Christianity is thriving in part because it offers a moral framework to citizens adrift in an age of Wild West capitalism that has not only exacted a heavy toll in corruption and pollution but also harmed the global image of products labeled "Made in China."
Some Chinese Christians say their faith is actually a boon for the party, because it shores up the economic foundation that is central to sustaining communist rule.
"With economic development, morality and ethics in China are degenerating quickly," prayer leader Zhang Wei told the crowd at Jin's church as worshipers bowed their heads. "Holy Father, please save the Chinese people's soul."
At the same time, Christianity is driving citizens to be more politically assertive, emboldening them to push for more freedoms and testing the party's willingness to adapt. For decades, most of China's Christians worshiped in secret churches, known as "house churches," that shunned attention for fear of arrest on charges such as "disturbing public order."
But in a sign of Christianity's growing prominence, in scores of interviews for a joint project of the Tribune and PBS' "Frontline/World," clerical leaders and worshipers from coastal boomtowns to inland villages publicly detailed their religious lives for the first time.
They voiced the belief that the time has come to proclaim their place in Chinese society as the world focuses on China and its hosting of the 2008 Olympics in August.
"We have nothing to hide," said Jin, a former Communist Party member who broke away from the state church last year to found his Zion Church.
Jin embodies a historic change: After centuries of foreign efforts to implant Christianity in China, the growing popularity of the religion is being led not by missionaries but by evangelical citizens at home. Where Christianity once was confined largely to poor villages, it's now spreading into urban centers, often with tacit approval from the regime.
It reaches into the most influential corners of Chinese life: Intellectuals disillusioned by the 1989 crackdown on dissidents at Tiananmen Square are placing their loyalty in faith, not politics; tycoons fed up with corruption are seeking an ethical code; and party members are daring to argue that their religion does not put them at odds with the government.
The boundaries of what is legal and what is not are constantly shifting. A new church or Sunday school, for instance, might be permissible one day and taboo the next, because local officials have broad latitude to interpret laws on religious gatherings.
Overall, though, the government is allowing churches to be more open and active than ever, signaling a new tolerance of faith in public life. President Hu Jintao even held an unprecedented Politburo "study session" on religion last year, in which he told China's 25 most powerful leaders that "the knowledge and strength of religious people must be mustered to build a prosperous society."
This rise, driven by evangelical Protestants, reflects a wider spiritual awakening in China. As communism fades into today's free-market reality, many Chinese describe a "crisis of faith" and seek solace from mystical Taoist sects, Bahai temples and Christian megachurches.
Today, the government counts 21 million Catholics and Protestants -- a 50% increase in less than 10 years -- though the underground population is far larger. The World Christian Database's estimate of 70 million Christians amounts to 5% of the population, second only to Buddhists.
At a time when Christianity in Western Europe is dwindling, China's believers are redrawing the world's religious map with a growing community that already exceeds all the Christians in Italy.
And increasing Christian clout in China has the potential to alter relations with the United States and other nations.
But much about the future of faith in China is uncertain, shaped most vividly in bold new evangelical churches such as Zion, where a soft-spoken preacher and his fervent flock do not yet know just how far the Communist Party is prepared to let them grow.
"We think that Christianity is good for Beijing, good for China," Jin said. "But it may take some time before our intention is understood, trusted, even respected by the authorities. We even have to consider the price we may have to pay."
[Via LA Times]
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Fully Recyclable, the Bike Made out of Cardboard
Sheffield - A student of industrial design has made a working £15 bicycle out of industrial-strength cardboard. Phil Bridge, 21, of Sheffield Hallam University, said the bike was strong enough for a rider weighing up to 12 stones and would not go soft in the rain, although it has a life expectancy of only about six months.
The bike is made almost entirely from recyclable and recycled materials, using mechanical parts that can be reused. Mr Bridge said: “The lightweight quality of the cardboard, combined with its low cost, means it’s possible to create a bargain bike that’s also less susceptible to thieves.”
[Via Times Online]
The bike is made almost entirely from recyclable and recycled materials, using mechanical parts that can be reused. Mr Bridge said: “The lightweight quality of the cardboard, combined with its low cost, means it’s possible to create a bargain bike that’s also less susceptible to thieves.”
[Via Times Online]
Espresso Book Machine
Blackwell bookshop announced yesterday that it is to install an "Espresso Book Machine" that will allow customers to print out a novel in just seven minutes.
The self-service machine, which will eventually be installed in 50 stores across the country, offers a choice of around one million titles. The fully-bound books are printed to library quality, including a front cover.
A more sophisticated version of the machine is smaller and prints books in just three minutes. The older version has already been installed in 11 sites worldwide and Blackwell hopes to eventually have the faster machine in its stores.
Britain's book industry has hailed the machine's arrival as potentially revolutionary. It means high street bookshops can offer a range of books that will compete for the first time with online stores such as Amazon.
Blackwell is leasing the book-making machine from its American owner, On Demand Books, according to The Bookseller. Vince Gunn, chief executive of Blackwell, described the technology as "trailblazing". "From a retailer's point of view, this is a fantastic opportunity," he said. "When I first read about the Espresso Book Machine, I was very keen to see it in action. I was really pleased with its performance when I saw it last year."
He said the machine was meant to enhance the choice in a book store, but that they would still retain a vast amount of titles on their shelves. "I'm a real advocate of books and I think they are here to stay. I don't think the book is dead but this is a great invention that will give more choice to readers," he said.
Alison Flood, news editor of The Bookseller, said: "Imagine going into a book store and getting an obscure title while you wait. It could be a way for street chains to compete with the range that is offered online. The novelty for readers will also be exciting and it could be a great thing for the high street."
On Demand has been in talks with other British retailers about stocking the Espresso. Blackwell is the first chain in Europe to place an order for the machine and the largest commercial retailer in the world to do so.
[Via Independent]
The self-service machine, which will eventually be installed in 50 stores across the country, offers a choice of around one million titles. The fully-bound books are printed to library quality, including a front cover.
A more sophisticated version of the machine is smaller and prints books in just three minutes. The older version has already been installed in 11 sites worldwide and Blackwell hopes to eventually have the faster machine in its stores.
Britain's book industry has hailed the machine's arrival as potentially revolutionary. It means high street bookshops can offer a range of books that will compete for the first time with online stores such as Amazon.
Blackwell is leasing the book-making machine from its American owner, On Demand Books, according to The Bookseller. Vince Gunn, chief executive of Blackwell, described the technology as "trailblazing". "From a retailer's point of view, this is a fantastic opportunity," he said. "When I first read about the Espresso Book Machine, I was very keen to see it in action. I was really pleased with its performance when I saw it last year."
He said the machine was meant to enhance the choice in a book store, but that they would still retain a vast amount of titles on their shelves. "I'm a real advocate of books and I think they are here to stay. I don't think the book is dead but this is a great invention that will give more choice to readers," he said.
Alison Flood, news editor of The Bookseller, said: "Imagine going into a book store and getting an obscure title while you wait. It could be a way for street chains to compete with the range that is offered online. The novelty for readers will also be exciting and it could be a great thing for the high street."
On Demand has been in talks with other British retailers about stocking the Espresso. Blackwell is the first chain in Europe to place an order for the machine and the largest commercial retailer in the world to do so.
[Via Independent]
Friday, June 27, 2008
Newspapers Run Ads About Fake Airline Derrie-Air
Derrie-Air has been exposed. Readers of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News opened their papers Friday to see ads for a new airline called Derrie-Air, which purportedly charges passengers by the pound.
But the new carrier will never get off the ground. It's a one-day advertising campaign about a fake airline by Philadelphia Media Holdings, the papers' owner, and Gyro ad agency.
In light blue banners throughout the papers — as well as on their Web site, Philly.com — Derrie-Air cheerily trumpets its policy: The more you weigh, the more you pay. The ads direct readers to the Web site http://www.flyderrie-air.com.
Philadelphia Media Holdings spokesman Jay Devine said the goal is to "demonstrate the power of our brands in generating awareness and generating traffic for our advertisers, and put a smile on people's faces."
The company will track traffic to the Derrie-Air site. Devine said there's already buzz about the campaign on online blogs.
Visitors to the airline site learn that Derrie-Air is the world's only carbon-neutral luxury airline, and it justifies its fare policy by saying that it takes more fuel to move heavier objects. The carrier pledges to plant trees to offset every pound of carbon its planes release into the atmosphere.
Derrie-Air's sample rates range from $1.40 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Chicago to $2.25 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Los Angeles.
Those who scroll to the bottom of the home page find out the truth behind Derrie-Air.
A disclaimer labels the ad campaign "fictitious" and says it is designed "to test the results of advertising in our print and online products and to stimulate discussion on a timely environmental topic of interest to all citizens."
"In other words," it says, "smile, we're pulling your leg."
[Via Yahoo News]
But the new carrier will never get off the ground. It's a one-day advertising campaign about a fake airline by Philadelphia Media Holdings, the papers' owner, and Gyro ad agency.
In light blue banners throughout the papers — as well as on their Web site, Philly.com — Derrie-Air cheerily trumpets its policy: The more you weigh, the more you pay. The ads direct readers to the Web site http://www.flyderrie-air.com.
Philadelphia Media Holdings spokesman Jay Devine said the goal is to "demonstrate the power of our brands in generating awareness and generating traffic for our advertisers, and put a smile on people's faces."
The company will track traffic to the Derrie-Air site. Devine said there's already buzz about the campaign on online blogs.
Visitors to the airline site learn that Derrie-Air is the world's only carbon-neutral luxury airline, and it justifies its fare policy by saying that it takes more fuel to move heavier objects. The carrier pledges to plant trees to offset every pound of carbon its planes release into the atmosphere.
Derrie-Air's sample rates range from $1.40 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Chicago to $2.25 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Los Angeles.
Those who scroll to the bottom of the home page find out the truth behind Derrie-Air.
A disclaimer labels the ad campaign "fictitious" and says it is designed "to test the results of advertising in our print and online products and to stimulate discussion on a timely environmental topic of interest to all citizens."
"In other words," it says, "smile, we're pulling your leg."
[Via Yahoo News]
Dr Pepper in Possession of Coke
The Soft-Drinks Industry is reeling with the news that high profile CEO Dr Pepper has been found in possession of Coke. Pepper was stopped for speeding on Highway 121 in Plano Texas, but what started as a routine traffic stop quickly escalated after officers shined their flashlights into his car and saw clear evidence of Coke-usage.
According to a Plano Police report, "after the officers engaged in a search of the vehicle, a partially concealed case full of Coke was discovered in the trunk".
It's not yet known if there was enough Coke to establish that Dr Pepper was intending to supply others or if it was simply a personal stash. However if a sufficient quantity is established to prove that Dr Pepper is a Coke dealer on the side, there are likely to be serious ramifications.
Industry insiders speculated that Dr Pepper, who recently got in trouble with the environmental movement over the amount of carbon dioxide released by his products, may not survive this second setback.
With the Rev Al Sharpton at his side, the usually effervescent Pepper was in somber mood at a Sunday news conference. Ashen-faced, he admitted to "secretly taking Coke on a daily basis" adding somberly "Some mornings I just need some Coke to get going. I think people will understand".
[Via Satire and Comment]
According to a Plano Police report, "after the officers engaged in a search of the vehicle, a partially concealed case full of Coke was discovered in the trunk".
It's not yet known if there was enough Coke to establish that Dr Pepper was intending to supply others or if it was simply a personal stash. However if a sufficient quantity is established to prove that Dr Pepper is a Coke dealer on the side, there are likely to be serious ramifications.
Industry insiders speculated that Dr Pepper, who recently got in trouble with the environmental movement over the amount of carbon dioxide released by his products, may not survive this second setback.
With the Rev Al Sharpton at his side, the usually effervescent Pepper was in somber mood at a Sunday news conference. Ashen-faced, he admitted to "secretly taking Coke on a daily basis" adding somberly "Some mornings I just need some Coke to get going. I think people will understand".
[Via Satire and Comment]
Apples and Pears
Eating an apple a day might keep the doctor away, but it could also be the reason why your figure is going pear-shaped. Scientists have discovered that fructose, the kind of sugar found in fruit, causes weight to build up disproportionately around the stomach, rather than being spread around the body.
There are significant implications to all of this: is the Government's five-a-day campaign, with its insistence on filling our diets with smoothies and juices, actually a cause of the obesity crisis?
Will compensation be demanded by brewers, whose trade has been damaged by the link between their product and "beer bellies"? Will these, in turn, be re-labelled "berry bellies"?
And which school will be first to teach its children to rhyme "spare tyre" and "papaya"? All food for thought - as well, of course, as a neat excuse to stick to the booze.
[Via Telegraph]
There are significant implications to all of this: is the Government's five-a-day campaign, with its insistence on filling our diets with smoothies and juices, actually a cause of the obesity crisis?
Will compensation be demanded by brewers, whose trade has been damaged by the link between their product and "beer bellies"? Will these, in turn, be re-labelled "berry bellies"?
And which school will be first to teach its children to rhyme "spare tyre" and "papaya"? All food for thought - as well, of course, as a neat excuse to stick to the booze.
[Via Telegraph]
Thursday, June 26, 2008
How Rich Peoeple Spend Their Time
People invariably believe that money can make them happy -- and rich people usually do report being happier than poor people do. But if this is the case, shouldn't wealthy people spend a lot more time doing enjoyable things than poor people?
Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has found, however, that being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.
People who make less than $20,000 a year, for example, told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure -- watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way -- putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities that were required as opposed to optional. The richest people spent nearly twice as much time as the poorest people in leisure activities that were active, structured and often stressful -- shopping, child care and exercise.
Kahneman and his colleagues argued that many people mistakenly allocate enormous amounts of their time and psychological focus to getting rich because of a mental illusion: When they think about what it would mean to be wealthy, they think about how enjoyable it would be to watch a flat-screen TV set, play lots of sports or get a lot of pampering -- our stereotypical beliefs of how the rich spend their time.
"In reality," Kahneman and his colleagues wrote in a paper they published in the journal Science, "they should think of spending a lot more time working and commuting and a lot less time engaged in passive leisure."
[Via Washington Post]
Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has found, however, that being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.
People who make less than $20,000 a year, for example, told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure -- watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way -- putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities that were required as opposed to optional. The richest people spent nearly twice as much time as the poorest people in leisure activities that were active, structured and often stressful -- shopping, child care and exercise.
Kahneman and his colleagues argued that many people mistakenly allocate enormous amounts of their time and psychological focus to getting rich because of a mental illusion: When they think about what it would mean to be wealthy, they think about how enjoyable it would be to watch a flat-screen TV set, play lots of sports or get a lot of pampering -- our stereotypical beliefs of how the rich spend their time.
"In reality," Kahneman and his colleagues wrote in a paper they published in the journal Science, "they should think of spending a lot more time working and commuting and a lot less time engaged in passive leisure."
[Via Washington Post]
Is War Good For the Economy?
The idea that warfare helps the economy is a prime example of Bizarro logic, which has pervaded our collective consciousness since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ideological fallout from the explosion of national hysteria that followed. In Bizarro World, as we all know, the laws of nature and logic are inverted, so that up is down, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. In the post-9/11 era, as I have often pointed out, we have finally arrived in a world where two plus two can and indeed often does equal five – if it suits the purposes of the War Party to deem it so.
Somewhere, George Orwell isn't smiling. He'd no doubt be appalled, and a little nonplused, by the accuracy of his speculations in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, you'll recall, the deliberate impoverishment of the ordinary "proles" and the Outer Party types was a matter of INGSOC policy, a theme underscored by the general shabbiness of Orwell's dystopia, what with the constant shortages and the way thing always seemed to be literally and physically falling apart. Particularly striking is the Orwellian presentiment that the world of the future is bound to be poorer and, simultaneously, engaged in constant warfare.
This prediction seemed, for quite a while, to be one of the few he got wrong. Yet Orwell, it turns out, was right; it's just that the productive power of capitalism in the U.S. was so great that it coasted along for a long time on sheer momentum. Our accumulated wealth reflected the dynamism of an earlier era. This upward spiral of productivity and wealth-generation really crested during the 1950s, a period of unprecedented prosperity and cultural optimism, and the early 1960s – before the Vietnam war and the inflationary policies that financed it ate away at the heart of American prosperity, the necessary prelude to the "stagflation" of the Carter years.
Wars are expensive propositions, especially the sort of all-embracing, the-sky's-the-limit, multi-generational conflict envisioned by the War Party's editorial board commandos. Our $3 trillion war, as Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have dubbed it, is an albatross hung round the neck of the American giant, whose great neck is bowing under its weight. The unipolar moment the neocons once exulted in will go down in the official record as the briefest incident in human history, albeit not the noblest.
This hasn't always been immediately obvious. The false prosperity induced by the speeding up of the printing presses over at the Federal Reserve led to what Alan Greenspan once called "irrational exuberance," a delusion created by the very easy money policies he carried out as head of the Fed. No sooner had certain Beltway sages declared that the age of permanent abundance was upon us – and that this rendered the struggle against the Welfare-Warfare State irrelevant – than their economic cornucopia of limitless wealth went empty. As banks are bailed out while ordinary Americans are turned out into the streets, the manic hubris of Fukuyama's historical "endism" and prophecies of universal prosperity via "globalization" stand revealed in all their silliness.
Mania is invariably followed by a massive downward plunge into despair, in economic terms, a deep recession, if not something far worse. So what has stopped the forward motion of America's dash over history's finish line?
As Ron Paul has tirelessly explained, it is the cost of our expanding overseas empire that is driving us into bankruptcy. We have, as the Old Right seer Garet Garrett put it, an empire of a unique type, one in which "everything goes out and nothing comes in." The costs of this are ordinarily hidden from sight, as Ron Paul explains, by governmental sleight-of-hand:
"As the war in Iraq surges forward, and the administration ponders military action against Iran, it's important to ask ourselves an overlooked question: Can we really afford it? If every American taxpayer had to submit an extra five or ten thousand dollars to the IRS this April to pay for the war, I'm quite certain it would end very quickly. The problem is that government finances war by borrowing and printing money, rather than presenting a bill directly in the form of higher taxes. When the costs are obscured, the question of whether any war is worth it becomes distorted."
Yet there comes a time when the obscuring mists are cleared and the costs of our foreign policy of perpetual war become readily apparent, and surely that time is approaching. Indeed, it may have already passed. Garrett dubbed ours' "the empire of the Bottomless Purse," yet we are just about scratching bottom about now. It remains for Paul and the movement he generated to point out how all of this is paid for. As Paul puts it:
"Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank have a cozy, unspoken arrangement that makes war easier to finance. Congress has an insatiable appetite for new spending, but raising taxes is politically unpopular. The Federal Reserve, however, is happy to accommodate deficit spending by creating new money through the Treasury Department. In exchange, Congress leaves the Fed alone to operate free of pesky oversight and free of political scrutiny. Monetary policy is utterly ignored in Washington, even though the Federal Reserve system is a creation of Congress.
"The result of this arrangement is inflation. And inflation finances war."
When our rulers decide to go to war, they simply step on the gas and flood the engines of inflated expectations, fueled by bank credit expansion. The results are the decline of the dollar and the current economic crisis, which might be compared to a hangover that follows an extended binge. Americans are suffering a double-hangover in the sense that they're still recovering from the post-Cold War triumphalism that envisioned a unipolar, Washington-centered world.
The idea that the defense of the country requires an overseas empire that surpasses the British imperium at its zenith is a typical neocon fantasy, one that is proving far more costly than advertised. Yet some are raking it in while others are foreclosed. Remember how the sale of oil was supposed to pay for the Iraq war? A consortium of U.S. and European oil companies have since homesteaded the oil revenues Paul Wolfowitz assured us would be reimbursed to the American taxpayers. It's funny how that works.
War, as the liberal intellectual Randolph Bourne famously explained, is the health of the state. That is, it benefits state officials and their dependents, clients, and assorted sycophants at the expense of the rest of us. Many are impoverished by our policies, but a few are enriched. The beneficiaries are the growing administrative, corporate, and military bureaucracies that oversee our ever expanding global presence, in effect a colonial class. This class pursues and secures its economic and social interests by means of directly influencing government policy, operating as an organized force on behalf of the policy of imperialism, so far with remarkable success.
When John McCain sneered at Mitt Romney's business experience as lacking in honor and the spirit of self-sacrifice, he was expressing the "noble" and highly stagy sentiments of this rising class. Forget the free market fervor of the Reagan era, when entrepreneurs were valorized. The new Republican hero is the swaggering caesar.
Is the Iraq war good for the economy?
Well, whose economy? Who benefits from this war, and who loses? Once the American people realize that they're among this war's biggest losers – aside from the Iraqi people, and perhaps the Iranians, too – they'll turn on the beneficiaries with a vengeance. As their savings are eaten up by inflation, and the equity they labored to preserve and increase evaporates into thin air, ordinary Americans are likely to be quite interested in the question: who's responsible?
As the Federal Reserve pumps more funny money into circulation, in a desperate and vain attempt to postpone the crisis of the Warfare State, the single biggest winners are the banks, the most government-protected industry of all, who are the first to be bailed out of any crisis. Oh, perhaps a few will be allowed to go under, but the big ones will be too big to fall, like Bear Stearns. The economic elite will golden parachute its way out of the crisis.
The main beneficiaries of the present system – what Murray Rothbard, the late libertarian theorist and polemicist, called the Welfare-Warfare State – are the new plutocrats. Think of what Ayn Rand referred to as "the aristocracy of pull," the principal villains of her famous novel Atlas Shrugged, i.e., corrupt businessmen who succeeded on account of their political connections rather than their entrepreneurial skill.
Today's aristocracy of pull is the militarized sector of the economy, which is completely dependent on government contracts. Their political Praetorian Guard is represented in Washington by both parties, and, what's more, their partisans dominate think-tanks of the ostensible Left as well as the Right.
The task of those who oppose the new colonialism, which masquerades as global altruism of one sort or another, is to unmask the real motives and connections of a self-interested colonial class, which, in spite of its claim to the mantle of honor and duty to country, is supremely successful at promoting its own interests over and above those of the nation.
[Via Antiwar.com]
Somewhere, George Orwell isn't smiling. He'd no doubt be appalled, and a little nonplused, by the accuracy of his speculations in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, you'll recall, the deliberate impoverishment of the ordinary "proles" and the Outer Party types was a matter of INGSOC policy, a theme underscored by the general shabbiness of Orwell's dystopia, what with the constant shortages and the way thing always seemed to be literally and physically falling apart. Particularly striking is the Orwellian presentiment that the world of the future is bound to be poorer and, simultaneously, engaged in constant warfare.
This prediction seemed, for quite a while, to be one of the few he got wrong. Yet Orwell, it turns out, was right; it's just that the productive power of capitalism in the U.S. was so great that it coasted along for a long time on sheer momentum. Our accumulated wealth reflected the dynamism of an earlier era. This upward spiral of productivity and wealth-generation really crested during the 1950s, a period of unprecedented prosperity and cultural optimism, and the early 1960s – before the Vietnam war and the inflationary policies that financed it ate away at the heart of American prosperity, the necessary prelude to the "stagflation" of the Carter years.
Wars are expensive propositions, especially the sort of all-embracing, the-sky's-the-limit, multi-generational conflict envisioned by the War Party's editorial board commandos. Our $3 trillion war, as Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have dubbed it, is an albatross hung round the neck of the American giant, whose great neck is bowing under its weight. The unipolar moment the neocons once exulted in will go down in the official record as the briefest incident in human history, albeit not the noblest.
This hasn't always been immediately obvious. The false prosperity induced by the speeding up of the printing presses over at the Federal Reserve led to what Alan Greenspan once called "irrational exuberance," a delusion created by the very easy money policies he carried out as head of the Fed. No sooner had certain Beltway sages declared that the age of permanent abundance was upon us – and that this rendered the struggle against the Welfare-Warfare State irrelevant – than their economic cornucopia of limitless wealth went empty. As banks are bailed out while ordinary Americans are turned out into the streets, the manic hubris of Fukuyama's historical "endism" and prophecies of universal prosperity via "globalization" stand revealed in all their silliness.
Mania is invariably followed by a massive downward plunge into despair, in economic terms, a deep recession, if not something far worse. So what has stopped the forward motion of America's dash over history's finish line?
As Ron Paul has tirelessly explained, it is the cost of our expanding overseas empire that is driving us into bankruptcy. We have, as the Old Right seer Garet Garrett put it, an empire of a unique type, one in which "everything goes out and nothing comes in." The costs of this are ordinarily hidden from sight, as Ron Paul explains, by governmental sleight-of-hand:
"As the war in Iraq surges forward, and the administration ponders military action against Iran, it's important to ask ourselves an overlooked question: Can we really afford it? If every American taxpayer had to submit an extra five or ten thousand dollars to the IRS this April to pay for the war, I'm quite certain it would end very quickly. The problem is that government finances war by borrowing and printing money, rather than presenting a bill directly in the form of higher taxes. When the costs are obscured, the question of whether any war is worth it becomes distorted."
Yet there comes a time when the obscuring mists are cleared and the costs of our foreign policy of perpetual war become readily apparent, and surely that time is approaching. Indeed, it may have already passed. Garrett dubbed ours' "the empire of the Bottomless Purse," yet we are just about scratching bottom about now. It remains for Paul and the movement he generated to point out how all of this is paid for. As Paul puts it:
"Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank have a cozy, unspoken arrangement that makes war easier to finance. Congress has an insatiable appetite for new spending, but raising taxes is politically unpopular. The Federal Reserve, however, is happy to accommodate deficit spending by creating new money through the Treasury Department. In exchange, Congress leaves the Fed alone to operate free of pesky oversight and free of political scrutiny. Monetary policy is utterly ignored in Washington, even though the Federal Reserve system is a creation of Congress.
"The result of this arrangement is inflation. And inflation finances war."
When our rulers decide to go to war, they simply step on the gas and flood the engines of inflated expectations, fueled by bank credit expansion. The results are the decline of the dollar and the current economic crisis, which might be compared to a hangover that follows an extended binge. Americans are suffering a double-hangover in the sense that they're still recovering from the post-Cold War triumphalism that envisioned a unipolar, Washington-centered world.
The idea that the defense of the country requires an overseas empire that surpasses the British imperium at its zenith is a typical neocon fantasy, one that is proving far more costly than advertised. Yet some are raking it in while others are foreclosed. Remember how the sale of oil was supposed to pay for the Iraq war? A consortium of U.S. and European oil companies have since homesteaded the oil revenues Paul Wolfowitz assured us would be reimbursed to the American taxpayers. It's funny how that works.
War, as the liberal intellectual Randolph Bourne famously explained, is the health of the state. That is, it benefits state officials and their dependents, clients, and assorted sycophants at the expense of the rest of us. Many are impoverished by our policies, but a few are enriched. The beneficiaries are the growing administrative, corporate, and military bureaucracies that oversee our ever expanding global presence, in effect a colonial class. This class pursues and secures its economic and social interests by means of directly influencing government policy, operating as an organized force on behalf of the policy of imperialism, so far with remarkable success.
When John McCain sneered at Mitt Romney's business experience as lacking in honor and the spirit of self-sacrifice, he was expressing the "noble" and highly stagy sentiments of this rising class. Forget the free market fervor of the Reagan era, when entrepreneurs were valorized. The new Republican hero is the swaggering caesar.
Is the Iraq war good for the economy?
Well, whose economy? Who benefits from this war, and who loses? Once the American people realize that they're among this war's biggest losers – aside from the Iraqi people, and perhaps the Iranians, too – they'll turn on the beneficiaries with a vengeance. As their savings are eaten up by inflation, and the equity they labored to preserve and increase evaporates into thin air, ordinary Americans are likely to be quite interested in the question: who's responsible?
As the Federal Reserve pumps more funny money into circulation, in a desperate and vain attempt to postpone the crisis of the Warfare State, the single biggest winners are the banks, the most government-protected industry of all, who are the first to be bailed out of any crisis. Oh, perhaps a few will be allowed to go under, but the big ones will be too big to fall, like Bear Stearns. The economic elite will golden parachute its way out of the crisis.
The main beneficiaries of the present system – what Murray Rothbard, the late libertarian theorist and polemicist, called the Welfare-Warfare State – are the new plutocrats. Think of what Ayn Rand referred to as "the aristocracy of pull," the principal villains of her famous novel Atlas Shrugged, i.e., corrupt businessmen who succeeded on account of their political connections rather than their entrepreneurial skill.
Today's aristocracy of pull is the militarized sector of the economy, which is completely dependent on government contracts. Their political Praetorian Guard is represented in Washington by both parties, and, what's more, their partisans dominate think-tanks of the ostensible Left as well as the Right.
The task of those who oppose the new colonialism, which masquerades as global altruism of one sort or another, is to unmask the real motives and connections of a self-interested colonial class, which, in spite of its claim to the mantle of honor and duty to country, is supremely successful at promoting its own interests over and above those of the nation.
[Via Antiwar.com]
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Old Keynesian Dogs, Old Fiscal Tricks
We are about to be thrown back into the tender mercies of Keynesian economists. In the current setting, this will push the economy lower rather than higher.
The main Keynesian solutions to a faltering economy are federal budget deficits and monetary inflation. This two-part program assumes unemployment at 25% and annual deflation at 10%: the Great Depression in America.
Problem: it's not 1936 any more.
Two recent articles reminded me that the intelligentsia of the United States is like Louis XVIII, the king of France in the post-Napoleonic restoration: he had forgotten nothing and had learned nothing.
What the intelligentsia learned from the popularizers of Keynesian economics after 1936 they have not forgotten. They have learned nothing new.
KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS
The heart of John Maynard Keynes' analysis in 1936 was the idea of a permanent free market equilibrium with high unemployment. For some reason, which he never explained coherently, sellers refuse to lower their prices when faced with buyers who refuse to buy at yesterday's pre-Depression prices. This is especially true of workers who refuse to cut their wage demands.
Keynesianism is based on two fundamental ideas: (1) sellers do not learn that something is better than nothing, and therefore will not lower their selling prices; (2) economists do not learn that government spending that is financed by debt is accomplished in one of only two ways: (a) money lent by savers, which could have been lent to businesses or consumers; (b) money lent by a central bank, which lowers the purchasing power of the currency unit. This is a philosophy of something for nothing.
We are told by economists that there are no free lunches. But, except for Austrian economists, all economists really do believe in something for nothing. They debate with each other about which "something" can be obtained for nothing – "nothing" always being a piece of legislation.
Non-Austrian economists believe that a gun, when held by a salaried government official and pointed at a citizen to extract his wealth, can sometimes produce economic growth, whereas a gun held by a thief and pointed at a citizen to extract his wealth always produces economic loss. The first produces something for nothing, whereas the second produces nothing for something. What is the difference? This: the person holding the gun.
KEYNES AND THE NEW DEAL
Early in Franklin Roosevelt's first term, Keynes met with Roosevelt. We know the date: May 28, 1934. Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, noted in her published recollections that Keynes came out of the meeting and commented on the President's lack of economic literacy. Later, when speaking with Roosevelt, she noted that he said he thought Keynes must be a mathematician, rather than a political economist.
Both men had the other pegged exactly. Roosevelt knew no economics, and Keynes had earned a bachelor's degree in math. He had no degree in economics. He got his job at Cambridge University in 1909 because his father, a Cambridge economist, put up half the money to hire his son.
Because the meeting was in 1934, and because Keynes had not yet come up with Keynesianism – he was still working on it – I do not think the meeting was important for the future of the American economy. Keynes justified in theory in 1936 what every Western government had been doing for several years: printing money, raising taxes, running deficits, and regulating the economy.
The New Deal did not end the Great Depression in the United States. World War II did. The war allowed governments to increase deficit spending, inflate tremendously, impose price controls, draft young men and put them to work killing each other (which reduced the labor pool), and hire women to work in munitions factories at below-market wages, using patriotism to persuade them to enter the labor force. Patriotism was used as a way to persuade men and women to work at what would have been below-market wages in 1938. Then inflation and rationing reduced real wages even more.
Economics teaches this: "When the price falls, more is demanded." This is true of the price of labor. Keynes knew this in 1936, and wrote specifically that the reduced real wage rates produced by monetary inflation would fool workers into going back to work. But it took worldwide deception – wartime wages – to achieve this on a scale sufficient to end unemployment.
None of this is taught in any textbook – not in economics, not in history. To teach it would alert students to the economics of war, which centralizes the power of the State. This is the thesis of economist Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan. This book's thesis and data never get into college textbooks.
With this as background, let me summarize the first of two documents.
TIME MARCHES ON!
In the May 15 issue of Time Magazine, there is an article by Justin Fox. I had never heard of Mr. Fox. His biography on Time's site says he has a B.A. in international relations. He therefore writes for the business section. He has recently published a book, The Myth of the Rational Market. You get the general idea.
Time was started in 1923 by Henry Luce (Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations). It has long been a popular outlet for the American Establishment. In fact, Time is the news magazine written by the American Establishment in order to shape the thinking of the voters on the Big Picture.
Mr. Fox's enemy is what he perceives as Reaganism.
Economic eras don't last forever, though, and there are signs that the current slowdown is a harbinger of something bigger: an end to America's 25-year love affair with tax cuts and deregulation. A lot of the cracks that have emerged during that time, because of global economic shifts or our own neglect, have become impossible to ignore – stagnant incomes, a federal budget gone way out of balance, soaring energy prices, a once-in-a-lifetime housing crash and growing financial risks in retirement and from health care.
He says there has been growing inequality of wealth. He offers no statistics to indicate that inequality has increased from the income distribution of 1940, let alone 1900. Those who identify inequality as a significant economic or moral liability that calls for radical policy changes by government never do offer such statistics. There is a reason for this. The ratio of wealth by income class has barely changed, in the United States or in Western Europe, in a hundred years.
The evidence for a significant increase in American inequality since 1980 is based on tax evidence. But this evidence does not consider money in tax-deferred retirement funds. So, it is questionable.
In any case, the critics offer no evidence that their reforms will eliminate inequality. It does no good to provide a cure until a problem is diagnosed. Why is income more unequal today – if it is – than it was in 1980? Second, was 1980 significantly different from 1940 or 1900? Where is the evidence? Next, where is the explanation? Only after we have both should we – meaning policy-makers – begin suggesting solutions.
So what should be done about income disparity? In an April Gallup poll, 68% of respondents said wealth "should be more evenly distributed" in the U.S. – the highest percentage saying so since Gallup started asking the question in 1984. A smaller majority, 51%, agreed that "heavy taxes on the rich" were needed.
Surprise! Surprise! Voters with less wealth want the government to stick a gun in the belly of anyone with more wealth, telling him to fork it over. Of course, voters do not want the government to send people with guns to stick in their bellies, on behalf of people even poorer, who are far more numerous.
The politics of envy is the politics of this commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." It is the politics of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. It is alive and well all over the world.
The author then launches an unsubstantiated attack on Reagan's cuts of the top brackets: from 70% to 28%. No mention is made of Kennedy's cuts from 91% to 70%. The economy boomed in both cases.
Then there is the energy crisis. What is needed? Not more production. We need more taxes and more subsidies by federal government.
What makes doing the right thing on energy difficult is that it would almost inevitably involve raising costs now, with higher taxes on oil, increased subsidies for other energy sources or higher energy-efficiency standards for vehicles and homes – or all three. Economists tend to prefer the first of these approaches because taxes on gas, oil or fossil fuels in general tamp demand and allow the market – rather than members of Congress – to sift out the best alternatives.
Here is the good news, he says: the candidates' stand on global warming.
Interesting, though, to fight global warming, Clinton, McCain and Obama are all in favor of a carbon-cap-and-trade regimen, which would raise the price of fossil fuels just as surely as a direct tax would. Almost in spite of ourselves, we may end up with a semi-rational long-term energy policy. It won't make gas cheaper anytime soon – or perhaps ever – but in the long run, it could strengthen the country's economic prospects.
Next, how should government solve the housing crisis? Simple: repeal the tax deduction for mortgage interest payments. That will do it! Yes, sir, there is nothing like a huge tax on everyone's after-tax income to stimulate robust growth in the housing market. (Too bad it won't happen – voters being used to the deduction.)
Several countries have dropped the mortgage-interest deduction in recent years, with no noticeably adverse effects, but there's no indication that any of our presidential candidates are contemplating such a move.
Then there is universal health care. No problem here, either!
But there's real hope on this front. It is possible to conceive of a system that brings the 47 million uninsured into the fold, improves medical outcomes and costs less than what we've got now. It's possible to conceive of because many other wealthy countries already have such systems. Figuring out exactly how to make universal health care work in the U.S. is a matter better left to its own lengthy magazine article. But if you're looking for big economic change from the next Administration, this is the form it's most likely to take.
This article appeared in the premier Establishment outlet for the American intelligentsia.
My conclusion: get ready for a big dose of the politics of envy.
KUCINICH'S ECONOMIST SPEAKS OUT
There are not many American politicians further to the Left economically than Dennis Kucinich. In a recent interview, his economic advisor, Michael Hudson, provided a detailed and accurate assessment of the problems facing the Federal Reserve System. Then he offered solutions.
You will not like the solutions.
The interviewer knew what questions to ask. The questions centered around the solvency of America's largest banks. The FED is letting them swap bad debt for Treasury debt. Half of the FED's reserves have been swapped for this supposedly AAA-rated paper since last December. This cannot go on much longer.
Problem: this program merely buys time. How will the banks unload this bad paper on suckers? The supply of suckers has dried up.
The Fed's idea was merely to buy enough time for the banks to sell their junk mortgages to the proverbial "greater fool." But foreign investors no longer are playing this role, nor are domestic U.S. pension funds. So the most likely result will be for the Fed simply to roll over its loans – as if the problem can be cured by yet more time.
The problem is bad real estate loans. There is nothing the Treasury can do to solve this problem. The game is over.
The financial sector has been living in the short run for quite a while now, and I suspect that a lot of money managers are planning to get out or be fired now that the game is over. And it really is over. The Treasury's attempt to reflate the real estate market has not worked, and it can't work. Mortgage arrears, defaults and foreclosures are rising, and much property has become unsaleable except at distress prices that leave homeowners with negative equity.
Hence, the title of the article: "The Game Is Over. There Won't Be a Rebound."
The dollar is likely to fall. The problem begins with the international trade system.
When Europe and Asia receive excess dollars, these are turned over to their central banks, which have little alternative but to recycle these back to the United States by buying U.S. Treasury bonds. Foreign governments – and their taxpayers – are thus financing the domestic U.S. federal budget deficit, which itself stems largely from the war in Iraq that most foreign voters oppose.
This is exactly the problem. The United States has pressured oil-exporting nations in the Middle East to demand payment in dollars and then cycle these dollars back through American multinational banks.
For over 30 years they have been pressured to recycle their oil earnings into the U.S. stock market and loans to U.S. financial institutions. They have taken large losses on these investments (such as last year's money to bail out Citibank), and are trying to recoup them via the oil market.
Conclusion: ". . . unless they are willing to make a structural break and change the world monetary system radically, they will remain powerless to avoid giving the United States a free ride – including a free ride for its military spending and war in the Near East."
But the fact is, a refusal by central banks to buy T-bills is exactly such a structural break in the world monetary system. He thinks this is now happening. So do I. So, I see no way to remain optimistic about the future value of the dollar.
Regional banks will go under, he says. The FED and the government will oversee mergers.
False reporting also will help financial institutions avoid the appearance of insolvency. They will seek more and more government guarantees, ostensibly to help middle-class depositors but actually favoring the big speculators who are their major clients.
I add: this is already taking place. That is what the FED's swaps of Treasury debt for private mortgage-backed assets is all about.
Then what should Obama do? Tax and spend.
As president, he will have to do what FDR did, and challenge the financial oligarchy with new government regulatory agencies staffed with real regulators, not deregulators as under the Bush-Clinton-Bush regime. . . .
Most of all, he will have to make the tax system back progressive again if the domestic market is to recover. He should remove the tax-deductibility of interest payments, and do what the original 1913 income tax did: tax capital gains at normal income rates rather than subsidizing speculation. . . .
Wait a minute! This is what Mr. Fox recommends in his article in Time.
What about Social Security and Medicare? Simple: exempt every family that makes under $60,000 a year and tax all income for everyone else – no cut-off at $105,000.
There is no deduction from gross income for donations under Social Security. This is just what the centralizers need! This will be Europe's tax system.
He says this will take power away from the American oligarchy. "Unless he does this, what used to be a democracy will be turned into an oligarchy."
Yet Time ran a cover story on just this sort of tax reform. And Time has been the popular news magazine for the oligarchy since its creation in 1923.
CONCLUSION
We are heading into a great reversal. We are going to see rising taxes and a falling stock market. Housing is unlikely to rebound next year.
The economic goal today is to keep what you have in the face of a revived welfare state. The days of wine and roses are going to be rolled back next year and beyond.
[Via Lew Rockwell]
The main Keynesian solutions to a faltering economy are federal budget deficits and monetary inflation. This two-part program assumes unemployment at 25% and annual deflation at 10%: the Great Depression in America.
Problem: it's not 1936 any more.
Two recent articles reminded me that the intelligentsia of the United States is like Louis XVIII, the king of France in the post-Napoleonic restoration: he had forgotten nothing and had learned nothing.
What the intelligentsia learned from the popularizers of Keynesian economics after 1936 they have not forgotten. They have learned nothing new.
KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS
The heart of John Maynard Keynes' analysis in 1936 was the idea of a permanent free market equilibrium with high unemployment. For some reason, which he never explained coherently, sellers refuse to lower their prices when faced with buyers who refuse to buy at yesterday's pre-Depression prices. This is especially true of workers who refuse to cut their wage demands.
Keynesianism is based on two fundamental ideas: (1) sellers do not learn that something is better than nothing, and therefore will not lower their selling prices; (2) economists do not learn that government spending that is financed by debt is accomplished in one of only two ways: (a) money lent by savers, which could have been lent to businesses or consumers; (b) money lent by a central bank, which lowers the purchasing power of the currency unit. This is a philosophy of something for nothing.
We are told by economists that there are no free lunches. But, except for Austrian economists, all economists really do believe in something for nothing. They debate with each other about which "something" can be obtained for nothing – "nothing" always being a piece of legislation.
Non-Austrian economists believe that a gun, when held by a salaried government official and pointed at a citizen to extract his wealth, can sometimes produce economic growth, whereas a gun held by a thief and pointed at a citizen to extract his wealth always produces economic loss. The first produces something for nothing, whereas the second produces nothing for something. What is the difference? This: the person holding the gun.
KEYNES AND THE NEW DEAL
Early in Franklin Roosevelt's first term, Keynes met with Roosevelt. We know the date: May 28, 1934. Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, noted in her published recollections that Keynes came out of the meeting and commented on the President's lack of economic literacy. Later, when speaking with Roosevelt, she noted that he said he thought Keynes must be a mathematician, rather than a political economist.
Both men had the other pegged exactly. Roosevelt knew no economics, and Keynes had earned a bachelor's degree in math. He had no degree in economics. He got his job at Cambridge University in 1909 because his father, a Cambridge economist, put up half the money to hire his son.
Because the meeting was in 1934, and because Keynes had not yet come up with Keynesianism – he was still working on it – I do not think the meeting was important for the future of the American economy. Keynes justified in theory in 1936 what every Western government had been doing for several years: printing money, raising taxes, running deficits, and regulating the economy.
The New Deal did not end the Great Depression in the United States. World War II did. The war allowed governments to increase deficit spending, inflate tremendously, impose price controls, draft young men and put them to work killing each other (which reduced the labor pool), and hire women to work in munitions factories at below-market wages, using patriotism to persuade them to enter the labor force. Patriotism was used as a way to persuade men and women to work at what would have been below-market wages in 1938. Then inflation and rationing reduced real wages even more.
Economics teaches this: "When the price falls, more is demanded." This is true of the price of labor. Keynes knew this in 1936, and wrote specifically that the reduced real wage rates produced by monetary inflation would fool workers into going back to work. But it took worldwide deception – wartime wages – to achieve this on a scale sufficient to end unemployment.
None of this is taught in any textbook – not in economics, not in history. To teach it would alert students to the economics of war, which centralizes the power of the State. This is the thesis of economist Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan. This book's thesis and data never get into college textbooks.
With this as background, let me summarize the first of two documents.
TIME MARCHES ON!
In the May 15 issue of Time Magazine, there is an article by Justin Fox. I had never heard of Mr. Fox. His biography on Time's site says he has a B.A. in international relations. He therefore writes for the business section. He has recently published a book, The Myth of the Rational Market. You get the general idea.
Time was started in 1923 by Henry Luce (Skull & Bones, Council on Foreign Relations). It has long been a popular outlet for the American Establishment. In fact, Time is the news magazine written by the American Establishment in order to shape the thinking of the voters on the Big Picture.
Mr. Fox's enemy is what he perceives as Reaganism.
Economic eras don't last forever, though, and there are signs that the current slowdown is a harbinger of something bigger: an end to America's 25-year love affair with tax cuts and deregulation. A lot of the cracks that have emerged during that time, because of global economic shifts or our own neglect, have become impossible to ignore – stagnant incomes, a federal budget gone way out of balance, soaring energy prices, a once-in-a-lifetime housing crash and growing financial risks in retirement and from health care.
He says there has been growing inequality of wealth. He offers no statistics to indicate that inequality has increased from the income distribution of 1940, let alone 1900. Those who identify inequality as a significant economic or moral liability that calls for radical policy changes by government never do offer such statistics. There is a reason for this. The ratio of wealth by income class has barely changed, in the United States or in Western Europe, in a hundred years.
The evidence for a significant increase in American inequality since 1980 is based on tax evidence. But this evidence does not consider money in tax-deferred retirement funds. So, it is questionable.
In any case, the critics offer no evidence that their reforms will eliminate inequality. It does no good to provide a cure until a problem is diagnosed. Why is income more unequal today – if it is – than it was in 1980? Second, was 1980 significantly different from 1940 or 1900? Where is the evidence? Next, where is the explanation? Only after we have both should we – meaning policy-makers – begin suggesting solutions.
So what should be done about income disparity? In an April Gallup poll, 68% of respondents said wealth "should be more evenly distributed" in the U.S. – the highest percentage saying so since Gallup started asking the question in 1984. A smaller majority, 51%, agreed that "heavy taxes on the rich" were needed.
Surprise! Surprise! Voters with less wealth want the government to stick a gun in the belly of anyone with more wealth, telling him to fork it over. Of course, voters do not want the government to send people with guns to stick in their bellies, on behalf of people even poorer, who are far more numerous.
The politics of envy is the politics of this commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." It is the politics of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. It is alive and well all over the world.
The author then launches an unsubstantiated attack on Reagan's cuts of the top brackets: from 70% to 28%. No mention is made of Kennedy's cuts from 91% to 70%. The economy boomed in both cases.
Then there is the energy crisis. What is needed? Not more production. We need more taxes and more subsidies by federal government.
What makes doing the right thing on energy difficult is that it would almost inevitably involve raising costs now, with higher taxes on oil, increased subsidies for other energy sources or higher energy-efficiency standards for vehicles and homes – or all three. Economists tend to prefer the first of these approaches because taxes on gas, oil or fossil fuels in general tamp demand and allow the market – rather than members of Congress – to sift out the best alternatives.
Here is the good news, he says: the candidates' stand on global warming.
Interesting, though, to fight global warming, Clinton, McCain and Obama are all in favor of a carbon-cap-and-trade regimen, which would raise the price of fossil fuels just as surely as a direct tax would. Almost in spite of ourselves, we may end up with a semi-rational long-term energy policy. It won't make gas cheaper anytime soon – or perhaps ever – but in the long run, it could strengthen the country's economic prospects.
Next, how should government solve the housing crisis? Simple: repeal the tax deduction for mortgage interest payments. That will do it! Yes, sir, there is nothing like a huge tax on everyone's after-tax income to stimulate robust growth in the housing market. (Too bad it won't happen – voters being used to the deduction.)
Several countries have dropped the mortgage-interest deduction in recent years, with no noticeably adverse effects, but there's no indication that any of our presidential candidates are contemplating such a move.
Then there is universal health care. No problem here, either!
But there's real hope on this front. It is possible to conceive of a system that brings the 47 million uninsured into the fold, improves medical outcomes and costs less than what we've got now. It's possible to conceive of because many other wealthy countries already have such systems. Figuring out exactly how to make universal health care work in the U.S. is a matter better left to its own lengthy magazine article. But if you're looking for big economic change from the next Administration, this is the form it's most likely to take.
This article appeared in the premier Establishment outlet for the American intelligentsia.
My conclusion: get ready for a big dose of the politics of envy.
KUCINICH'S ECONOMIST SPEAKS OUT
There are not many American politicians further to the Left economically than Dennis Kucinich. In a recent interview, his economic advisor, Michael Hudson, provided a detailed and accurate assessment of the problems facing the Federal Reserve System. Then he offered solutions.
You will not like the solutions.
The interviewer knew what questions to ask. The questions centered around the solvency of America's largest banks. The FED is letting them swap bad debt for Treasury debt. Half of the FED's reserves have been swapped for this supposedly AAA-rated paper since last December. This cannot go on much longer.
Problem: this program merely buys time. How will the banks unload this bad paper on suckers? The supply of suckers has dried up.
The Fed's idea was merely to buy enough time for the banks to sell their junk mortgages to the proverbial "greater fool." But foreign investors no longer are playing this role, nor are domestic U.S. pension funds. So the most likely result will be for the Fed simply to roll over its loans – as if the problem can be cured by yet more time.
The problem is bad real estate loans. There is nothing the Treasury can do to solve this problem. The game is over.
The financial sector has been living in the short run for quite a while now, and I suspect that a lot of money managers are planning to get out or be fired now that the game is over. And it really is over. The Treasury's attempt to reflate the real estate market has not worked, and it can't work. Mortgage arrears, defaults and foreclosures are rising, and much property has become unsaleable except at distress prices that leave homeowners with negative equity.
Hence, the title of the article: "The Game Is Over. There Won't Be a Rebound."
The dollar is likely to fall. The problem begins with the international trade system.
When Europe and Asia receive excess dollars, these are turned over to their central banks, which have little alternative but to recycle these back to the United States by buying U.S. Treasury bonds. Foreign governments – and their taxpayers – are thus financing the domestic U.S. federal budget deficit, which itself stems largely from the war in Iraq that most foreign voters oppose.
This is exactly the problem. The United States has pressured oil-exporting nations in the Middle East to demand payment in dollars and then cycle these dollars back through American multinational banks.
For over 30 years they have been pressured to recycle their oil earnings into the U.S. stock market and loans to U.S. financial institutions. They have taken large losses on these investments (such as last year's money to bail out Citibank), and are trying to recoup them via the oil market.
Conclusion: ". . . unless they are willing to make a structural break and change the world monetary system radically, they will remain powerless to avoid giving the United States a free ride – including a free ride for its military spending and war in the Near East."
But the fact is, a refusal by central banks to buy T-bills is exactly such a structural break in the world monetary system. He thinks this is now happening. So do I. So, I see no way to remain optimistic about the future value of the dollar.
Regional banks will go under, he says. The FED and the government will oversee mergers.
False reporting also will help financial institutions avoid the appearance of insolvency. They will seek more and more government guarantees, ostensibly to help middle-class depositors but actually favoring the big speculators who are their major clients.
I add: this is already taking place. That is what the FED's swaps of Treasury debt for private mortgage-backed assets is all about.
Then what should Obama do? Tax and spend.
As president, he will have to do what FDR did, and challenge the financial oligarchy with new government regulatory agencies staffed with real regulators, not deregulators as under the Bush-Clinton-Bush regime. . . .
Most of all, he will have to make the tax system back progressive again if the domestic market is to recover. He should remove the tax-deductibility of interest payments, and do what the original 1913 income tax did: tax capital gains at normal income rates rather than subsidizing speculation. . . .
Wait a minute! This is what Mr. Fox recommends in his article in Time.
What about Social Security and Medicare? Simple: exempt every family that makes under $60,000 a year and tax all income for everyone else – no cut-off at $105,000.
There is no deduction from gross income for donations under Social Security. This is just what the centralizers need! This will be Europe's tax system.
He says this will take power away from the American oligarchy. "Unless he does this, what used to be a democracy will be turned into an oligarchy."
Yet Time ran a cover story on just this sort of tax reform. And Time has been the popular news magazine for the oligarchy since its creation in 1923.
CONCLUSION
We are heading into a great reversal. We are going to see rising taxes and a falling stock market. Housing is unlikely to rebound next year.
The economic goal today is to keep what you have in the face of a revived welfare state. The days of wine and roses are going to be rolled back next year and beyond.
[Via Lew Rockwell]
Meet the Antipreneurs
Bill Goldsmith has always been a maverick. As a radio disc jockey and program director in the 1970s and '80s, he loved creating his own mixes of modern rock and introducing listeners to cutting-edge musicians. But in the '90s, as large corporations bought up the stations he worked for, Goldsmith began to feel increasingly choked by the demands of commercial radio. Programming was becoming too formulaic; he was given less leeway. Working in radio just wasn't fun anymore.
In 2000, with the rise of the Internet and streaming media, Goldsmith had an idea: Why not start his own station, one that would buck the constraints of corporate radio with innovative programming and no ads? Today, Radioparadise.com, which broadcasts an eclectic mix of modern, classic, and alternative rock, is commercial-free. It's supported entirely by donations from its listeners, 15,000 of whom are logged onto the site at any given time. Goldsmith's company, based in Paradise, Calif., has three employees and about $1 million in annual revenues. Rebecca Goldsmith, Bill's wife, is the CFO and new music reviewer. Says Bill: "I hate advertising. There is this kind of organic sense of community that develops here that could not happen if this radio station's sole reason for existence was to increase shareholder value for a large corporation."
Meet the antipreneurs. Goldsmith is one of perhaps a few thousand business owners who have won both notice and profits by being overtly or covertly anti-big business and anti-advertising. Antipreneurs frequently choose each other as suppliers because they share similar philosophies. Their marketing strategy is targeted toward consumers who have grown cynical about buying products and services from larger companies, whose methods they deem irresponsible. "Cynical consumers perceive that most of the marketplace is bad, lacking in integrity, or not trustworthy, except for a few [often small or local] companies," says Amanda Helm, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. "But once they find a company they can trust, they are very motivated to stick with [it]."
Antipreneurs are quick to differentiate their efforts to reform capitalism from social entrepreneurs' attempts to harness business for philanthropic ends. "What appeals to people about us is that this is a positive vision of how the marketplace can and should work," says Adam Neiman, president and CEO of No Sweat Apparel, a five- employee, $1 million Boston company that sells clothes produced in union factories. Neiman says the company's mission is to improve conditions for workers in the garment industry, in part by paying them a living wage and ensuring that they have union representation.
Antipreneurs walk a fine ideological line: They are pro-business and want their companies to grow, but they're against big business. They engage in global commerce while disdaining the machinations of globalization. They profit from the free market, but they criticize it, too.
So how do they get away with it? They wear their contrarian politics on their sleeves and seek customers who do the same. Often those are the so-called dark greens and very dark greens, who marketing experts say are borderline obsessed with environmental issues and feel the need to preach about their lifestyle. In addition, some 37% of people age 18 to 30 prefer to use brands that are socially conscious, with more than three-quarters of that group citing fair labor practices and two-thirds listing environmental factors as chief concerns, according to New York youth marketing company Alloy Media & Marketing (ALOY). Alloy says the youth market has nearly $200 billion in buying power.
Antipreneurs attempt to reach their potential customers without traditional advertising. What advertising they do is likely to be ironic, in-your-face, or highly political. In all cases, it reinforces the importance of buying from small companies that produce with sustainability in mind and use ethical labor practices. One consequence of this highly charged political stance is that antipreneurs face the wrath of passionate customers if they underdeliver or merely appear to.
ANTI-BRANDS
Although some credit The New York Times media columnist Rob Walker with coining the term "antipreneur," Vancouver-based Kalle Lasn gives the movement much of its ideological weight. Lasn is co-founder of the magazine Adbusters, which analyzes the effects and pervasiveness of advertising by large corporations. He advocates "culture jamming," which he describes as the interruption of unconscious consumer behavior that favors buying over producing. One of culture jamming's techniques is the deconstruction of large companies' ad campaigns to expose what antipreneurs believe is their hypocrisy.
Lasn doesn't stop with advertising. "If you want to change the world, you have to change capitalism into a more grassroots phenomenon, and that means pulling down the megacorporations," he says, speaking with hints of his native Estonian. In the past decade, he says, "A whole new wave of small business is really strutting its stuff in a powerful way around the world, and it includes everything from ethical principles in running business to fair trade to a large and growing movement of people who just want to buy local." Lasn says this movement is gaining strength as people become exasperated with what he calls the traditional "complaint-based" politics of the left—whining lots and doing little. Antipreneurs, he says, actually make a difference by promoting products that have a low impact on the environment or are fairly produced.
Lasn is himself an antipreneur. In 2003 he took on sneaker manufacturer Nike (NKE) and its labor practices in Asia by launching Blackspot Shoes. One shoe is even called the "Unswoosher," a deliberate swipe at the Nike logo. Blackspot's logo is, naturally, a large white spot. "This is in the spirit of playful resistance that culture jamming is all about," Lasn says. "Why not befuddle a few people and force them, through cognitive dissonance, to figure out the contradiction? It's good for them."
Marketing experts see things a bit differently. "No logo is still a logo, and one your social-cultural tribe will recognize," says Michal Strahilevitz, a professor of marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. "It has the same effect of the Nike Swoosh, but it is the logo of a different tribe." This also explains why apparel is such fertile territory for antipreneurs: Antipreneurs appeal to consumers who want to buy products with a kind of reverse conspicuous consumption in mind. "It works better if it is publicly consumed, as that way others know you are an ethical consumer," she says. "You get points for being seen."
To date, Lasn's 13-person company has sold about 30,000 pairs of the $100 shoes, which are made in a union factory in Portugal. Lasn advertises only in his own magazine, although he says he's planning to run an MTV (VIA) spot with the tagline "Rethink Capitalism" within the next year or so.
Lasn has certainly made an impact on other antipreneurs, such as David Wampler, founder and sole proprietor of Simple Living Network in Trout Lake, Wash. The Web company, with $200,000 in annual revenues, is an online bazaar of products and services—information on green living, T-shirts, CDs—offered by small, anticorporate businesses. "I found inspiration in [Lasn's] work and appreciate the approach he is taking and the message he is trying to deliver," Wampler says. His goal is not to get rich so much as to run a business that supports an "outwardly simple and inwardly rich" life. Wampler says he has "purposely chosen to operate as a for-profit corporation in order to model sustainable small business practices."
Antipreneurs do pay careful attention to how their products are presented. Moo Shoes, a $1.2 million New York vegan shoe store with five employees, has made its shop a community hub for information about the vegan lifestyle and about animal cruelty. This spring, Moo Shoes hosted Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, a national agency for stray and abused pets. Best Friends set up pens and cages in the store with about 20 homeless dogs and cats. Customers learned about the agency and the strays, and two cats were placed in city homes. "We care about animals, and getting animals homes is important to us, though not directly related to the shoes," says Moo Shoes co-founder Sara Kubersky.
The store sells footwear that is produced by a tiny universe of manufacturers that use vegan materials and adhere to fair labor practices. Moo Shoes also manufactures its own vegan shoes, called Novaca (Spanish for "no cow"), in Portugal. The company does do some advertising, primarily in publications such as VegNews and Vegetarian Times. One ad depicts a lone cow sitting near a barn saying "Save My Skin: Buying leather directly supports factory farms and slaughterhouses, where, every year, millions of animals are killed for their skins. Think. Before you buy."
Of course, antipreneurs aren't the only ones to have figured out that appearing not to advertise, or running nontraditional ads, can be just as effective as more conventional campaigns. Big companies have caught on, too. "The hot trend within promotions is to try to create an impression that your product is more countercultural," says the University of Wisconsin's Helm. Nissan ran billboards painted by graffiti artist JCDecaux to launch its new Qashqai mini-sport-utility vehicle last winter. Nissan (NSANY) and Blackspot, says Samantha Skey, executive vice-president of strategic marketing at Alloy, "are going after the same customer."
Here, antipreneurs have an inherent advantage. "When you have a smaller company committed to a certain type of social responsibility [from its] inception, one that is really and truly founded on building business around sustainability or fair labor, that [philosophy] is inherent in the DNA of the company," says Skey. "Consumers pick up on it."
Or as Erica Kubersky, co-founder of Moo Shoes, says: "Consumers know more these days than they used to. If you are not doing this from personal conviction, you will never convey the same message."
The other approach, taken by No Sweat Apparel, is to do no advertising. Like Goldsmith, Neiman, president and CEO of the eight-year-old company, depends on word of mouth to spread the gospel of his goods. Using ads to sell a product "really puts a huge amount of pressure on wages," says Neiman, estimating that advertising would add about 20% to his costs. He says his workers in the seven union factories that supply him, located in places as far-flung as Argentina, South Africa, and the West Bank, all get paid a living wage.
No Sweat makes the most of its logo, which features the World War II icon Rosie the Riveter. The brand has a following among the indie music crowd, so Neiman gives emerging bands a banner with Rosie tricked out as a punk rocker, complete with piercings, metal bracelets, and tattoos. The bands often display the banner at concerts. "We call her the dominatrix of labor," says Neiman, with a laugh. "What we are doing is a little tongue-in-cheek, trying to provoke a reaction."
UNION DUES
still, since image is crucial to their ability to sell, these companies must deliver on their message in ways other businesses may not have to. In 2006, another union was trying to take over the already-unionized factory Neiman used in Indonesia. This union eventually audited Neiman's factory, and Lasn posted some unflattering details from the audit on Adbusters' Web site this April. It didn't help that Neiman and Lasn were making similar shoes. But the audit wasn't news to Neiman, who says he posted the same details on his own company's Web site before Lasn got involved. "We got blindsided by a segment of the anti-sweatshop community that objects to market-based solutions altogether," he says. In the end, he had to sever ties with the factory he'd been using.
No matter how countercultural he might sound, Neiman still wants to grow his business, like most other entrepreneurs. "This model is scalable," he says. "We can source from as many union shops as are out there, and we can keep growing and expanding rapidly." Sara Kubersky wants to open Moo Shoes stores in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in the next two to three years. "It would be great to have one in every city," she says. Goldsmith doesn't think his noncommercial ethos means he's sacrificing revenue—quite the contrary. "I firmly believe we are making more money with our anti-advertising stance than we would if we solicited as much advertising as possible," he says. He wouldn't mind if Radioparadise.com grew to four to five times its current size. As long as he can set the playlist, and the priorities, himself.
[Via Business Week]
In 2000, with the rise of the Internet and streaming media, Goldsmith had an idea: Why not start his own station, one that would buck the constraints of corporate radio with innovative programming and no ads? Today, Radioparadise.com, which broadcasts an eclectic mix of modern, classic, and alternative rock, is commercial-free. It's supported entirely by donations from its listeners, 15,000 of whom are logged onto the site at any given time. Goldsmith's company, based in Paradise, Calif., has three employees and about $1 million in annual revenues. Rebecca Goldsmith, Bill's wife, is the CFO and new music reviewer. Says Bill: "I hate advertising. There is this kind of organic sense of community that develops here that could not happen if this radio station's sole reason for existence was to increase shareholder value for a large corporation."
Meet the antipreneurs. Goldsmith is one of perhaps a few thousand business owners who have won both notice and profits by being overtly or covertly anti-big business and anti-advertising. Antipreneurs frequently choose each other as suppliers because they share similar philosophies. Their marketing strategy is targeted toward consumers who have grown cynical about buying products and services from larger companies, whose methods they deem irresponsible. "Cynical consumers perceive that most of the marketplace is bad, lacking in integrity, or not trustworthy, except for a few [often small or local] companies," says Amanda Helm, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. "But once they find a company they can trust, they are very motivated to stick with [it]."
Antipreneurs are quick to differentiate their efforts to reform capitalism from social entrepreneurs' attempts to harness business for philanthropic ends. "What appeals to people about us is that this is a positive vision of how the marketplace can and should work," says Adam Neiman, president and CEO of No Sweat Apparel, a five- employee, $1 million Boston company that sells clothes produced in union factories. Neiman says the company's mission is to improve conditions for workers in the garment industry, in part by paying them a living wage and ensuring that they have union representation.
Antipreneurs walk a fine ideological line: They are pro-business and want their companies to grow, but they're against big business. They engage in global commerce while disdaining the machinations of globalization. They profit from the free market, but they criticize it, too.
So how do they get away with it? They wear their contrarian politics on their sleeves and seek customers who do the same. Often those are the so-called dark greens and very dark greens, who marketing experts say are borderline obsessed with environmental issues and feel the need to preach about their lifestyle. In addition, some 37% of people age 18 to 30 prefer to use brands that are socially conscious, with more than three-quarters of that group citing fair labor practices and two-thirds listing environmental factors as chief concerns, according to New York youth marketing company Alloy Media & Marketing (ALOY). Alloy says the youth market has nearly $200 billion in buying power.
Antipreneurs attempt to reach their potential customers without traditional advertising. What advertising they do is likely to be ironic, in-your-face, or highly political. In all cases, it reinforces the importance of buying from small companies that produce with sustainability in mind and use ethical labor practices. One consequence of this highly charged political stance is that antipreneurs face the wrath of passionate customers if they underdeliver or merely appear to.
ANTI-BRANDS
Although some credit The New York Times media columnist Rob Walker with coining the term "antipreneur," Vancouver-based Kalle Lasn gives the movement much of its ideological weight. Lasn is co-founder of the magazine Adbusters, which analyzes the effects and pervasiveness of advertising by large corporations. He advocates "culture jamming," which he describes as the interruption of unconscious consumer behavior that favors buying over producing. One of culture jamming's techniques is the deconstruction of large companies' ad campaigns to expose what antipreneurs believe is their hypocrisy.
Lasn doesn't stop with advertising. "If you want to change the world, you have to change capitalism into a more grassroots phenomenon, and that means pulling down the megacorporations," he says, speaking with hints of his native Estonian. In the past decade, he says, "A whole new wave of small business is really strutting its stuff in a powerful way around the world, and it includes everything from ethical principles in running business to fair trade to a large and growing movement of people who just want to buy local." Lasn says this movement is gaining strength as people become exasperated with what he calls the traditional "complaint-based" politics of the left—whining lots and doing little. Antipreneurs, he says, actually make a difference by promoting products that have a low impact on the environment or are fairly produced.
Lasn is himself an antipreneur. In 2003 he took on sneaker manufacturer Nike (NKE) and its labor practices in Asia by launching Blackspot Shoes. One shoe is even called the "Unswoosher," a deliberate swipe at the Nike logo. Blackspot's logo is, naturally, a large white spot. "This is in the spirit of playful resistance that culture jamming is all about," Lasn says. "Why not befuddle a few people and force them, through cognitive dissonance, to figure out the contradiction? It's good for them."
Marketing experts see things a bit differently. "No logo is still a logo, and one your social-cultural tribe will recognize," says Michal Strahilevitz, a professor of marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. "It has the same effect of the Nike Swoosh, but it is the logo of a different tribe." This also explains why apparel is such fertile territory for antipreneurs: Antipreneurs appeal to consumers who want to buy products with a kind of reverse conspicuous consumption in mind. "It works better if it is publicly consumed, as that way others know you are an ethical consumer," she says. "You get points for being seen."
To date, Lasn's 13-person company has sold about 30,000 pairs of the $100 shoes, which are made in a union factory in Portugal. Lasn advertises only in his own magazine, although he says he's planning to run an MTV (VIA) spot with the tagline "Rethink Capitalism" within the next year or so.
Lasn has certainly made an impact on other antipreneurs, such as David Wampler, founder and sole proprietor of Simple Living Network in Trout Lake, Wash. The Web company, with $200,000 in annual revenues, is an online bazaar of products and services—information on green living, T-shirts, CDs—offered by small, anticorporate businesses. "I found inspiration in [Lasn's] work and appreciate the approach he is taking and the message he is trying to deliver," Wampler says. His goal is not to get rich so much as to run a business that supports an "outwardly simple and inwardly rich" life. Wampler says he has "purposely chosen to operate as a for-profit corporation in order to model sustainable small business practices."
Antipreneurs do pay careful attention to how their products are presented. Moo Shoes, a $1.2 million New York vegan shoe store with five employees, has made its shop a community hub for information about the vegan lifestyle and about animal cruelty. This spring, Moo Shoes hosted Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, a national agency for stray and abused pets. Best Friends set up pens and cages in the store with about 20 homeless dogs and cats. Customers learned about the agency and the strays, and two cats were placed in city homes. "We care about animals, and getting animals homes is important to us, though not directly related to the shoes," says Moo Shoes co-founder Sara Kubersky.
The store sells footwear that is produced by a tiny universe of manufacturers that use vegan materials and adhere to fair labor practices. Moo Shoes also manufactures its own vegan shoes, called Novaca (Spanish for "no cow"), in Portugal. The company does do some advertising, primarily in publications such as VegNews and Vegetarian Times. One ad depicts a lone cow sitting near a barn saying "Save My Skin: Buying leather directly supports factory farms and slaughterhouses, where, every year, millions of animals are killed for their skins. Think. Before you buy."
Of course, antipreneurs aren't the only ones to have figured out that appearing not to advertise, or running nontraditional ads, can be just as effective as more conventional campaigns. Big companies have caught on, too. "The hot trend within promotions is to try to create an impression that your product is more countercultural," says the University of Wisconsin's Helm. Nissan ran billboards painted by graffiti artist JCDecaux to launch its new Qashqai mini-sport-utility vehicle last winter. Nissan (NSANY) and Blackspot, says Samantha Skey, executive vice-president of strategic marketing at Alloy, "are going after the same customer."
Here, antipreneurs have an inherent advantage. "When you have a smaller company committed to a certain type of social responsibility [from its] inception, one that is really and truly founded on building business around sustainability or fair labor, that [philosophy] is inherent in the DNA of the company," says Skey. "Consumers pick up on it."
Or as Erica Kubersky, co-founder of Moo Shoes, says: "Consumers know more these days than they used to. If you are not doing this from personal conviction, you will never convey the same message."
The other approach, taken by No Sweat Apparel, is to do no advertising. Like Goldsmith, Neiman, president and CEO of the eight-year-old company, depends on word of mouth to spread the gospel of his goods. Using ads to sell a product "really puts a huge amount of pressure on wages," says Neiman, estimating that advertising would add about 20% to his costs. He says his workers in the seven union factories that supply him, located in places as far-flung as Argentina, South Africa, and the West Bank, all get paid a living wage.
No Sweat makes the most of its logo, which features the World War II icon Rosie the Riveter. The brand has a following among the indie music crowd, so Neiman gives emerging bands a banner with Rosie tricked out as a punk rocker, complete with piercings, metal bracelets, and tattoos. The bands often display the banner at concerts. "We call her the dominatrix of labor," says Neiman, with a laugh. "What we are doing is a little tongue-in-cheek, trying to provoke a reaction."
UNION DUES
still, since image is crucial to their ability to sell, these companies must deliver on their message in ways other businesses may not have to. In 2006, another union was trying to take over the already-unionized factory Neiman used in Indonesia. This union eventually audited Neiman's factory, and Lasn posted some unflattering details from the audit on Adbusters' Web site this April. It didn't help that Neiman and Lasn were making similar shoes. But the audit wasn't news to Neiman, who says he posted the same details on his own company's Web site before Lasn got involved. "We got blindsided by a segment of the anti-sweatshop community that objects to market-based solutions altogether," he says. In the end, he had to sever ties with the factory he'd been using.
No matter how countercultural he might sound, Neiman still wants to grow his business, like most other entrepreneurs. "This model is scalable," he says. "We can source from as many union shops as are out there, and we can keep growing and expanding rapidly." Sara Kubersky wants to open Moo Shoes stores in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in the next two to three years. "It would be great to have one in every city," she says. Goldsmith doesn't think his noncommercial ethos means he's sacrificing revenue—quite the contrary. "I firmly believe we are making more money with our anti-advertising stance than we would if we solicited as much advertising as possible," he says. He wouldn't mind if Radioparadise.com grew to four to five times its current size. As long as he can set the playlist, and the priorities, himself.
[Via Business Week]
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Bay Area Home Prices Continue Steep Fall
SAN FRANCISCO - Regional home prices continued to fall at an accelerating pace in April, establishing yet another record low, according to a closely watched real estate market analysis.
The price of a typical single-family home in the San Francisco area plunged 22.1 percent compared with a year earlier, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price index. The study, published by New York credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, defines the region as Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
The 10-City Composite index, tracking major U.S. markets, decreased 16.3 percent, also the largest decline in more than 20 years of data. Among the 20 regions tracked by S&P/Case-Shiller, 13 posted record annual lows and, for the first time at least in this market cycle, all stood in negative territory. Las Vegas and Miami were the worst off, down 26.8 percent and 26.7 percent, respectively.
Bay Area home prices declined 20.2 percent year-over-year in March, 17.2 percent in February and 13.2 percent in January. April prices were off 2.2 percent from the prior month.
The indexes show the overall price trend in specific metropolitan areas. Many of the cities or neighborhoods within these regions performed better or worse. Areas like San Francisco and much of the Peninsula have held up relatively well, for instance, but the net figure has been dragged down by steep drops in outlying areas like eastern Contra Costa County.
Many real estate experts consider the S&P/Case-Shiller indexes and others like them more accurate gauges of real estate trends than the median price approach used by other groups. Because they track the value only of homes that have traded hands at least twice, the indexes chart the actual increase or decrease in specific homes.
Median surveys compare prices for homes sold in one month to an entirely different set sold in the next, meaning they can be artificially distorted when a higher proportion of homes sell in the lower- or higher-priced tier in a given period.
[Via SF Gate]
The price of a typical single-family home in the San Francisco area plunged 22.1 percent compared with a year earlier, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price index. The study, published by New York credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, defines the region as Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
The 10-City Composite index, tracking major U.S. markets, decreased 16.3 percent, also the largest decline in more than 20 years of data. Among the 20 regions tracked by S&P/Case-Shiller, 13 posted record annual lows and, for the first time at least in this market cycle, all stood in negative territory. Las Vegas and Miami were the worst off, down 26.8 percent and 26.7 percent, respectively.
Bay Area home prices declined 20.2 percent year-over-year in March, 17.2 percent in February and 13.2 percent in January. April prices were off 2.2 percent from the prior month.
The indexes show the overall price trend in specific metropolitan areas. Many of the cities or neighborhoods within these regions performed better or worse. Areas like San Francisco and much of the Peninsula have held up relatively well, for instance, but the net figure has been dragged down by steep drops in outlying areas like eastern Contra Costa County.
Many real estate experts consider the S&P/Case-Shiller indexes and others like them more accurate gauges of real estate trends than the median price approach used by other groups. Because they track the value only of homes that have traded hands at least twice, the indexes chart the actual increase or decrease in specific homes.
Median surveys compare prices for homes sold in one month to an entirely different set sold in the next, meaning they can be artificially distorted when a higher proportion of homes sell in the lower- or higher-priced tier in a given period.
[Via SF Gate]
Your House Is Worth Less? Good
The last time we had this feeling of financial vertigo was when the Internet bubble popped seven years ago. But this is much worse: the value of our homes is collapsing. For generations, rising home prices have been central to our general sense of well-being.
So why is the real estate collapse a good thing? First, because the collapse of any financial bubble can be interpreted as a morality play: greed gets its comeuppance. Subprime mortgages play the role that used to be played by junk bonds. They represent easy money--too easy, in retrospect. Borrowed money, if it gets out of hand, puts economic history on speed: everything rises faster, then collapses harder. Foolish lenders become the enablers of foolish borrowers. In the 1990s, people came to believe that stock prices would rise forever. They learned differently. And now we are learning differently about real estate as well. Whenever the price people will pay today depends on the belief that other people will pay even more tomorrow, you've got a bubble. It takes only a slight letdown in those expectations to send the whole delightful, self-feeding process into reverse.
The end of the housing bubble is good for practical reasons as well. Real estate--land and buildings--is fundamentally different from most other things people invest in. Unlike a factory (or a company full of factories), a house does not produce anything. Sure, it's a place to live, and that has value. But that value--as measured by what the property would rent for--hasn't been going up anything like the 20% or 30% or 40% a year that some houses have appreciated recently. If the price of, say, onions goes up 40%, more onions will soon flood the market. The extra money people pay will go to the production of onions. This happens in the housing market only to a tiny extent. Most houses that change hands each year were built long ago. When they are sold for a higher price, the money goes into the pockets of the previous owners.
We all count this money when we tot up our net worth. If you don't want to sell your house, you can borrow against its rising value. Nowhere is the real estate insanity of recent years more vividly on display than in the market for second mortgages. Lenders hawk them like patent medicines in the 19th century, as a cure for all your ills.
And even if you don't take out a second mortgage, you can still fantasize about what the house is worth. Fantasies of real estate prices have long been a staple of middle-class conversation. These days you can go to the Web and get a specific number.
All these rising house values added trillions to our sense of national wealth, but it is an illusion. If everybody, or even a fraction of everybody, tried to cash in on this rising value, prices would collapse, and the value would disappear. (By contrast, there aren't millions of onion owners counting on the value of their onions to keep going up year after year.) Economists predicted for years that something like this would happen as the boomer generation aged. Nobody believed them.
Since most families own their homes, the country is happier when real estate prices are going up. But it is healthier when prices are going down. Look at it this way: in the housing market, people fall into three categories. Some, mostly young folks, are trying to buy their first home. Some, at various stages of midlife, own a home but will trade up someday, or at least think about it. And some, mostly older, are trying to sell and downsize. Who is served by soaring house prices? Not the first group: rising prices make it hard for those people to get into the game. Not the second group: what it will have to pay for a bigger house is probably increasing faster than what it can get for the current one.
The only clear beneficiaries of rising house prices are those, generally older, who want to sell their home and buy a smaller one or none at all. These people, on average, have benefited the most from the spectacular rise of real estate prices over their entire adult lives. If they have to forgo part of that windfall, it is no tragedy.
If they borrowed against a value for their house that turns out to be fictitious and spent the money on ephemeral things like vacations, as the commercials urge them to do, that was foolish--in some cases, maybe even tragically foolish. People want the government to do something, and presidential candidates are beavering away at plans. But any plan that would prevent home prices from declining would be foolishness squared. Genuine tragedy deserves sympathy and help, even if it is the result of your own foolishness. But when we do not even guarantee basic health care, it would be nuts to think about making protection against real estate losses part of the social safety net.
[Via Time]
So why is the real estate collapse a good thing? First, because the collapse of any financial bubble can be interpreted as a morality play: greed gets its comeuppance. Subprime mortgages play the role that used to be played by junk bonds. They represent easy money--too easy, in retrospect. Borrowed money, if it gets out of hand, puts economic history on speed: everything rises faster, then collapses harder. Foolish lenders become the enablers of foolish borrowers. In the 1990s, people came to believe that stock prices would rise forever. They learned differently. And now we are learning differently about real estate as well. Whenever the price people will pay today depends on the belief that other people will pay even more tomorrow, you've got a bubble. It takes only a slight letdown in those expectations to send the whole delightful, self-feeding process into reverse.
The end of the housing bubble is good for practical reasons as well. Real estate--land and buildings--is fundamentally different from most other things people invest in. Unlike a factory (or a company full of factories), a house does not produce anything. Sure, it's a place to live, and that has value. But that value--as measured by what the property would rent for--hasn't been going up anything like the 20% or 30% or 40% a year that some houses have appreciated recently. If the price of, say, onions goes up 40%, more onions will soon flood the market. The extra money people pay will go to the production of onions. This happens in the housing market only to a tiny extent. Most houses that change hands each year were built long ago. When they are sold for a higher price, the money goes into the pockets of the previous owners.
We all count this money when we tot up our net worth. If you don't want to sell your house, you can borrow against its rising value. Nowhere is the real estate insanity of recent years more vividly on display than in the market for second mortgages. Lenders hawk them like patent medicines in the 19th century, as a cure for all your ills.
And even if you don't take out a second mortgage, you can still fantasize about what the house is worth. Fantasies of real estate prices have long been a staple of middle-class conversation. These days you can go to the Web and get a specific number.
All these rising house values added trillions to our sense of national wealth, but it is an illusion. If everybody, or even a fraction of everybody, tried to cash in on this rising value, prices would collapse, and the value would disappear. (By contrast, there aren't millions of onion owners counting on the value of their onions to keep going up year after year.) Economists predicted for years that something like this would happen as the boomer generation aged. Nobody believed them.
Since most families own their homes, the country is happier when real estate prices are going up. But it is healthier when prices are going down. Look at it this way: in the housing market, people fall into three categories. Some, mostly young folks, are trying to buy their first home. Some, at various stages of midlife, own a home but will trade up someday, or at least think about it. And some, mostly older, are trying to sell and downsize. Who is served by soaring house prices? Not the first group: rising prices make it hard for those people to get into the game. Not the second group: what it will have to pay for a bigger house is probably increasing faster than what it can get for the current one.
The only clear beneficiaries of rising house prices are those, generally older, who want to sell their home and buy a smaller one or none at all. These people, on average, have benefited the most from the spectacular rise of real estate prices over their entire adult lives. If they have to forgo part of that windfall, it is no tragedy.
If they borrowed against a value for their house that turns out to be fictitious and spent the money on ephemeral things like vacations, as the commercials urge them to do, that was foolish--in some cases, maybe even tragically foolish. People want the government to do something, and presidential candidates are beavering away at plans. But any plan that would prevent home prices from declining would be foolishness squared. Genuine tragedy deserves sympathy and help, even if it is the result of your own foolishness. But when we do not even guarantee basic health care, it would be nuts to think about making protection against real estate losses part of the social safety net.
[Via Time]
Monday, June 23, 2008
Medical Care's State of Denial
Doctors are supposed to prescribe tests and treatments that are medically necessary for their patients. Health insurers are expected to cover that care, while keeping inappropriate expenses in check.
But what happens when that process breaks down and sick patients are left to fight for medical care?
Each year, thousands of Californians find themselves at odds with their health insurers over whether they, as patients, should get the treatment their doctors prescribed.
Peter Isgro of Santa Cruz is among them. His insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, stopped paying for certain chemotherapy drugs after his cancer progressed, a decision that has been upheld in two appeals.
Isgro said he feels like the insurance company is second-guessing his doctor. "If your doctor wants to give you something and they can deny it, that's wrong," he said.
Anthem Blue Cross said it follows strict protocols, relying on medical evidence in determining what is necessary and appropriate to cover.
"Even in a dire situation, it is ethically appropriate to withhold treatment if it's not effective," said Dr. Michael Belman, medical director of Anthem Blue Cross, who was not speaking specifically about Isgro's case. Belman said doctors do not always recommend the best treatments, and cost is never a primary consideration.
Consumer advocates, however, see the situation differently.
Health insurers "are going back to the old strategies of the '90s, when they interrupted care on the front end by denying or delaying treatment offered by a doctor," said Jerry Flanagan, health advocate for Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica group. According to him, insurers hope patients will give up or settle for less, either way saving them money, a contention the companies dispute.
Patients now have a number of resources to turn to if they believe they received an unfair denial. Last year, the state's HMO Help Center received nearly 90,000 calls from consumers asking for help in resolving their health plan woes.
About 7,000 Californians have taken advantage of third-party medical reviews since 2001, when the state Department of Managed Health Care started offering them. Last year, the department resolved 1,716 independent medical review, or IMR, cases.
The Department of Insurance, which regulates a smaller number of plans, received 35,280 complaints and resolved 262 IMRs in 2007.
About 40 percent of all IMR decisions are settled in favor of the patient, according to the Department of Managed Health Care.
The majority of treatment disputes address whether the proposed therapy is "medically necessary" or if it is considered to be "experimental" or "investigational." Even treatments approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can be deemed experimental if they are typically used in a different fashion or there is simply not enough evidence to support the use.
Physicians often feel caught in the middle.
"Do I stop treating them while the insurer determines they have eligibility? Even if they get authorization, they say that doesn't guarantee payment," said Dr. Michael Sherman, an oncologist who has offices in Walnut Creek and San Ramon. Sherman said he is forced to provide unreimbursed treatments to patients in those situations.
Dr. Alan Sokolow, chief medical officer for Blue Shield of California, said insurers try to strike a balance.
"We think that is our job - to help patients and providers apply the benefit package the patient has, the dollars they put for insurance coverage and health care, in the most appropriate and effective way," he said, adding that patients should appeal if they disagree.
When appeals don't work, patients can sue their health plan. But that can be a difficult proposition, given that it can be tough to get a lawyer to take such a case, and most plans require their members to agree to binding arbitration.
In the end, patients usually want to get the treatment rather than endure a lengthy legal process.
Joanna Smith, a patient advocate who runs Healthcare Liaison Inc. in Berkeley, said persistence and doing research to back up the case give patients a better chance of success.
"I always say to people appeal, appeal, appeal," she said. "And then appeal again."
Case studies: Three Northern California patients' struggles with insurance carriers.
Karen Vinci
In December 2006, when Karen Vinci's bile-duct cancer recurred, she was told surgery wasn't an option because of the location of the tumor.
Instead, a group of doctors at UCSF recommended what they considered the Alamo woman's only option: five weeks of external-beam radiation followed by noninvasive radiosurgery that used a robotic device called CyberKnife, which attacks the tumor with high doses of targeted radiation.
Vinci's insurer, Blue Shield, approved all the treatments she needed in preparation for the therapy, including the implantation of gold seeds in the tumor. But about two weeks into the radiation treatments in March 2007, Blue Shield reneged on the rest of the radiation as well her CyberKnife procedures.
So Vinci's husband pulled out a checkbook and paid UCSF $10,000 of the $60,000 treatment to make sure his wife's care was not delayed or canceled.
"I had no choice. It was either die or give them money," said Vinci, 57.
Blue Shield had labeled the treatment, which received FDA approval in 2001 for treatment of nonoperable tumors in all parts of the body, "experimental." CyberKnife's manufacturer, Accuray Inc., said the federal government's Medicare program covers the treatment, which has been used on more than 40,000 patients.
Vinci, with the help of her husband and a patient advocate at UCSF, immediately filed a grievance to have a doctor within the insurance company review her case. After that was denied, Vinci went to the insurer's second-level appeal, a three-party panel, which sided with the company.
When Vinci requested an expedited independent medical review of her case through the Department of Managed Health Care, she got the answer she wanted. The state's reviewers overturned Blue Shield's decision, and the hospital promptly refunded the Vincis' money.
Vinci, who is now cancer-free, still does not understand the denial, especially because the treatment was expected to give her a full recovery.
"It was just devastating to know that money was an issue when it comes to your life," she said.
Richard Reynolds
Richard Reynolds' health insurer, Blue Shield of California, paid for virtually everything - surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and medication - after the Berkeley man was diagnosed last year with a rare form of cancer.
When his tumor failed to show on a standard CT scan, his doctors recommended a more sensitive and expensive imaging technique called a PET scan. But his medical group and insurer, having denied an earlier PET scan request, again balked, labeling the tool "experimental" or "investigational" for his diagnosis.
Reynolds managed to get the scan covered when his surgeon appealed directly to high-ranking Blue Shield executives. But a follow-up scan requested several months later was still denied.
Fearing a delay in care, Reynolds shelled out $2,200 in March for the scan at a private PET imaging center. CT scans cost about half the price of PET scans.
Reynolds was mystified by Blue Shield's position. "They've paid for all kinds of specialists. They've put out hundreds and thousands of dollars. But with this one thing - the PET scan - they've drawn this bizarre line in the sand," said Reynolds, 64, communications director at Mother Jones magazine.
His doctor recently submitted a fourth request for an upcoming PET scan, which also was denied.
Reynolds, whose appeals were initially denied through Blue Shield's internal grievance process, submitted a request for an independent medical review through the state Department of Managed Health Care. But when a reporter told Blue Shield officials about the issue - even without identifying the patient or his diagnosis - they tracked down Reynolds' case and resolved the problem.
Blue Shield's medical director, Dr. Alan Sokolow, said his company should have covered the test, but found itself in the difficult terrain of trying to apply standardized protocols to a rare condition.
"We try very hard to be consistent and be fair and correct in our decision making. But this is why we have an appeal process," he said. "Sometimes, we don't always make the correct decision."
Peter Isgro
When antiques store owner Peter Isgro was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer, he was told he had just months to live. That was more than two years ago.
For those two additional years, the 61-year-old Santa Cruz resident credits a different oncologist who put him on an intense chemotherapy regimen - a multidrug concoction of older and cutting-edge therapies that costs about $10,000 every other week.
It was a treatment that gave Isgro the ability to continue working four days a week, allowed him to travel to Europe and kept him alive.
But after scans showed his tumors were growing, his insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, discontinued coverage of the more expensive drugs in his chemotherapy regimen. Since their use was stopped in early May, Isgro's disease, according to his oncologist, has "exploded."
"Clearly, we were keeping a lid on it. It was progressing very slowly and, when we stopped the drugs, it progressed very quickly," said Dr. James Cohen of Los Gatos, adding that all of the drugs he had been combining are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for colon cancer.
Cohen said no amount or combination of medication would cure Isgro. Rather, he hoped to give him a better quality of life as well as more time.
Two appeals to the state Department of Managed Health Care have gone in favor of the insurer. In the most recent decision, issued June 12, two of the three reviewers concluded that the requested therapy would not be more beneficial than the standard, less expensive treatment the insurance company approved.
Isgro believes his insurer simply doesn't want to spend any more money to keep him alive. And he's angry.
"If my name was Kennedy, do you think they'd try to deny me?" he said, referring to Sen. Edward Kennedy, who recently underwent surgery for brain cancer.
Isgro, who has found an attorney to represent him at no cost, is considering his options. He recently resumed the more expensive treatments with the help of his sister, who paid more than $4,000 out of pocket. He also is contacting the pharmaceutical companies that make his drugs to see if they will help pay for his therapy.
"What good does it do to have any kind of national health care plan or state health care plan if your doctor, your primary doctor, does not have the right to prescribe the medications he feels are best for you?" he said. "That's not health care."
What to do if you are denied medical care
If your health insurance carrier is refusing to approve treatment recommended by your doctor, you have a number of options. First, contact your health plan. You probably will have to go through the plan's internal grievance process first. If time is of the essence, ask for an expedited review through the state.
Tips to help you get the care you need:
- Review your health plan policy. Many are available online.
- Make sure your doctor is aware of your problem. Sometimes the initial denial comes from the medical group, which is charged with managing costs. In any case, your doctor's support is important.
- Request the reason for the denial in writing. Take detailed notes of all conversations, including the date and time of the call and the name of the person you speak with. Save copies of all paperwork, and keep these records in chronological order.
- Act soon. If you wait longer than six months, you could lose the right to file a complaint, ask for an independent medical review (also called an IMR), or take other action against your health plan such as arbitration or a lawsuit. An IMR decision is binding on the health plan, but not the patient.
[Via SF Gate ]
But what happens when that process breaks down and sick patients are left to fight for medical care?
Each year, thousands of Californians find themselves at odds with their health insurers over whether they, as patients, should get the treatment their doctors prescribed.
Peter Isgro of Santa Cruz is among them. His insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, stopped paying for certain chemotherapy drugs after his cancer progressed, a decision that has been upheld in two appeals.
Isgro said he feels like the insurance company is second-guessing his doctor. "If your doctor wants to give you something and they can deny it, that's wrong," he said.
Anthem Blue Cross said it follows strict protocols, relying on medical evidence in determining what is necessary and appropriate to cover.
"Even in a dire situation, it is ethically appropriate to withhold treatment if it's not effective," said Dr. Michael Belman, medical director of Anthem Blue Cross, who was not speaking specifically about Isgro's case. Belman said doctors do not always recommend the best treatments, and cost is never a primary consideration.
Consumer advocates, however, see the situation differently.
Health insurers "are going back to the old strategies of the '90s, when they interrupted care on the front end by denying or delaying treatment offered by a doctor," said Jerry Flanagan, health advocate for Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica group. According to him, insurers hope patients will give up or settle for less, either way saving them money, a contention the companies dispute.
Patients now have a number of resources to turn to if they believe they received an unfair denial. Last year, the state's HMO Help Center received nearly 90,000 calls from consumers asking for help in resolving their health plan woes.
About 7,000 Californians have taken advantage of third-party medical reviews since 2001, when the state Department of Managed Health Care started offering them. Last year, the department resolved 1,716 independent medical review, or IMR, cases.
The Department of Insurance, which regulates a smaller number of plans, received 35,280 complaints and resolved 262 IMRs in 2007.
About 40 percent of all IMR decisions are settled in favor of the patient, according to the Department of Managed Health Care.
The majority of treatment disputes address whether the proposed therapy is "medically necessary" or if it is considered to be "experimental" or "investigational." Even treatments approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can be deemed experimental if they are typically used in a different fashion or there is simply not enough evidence to support the use.
Physicians often feel caught in the middle.
"Do I stop treating them while the insurer determines they have eligibility? Even if they get authorization, they say that doesn't guarantee payment," said Dr. Michael Sherman, an oncologist who has offices in Walnut Creek and San Ramon. Sherman said he is forced to provide unreimbursed treatments to patients in those situations.
Dr. Alan Sokolow, chief medical officer for Blue Shield of California, said insurers try to strike a balance.
"We think that is our job - to help patients and providers apply the benefit package the patient has, the dollars they put for insurance coverage and health care, in the most appropriate and effective way," he said, adding that patients should appeal if they disagree.
When appeals don't work, patients can sue their health plan. But that can be a difficult proposition, given that it can be tough to get a lawyer to take such a case, and most plans require their members to agree to binding arbitration.
In the end, patients usually want to get the treatment rather than endure a lengthy legal process.
Joanna Smith, a patient advocate who runs Healthcare Liaison Inc. in Berkeley, said persistence and doing research to back up the case give patients a better chance of success.
"I always say to people appeal, appeal, appeal," she said. "And then appeal again."
Case studies: Three Northern California patients' struggles with insurance carriers.
Karen Vinci
In December 2006, when Karen Vinci's bile-duct cancer recurred, she was told surgery wasn't an option because of the location of the tumor.
Instead, a group of doctors at UCSF recommended what they considered the Alamo woman's only option: five weeks of external-beam radiation followed by noninvasive radiosurgery that used a robotic device called CyberKnife, which attacks the tumor with high doses of targeted radiation.
Vinci's insurer, Blue Shield, approved all the treatments she needed in preparation for the therapy, including the implantation of gold seeds in the tumor. But about two weeks into the radiation treatments in March 2007, Blue Shield reneged on the rest of the radiation as well her CyberKnife procedures.
So Vinci's husband pulled out a checkbook and paid UCSF $10,000 of the $60,000 treatment to make sure his wife's care was not delayed or canceled.
"I had no choice. It was either die or give them money," said Vinci, 57.
Blue Shield had labeled the treatment, which received FDA approval in 2001 for treatment of nonoperable tumors in all parts of the body, "experimental." CyberKnife's manufacturer, Accuray Inc., said the federal government's Medicare program covers the treatment, which has been used on more than 40,000 patients.
Vinci, with the help of her husband and a patient advocate at UCSF, immediately filed a grievance to have a doctor within the insurance company review her case. After that was denied, Vinci went to the insurer's second-level appeal, a three-party panel, which sided with the company.
When Vinci requested an expedited independent medical review of her case through the Department of Managed Health Care, she got the answer she wanted. The state's reviewers overturned Blue Shield's decision, and the hospital promptly refunded the Vincis' money.
Vinci, who is now cancer-free, still does not understand the denial, especially because the treatment was expected to give her a full recovery.
"It was just devastating to know that money was an issue when it comes to your life," she said.
Richard Reynolds
Richard Reynolds' health insurer, Blue Shield of California, paid for virtually everything - surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and medication - after the Berkeley man was diagnosed last year with a rare form of cancer.
When his tumor failed to show on a standard CT scan, his doctors recommended a more sensitive and expensive imaging technique called a PET scan. But his medical group and insurer, having denied an earlier PET scan request, again balked, labeling the tool "experimental" or "investigational" for his diagnosis.
Reynolds managed to get the scan covered when his surgeon appealed directly to high-ranking Blue Shield executives. But a follow-up scan requested several months later was still denied.
Fearing a delay in care, Reynolds shelled out $2,200 in March for the scan at a private PET imaging center. CT scans cost about half the price of PET scans.
Reynolds was mystified by Blue Shield's position. "They've paid for all kinds of specialists. They've put out hundreds and thousands of dollars. But with this one thing - the PET scan - they've drawn this bizarre line in the sand," said Reynolds, 64, communications director at Mother Jones magazine.
His doctor recently submitted a fourth request for an upcoming PET scan, which also was denied.
Reynolds, whose appeals were initially denied through Blue Shield's internal grievance process, submitted a request for an independent medical review through the state Department of Managed Health Care. But when a reporter told Blue Shield officials about the issue - even without identifying the patient or his diagnosis - they tracked down Reynolds' case and resolved the problem.
Blue Shield's medical director, Dr. Alan Sokolow, said his company should have covered the test, but found itself in the difficult terrain of trying to apply standardized protocols to a rare condition.
"We try very hard to be consistent and be fair and correct in our decision making. But this is why we have an appeal process," he said. "Sometimes, we don't always make the correct decision."
Peter Isgro
When antiques store owner Peter Isgro was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer, he was told he had just months to live. That was more than two years ago.
For those two additional years, the 61-year-old Santa Cruz resident credits a different oncologist who put him on an intense chemotherapy regimen - a multidrug concoction of older and cutting-edge therapies that costs about $10,000 every other week.
It was a treatment that gave Isgro the ability to continue working four days a week, allowed him to travel to Europe and kept him alive.
But after scans showed his tumors were growing, his insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, discontinued coverage of the more expensive drugs in his chemotherapy regimen. Since their use was stopped in early May, Isgro's disease, according to his oncologist, has "exploded."
"Clearly, we were keeping a lid on it. It was progressing very slowly and, when we stopped the drugs, it progressed very quickly," said Dr. James Cohen of Los Gatos, adding that all of the drugs he had been combining are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for colon cancer.
Cohen said no amount or combination of medication would cure Isgro. Rather, he hoped to give him a better quality of life as well as more time.
Two appeals to the state Department of Managed Health Care have gone in favor of the insurer. In the most recent decision, issued June 12, two of the three reviewers concluded that the requested therapy would not be more beneficial than the standard, less expensive treatment the insurance company approved.
Isgro believes his insurer simply doesn't want to spend any more money to keep him alive. And he's angry.
"If my name was Kennedy, do you think they'd try to deny me?" he said, referring to Sen. Edward Kennedy, who recently underwent surgery for brain cancer.
Isgro, who has found an attorney to represent him at no cost, is considering his options. He recently resumed the more expensive treatments with the help of his sister, who paid more than $4,000 out of pocket. He also is contacting the pharmaceutical companies that make his drugs to see if they will help pay for his therapy.
"What good does it do to have any kind of national health care plan or state health care plan if your doctor, your primary doctor, does not have the right to prescribe the medications he feels are best for you?" he said. "That's not health care."
What to do if you are denied medical care
If your health insurance carrier is refusing to approve treatment recommended by your doctor, you have a number of options. First, contact your health plan. You probably will have to go through the plan's internal grievance process first. If time is of the essence, ask for an expedited review through the state.
Tips to help you get the care you need:
- Review your health plan policy. Many are available online.
- Make sure your doctor is aware of your problem. Sometimes the initial denial comes from the medical group, which is charged with managing costs. In any case, your doctor's support is important.
- Request the reason for the denial in writing. Take detailed notes of all conversations, including the date and time of the call and the name of the person you speak with. Save copies of all paperwork, and keep these records in chronological order.
- Act soon. If you wait longer than six months, you could lose the right to file a complaint, ask for an independent medical review (also called an IMR), or take other action against your health plan such as arbitration or a lawsuit. An IMR decision is binding on the health plan, but not the patient.
[Via SF Gate ]
Worst. Apartment. Ever. - Craigslist Ad
Come live in a real honest-to-goodness shithole. We take great pride in our inability to keep good tenants happy. Do you pay your rent on time every month? We will reward you by increasing it to the maximum allowable limit every year like clockwork. Love hot water for your morning shower? Who doesn't? Well, you won't find those kind of luxuries here. The water temperature is tepid at best. And if your bathtub stops draining, you'll be billed for the repair, even though that's illegal. Don’t worry when the ceiling leaks on sunny days. That’s the pipes above the ceiling that are leaking. All repairs will be made by unlicensed handymen found in the Home Depot parking lot. We will attempt to clean your stained couch cushions in our own laundry facility, right on the premises. We won’t do a very good job, though. What do you care? You live in a shithole. Speaking of our laundry facility, please note that you will have a difficult time finding available washers & dryers. This is due to the fact that our on-site managers allow their various family members to do laundry when they make weekly visits. Even though you see air-conditioners in two other apartments, do not be fooled into thinking that you too may enjoy electrically cooled rooms. Should you decide to install one in your unit, you will find an eviction notice taped to your front door. We also like to snoop around your apartment once a month under the guise of smoke alarm checks. Enjoy the beautiful pool--but only during the week. Here's the schedule: Every Saturday at 10 AM the gardener uses his leaf blower to fill the pool with leaves & debris. It remains this way until the pool cleaner comes by on Monday. Perfect for kids that don’t yet have health problems.
The neighborhood gang activity keeps things lively as well. The dealers are all within walking distance. Convenient for drug users who are fed up with high gas prices. Enjoy real culture with vibrant artists ‘tagging’ their area. See that broken glass on the curb? That’s where a local artist liberated the contents of a car the night before. It’s OK, the owner needed a new stereo with iPod hook-ups anyway. Win-win.
We can’t imagine why this apartment has been vacant for over six months.
Large 2 bedroom 1 bath, newly painted, vertical blinds, ceiling fan, new appliances, pool, gated parking, new roof, laundry facilities, no pets, one year lease. Near Amoeba music, Arclight theaters, 24 hour fitness, The LA Film School, Sunset & Highland.
[Via Craigslist]
The neighborhood gang activity keeps things lively as well. The dealers are all within walking distance. Convenient for drug users who are fed up with high gas prices. Enjoy real culture with vibrant artists ‘tagging’ their area. See that broken glass on the curb? That’s where a local artist liberated the contents of a car the night before. It’s OK, the owner needed a new stereo with iPod hook-ups anyway. Win-win.
We can’t imagine why this apartment has been vacant for over six months.
Large 2 bedroom 1 bath, newly painted, vertical blinds, ceiling fan, new appliances, pool, gated parking, new roof, laundry facilities, no pets, one year lease. Near Amoeba music, Arclight theaters, 24 hour fitness, The LA Film School, Sunset & Highland.
[Via Craigslist]
The Bay Area Is Packed with Brainiacs
The Bay Area is packed with brainiacs; there are the obvious ones - Steve Jobs, Jerry Yang, the Google guys. But what about the lesser-known, yet enormously talented ones?
Daniel Naroditsky ranks first in the world in chess for boys ages 12 and under. Chester Santos holds the USA Memory Championship title. And Leyan Lo won the most recent national Rubik's Cube competition.
How did these people develop their obsessions? What does it take to dominate a game?
Chess prodigy
Daniel Naroditsky received an 800-page music encyclopedia when he turned 7. As he flipped through the book, he spotted an error: A composer's birthday was one year off. None of the dozen adults in the room, including Daniel's mother, a professional pianist, had heard of the composer. They checked an alternate source and confirmed the mistake.
A few years later, Daniel was traveling to a chess tournament four hours away. He was bored, opened his father's computer and read through all of the countries and their capitals. He became very frustrated afterward when he couldn't recall three of the countries.
Daniel's phenomenal memory is just one of several driving forces behind his recent world victory in chess for boys ages 12 and under. Other factors include intelligence, discipline, talent, time and money.
I met Daniel recently at his father Vladimir's office at the Vega Capital Group, a boutique investment firm in downtown San Francisco. I'd heard so much about his accomplishments that I forgot how young he'd look. When I greeted him and his brother Alan, 17, they didn't smile and barely spoke.
"How's your spring break?" I asked.
They haven't had a vacation, Vladimir replied. Daniel, a sixth-grade student at Crystal Springs Upland School in Hillsborough, just returned from an adult chess tournament in Reno. He came to a draw with a 42-year-old grandmaster and tied two others for second place. Daniel was leaving for another tournament in Oklahoma in two days.
Daniel studies chess at least 24 hours a week. He plays 20-minute games, records every move of his tournaments and analyzes previous games for mistakes. He pores over the 1,000 chess books in his personal library, and sometimes Vladimir reads him chess books in Russian, their native language. They can spend two hours talking about one page.
"It's like reading a graduate-level science textbook," says Vladimir, who used to play chess competitively in his home country of Ukraine. "We'll talk about what the grandmaster thinks, his mistakes, and what Daniel thinks is the next move. He'll often predict it."
A good chess book can take a year to read, and Daniel often rereads them. He memorizes the strategies down to player names, game dates and the page numbers of the book they're described in. Daniel also types notes on his computer and is writing an advanced chess textbook. "I was thinking about new ways to improve," he explains. Daniel's previous book, which he wrote at age 10, was about the history of the world.
On top of independent study, Daniel trains with three chess instructors, including two grandmasters, eight hours a week. Last August, his family took in his Russian grandmaster coach for a month to give him 10-hour-a-day lessons.
Michael Aigner, a Stanford-trained engineer and chess master who's coached Daniel for 18 months says, "Daniel's one of smartest, if not the smartest, person I've ever met."
Vladimir estimates that they spend up to $60,000 a year on chess for Daniel and Alan, who ranks as one of the top 100 chess players in America. Ninety percent of the money goes toward Daniel, who travels every month for tournaments. The family has sacrificed vacations and a bigger house. But Daniel says he isn't pressured by the cost; he just plays for fun.
Daniel's rigorous training begs the question: Who's the driving force behind his chess? Vladimir, Aigner and Daniel insist it is all Daniel. No one can be forced to achieve at his level, they say. Vladimir is always reading books on how to raise prodigies, and opts for what he considers to be a more relaxed philosophy, refusing to subject Daniel to IQ tests or grade skipping.
"He has enough pressure on the inside," Vladimir says. "We don't want to add more unless necessary."
Cube addict
Leyan Lo spent most of his free time as a freshman at Caltech jumping around to Dance Dance Revolution, devouring Manga and folding origami. All that changed when his friend Tyson Mao decided to create a campus Rubik's Cube club in October 2003. Lo wanted to support Mao, so he picked up the puzzle. Nearly three years later, he went on to capture the 2006 U.S. title for the game at the most recent national competition.
How did Lo get to be so good? Procrastination. Lo would often cube for hours a day, working late into the night to avoid homework and problem sets. Even now, he brings his cube everywhere except for the bathroom.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Lo attends a competition in a windowless classroom in the basement of Moffitt Library at UC Berkeley. When I arrive, Lo isn't practicing as many other are, nor is he socializing with other competitors. He's asleep.
"One of Leyan's trademarks (is) being able to fall asleep anywhere, at any time, within five minutes," his friend Shelley Chang tells me.
After Lo awakens, the 24-year-old, first-year physics doctoral student at Stanford attempts to teach me how to solve a cube. Lo grabs his puzzle, which he personally assembled so it spins more easily, and tells me that a beginner should start by creating a cross design on one face. But, I have to ensure that the legs of the cross have color stickers on their other side that match the center pieces on those sides.
Then he starts telling me things like, "Orient the edge. Orient the corners. Position the edge. Position the corners." I'm obviously lost, so I quickly change the topic. I can always figure out the solution later because there are a gazillion Rubik's cube solutions online. In fact, that's how Lo gets all of his solutions: He surfs the Web, converses in chat rooms and talks to friends. It's all about pattern memorization and algorithm execution. Not too difficult. I could solve one, maybe in a few decades.
Lo says his addictive personality is a major reason for his success. Aside from obsessions with DDR and the cube, his most recent hobby is typing. He and his cubing friends reprogrammed their keyboards into the more ergonomically friendly Dvorak layout and took typing lessons and tests until they perfected their techniques. His friends have mostly stopped the tests, so Lo's given it up, too. It's not enticing when there's no competition.
At today's contest, Lo bounces down the stars to the front of the room where five other cubers and their corresponding judges are lined up. Giant timers are perched in front of each contestant. A judge hands Lo a 4-by-4 cube that's been pre-scrambled to a set pattern. Lo studies the cube for a few seconds, puts it down, touches the timer pad, grabs the cube and twirls away. 65.5 seconds later, Lo drops the cube on the table and hits the timer. The audience barely notices because they're working on the Square One, 7-by-7 cubes, pyraminxes and other puzzles I've never seen.
Lo got the fastest solve for the regular Rubik's Cube, but finishes second in the tournament overall. It doesn't bother him, he says, because he did his best. There's also no cash prize. And maybe it's because he, like his friend Mao - the former world-record holder for the blindfold solve and a contestant on Season 2 of "Beauty and the Geek" - doesn't think it means much.
Mao explains, "Just because (Lo) can solve it fast doesn't mean he's smart or anything. It just means he enjoys it and has put a lot of time into it."
Not that many others can do what he's done.
Master memorizer
Imagine this: Adam Sandler is holding puffy, white pillows and saying, "What's up dude? Look at these pillows. They're crazy."
Razor blades start jutting out of the pillows and begin to slice off his arm. He shrieks, "This is crazy!"
This scenario could be straight out of a cheesy horror movie, but when Chester Santos conjures it up, he recalls the following playing cards: 10 of hearts, queen of spades and seven of diamonds. The technique of linking cards to people, objects and actions enables Santos to memorize the order of a card deck in 2 minutes and 27 seconds, helping him win this year's USA Memory Championship.
Santos, a 31-year old computer engineer with eyes the size of quarters and a sincere manner, first heard about the competition on ABC's "20/20." He figured he could beat the champion, so he started competing in 2003. Santos placed third four times, not that most of his friends knew anything about it.
"I knew him for years before I realized he was involved," says Santos' friend Mark Reichstadt. "When he started telling me about it, I was amazed. He's a very understated person."
Santos earliest recollections are of his father, who left his family before Santos was 1. He'd dream about his dad.
"I'd always ask my mom, 'Who is this guy?' She'd tell me I was imagining stuff," Santos said. His mother remarried before he was 2, and the couple told him his stepfather was his biological dad.
Santos, who grew up in Hanford, a working-class suburb 40 miles south of Fresno, was at the top of his high school class until his junior year, when his mother and stepfather divorced. Santos' grades plummeted, especially after discovering his stepfather wasn't his biological dad. He ended up going to Fresno City College before transferring to UC Berkeley to study psychology. He rarely did homework or went to class.
"His textbooks would remain wrapped in cellophane for the entire semester," recalls Alex McIntyre, Santos' roommate for two years. Santos would cram for 36 hours before exams.
"He'd always come back after test was over, laugh, and say he'd made a mockery of the test," McIntyre said. "Then he'd sleep for 18 hours."
After earning a 3.7 GPA at Cal (he lost points for attendance), Santos spent a year in law school. He got jaded, dropped out and picked up another bachelor's and a master's degree in computer programming before going to work for Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo.
When it came time for the memory competitions, Santos approached them with a relaxed attitude, training for 30 minutes a day for a few weeks. But, this year he had a new girlfriend.
"She found out about the opportunities I'd have if I won. She said, 'You're crazy. Why don't you train?' " said Santos.
So he spent an hour a day for about three months memorizing cards, poems and long sequences of numbers, matching the information to names, faces and objects.
Santos competes in memory mainly for the money. Nearly all winners have quit their jobs and gone into the memory business fulltime, coaching, writing books and landing television gigs.
In fact, Santos recently quit his $83,000-a-year computer engineering job at Wells Fargo in order to pursue memory consulting full time. He hopes to write a book, become the second American grandmaster memorizer and train for the World Memory Championships in Bahrain in October. He also wants to the most-well-known American memorizer.
But first, he needs more students for his memory seminars.
"I doubt that more than 100 people even have any idea that I'm teaching classes in S.F. now. I'm really hoping that you'll list my Web site somewhere in the article," Santos e-mails me. It's www.chestersantos.net.
[Via SF Gate]
Daniel Naroditsky ranks first in the world in chess for boys ages 12 and under. Chester Santos holds the USA Memory Championship title. And Leyan Lo won the most recent national Rubik's Cube competition.
How did these people develop their obsessions? What does it take to dominate a game?
Chess prodigy
Daniel Naroditsky received an 800-page music encyclopedia when he turned 7. As he flipped through the book, he spotted an error: A composer's birthday was one year off. None of the dozen adults in the room, including Daniel's mother, a professional pianist, had heard of the composer. They checked an alternate source and confirmed the mistake.
A few years later, Daniel was traveling to a chess tournament four hours away. He was bored, opened his father's computer and read through all of the countries and their capitals. He became very frustrated afterward when he couldn't recall three of the countries.
Daniel's phenomenal memory is just one of several driving forces behind his recent world victory in chess for boys ages 12 and under. Other factors include intelligence, discipline, talent, time and money.
I met Daniel recently at his father Vladimir's office at the Vega Capital Group, a boutique investment firm in downtown San Francisco. I'd heard so much about his accomplishments that I forgot how young he'd look. When I greeted him and his brother Alan, 17, they didn't smile and barely spoke.
"How's your spring break?" I asked.
They haven't had a vacation, Vladimir replied. Daniel, a sixth-grade student at Crystal Springs Upland School in Hillsborough, just returned from an adult chess tournament in Reno. He came to a draw with a 42-year-old grandmaster and tied two others for second place. Daniel was leaving for another tournament in Oklahoma in two days.
Daniel studies chess at least 24 hours a week. He plays 20-minute games, records every move of his tournaments and analyzes previous games for mistakes. He pores over the 1,000 chess books in his personal library, and sometimes Vladimir reads him chess books in Russian, their native language. They can spend two hours talking about one page.
"It's like reading a graduate-level science textbook," says Vladimir, who used to play chess competitively in his home country of Ukraine. "We'll talk about what the grandmaster thinks, his mistakes, and what Daniel thinks is the next move. He'll often predict it."
A good chess book can take a year to read, and Daniel often rereads them. He memorizes the strategies down to player names, game dates and the page numbers of the book they're described in. Daniel also types notes on his computer and is writing an advanced chess textbook. "I was thinking about new ways to improve," he explains. Daniel's previous book, which he wrote at age 10, was about the history of the world.
On top of independent study, Daniel trains with three chess instructors, including two grandmasters, eight hours a week. Last August, his family took in his Russian grandmaster coach for a month to give him 10-hour-a-day lessons.
Michael Aigner, a Stanford-trained engineer and chess master who's coached Daniel for 18 months says, "Daniel's one of smartest, if not the smartest, person I've ever met."
Vladimir estimates that they spend up to $60,000 a year on chess for Daniel and Alan, who ranks as one of the top 100 chess players in America. Ninety percent of the money goes toward Daniel, who travels every month for tournaments. The family has sacrificed vacations and a bigger house. But Daniel says he isn't pressured by the cost; he just plays for fun.
Daniel's rigorous training begs the question: Who's the driving force behind his chess? Vladimir, Aigner and Daniel insist it is all Daniel. No one can be forced to achieve at his level, they say. Vladimir is always reading books on how to raise prodigies, and opts for what he considers to be a more relaxed philosophy, refusing to subject Daniel to IQ tests or grade skipping.
"He has enough pressure on the inside," Vladimir says. "We don't want to add more unless necessary."
Cube addict
Leyan Lo spent most of his free time as a freshman at Caltech jumping around to Dance Dance Revolution, devouring Manga and folding origami. All that changed when his friend Tyson Mao decided to create a campus Rubik's Cube club in October 2003. Lo wanted to support Mao, so he picked up the puzzle. Nearly three years later, he went on to capture the 2006 U.S. title for the game at the most recent national competition.
How did Lo get to be so good? Procrastination. Lo would often cube for hours a day, working late into the night to avoid homework and problem sets. Even now, he brings his cube everywhere except for the bathroom.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Lo attends a competition in a windowless classroom in the basement of Moffitt Library at UC Berkeley. When I arrive, Lo isn't practicing as many other are, nor is he socializing with other competitors. He's asleep.
"One of Leyan's trademarks (is) being able to fall asleep anywhere, at any time, within five minutes," his friend Shelley Chang tells me.
After Lo awakens, the 24-year-old, first-year physics doctoral student at Stanford attempts to teach me how to solve a cube. Lo grabs his puzzle, which he personally assembled so it spins more easily, and tells me that a beginner should start by creating a cross design on one face. But, I have to ensure that the legs of the cross have color stickers on their other side that match the center pieces on those sides.
Then he starts telling me things like, "Orient the edge. Orient the corners. Position the edge. Position the corners." I'm obviously lost, so I quickly change the topic. I can always figure out the solution later because there are a gazillion Rubik's cube solutions online. In fact, that's how Lo gets all of his solutions: He surfs the Web, converses in chat rooms and talks to friends. It's all about pattern memorization and algorithm execution. Not too difficult. I could solve one, maybe in a few decades.
Lo says his addictive personality is a major reason for his success. Aside from obsessions with DDR and the cube, his most recent hobby is typing. He and his cubing friends reprogrammed their keyboards into the more ergonomically friendly Dvorak layout and took typing lessons and tests until they perfected their techniques. His friends have mostly stopped the tests, so Lo's given it up, too. It's not enticing when there's no competition.
At today's contest, Lo bounces down the stars to the front of the room where five other cubers and their corresponding judges are lined up. Giant timers are perched in front of each contestant. A judge hands Lo a 4-by-4 cube that's been pre-scrambled to a set pattern. Lo studies the cube for a few seconds, puts it down, touches the timer pad, grabs the cube and twirls away. 65.5 seconds later, Lo drops the cube on the table and hits the timer. The audience barely notices because they're working on the Square One, 7-by-7 cubes, pyraminxes and other puzzles I've never seen.
Lo got the fastest solve for the regular Rubik's Cube, but finishes second in the tournament overall. It doesn't bother him, he says, because he did his best. There's also no cash prize. And maybe it's because he, like his friend Mao - the former world-record holder for the blindfold solve and a contestant on Season 2 of "Beauty and the Geek" - doesn't think it means much.
Mao explains, "Just because (Lo) can solve it fast doesn't mean he's smart or anything. It just means he enjoys it and has put a lot of time into it."
Not that many others can do what he's done.
Master memorizer
Imagine this: Adam Sandler is holding puffy, white pillows and saying, "What's up dude? Look at these pillows. They're crazy."
Razor blades start jutting out of the pillows and begin to slice off his arm. He shrieks, "This is crazy!"
This scenario could be straight out of a cheesy horror movie, but when Chester Santos conjures it up, he recalls the following playing cards: 10 of hearts, queen of spades and seven of diamonds. The technique of linking cards to people, objects and actions enables Santos to memorize the order of a card deck in 2 minutes and 27 seconds, helping him win this year's USA Memory Championship.
Santos, a 31-year old computer engineer with eyes the size of quarters and a sincere manner, first heard about the competition on ABC's "20/20." He figured he could beat the champion, so he started competing in 2003. Santos placed third four times, not that most of his friends knew anything about it.
"I knew him for years before I realized he was involved," says Santos' friend Mark Reichstadt. "When he started telling me about it, I was amazed. He's a very understated person."
Santos earliest recollections are of his father, who left his family before Santos was 1. He'd dream about his dad.
"I'd always ask my mom, 'Who is this guy?' She'd tell me I was imagining stuff," Santos said. His mother remarried before he was 2, and the couple told him his stepfather was his biological dad.
Santos, who grew up in Hanford, a working-class suburb 40 miles south of Fresno, was at the top of his high school class until his junior year, when his mother and stepfather divorced. Santos' grades plummeted, especially after discovering his stepfather wasn't his biological dad. He ended up going to Fresno City College before transferring to UC Berkeley to study psychology. He rarely did homework or went to class.
"His textbooks would remain wrapped in cellophane for the entire semester," recalls Alex McIntyre, Santos' roommate for two years. Santos would cram for 36 hours before exams.
"He'd always come back after test was over, laugh, and say he'd made a mockery of the test," McIntyre said. "Then he'd sleep for 18 hours."
After earning a 3.7 GPA at Cal (he lost points for attendance), Santos spent a year in law school. He got jaded, dropped out and picked up another bachelor's and a master's degree in computer programming before going to work for Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo.
When it came time for the memory competitions, Santos approached them with a relaxed attitude, training for 30 minutes a day for a few weeks. But, this year he had a new girlfriend.
"She found out about the opportunities I'd have if I won. She said, 'You're crazy. Why don't you train?' " said Santos.
So he spent an hour a day for about three months memorizing cards, poems and long sequences of numbers, matching the information to names, faces and objects.
Santos competes in memory mainly for the money. Nearly all winners have quit their jobs and gone into the memory business fulltime, coaching, writing books and landing television gigs.
In fact, Santos recently quit his $83,000-a-year computer engineering job at Wells Fargo in order to pursue memory consulting full time. He hopes to write a book, become the second American grandmaster memorizer and train for the World Memory Championships in Bahrain in October. He also wants to the most-well-known American memorizer.
But first, he needs more students for his memory seminars.
"I doubt that more than 100 people even have any idea that I'm teaching classes in S.F. now. I'm really hoping that you'll list my Web site somewhere in the article," Santos e-mails me. It's www.chestersantos.net.
[Via SF Gate]
Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Wins National Contest
Tourists gaped at six stunning wedding dresses displayed at Ripley's Believe It or Not! in New York's Times Square.
The fashionable white frocks were fashioned entirely of toilet paper.
Six dresses were displayed at the Times Square "odditorium" Thursday and three winning designers squared off for the top prize of $1,000.
The judges from Ripley's Believe it or Not!, Charmin and Cheap-Chic-Weddings.com crowned this year's winner, Katrina Chalifoux of Rockford, Ill. She spent two weeks creating a sheath dress with a raised flower pattern from molded toilet paper.
Terri Glover of Marlin, Texas, was a second prize winner. Ann Lee, of Honolulu, Hawaii, placed third in the annual dress competition, which just celebrated its fourth year.
[Via SF Gate]
The fashionable white frocks were fashioned entirely of toilet paper.
Six dresses were displayed at the Times Square "odditorium" Thursday and three winning designers squared off for the top prize of $1,000.
The judges from Ripley's Believe it or Not!, Charmin and Cheap-Chic-Weddings.com crowned this year's winner, Katrina Chalifoux of Rockford, Ill. She spent two weeks creating a sheath dress with a raised flower pattern from molded toilet paper.
Terri Glover of Marlin, Texas, was a second prize winner. Ann Lee, of Honolulu, Hawaii, placed third in the annual dress competition, which just celebrated its fourth year.
[Via SF Gate]
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Food Stamps Buy Less; Families Are Hit Hard
Making ends meet on food stamps has never been easy for Cassandra Johnson, but since food prices began their steep climb earlier this year, she has had to develop new survival strategies.
She hunts for items that are on the shelf beyond their expiration dates because their prices are often reduced, a practice she once avoided.
Ms. Johnson, 44, who works in customer service for a medical firm, knows that buying food this way is not healthy, but she sees no other choice if she wants to feed herself and her 1-year-old niece Ammni Harris and 2-year-old nephew Tramier Harris, who live with her.
“I live paycheck to paycheck,” said Ms. Johnson, as she walked out of a market near her home in Hackensack, N.J., pushing both Ammni and the week’s groceries in a shopping cart. “And we’re not coping.”
The sharp rise in food prices is being felt acutely by poor families on food stamps, the federal food assistance program.
In the past year, the cost of food for what the government considers a minimum nutritional diet has risen 7.2 percent nationwide. It is on track to become the largest increase since 1989, according to April data, the most recent numbers, from the United States Department of Agriculture. The prices of certain staples have risen even more. The cost of eggs, for example, has increased nearly 20 percent, and the price of milk and other dairy products has risen 10 percent.
But food stamp allocations, intended to cover only minimum needs, have not changed since last fall and will not rise again until October, when an increase linked to inflation will take effect. The percentage, equal to the annual rise in prices for the minimum nutritional food basket as measured each June, is usually announced by early August.
Some advocates and politicians say that this relief will not come soon enough and will probably not be adequate to keep pace with inflation.
Stacy Dean, the director of food assistance for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington social issues research and advocacy organization, estimates that the rising food prices have resulted in two fewer bags of groceries a month for the families most reliant on the program.
“We know food stamps are falling short $34 a month” of the monthly $576 that the government says it costs a family of four to eat nutritional meals, she said. “The sudden price increases on top of everything else like soaring fuel and health care have meant squeeze and strain that is unprecedented since the late 1970s.”
The declining buying power of food stamps has not gone unrecognized in Washington. In May, Congress passed a farm bill that would raise the minimum amount of food stamps that families receive, starting in October. The bill, which was passed over President Bush’s veto, will also raise for the first time since 1996 the amount of income that families of fewer than four can keep for costs like housing or fuel without having their benefits reduced.
This month, a coalition led by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. called on Congress to immediately enact a temporary 20 percent increase in food stamps. Officials at the Agriculture Department, which administers the program, say there is no precedent for such an action. Families on food stamps have been hit hard across the nation, but perhaps not as hard as families in New York, where food costs are substantially higher than prices almost everywhere else, including other urban areas, according to the Food Research and Action Center, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
The more than one million New Yorkers on food stamps receive on average $107 a month in assistance, which is slightly higher than the average for the rest of the country. But it is not enough to close the gap in food costs, experts say.
Poor families interviewed in the New York area say that they are not going hungry — thanks in large part to the city’s strong network of 1,200 soup kitchens and food pantries — but that they have really felt the pinch. To cope, many say, they are doing without the basics.
June Jacobs-Cuffee of Brooklyn shares $120 a month in food stamps with her 19-year-old epileptic son. She says that even after her once-a-month trip to the food pantry at St. John’s Bread & Life in Brooklyn, she has had to give up red meat and is also cutting back on buying fresh fruits and sticking instead with canned goods and fruit cocktail.
“It is not a question of running out, yet,” she said. “But it does require very careful budgeting.”
The most recent census data showed that from 2003 to 2006 an average of 1.3 million New Yorkers identified themselves as “food insecure,” meaning that they were worried about being able to buy enough food to keep their families adequately fed. City officials are concerned that the food price increase has caused that number to increase significantly.
“I am much more worried about the state of hunger in New York City than I was 6 or 12 months ago,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Ms. Quinn said that food pantries were increasingly complaining about being tapped out. She added, “What we are hearing from constituents is that they are having to make tougher and tougher decisions like to water down milk for kids or not purchase medication to keep money for food.”
Yessenia Villar, who lives in Washington Heights and works tutoring children in Spanish and English, knows about tough choices. She says it is getting harder to stretch her monthly $190 in food stamps to cover food for herself, her mother and her 5-year-old daughter. At the end of the month, she runs out of oil, rice and, most painful of all, plantains, which have gone from five for $1 to two for $1, she says.
She says she has stopped buying extras like summer sandals for herself, and has also given up treats like cookies and ice cream for her daughter. “I used to make all my groceries for $150 a month and then have a little extra,” she said. “Now it is, like, crazy.”
[Via NY Times]
She hunts for items that are on the shelf beyond their expiration dates because their prices are often reduced, a practice she once avoided.
Ms. Johnson, 44, who works in customer service for a medical firm, knows that buying food this way is not healthy, but she sees no other choice if she wants to feed herself and her 1-year-old niece Ammni Harris and 2-year-old nephew Tramier Harris, who live with her.
“I live paycheck to paycheck,” said Ms. Johnson, as she walked out of a market near her home in Hackensack, N.J., pushing both Ammni and the week’s groceries in a shopping cart. “And we’re not coping.”
The sharp rise in food prices is being felt acutely by poor families on food stamps, the federal food assistance program.
In the past year, the cost of food for what the government considers a minimum nutritional diet has risen 7.2 percent nationwide. It is on track to become the largest increase since 1989, according to April data, the most recent numbers, from the United States Department of Agriculture. The prices of certain staples have risen even more. The cost of eggs, for example, has increased nearly 20 percent, and the price of milk and other dairy products has risen 10 percent.
But food stamp allocations, intended to cover only minimum needs, have not changed since last fall and will not rise again until October, when an increase linked to inflation will take effect. The percentage, equal to the annual rise in prices for the minimum nutritional food basket as measured each June, is usually announced by early August.
Some advocates and politicians say that this relief will not come soon enough and will probably not be adequate to keep pace with inflation.
Stacy Dean, the director of food assistance for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington social issues research and advocacy organization, estimates that the rising food prices have resulted in two fewer bags of groceries a month for the families most reliant on the program.
“We know food stamps are falling short $34 a month” of the monthly $576 that the government says it costs a family of four to eat nutritional meals, she said. “The sudden price increases on top of everything else like soaring fuel and health care have meant squeeze and strain that is unprecedented since the late 1970s.”
The declining buying power of food stamps has not gone unrecognized in Washington. In May, Congress passed a farm bill that would raise the minimum amount of food stamps that families receive, starting in October. The bill, which was passed over President Bush’s veto, will also raise for the first time since 1996 the amount of income that families of fewer than four can keep for costs like housing or fuel without having their benefits reduced.
This month, a coalition led by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. called on Congress to immediately enact a temporary 20 percent increase in food stamps. Officials at the Agriculture Department, which administers the program, say there is no precedent for such an action. Families on food stamps have been hit hard across the nation, but perhaps not as hard as families in New York, where food costs are substantially higher than prices almost everywhere else, including other urban areas, according to the Food Research and Action Center, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
The more than one million New Yorkers on food stamps receive on average $107 a month in assistance, which is slightly higher than the average for the rest of the country. But it is not enough to close the gap in food costs, experts say.
Poor families interviewed in the New York area say that they are not going hungry — thanks in large part to the city’s strong network of 1,200 soup kitchens and food pantries — but that they have really felt the pinch. To cope, many say, they are doing without the basics.
June Jacobs-Cuffee of Brooklyn shares $120 a month in food stamps with her 19-year-old epileptic son. She says that even after her once-a-month trip to the food pantry at St. John’s Bread & Life in Brooklyn, she has had to give up red meat and is also cutting back on buying fresh fruits and sticking instead with canned goods and fruit cocktail.
“It is not a question of running out, yet,” she said. “But it does require very careful budgeting.”
The most recent census data showed that from 2003 to 2006 an average of 1.3 million New Yorkers identified themselves as “food insecure,” meaning that they were worried about being able to buy enough food to keep their families adequately fed. City officials are concerned that the food price increase has caused that number to increase significantly.
“I am much more worried about the state of hunger in New York City than I was 6 or 12 months ago,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Ms. Quinn said that food pantries were increasingly complaining about being tapped out. She added, “What we are hearing from constituents is that they are having to make tougher and tougher decisions like to water down milk for kids or not purchase medication to keep money for food.”
Yessenia Villar, who lives in Washington Heights and works tutoring children in Spanish and English, knows about tough choices. She says it is getting harder to stretch her monthly $190 in food stamps to cover food for herself, her mother and her 5-year-old daughter. At the end of the month, she runs out of oil, rice and, most painful of all, plantains, which have gone from five for $1 to two for $1, she says.
She says she has stopped buying extras like summer sandals for herself, and has also given up treats like cookies and ice cream for her daughter. “I used to make all my groceries for $150 a month and then have a little extra,” she said. “Now it is, like, crazy.”
[Via NY Times]
Exodus of S.F.'s Middle Class
It's urban flight flipped on its head: The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city's exorbitant housing costs.
Many worry it's increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.
"A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies," said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can't afford to live there anymore."
From 2002 to 2006, the number of households making up to $49,000 per year dropped by 7.4 percent, those earning between $50,000 and $99,999 declined by 4.4 percent, and those bringing home between $100,000 and $149,999 fell by 3.9 percent, according to Census Bureau estimates. In polar opposition, the number of households making between $150,000 and $199,999 surged 52.2 percent and those earning more than $200,000 climbed 40.1 percent.
Certainly, some of the movement can be attributed to people earning their way into higher income classes. But a separate analysis of census data from those who reported moving from San Francisco to elsewhere in the United States confirms the overall trend: The less you make, the more likely you are to leave the city or not move here in the first place.
The chance of departing in 2006 stood at less than 8 percent for those making $150,000 or more, but jumped to greater than 11 percent for those making between $25,000 and $50,000, according to the Public Policy Institute. "The net effect is fairly dramatic," Johnson said.
The high cost of high costs
The trend of well-heeled and upwardly mobile young professionals moving into cities across the country, drawn by a newfound affection for the amenities of urban life, is by now well documented. It's led to many benefits: Cities are revitalizing aging downtowns with new buildings and businesses, people are walking and using transit instead of making long commutes in polluting autos.
But it's also been putting pressure on housing prices for existing stock and, many argue, steering much of the new development toward the high end.
Since 2002, the median price for all San Francisco home types has risen 113.5 percent to $790,000, according to DataQuick Information Systems. While the housing slump has dragged down values by more than a third in some parts of the region, it's only nudged prices in the city down 5.4 percent from their peak.
A San Francisco household requires an annual income of $196,878 to afford a median-priced home in the city, according to a February report from the California Budget Project, a liberal research and advocacy group. Fewer than 4 in 10 city households owned their homes in 2006, 39.3 percent, the lowest rate among counties in the state.
Sarah and Mike Northrop, both 32, lived in San Francisco for seven years, most recently renting an Inner Sunset apartment. She's a physical therapist and he's an engineer, and together they make between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. But they spent more than two years looking for a place to buy in the city and couldn't find anything in their price range that was big enough for them and their two daughters.
Last year, they expanded their search beyond city limits and closed on a three-bedroom home with a garage and backyard in Pacifica.
"We love the city," said Sarah Northrop, adding that she misses the cultural events, parks and easy walking to shops and entertainment. "I would have done anything to stay."
Rents have also climbed rapidly. In the first quarter, San Francisco was, as always, the most expensive Bay Area city for renters, according to RealFacts of Novato. The average for all apartment types stood at $2,326 in the first quarter, up nearly 25 percent from 2002 and 14.4 percent from a year ago.
Monicqua Brown, a union carpenter, lived in San Francisco her whole life, until rising rent forced her out of her Bayview apartment about five years ago.
The only San Francisco neighborhood that she could afford was the Tenderloin - a nonstarter with her two young daughters. Instead, she found a two-bedroom apartment in Richmond, near the El Cerrito border, for about $500 less per month. It means a drive across the Bay Bridge each weekday for her job.
"I think it's a shame, a real shame that it costs so much," she said. "I believe if you work here, you should be able to afford to live here."
Social toll
The social consequences for a city where moderate- and low-income families can't get by are manifold. Many believe it's the primary reason San Francisco has the fewest children per capita of any major metropolitan area in the United States. In 2006, a group of Potrero Hill parents concerned about declining public school ranks surveyed families that had left San Francisco to find out why they had done so. Fifty-three percent cited the schools; 70 percent blamed housing costs.
For most of the decade, San Francisco Unified School District has lost an average of 800 students per year, which has meant losing an additional $4 million in state and federal funds each time.
"So we offer less for kids in terms of programs and classes," said Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. "It definitely hits us hard."
High housing prices are also a key reason that among 2,227 sworn police officers in San Francisco, only 675 live in the city, a little more than 30 percent, said Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association.
The nightmare consequence of this would be an evening earthquake that shuts down BART and bridges, blocking two-thirds of the city's police officers and large percentages of other first responders from quickly attending to life-threatening building collapses, injuries or fires.
Housing that's out of reach in the city also promotes suburban sprawl, makes it more difficult for companies, schools, hospitals and nonprofits to attract or hang on to workers, and decreases San Francisco's economic and cultural diversity.
"It's not very healthy for the city's social fabric or the city's economy," said Roberta Achtenberg, an economic development consultant who focuses on workforce housing.
Few see it turning around anytime soon, despite ardent hopes to the contrary.
David and Arianna Orleans, 37 and 36, have been searching for a home they can afford in San Francisco for more than a year. They both have lived here at least a decade and currently rent an apartment in the Inner Richmond.
He's an insurance broker, and she's a teacher. They're Giants fans and members of the zoo society. They spend weekends visiting the Ferry Building, Ocean Beach or Crissy Field. Their 2-year-old son loves to ride the cable cars.
But, given the housing prices they've seen and the worrisome state of the public school system, David Orleans said there's a good chance they will have to move to a more affordable suburb.
"San Francisco is such a great city, and we wish there was room just for an average middle-class family," he said. "Not everyone can make venture-capital money."
[Via SF Gate]
Many worry it's increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.
"A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies," said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can't afford to live there anymore."
From 2002 to 2006, the number of households making up to $49,000 per year dropped by 7.4 percent, those earning between $50,000 and $99,999 declined by 4.4 percent, and those bringing home between $100,000 and $149,999 fell by 3.9 percent, according to Census Bureau estimates. In polar opposition, the number of households making between $150,000 and $199,999 surged 52.2 percent and those earning more than $200,000 climbed 40.1 percent.
Certainly, some of the movement can be attributed to people earning their way into higher income classes. But a separate analysis of census data from those who reported moving from San Francisco to elsewhere in the United States confirms the overall trend: The less you make, the more likely you are to leave the city or not move here in the first place.
The chance of departing in 2006 stood at less than 8 percent for those making $150,000 or more, but jumped to greater than 11 percent for those making between $25,000 and $50,000, according to the Public Policy Institute. "The net effect is fairly dramatic," Johnson said.
The high cost of high costs
The trend of well-heeled and upwardly mobile young professionals moving into cities across the country, drawn by a newfound affection for the amenities of urban life, is by now well documented. It's led to many benefits: Cities are revitalizing aging downtowns with new buildings and businesses, people are walking and using transit instead of making long commutes in polluting autos.
But it's also been putting pressure on housing prices for existing stock and, many argue, steering much of the new development toward the high end.
Since 2002, the median price for all San Francisco home types has risen 113.5 percent to $790,000, according to DataQuick Information Systems. While the housing slump has dragged down values by more than a third in some parts of the region, it's only nudged prices in the city down 5.4 percent from their peak.
A San Francisco household requires an annual income of $196,878 to afford a median-priced home in the city, according to a February report from the California Budget Project, a liberal research and advocacy group. Fewer than 4 in 10 city households owned their homes in 2006, 39.3 percent, the lowest rate among counties in the state.
Sarah and Mike Northrop, both 32, lived in San Francisco for seven years, most recently renting an Inner Sunset apartment. She's a physical therapist and he's an engineer, and together they make between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. But they spent more than two years looking for a place to buy in the city and couldn't find anything in their price range that was big enough for them and their two daughters.
Last year, they expanded their search beyond city limits and closed on a three-bedroom home with a garage and backyard in Pacifica.
"We love the city," said Sarah Northrop, adding that she misses the cultural events, parks and easy walking to shops and entertainment. "I would have done anything to stay."
Rents have also climbed rapidly. In the first quarter, San Francisco was, as always, the most expensive Bay Area city for renters, according to RealFacts of Novato. The average for all apartment types stood at $2,326 in the first quarter, up nearly 25 percent from 2002 and 14.4 percent from a year ago.
Monicqua Brown, a union carpenter, lived in San Francisco her whole life, until rising rent forced her out of her Bayview apartment about five years ago.
The only San Francisco neighborhood that she could afford was the Tenderloin - a nonstarter with her two young daughters. Instead, she found a two-bedroom apartment in Richmond, near the El Cerrito border, for about $500 less per month. It means a drive across the Bay Bridge each weekday for her job.
"I think it's a shame, a real shame that it costs so much," she said. "I believe if you work here, you should be able to afford to live here."
Social toll
The social consequences for a city where moderate- and low-income families can't get by are manifold. Many believe it's the primary reason San Francisco has the fewest children per capita of any major metropolitan area in the United States. In 2006, a group of Potrero Hill parents concerned about declining public school ranks surveyed families that had left San Francisco to find out why they had done so. Fifty-three percent cited the schools; 70 percent blamed housing costs.
For most of the decade, San Francisco Unified School District has lost an average of 800 students per year, which has meant losing an additional $4 million in state and federal funds each time.
"So we offer less for kids in terms of programs and classes," said Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. "It definitely hits us hard."
High housing prices are also a key reason that among 2,227 sworn police officers in San Francisco, only 675 live in the city, a little more than 30 percent, said Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association.
The nightmare consequence of this would be an evening earthquake that shuts down BART and bridges, blocking two-thirds of the city's police officers and large percentages of other first responders from quickly attending to life-threatening building collapses, injuries or fires.
Housing that's out of reach in the city also promotes suburban sprawl, makes it more difficult for companies, schools, hospitals and nonprofits to attract or hang on to workers, and decreases San Francisco's economic and cultural diversity.
"It's not very healthy for the city's social fabric or the city's economy," said Roberta Achtenberg, an economic development consultant who focuses on workforce housing.
Few see it turning around anytime soon, despite ardent hopes to the contrary.
David and Arianna Orleans, 37 and 36, have been searching for a home they can afford in San Francisco for more than a year. They both have lived here at least a decade and currently rent an apartment in the Inner Richmond.
He's an insurance broker, and she's a teacher. They're Giants fans and members of the zoo society. They spend weekends visiting the Ferry Building, Ocean Beach or Crissy Field. Their 2-year-old son loves to ride the cable cars.
But, given the housing prices they've seen and the worrisome state of the public school system, David Orleans said there's a good chance they will have to move to a more affordable suburb.
"San Francisco is such a great city, and we wish there was room just for an average middle-class family," he said. "Not everyone can make venture-capital money."
[Via SF Gate]
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know
The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.
"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."
The following is the entire list of 100 words:
abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat
"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."
The following is the entire list of 100 words:
abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat
People Are Giving Up Meat So They Can Buy Fuel
TCHULA, Miss. — Gasoline prices reached a national average of $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend, adding more strain to motorists across the country.
But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.
Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.
People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.
The disparity between rural America and the rest of the country is a matter of simple home economics. Nationwide, Americans are now spending about 4 percent of their take-home income on gasoline. By contrast, in some counties in the Mississippi Delta, that figure has surpassed 13 percent.
As a result, gasoline expenses are rivaling what families spend on food and housing.
“This crisis really impacts those who are at the economic margins of society, mostly in the rural areas and particularly parts of the Southeast,” said Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, a fuel analysis firm. “These are people who have to decide between food and transportation.”
A survey by Mr. Rozell’s firm late last month found that the gasoline crisis is taking the highest toll, as a percentage of income, on people in rural areas of the South, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.
With the exception of rural Maine, the Northeast appears least affected by gasoline prices because people there make more money and drive shorter distances, or they take a bus or train to work.
But across Mississippi and the rural South, little public transit is available and people have no choice but to drive to work. Since jobs are scarce, commutes are frequently 20 miles or more. Many of the vehicles on the roads here are old rundown trucks, some getting 10 or fewer miles to the gallon.
The survey showed that of the 13 counties where people spent 13 percent or more of their family income on gasoline, 5 were located in Mississippi, 4 were in Alabama, 3 were in Kentucky and 1 was in West Virginia. While people here in Holmes County spent an average of 15.6 percent of their income on gasoline, people in Nassau County, N.Y., spent barely more than 2 percent, according to the survey.
Economists say that despite widespread concern about gasoline prices, the nationwide impact of the oil crisis has so far been gentler than during the oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s, when shortages caused long lines at the pump, set off inflation and drove the economy into recession.
Americans on average now spend about 4 percent of their after-tax income on transportation fuels, according to Brian A. Bethune, an economist at Global Insight, a forecasting firm. That compares with 4.5 percent in early 1981, the highest point since World War II. At its lowest point, in 1998, that share dropped to 1.9 percent.
“Gas prices have doubled over the last year but the economy has not fallen off the cliff,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. “But for the rural lower income people, as a proportion of their income the rise of gas prices is very high.”
While people everywhere are talking about gasoline prices these days, some folks in Tchula (the T is silent) have gone beyond talking.
Anthony Clark, a farm worker from Tchula, says he prays every night for lower gasoline prices. He recently decided not to fix his broken 1992 Chevrolet Astro van because he could not afford the fuel. Now he hires friends and family members to drive him around to buy food and medicine for his diabetic aunt, and his boss sends a van to pick him up for the 10-mile commute to work.
A trip from Tchula to the nearest sizable town about 15 minutes away can cost him $25 roundtrip — for the driving and the waiting. That is about 10 percent of what he makes in a week.
Taking a break under some cottonwood trees beside a drainage ditch filled with buzzing mosquitoes, Mr. Clark and members of his work crew spoke of the big and little changes that higher gas prices have brought. The extra dollars spent at the pump mean electric bills are going unpaid and macaroni is replacing meat at supper. Donations to church are being put off, and video rentals are now unaffordable.
Cleveland Whiteside, who works with Mr. Clark and used to commute 30 miles a day, said his Jeep Cherokee was repossessed last month, because “I paid so much for gas to get to work I couldn’t pay my payments anymore.” His employer, Larry Clanton, has lent him a pickup truck so he can get to work.
Signs of pain and adaptation because of the cost of gas are everywhere. Local fried chicken restaurants are closing because people are eating out less. At the hardware store here, sales have plummeted to $30 a day from $250 a day a month ago.
“Money goes to gasoline — I know mine does,” said the hardware store’s manager, Pam Williams, who tries to attract customers by putting out choice crickets for fishing bait beside the front door.
Local governments are leaving grass high along the roads and doing fewer road repairs to save on fuel costs. The Holmes County government has cut the work week to four days to give workers gasoline relief (keeping the same total of hours), and politicians are even considering replacing sanitation workers with prison inmates on some shifts to conserve money for fuel.
The local price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was roughly $3.85 last week, slightly below the national average, but the median family income in Holmes County is about $18,500.
Nationwide, regular unleaded gasoline reached an average of $4.005 on Sunday, according to the American Automobile Association. That is the highest price ever and about a dollar higher than at the start of the year.
While looking to cut workers at his fish processing plant in nearby Isola, Miss., Dick Stevens, president of Consolidated Catfish Producers, said that 10 workers walked into his office last week and volunteered to take a buyout rather than continue commuting from Charleston, Miss., 65 miles away. “The gas ate them alive,” he said.
Workers at the plant are trying to find ways to cope. Josephine Cage, who fillets fish, said her 30-mile commute from Tchula to Isola in her 1998 Ford Escort four days a week is costing her $200 a month, or nearly 20 percent of her pay.
“I make it by the grace of God,” she said, and also by replacing meat at supper with soups and green beans and broccoli. She fills her car a little bit every day, because “I can’t afford to fill it up. Whatever money I have, I put it in.”
Sociologists and economists who study rural poverty say the gasoline crisis in the rural South, if it persists, could accelerate population loss and decrease the tax base in some areas as more people move closer to urban manufacturing jobs. They warn that the high cost of driving makes low-wage labor even less attractive to workers, especially those who also have to pay for child care and can live off welfare and food stamps.
“As gas prices rise, working less could be the economically rational choice,” said Tim Slack, a sociologist at Louisiana State University who studies rural poverty. “That would mean lower incomes for the poor and greater distance from the mainstream.”
[Via NY Times]
But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.
Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.
People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.
The disparity between rural America and the rest of the country is a matter of simple home economics. Nationwide, Americans are now spending about 4 percent of their take-home income on gasoline. By contrast, in some counties in the Mississippi Delta, that figure has surpassed 13 percent.
As a result, gasoline expenses are rivaling what families spend on food and housing.
“This crisis really impacts those who are at the economic margins of society, mostly in the rural areas and particularly parts of the Southeast,” said Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, a fuel analysis firm. “These are people who have to decide between food and transportation.”
A survey by Mr. Rozell’s firm late last month found that the gasoline crisis is taking the highest toll, as a percentage of income, on people in rural areas of the South, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.
With the exception of rural Maine, the Northeast appears least affected by gasoline prices because people there make more money and drive shorter distances, or they take a bus or train to work.
But across Mississippi and the rural South, little public transit is available and people have no choice but to drive to work. Since jobs are scarce, commutes are frequently 20 miles or more. Many of the vehicles on the roads here are old rundown trucks, some getting 10 or fewer miles to the gallon.
The survey showed that of the 13 counties where people spent 13 percent or more of their family income on gasoline, 5 were located in Mississippi, 4 were in Alabama, 3 were in Kentucky and 1 was in West Virginia. While people here in Holmes County spent an average of 15.6 percent of their income on gasoline, people in Nassau County, N.Y., spent barely more than 2 percent, according to the survey.
Economists say that despite widespread concern about gasoline prices, the nationwide impact of the oil crisis has so far been gentler than during the oil crises of the 1970s and 1980s, when shortages caused long lines at the pump, set off inflation and drove the economy into recession.
Americans on average now spend about 4 percent of their after-tax income on transportation fuels, according to Brian A. Bethune, an economist at Global Insight, a forecasting firm. That compares with 4.5 percent in early 1981, the highest point since World War II. At its lowest point, in 1998, that share dropped to 1.9 percent.
“Gas prices have doubled over the last year but the economy has not fallen off the cliff,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. “But for the rural lower income people, as a proportion of their income the rise of gas prices is very high.”
While people everywhere are talking about gasoline prices these days, some folks in Tchula (the T is silent) have gone beyond talking.
Anthony Clark, a farm worker from Tchula, says he prays every night for lower gasoline prices. He recently decided not to fix his broken 1992 Chevrolet Astro van because he could not afford the fuel. Now he hires friends and family members to drive him around to buy food and medicine for his diabetic aunt, and his boss sends a van to pick him up for the 10-mile commute to work.
A trip from Tchula to the nearest sizable town about 15 minutes away can cost him $25 roundtrip — for the driving and the waiting. That is about 10 percent of what he makes in a week.
Taking a break under some cottonwood trees beside a drainage ditch filled with buzzing mosquitoes, Mr. Clark and members of his work crew spoke of the big and little changes that higher gas prices have brought. The extra dollars spent at the pump mean electric bills are going unpaid and macaroni is replacing meat at supper. Donations to church are being put off, and video rentals are now unaffordable.
Cleveland Whiteside, who works with Mr. Clark and used to commute 30 miles a day, said his Jeep Cherokee was repossessed last month, because “I paid so much for gas to get to work I couldn’t pay my payments anymore.” His employer, Larry Clanton, has lent him a pickup truck so he can get to work.
Signs of pain and adaptation because of the cost of gas are everywhere. Local fried chicken restaurants are closing because people are eating out less. At the hardware store here, sales have plummeted to $30 a day from $250 a day a month ago.
“Money goes to gasoline — I know mine does,” said the hardware store’s manager, Pam Williams, who tries to attract customers by putting out choice crickets for fishing bait beside the front door.
Local governments are leaving grass high along the roads and doing fewer road repairs to save on fuel costs. The Holmes County government has cut the work week to four days to give workers gasoline relief (keeping the same total of hours), and politicians are even considering replacing sanitation workers with prison inmates on some shifts to conserve money for fuel.
The local price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was roughly $3.85 last week, slightly below the national average, but the median family income in Holmes County is about $18,500.
Nationwide, regular unleaded gasoline reached an average of $4.005 on Sunday, according to the American Automobile Association. That is the highest price ever and about a dollar higher than at the start of the year.
While looking to cut workers at his fish processing plant in nearby Isola, Miss., Dick Stevens, president of Consolidated Catfish Producers, said that 10 workers walked into his office last week and volunteered to take a buyout rather than continue commuting from Charleston, Miss., 65 miles away. “The gas ate them alive,” he said.
Workers at the plant are trying to find ways to cope. Josephine Cage, who fillets fish, said her 30-mile commute from Tchula to Isola in her 1998 Ford Escort four days a week is costing her $200 a month, or nearly 20 percent of her pay.
“I make it by the grace of God,” she said, and also by replacing meat at supper with soups and green beans and broccoli. She fills her car a little bit every day, because “I can’t afford to fill it up. Whatever money I have, I put it in.”
Sociologists and economists who study rural poverty say the gasoline crisis in the rural South, if it persists, could accelerate population loss and decrease the tax base in some areas as more people move closer to urban manufacturing jobs. They warn that the high cost of driving makes low-wage labor even less attractive to workers, especially those who also have to pay for child care and can live off welfare and food stamps.
“As gas prices rise, working less could be the economically rational choice,” said Tim Slack, a sociologist at Louisiana State University who studies rural poverty. “That would mean lower incomes for the poor and greater distance from the mainstream.”
[Via NY Times]
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Financier Chris Hohn's £460 Million Giveaway Is Biggest Ever Charity Donation
The hedge fund manager Chris Hohn, who runs The Children's Investment Fund (TCI), has donated £466 million to the foundation run by his wife, Jamie Cooper-Hohn, that benefits projects across Africa and the developing world.
The donation dwarfs other recent gifts. Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish billionaire, has promised to give £1 billion to charity, but that was spread over his life time. David and Heather Stevens, the founders of the insurance company Admiral, gave away £100 million.
The Hohns have given almost £800 million in only four years, making them Britain's most generous philanthropists.
Mr Hohn, 41, who has a reputation for being aggressive and ruthless with the management of the companies he invests in, set up TCI in 2003. The fund was structured so that a percentage of the earnings go directly to its charitable arm, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).
The couple are considered pioneers among the "new philanthropists", the super-rich who are not only giving away a large proportion of their wealth but increasingly controlling the charities too.
As president of CIFF, American-born Mrs Cooper-Hohn, 43, meticulously researches each cause to find those that will produce "transformational change" on a large scale.
She says she runs the charity using the business model of her husband's fund. She once said: "I was very eager that if we did this we would do it very much in the way Chris invests, making long-term, well-researched investments, bringing business rigour and a private-sector approach into development."
The foundation has given money to the Clinton Foundation for the treatment of HIV/Aids; to a scheme to help orphans in Malawi; and to emergency aid projects in places such as Darfur.
After the charity gave £2.9 million to HIV and Aids work conducted by Bill Clinton's foundation, the former president said that the Hohns' "marriage of business and philanthropy provides a great tool to effect serious change in the developing world".
Originally the Hohns planned to give £5 million a year to CIFF but, because of the success of TCI, donations soared each year. In 2005, the foundation gave £500 million.
Last year the cash injection leapt to £235.8 million. CIFF is now thought to be Britain's fastest growing foundation. The Hohns, who avoid publicity and about whom little is known, have four children and live in north London. Mrs Cooper-Hohn has given an exclusive interview to tomorrow's Sunday Telegraph.
In it she said: "One of the things that attracted Chris and I was the shared sense of something that is larger than ourselves and the thrill that we can have a positive impact.
"We work well together – he is passionate about helping, I'm more pragmatic about it. The aim is that Chris's money will result in long lasting and radical change."
Mr Hohn's father, a mechanic, came to Britain in the 1960s from Jamaica. He married Winifred, a secretary, and lived in Sussex. His son went to Southampton University then Harvard Business School. There he met Mrs Cooper-Hohn, who was brought up in Chicago.
TCI manages more than £5 billion for clients and made returns of more than 40 per cent on investors' money in 2006 and of 50 per cent in 2005. Mrs Cooper-Hohn does not take a salary.
Britain's richest people are involved in unprecedented levels of charitable giving. It is estimated that the top 30 philanthropists among Britain's richest 1,000 people either gave away or pledged to give away £2.38 billion over the year to May 2008.
Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish entrepreneur, has pledged to give away £1 billion in his lifetime through his Hunter Foundation.
Meanwhile Peter Cruddas, the founder of the internet securities dealer CMC, has set up the Peter Cruddas Foundation to handle his donations. He has endowed the fund with £100 million. Margie Moffat, the co-founder of the AT Mays travel agency, has put £50 million into a charitable trust for Scottish causes.
Eric Clapton raises funds for the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, which he founded to help alcoholics and recovering drug addicts.
Up to 30 per cent of Elton John's earnings from live performances go to charity.
Notable donations
Sir Tom Hunter, The Hunter Foundation - £1,013.8m
Lord Sainsbury, Sainsbury family charitable trusts - £233.6m
Peter Cruddas, The Peter Cruddas Foundation - £100m
Anthony d’Offay, Gift of art collection to the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland - £97m
Margie and Jamie Moffat, The Moffat Charitable Trust - £54.8m
Johan Eliasch, Amazon rainforest - £50m
Sir Ian Wood, The Wood Family Trust - £50m
Sir Elton John, Elton John Aids Foundations £25.8m
Michael Spencer, One day’s revenue at Icap to good causes - £9.2m
Hermann Hauser, Centre for Entrepreneurship, University of Cambridge - £8m
[Via Telegraph]
The donation dwarfs other recent gifts. Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish billionaire, has promised to give £1 billion to charity, but that was spread over his life time. David and Heather Stevens, the founders of the insurance company Admiral, gave away £100 million.
The Hohns have given almost £800 million in only four years, making them Britain's most generous philanthropists.
Mr Hohn, 41, who has a reputation for being aggressive and ruthless with the management of the companies he invests in, set up TCI in 2003. The fund was structured so that a percentage of the earnings go directly to its charitable arm, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).
The couple are considered pioneers among the "new philanthropists", the super-rich who are not only giving away a large proportion of their wealth but increasingly controlling the charities too.
As president of CIFF, American-born Mrs Cooper-Hohn, 43, meticulously researches each cause to find those that will produce "transformational change" on a large scale.
She says she runs the charity using the business model of her husband's fund. She once said: "I was very eager that if we did this we would do it very much in the way Chris invests, making long-term, well-researched investments, bringing business rigour and a private-sector approach into development."
The foundation has given money to the Clinton Foundation for the treatment of HIV/Aids; to a scheme to help orphans in Malawi; and to emergency aid projects in places such as Darfur.
After the charity gave £2.9 million to HIV and Aids work conducted by Bill Clinton's foundation, the former president said that the Hohns' "marriage of business and philanthropy provides a great tool to effect serious change in the developing world".
Originally the Hohns planned to give £5 million a year to CIFF but, because of the success of TCI, donations soared each year. In 2005, the foundation gave £500 million.
Last year the cash injection leapt to £235.8 million. CIFF is now thought to be Britain's fastest growing foundation. The Hohns, who avoid publicity and about whom little is known, have four children and live in north London. Mrs Cooper-Hohn has given an exclusive interview to tomorrow's Sunday Telegraph.
In it she said: "One of the things that attracted Chris and I was the shared sense of something that is larger than ourselves and the thrill that we can have a positive impact.
"We work well together – he is passionate about helping, I'm more pragmatic about it. The aim is that Chris's money will result in long lasting and radical change."
Mr Hohn's father, a mechanic, came to Britain in the 1960s from Jamaica. He married Winifred, a secretary, and lived in Sussex. His son went to Southampton University then Harvard Business School. There he met Mrs Cooper-Hohn, who was brought up in Chicago.
TCI manages more than £5 billion for clients and made returns of more than 40 per cent on investors' money in 2006 and of 50 per cent in 2005. Mrs Cooper-Hohn does not take a salary.
Britain's richest people are involved in unprecedented levels of charitable giving. It is estimated that the top 30 philanthropists among Britain's richest 1,000 people either gave away or pledged to give away £2.38 billion over the year to May 2008.
Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish entrepreneur, has pledged to give away £1 billion in his lifetime through his Hunter Foundation.
Meanwhile Peter Cruddas, the founder of the internet securities dealer CMC, has set up the Peter Cruddas Foundation to handle his donations. He has endowed the fund with £100 million. Margie Moffat, the co-founder of the AT Mays travel agency, has put £50 million into a charitable trust for Scottish causes.
Eric Clapton raises funds for the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, which he founded to help alcoholics and recovering drug addicts.
Up to 30 per cent of Elton John's earnings from live performances go to charity.
Notable donations
Sir Tom Hunter, The Hunter Foundation - £1,013.8m
Lord Sainsbury, Sainsbury family charitable trusts - £233.6m
Peter Cruddas, The Peter Cruddas Foundation - £100m
Anthony d’Offay, Gift of art collection to the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland - £97m
Margie and Jamie Moffat, The Moffat Charitable Trust - £54.8m
Johan Eliasch, Amazon rainforest - £50m
Sir Ian Wood, The Wood Family Trust - £50m
Sir Elton John, Elton John Aids Foundations £25.8m
Michael Spencer, One day’s revenue at Icap to good causes - £9.2m
Hermann Hauser, Centre for Entrepreneurship, University of Cambridge - £8m
[Via Telegraph]
Why Men Die First
There is a charming anecdote that Marianne Legato, a best-selling American author and the professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University, tells about her father. He was a short, muscular and fit man, a successful physician like his daughter, who had one other passion in his life apart from medicine: hunting. He used to take his son on frequent hunting trips and on one occasion they came to the edge of a sunflower field.
"The plants were tall and entangled together, making it very difficult to walk through them. My father, who was about 70 at the time, bent his head and simply started out, doggedly trudging through the field with no complaint, never pausing to rest and never commenting on how difficult the passage undoubtedly was.
"On another trip, my brother found him sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking, at three in the morning. 'What's the matter, Dad?' he asked. My father answered, pointing to his head: 'Too much traffic.' That was all he said. It would never have occurred to him to confide in one of his sons – or anyone else."
This insight into the family's modus operandi appears in the opening chapter of Dr Legato's latest book, Why Men Die First. It illustrates a truth about the male psyche: a bloody-minded refusal to ask for help. Dr Legato's father took risks, had enormous confidence and dismissed anything that might be interpreted as a sign of weakness. When he died of cancer, 10 years before her mother, it was partly because he had ignored the fact that his urine was blood-tinged for two years before he asked a colleague to examine his bladder.
For Dr Legato, part of the solution is that men need to live more like women. "Men are told from an early age to 'suck it up'," she says. "They are socialised to get on with it and it is left to women to urge them to go to the doctor, usually ineffectively."
It is extraordinary, as the opening sentence of her book says, that in a society where health is an obsession, we are not investigating in more detail the most fundamental question of all – why one sex should die before the other.
On average, women live seven years longer than men. Boys die more frequently than girls in infancy and in childhood. Between the ages of 20 and 24, three times more men die than women, and men are twice as likely to die before 65. Heart disease, cancer, suicide, accidents and murder are all higher among men.
The difference in death rates between the sexes has puzzled doctors on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, the former chief medical officer, Sir Donald Acheson, has a single word explanation for the gender gap: hormones. Among younger, testosterone-fuelled men, accidents and violence are the chief cause of death, whereas in later life they are carried off by heart disease – against which women are protected by the female hormone, oestrogen. Men also die in larger numbers from lung cancer, because they tend to be heavier smokers than women. It is men's "rash and venturesome natures" that rendered them the weaker sex, he says.
Dr Legato agrees that hormones supply a "tremendous part of the answer". But this raises a further question. "Why are we not looking for an oestrogen-like molecule to protect men from coronary disease?" she says. "Men start to die from heart disease from the age of 35 – it should be regarded as important as breast cancer."
Twenty years ago, men and women were regarded as indistinguishable in terms of the way their bodies functioned. Gradually, that view has changed as it has become clear that the two sexes are different, not just in the obvious ways, but in every system of their bodies. In 1992, Dr Legato wrote The Female Heart, exploring the reasons why heart disease affects men and women differently. That experience led her to create a discipline of gender specific medicine.
Today, the sexes are becoming homogenised as they exchange roles – she interviewed female soldiers, firefighters and boxers for the book as well as house husbands. But it is too early to say whether these changes will shift attitudes at a deeper level. Why is it, for example, that there are more cases of melanoma (the most serious form of skin cancer) in women, but more deaths in men?
Her latest book traces what she calls the "fragility" of men throughout their lives. As well as biological differences, social pressures on men can be lethal, she says.
Now in her seventies, Dr Legato has two children of her own, a son and a daughter, whom she admits to having treated differently, sending the boy to a tough school renowned for its discipline, while the girl attended a "softer" institution.
The legacy of that decision is still evident. Her son, a lawyer in his mid-thirties, called her recently to tell her he was sick and would not be going to work. Three days later he called again and it was clear that he was seriously ill, but had done nothing about it.
She says: "If he had asked for help earlier, I think we could have made him better sooner, but he talked of soldiering on. I wish he would read my book, but I don't think he will. He is not interested in why men die first."
Health risks every man should know about
Obesity
A waist measurement over 37 inches increases your risk of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease. Eat healthily and lose that gut.
Unprotected sex
Up to 50 per cent of men (70 per cent of women) with a sexually transmitted infection don't show any symptoms. Use a condom
Too little exercise
Staying fit is the key to good health. Walking is fine (10,000 steps burns 500 calories) and if you jog or swim or play football (700 calories an hour), you burn more.
Heart disease
There are more than 200,000 deaths a year in the UK from heart disease and stroke and together they account for almost one in three premature deaths (before age 75) in men. Check your blood pressure (should be below 160/100 mmHg) and cholesterol level (ideally less than 5mmol/litre).
Smoking
Men still smoke more and die more frequently from smoking than women. It increases the risk of heart disease, half a dozen kinds of cancer and other illnesses such as bronchitis. Half of all smokers will die from their habit if they do not stop. Give it up.
Drinking
Heavy drinking is common among men. In moderation alcohol enhances enjoyment and reduces the risk of heart disease. In excess, it leads to social and psychological distress and physical damage. Three small glasses of wine or a pint and a half of beer a day is fine – more could be problematic.
Testicular cancer
Although still rare, rates have trebled in the past 25 years and it is the commonest cause of cancer deaths in men aged 15-35. Check your testicles regularly.
Prostate cancer
The commonest in men with 35,000 cases and 10,000 deaths a year. Be alert to warning signs (difficulty peeing or getting up in the night).
Other cancers
Don't ignore symptoms (persistent cough, blood in the urine or faeces) – early treatment increases the chance of a cure.
[Via Independent]
Why Men Die First: How to Lengthen Your Lifespan
"The plants were tall and entangled together, making it very difficult to walk through them. My father, who was about 70 at the time, bent his head and simply started out, doggedly trudging through the field with no complaint, never pausing to rest and never commenting on how difficult the passage undoubtedly was.
"On another trip, my brother found him sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking, at three in the morning. 'What's the matter, Dad?' he asked. My father answered, pointing to his head: 'Too much traffic.' That was all he said. It would never have occurred to him to confide in one of his sons – or anyone else."
This insight into the family's modus operandi appears in the opening chapter of Dr Legato's latest book, Why Men Die First. It illustrates a truth about the male psyche: a bloody-minded refusal to ask for help. Dr Legato's father took risks, had enormous confidence and dismissed anything that might be interpreted as a sign of weakness. When he died of cancer, 10 years before her mother, it was partly because he had ignored the fact that his urine was blood-tinged for two years before he asked a colleague to examine his bladder.
For Dr Legato, part of the solution is that men need to live more like women. "Men are told from an early age to 'suck it up'," she says. "They are socialised to get on with it and it is left to women to urge them to go to the doctor, usually ineffectively."
It is extraordinary, as the opening sentence of her book says, that in a society where health is an obsession, we are not investigating in more detail the most fundamental question of all – why one sex should die before the other.
On average, women live seven years longer than men. Boys die more frequently than girls in infancy and in childhood. Between the ages of 20 and 24, three times more men die than women, and men are twice as likely to die before 65. Heart disease, cancer, suicide, accidents and murder are all higher among men.
The difference in death rates between the sexes has puzzled doctors on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, the former chief medical officer, Sir Donald Acheson, has a single word explanation for the gender gap: hormones. Among younger, testosterone-fuelled men, accidents and violence are the chief cause of death, whereas in later life they are carried off by heart disease – against which women are protected by the female hormone, oestrogen. Men also die in larger numbers from lung cancer, because they tend to be heavier smokers than women. It is men's "rash and venturesome natures" that rendered them the weaker sex, he says.
Dr Legato agrees that hormones supply a "tremendous part of the answer". But this raises a further question. "Why are we not looking for an oestrogen-like molecule to protect men from coronary disease?" she says. "Men start to die from heart disease from the age of 35 – it should be regarded as important as breast cancer."
Twenty years ago, men and women were regarded as indistinguishable in terms of the way their bodies functioned. Gradually, that view has changed as it has become clear that the two sexes are different, not just in the obvious ways, but in every system of their bodies. In 1992, Dr Legato wrote The Female Heart, exploring the reasons why heart disease affects men and women differently. That experience led her to create a discipline of gender specific medicine.
Today, the sexes are becoming homogenised as they exchange roles – she interviewed female soldiers, firefighters and boxers for the book as well as house husbands. But it is too early to say whether these changes will shift attitudes at a deeper level. Why is it, for example, that there are more cases of melanoma (the most serious form of skin cancer) in women, but more deaths in men?
Her latest book traces what she calls the "fragility" of men throughout their lives. As well as biological differences, social pressures on men can be lethal, she says.
Now in her seventies, Dr Legato has two children of her own, a son and a daughter, whom she admits to having treated differently, sending the boy to a tough school renowned for its discipline, while the girl attended a "softer" institution.
The legacy of that decision is still evident. Her son, a lawyer in his mid-thirties, called her recently to tell her he was sick and would not be going to work. Three days later he called again and it was clear that he was seriously ill, but had done nothing about it.
She says: "If he had asked for help earlier, I think we could have made him better sooner, but he talked of soldiering on. I wish he would read my book, but I don't think he will. He is not interested in why men die first."
Health risks every man should know about
Obesity
A waist measurement over 37 inches increases your risk of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease. Eat healthily and lose that gut.
Unprotected sex
Up to 50 per cent of men (70 per cent of women) with a sexually transmitted infection don't show any symptoms. Use a condom
Too little exercise
Staying fit is the key to good health. Walking is fine (10,000 steps burns 500 calories) and if you jog or swim or play football (700 calories an hour), you burn more.
Heart disease
There are more than 200,000 deaths a year in the UK from heart disease and stroke and together they account for almost one in three premature deaths (before age 75) in men. Check your blood pressure (should be below 160/100 mmHg) and cholesterol level (ideally less than 5mmol/litre).
Smoking
Men still smoke more and die more frequently from smoking than women. It increases the risk of heart disease, half a dozen kinds of cancer and other illnesses such as bronchitis. Half of all smokers will die from their habit if they do not stop. Give it up.
Drinking
Heavy drinking is common among men. In moderation alcohol enhances enjoyment and reduces the risk of heart disease. In excess, it leads to social and psychological distress and physical damage. Three small glasses of wine or a pint and a half of beer a day is fine – more could be problematic.
Testicular cancer
Although still rare, rates have trebled in the past 25 years and it is the commonest cause of cancer deaths in men aged 15-35. Check your testicles regularly.
Prostate cancer
The commonest in men with 35,000 cases and 10,000 deaths a year. Be alert to warning signs (difficulty peeing or getting up in the night).
Other cancers
Don't ignore symptoms (persistent cough, blood in the urine or faeces) – early treatment increases the chance of a cure.
[Via Independent]
Why Men Die First: How to Lengthen Your Lifespan
$8,000-per-gallon Printer Ink Leads to Antitrust Lawsuit
A Boston man has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing hardware maker HP and office supply retailer Staples of colluding to inflate the price of printer ink cartridges in violation of federal antitrust law. According to the suit, HP allegedly paid Staples $100 million to refrain from selling inexpensive third-party ink cartridges, although the suit doesn't make it clear how plaintiff Ranjit Bedi arrived at that figure.
For most printer companies, ink is the bread and butter of their business. The price of ink for HP ink-jet printers can be as much as $8,000 per gallon, a figure that makes gas-pump price gouging look tame. HP is currently the dominant company in the printing market, and a considerable portion of the company's profits come from ink.
The printer makers have been waging an all-out war against third-party vendors that sell replacement cartridges at a fraction of the price. The tactics employed by the printer makers to maintain monopoly control over ink distribution for their printing products have become increasingly aggressive. In the past, we have seen HP, Epson, Lenovo and other companies attempt to use patents and even the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in their efforts to crush third-party ink distributors.
The companies have also turned to using the ink equivalent of DRM, the use of microchips embedded in ink cartridges that work with a corresponding technical mechanism in the printer that blocks the use of unauthorized third-party ink. Adding insult to injury, most printers are lying, filthy ink thieves, according to a recent study, misreporting that they are low on ink when they are not.
Bedi's suit asks for unspecified damages and an injunction barring the two companies from engaging in anticompetitive business practices.
[Via Ars Technica]
For most printer companies, ink is the bread and butter of their business. The price of ink for HP ink-jet printers can be as much as $8,000 per gallon, a figure that makes gas-pump price gouging look tame. HP is currently the dominant company in the printing market, and a considerable portion of the company's profits come from ink.
The printer makers have been waging an all-out war against third-party vendors that sell replacement cartridges at a fraction of the price. The tactics employed by the printer makers to maintain monopoly control over ink distribution for their printing products have become increasingly aggressive. In the past, we have seen HP, Epson, Lenovo and other companies attempt to use patents and even the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in their efforts to crush third-party ink distributors.
The companies have also turned to using the ink equivalent of DRM, the use of microchips embedded in ink cartridges that work with a corresponding technical mechanism in the printer that blocks the use of unauthorized third-party ink. Adding insult to injury, most printers are lying, filthy ink thieves, according to a recent study, misreporting that they are low on ink when they are not.
Bedi's suit asks for unspecified damages and an injunction barring the two companies from engaging in anticompetitive business practices.
[Via Ars Technica]
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Obama Money Machine
Freed from a serious fundraising constraint, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is positioned to mount a general election campaign on a scale the nation has never seen, fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations.
By rejecting public financing Thursday, Obama now faces no legal spending limits after he emerges from the Democratic National Convention in August and moves to the final stage of the race against the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.
Obama turned down $84.1 million in federal dollars in opting out of the federal system - the first major-party candidate to do so since it started in 1976. But his campaign is betting it will collect far more than that from his donors.
The Illinois senator intends to use the extra money to redraw the electoral map. He will run television ads in traditionally Republican states where he hopes to compete and deploy field operations in places Democrats are not supposed to win.
"It allows him to go broader and deeper than any candidate has been able to do from a financial basis," said Don Sipple, a Republican political strategist.
McCain said Thursday he would accept public financing, meaning he will be restricted to $84.1 million in direct spending in the two months between the Republican convention and election day.
He accused Obama of breaking a promise to abide by the federal spending limit.
"This is a big deal, a big deal," McCain said. "He has completely reversed himself and gone back, not on his word to me, but the commitment he made to the American people."
Though Obama's decision made strategic sense, it left some good government groups discouraged, predicting it would only fuel the money chase in politics. Complicating matters for Obama, he wrote in a campaign questionnaire last November that he was committed to public financing. His statement, however, left some wiggle room.
"It's a mistake; I'm sure he's thinking more of his short-term advantage than the long-term success of his reform program," said Steve Weissman, associate director for policy at the Campaign Finance Institute. "Even though he's for fixing the public financing system, this could help erode support for that objective."
Obama's campaign said the decision to reject public funding was tough. It is rooted in the unmatched success Obama has enjoyed in raising money. Through the end of April, Obama has brought in more than $265 million, compared to less than $97 million for McCain, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Under the public financing system, McCain can continue to raise and spend as much as he wants until he becomes the GOP nominee at the September convention. At that point, the Arizona senator can spend only the $84.1 million from a federal treasury fund. Taxpayers kick into the fund by voluntarily checking off a $3 contribution on their tax returns.
Obama's already deep pool of about 1.4 million donors is expected to swell. He is now absorbing New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's fundraising machinery, which will provide a jolt.
Obama's senior staff met in Chicago on Thursday with a half-dozen of Clinton's top fundraisers, and Clinton has called on 100 of her top fundraisers to meet with her and Obama next week in Washington.
Obama is also in a strong position because nearly half his donors have given less than $200, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Contributions to the general election are capped at $2,300. So Obama is free to return to his small donors and ask for more.
Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist who worked for John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign, predicted that Obama could raise and spend $200 million in the post-convention period alone.
Evan Tracey, head of the nonpartisan Campaign Media Analysis Group, said Obama's strategy against Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary foreshadowed what he might do to weaken McCain. Obama forces did not expect to beat her, but they spent so much that Clinton was compelled to deplete her resources to preserve victory.
"He can complicate McCain campaign's electoral math," said Tracey. "They can try to make any state in the country competitive."
[Via SF Gate]
By rejecting public financing Thursday, Obama now faces no legal spending limits after he emerges from the Democratic National Convention in August and moves to the final stage of the race against the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.
Obama turned down $84.1 million in federal dollars in opting out of the federal system - the first major-party candidate to do so since it started in 1976. But his campaign is betting it will collect far more than that from his donors.
The Illinois senator intends to use the extra money to redraw the electoral map. He will run television ads in traditionally Republican states where he hopes to compete and deploy field operations in places Democrats are not supposed to win.
"It allows him to go broader and deeper than any candidate has been able to do from a financial basis," said Don Sipple, a Republican political strategist.
McCain said Thursday he would accept public financing, meaning he will be restricted to $84.1 million in direct spending in the two months between the Republican convention and election day.
He accused Obama of breaking a promise to abide by the federal spending limit.
"This is a big deal, a big deal," McCain said. "He has completely reversed himself and gone back, not on his word to me, but the commitment he made to the American people."
Though Obama's decision made strategic sense, it left some good government groups discouraged, predicting it would only fuel the money chase in politics. Complicating matters for Obama, he wrote in a campaign questionnaire last November that he was committed to public financing. His statement, however, left some wiggle room.
"It's a mistake; I'm sure he's thinking more of his short-term advantage than the long-term success of his reform program," said Steve Weissman, associate director for policy at the Campaign Finance Institute. "Even though he's for fixing the public financing system, this could help erode support for that objective."
Obama's campaign said the decision to reject public funding was tough. It is rooted in the unmatched success Obama has enjoyed in raising money. Through the end of April, Obama has brought in more than $265 million, compared to less than $97 million for McCain, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Under the public financing system, McCain can continue to raise and spend as much as he wants until he becomes the GOP nominee at the September convention. At that point, the Arizona senator can spend only the $84.1 million from a federal treasury fund. Taxpayers kick into the fund by voluntarily checking off a $3 contribution on their tax returns.
Obama's already deep pool of about 1.4 million donors is expected to swell. He is now absorbing New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's fundraising machinery, which will provide a jolt.
Obama's senior staff met in Chicago on Thursday with a half-dozen of Clinton's top fundraisers, and Clinton has called on 100 of her top fundraisers to meet with her and Obama next week in Washington.
Obama is also in a strong position because nearly half his donors have given less than $200, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Contributions to the general election are capped at $2,300. So Obama is free to return to his small donors and ask for more.
Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist who worked for John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign, predicted that Obama could raise and spend $200 million in the post-convention period alone.
Evan Tracey, head of the nonpartisan Campaign Media Analysis Group, said Obama's strategy against Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary foreshadowed what he might do to weaken McCain. Obama forces did not expect to beat her, but they spent so much that Clinton was compelled to deplete her resources to preserve victory.
"He can complicate McCain campaign's electoral math," said Tracey. "They can try to make any state in the country competitive."
[Via SF Gate]
China Presses Injured Athletes in Quest for Gold
SHANGHAI — When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a detached retina while training, a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family members and fans speculated about the imminent end of a great career.
The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”
But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.
“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”
Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial riches awaiting star performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.
“An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”
Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004 Olympics, its highest ranking ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the hosting of the Games by surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.
The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic aspirants, from still largely unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s brightest marquee names, like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months of the N.B.A. season with a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.
Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of retirement, and some female stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving birth. Previous gold medal winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a repeat victory will let the whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious injuries. A female weight lifter, Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high blood pressure that her chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”
‘Don’t Retreat’
These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Liu Xiang, a Chinese track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular sports star in Athens when he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, as saying, “Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”
So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last August, after winning the track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high expectations. “I’ve been tortured these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve never been so nervous; more nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”
For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of China’s Olympic-caliber competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every aspect of their lives, often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care and interactions with the public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training regimens and the risks of injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top female doubles tennis player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often operates.
Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last year to gain tour points required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost in the first round of the French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong I could hardly concentrate,” she said.
Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if she kept playing without treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her request to concede the French Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was an important factor in their performance.”
“The philosophy of our sports system has several bad points,” said Chen Peide, former director of the Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau. “Urging people to tenaciously strive to succeed, to be faster, to jump higher, to be stronger and to win more gold medals usually comes at the expense of athletes’ health.
“When they’re having a 100- or 102-degree fever, we tell them not to give up so easily,” he said.
Mr. Chen said that a Communist war slogan, “Don’t retreat from the front lines with light injuries,” was a pet phrase of Chinese athletes and coaches.
While Ms. Zheng invoked her doctor’s advice in appealing to her coach, for many other Olympics hopefuls, medical decisions are made without consulting medical professionals.
“The athletes themselves basically have no idea of their injuries and they usually don’t have a say” in how they are treated, said Dr. Wang Yubin, the medical director for the sports injury department at Shanghai East International Medical Center. Decisions about how to handle injuries of important athletes, he said, are made by officials of the sporting establishment.
Sacrificing for a Payoff
If it is true that the system pushes athletes hard, many athletes are just as demanding of themselves. Since the 1980s, when the commercialization of sports began in China, money has become a powerful incentive alongside the drive for glory. “I once treated a national weight-lifting champion and warned him not to carry on in the sport anymore,” Dr. Wang said. “I told both him and his parents that in the worst case, he could be paralyzed for life. The parents replied that there was nothing for their child to do but persevere.
“They said, ‘What else can he do if he doesn’t lift weights?’ ”
Li Zhuo, a retired silver medalist in the women’s weight-lifting 48-kilogram category in 2004, put it another way. “Once you win gold, your status is changed and you become another person,” she said, referring to the monetary awards and business opportunities showered on victors. “One Olympics can change an athlete’s life, and that’s pressure.”
Hu Jia, the gold medal diver, for example, was born to laid-off workers in Hubei Province in central China. When he was 6 years old, his parents piled quilts on the ground, then let him jump from a bed to practice diving. Three years later, he was spotted by a former diver and sent to train with a coach in Guangdong, where he made the provincial team. He was considered relatively untalented by coaches and mocked by the public as a perpetual also-ran before the 2004 Games. But he distinguished himself through unrelenting hard work, eventually beating out the favorite, Tian Liang, for a gold.
Although a spot on this year’s squad is no sure thing, he has shown the same determination in working his way back from injury, forgoing anesthesia during eye surgery because he hoped it would speed recovery. “There are so many difficulties, surgery and injuries on the road, but I have to keep up to the last,” he told a newspaper in Wuhan.
According to a study published in 2000, 24 percent of Chinese divers have had retina injuries. Yu Fen, a former national coach, said the high rate was because of poor screening of young athletes for congenital eye problems and antiquated, high-intensity training methods. Divers wear no goggles, and repeated impact with the water can damage eyes, Chinese medical experts say, especially if divers fail to close their eyes just before hitting the water.
Dr. Wang Yongli, a sports medicine expert at Beijing Sports Hospital who discovered a high incidence of retina damage when he conducted a survey at the end of 1990s, said there had been minor changes in training techniques since then. But he said he did not expect them to have much effect on the rate of injury.
“I don’t have any solid numbers to show what it’s like in other countries, but the rate should be lower compared to what I’ve found in the Chinese team,” Dr. Wang said.
“The training regimen of foreign athletes by no means compares to ours, meaning the hours devoted to training, and the number of dives into the water. Chinese divers are professionals, which means they practice all day long, while Australians and Canadians might be a bank clerk or a dentist, who only spend two hours practicing after work.”
As suggested by the injunction to athletes against retreating from the front lines, China’s national sports system does indeed borrow heavily from wartime, albeit largely from the cold war. Within five years of taking power in 1949, Mao Zedong adopted many of the features of the heavily centralized sports system of China’s then-Communist ally, the Soviet Union.
As in the Soviet Union, China’s new sports establishment was deliberately conceived as an instrument of nation-building, a tool of mass mobilization and even of foreign policy, aimed both at increasing the country’s prestige and promoting feelings of integration among the people.
Experts say, however, that the two systems quickly diverged as ties between Moscow and Beijing soured.
“The Soviet system was centered on industry, with factory sponsors for each team, while the Chinese system was centered on government and military units,” said Susan Brownell, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of “Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China.” “This created an aspect in the Chinese system of intense rivalries between the provinces, as well as between provinces and the central government.”
Selection of athletes at the provincial level may begin when they are as young as 6, experts say, with as many as 2 percent of grade school students flagged as promising. These children are placed in all-expenses-paid sports schools and “filtered” through increasingly intensive competitions that weed out all but an elite 80,000 who find homes on provincial teams. Of those, only a tiny fraction will make the next big step, earning a place on China’s national team.
The Strategy of Success
“Pressure doesn’t just come from the central government, but from each province, and even from the cities the athletes come from,” said Mr. Chen, the former Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau director. “Quotas are assigned to each province, and if a province won several gold medals last time, it should perform at least as well this time. The promotion of sports officials in each province depends on how many medals their province has won.”
In many sports, parents can go years without seeing their children, and may speak to them only once or twice a year. But local and provincial officials are unstintingly attentive, showering gifts on the families during Spring Festival, China’s most important holiday, to make up for the children’s absence.
Major changes to China’s sports policy were instituted at the start of the era of economic reform in the early 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s top leader, announced the “Ten Year Sports Guidelines” and China returned to Olympic competition after a 32-year absence.
This led to greatly increased spending on sports and new training methods, pioneered in the 1980s by Ma Junren, a legendary coach from Liaoning Province who insisted on multiple, grueling training sessions per day for track athletes rather than the two sessions that were customary in the West. Mr. Ma and many of his runners, known as “Ma’s army,” fell into disrepute and were withdrawn from Olympics competition in the late 1990s when many tested positive for steroids.
A pillar of China’s recent strong rise in the Olympics-medal tallies has been the astute targeting of sports where medal opportunities seem greatest. In some categories, competition is relatively thin.
“The Chinese have been very strategic in where they have put their energies,” said Ms. Brownell, a visiting professor at Beijing Sport University. “They have put major efforts into training for new events, so that they can set records as soon as the events come into effect. This has been the case with the triple jump, the pole vault and with women’s weight lifting.”
Speaking of women’s weight lifting, Dai Guangyu, former vice chairman of the China Weight Lifting Association, said China’s national system had allowed it to invest in developing female weight lifters beginning in the 1980s. “Other countries didn’t have that many people involved,” Mr. Dai said.
Since the 2000 Olympics, when women’s weight lifting was introduced, China has won half of the 14 gold medals awarded, and on the eve of the Beijing Games, pressure is as high in this sport as in any to at least hold the line on gold medals. Mr. Dai acknowledged that a successful push in this sport — widely seen as dangerous and unglamorous, making it hard for muscle-bound women to find work or spouses when their careers end — depends on recruiting among the rural poor. With its heavy training, it also depends on being able to closely control an athlete’s life.
Wang Mingjuan, one of three aspirants to represent China in the 48-kilogram category, was asked to try out recently in a higher weight category to give China an even better shot at winning medals. But she injured her lower back and has returned to her normal weight class. Her parents, who say they see her once every three or four years, said she had told them in their last phone call not to worry.
“We don’t have much money, and the life was hard,” her mother, Wang Meiyu, said, explaining the decision to send her to a sports school at the age of 9. “She was so little and we couldn’t see her often, but when we visited, my heart felt bitter and sour. It was so tough.”
Unless Ms. Wang and her teammates win gold, Chen Xiaomin, a women’s weight-lifting champion in the 2000 Olympics, said the bitterness was likely to continue. “It takes at least 10 years’ practice before you can become a world champion,” Ms. Chen said. “Once you win a world championship, you can go to college for free, or work, or become an official. If you don’t, you get nothing but injuries all over your body. No diploma, no job, no skill.”
[Via NY Times]
The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”
But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.
“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”
Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial riches awaiting star performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.
“An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”
Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004 Olympics, its highest ranking ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the hosting of the Games by surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.
The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic aspirants, from still largely unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s brightest marquee names, like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months of the N.B.A. season with a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.
Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of retirement, and some female stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving birth. Previous gold medal winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a repeat victory will let the whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious injuries. A female weight lifter, Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high blood pressure that her chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”
‘Don’t Retreat’
These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Liu Xiang, a Chinese track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular sports star in Athens when he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, as saying, “Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”
So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last August, after winning the track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high expectations. “I’ve been tortured these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve never been so nervous; more nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”
For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of China’s Olympic-caliber competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every aspect of their lives, often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care and interactions with the public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training regimens and the risks of injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top female doubles tennis player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often operates.
Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last year to gain tour points required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost in the first round of the French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong I could hardly concentrate,” she said.
Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if she kept playing without treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her request to concede the French Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was an important factor in their performance.”
“The philosophy of our sports system has several bad points,” said Chen Peide, former director of the Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau. “Urging people to tenaciously strive to succeed, to be faster, to jump higher, to be stronger and to win more gold medals usually comes at the expense of athletes’ health.
“When they’re having a 100- or 102-degree fever, we tell them not to give up so easily,” he said.
Mr. Chen said that a Communist war slogan, “Don’t retreat from the front lines with light injuries,” was a pet phrase of Chinese athletes and coaches.
While Ms. Zheng invoked her doctor’s advice in appealing to her coach, for many other Olympics hopefuls, medical decisions are made without consulting medical professionals.
“The athletes themselves basically have no idea of their injuries and they usually don’t have a say” in how they are treated, said Dr. Wang Yubin, the medical director for the sports injury department at Shanghai East International Medical Center. Decisions about how to handle injuries of important athletes, he said, are made by officials of the sporting establishment.
Sacrificing for a Payoff
If it is true that the system pushes athletes hard, many athletes are just as demanding of themselves. Since the 1980s, when the commercialization of sports began in China, money has become a powerful incentive alongside the drive for glory. “I once treated a national weight-lifting champion and warned him not to carry on in the sport anymore,” Dr. Wang said. “I told both him and his parents that in the worst case, he could be paralyzed for life. The parents replied that there was nothing for their child to do but persevere.
“They said, ‘What else can he do if he doesn’t lift weights?’ ”
Li Zhuo, a retired silver medalist in the women’s weight-lifting 48-kilogram category in 2004, put it another way. “Once you win gold, your status is changed and you become another person,” she said, referring to the monetary awards and business opportunities showered on victors. “One Olympics can change an athlete’s life, and that’s pressure.”
Hu Jia, the gold medal diver, for example, was born to laid-off workers in Hubei Province in central China. When he was 6 years old, his parents piled quilts on the ground, then let him jump from a bed to practice diving. Three years later, he was spotted by a former diver and sent to train with a coach in Guangdong, where he made the provincial team. He was considered relatively untalented by coaches and mocked by the public as a perpetual also-ran before the 2004 Games. But he distinguished himself through unrelenting hard work, eventually beating out the favorite, Tian Liang, for a gold.
Although a spot on this year’s squad is no sure thing, he has shown the same determination in working his way back from injury, forgoing anesthesia during eye surgery because he hoped it would speed recovery. “There are so many difficulties, surgery and injuries on the road, but I have to keep up to the last,” he told a newspaper in Wuhan.
According to a study published in 2000, 24 percent of Chinese divers have had retina injuries. Yu Fen, a former national coach, said the high rate was because of poor screening of young athletes for congenital eye problems and antiquated, high-intensity training methods. Divers wear no goggles, and repeated impact with the water can damage eyes, Chinese medical experts say, especially if divers fail to close their eyes just before hitting the water.
Dr. Wang Yongli, a sports medicine expert at Beijing Sports Hospital who discovered a high incidence of retina damage when he conducted a survey at the end of 1990s, said there had been minor changes in training techniques since then. But he said he did not expect them to have much effect on the rate of injury.
“I don’t have any solid numbers to show what it’s like in other countries, but the rate should be lower compared to what I’ve found in the Chinese team,” Dr. Wang said.
“The training regimen of foreign athletes by no means compares to ours, meaning the hours devoted to training, and the number of dives into the water. Chinese divers are professionals, which means they practice all day long, while Australians and Canadians might be a bank clerk or a dentist, who only spend two hours practicing after work.”
As suggested by the injunction to athletes against retreating from the front lines, China’s national sports system does indeed borrow heavily from wartime, albeit largely from the cold war. Within five years of taking power in 1949, Mao Zedong adopted many of the features of the heavily centralized sports system of China’s then-Communist ally, the Soviet Union.
As in the Soviet Union, China’s new sports establishment was deliberately conceived as an instrument of nation-building, a tool of mass mobilization and even of foreign policy, aimed both at increasing the country’s prestige and promoting feelings of integration among the people.
Experts say, however, that the two systems quickly diverged as ties between Moscow and Beijing soured.
“The Soviet system was centered on industry, with factory sponsors for each team, while the Chinese system was centered on government and military units,” said Susan Brownell, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of “Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China.” “This created an aspect in the Chinese system of intense rivalries between the provinces, as well as between provinces and the central government.”
Selection of athletes at the provincial level may begin when they are as young as 6, experts say, with as many as 2 percent of grade school students flagged as promising. These children are placed in all-expenses-paid sports schools and “filtered” through increasingly intensive competitions that weed out all but an elite 80,000 who find homes on provincial teams. Of those, only a tiny fraction will make the next big step, earning a place on China’s national team.
The Strategy of Success
“Pressure doesn’t just come from the central government, but from each province, and even from the cities the athletes come from,” said Mr. Chen, the former Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau director. “Quotas are assigned to each province, and if a province won several gold medals last time, it should perform at least as well this time. The promotion of sports officials in each province depends on how many medals their province has won.”
In many sports, parents can go years without seeing their children, and may speak to them only once or twice a year. But local and provincial officials are unstintingly attentive, showering gifts on the families during Spring Festival, China’s most important holiday, to make up for the children’s absence.
Major changes to China’s sports policy were instituted at the start of the era of economic reform in the early 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s top leader, announced the “Ten Year Sports Guidelines” and China returned to Olympic competition after a 32-year absence.
This led to greatly increased spending on sports and new training methods, pioneered in the 1980s by Ma Junren, a legendary coach from Liaoning Province who insisted on multiple, grueling training sessions per day for track athletes rather than the two sessions that were customary in the West. Mr. Ma and many of his runners, known as “Ma’s army,” fell into disrepute and were withdrawn from Olympics competition in the late 1990s when many tested positive for steroids.
A pillar of China’s recent strong rise in the Olympics-medal tallies has been the astute targeting of sports where medal opportunities seem greatest. In some categories, competition is relatively thin.
“The Chinese have been very strategic in where they have put their energies,” said Ms. Brownell, a visiting professor at Beijing Sport University. “They have put major efforts into training for new events, so that they can set records as soon as the events come into effect. This has been the case with the triple jump, the pole vault and with women’s weight lifting.”
Speaking of women’s weight lifting, Dai Guangyu, former vice chairman of the China Weight Lifting Association, said China’s national system had allowed it to invest in developing female weight lifters beginning in the 1980s. “Other countries didn’t have that many people involved,” Mr. Dai said.
Since the 2000 Olympics, when women’s weight lifting was introduced, China has won half of the 14 gold medals awarded, and on the eve of the Beijing Games, pressure is as high in this sport as in any to at least hold the line on gold medals. Mr. Dai acknowledged that a successful push in this sport — widely seen as dangerous and unglamorous, making it hard for muscle-bound women to find work or spouses when their careers end — depends on recruiting among the rural poor. With its heavy training, it also depends on being able to closely control an athlete’s life.
Wang Mingjuan, one of three aspirants to represent China in the 48-kilogram category, was asked to try out recently in a higher weight category to give China an even better shot at winning medals. But she injured her lower back and has returned to her normal weight class. Her parents, who say they see her once every three or four years, said she had told them in their last phone call not to worry.
“We don’t have much money, and the life was hard,” her mother, Wang Meiyu, said, explaining the decision to send her to a sports school at the age of 9. “She was so little and we couldn’t see her often, but when we visited, my heart felt bitter and sour. It was so tough.”
Unless Ms. Wang and her teammates win gold, Chen Xiaomin, a women’s weight-lifting champion in the 2000 Olympics, said the bitterness was likely to continue. “It takes at least 10 years’ practice before you can become a world champion,” Ms. Chen said. “Once you win a world championship, you can go to college for free, or work, or become an official. If you don’t, you get nothing but injuries all over your body. No diploma, no job, no skill.”
[Via NY Times]
Tuna Sushi Contains Hazardously High Levels of Mercury
A study conducted by the New York Times has found dangerously high levels of mercury in tuna sushi sold in New York City.
Investigators for the Times purchased 44 pieces of tuna sushi from local stores and restaurants. More than half of the locations sold sushi that tested so high for mercury that eating six pieces per week would expose a person to unsafe levels, according to standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The EPA standard presumes that the average adult weighs 154 pounds. People weighing less than that should consume even less mercury.
Eight of the 44 pieces tested had mercury levels high enough that eating even two or three pieces a week would exceed the EPA's "safe" intake levels. With concentrations of more than one part per million, this sushi exceeds the "action level" at which the FDA is empowered to take it off the market.
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, known to accumulate in the bodies of predatory and long-lived fish in particular. In 2004, the FDA and EPA warned children and women who might become pregnant to eat only limited amounts of certain kinds of canned tuna. Fresh tuna, however, was not included in the warning.
The fresh tuna sampled in the Times study contained significantly more mercury that is usually found in canned fish.
A 2007 survey conducted by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that the average New Yorker has blood mercury levels three times higher than the national average. Levels among Asians and higher income groups, both of which are known to eat more seafood, are even higher.
Numerous studies have linked seafood consumption to high blood mercury levels.
"The current advice from the FDA is insufficient," said Philippe Grandjean, of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Environmental Medicine at the University of Southern Denmark. "In order to maintain reasonably low mercury exposure you have to eat fish low in the food chain, the smaller fish, and they are not saying that."
[Via Natural News]
Investigators for the Times purchased 44 pieces of tuna sushi from local stores and restaurants. More than half of the locations sold sushi that tested so high for mercury that eating six pieces per week would expose a person to unsafe levels, according to standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The EPA standard presumes that the average adult weighs 154 pounds. People weighing less than that should consume even less mercury.
Eight of the 44 pieces tested had mercury levels high enough that eating even two or three pieces a week would exceed the EPA's "safe" intake levels. With concentrations of more than one part per million, this sushi exceeds the "action level" at which the FDA is empowered to take it off the market.
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, known to accumulate in the bodies of predatory and long-lived fish in particular. In 2004, the FDA and EPA warned children and women who might become pregnant to eat only limited amounts of certain kinds of canned tuna. Fresh tuna, however, was not included in the warning.
The fresh tuna sampled in the Times study contained significantly more mercury that is usually found in canned fish.
A 2007 survey conducted by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that the average New Yorker has blood mercury levels three times higher than the national average. Levels among Asians and higher income groups, both of which are known to eat more seafood, are even higher.
Numerous studies have linked seafood consumption to high blood mercury levels.
"The current advice from the FDA is insufficient," said Philippe Grandjean, of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Environmental Medicine at the University of Southern Denmark. "In order to maintain reasonably low mercury exposure you have to eat fish low in the food chain, the smaller fish, and they are not saying that."
[Via Natural News]
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Details on Around 11,000 Patients Has Been Stolen
More than 20,000 records were held on computers stolen from a south London hospital. In Wolverhampton, a laptop holding details on around 11,000 patients has been stolen.
The missing data includes names, addresses, NHS numbers and, in the Wolverhampton theft, personal medical histories.
In both cases, sensitive data had been stored on laptops in defiance of rules that are meant to protect such records from theft or loss.
[Via Telegraph]
The missing data includes names, addresses, NHS numbers and, in the Wolverhampton theft, personal medical histories.
In both cases, sensitive data had been stored on laptops in defiance of rules that are meant to protect such records from theft or loss.
[Via Telegraph]
Self-fulfilling Prophecies
Expectations of stereotypes will come to pass if people believe in them.
Self-fulfilling prophecies—ideas that become reality simply because someone believes them—do not usually have strong effects. But a study shows that expectations may come to pass when many people hold the same beliefs—if those beliefs are unfavorable.
Stephanie Madon, an Iowa State University psychologist, investigated parents' expectations about their children's alcohol use. She discovered that when both parents believe that a child will abuse alcohol, in fact, the child is likely to drink more than expected. This holds true even when signs, such as past alcohol use and friends' behavior, suggest a teenager is at low risk. The findings support the social theory that prophecies are especially self-fulfilling for stereotyped groups.
But Madon notes that her study also offers hope. If one parent has positive expectations about a child, the child is protected from the other parent's negative belief.
[Via Psychology Today]
Self-fulfilling prophecies—ideas that become reality simply because someone believes them—do not usually have strong effects. But a study shows that expectations may come to pass when many people hold the same beliefs—if those beliefs are unfavorable.
Stephanie Madon, an Iowa State University psychologist, investigated parents' expectations about their children's alcohol use. She discovered that when both parents believe that a child will abuse alcohol, in fact, the child is likely to drink more than expected. This holds true even when signs, such as past alcohol use and friends' behavior, suggest a teenager is at low risk. The findings support the social theory that prophecies are especially self-fulfilling for stereotyped groups.
But Madon notes that her study also offers hope. If one parent has positive expectations about a child, the child is protected from the other parent's negative belief.
[Via Psychology Today]
Chemicals in Toothpaste Kill Teenage Girl
A teenage girl who died from anaphylactic shock in October was killed by an allergic reaction to her toothpaste, her family has alleged.
Francesca Sanna went into anaphylactic shock while in a car heading out with her friends for the night. She died before she could receive the necessary medical treatment.
Only minutes before the attack, she had brushed her teeth with Aquafresh toothpaste. Her parents have blamed the toothpaste for their daughter's death.
"From the beginning I thought that toothpaste might have contributed to her death," said Sanna's mother Kim. "We always used Aquafresh Mild and Minty, and then the packaging changed. This is when Francesca started to complain of sore teeth and gums - a couple of weeks before she died."
Kim Sanna noted that her daughter had brushed her teeth right before leaving the house.
"Her [allergic] reaction was so severe and so quick the trigger must have been something she did before she left the house, like brushing her teeth," she said.
In response to the allegations, a spokesperson for Aquafresh manufacturer Glaxo SmithKline said that the ingredients of Aquafresh Mild and Minty toothpaste have not changed since 2001, and that the company has never had reports of severe allergies to the product.
The coroner's report on Sanna's death was inconclusive, beyond the fact that an allergic reaction - specifically, an acute anaphylactic reaction and asthma - was definitely the cause of death.
"She must have come into contact with or ingested something that caused her death," said coroner Carolyn Singleton.
At a recent inquest into the death, pathologist Dr Richard Prescott said, "Both lungs were inflamed and the bronchials were plugged with mucus, but she did not die from an asthma attack.
"[The cause] could have been a number of different things. People have suffered severe reactions in the past from toothpaste, mouthwash or even tampons," Prescott said.
[Via Natural News]
Francesca Sanna went into anaphylactic shock while in a car heading out with her friends for the night. She died before she could receive the necessary medical treatment.
Only minutes before the attack, she had brushed her teeth with Aquafresh toothpaste. Her parents have blamed the toothpaste for their daughter's death.
"From the beginning I thought that toothpaste might have contributed to her death," said Sanna's mother Kim. "We always used Aquafresh Mild and Minty, and then the packaging changed. This is when Francesca started to complain of sore teeth and gums - a couple of weeks before she died."
Kim Sanna noted that her daughter had brushed her teeth right before leaving the house.
"Her [allergic] reaction was so severe and so quick the trigger must have been something she did before she left the house, like brushing her teeth," she said.
In response to the allegations, a spokesperson for Aquafresh manufacturer Glaxo SmithKline said that the ingredients of Aquafresh Mild and Minty toothpaste have not changed since 2001, and that the company has never had reports of severe allergies to the product.
The coroner's report on Sanna's death was inconclusive, beyond the fact that an allergic reaction - specifically, an acute anaphylactic reaction and asthma - was definitely the cause of death.
"She must have come into contact with or ingested something that caused her death," said coroner Carolyn Singleton.
At a recent inquest into the death, pathologist Dr Richard Prescott said, "Both lungs were inflamed and the bronchials were plugged with mucus, but she did not die from an asthma attack.
"[The cause] could have been a number of different things. People have suffered severe reactions in the past from toothpaste, mouthwash or even tampons," Prescott said.
[Via Natural News]
Friday 13th Is Safer Than an Average Friday
Unlucky for some? Dutch statisticians have established that Friday 13th, a date regarded in many countries as inauspicious, is actually safer than an average Friday.
A study published by the Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics (CVS) showed that fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft occur when the 13th of the month falls on a Friday than on other Fridays.
"I find it hard to believe that it is because people are preventatively more careful or just stay home, but statistically speaking, driving is a little bit safer on Friday 13th," CVS statistician Alex Hoen told the Verzekerd insurance magazine.
In the last two years, Dutch insurers received reports of an average 7800 traffic accidents each Friday, the CVS study said.
But the average figure when the 13th fell on a Friday was just 7500.
There were also fewer incidents of fire and theft, although the average value of losses on Fridays 13th was slightly higher.
[Via News.com.au]
A study published by the Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics (CVS) showed that fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft occur when the 13th of the month falls on a Friday than on other Fridays.
"I find it hard to believe that it is because people are preventatively more careful or just stay home, but statistically speaking, driving is a little bit safer on Friday 13th," CVS statistician Alex Hoen told the Verzekerd insurance magazine.
In the last two years, Dutch insurers received reports of an average 7800 traffic accidents each Friday, the CVS study said.
But the average figure when the 13th fell on a Friday was just 7500.
There were also fewer incidents of fire and theft, although the average value of losses on Fridays 13th was slightly higher.
[Via News.com.au]
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Sometimes It Rains Cement
Russian air force planes dropped a 25-kg (55-lb) sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home last week while seeding clouds to prevent rain from spoiling a holiday, Russian media said on Tuesday.
"A pack of cement used in creating ... good weather in the capital region ... failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft)," police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.
Ahead of major public holidays the Russian Air Force often dispatches up to 12 cargo planes carrying loads of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture.
A spokesman for the Russian Air Force refused to comment.
June 12 was Russia Day, a patriotic holiday celebrating the country's independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Weather specialists said the cement's failure to turn to powder was the first hiccup in 20 years.
The homeowner was not injured, but refused an offer of 50,000 roubles ($2,100) from the air force, saying she would sue for damages and compensation for moral suffering, Interfax said.
[Via Yahoo News]
"A pack of cement used in creating ... good weather in the capital region ... failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft)," police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti.
Ahead of major public holidays the Russian Air Force often dispatches up to 12 cargo planes carrying loads of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture.
A spokesman for the Russian Air Force refused to comment.
June 12 was Russia Day, a patriotic holiday celebrating the country's independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Weather specialists said the cement's failure to turn to powder was the first hiccup in 20 years.
The homeowner was not injured, but refused an offer of 50,000 roubles ($2,100) from the air force, saying she would sue for damages and compensation for moral suffering, Interfax said.
[Via Yahoo News]
Honesty Is Not the Best Policy in the Workplace
"The successful candidate will mask his true feelings, negative and positive, in the name of professionalism." So might read the majority of job descriptions, and not just for positions such as customer service rep, 911 operator, or waiter.
Emotional subterfuge is de rigueur across the job board, according to Michael Kramer, Ph.D., and Jon Hess, Ph.D., professors of communication at the University of Missouri in Columbia. They examined the masking of emotions in occupations that don't necessarily require interaction with the public.
Ninety-five employees, from a utility worker to a TV director, were asked for examples of inappropriate emotional displays at work. Gloating over a promotion was considered just as destructive as losing one's cool under pressure. Misdirected positive displays, such as a manager congratulating one employee for a group effort, also reflected poorly on an individual's perceived professionalism.
[Via Psychology Today]
Emotional subterfuge is de rigueur across the job board, according to Michael Kramer, Ph.D., and Jon Hess, Ph.D., professors of communication at the University of Missouri in Columbia. They examined the masking of emotions in occupations that don't necessarily require interaction with the public.
Ninety-five employees, from a utility worker to a TV director, were asked for examples of inappropriate emotional displays at work. Gloating over a promotion was considered just as destructive as losing one's cool under pressure. Misdirected positive displays, such as a manager congratulating one employee for a group effort, also reflected poorly on an individual's perceived professionalism.
[Via Psychology Today]
Are Americans Giving up French Fries?
America is eating fewer french fries, according to a recently released data from the consumer market research firm NPD Group.
It doesn't hold true in my universe; I order them whenever I can; if they're cooked in duck fat, as they are at Boca in Novato or Spruce and Orson in San Francisco, I'm always tempted to order two.
According to an article in Nation's Restaurant News, french fry sales have been declining since 2006, but they've taken a huge dive this year. In the first quarter of 2008, sales were down 7 percent. That's a staggering amount when you figure restaurants serve about two billion orders a year.
The story went on to explain that 89 percent of sales can be attributed to quick-service restaurants, particularly hamburger chains such as McDonald's. However, midscale restaurants were down even more: 10 percent. All age groups contributed to the decline, the study shows, but the biggest dip was in the 18- to 24-year-old age group, and children under 6.
What it shows is that the word is out about healthful eating. Parents are watching what their young children eat, and young adults have obviously gotten the message, too.
Yes, and for those quick to criticize, I have, too. I promise not to order them more than three times a week.
[Via SF Gate]
It doesn't hold true in my universe; I order them whenever I can; if they're cooked in duck fat, as they are at Boca in Novato or Spruce and Orson in San Francisco, I'm always tempted to order two.
According to an article in Nation's Restaurant News, french fry sales have been declining since 2006, but they've taken a huge dive this year. In the first quarter of 2008, sales were down 7 percent. That's a staggering amount when you figure restaurants serve about two billion orders a year.
The story went on to explain that 89 percent of sales can be attributed to quick-service restaurants, particularly hamburger chains such as McDonald's. However, midscale restaurants were down even more: 10 percent. All age groups contributed to the decline, the study shows, but the biggest dip was in the 18- to 24-year-old age group, and children under 6.
What it shows is that the word is out about healthful eating. Parents are watching what their young children eat, and young adults have obviously gotten the message, too.
Yes, and for those quick to criticize, I have, too. I promise not to order them more than three times a week.
[Via SF Gate]
U.S. School District to Begin Microchipping Students
A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.
The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.
Parents or school officials could log onto a school web site to see whether and when specific children had entered or exited which bus, and to look up the bus's current location as provided by the GPS device.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized the plan as an invasion of children's privacy and a potential risk to their safety.
"There's absolutely no need to be tagging children," said Stephen Brown, executive director of the ACLU's Rhode Island chapter. According to Brown, the school district should already know where its students are.
"[This program is] a solution in search of a problem," Brown said.
The school district says that its current plan is no different than other programs already in place for parents to monitor their children's school experience. For example, parents can already check on their children's attendance records and what they have for lunch, said district Superintendent Rosemary Kraeger.
Brown disputed this argument. The school is perfectly entitled to track its buses, he said, but "it's a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves." He raised the question of whether unauthorized individuals could use easily available RFID readers to find out students' private information and monitor their movements.
Because the pilot program is being provided to the school district at no cost, it did not require approval from the Rhode Island ethics commission.
[Via Natural News]
The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.
Parents or school officials could log onto a school web site to see whether and when specific children had entered or exited which bus, and to look up the bus's current location as provided by the GPS device.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized the plan as an invasion of children's privacy and a potential risk to their safety.
"There's absolutely no need to be tagging children," said Stephen Brown, executive director of the ACLU's Rhode Island chapter. According to Brown, the school district should already know where its students are.
"[This program is] a solution in search of a problem," Brown said.
The school district says that its current plan is no different than other programs already in place for parents to monitor their children's school experience. For example, parents can already check on their children's attendance records and what they have for lunch, said district Superintendent Rosemary Kraeger.
Brown disputed this argument. The school is perfectly entitled to track its buses, he said, but "it's a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves." He raised the question of whether unauthorized individuals could use easily available RFID readers to find out students' private information and monitor their movements.
Because the pilot program is being provided to the school district at no cost, it did not require approval from the Rhode Island ethics commission.
[Via Natural News]
Monday, June 16, 2008
Woman Loses Discrimination Claim Over Flatulence
A British woman who said she suffered cruel jibes from work colleagues because of her chronic flatulence has lost a discrimination claim.
The unnamed woman said she was taunted by colleagues at Leeds Metropolitan University because she suffered from severe irritable bowel syndrome and claimed disability and racial discrimination against the university, as well as constructive dismissal.
A Leeds employment tribunal was told one workmate said: "She opens the window because she sits there and stinks the place out - we shouldn't have to put up with it."
She told the hearing colleagues would make sniffing noises and "bowel jokes" when she was within earshot.
The three-strong tribunal panel dismissed all three of her claims.
[Via News.com.au]
The unnamed woman said she was taunted by colleagues at Leeds Metropolitan University because she suffered from severe irritable bowel syndrome and claimed disability and racial discrimination against the university, as well as constructive dismissal.
A Leeds employment tribunal was told one workmate said: "She opens the window because she sits there and stinks the place out - we shouldn't have to put up with it."
She told the hearing colleagues would make sniffing noises and "bowel jokes" when she was within earshot.
The three-strong tribunal panel dismissed all three of her claims.
[Via News.com.au]
Tim Russert's Death Is a Symbol of the Failure of Drug-based Medicine
NBC commentator Tim Russert was taking prescription medications when he suffered a heart attack and died yesterday at the age of 58. The mainstream media is reporting that Russert died from a "heart attack," but no press outlet has yet bothered to ask: "What caused the heart attack?"
Nearly 100,000 Americans are killed each year by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, according to the American Medical Association. Virtually none of those deaths are accurately reported as being caused by pharmaceuticals. Instead, the media simply reports that the victim died of whatever biological malfunction was most noticeable at the time of death.
That's why Tim Russert was said to have died of a "heart attack" -- his failing heart was the most obvious and sudden organ failure, even though the biological tipping point that brought him to that moment of heart failure could have been caused by the very pharmaceuticals he was taking in an effort to "control" coronary artery disease.
Pharmaceuticals do not make you healthy
Pharmaceuticals, you see, do not solve any underlying health problems. They do not cure heart disease, nor do they prevent it. Rather, they simply "control" the symptoms of disease by artificially lowering or inflating numbers on a blood test, thereby creating the illusion of health when, in reality, no fundamental health improvements exist at all.
That's why pharmaceuticals that are used to treat heart disease actually promote the continuation of disease and discourage patients from taking other, more proactive steps to resolve their underlying health problems and eliminate the need for medication.
Tim Russert, unfortunately, believed in using medication and did not take the necessary steps to alter his diet and lifestyle in a way that eliminated his dependence on that medication. According to Russert's internist, Michael A. Newman, Russert knew he had been diagnosed with coronary artery disease but believed he was "controlling" it with medication and exercise.
One look at Russert's physique tells you he wasn't controlling anything with exercise, which means he was relying primarily on medication to solve his coronary heart disease problems for him. This may have been a fatal mistake: A working man who suddenly dies at age 58 from a completely preventable disease is not dying of "normal causes" at all; he's being killed by something.
Russert's heart disease was not his only health problem
We can't be certain it was entirely from medication, of course. Russert's diet no doubt had something to do with it, too. A quick look at Russert's body and face tells you he consumed large quantities of animal products (meat, milk, cheese) which directly cause coronary artery disease. It's also not difficult to see that he suffered from rather prominent liver problems as well as a kidney disorder that caused excessive water retention. These health problems are obvious to anyone schooled in simple face diagnosis. (You can see these signs in his eyes and skin.)
Of course, even Russert never claimed he was in excellent health. But he likely lived under the illusion that his doctor-prescribed heart medication would "control" his symptoms and thereby relieve him of any worry about dying from sudden heart attacks or strokes. It is in this way that conventional medicine likely killed Tim Russert. His doctors made him believe that medication would save his life rather than end his life. But one hard look at the published studies on statin drugs, for example, reveals that cholesterol medications provide absolutely no health benefits to those who take them.
You read that correctly: Statin drugs may lower cholesterol numbers, but they do absolutely nothing to reduce the risk of death by heart attacks and strokes. They do not extend life, and they do not prevent death in any way. By any rational scientific assessment, statin drugs are medically useless.
But that doesn't stop a hundred million Americans from taking them, believing in the myths passed onto them by doctors who parrot the marketing lines of drug companies: "Statin drugs will control your cholesterol!" It's a lie, of course, but it sells a lot of drugs to gullible consumers who are ready to believe that a shiny little pill can relieve them of the responsibility of taking care of their own health.
What happened to Russert is about to happen to America's medicated population
Sadly, Tim Russert has learned the hard way what four generations of Americans are about to learn: That you cannot medicate yourself to good health, and when you try to do so, you often end up dying from the very medicine you thought was saving your life.
There's a book Tim Russert needed, and it's the same book that tens of millions of Americans need right now. It's called Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn. You can read about the book at his website, www.HeartAttackProof.com
This book, simply stated, teaches you how to reverse heart disease by changing what you eat. Change your diet, and heart disease vanishes, blood flow is restored, and the build-up of arterial plaque begins to fade away. It is absolutely true that through changes in diet and exercise, a person can make themselves heart attack proof.
Tim Russert, unfortunately, was not heart attack proof. And perhaps more important, his medication did not make him heart attack proof either.
Tim Russert's death is a symbol of the failure of drug-based medicine
There's no reason for an intelligent, active man to die at age 58, and to those Americans who are truly informed about health, disease and medication, Tim Russert's death symbolizes the danger of betting your life on statin drugs and heart medication. But to the ignorant masses of mainstream media journalists who worked in the same industry as Tim Russert, his death is just another mysterious loss of a talented man who died from bad luck.
The true causes of disease and health remain as much of a mystery to mainstream media journalists as the movement of the stars in the heavens were a mystery to 15th century sheep herders. They have no ability to rise above the belief in luck, myths and medical superstitions that dominate popular culture today. The most relevant superstition at work in this fiasco, of course, involves the recruitment of medical authorities to the Cult of Pharmacology and the quackery of doctors who prescribe heart medications to patients instead of taking the time to teach them how to prevent heart disease in the first place.
Regardless of what you thought about Tim Russert's politics, NaturalNews wishes his spirit well, and we hope that on his next journey through this world, he will learn to avoid the dangers of living an unhealthy lifestyle and taking prescription medications. Fifty-eight years is not nearly long enough to enjoy the experiences that life has to offer us, and perhaps the greatest crime of pharmaceutical-based medicine is not merely that it kills so many people, but that it steals from them the best years of their lives and leaves them with a life experience cut short by chemically-induced tragedy.
Tim Russert did not have to die. And yet, sadly, 100,000 other Americans will die this year from the same cause that likely killed Russert: Patented pharmaceuticals that simply don't work.
[Via Natural News]
Nearly 100,000 Americans are killed each year by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, according to the American Medical Association. Virtually none of those deaths are accurately reported as being caused by pharmaceuticals. Instead, the media simply reports that the victim died of whatever biological malfunction was most noticeable at the time of death.
That's why Tim Russert was said to have died of a "heart attack" -- his failing heart was the most obvious and sudden organ failure, even though the biological tipping point that brought him to that moment of heart failure could have been caused by the very pharmaceuticals he was taking in an effort to "control" coronary artery disease.
Pharmaceuticals do not make you healthy
Pharmaceuticals, you see, do not solve any underlying health problems. They do not cure heart disease, nor do they prevent it. Rather, they simply "control" the symptoms of disease by artificially lowering or inflating numbers on a blood test, thereby creating the illusion of health when, in reality, no fundamental health improvements exist at all.
That's why pharmaceuticals that are used to treat heart disease actually promote the continuation of disease and discourage patients from taking other, more proactive steps to resolve their underlying health problems and eliminate the need for medication.
Tim Russert, unfortunately, believed in using medication and did not take the necessary steps to alter his diet and lifestyle in a way that eliminated his dependence on that medication. According to Russert's internist, Michael A. Newman, Russert knew he had been diagnosed with coronary artery disease but believed he was "controlling" it with medication and exercise.
One look at Russert's physique tells you he wasn't controlling anything with exercise, which means he was relying primarily on medication to solve his coronary heart disease problems for him. This may have been a fatal mistake: A working man who suddenly dies at age 58 from a completely preventable disease is not dying of "normal causes" at all; he's being killed by something.
Russert's heart disease was not his only health problem
We can't be certain it was entirely from medication, of course. Russert's diet no doubt had something to do with it, too. A quick look at Russert's body and face tells you he consumed large quantities of animal products (meat, milk, cheese) which directly cause coronary artery disease. It's also not difficult to see that he suffered from rather prominent liver problems as well as a kidney disorder that caused excessive water retention. These health problems are obvious to anyone schooled in simple face diagnosis. (You can see these signs in his eyes and skin.)
Of course, even Russert never claimed he was in excellent health. But he likely lived under the illusion that his doctor-prescribed heart medication would "control" his symptoms and thereby relieve him of any worry about dying from sudden heart attacks or strokes. It is in this way that conventional medicine likely killed Tim Russert. His doctors made him believe that medication would save his life rather than end his life. But one hard look at the published studies on statin drugs, for example, reveals that cholesterol medications provide absolutely no health benefits to those who take them.
You read that correctly: Statin drugs may lower cholesterol numbers, but they do absolutely nothing to reduce the risk of death by heart attacks and strokes. They do not extend life, and they do not prevent death in any way. By any rational scientific assessment, statin drugs are medically useless.
But that doesn't stop a hundred million Americans from taking them, believing in the myths passed onto them by doctors who parrot the marketing lines of drug companies: "Statin drugs will control your cholesterol!" It's a lie, of course, but it sells a lot of drugs to gullible consumers who are ready to believe that a shiny little pill can relieve them of the responsibility of taking care of their own health.
What happened to Russert is about to happen to America's medicated population
Sadly, Tim Russert has learned the hard way what four generations of Americans are about to learn: That you cannot medicate yourself to good health, and when you try to do so, you often end up dying from the very medicine you thought was saving your life.
There's a book Tim Russert needed, and it's the same book that tens of millions of Americans need right now. It's called Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn. You can read about the book at his website, www.HeartAttackProof.com
This book, simply stated, teaches you how to reverse heart disease by changing what you eat. Change your diet, and heart disease vanishes, blood flow is restored, and the build-up of arterial plaque begins to fade away. It is absolutely true that through changes in diet and exercise, a person can make themselves heart attack proof.
Tim Russert, unfortunately, was not heart attack proof. And perhaps more important, his medication did not make him heart attack proof either.
Tim Russert's death is a symbol of the failure of drug-based medicine
There's no reason for an intelligent, active man to die at age 58, and to those Americans who are truly informed about health, disease and medication, Tim Russert's death symbolizes the danger of betting your life on statin drugs and heart medication. But to the ignorant masses of mainstream media journalists who worked in the same industry as Tim Russert, his death is just another mysterious loss of a talented man who died from bad luck.
The true causes of disease and health remain as much of a mystery to mainstream media journalists as the movement of the stars in the heavens were a mystery to 15th century sheep herders. They have no ability to rise above the belief in luck, myths and medical superstitions that dominate popular culture today. The most relevant superstition at work in this fiasco, of course, involves the recruitment of medical authorities to the Cult of Pharmacology and the quackery of doctors who prescribe heart medications to patients instead of taking the time to teach them how to prevent heart disease in the first place.
Regardless of what you thought about Tim Russert's politics, NaturalNews wishes his spirit well, and we hope that on his next journey through this world, he will learn to avoid the dangers of living an unhealthy lifestyle and taking prescription medications. Fifty-eight years is not nearly long enough to enjoy the experiences that life has to offer us, and perhaps the greatest crime of pharmaceutical-based medicine is not merely that it kills so many people, but that it steals from them the best years of their lives and leaves them with a life experience cut short by chemically-induced tragedy.
Tim Russert did not have to die. And yet, sadly, 100,000 other Americans will die this year from the same cause that likely killed Russert: Patented pharmaceuticals that simply don't work.
[Via Natural News]
Less Education Means Lower Life Expectancy
New research reveals that death rate differences between the highly educated and poorly educated sectors of the population are growing wider and more pronounced. Americans who have less than a high school education have a greater risk of dying early than comparative college graduates. This risk has risen most quickly for white women and the premature death rates have fallen the fastest for black men who are college graduates.
Whites who drop out of high school are four times more likely than white college graduates to die at a young age. This difference is three times higher than rates that existed from the early 1990s. Blacks have similar trends, though they are less pronounced.
This trend is indicative of the overall health of our country's population. Those people with resources at their disposal and higher incomes are doing well and those without resources are declining.
The study compared the mortality rates between the years of 1993 and 2001. For purposes of the study, deaths of people between the ages of 25 and 64 were utilized. All of these deaths were considered premature because they occurred at ages that were considered lower than the life expectancies for the groups studied.
White women high school dropouts showed the biggest decline in heath. Their mortality rate rose by approximately 3 % per year over a nine-year period. Accidents, heart attacks, emphysema, and cancer were the causes of approximately half of the increase. This group of women had mortality rates 3.8 times college graduate rates.
White men high school dropouts also showed a large health decline, their mortality rate rose approximately 1 % per year. For these men, accidents, suicides, and cancer were the main causes of their mortality rates. These men were 4.4 times more likely to die prematurely than their college graduate counterparts.
Black males with college degrees showed a dramatic mortality rate improvement -- approximately 6 % over the nine year period. Black female college graduates had mortality rates that were 3 % lower per year. For both blacks and whites examined in the study, education exerted a stronger influence on men than women.
The study did not include the reasons behind these disparities. Speculating is interesting, however. Researchers suggest that the best explanations are likely the increase in obesity, blood pressure, and tobacco use among the less educated groups.
This study has been published in PloS One. This is a journal published by the Public Library of Science. The study based its findings on vital statistics from 43 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Seven of these states originally included had incomplete education information and had to be excluded. The study included only non-Hispanic whites and blacks due to problems reporting other racial and ethnic groups.
[Via Natural News]
Whites who drop out of high school are four times more likely than white college graduates to die at a young age. This difference is three times higher than rates that existed from the early 1990s. Blacks have similar trends, though they are less pronounced.
This trend is indicative of the overall health of our country's population. Those people with resources at their disposal and higher incomes are doing well and those without resources are declining.
The study compared the mortality rates between the years of 1993 and 2001. For purposes of the study, deaths of people between the ages of 25 and 64 were utilized. All of these deaths were considered premature because they occurred at ages that were considered lower than the life expectancies for the groups studied.
White women high school dropouts showed the biggest decline in heath. Their mortality rate rose by approximately 3 % per year over a nine-year period. Accidents, heart attacks, emphysema, and cancer were the causes of approximately half of the increase. This group of women had mortality rates 3.8 times college graduate rates.
White men high school dropouts also showed a large health decline, their mortality rate rose approximately 1 % per year. For these men, accidents, suicides, and cancer were the main causes of their mortality rates. These men were 4.4 times more likely to die prematurely than their college graduate counterparts.
Black males with college degrees showed a dramatic mortality rate improvement -- approximately 6 % over the nine year period. Black female college graduates had mortality rates that were 3 % lower per year. For both blacks and whites examined in the study, education exerted a stronger influence on men than women.
The study did not include the reasons behind these disparities. Speculating is interesting, however. Researchers suggest that the best explanations are likely the increase in obesity, blood pressure, and tobacco use among the less educated groups.
This study has been published in PloS One. This is a journal published by the Public Library of Science. The study based its findings on vital statistics from 43 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Seven of these states originally included had incomplete education information and had to be excluded. The study included only non-Hispanic whites and blacks due to problems reporting other racial and ethnic groups.
[Via Natural News]
The Perfect Level of Stress
Anxious people, it turns out, may make better decisions. Gregory Samanez-Larkin, a graduate student in psychology at Stanford University, scanned the brains of healthy people (none of them had anxiety disorders) and found that a particular region, the anterior insula, lit up when the subjects anticipated losing money. But those who were more anxious showed even more activity in the anterior insula.
Later he brought the same group back to the lab to play a computer game for real cash. Those with greater insular activity—the more anxious ones—were better at learning how to avoid losing money in subsequent games. "Their anxiety over losing money perhaps led them to be more precise in the way they played the game," Samanez-Larkin says.
Anxiety isn't the same as stress per se, but if your body is in a stressful state and you don't feel happy about it, (as you would when keyed up for an exciting or fun event), then you will likely feel anxious.
Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, studies anxiety's effects on decision-making. "Under certain circumstances anxious people are more sensitive in detecting potentially bad outcomes associated with choices. They do avoid harm, so, as a consequence, it may be useful to be anxious," he says.
But those who are too sensitive to threats in their midst will make decisions that err on the side of caution. "Highly anxious people may decide not go to a mall, for example, because they feel extremely uncomfortable. Over time they may avoid engaging in interactions with other people, and this could hurt them," Paulus says.
Paulus and his team have found that anxious people tend to take a "bottom-up" approach to life—their emotional reactions to events are stronger, while their ability to reason and intellectually interpret events is weaker. "Chronically anxious peoples' brains experience everything as aversive," he says. Less anxious people, in contrast, take more of a "top-down" approach—the rational parts of their brain take over when they experience something potentially anxiety inducing, and they essentially talk themselves into not getting worked up.
Paulus hopes to eventually identify a specific therapy that would employ, say, meditative exercises to calm anxious people's emotional reactions (possibly in tandem with anti-anxiety medication) and also cognitive-behavioral therapy to help them think in ways that would also help them interpret situations as not dangerous.
Since a little stress is good for you and a lot is bad, how do you know if you are in the "just right" zone? Depending on what state you are in, Paulus says, you respond differently to touch and to temperature. Physiological tests built around these insights could eventually help tell us if we're stressed out a good amount or not. In the meantime, just relax and rely on your own intuition.
[Via Psychology Today]
Later he brought the same group back to the lab to play a computer game for real cash. Those with greater insular activity—the more anxious ones—were better at learning how to avoid losing money in subsequent games. "Their anxiety over losing money perhaps led them to be more precise in the way they played the game," Samanez-Larkin says.
Anxiety isn't the same as stress per se, but if your body is in a stressful state and you don't feel happy about it, (as you would when keyed up for an exciting or fun event), then you will likely feel anxious.
Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, studies anxiety's effects on decision-making. "Under certain circumstances anxious people are more sensitive in detecting potentially bad outcomes associated with choices. They do avoid harm, so, as a consequence, it may be useful to be anxious," he says.
But those who are too sensitive to threats in their midst will make decisions that err on the side of caution. "Highly anxious people may decide not go to a mall, for example, because they feel extremely uncomfortable. Over time they may avoid engaging in interactions with other people, and this could hurt them," Paulus says.
Paulus and his team have found that anxious people tend to take a "bottom-up" approach to life—their emotional reactions to events are stronger, while their ability to reason and intellectually interpret events is weaker. "Chronically anxious peoples' brains experience everything as aversive," he says. Less anxious people, in contrast, take more of a "top-down" approach—the rational parts of their brain take over when they experience something potentially anxiety inducing, and they essentially talk themselves into not getting worked up.
Paulus hopes to eventually identify a specific therapy that would employ, say, meditative exercises to calm anxious people's emotional reactions (possibly in tandem with anti-anxiety medication) and also cognitive-behavioral therapy to help them think in ways that would also help them interpret situations as not dangerous.
Since a little stress is good for you and a lot is bad, how do you know if you are in the "just right" zone? Depending on what state you are in, Paulus says, you respond differently to touch and to temperature. Physiological tests built around these insights could eventually help tell us if we're stressed out a good amount or not. In the meantime, just relax and rely on your own intuition.
[Via Psychology Today]
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Dolphins Swim So Fast It Hurts
What is the fastest a dolphin can swim? Near the surface, no more than 54 kilometres per hour. Why? Because it hurts it to swim faster.
Those are the findings of a pair of researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. But tuna, they say, do not suffer the same problem.
Gil Iosilevskii and Danny Weihs carried out a series of calculations to model the tail and fins of fish such as tuna and mackerel, and cetaceans such as dolphins. The aim was to determine what limits the maximum speed at which these creatures can swim.
The researchers found that although muscle power is the limiting factor for small fish, this is not the case for larger and more powerful swimmers such as tuna and dolphins.
Pain barrier
"There are certain limits on swimming speed that are imposed irrespective of power," explains Iosilevskii. One of these is the frequency at which the swimmers can beat their tails to propel themselves forward.
The other is the formation of microscopic bubbles around the tail, a phenomenon known as "cavitation". According to Iosilevskii and Weihs, for animals such as dolphins that have nerve endings in their tails, cavitation can be the most important limiting factor.
The bubbles form as a result of the pressure difference created by the movement of the fins. This process is what produces the ribbons of tiny bubbles that stream behind a ship's propeller (see image).
When the bubbles collapse, they produce a shockwave, which eats away the metal in propellers. To dolphins, it is painful. According to the researchers' calculations, within the top few metres of the water column, this happens when the dolphins reach 10 to 15 metres per second (36 to 54 kilometres per hour).
'Cheating' surfers
Tuna have "bony" tails without nerve endings, which is why they may sometimes break the speed limit imposed by the pain barrier. Tuna have been known to have lesions typical of the damage caused by cavitation.
Despite this, cavitation does slow tuna down: when the bubbles collapse, they break the flow of water over the fish's fins and tail, causing it to stall.
But for real speed, head deep. Cavitation events decrease as fish or dolphins swim deeper, and the local pressure increases.
The theoretical top speed of dolphins and tuna is unknown, however, as the animals' intrinsic power and maximum "tail beating rate" is unknown.
Either way, Iosilevskii says reports of dolphins overtaking speed boats are likely to be a result of the dolphins "cheating" by surfing the bow waves.
[Via New Scientist]
Those are the findings of a pair of researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. But tuna, they say, do not suffer the same problem.
Gil Iosilevskii and Danny Weihs carried out a series of calculations to model the tail and fins of fish such as tuna and mackerel, and cetaceans such as dolphins. The aim was to determine what limits the maximum speed at which these creatures can swim.
The researchers found that although muscle power is the limiting factor for small fish, this is not the case for larger and more powerful swimmers such as tuna and dolphins.
Pain barrier
"There are certain limits on swimming speed that are imposed irrespective of power," explains Iosilevskii. One of these is the frequency at which the swimmers can beat their tails to propel themselves forward.
The other is the formation of microscopic bubbles around the tail, a phenomenon known as "cavitation". According to Iosilevskii and Weihs, for animals such as dolphins that have nerve endings in their tails, cavitation can be the most important limiting factor.
The bubbles form as a result of the pressure difference created by the movement of the fins. This process is what produces the ribbons of tiny bubbles that stream behind a ship's propeller (see image).
When the bubbles collapse, they produce a shockwave, which eats away the metal in propellers. To dolphins, it is painful. According to the researchers' calculations, within the top few metres of the water column, this happens when the dolphins reach 10 to 15 metres per second (36 to 54 kilometres per hour).
'Cheating' surfers
Tuna have "bony" tails without nerve endings, which is why they may sometimes break the speed limit imposed by the pain barrier. Tuna have been known to have lesions typical of the damage caused by cavitation.
Despite this, cavitation does slow tuna down: when the bubbles collapse, they break the flow of water over the fish's fins and tail, causing it to stall.
But for real speed, head deep. Cavitation events decrease as fish or dolphins swim deeper, and the local pressure increases.
The theoretical top speed of dolphins and tuna is unknown, however, as the animals' intrinsic power and maximum "tail beating rate" is unknown.
Either way, Iosilevskii says reports of dolphins overtaking speed boats are likely to be a result of the dolphins "cheating" by surfing the bow waves.
[Via New Scientist]
Old Money Marries New Media
Melissa C. Morris was weighing her words carefully. The society wife, whose two-and-half-year-old blog about her rarefied life has garnered a devoted and growing readership, wanted to be sure nothing she said could be taken the wrong way. Over espresso at a restaurant near her Manhattan apartment, she said that, on the Internet and in life, “I focus on the positive. I like to keep things lighthearted.”
Using a medium that often portrays women of her milieu as spoiled backstabbers, Mrs. Morris offers a rare perspective of New York society on her blog, May December, named in part because of the 30-year age gap between her and her husband. The defunct Socialite Rank once passed harsh judgment over the social ambitions of young Manhattan swells like Mrs. Morris, but it and other socialite observer blogs are generally written by outsiders (in the case of Park Avenue Peerage, a college student in Illinois). But Mrs. Morris, 28, not only lives the life of galas, country houses and world travel, but reports on it in posts utterly free of snark.
Nowhere on May December (melissacmorris.com) will a reader find salacious gossip or compromising party photos. Instead, in posts written with all the propriety of a thank-you note on Mrs. John L. Strong stationery, she shares a recipe for beef stroganoff and snapshots from a family wedding in Nashville, and seeks help in settling a friendly dispute with her husband.
In a post titled, “A Tale of Two Dishwashers,” she wrote, “When we renovated part of our kitchen we added a butler’s pantry (don’t get too excited, there’s just me and no butler in sight, so technically this room should be renamed Mel’s pantry).”
She compared the merits of a new appliance in the pantry with the older model still in the kitchen, and said she and her husband disagreed about which one was better. “So, blog readers, what say you,” she wrote, “dishwasher with the silverware rack up top or dishwasher with the silverware basket?” (In a follow-up post, she said she preferred the basket.)
She could be any housewife — her preferred descriptor — except her homes are on the Upper East Side and in New Canaan, Conn. (where the Mieles in question are). Her husband is Alfred Hennen Morris, 58, known as Chappy, whose ancestors settled New York and helped draft the United States Constitution. And included among friends in those wedding candids is “Senator Bill,” as in Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader.
The juxtaposition of the mundane and the glamorous, provided by a woman who wears her glasses to charity galas and prefers preppy togs to high fashion, nets May December 40,000 hits a month. “There’s nothing too deep about her life, but it’s kind of neat to keep up with her,” said Nina Theiss, a Minneapolis stock trader and reader.
The pink-and-green blog is illustrated with close-up details of the Morrises’ life: their Christmas cards, a picture of a brick wall by their Connecticut driveway after a garbage truck hit it. A popular feature is “Monty Monday,” in which Mrs. Morris showcases her pet Italian greyhound, Monty, playing fetch or dressed as a chicken for Halloween.
Another recurring cast member is Mr. Morris, a fixture on the Upper East Side party circuit. For the blog, his wife once photographed him in the Park Avenue window display of Scully & Scully, the home furnishings boutique, trying out a desk chair.
“I think he substantially brightens up the display,” she wrote.
The former Melissa Catherine Stanley married in May 2006, after the two had been dating for five years. The news of the engagement caused a small stir in the society pages. “Chappy was a really eligible bachelor,” said David Patrick Columbia, the editor of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, one of the few socialite chronicles online written by an insider. “He’s a very nice guy, likes women, has money, comes from a very old, real old, real authentic New York family, and had never been married before. A lot of women wanted to go out with him.”
And Mr. Morris obliged a number of them. “It’s no secret, I certainly had fun,” Mr. Morris said. Of his nine godchildren, four are the children of former girlfriends. But, he said: “Melissa’s cool with it. She’s not jealous. She’s friends with my exes. It’s in the past, all of that stuff.”
Mrs. Morris grew up in Short Hills, N.J., summered in New England and attended the Barclay Classes (“dance classes where you wear white gloves and learn about table manners,” she said). She met Mr. Morris in 2000 when she worked as his personal trainer. At the time she was dating the “RoboCop” star Peter Weller; Mr. Morris was dating Taylor Stein, the daughter of a nightclub owner. The two started out as friends. “I had no idea who he was,” Mrs. Morris said.
Though the couple appear in party photos (in May, Mr. Morris was a chairman of the American Theater Wing’s spring gala), the blog is largely off the radar of their social set. “I’ve never heard of it,” said Somers Farkas, a New York philanthropist who is friendly with the couple but who does not read blogs. (“I’m not even sure I would know how to find one,” she said.)
But some fellow bloggers give Mrs. Morris credit. “The fact that she got 58 comments about her dishwasher — I’m impressed with that,” said Emily Brill, the publishing heiress whose four-month-old blog, Essentially Emily, is decidedly racier.
On the Internet, a few reactions to May December have been less than charitable. Early on, when Mrs. Morris was still thinking of her site as a digital diary mostly for her own amusement, she posted photos of her wedding. A harsh drubbing followed from bloggers and commenters who mocked her hairstyle, her lifestyle and, above all, her relationship. Among the few printable criticisms: “Is that Melissa C. Morris chick way older than she looks, or is she pulling an Anna Nicole?” wrote one commenter on Gawker.
Mrs. Morris is well aware that her site can read like a parody of the rich and preppy. “I’m in on the joke,” she said. “The monogramming, marrying a guy named Chappy — you just have to go with it.”
The Morris marriage is, by the couple’s account, happy. He admires her “old soul” and common sense; she says he’s encouraging and a good sport. He calls her Bee, short for Honeybee. She calls him Freddie. (“I think Chappy is too-too,” she said.)
The two know how their age difference may appear to the outside world. “People are going to have all kind of preconceived notions,” he said. “I would have preconceived notions. But Mel is very mature, and I’m very patient, and that’s how it works.”
He said he likes and approves of May December; he even reads it, he joked, “to see what we’ve been up to.” Despite his buttoned-up appearance, it is he who suggests some of the blog’s wackier moments: for photographs, he volunteered to lie on the tracks in front of a display locomotive and to stick his head into the mouth of a lion-head door knocker. “Melissa is much more serious,” he said. “She would never tell me to do that.”
Occasionally on May December, Mrs. Morris will offer up a semi-intimate tidbit. An e-mail message from a reader asking whether she preferred Justin Timberlake or Brad Pitt prompted her to confess that while her husband would always be tops with her, she had “a bit of a thing” for John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States. (“Just. Plain. Hunky.”)
But she remains decorously mum about most personal issues, and it is her tendency toward undersharing that compels readers to parse her photos for clues to where she lives and to ask her borderline impolite questions. “The most popular is, ‘When are you and Chappy going to have a baby?’ ” Mrs. Morris said. “I don’t mind if people ask. I just don’t answer.” For the record: they plan to start a family after their fifth wedding anniversary.
In the meantime she has smaller adventures to keep her occupied. In one December post, which was the closest she has come to a rant, she blogged about having car trouble with a new Range Rover that left her stranded overnight with her dog on a snowy trip to Boston.
She coped by holing up at a boutique hotel. “I made the best of it,” she said, in on the joke as always. “I had Monty, I had room service. We had a fun night.”
[Via NY Times]
Using a medium that often portrays women of her milieu as spoiled backstabbers, Mrs. Morris offers a rare perspective of New York society on her blog, May December, named in part because of the 30-year age gap between her and her husband. The defunct Socialite Rank once passed harsh judgment over the social ambitions of young Manhattan swells like Mrs. Morris, but it and other socialite observer blogs are generally written by outsiders (in the case of Park Avenue Peerage, a college student in Illinois). But Mrs. Morris, 28, not only lives the life of galas, country houses and world travel, but reports on it in posts utterly free of snark.
Nowhere on May December (melissacmorris.com) will a reader find salacious gossip or compromising party photos. Instead, in posts written with all the propriety of a thank-you note on Mrs. John L. Strong stationery, she shares a recipe for beef stroganoff and snapshots from a family wedding in Nashville, and seeks help in settling a friendly dispute with her husband.
In a post titled, “A Tale of Two Dishwashers,” she wrote, “When we renovated part of our kitchen we added a butler’s pantry (don’t get too excited, there’s just me and no butler in sight, so technically this room should be renamed Mel’s pantry).”
She compared the merits of a new appliance in the pantry with the older model still in the kitchen, and said she and her husband disagreed about which one was better. “So, blog readers, what say you,” she wrote, “dishwasher with the silverware rack up top or dishwasher with the silverware basket?” (In a follow-up post, she said she preferred the basket.)
She could be any housewife — her preferred descriptor — except her homes are on the Upper East Side and in New Canaan, Conn. (where the Mieles in question are). Her husband is Alfred Hennen Morris, 58, known as Chappy, whose ancestors settled New York and helped draft the United States Constitution. And included among friends in those wedding candids is “Senator Bill,” as in Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader.
The juxtaposition of the mundane and the glamorous, provided by a woman who wears her glasses to charity galas and prefers preppy togs to high fashion, nets May December 40,000 hits a month. “There’s nothing too deep about her life, but it’s kind of neat to keep up with her,” said Nina Theiss, a Minneapolis stock trader and reader.
The pink-and-green blog is illustrated with close-up details of the Morrises’ life: their Christmas cards, a picture of a brick wall by their Connecticut driveway after a garbage truck hit it. A popular feature is “Monty Monday,” in which Mrs. Morris showcases her pet Italian greyhound, Monty, playing fetch or dressed as a chicken for Halloween.
Another recurring cast member is Mr. Morris, a fixture on the Upper East Side party circuit. For the blog, his wife once photographed him in the Park Avenue window display of Scully & Scully, the home furnishings boutique, trying out a desk chair.
“I think he substantially brightens up the display,” she wrote.
The former Melissa Catherine Stanley married in May 2006, after the two had been dating for five years. The news of the engagement caused a small stir in the society pages. “Chappy was a really eligible bachelor,” said David Patrick Columbia, the editor of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, one of the few socialite chronicles online written by an insider. “He’s a very nice guy, likes women, has money, comes from a very old, real old, real authentic New York family, and had never been married before. A lot of women wanted to go out with him.”
And Mr. Morris obliged a number of them. “It’s no secret, I certainly had fun,” Mr. Morris said. Of his nine godchildren, four are the children of former girlfriends. But, he said: “Melissa’s cool with it. She’s not jealous. She’s friends with my exes. It’s in the past, all of that stuff.”
Mrs. Morris grew up in Short Hills, N.J., summered in New England and attended the Barclay Classes (“dance classes where you wear white gloves and learn about table manners,” she said). She met Mr. Morris in 2000 when she worked as his personal trainer. At the time she was dating the “RoboCop” star Peter Weller; Mr. Morris was dating Taylor Stein, the daughter of a nightclub owner. The two started out as friends. “I had no idea who he was,” Mrs. Morris said.
Though the couple appear in party photos (in May, Mr. Morris was a chairman of the American Theater Wing’s spring gala), the blog is largely off the radar of their social set. “I’ve never heard of it,” said Somers Farkas, a New York philanthropist who is friendly with the couple but who does not read blogs. (“I’m not even sure I would know how to find one,” she said.)
But some fellow bloggers give Mrs. Morris credit. “The fact that she got 58 comments about her dishwasher — I’m impressed with that,” said Emily Brill, the publishing heiress whose four-month-old blog, Essentially Emily, is decidedly racier.
On the Internet, a few reactions to May December have been less than charitable. Early on, when Mrs. Morris was still thinking of her site as a digital diary mostly for her own amusement, she posted photos of her wedding. A harsh drubbing followed from bloggers and commenters who mocked her hairstyle, her lifestyle and, above all, her relationship. Among the few printable criticisms: “Is that Melissa C. Morris chick way older than she looks, or is she pulling an Anna Nicole?” wrote one commenter on Gawker.
Mrs. Morris is well aware that her site can read like a parody of the rich and preppy. “I’m in on the joke,” she said. “The monogramming, marrying a guy named Chappy — you just have to go with it.”
The Morris marriage is, by the couple’s account, happy. He admires her “old soul” and common sense; she says he’s encouraging and a good sport. He calls her Bee, short for Honeybee. She calls him Freddie. (“I think Chappy is too-too,” she said.)
The two know how their age difference may appear to the outside world. “People are going to have all kind of preconceived notions,” he said. “I would have preconceived notions. But Mel is very mature, and I’m very patient, and that’s how it works.”
He said he likes and approves of May December; he even reads it, he joked, “to see what we’ve been up to.” Despite his buttoned-up appearance, it is he who suggests some of the blog’s wackier moments: for photographs, he volunteered to lie on the tracks in front of a display locomotive and to stick his head into the mouth of a lion-head door knocker. “Melissa is much more serious,” he said. “She would never tell me to do that.”
Occasionally on May December, Mrs. Morris will offer up a semi-intimate tidbit. An e-mail message from a reader asking whether she preferred Justin Timberlake or Brad Pitt prompted her to confess that while her husband would always be tops with her, she had “a bit of a thing” for John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States. (“Just. Plain. Hunky.”)
But she remains decorously mum about most personal issues, and it is her tendency toward undersharing that compels readers to parse her photos for clues to where she lives and to ask her borderline impolite questions. “The most popular is, ‘When are you and Chappy going to have a baby?’ ” Mrs. Morris said. “I don’t mind if people ask. I just don’t answer.” For the record: they plan to start a family after their fifth wedding anniversary.
In the meantime she has smaller adventures to keep her occupied. In one December post, which was the closest she has come to a rant, she blogged about having car trouble with a new Range Rover that left her stranded overnight with her dog on a snowy trip to Boston.
She coped by holing up at a boutique hotel. “I made the best of it,” she said, in on the joke as always. “I had Monty, I had room service. We had a fun night.”
[Via NY Times]
High Costs Cause Many to Scale Down Vacations
The days of cheap travel are over and may be gone for good.
Blame soaring airfares and gasoline prices, which are pushing up the cost of getting from here to there. Add to that a feeble dollar and an overall economic squeeze. The result: For many in the middle class, long-distance travel increasingly is out of reach.
Americans, who take it as their birthright to gallop the globe, venture out on long road trips or jet across the continent for the weekend, are in a state of shock.
"Things are going up, up, up. We can't even go on a day trip," moaned Evan Wong, 43, a social worker from Daly City. "We're being priced out of the market for travel."
The key factor behind the surge in travel costs is the explosive rise in energy prices. Oil above $135 per barrel and gas at $4.50 per gallon might not last. But even if there's a dip, experts expect gasoline and jet fuel to settle at prices far above their historic levels, putting the cost of flying and driving on a permanently higher plane. And the weak dollar, which has dramatically pushed up the cost of foreign travel, might not recover its former strength for years to come, if ever.
"This isn't a blip. It's a long-term structural change," said Rich Harrill, director of the International Tourism Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.
As prices rise, some are giving up long-distance travel and staying close to home during their time off from work. There's even a new name for such behavior - the "staycation." But a far larger number are pressing ahead with their getaways, while looking for ways to save a few bucks when they hit the road or take to the skies.
"Most people consider their holidays to be sacred," Harrill said. "Americans would rather take the sugar off the breakfast table than sacrifice the family vacation."
Scaling back
In order to preserve their time away, Americans are trading down and downsizing their holidays. They're choosing locales closer to where they live, taking long weekends instead of weeklong vacations and avoiding dollar-sucking destinations such as London and Paris. They're choosing alternatives to air travel that have risen relatively less in price, such as trains, buses and cruises.
They're also experimenting with alternative travel arrangements, including home exchanges, shared rides to vacations spots and "couch-surfing," the aptly named practice of crashing with strangers contacted through the Internet. And they're stepping up their use of packages, promotions and rewards that offer discounts on food, transportation and lodging.
"The consumer seems to be able to acclimate," said Suzanne Cook, research director of the Travel Industry Association, a trade group. "People have made decisions to keep traveling by modifying their trips."
San Franciscan Bill Chiles, 55, wanted to go camping in Utah's Zion National Park but was daunted by the prospect of filling the tank of his Volvo station wagon for the 1,500-mile trip. So he and his partner, Max, arranged to go with a friend from Salt Lake City who is visiting San Francisco at the beginning of July, splitting gas costs. They'll drop him back home before making the return trip.
Chiles, retired from his job as systems analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said saving money is important.
"Our incomes are kind of limited, but everybody needs a break," he said. "It just became simple to pay the fuel costs by sharing the trip."
Back on the bus
For travelers, perhaps the most wrenching change has been the sharp run-up in the price of U.S. airline tickets, rolling back, at least in part, the low-cost revolution spurred by discount airlines the past two decades. Not only are fares higher, but passengers are getting slapped with fuel surcharges and fees for checking luggage.
"It's not unusual for airfares to be up 100 percent from last year, even 200 percent," said Terry Trippler, owner of Tripplertravel.com, which tracks air travel costs. The biggest jumps are occurring on routes where discount airlines don't have a strong presence. But even the discounters are jacking up fares to cope with higher fuel bills.
Over the last generation, flying had become democratized as low fares allowed people across the economic spectrum to take to the air. Now we're returning to the days when leisure flights were luxuries.
"Airlines are not going to be mass transit like they have been," Trippler said. "People who used to take the bus are now taking the plane. They're going to have to get back on the bus."
For Diane Schreiber, 40, a public relations consultant from Brisbane, it's a question of how often she can see her mother, who lives in New York. Schreiber's mom has been visiting three or four times a year, taking advantage of heavy discounting on the San Francisco-New York route spurred by JetBlue Airways' entry into the market. Now, with the cheapest round-trip tickets near $400, mother and daughter might have to get together less frequently.
"It's a daily conversation with my mom," Schreiber said. "The distance was never cost-prohibitive and now it's turning into that."
The urge to go
Despite the obstacles, the travel bug is hard to resist. And so people are making do. They're planning months, even years in advance, to take advantage of discounts. Or they're improvising.
Bert Hill, 60, a San Francisco bicycling safety instructor, drove to the Seattle area with his son and daughter-in-law for a family reunion. This week, the next leg of his trip will take him to a convention in Portland, Ore. He's getting a ride part way and cycling the rest. Then he'll hop on Amtrak's Coast Starlight train home, which is costing him $87 with his AAA discount.
"When you were in college and you wanted to travel, you'd put a sign up," he said.
You might say that Hill is going back to the way it used to be - sharing rides, staying with friends and relatives, taking the train. It looks like a trend.
[Via SF Gate]
Blame soaring airfares and gasoline prices, which are pushing up the cost of getting from here to there. Add to that a feeble dollar and an overall economic squeeze. The result: For many in the middle class, long-distance travel increasingly is out of reach.
Americans, who take it as their birthright to gallop the globe, venture out on long road trips or jet across the continent for the weekend, are in a state of shock.
"Things are going up, up, up. We can't even go on a day trip," moaned Evan Wong, 43, a social worker from Daly City. "We're being priced out of the market for travel."
The key factor behind the surge in travel costs is the explosive rise in energy prices. Oil above $135 per barrel and gas at $4.50 per gallon might not last. But even if there's a dip, experts expect gasoline and jet fuel to settle at prices far above their historic levels, putting the cost of flying and driving on a permanently higher plane. And the weak dollar, which has dramatically pushed up the cost of foreign travel, might not recover its former strength for years to come, if ever.
"This isn't a blip. It's a long-term structural change," said Rich Harrill, director of the International Tourism Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.
As prices rise, some are giving up long-distance travel and staying close to home during their time off from work. There's even a new name for such behavior - the "staycation." But a far larger number are pressing ahead with their getaways, while looking for ways to save a few bucks when they hit the road or take to the skies.
"Most people consider their holidays to be sacred," Harrill said. "Americans would rather take the sugar off the breakfast table than sacrifice the family vacation."
Scaling back
In order to preserve their time away, Americans are trading down and downsizing their holidays. They're choosing locales closer to where they live, taking long weekends instead of weeklong vacations and avoiding dollar-sucking destinations such as London and Paris. They're choosing alternatives to air travel that have risen relatively less in price, such as trains, buses and cruises.
They're also experimenting with alternative travel arrangements, including home exchanges, shared rides to vacations spots and "couch-surfing," the aptly named practice of crashing with strangers contacted through the Internet. And they're stepping up their use of packages, promotions and rewards that offer discounts on food, transportation and lodging.
"The consumer seems to be able to acclimate," said Suzanne Cook, research director of the Travel Industry Association, a trade group. "People have made decisions to keep traveling by modifying their trips."
San Franciscan Bill Chiles, 55, wanted to go camping in Utah's Zion National Park but was daunted by the prospect of filling the tank of his Volvo station wagon for the 1,500-mile trip. So he and his partner, Max, arranged to go with a friend from Salt Lake City who is visiting San Francisco at the beginning of July, splitting gas costs. They'll drop him back home before making the return trip.
Chiles, retired from his job as systems analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said saving money is important.
"Our incomes are kind of limited, but everybody needs a break," he said. "It just became simple to pay the fuel costs by sharing the trip."
Back on the bus
For travelers, perhaps the most wrenching change has been the sharp run-up in the price of U.S. airline tickets, rolling back, at least in part, the low-cost revolution spurred by discount airlines the past two decades. Not only are fares higher, but passengers are getting slapped with fuel surcharges and fees for checking luggage.
"It's not unusual for airfares to be up 100 percent from last year, even 200 percent," said Terry Trippler, owner of Tripplertravel.com, which tracks air travel costs. The biggest jumps are occurring on routes where discount airlines don't have a strong presence. But even the discounters are jacking up fares to cope with higher fuel bills.
Over the last generation, flying had become democratized as low fares allowed people across the economic spectrum to take to the air. Now we're returning to the days when leisure flights were luxuries.
"Airlines are not going to be mass transit like they have been," Trippler said. "People who used to take the bus are now taking the plane. They're going to have to get back on the bus."
For Diane Schreiber, 40, a public relations consultant from Brisbane, it's a question of how often she can see her mother, who lives in New York. Schreiber's mom has been visiting three or four times a year, taking advantage of heavy discounting on the San Francisco-New York route spurred by JetBlue Airways' entry into the market. Now, with the cheapest round-trip tickets near $400, mother and daughter might have to get together less frequently.
"It's a daily conversation with my mom," Schreiber said. "The distance was never cost-prohibitive and now it's turning into that."
The urge to go
Despite the obstacles, the travel bug is hard to resist. And so people are making do. They're planning months, even years in advance, to take advantage of discounts. Or they're improvising.
Bert Hill, 60, a San Francisco bicycling safety instructor, drove to the Seattle area with his son and daughter-in-law for a family reunion. This week, the next leg of his trip will take him to a convention in Portland, Ore. He's getting a ride part way and cycling the rest. Then he'll hop on Amtrak's Coast Starlight train home, which is costing him $87 with his AAA discount.
"When you were in college and you wanted to travel, you'd put a sign up," he said.
You might say that Hill is going back to the way it used to be - sharing rides, staying with friends and relatives, taking the train. It looks like a trend.
[Via SF Gate]
Root of Terrorism: Darwinism and Materialism
Introduction
Most people think the theory of evolution was first proposed by Charles Darwin, and rests on scientific evidence, observations and experiments. However, the truth is that Darwin was not its originator, and neither does the theory rest on scientific proof. The theory consists of an adaptation to nature of the ancient dogma of materialist philosophy. Although it is not backed up by scientific discoveries, the theory is blindly supported in the name of materialist philosophy.
This fanaticism has resulted in all kinds of disasters. Together with the spread of Darwinism and the materialist philosophy it supports, the answer to the question "What is a human being?" has changed. People who used to answer: "Human beings were created by God and have to live according to the beautiful morality He teaches", have now begun to think that "Man came into being by chance, and is an animal who developed by means of the fight for survival." There is a heavy price to pay for this great deception. Violent ideologies such as racism, fascism and communism, and many other barbaric world views based on conflict have all drawn strength from this deception.
This article will examine the disaster Darwinism has visited on the world and reveal its connection with terrorism, one of the most important global problems of our time.
The Darwinist Lie: 'Life is conflict'
Darwin set out with one basic premise when developing his theory: "The development of living things depends on the fight for survival. The strong win the struggle. The weak are condemned to defeat and oblivion."
According to Darwin, there is a ruthless struggle for survival and an eternal conflict in nature. The strong always overcome the weak, and this enables development to take place. The subtitle he gave to his book The Origin of Species, "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", encapsulates that view.
Furthermore, Darwin proposed that the 'fight for survival' also applied between human racial groups. According to that fantastical claim, 'favoured races' were victorious in the struggle. Favoured races, in Darwin's view, were white Europeans. African or Asian races had lagged behind in the struggle for survival. Darwin went further, and suggested that these races would soon lose the "struggle for survival" entirely, and thus disappear:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes… will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.1
The Indian anthropologist Lalita Vidyarthi explains how Darwin's theory of evolution imposed racism on the social sciences:
His (Darwin's) theory of the survival of the fittest was warmly welcomed by the social scientists of the day, and they believed mankind had achieved various levels of evolution culminating in the white man's civilization. By the second half of the nineteenth century racism was accepted as fact by the vast majority of Western scientists.2
Darwin's Source of Inspiration: Malthus's Theory of Ruthlessness
Darwin's source of inspiration on this subject was the British economist Thomas Malthus's book An Essay on the Principle of Population. Left to their own devices, Malthus calculated that the human population increased rapidly. In his view, the main influences that kept populations under control were disasters such as war, famine and disease. In short, according to this brutal claim, some people had to die for others to live. Existence came to mean "permanent war."
In the 19th century, Malthus's ideas were widely accepted. European upper class intellectuals in particular supported his cruel ideas. In the article "The Scientific Background of the Nazi 'Race Purification' Programme", the importance 19th century Europe attached to Malthus's views on population is described in this way:
In the opening half of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe, members of the ruling classes gathered to discuss the newly discovered "Population problem" and to devise ways of implementing the Malthusian mandate, to increase the mortality rate of the poor: "Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations,"and so forth and so on.3
As a result of this cruel policy, the weak, and those who lost the struggle for survival would be eliminated, and as a result the rapid rise in population would be balanced out. This so-called "oppression of the poor" policy was actually carried out in 19th century Britain. An industrial order was set up in which children of eight and nine were made to work sixteen hours a day in the coal mines and thousands died from the terrible conditions. The "struggle for survival" demanded by Malthus's theory led to millions of Britons leading lives full of suffering.
Influenced by these ideas, Darwin applied this concept of conflict to all of nature, and proposed that the strong and the fittest emerged victorious from this war of existence. Moreover, he claimed that the so-called struggle for survival was a justified and unchangeable law of nature. On the other hand, he invited people to abandon their religious beliefs by denying the Creation, and thus undermined at all ethical values that might prove to be obstacles to the ruthlessness of the "struggle for survival."
Humanity has paid a heavy price in the 20th century for the dissemination of these callous views which lead people to acts of ruthlessness and cruelty.
What 'The Law of the Jungle' Led to: Fascism
As Darwinism fed racism in the 19th century, it formed the basis of an ideology that would develop and drown the world in blood in the 20th century: Nazism.
A strong Darwinist influence can be seen in Nazi ideologues. When one examines this theory, which was given shape by Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, one comes across such concepts as "natural selection", "selective mating", and "the struggle for survival between the races", which are repeated dozens of time in the works of Darwin. When calling his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler was inspired by the Darwinist struggle for survival and the principle that victory went to the fittest. He particularly talks about the struggle between the races:
History would culminate in a new millennial empire of unparalleled splendour, based on a new racial hierarchy ordained by nature herself.4
In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler proclaimed that "a higher race subjects to itself a lower race… a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right".
That the Nazis were influenced by Darwinism is a fact that almost all historians who are expert in the matter accept. The historian Hickman describes Darwinism's influence on Hitler as follows:
(Hitler) was a firm believer and preacher of evolution. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his psychosis, it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important because]… his book, Mein Kampf, clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and the extermination of the weak to produce a better society.5
Hitler, who emerged with these views, dragged the world to violence that had never before been seen. Many ethnic and political groups, and especially the Jews, were exposed to terrible cruelty and slaughter in the Nazi concentration camps. World War II, which began with the Nazi invasion, cost 55 million lives. What lay behind the greatest tragedy in world history was Darwinism's concept of the "struggle for survival."
The Bloody Alliance: Darwinism and Communism
While fascists are found on the right wing of Social Darwinism, the left wing is occupied by communists. Communists have always been among the fiercest defenders of Darwin's theory.
This relationship between Darwinism and communism goes right back to the founders of both these "isms". Marx and Engels, the founders of communism, read Darwin's The Origin of Species as soon as it came out, and were amazed at its 'dialectical materialist' attitude. The correspondence between Marx and Engels showed that they saw Darwin's theory as "containing the basis in natural history for communism". In his book The Dialectics of Nature, which he wrote under the influence of Darwin, Engels was full of praise for Darwin, and tried to make his own contribution to the theory in the chapter "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man".
Russian communists who followed in the footsteps of Marx and Engels, such as Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, all agreed with Darwin's theory of evolution. Plekhanov, who is seen as the founder of Russian communism, regarded marxism as "Darwinism in its application to social science".6
Trotsky said, "Darwin's discovery is the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter." 7
'Darwinist education' had a major role in the formation of communist cadres. For instance, historians note the fact that Stalin was religious in his youth, but became an atheist primarily because of Darwin's books.8
Mao, who established communist rule in China and killed millions of people, openly stated that "Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution." 9
The Harvard University historian James Reeve Pusey goes into great detail regarding Darwinism's effect on Mao and Chinese communism in his research book China and Charles Darwin.10
In short, there is an unbreakable link between the theory of evolution and communism. The theory claims that living things are the product of chance, and provides a so-called scientific support for atheism. Communism, an atheist ideology, is for that reason firmly tied to Darwinism. Moreover, the theory of evolution proposes that development in nature is possible thanks to conflict (in other words "the struggle for survival") and supports the concept of "dialectics" which is fundamental to communism.
If we think of the communist concept of "dialectical conflict", which killed some 120 million people during the 20th century, as a "killing machine" then we can better understand the dimensions of the disaster that Darwinism visited on the planet.
Darwinism and Terrorism
As we have so far seen, Darwinism is at the root of various ideologies of violence that have spelled disaster to mankind in the 20th century. The fundamental concept behind this understanding and method is "fighting whoever is not one of us."
We can explain this in the following way: There are different beliefs, worldviews and philosophies in the world. It is very natural that all these diverse ideas have traits opposing one another. However, these different stances can look at each other in one of two ways:
1) They can respect the existence of those who are not like them and try to establish dialogue with them, employing a humane method. Indeed, this method conforms with the morality of the Qur'an.
2) They can choose to fight others, and to try to secure an advantage by damaging them, in other words, to behave like a wild animal. This is a method employed by materialism, that is, irreligion.
The horror we call terrorism is nothing other than a statement of the second view.
When we consider the difference between these two approaches, we can see that the idea of "man as a fighting animal" which Darwinism has subconsciously imposed on people is particularly influential. Individuals and groups who choose the way of conflict may never have heard of Darwinism and the principles of that ideology. But at the end of the day they agree with a view whose philosophical basis rests on Darwinism. What leads them to believe in the rightness of this view is such Darwinism-based slogans as "In this world, the strong survive", "Big fish swallow little ones", "War is a virtue", and "Man advances by waging war". Take Darwinism away, and these are nothing but empty slogans.
Actually, when Darwinism is taken away, no philosophy of 'conflict' remains. The three divine religions that most people in the world believe in, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all oppose violence. All three religions wish to bring peace and harmony to the world, and oppose innocent people being killed and suffering cruelty and torture. Conflict and violence violate the morality that God has set out for man, and are abnormal and unwanted concepts. However, Darwinism sees and portrays conflict and violence as natural, justified and correct concepts that have to exist.
For this reason, if some people commit terrorism using the concepts and symbols of Islam, Christianity or Judaism in the name of those religions, you can be sure that those people are not Muslims, Christians or Jews. They are real Social Darwinists. They hide under a cloak of religion, but they are not genuine believers. Even if they claim to be serving religion, they are actually enemies of religion and of believers. That is because they are ruthlessly committing a crime that religion forbids, and in such a way as to blacken religion in peoples' eyes.
For this reason, the root of the terrorism that plagues our planet is not any of the divine religions, but in atheism, and the expression of atheism in our times: "Darwinism" and "materialism."
ISLAM IS NOT THE SOURCE OF TERRORISM, BUT ITS SOLUTION
Some people who say they are acting in the name of religion may misunderstand their religion or practice it wrongly. For that reason, it would be wrong to form ideas about that religion by taking these people as an example. The best way to understand a religion is to study its divine source.
The holy source of Islam is the Qur'an; and the model of morality in the Qur'an-Islam-is completely different from the image of it formed in the minds of some westerners. The Qur'an is based on the concepts of morality, love, compassion, mercy, humility, sacrifice, tolerance and peace, and a Muslim who lives by that morality in its true sense will be most polite, considerate, tolerant, trustworthy and accomodating. He will spread love, respect, harmony and the joy of living all around him.
Islam is a Religion of Peace and Well-Being
The word Islam is derived from the word meaning "peace" in Arabic. Islam is a religion revealed to mankind with the intention of presenting a peacable life through which the infinite compassion and mercy of God manifest on earth. God calls all people to Islamic morals through through which mercy, compassion, tolerance and peace can be experienced all over the world. In Surat al-Baqara verse 208, God addresses the believers as follows:
You who believe! Enter absolutely into peace (Islam). Do not follow in the footsteps of Satan. He is an outright enemy to you.
As the verse makes clear, security can only be ensured by 'entering into Islam', that is, living by the values of the Qur'an.
God Has Condemned Wickedness
God has commanded people to avoid committing evil; He has forbidden disbelief, immorality, rebellion, cruelty, aggressiveness, murder and bloodshed. He describes those who fail to obey this command as "following in Satan's footsteps" and adopting a posture that is openly revealed to be sinful in the Qur'an. A few of the many verses on this matter in the Qur'an read:
But as for those who break God's contract after it has been agreed and sever what God has commanded to be joined, and cause corruption in the earth, the curse will be upon them. They will have the Evil Abode. (Surat ar-Ra'd: 25)
Seek the abode of the hereafter with what God has given you, without forgetting your portion of the world. And do good as God has been good to you. And do not seek to cause mischief on earth. God does not love mischief makers. (Surat al-Qasas: 77)
As we can see, God has forbidden every kind of mischievous acts in the religion of Islam including terrorism and violence, and condemned those who commit such deeds. A Muslim lends beauty to the world and improves it.
Islam Defends Tolerance and Freedom of Speech
Ýslam is a religion which provides and guarantees freedom of ideas, thought and life. It has issued commands to prevent and forbid tension, disputes, slander and even negative thinking among people.
In the same way that it is determinedly opposed to terrorism and all acts of violence, it has also forbidden even the slightest ideological pressure to be put on them:
There is no compulsion in religion. Right guidance has become clearly distinct from error. Anyone who rejects false gods and believes in God has grasped the Firmest Handhold, which will never give way. God is All-Hearing, All-Knowing. (Surat al-Baqara: 256)
So remind, you need only to remind. You cannot compel them to believe. (Surat al-Ghashiyah: 22)
Forcing people to believe in a religion or to adopt its forms of belief is completely contrary to the essence and spirit of Ýslam. According to Ýslam, true faith is only possible with free will and freedom of conscience. Of course, Muslims can advise and encourage each other about the features of Qur'anic morality, but they will never resort to compulsion, nor any kind of physical or psychological pressure. Neither will they use any worldly privilege to turn someone towards religion.
Let us imagine a completely opposite model of society. For example, a world in which people are forced by law to practice religion. Such a model of society is completely contrary to Ýslam because faith and worship are only of any value when they are directed to God by the free will of the individual. If a system imposes belief and worship on people, then they will become religious only out of fear of that system. From the religious point of view, what really counts is that religion should be lived for God's good pleasure in an environment where peoples' consciences are totally free.
God Has Made the Killing of Innocent People Unlawful
According to the Qur'an, one of the greatest sins is to kill a human being who has committed no fault.
...If someone kills another person - unless it is in retaliation for someone else or for causing corruption in the earth - it is as if he had murdered all mankind. And if anyone gives life to another person, it is as if he had given life to all mankind. Our Messengers came to them with Clear Signs but even after that many of them committed outrages in the earth. (Surat al-Ma'ida: 32)
Those who do not call on any other deity together with God and do not kill anyone God has made inviolate, except with the right to do so, and do not fornicate; anyone who does that will receive an evil punishment. (Surat al-Furqan: 68)
As the verses suggest, a person who kills innocent people for no reason is threatened with a great torment. God has revealed that killing even a single person is as evil as murdering all mankind. A person who observes God's limits can do no harm to a single human, let alone massacre thousands of innocent people. Those who assume that they can avoid justice and thus punishment in this world will never succeed, for they will have to give an account of their deeds in the presence of God. That is why believers, who know that they will give an account of their deeds after death, are very meticulous to observe God's limits.
God Commands Believers to be Compassionate and Merciful
Islamic morality is described in the Qur'an as:
...To be one of those who believe and urge each other to steadfastness and urge each other to compassion. Those are the Companions of the Right. (Surat al-Balad: 17-18)
As we have seen in this verse, one of the most important moral precepts that God has sent down to His servants so that they may receive salvation and mercy and attain Paradise, is to "urge each other to compassion".
Ýslam as described in the Qur'an is a modern, enlightened, progressive religion. A Muslim is above all a person of peace; he is tolerant with a democratic spirit, cultured, enlightened, honest, knowledgeable about art and science and civilized.
A Muslim educated in the fine moral teaching of the Qur'an, approaches everyone with the love that Ýslam expects. He shows respect for every idea and he values art and aesthetics. He is conciliatory in the face of every event, diminishing tension and restoring amity. In societies composed of individuals such as this, there will be a more developed civilization, a higher social morality, more joy, happiness, justice, security, abundance and blessings than in the most modern nations of the world today.
God Has Commanded Tolerance and Forgiveness
The concept of forgiveness and tolerance, described in the words, 'Make allowances for people' (Surat al-A'raf: 199), is one of the most fundamental tenets of Islam.
When we look at the history of Ýslam, the way that Muslims have translated this important feature of Qur'anic morality into the life of society can be seen quite clearly. Muslims have always brought with them an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance and destroyed unlawful practices wherever they have gone. They have enabled people whose religions, languages and cultures are completely different from one another to live together in peace and harmony under one roof, and provided peace and harmony for its own members. One of the most important reasons for the centuries-long existence of the Ottoman Empire, which spread over an enormous region, was the atmosphere of tolerance and understanding that Ýslam brought with it. Muslims, who have been known for their tolerant and loving natures for centuries, have always been the most compassionate and just of people. Within this multi-national structure, all ethnic groups have been free to live according to their own religions, and their own rules.
True tolerance can only bring peace and well-being to the world when implemented along the lines set out in the Qur'an. Attention is drawn to this fact in a verse which reads:
A good action and a bad action are not the same. Repel the bad with something better and, if there is enmity between you and someone else, he will be like a bosom friend. (Surat al-Fussilat: 34)
Conclusion
All of this shows that the morality that Islam recommends to mankind brings to the world the virtues of peace, harmony and justice. The barbarism known as terrorism, that is so preoccupying the world at present, is the work of ignorant and fanatical people, completely estranged from Qur'anic morality, and who have absolutely nothing to do with religion. The solution to these people and groups who try to carry out their savagery under the mask of religion is the teaching of true Qur'anic morality. In other words, Ýslam and Qur'anic morality are solutions to the scourge of terrorism, not supporters of it.
[Via Harun Yahya]
Most people think the theory of evolution was first proposed by Charles Darwin, and rests on scientific evidence, observations and experiments. However, the truth is that Darwin was not its originator, and neither does the theory rest on scientific proof. The theory consists of an adaptation to nature of the ancient dogma of materialist philosophy. Although it is not backed up by scientific discoveries, the theory is blindly supported in the name of materialist philosophy.
This fanaticism has resulted in all kinds of disasters. Together with the spread of Darwinism and the materialist philosophy it supports, the answer to the question "What is a human being?" has changed. People who used to answer: "Human beings were created by God and have to live according to the beautiful morality He teaches", have now begun to think that "Man came into being by chance, and is an animal who developed by means of the fight for survival." There is a heavy price to pay for this great deception. Violent ideologies such as racism, fascism and communism, and many other barbaric world views based on conflict have all drawn strength from this deception.
This article will examine the disaster Darwinism has visited on the world and reveal its connection with terrorism, one of the most important global problems of our time.
The Darwinist Lie: 'Life is conflict'
Darwin set out with one basic premise when developing his theory: "The development of living things depends on the fight for survival. The strong win the struggle. The weak are condemned to defeat and oblivion."
According to Darwin, there is a ruthless struggle for survival and an eternal conflict in nature. The strong always overcome the weak, and this enables development to take place. The subtitle he gave to his book The Origin of Species, "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", encapsulates that view.
Furthermore, Darwin proposed that the 'fight for survival' also applied between human racial groups. According to that fantastical claim, 'favoured races' were victorious in the struggle. Favoured races, in Darwin's view, were white Europeans. African or Asian races had lagged behind in the struggle for survival. Darwin went further, and suggested that these races would soon lose the "struggle for survival" entirely, and thus disappear:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes… will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.1
The Indian anthropologist Lalita Vidyarthi explains how Darwin's theory of evolution imposed racism on the social sciences:
His (Darwin's) theory of the survival of the fittest was warmly welcomed by the social scientists of the day, and they believed mankind had achieved various levels of evolution culminating in the white man's civilization. By the second half of the nineteenth century racism was accepted as fact by the vast majority of Western scientists.2
Darwin's Source of Inspiration: Malthus's Theory of Ruthlessness
Darwin's source of inspiration on this subject was the British economist Thomas Malthus's book An Essay on the Principle of Population. Left to their own devices, Malthus calculated that the human population increased rapidly. In his view, the main influences that kept populations under control were disasters such as war, famine and disease. In short, according to this brutal claim, some people had to die for others to live. Existence came to mean "permanent war."
In the 19th century, Malthus's ideas were widely accepted. European upper class intellectuals in particular supported his cruel ideas. In the article "The Scientific Background of the Nazi 'Race Purification' Programme", the importance 19th century Europe attached to Malthus's views on population is described in this way:
In the opening half of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe, members of the ruling classes gathered to discuss the newly discovered "Population problem" and to devise ways of implementing the Malthusian mandate, to increase the mortality rate of the poor: "Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations,"and so forth and so on.3
As a result of this cruel policy, the weak, and those who lost the struggle for survival would be eliminated, and as a result the rapid rise in population would be balanced out. This so-called "oppression of the poor" policy was actually carried out in 19th century Britain. An industrial order was set up in which children of eight and nine were made to work sixteen hours a day in the coal mines and thousands died from the terrible conditions. The "struggle for survival" demanded by Malthus's theory led to millions of Britons leading lives full of suffering.
Influenced by these ideas, Darwin applied this concept of conflict to all of nature, and proposed that the strong and the fittest emerged victorious from this war of existence. Moreover, he claimed that the so-called struggle for survival was a justified and unchangeable law of nature. On the other hand, he invited people to abandon their religious beliefs by denying the Creation, and thus undermined at all ethical values that might prove to be obstacles to the ruthlessness of the "struggle for survival."
Humanity has paid a heavy price in the 20th century for the dissemination of these callous views which lead people to acts of ruthlessness and cruelty.
What 'The Law of the Jungle' Led to: Fascism
As Darwinism fed racism in the 19th century, it formed the basis of an ideology that would develop and drown the world in blood in the 20th century: Nazism.
A strong Darwinist influence can be seen in Nazi ideologues. When one examines this theory, which was given shape by Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, one comes across such concepts as "natural selection", "selective mating", and "the struggle for survival between the races", which are repeated dozens of time in the works of Darwin. When calling his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler was inspired by the Darwinist struggle for survival and the principle that victory went to the fittest. He particularly talks about the struggle between the races:
History would culminate in a new millennial empire of unparalleled splendour, based on a new racial hierarchy ordained by nature herself.4
In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler proclaimed that "a higher race subjects to itself a lower race… a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right".
That the Nazis were influenced by Darwinism is a fact that almost all historians who are expert in the matter accept. The historian Hickman describes Darwinism's influence on Hitler as follows:
(Hitler) was a firm believer and preacher of evolution. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his psychosis, it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important because]… his book, Mein Kampf, clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and the extermination of the weak to produce a better society.5
Hitler, who emerged with these views, dragged the world to violence that had never before been seen. Many ethnic and political groups, and especially the Jews, were exposed to terrible cruelty and slaughter in the Nazi concentration camps. World War II, which began with the Nazi invasion, cost 55 million lives. What lay behind the greatest tragedy in world history was Darwinism's concept of the "struggle for survival."
The Bloody Alliance: Darwinism and Communism
While fascists are found on the right wing of Social Darwinism, the left wing is occupied by communists. Communists have always been among the fiercest defenders of Darwin's theory.
This relationship between Darwinism and communism goes right back to the founders of both these "isms". Marx and Engels, the founders of communism, read Darwin's The Origin of Species as soon as it came out, and were amazed at its 'dialectical materialist' attitude. The correspondence between Marx and Engels showed that they saw Darwin's theory as "containing the basis in natural history for communism". In his book The Dialectics of Nature, which he wrote under the influence of Darwin, Engels was full of praise for Darwin, and tried to make his own contribution to the theory in the chapter "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man".
Russian communists who followed in the footsteps of Marx and Engels, such as Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, all agreed with Darwin's theory of evolution. Plekhanov, who is seen as the founder of Russian communism, regarded marxism as "Darwinism in its application to social science".6
Trotsky said, "Darwin's discovery is the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter." 7
'Darwinist education' had a major role in the formation of communist cadres. For instance, historians note the fact that Stalin was religious in his youth, but became an atheist primarily because of Darwin's books.8
Mao, who established communist rule in China and killed millions of people, openly stated that "Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution." 9
The Harvard University historian James Reeve Pusey goes into great detail regarding Darwinism's effect on Mao and Chinese communism in his research book China and Charles Darwin.10
In short, there is an unbreakable link between the theory of evolution and communism. The theory claims that living things are the product of chance, and provides a so-called scientific support for atheism. Communism, an atheist ideology, is for that reason firmly tied to Darwinism. Moreover, the theory of evolution proposes that development in nature is possible thanks to conflict (in other words "the struggle for survival") and supports the concept of "dialectics" which is fundamental to communism.
If we think of the communist concept of "dialectical conflict", which killed some 120 million people during the 20th century, as a "killing machine" then we can better understand the dimensions of the disaster that Darwinism visited on the planet.
Darwinism and Terrorism
As we have so far seen, Darwinism is at the root of various ideologies of violence that have spelled disaster to mankind in the 20th century. The fundamental concept behind this understanding and method is "fighting whoever is not one of us."
We can explain this in the following way: There are different beliefs, worldviews and philosophies in the world. It is very natural that all these diverse ideas have traits opposing one another. However, these different stances can look at each other in one of two ways:
1) They can respect the existence of those who are not like them and try to establish dialogue with them, employing a humane method. Indeed, this method conforms with the morality of the Qur'an.
2) They can choose to fight others, and to try to secure an advantage by damaging them, in other words, to behave like a wild animal. This is a method employed by materialism, that is, irreligion.
The horror we call terrorism is nothing other than a statement of the second view.
When we consider the difference between these two approaches, we can see that the idea of "man as a fighting animal" which Darwinism has subconsciously imposed on people is particularly influential. Individuals and groups who choose the way of conflict may never have heard of Darwinism and the principles of that ideology. But at the end of the day they agree with a view whose philosophical basis rests on Darwinism. What leads them to believe in the rightness of this view is such Darwinism-based slogans as "In this world, the strong survive", "Big fish swallow little ones", "War is a virtue", and "Man advances by waging war". Take Darwinism away, and these are nothing but empty slogans.
Actually, when Darwinism is taken away, no philosophy of 'conflict' remains. The three divine religions that most people in the world believe in, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all oppose violence. All three religions wish to bring peace and harmony to the world, and oppose innocent people being killed and suffering cruelty and torture. Conflict and violence violate the morality that God has set out for man, and are abnormal and unwanted concepts. However, Darwinism sees and portrays conflict and violence as natural, justified and correct concepts that have to exist.
For this reason, if some people commit terrorism using the concepts and symbols of Islam, Christianity or Judaism in the name of those religions, you can be sure that those people are not Muslims, Christians or Jews. They are real Social Darwinists. They hide under a cloak of religion, but they are not genuine believers. Even if they claim to be serving religion, they are actually enemies of religion and of believers. That is because they are ruthlessly committing a crime that religion forbids, and in such a way as to blacken religion in peoples' eyes.
For this reason, the root of the terrorism that plagues our planet is not any of the divine religions, but in atheism, and the expression of atheism in our times: "Darwinism" and "materialism."
ISLAM IS NOT THE SOURCE OF TERRORISM, BUT ITS SOLUTION
Some people who say they are acting in the name of religion may misunderstand their religion or practice it wrongly. For that reason, it would be wrong to form ideas about that religion by taking these people as an example. The best way to understand a religion is to study its divine source.
The holy source of Islam is the Qur'an; and the model of morality in the Qur'an-Islam-is completely different from the image of it formed in the minds of some westerners. The Qur'an is based on the concepts of morality, love, compassion, mercy, humility, sacrifice, tolerance and peace, and a Muslim who lives by that morality in its true sense will be most polite, considerate, tolerant, trustworthy and accomodating. He will spread love, respect, harmony and the joy of living all around him.
Islam is a Religion of Peace and Well-Being
The word Islam is derived from the word meaning "peace" in Arabic. Islam is a religion revealed to mankind with the intention of presenting a peacable life through which the infinite compassion and mercy of God manifest on earth. God calls all people to Islamic morals through through which mercy, compassion, tolerance and peace can be experienced all over the world. In Surat al-Baqara verse 208, God addresses the believers as follows:
You who believe! Enter absolutely into peace (Islam). Do not follow in the footsteps of Satan. He is an outright enemy to you.
As the verse makes clear, security can only be ensured by 'entering into Islam', that is, living by the values of the Qur'an.
God Has Condemned Wickedness
God has commanded people to avoid committing evil; He has forbidden disbelief, immorality, rebellion, cruelty, aggressiveness, murder and bloodshed. He describes those who fail to obey this command as "following in Satan's footsteps" and adopting a posture that is openly revealed to be sinful in the Qur'an. A few of the many verses on this matter in the Qur'an read:
But as for those who break God's contract after it has been agreed and sever what God has commanded to be joined, and cause corruption in the earth, the curse will be upon them. They will have the Evil Abode. (Surat ar-Ra'd: 25)
Seek the abode of the hereafter with what God has given you, without forgetting your portion of the world. And do good as God has been good to you. And do not seek to cause mischief on earth. God does not love mischief makers. (Surat al-Qasas: 77)
As we can see, God has forbidden every kind of mischievous acts in the religion of Islam including terrorism and violence, and condemned those who commit such deeds. A Muslim lends beauty to the world and improves it.
Islam Defends Tolerance and Freedom of Speech
Ýslam is a religion which provides and guarantees freedom of ideas, thought and life. It has issued commands to prevent and forbid tension, disputes, slander and even negative thinking among people.
In the same way that it is determinedly opposed to terrorism and all acts of violence, it has also forbidden even the slightest ideological pressure to be put on them:
There is no compulsion in religion. Right guidance has become clearly distinct from error. Anyone who rejects false gods and believes in God has grasped the Firmest Handhold, which will never give way. God is All-Hearing, All-Knowing. (Surat al-Baqara: 256)
So remind, you need only to remind. You cannot compel them to believe. (Surat al-Ghashiyah: 22)
Forcing people to believe in a religion or to adopt its forms of belief is completely contrary to the essence and spirit of Ýslam. According to Ýslam, true faith is only possible with free will and freedom of conscience. Of course, Muslims can advise and encourage each other about the features of Qur'anic morality, but they will never resort to compulsion, nor any kind of physical or psychological pressure. Neither will they use any worldly privilege to turn someone towards religion.
Let us imagine a completely opposite model of society. For example, a world in which people are forced by law to practice religion. Such a model of society is completely contrary to Ýslam because faith and worship are only of any value when they are directed to God by the free will of the individual. If a system imposes belief and worship on people, then they will become religious only out of fear of that system. From the religious point of view, what really counts is that religion should be lived for God's good pleasure in an environment where peoples' consciences are totally free.
God Has Made the Killing of Innocent People Unlawful
According to the Qur'an, one of the greatest sins is to kill a human being who has committed no fault.
...If someone kills another person - unless it is in retaliation for someone else or for causing corruption in the earth - it is as if he had murdered all mankind. And if anyone gives life to another person, it is as if he had given life to all mankind. Our Messengers came to them with Clear Signs but even after that many of them committed outrages in the earth. (Surat al-Ma'ida: 32)
Those who do not call on any other deity together with God and do not kill anyone God has made inviolate, except with the right to do so, and do not fornicate; anyone who does that will receive an evil punishment. (Surat al-Furqan: 68)
As the verses suggest, a person who kills innocent people for no reason is threatened with a great torment. God has revealed that killing even a single person is as evil as murdering all mankind. A person who observes God's limits can do no harm to a single human, let alone massacre thousands of innocent people. Those who assume that they can avoid justice and thus punishment in this world will never succeed, for they will have to give an account of their deeds in the presence of God. That is why believers, who know that they will give an account of their deeds after death, are very meticulous to observe God's limits.
God Commands Believers to be Compassionate and Merciful
Islamic morality is described in the Qur'an as:
...To be one of those who believe and urge each other to steadfastness and urge each other to compassion. Those are the Companions of the Right. (Surat al-Balad: 17-18)
As we have seen in this verse, one of the most important moral precepts that God has sent down to His servants so that they may receive salvation and mercy and attain Paradise, is to "urge each other to compassion".
Ýslam as described in the Qur'an is a modern, enlightened, progressive religion. A Muslim is above all a person of peace; he is tolerant with a democratic spirit, cultured, enlightened, honest, knowledgeable about art and science and civilized.
A Muslim educated in the fine moral teaching of the Qur'an, approaches everyone with the love that Ýslam expects. He shows respect for every idea and he values art and aesthetics. He is conciliatory in the face of every event, diminishing tension and restoring amity. In societies composed of individuals such as this, there will be a more developed civilization, a higher social morality, more joy, happiness, justice, security, abundance and blessings than in the most modern nations of the world today.
God Has Commanded Tolerance and Forgiveness
The concept of forgiveness and tolerance, described in the words, 'Make allowances for people' (Surat al-A'raf: 199), is one of the most fundamental tenets of Islam.
When we look at the history of Ýslam, the way that Muslims have translated this important feature of Qur'anic morality into the life of society can be seen quite clearly. Muslims have always brought with them an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance and destroyed unlawful practices wherever they have gone. They have enabled people whose religions, languages and cultures are completely different from one another to live together in peace and harmony under one roof, and provided peace and harmony for its own members. One of the most important reasons for the centuries-long existence of the Ottoman Empire, which spread over an enormous region, was the atmosphere of tolerance and understanding that Ýslam brought with it. Muslims, who have been known for their tolerant and loving natures for centuries, have always been the most compassionate and just of people. Within this multi-national structure, all ethnic groups have been free to live according to their own religions, and their own rules.
True tolerance can only bring peace and well-being to the world when implemented along the lines set out in the Qur'an. Attention is drawn to this fact in a verse which reads:
A good action and a bad action are not the same. Repel the bad with something better and, if there is enmity between you and someone else, he will be like a bosom friend. (Surat al-Fussilat: 34)
Conclusion
All of this shows that the morality that Islam recommends to mankind brings to the world the virtues of peace, harmony and justice. The barbarism known as terrorism, that is so preoccupying the world at present, is the work of ignorant and fanatical people, completely estranged from Qur'anic morality, and who have absolutely nothing to do with religion. The solution to these people and groups who try to carry out their savagery under the mask of religion is the teaching of true Qur'anic morality. In other words, Ýslam and Qur'anic morality are solutions to the scourge of terrorism, not supporters of it.
[Via Harun Yahya]
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Dying of Medicine
Let's work our way up from the bottom of the list of drugs that killed people in Florida in 2007. Florida has 15 million adults. Marijuana killed none of them in 2007. Methamphetamines, 25 people. Heroin, 110. Alcohol, 466. Cocaine, 843.
Tranquilizers actually caused slightly fewer deaths than cocaine - 743 - although more than alcohol and heroin added together. Vicodin/OxyContin - 2,328. And prescription drug fatalities have been growing steadily and are increasing far more rapidly than illicit drug use and fatalities.
Although prescription addiction is more upscale (witness Cindy McCain), it has been more common than addiction to herbal drugs for decades. And Florida is the capital of pharmaceutical abuse, addiction, and death. Anna Nicole Smith died in Florida of prescription drug misuse. The former governor's daughter (and niece of the president), Noelle Bush, has been treated for her addiction to medications. And Rush Limbaugh cruised the streets of Palm Beach (actually, he had his maid do it) scoring OxyContin.
We're worried about the wrong things. After years of being afraid of bugaboos like heroin, cocaine, and meth, and thinking we were public health experts by imagining that alcohol was the most lethal substance of all, we discover that those medical substances we take to allay our poor, troubled souls are killing us at ever increasing rates. And young people are far more likely to use these drugs than older generations, so the future of death by medicine is even bleaker.
If the government allocated its resources against substances strictly on their likelihood of being abused and causing death, the NIDA would change its name to the National Institute on Pharmaceutical Abuse. Addiction has always been a bludgeon used to fend off foreign drugs. Drug education is about continuing to scare kids about illegal drugs and alcohol.
Addiction and dangerous drug use are not about illicit substances - they are at the heart of the American experience.
[Via Psychology Today]
Tranquilizers actually caused slightly fewer deaths than cocaine - 743 - although more than alcohol and heroin added together. Vicodin/OxyContin - 2,328. And prescription drug fatalities have been growing steadily and are increasing far more rapidly than illicit drug use and fatalities.
Although prescription addiction is more upscale (witness Cindy McCain), it has been more common than addiction to herbal drugs for decades. And Florida is the capital of pharmaceutical abuse, addiction, and death. Anna Nicole Smith died in Florida of prescription drug misuse. The former governor's daughter (and niece of the president), Noelle Bush, has been treated for her addiction to medications. And Rush Limbaugh cruised the streets of Palm Beach (actually, he had his maid do it) scoring OxyContin.
We're worried about the wrong things. After years of being afraid of bugaboos like heroin, cocaine, and meth, and thinking we were public health experts by imagining that alcohol was the most lethal substance of all, we discover that those medical substances we take to allay our poor, troubled souls are killing us at ever increasing rates. And young people are far more likely to use these drugs than older generations, so the future of death by medicine is even bleaker.
If the government allocated its resources against substances strictly on their likelihood of being abused and causing death, the NIDA would change its name to the National Institute on Pharmaceutical Abuse. Addiction has always been a bludgeon used to fend off foreign drugs. Drug education is about continuing to scare kids about illegal drugs and alcohol.
Addiction and dangerous drug use are not about illicit substances - they are at the heart of the American experience.
[Via Psychology Today]
Robert Kennedy's Assassination 40 Years Ago Was in Fact an Eminently Political Act
Decades must often pass before shattering historic events can be truly understood. So it is with the assassination of senator Robert Kennedy, which stunned the world 40 years ago this month.
The killer, Sirhan Sirhan, seemed at the time to fit the pattern of the wild-eyed lunatic that is often associated with political assassins. James Reston, the eminent New York Times columnist, called the murder "a wholly irrational act". Most Americans saw it that way.
Only now is it clear how wrong this view was. Far from being a "maniacally absurd" crime, as Newsweek concluded, the Robert Kennedy assassination was in fact an eminently political act. It was the first "blowback" attack the United States suffered as a result of its Middle East policies.
Sirhan was the first in a line of Arab terrorists that would later produce the bombers of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, American embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole and the World Trade Center in New York.
"I can explain!" Sirhan cried out as he was arrested. "I did it for my country!" At the time, that seemed to be no more than the raving of what one American newspaper called "a mad man". Now that the word understands much more about the upheaval that produced Sirhan, it sounds quite different.
Sirhan was not simply a "Jordanian citizen", as he was called at the time. He was an embittered Palestinian who had been born in 1944 to a Christian family in Jerusalem. During the war that broke out when he was four years old, Jewish insurgents seized his house, and his family was forced to flee. He was nearly killed in an Irgun bombing at the Damascus Gate, and witnessed other violent attacks that deeply traumatised him.
As a young refugee, Sirhan attended a school where teachers exhorted students to struggle for Palestinian rights. Later his family moved to California, and he was there when Israel seized East Jerusalem and other Arab territories in the Six-Day War of 1967. He told at a friend that he believed Fatah was justified in using terror to oppose Israeli rule.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Sirhan came to identify Robert Kennedy, who he had originally supported, as a friend of Israel. Three weeks before committing his crime, he watched a documentary about Kennedy's involvement with Israel on CBS television. Soon afterward he heard a radio tape of Kennedy telling an audience at a Los Angeles synagogue that he would maintain "clear and compelling" support for Israel. After hearing it, a relative later testified, Sirhan ran from the room with "his hands on his ears, and almost weeping".
Sirhan timed his attack on Kennedy to coincide with the first anniversary of the opening of the Six-Day War. At his trial, he sought several times to place his crime in the Palestinian context. "When you move a whole country, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their land, from their business," he said, "that is completely wrong … . That burned the hell out of me." Few Americans had any idea what he was talking about.
"The source of his rage, bitterness, and anger at 'Jews' was not explained in most news stories," Mel Ayton, one of the few analysts who has fully grasped the crime's Middle East connection, wrote in his 2007 book The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F Kennedy. "In those days most Americans had no idea what a 'Palestinian' was and even fewer understood their grievances."
When news of Sirhan's background was flashed back to the Arab world after he killed Kennedy, many people there instinctively understood what had happened. They recognised the crime as a horrific expression of the violent frustration that young Palestinians were beginning to feel. Almost no one in the rest of the world, however, understood this.
Foreign interventions and entanglements often produce unpredictable, even unimaginable long-term consequences. The murder of Robert Kennedy is one example. If Israel had never come into existence, or if the United States had not supported it, or if Kennedy had not reaffirmed that support, Sirhan would probably never have pulled his trigger.
[Via Guardian]
The killer, Sirhan Sirhan, seemed at the time to fit the pattern of the wild-eyed lunatic that is often associated with political assassins. James Reston, the eminent New York Times columnist, called the murder "a wholly irrational act". Most Americans saw it that way.
Only now is it clear how wrong this view was. Far from being a "maniacally absurd" crime, as Newsweek concluded, the Robert Kennedy assassination was in fact an eminently political act. It was the first "blowback" attack the United States suffered as a result of its Middle East policies.
Sirhan was the first in a line of Arab terrorists that would later produce the bombers of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, American embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole and the World Trade Center in New York.
"I can explain!" Sirhan cried out as he was arrested. "I did it for my country!" At the time, that seemed to be no more than the raving of what one American newspaper called "a mad man". Now that the word understands much more about the upheaval that produced Sirhan, it sounds quite different.
Sirhan was not simply a "Jordanian citizen", as he was called at the time. He was an embittered Palestinian who had been born in 1944 to a Christian family in Jerusalem. During the war that broke out when he was four years old, Jewish insurgents seized his house, and his family was forced to flee. He was nearly killed in an Irgun bombing at the Damascus Gate, and witnessed other violent attacks that deeply traumatised him.
As a young refugee, Sirhan attended a school where teachers exhorted students to struggle for Palestinian rights. Later his family moved to California, and he was there when Israel seized East Jerusalem and other Arab territories in the Six-Day War of 1967. He told at a friend that he believed Fatah was justified in using terror to oppose Israeli rule.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Sirhan came to identify Robert Kennedy, who he had originally supported, as a friend of Israel. Three weeks before committing his crime, he watched a documentary about Kennedy's involvement with Israel on CBS television. Soon afterward he heard a radio tape of Kennedy telling an audience at a Los Angeles synagogue that he would maintain "clear and compelling" support for Israel. After hearing it, a relative later testified, Sirhan ran from the room with "his hands on his ears, and almost weeping".
Sirhan timed his attack on Kennedy to coincide with the first anniversary of the opening of the Six-Day War. At his trial, he sought several times to place his crime in the Palestinian context. "When you move a whole country, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their land, from their business," he said, "that is completely wrong … . That burned the hell out of me." Few Americans had any idea what he was talking about.
"The source of his rage, bitterness, and anger at 'Jews' was not explained in most news stories," Mel Ayton, one of the few analysts who has fully grasped the crime's Middle East connection, wrote in his 2007 book The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F Kennedy. "In those days most Americans had no idea what a 'Palestinian' was and even fewer understood their grievances."
When news of Sirhan's background was flashed back to the Arab world after he killed Kennedy, many people there instinctively understood what had happened. They recognised the crime as a horrific expression of the violent frustration that young Palestinians were beginning to feel. Almost no one in the rest of the world, however, understood this.
Foreign interventions and entanglements often produce unpredictable, even unimaginable long-term consequences. The murder of Robert Kennedy is one example. If Israel had never come into existence, or if the United States had not supported it, or if Kennedy had not reaffirmed that support, Sirhan would probably never have pulled his trigger.
[Via Guardian]
Insidious Activities by the Family Are Undermining American Democracy
From Barack Obama's incendiary pastor, to Mitt Romney's Mormonism, to Mike Huckabee's southern Baptist roots, religion is the constant in America's choosing of a president. Racism, sexism, health policy, the economy and Iraq have had their moments, but religion renews itself with every fresh controversy.
Even John McCain, relatively secure as presumed Republican candidate, has jettisoned a preacher whose endorsement became politically untenable.
Yet the most influential and enduring religious force in the country - elitist Christian fundamentalism - is mostly unsighted and rarely remarked upon, according to writer Jeff Sharlet.
Overt fundamentalists, the Bible thumping televangelist populists, are the antithesis of the secretive network he has identified and that is known variously as The Fellowship and The Family.
The Family organises Washington politicians into intimate "prayer cells", influences foreign policy, inspired the creation of the president's Annual Prayer Breakfast in 1953 and sponsored President George Bush's faith-based policy of transferring social welfare responsibilities to religious groups in 2001. It has actively narrowed debate, limiting what change might be possible.
"The Family is an international network of evangelical elites, in government, military and business, dating back 70 years, organised around this one central idea, which was that Christianity for 2000 years got it wrong," Sharlet says.
"Christianity, in theory anyway, was about the poor, the weak, the suffering, the down-and-out, and the idea of the founder of this network was that God was more interested in those whom he called the up-and-out: the wealthy, the powerful, those with status. (They rely) on this very literal reading of a verse from Paul's letter to the Romans: 'The powers that be are ordained of God.' They take that very literally. If you have power that's because God wants you to have power."
It is essentially a conservative concept, defensive of the status quo and a marked contrast with another American contribution to Christian thought, black liberation theology. The Family worships a "manly Jesus" for whom the compassion of the Sermon on the Mount was an aberration.
It might be tempting to dismiss The Family as just another product of the home of conspiracy theories had not the man at the head of the network, Doug Coe, been attested to by presidents such as George Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush snr, and the group referred to guardedly by Ronald Reagan: "It is working precisely because it is private."
Sharlet offers a roll-call of, mostly Republican, senators who have been or are members, and notes that while Hillary Clinton is not a member, she has prayed with Coe and is considered a "friend" of The Family. The bigger problem, however, is that The Family is so deeply embedded in Washington that Clinton is not unusual in holding even her casual link to the group, he says.
When a Time magazine reporter who was researching the most influential religious figures in the country approached Sharlet for his opinion, Sharlet suggested the reporter ask around Congress about Coe. The reporter, who had not previously heard of Coe, learned enough to label him "The Stealth Persuader".
Sharlet, a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone magazines, encountered the group by accident seven years ago when he was reporting on fringe religious groups and was invited to one of its residential centres, called Ivanwald, in Virginia.
Those with whom he stayed at Ivanwald were caretakers of The Family headquarters known as The Cedars, where meetings of congressmen, businessmen, ambassadors and foreign leaders were held. While he was there, Sharlet was told that Megawati Sukarnoputri visited The Cedars in her time as Indonesian president. He later discovered a cache of documents, more than 600 boxes of papers archived and forgotten, which unlocked the network's history.
His work has resulted in his book The Family. Its central finding is that American fundamentalism has two movements, and that the most influential is the least visible. There is the public face, the popular image of sweating, impassioned televangelists, and there is the private one comprising the exclusive world of The Family.
"There's sort of a trickle-down fundamentalism that begins with the elites and winds up in the mass movements," he says.
"Ever since the 'Scopes Monkey Trial' of 1925, the media has been declaring Christian fundamentalism dead every few years, and it just keeps coming back. The press can see religion when it's working class and poor; it has a much harder time seeing it when it's infused at the top levels."
Sharlet says The Family facilitated aid and links to US industry for dictators such as Papa Doc of Haiti, Siad Barre of Somalia and Indonesia's Suharto. It finds "friends" in Congress for powerful foreigners and influences foreign policy. Coe annually subverts normal vetting procedures for foreign leaders by arranging for them to meet the President at the annual prayer breakfast, Sharlet says. In short, The Family is a secretive, undemocratic organisation that is prepared to aid and abet dictators.
Since it works on the inside, there is no need for fulminating at the pulpit. Sharlet quotes Coe as saying in a rare interview: "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."
Sharlet says the push for a "government led by God" is done through secret alliances and in defiance of democratic processes.
"I think it's dangerous. In some ways I resist calling it a left-right issue - although they do tend to be right-wingers - so much as an issue of open democracy, of transparency.
"They use this pretentious phrase of bringing politicians together to make decisions 'beyond the din of the vox populi', the voice of the people. At its worst it's cynical cronyism.
"What The Family does when it says it is going to get beyond politics is try to shut down the debate."
Coe preaches submission, and approvingly cites Hitler and Mao. "There's this constant thread and reverence for what essentially is an authoritarian concept of God, that what matters most in one's concept of God is obedience," Sharlet says.
"When I was living with those guys in Ivanwald, you literally turn over decision-making in every aspect of your life. Not just these grand issues of what am I going to do with my life, but should I date this woman?"
It was The Family's conceit that it thought it could recruit Sharlet, half-Jewish and a leftish journalist, to its distinctive ways.
A bit like Groucho Marx - who did not want to join any club that would have him as a member - Sharlet was amazed to find himself in their company at Ivanwald, where he lived for a month in an all-male, no-drinking, no swearing, arm-wrestling dormitory.
Had they only Googled me, he says, they'd have realised what an unpromising prospect they had. In his background, however, were hints of fertile ground for The Family.
Sharlet's parents separated when he was two, but he remained close to his Jewish father even as he was raised by his mother, Nancy. His mother was Pentacostal, a member of that fevered troop of Christians inclined to talking in tongues, although she was not so inclined.
She had family among Tennessee hillbillies, but after her separation from Sharlet's father, she stayed around New York State in a town that, Sharlet says, was unusually anti-Semitic.
Nancy Sharlet was something of a hippie, sampling from numerous religions so that her son grew up surrounded by questions of faith. Catholics would come to pray at their home at noon, and a couple of hours later a Buddhist nun would arrive. It seemed that he was immersed in the entire panoply of religion, with his mother drawn to whichever service had the best music.
Sharlet's father might have interested The Family. Robert Sharlet was an academic and a specialist in Soviet politics. As a Sovietologist he served as an adviser to the CIA.
"I think the Family liked the fact I was Jewish. Having a Jew pray to Jesus shows the power of Jesus. They liked the fact I was a journalist and they liked the fact my father was a consultant to the CIA," Sharlet says.
An uncle, also Jeff Sharlet, served in Vietnam as a translator and intelligence officer in 1962-63 and became a critic of the war. He died of cancer, aged 27, having been exposed to a precursor of Agent Orange. He has inspired Sharlet's next major book, covering GI anti-war movements. It is a joint project with his father, who has done much of the research tracking down veterans.
But first, Sharlet, 36, has another job, having been commissioned to write the story of the evolution, or devolution, of Pete Seeger's song If I Had a Hammer.
"It's telling the decline of the American left through the story of that song. When it was first performed there was a huge anti-communist riot in response to it," Sharlet says. Recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, it became a civil-rights anthem. "Today, it's a kids' song and there's a hokey-pokey dance you do to it.
"It's a completely depoliticised song now. The original was not so. Pete Seeger was not just a communist, he was a Stalinist."
Sharlet lives in New York, a place of infinite wickedness to The Family, a fact that may also have enhanced his appeal to them as a reform project. Despite Hillary Clinton's involvement with The Family, Sharlet says he voted for her.
"Her involvement is not huge, but that it's there at all is tremendously significant for the relationship of religion and politics in America. The idea that a group with ideas this eccentric and explicitly anti-democratic (exists) suggests something about the unwillingness of politicians who ought to know better to even challenge that establishment," he says.
He hopes one of the results of the book's publication is that newly elected members of Congress will not be blind to the network they are asked to join when invited to one of Coe's prayer cells.
But sitting in a cafe in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens district on the eve of the book's launch, he was not expecting a big splash. The Family will try to roll with the punch.
They are in power, but they are soft-spoken. And unique to religion in America, invisible by design.
JEFF Sharlet found an Australian association to The Family in his initial contact with the network: one of his fellow inhabitants at Ivanwald, who is unnamed in the book, said he was there on the recommendation of (now former) Liberal federal MP Bruce Baird.
The Family's links to Australia appear to run much deeper, however.
Australia has had a national prayer breakfast for more then 20 years, and the documents unearthed by Sharlet tell of a delegation of US congressmen in 1966 meeting "leaders in the Australian Parliament" to discuss breakfast groups.
Earlier still, in 1963, an Australian parliamentary group was reported as communicating regularly with a US Senate group. Another reference, in an undated telegram believed to have been sent around 1980, identifies a former immigration minister in the Fraser Government, Michael MacKellar, as an Australian contact for The Family's leader, Doug Coe.
And the Australian ambassador to the US immediately after World War II, former Labor MP Norman Makin, is identified in a 1948 newsletter as a key speaker to a meeting of the group, which was then known as the National Committee for Christian Leadership. A 1949 reference notes "Ambassador Makin starting groups there".
In a very different way, Australia's ties to the group extend to its creation.
In the fear and uncertainty that the Great Depression wrought on 1930s America, The Family was created following industrial violence centred on the San Francisco waterfront.
Leading striking workers was a Melbourne-born militant, Harry Bridges, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
"The Family really begins when the founder (Abraham Vereide) has this vision, which he thinks comes from God, that Harry Bridges, this Australian labour organiser who organised really the biggest strike in American history, a very successful strike, is a Satanic and Soviet agent," Sharlet says.
Vereide began by uniting a group of business leaders that tied his vision of Christianity to what became a political machine. "This is one of the interesting things," Sharlet says. "American elite fundamentalism begins not around an issue of abortion, sexuality or anything like that, but against organised labour."
[Via The Age]
Even John McCain, relatively secure as presumed Republican candidate, has jettisoned a preacher whose endorsement became politically untenable.
Yet the most influential and enduring religious force in the country - elitist Christian fundamentalism - is mostly unsighted and rarely remarked upon, according to writer Jeff Sharlet.
Overt fundamentalists, the Bible thumping televangelist populists, are the antithesis of the secretive network he has identified and that is known variously as The Fellowship and The Family.
The Family organises Washington politicians into intimate "prayer cells", influences foreign policy, inspired the creation of the president's Annual Prayer Breakfast in 1953 and sponsored President George Bush's faith-based policy of transferring social welfare responsibilities to religious groups in 2001. It has actively narrowed debate, limiting what change might be possible.
"The Family is an international network of evangelical elites, in government, military and business, dating back 70 years, organised around this one central idea, which was that Christianity for 2000 years got it wrong," Sharlet says.
"Christianity, in theory anyway, was about the poor, the weak, the suffering, the down-and-out, and the idea of the founder of this network was that God was more interested in those whom he called the up-and-out: the wealthy, the powerful, those with status. (They rely) on this very literal reading of a verse from Paul's letter to the Romans: 'The powers that be are ordained of God.' They take that very literally. If you have power that's because God wants you to have power."
It is essentially a conservative concept, defensive of the status quo and a marked contrast with another American contribution to Christian thought, black liberation theology. The Family worships a "manly Jesus" for whom the compassion of the Sermon on the Mount was an aberration.
It might be tempting to dismiss The Family as just another product of the home of conspiracy theories had not the man at the head of the network, Doug Coe, been attested to by presidents such as George Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush snr, and the group referred to guardedly by Ronald Reagan: "It is working precisely because it is private."
Sharlet offers a roll-call of, mostly Republican, senators who have been or are members, and notes that while Hillary Clinton is not a member, she has prayed with Coe and is considered a "friend" of The Family. The bigger problem, however, is that The Family is so deeply embedded in Washington that Clinton is not unusual in holding even her casual link to the group, he says.
When a Time magazine reporter who was researching the most influential religious figures in the country approached Sharlet for his opinion, Sharlet suggested the reporter ask around Congress about Coe. The reporter, who had not previously heard of Coe, learned enough to label him "The Stealth Persuader".
Sharlet, a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone magazines, encountered the group by accident seven years ago when he was reporting on fringe religious groups and was invited to one of its residential centres, called Ivanwald, in Virginia.
Those with whom he stayed at Ivanwald were caretakers of The Family headquarters known as The Cedars, where meetings of congressmen, businessmen, ambassadors and foreign leaders were held. While he was there, Sharlet was told that Megawati Sukarnoputri visited The Cedars in her time as Indonesian president. He later discovered a cache of documents, more than 600 boxes of papers archived and forgotten, which unlocked the network's history.
His work has resulted in his book The Family. Its central finding is that American fundamentalism has two movements, and that the most influential is the least visible. There is the public face, the popular image of sweating, impassioned televangelists, and there is the private one comprising the exclusive world of The Family.
"There's sort of a trickle-down fundamentalism that begins with the elites and winds up in the mass movements," he says.
"Ever since the 'Scopes Monkey Trial' of 1925, the media has been declaring Christian fundamentalism dead every few years, and it just keeps coming back. The press can see religion when it's working class and poor; it has a much harder time seeing it when it's infused at the top levels."
Sharlet says The Family facilitated aid and links to US industry for dictators such as Papa Doc of Haiti, Siad Barre of Somalia and Indonesia's Suharto. It finds "friends" in Congress for powerful foreigners and influences foreign policy. Coe annually subverts normal vetting procedures for foreign leaders by arranging for them to meet the President at the annual prayer breakfast, Sharlet says. In short, The Family is a secretive, undemocratic organisation that is prepared to aid and abet dictators.
Since it works on the inside, there is no need for fulminating at the pulpit. Sharlet quotes Coe as saying in a rare interview: "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."
Sharlet says the push for a "government led by God" is done through secret alliances and in defiance of democratic processes.
"I think it's dangerous. In some ways I resist calling it a left-right issue - although they do tend to be right-wingers - so much as an issue of open democracy, of transparency.
"They use this pretentious phrase of bringing politicians together to make decisions 'beyond the din of the vox populi', the voice of the people. At its worst it's cynical cronyism.
"What The Family does when it says it is going to get beyond politics is try to shut down the debate."
Coe preaches submission, and approvingly cites Hitler and Mao. "There's this constant thread and reverence for what essentially is an authoritarian concept of God, that what matters most in one's concept of God is obedience," Sharlet says.
"When I was living with those guys in Ivanwald, you literally turn over decision-making in every aspect of your life. Not just these grand issues of what am I going to do with my life, but should I date this woman?"
It was The Family's conceit that it thought it could recruit Sharlet, half-Jewish and a leftish journalist, to its distinctive ways.
A bit like Groucho Marx - who did not want to join any club that would have him as a member - Sharlet was amazed to find himself in their company at Ivanwald, where he lived for a month in an all-male, no-drinking, no swearing, arm-wrestling dormitory.
Had they only Googled me, he says, they'd have realised what an unpromising prospect they had. In his background, however, were hints of fertile ground for The Family.
Sharlet's parents separated when he was two, but he remained close to his Jewish father even as he was raised by his mother, Nancy. His mother was Pentacostal, a member of that fevered troop of Christians inclined to talking in tongues, although she was not so inclined.
She had family among Tennessee hillbillies, but after her separation from Sharlet's father, she stayed around New York State in a town that, Sharlet says, was unusually anti-Semitic.
Nancy Sharlet was something of a hippie, sampling from numerous religions so that her son grew up surrounded by questions of faith. Catholics would come to pray at their home at noon, and a couple of hours later a Buddhist nun would arrive. It seemed that he was immersed in the entire panoply of religion, with his mother drawn to whichever service had the best music.
Sharlet's father might have interested The Family. Robert Sharlet was an academic and a specialist in Soviet politics. As a Sovietologist he served as an adviser to the CIA.
"I think the Family liked the fact I was Jewish. Having a Jew pray to Jesus shows the power of Jesus. They liked the fact I was a journalist and they liked the fact my father was a consultant to the CIA," Sharlet says.
An uncle, also Jeff Sharlet, served in Vietnam as a translator and intelligence officer in 1962-63 and became a critic of the war. He died of cancer, aged 27, having been exposed to a precursor of Agent Orange. He has inspired Sharlet's next major book, covering GI anti-war movements. It is a joint project with his father, who has done much of the research tracking down veterans.
But first, Sharlet, 36, has another job, having been commissioned to write the story of the evolution, or devolution, of Pete Seeger's song If I Had a Hammer.
"It's telling the decline of the American left through the story of that song. When it was first performed there was a huge anti-communist riot in response to it," Sharlet says. Recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, it became a civil-rights anthem. "Today, it's a kids' song and there's a hokey-pokey dance you do to it.
"It's a completely depoliticised song now. The original was not so. Pete Seeger was not just a communist, he was a Stalinist."
Sharlet lives in New York, a place of infinite wickedness to The Family, a fact that may also have enhanced his appeal to them as a reform project. Despite Hillary Clinton's involvement with The Family, Sharlet says he voted for her.
"Her involvement is not huge, but that it's there at all is tremendously significant for the relationship of religion and politics in America. The idea that a group with ideas this eccentric and explicitly anti-democratic (exists) suggests something about the unwillingness of politicians who ought to know better to even challenge that establishment," he says.
He hopes one of the results of the book's publication is that newly elected members of Congress will not be blind to the network they are asked to join when invited to one of Coe's prayer cells.
But sitting in a cafe in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens district on the eve of the book's launch, he was not expecting a big splash. The Family will try to roll with the punch.
They are in power, but they are soft-spoken. And unique to religion in America, invisible by design.
JEFF Sharlet found an Australian association to The Family in his initial contact with the network: one of his fellow inhabitants at Ivanwald, who is unnamed in the book, said he was there on the recommendation of (now former) Liberal federal MP Bruce Baird.
The Family's links to Australia appear to run much deeper, however.
Australia has had a national prayer breakfast for more then 20 years, and the documents unearthed by Sharlet tell of a delegation of US congressmen in 1966 meeting "leaders in the Australian Parliament" to discuss breakfast groups.
Earlier still, in 1963, an Australian parliamentary group was reported as communicating regularly with a US Senate group. Another reference, in an undated telegram believed to have been sent around 1980, identifies a former immigration minister in the Fraser Government, Michael MacKellar, as an Australian contact for The Family's leader, Doug Coe.
And the Australian ambassador to the US immediately after World War II, former Labor MP Norman Makin, is identified in a 1948 newsletter as a key speaker to a meeting of the group, which was then known as the National Committee for Christian Leadership. A 1949 reference notes "Ambassador Makin starting groups there".
In a very different way, Australia's ties to the group extend to its creation.
In the fear and uncertainty that the Great Depression wrought on 1930s America, The Family was created following industrial violence centred on the San Francisco waterfront.
Leading striking workers was a Melbourne-born militant, Harry Bridges, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
"The Family really begins when the founder (Abraham Vereide) has this vision, which he thinks comes from God, that Harry Bridges, this Australian labour organiser who organised really the biggest strike in American history, a very successful strike, is a Satanic and Soviet agent," Sharlet says.
Vereide began by uniting a group of business leaders that tied his vision of Christianity to what became a political machine. "This is one of the interesting things," Sharlet says. "American elite fundamentalism begins not around an issue of abortion, sexuality or anything like that, but against organised labour."
[Via The Age]
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Brewer Bids $46 Billion for Anheuser-Busch
One of the nation’s most prominent family-run companies, Anheuser-Busch, formally became the target of a $46.4 billion unsolicited takeover offer from InBev of Belgium on Wednesday.
A deal, if reached, would combine Anheuser-Busch’s best-selling Budweiser and Bud Light brands with InBev’s Stella Artois, Beck’s and Bass and would create the world’s largest brewer, with distribution channels around the globe.
InBev’s bid is likely to set off a bitter battle for control of Anheuser-Busch, based in St. Louis, which has been led by the Anheuser and Busch families for 148 years. The company, led by a scion of the Busch family, August A. Busch IV, has signaled that it will fight a takeover. In recent weeks, in anticipation of InBev’s bid, privately called Project Aluminum, Anheuser-Busch has hired an army of bankers, lawyers and other advisers to help it mount a defense.
The battle may stir a national debate filled with patriotic fervor over a company ingrained in the American consciousness. Anheuser-Busch spends more money than any other advertiser during the Super Bowl each year; last year alone, it spent $23.9 million, according to TNS, a market research company.
The bid could also put Warren E. Buffett, Anheuser-Busch’s second-largest shareholder after August A. Busch III, a former Anheuser-Busch chairman and chief executive, in the middle of a struggle.
Gov. Matthew R. Blunt of Missouri said in a statement Wednesday that he opposed any sale. “Today’s offer to purchase the company is deeply troubling to me,” he said, adding that he was directing the state’s department of economic development to explore ways to keep Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis.
Two InBev directors approached Mr. Busch about a deal during a secret meeting in Tampa, Fla., on June 2.
The meeting, which people who were briefed on it described as “polite and short,” was a prelude to InBev’s formal offer, made in a letter to Mr. Busch and Anheuser-Busch’s board. InBev said it hoped to reach a friendly deal and, in that spirit, said that it hoped to “keep the contents of this letter private.” Within hours, however, word had spread across Wall Street, and Anheuser-Busch chose to make the bid public.
For weeks, hedge funds and arbitrageurs have been buying up shares of Anheuser-Busch, pushing its stock up more than 11 percent in the last two weeks.
Shares of Anheuser-Busch closed on Wednesday at $58.35, but rose as much as 10 percent in after-hours trading.
In a brief statement, Anheuser-Busch said its board would review the proposal and make a decision “in due course.”
Consolidation has been the watchword in the beer industry for years, as breweries have sought economies of scale. The world’s two largest brewers are the products of trans-Atlantic deals struck over the past decade: SABMiller, from South African Breweries’ 2002 purchase of Miller Brewing, and InBev, from the 2004 union of Belgium’s InterBrew and Brazil’s AmBev.
The rise in the prices of grain and other ingredients has added extra impetus to merger efforts.
But domestic brewers have struggled in recent years as their customers drift toward wine and spirits, as well as craft beers and imports. That has tempted the international brewers. SABMiller and Molson Coors will combine their operations in the United States, forming a formidable rival to Anheuser-Busch.
One of Anheuser-Busch’s potential countermoves would involve buying the 50 percent of Mexico’s Grupo Modelo that it does not already own. That would raise Anheuser-Busch’s price tag, potentially deterring a suitor.
InBev has been planning its bid for Anheuser-Busch for months, according to people briefed on the matter. Despite a relatively barren environment for deal financing, the Belgian company has already lined up lender commitments from eight international banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Banco Santander of Spain and Deutsche Bank of Germany.
In his letter to Mr. Busch, InBev’s chief executive, Carlos Brito, took pains to emphasize that he would make several concessions to reach a friendly deal. He proposed keeping St. Louis as the new company’s headquarters, retaining the Anheuser-Busch name in some way and making Budweiser its flagship brand.
“We have the highest respect for Anheuser-Busch, its employees and its leadership, who have built the leading brewer in the U.S. and grown the iconic Budweiser brand,” Mr. Brito said in a statement.
A deal would probably remove Anheuser-Busch from the hands of the Anheuser and Busch families. Mr. Busch, 43, is the fifth generation of the Busch family to run the company.
Mr. Busch is likely to feel great pressure to strike a deal. Anheuser-Busch’s stock has been stagnant for years, as the company sought to find new avenues for growth.
InBev’s interest has even created a divide within the Busch family. Adolphus A. Busch IV, an uncle to Mr. Busch, has said that any decision about the company should be based on shareholder value, not nostalgia.
Anheuser-Busch lacks some common defenses against takeover offers. Its board is no longer staggered, meaning all its directors are up for re-election in any given year. And the Busch family does not control the company through supervoting shares, as is the case with some other family businesses that are publicly held.
[Via NY Times]
A deal, if reached, would combine Anheuser-Busch’s best-selling Budweiser and Bud Light brands with InBev’s Stella Artois, Beck’s and Bass and would create the world’s largest brewer, with distribution channels around the globe.
InBev’s bid is likely to set off a bitter battle for control of Anheuser-Busch, based in St. Louis, which has been led by the Anheuser and Busch families for 148 years. The company, led by a scion of the Busch family, August A. Busch IV, has signaled that it will fight a takeover. In recent weeks, in anticipation of InBev’s bid, privately called Project Aluminum, Anheuser-Busch has hired an army of bankers, lawyers and other advisers to help it mount a defense.
The battle may stir a national debate filled with patriotic fervor over a company ingrained in the American consciousness. Anheuser-Busch spends more money than any other advertiser during the Super Bowl each year; last year alone, it spent $23.9 million, according to TNS, a market research company.
The bid could also put Warren E. Buffett, Anheuser-Busch’s second-largest shareholder after August A. Busch III, a former Anheuser-Busch chairman and chief executive, in the middle of a struggle.
Gov. Matthew R. Blunt of Missouri said in a statement Wednesday that he opposed any sale. “Today’s offer to purchase the company is deeply troubling to me,” he said, adding that he was directing the state’s department of economic development to explore ways to keep Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis.
Two InBev directors approached Mr. Busch about a deal during a secret meeting in Tampa, Fla., on June 2.
The meeting, which people who were briefed on it described as “polite and short,” was a prelude to InBev’s formal offer, made in a letter to Mr. Busch and Anheuser-Busch’s board. InBev said it hoped to reach a friendly deal and, in that spirit, said that it hoped to “keep the contents of this letter private.” Within hours, however, word had spread across Wall Street, and Anheuser-Busch chose to make the bid public.
For weeks, hedge funds and arbitrageurs have been buying up shares of Anheuser-Busch, pushing its stock up more than 11 percent in the last two weeks.
Shares of Anheuser-Busch closed on Wednesday at $58.35, but rose as much as 10 percent in after-hours trading.
In a brief statement, Anheuser-Busch said its board would review the proposal and make a decision “in due course.”
Consolidation has been the watchword in the beer industry for years, as breweries have sought economies of scale. The world’s two largest brewers are the products of trans-Atlantic deals struck over the past decade: SABMiller, from South African Breweries’ 2002 purchase of Miller Brewing, and InBev, from the 2004 union of Belgium’s InterBrew and Brazil’s AmBev.
The rise in the prices of grain and other ingredients has added extra impetus to merger efforts.
But domestic brewers have struggled in recent years as their customers drift toward wine and spirits, as well as craft beers and imports. That has tempted the international brewers. SABMiller and Molson Coors will combine their operations in the United States, forming a formidable rival to Anheuser-Busch.
One of Anheuser-Busch’s potential countermoves would involve buying the 50 percent of Mexico’s Grupo Modelo that it does not already own. That would raise Anheuser-Busch’s price tag, potentially deterring a suitor.
InBev has been planning its bid for Anheuser-Busch for months, according to people briefed on the matter. Despite a relatively barren environment for deal financing, the Belgian company has already lined up lender commitments from eight international banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Banco Santander of Spain and Deutsche Bank of Germany.
In his letter to Mr. Busch, InBev’s chief executive, Carlos Brito, took pains to emphasize that he would make several concessions to reach a friendly deal. He proposed keeping St. Louis as the new company’s headquarters, retaining the Anheuser-Busch name in some way and making Budweiser its flagship brand.
“We have the highest respect for Anheuser-Busch, its employees and its leadership, who have built the leading brewer in the U.S. and grown the iconic Budweiser brand,” Mr. Brito said in a statement.
A deal would probably remove Anheuser-Busch from the hands of the Anheuser and Busch families. Mr. Busch, 43, is the fifth generation of the Busch family to run the company.
Mr. Busch is likely to feel great pressure to strike a deal. Anheuser-Busch’s stock has been stagnant for years, as the company sought to find new avenues for growth.
InBev’s interest has even created a divide within the Busch family. Adolphus A. Busch IV, an uncle to Mr. Busch, has said that any decision about the company should be based on shareholder value, not nostalgia.
Anheuser-Busch lacks some common defenses against takeover offers. Its board is no longer staggered, meaning all its directors are up for re-election in any given year. And the Busch family does not control the company through supervoting shares, as is the case with some other family businesses that are publicly held.
[Via NY Times]
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Protests at UC Animal-lab Workers' Homes
Officials have been trying to keep it quiet, but 24 UC Berkeley researchers and seven staffers have been harassed by animal rights activists in recent months, in some cases having their homes or cars vandalized.
"What they all have in common is that they all work in animal research," UC Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders said of the targeted employees.
In several instances, the activists have shown up outside researchers' homes in the middle of the night with bullhorns and chanting, "Animal killers." Sometimes they have scrawled slogans on the sidewalk in chalk.
On more than one occasion, rocks have been thrown through the researchers' windows and their cars have been scratched up.
"Sometimes (the activists) go up to the door," Sanders said, "which can be very frightening to the family."
According to UC, there have been 20 reports of damage to researchers' homes in Berkeley, Oakland and El Cerrito since August, including seven broken house windows and three vandalized cars.
Thirteen researchers have been harassed on more than one occasion, authorities said. One researcher, who studies how cat brains work for epilepsy research, has reported seven incidents at his home.
No specific group has been identified as being behind the harassment. The actions appear to be coordinated through an animal rights Web site that includes photos of researchers, descriptions and photos of their experiments, plus their home addresses and phone numbers - along with the disclaimer, "Please keep communications with the individuals legal and nonthreatening."
However, it doesn't appear that activists are always following those instructions.
The latest incident occurred the weekend of June 1 in Berkeley, when a group of activists showed up during the daytime outside the home of a researcher who studies the effects of pesticides on mice. A rock was thrown through the researcher's window and a window at a neighbor's home, Sanders said.
Even a researcher who studies bird singing has been harassed and had his house vandalized.
"To study bird songs, you need to get them into the lab," Sanders said. "You want to record them and see how they raise their young."
It's not exactly the animal torture chamber one usually associates with the most negative depictions of animal research. But "apparently, these activists don't believe in any kind of animal research," Sanders said.
"As you can imagine," he added, "some of these faculty members are pretty freaked out."
By the time the cops show up, the protesters are usually gone. As a result, there have been no arrests - only an occasional citation issued for disturbing the peace.
Officials have been trying to keep the protests quiet, in part out of concern that publicity will only cause more incidents and an escalation in violence. At UCLA, animal rights protests have included attempted firebombings and one instance in which a researcher's home was flooded with a garden hose.
Looking at the numbers, it's pretty clear that keeping things quiet in the press hasn't toned down the protesters much. It's just as clear, however, that the protesters aren't reaching their goals, either.
"All of our researchers are adamant that their research is critical and that they are not going to quit," Sanders said.
Ballpark hangover: A sewage backup at AT&T Park during a six-hour concert Sunday featuring country-western star Kenny Chesney left many of the 35,000-plus in attendance in a real jam.
The first sign of trouble came early in the evening when ballpark crews discovered that a gated entry area off Third Street had flooded. So stadium engineers turned down the water pressure throughout the ballpark.
In the process, however, running water was lost in many of the stadium's 54 restrooms. The result wasn't pretty.
"'I felt like I was attending a massive Chico State frat party reunion," said San Francisco resident David Wilson, whose family bailed early because of the drunken concertgoers and clogged toilets.
"I saw several maintenance personnel wandering around the concourses, unable to speak any English, who had no clue as to what to do or what to say to patrons - with tickets upwards to $300," complained Tone Kambeitz, a concertgoer from Sebastopol.
At first, stadium officials suspected the problem might be a break in a city water main. But city Public Utilities Commission spokesman Tony Winnicker ruled that out, saying the likely culprit was the stadium's cooking grease.
"They make a lot of garlic fries at AT&T Park, and if you have a lot of grease going down the drain, it could easily block their internal plumbing and cause a backup throughout the park," Winnicker said.
But Giants spokeswoman Staci Slaughter downplayed the greasy fries theory, saying all the concession grease traps appeared to be functioning properly.
In any event, plumbing crews were being brought in to inspect and clean the ballpark pipes before their next big test Friday night, when the Giants come home for one of the bigger draws of the season - the Oakland A's.
Hole in the wall gang: Talk about an inside job.
The other night, SFPD Officers Magnus Chow and Chris Olson were called to the 1300 block of Taylor Street to take what looked to be a routine burglary report.
The victim told the officers that she had left her apartment at noon and returned about 11 p.m. to find her place ransacked and several items missing.
On the way out, the officers noticed a hallway door propped open, leading down to the basement - where they found a hole in the wall and two guys, ages 19 and 20, living in a crawlspace.
"This wasn't just some sleeping bag deal," said Central Station Capt. Jim Dudley. "They had bedding, dishes, glasses, a television and laptop all hooked up to the building's electricity."
They also had the stolen items from the apartment upstairs, which sent the pair to their new home - in county lockup.
[Via SF Gate]
"What they all have in common is that they all work in animal research," UC Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders said of the targeted employees.
In several instances, the activists have shown up outside researchers' homes in the middle of the night with bullhorns and chanting, "Animal killers." Sometimes they have scrawled slogans on the sidewalk in chalk.
On more than one occasion, rocks have been thrown through the researchers' windows and their cars have been scratched up.
"Sometimes (the activists) go up to the door," Sanders said, "which can be very frightening to the family."
According to UC, there have been 20 reports of damage to researchers' homes in Berkeley, Oakland and El Cerrito since August, including seven broken house windows and three vandalized cars.
Thirteen researchers have been harassed on more than one occasion, authorities said. One researcher, who studies how cat brains work for epilepsy research, has reported seven incidents at his home.
No specific group has been identified as being behind the harassment. The actions appear to be coordinated through an animal rights Web site that includes photos of researchers, descriptions and photos of their experiments, plus their home addresses and phone numbers - along with the disclaimer, "Please keep communications with the individuals legal and nonthreatening."
However, it doesn't appear that activists are always following those instructions.
The latest incident occurred the weekend of June 1 in Berkeley, when a group of activists showed up during the daytime outside the home of a researcher who studies the effects of pesticides on mice. A rock was thrown through the researcher's window and a window at a neighbor's home, Sanders said.
Even a researcher who studies bird singing has been harassed and had his house vandalized.
"To study bird songs, you need to get them into the lab," Sanders said. "You want to record them and see how they raise their young."
It's not exactly the animal torture chamber one usually associates with the most negative depictions of animal research. But "apparently, these activists don't believe in any kind of animal research," Sanders said.
"As you can imagine," he added, "some of these faculty members are pretty freaked out."
By the time the cops show up, the protesters are usually gone. As a result, there have been no arrests - only an occasional citation issued for disturbing the peace.
Officials have been trying to keep the protests quiet, in part out of concern that publicity will only cause more incidents and an escalation in violence. At UCLA, animal rights protests have included attempted firebombings and one instance in which a researcher's home was flooded with a garden hose.
Looking at the numbers, it's pretty clear that keeping things quiet in the press hasn't toned down the protesters much. It's just as clear, however, that the protesters aren't reaching their goals, either.
"All of our researchers are adamant that their research is critical and that they are not going to quit," Sanders said.
Ballpark hangover: A sewage backup at AT&T Park during a six-hour concert Sunday featuring country-western star Kenny Chesney left many of the 35,000-plus in attendance in a real jam.
The first sign of trouble came early in the evening when ballpark crews discovered that a gated entry area off Third Street had flooded. So stadium engineers turned down the water pressure throughout the ballpark.
In the process, however, running water was lost in many of the stadium's 54 restrooms. The result wasn't pretty.
"'I felt like I was attending a massive Chico State frat party reunion," said San Francisco resident David Wilson, whose family bailed early because of the drunken concertgoers and clogged toilets.
"I saw several maintenance personnel wandering around the concourses, unable to speak any English, who had no clue as to what to do or what to say to patrons - with tickets upwards to $300," complained Tone Kambeitz, a concertgoer from Sebastopol.
At first, stadium officials suspected the problem might be a break in a city water main. But city Public Utilities Commission spokesman Tony Winnicker ruled that out, saying the likely culprit was the stadium's cooking grease.
"They make a lot of garlic fries at AT&T Park, and if you have a lot of grease going down the drain, it could easily block their internal plumbing and cause a backup throughout the park," Winnicker said.
But Giants spokeswoman Staci Slaughter downplayed the greasy fries theory, saying all the concession grease traps appeared to be functioning properly.
In any event, plumbing crews were being brought in to inspect and clean the ballpark pipes before their next big test Friday night, when the Giants come home for one of the bigger draws of the season - the Oakland A's.
Hole in the wall gang: Talk about an inside job.
The other night, SFPD Officers Magnus Chow and Chris Olson were called to the 1300 block of Taylor Street to take what looked to be a routine burglary report.
The victim told the officers that she had left her apartment at noon and returned about 11 p.m. to find her place ransacked and several items missing.
On the way out, the officers noticed a hallway door propped open, leading down to the basement - where they found a hole in the wall and two guys, ages 19 and 20, living in a crawlspace.
"This wasn't just some sleeping bag deal," said Central Station Capt. Jim Dudley. "They had bedding, dishes, glasses, a television and laptop all hooked up to the building's electricity."
They also had the stolen items from the apartment upstairs, which sent the pair to their new home - in county lockup.
[Via SF Gate]
To Save Fuel, Airlines Find No Speck Too Small
The nation’s airlines are scrutinizing every step of their operations, from the tarmac to the sky, and from the nose to the tail of their planes, searching for new ways to cut their soaring fuel bills.
They are power-washing jet engines more often to get rid of grime, carrying less water for the bathroom faucets and toilets, and replacing passenger seats with lighter models.
The financial pain of higher fuel prices is particularly acute for airlines because it is their single biggest expense. Eight years ago, 15 percent of the price of an airplane ticket went to pay for jet fuel; now, it is 40 percent, according to the Air Transport Association, the industry’s trade group.
If prices stay where they are, the nation’s airlines will collectively spend $61.2 billion this year on jet fuel — more than five times what they spent in 2002, when travel fell sharply after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Every increase in the price of fuel, already up 84 percent compared with last year, increases the pressure on the carriers, which pump about 7,000 gallons into a Boeing 737 and as much as 60,000 gallons into bigger 747s.
Airlines are raising fares and adding surcharges and fees as fast as they can, but at a certain point, passengers stay home. That’s why the carriers are looking for any new savings they can find.
“Our fleet is over 500 airplanes,” said Beth Harbin, a Southwest spokeswoman. “If you can make a difference on one airplane on one flight, and multiply that by 500, in this day and age that is significant.”
Although airlines have tried fuel-saving measures for years, they attacked the problem with renewed urgency when oil passed $100 a barrel this year. Now, all airlines are urging employees to suggest ways, large and small, to cut fuel use.
Carriers save the most by parking aging aircraft, of course, and many are already doing so. Northwest is retiring DC-9 jets it has used for decades; American is grounding some of its MD-80s, while United is parking six 747s.
Each generation of aircraft is more efficient. At Northwest, the Airbus A330 long-range jets use 38 percent less fuel than the DC-10s they replaced, while the Airbus A319 medium-range planes are 27 percent more efficient than DC-9s, said Tim McGraw, Northwest’s director of corporate environmental and safety programs.
But even specks of dirt are considered culprits. American and Southwest are washing a handful of jet engines each night, a process that used to happen only during thorough maintenance overhauls. Southwest figures it has already saved $1.6 million in fuel costs since April by reducing the drag caused by dirt and debris.
American, for one, expects to save roughly $330.7 million this year, or about 3.5 percent on a total fuel bill that will approach $9.26 billion.
A number of airlines are flying their planes somewhat slower in order to save fuel — 480 miles an hour, for example, instead of the usual cruising speed of 500 m.p.h.
Five years ago, Delta estimated the flying time from Los Angeles to Atlanta at 4 hours, 12 minutes; now it is 4 hours and 18 minutes at a lower speed. (The airline has not changed its timetable, which sets aside about four and a half hours for the trip, including taxiing time.)
Up in the cockpit, Delta is studying whether it is feasible to divide the heavy pilot manuals required on each flight between the captain and first officer, so pilots are not toting duplicate sets of five or six books that each weigh about a pound and a half.
Eventually, the airline wants to eliminate printed manuals and display the information on computer screens, a step the government would have to approve.
“That’s very much where we want to go,” said Gary Edwards, Delta’s director of flight control. “That’s the wave of the future.”
Passengers may notice other changes. Airlines including Delta are swapping heavier seats for models weighing about 5 pounds less. American is replacing its bulky drink carts with ones that are 17 pounds lighter. The airline said that move will help save 1.9 million gallons of fuel a year, on top of the 96 million gallons it is saving through other means.
Water is another target. Northwest is putting 25 percent less water for bathroom faucets and toilets on its international flights, Mr. McGraw said. Most planes had been returning from long flights with their tanks half full, an unneeded expense given that water weighs 8.3 pounds a gallon and a gallon of jet fuel is 6.8 pounds.
“Every 25 pounds we remove, we save $440,000 a year,” Mr. McGraw said.
Airlines also are trying to cut fuel consumption at the airport. Most now run their planes’ electrical systems at the gate by plugging them into outlets, rather than running the engines.
“We’re really fine-tuning to get to that sweet spot of efficiency,” said Mr. Edwards of Delta.
Northwest has studied everything from providing customers with packing tips to serving soda from two-liter plastic bottles rather than individual cans. But it decided that customers would balk at that idea.
“They like the can,” Mr. McGraw said. “They want the can.”
[Via NY Times]
They are power-washing jet engines more often to get rid of grime, carrying less water for the bathroom faucets and toilets, and replacing passenger seats with lighter models.
The financial pain of higher fuel prices is particularly acute for airlines because it is their single biggest expense. Eight years ago, 15 percent of the price of an airplane ticket went to pay for jet fuel; now, it is 40 percent, according to the Air Transport Association, the industry’s trade group.
If prices stay where they are, the nation’s airlines will collectively spend $61.2 billion this year on jet fuel — more than five times what they spent in 2002, when travel fell sharply after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Every increase in the price of fuel, already up 84 percent compared with last year, increases the pressure on the carriers, which pump about 7,000 gallons into a Boeing 737 and as much as 60,000 gallons into bigger 747s.
Airlines are raising fares and adding surcharges and fees as fast as they can, but at a certain point, passengers stay home. That’s why the carriers are looking for any new savings they can find.
“Our fleet is over 500 airplanes,” said Beth Harbin, a Southwest spokeswoman. “If you can make a difference on one airplane on one flight, and multiply that by 500, in this day and age that is significant.”
Although airlines have tried fuel-saving measures for years, they attacked the problem with renewed urgency when oil passed $100 a barrel this year. Now, all airlines are urging employees to suggest ways, large and small, to cut fuel use.
Carriers save the most by parking aging aircraft, of course, and many are already doing so. Northwest is retiring DC-9 jets it has used for decades; American is grounding some of its MD-80s, while United is parking six 747s.
Each generation of aircraft is more efficient. At Northwest, the Airbus A330 long-range jets use 38 percent less fuel than the DC-10s they replaced, while the Airbus A319 medium-range planes are 27 percent more efficient than DC-9s, said Tim McGraw, Northwest’s director of corporate environmental and safety programs.
But even specks of dirt are considered culprits. American and Southwest are washing a handful of jet engines each night, a process that used to happen only during thorough maintenance overhauls. Southwest figures it has already saved $1.6 million in fuel costs since April by reducing the drag caused by dirt and debris.
American, for one, expects to save roughly $330.7 million this year, or about 3.5 percent on a total fuel bill that will approach $9.26 billion.
A number of airlines are flying their planes somewhat slower in order to save fuel — 480 miles an hour, for example, instead of the usual cruising speed of 500 m.p.h.
Five years ago, Delta estimated the flying time from Los Angeles to Atlanta at 4 hours, 12 minutes; now it is 4 hours and 18 minutes at a lower speed. (The airline has not changed its timetable, which sets aside about four and a half hours for the trip, including taxiing time.)
Up in the cockpit, Delta is studying whether it is feasible to divide the heavy pilot manuals required on each flight between the captain and first officer, so pilots are not toting duplicate sets of five or six books that each weigh about a pound and a half.
Eventually, the airline wants to eliminate printed manuals and display the information on computer screens, a step the government would have to approve.
“That’s very much where we want to go,” said Gary Edwards, Delta’s director of flight control. “That’s the wave of the future.”
Passengers may notice other changes. Airlines including Delta are swapping heavier seats for models weighing about 5 pounds less. American is replacing its bulky drink carts with ones that are 17 pounds lighter. The airline said that move will help save 1.9 million gallons of fuel a year, on top of the 96 million gallons it is saving through other means.
Water is another target. Northwest is putting 25 percent less water for bathroom faucets and toilets on its international flights, Mr. McGraw said. Most planes had been returning from long flights with their tanks half full, an unneeded expense given that water weighs 8.3 pounds a gallon and a gallon of jet fuel is 6.8 pounds.
“Every 25 pounds we remove, we save $440,000 a year,” Mr. McGraw said.
Airlines also are trying to cut fuel consumption at the airport. Most now run their planes’ electrical systems at the gate by plugging them into outlets, rather than running the engines.
“We’re really fine-tuning to get to that sweet spot of efficiency,” said Mr. Edwards of Delta.
Northwest has studied everything from providing customers with packing tips to serving soda from two-liter plastic bottles rather than individual cans. But it decided that customers would balk at that idea.
“They like the can,” Mr. McGraw said. “They want the can.”
[Via NY Times]
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The Myth of Top Gear
Like my 10-year-old nephew, I can't wait for the new series of Top Gear later this month. Neither of us is very interested in brake horsepower or understeer, but we both like the show's beautifully filmed escapades, its insider's vocabulary and its enduringly likable presenters. (Yes, I am aware this isn't a universal response to Jeremy Clarkson.) This charm may explain why a programme made by the supposedly impartial BBC has got away with a long-running and highly politicised campaign against speed cameras.
In Mythologies, the book he wrote in 1957, Roland Barthes argued that cultural myths develop not through lies or distortion, but through a deceptive transparency. Myth "abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences", creating "a world wide open and wallowing in the evident ... a blissful clarity". I am not sure what Barthes would have made of Top Gear, but this programme certainly dispenses its own cultural myth - that speeding is a victimless crime - with the same kind of blissful clarity.
Its presenters venture infrequently on normal UK roads, preferring to test cars on high-speed tracks, do daredevil stunts on deserted beaches, or challenge each other to intercontinental road races. Here they marvel at the laid-back attitudes of the French police to speeding, or the liberating absence of speed limits on the autobahns. They inhabit a make-believe universe in which the petty restrictions of British roads, with their speed cameras and dawdling caravans, magically melt away.
The main purpose of myth, wrote Barthes, is "to transform history into nature", to disguise contentious historical arguments behind the celebration of natural human instincts. The common complaint about the mechanical stupidity of the speed camera has echoed down the years whenever the police have attempted to apply the law scientifically - from the hated speed traps of the 1900s to the radar guns of the 1950s that the AA complained were "a quite unnecessarily extravagant method of enforcing the law".
Drivers have long countered these restrictions with fantasies of revenge and flight, of defeating the killjoys and escaping the road altogether. In WR Booth's 1906 film, The '?' Motorist, a couple in a car run over a traffic policeman and then fly into space, ending up at the planet Saturn, whose gas rings they put to use as a racetrack.
Motoring journalists have also long dismissed advocates of blanket speed limits as soulless life-deniers. LJK Setright, the celebrated Car magazine columnist, saw speed limits as a tool of political repression, which helped to "coerce the populace to remain where they are, instead of roaming around being inquisitive or simply escaping to where the grass appears to grow greener". The historian AJP Taylor often used his Sunday Express column to extol the pleasures of driving fast, one of his pieces arguing that road accidents were caused by motorists driving too slowly. ("What it is," commented one Daily Telegraph columnist, "to have a highly trained mind.") Top Gear is part of this resilient Tory anarchism of the road, the championing of the right of every freeborn Englishman to drive on the Queen's Highway in the manner of his choosing.
Barthes argued that cultural myths work primarily through flattering identification: they offer us our own likeness, but "clarified, exalted, superbly elevated into a type". Top Gear similarly appeals to those perennially victimised members of the respectable middle classes - speeding motorists - and presents them with their best version of themselves, innocently enjoying the aesthetics of speed away from the prying eyes of government busybodies.
When Clarkson apparently confessed at the Hay festival to have driven at 186mph on a public road - even though it is impossible to drive that fast in the Limehouse Link tunnel - he also said that Top Gear was "just fluff ... Nobody listens to me". Myth always has an alibi to hand: in Top Gear's case, it is that everything is a joke, a jeu d'esprit, just messing about. But humour can be coercive when anyone who does not get the joke is dismissed as a joyless puritan. Unfortunately for those of us who like to puncture myths, this one appeals to 10-year-olds and grown-ups alike. It is as beguiling and seductive as a fairytale.
[Via Guardian]
In Mythologies, the book he wrote in 1957, Roland Barthes argued that cultural myths develop not through lies or distortion, but through a deceptive transparency. Myth "abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences", creating "a world wide open and wallowing in the evident ... a blissful clarity". I am not sure what Barthes would have made of Top Gear, but this programme certainly dispenses its own cultural myth - that speeding is a victimless crime - with the same kind of blissful clarity.
Its presenters venture infrequently on normal UK roads, preferring to test cars on high-speed tracks, do daredevil stunts on deserted beaches, or challenge each other to intercontinental road races. Here they marvel at the laid-back attitudes of the French police to speeding, or the liberating absence of speed limits on the autobahns. They inhabit a make-believe universe in which the petty restrictions of British roads, with their speed cameras and dawdling caravans, magically melt away.
The main purpose of myth, wrote Barthes, is "to transform history into nature", to disguise contentious historical arguments behind the celebration of natural human instincts. The common complaint about the mechanical stupidity of the speed camera has echoed down the years whenever the police have attempted to apply the law scientifically - from the hated speed traps of the 1900s to the radar guns of the 1950s that the AA complained were "a quite unnecessarily extravagant method of enforcing the law".
Drivers have long countered these restrictions with fantasies of revenge and flight, of defeating the killjoys and escaping the road altogether. In WR Booth's 1906 film, The '?' Motorist, a couple in a car run over a traffic policeman and then fly into space, ending up at the planet Saturn, whose gas rings they put to use as a racetrack.
Motoring journalists have also long dismissed advocates of blanket speed limits as soulless life-deniers. LJK Setright, the celebrated Car magazine columnist, saw speed limits as a tool of political repression, which helped to "coerce the populace to remain where they are, instead of roaming around being inquisitive or simply escaping to where the grass appears to grow greener". The historian AJP Taylor often used his Sunday Express column to extol the pleasures of driving fast, one of his pieces arguing that road accidents were caused by motorists driving too slowly. ("What it is," commented one Daily Telegraph columnist, "to have a highly trained mind.") Top Gear is part of this resilient Tory anarchism of the road, the championing of the right of every freeborn Englishman to drive on the Queen's Highway in the manner of his choosing.
Barthes argued that cultural myths work primarily through flattering identification: they offer us our own likeness, but "clarified, exalted, superbly elevated into a type". Top Gear similarly appeals to those perennially victimised members of the respectable middle classes - speeding motorists - and presents them with their best version of themselves, innocently enjoying the aesthetics of speed away from the prying eyes of government busybodies.
When Clarkson apparently confessed at the Hay festival to have driven at 186mph on a public road - even though it is impossible to drive that fast in the Limehouse Link tunnel - he also said that Top Gear was "just fluff ... Nobody listens to me". Myth always has an alibi to hand: in Top Gear's case, it is that everything is a joke, a jeu d'esprit, just messing about. But humour can be coercive when anyone who does not get the joke is dismissed as a joyless puritan. Unfortunately for those of us who like to puncture myths, this one appeals to 10-year-olds and grown-ups alike. It is as beguiling and seductive as a fairytale.
[Via Guardian]
The Biology of Attraction
In an apocryphal story, a colleague once turned to the great British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, and said, "Tell me, Mr. Haldane, knowing what you do about nature, what can you tell me about God?" Haldane replied, "He has an inordinate fondness for beetles." Indeed, the world contains over 300,000 species of beetles. I would add that "God" loves the human mating game, for no other aspect of our behavior is so complex, so subtle, or so pervasive. And although these sexual strategies differ from one individual to the next, the essential choreography of human courtship, love, and marriage has myriad designs that seem etched into the human psyche, the product of time, selection, and evolution. They begin the moment men and women get within courting range—with the way we flirt.
In describing these strategies, I make no effort to be "politically correct." Nature designed men and women to work together. But I cannot pretend that they are alike. They are not. And I have given evolutionary and biological explanations for their differences where I find them appropriate.
Flirting
Women from places as different as the jungles of Amazonia, the salons of Paris, and the highlands of New Guinea apparently flirt with the same sequence of expressions.
First the woman smiles at her admirer and lifts her eyebrows in a swift, jerky motion as she opens her eyes wide to gaze at him. Then she drops her eyelids, tilts her head down and to the side, and looks away. Frequently she also covers her face with her hands, giggling nervously as she retreats behind her palms. This sequential flirting gesture is so distinctive that [German ethologist Irenaus] Eibl-Eibesfeldt was convinced it is innate, a human female courtship ploy that evolved eons ago to signal sexual interest.
Men also employ courting tactics similar to those seen in other species. Have you ever walked into the boss's office and seen him leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows high, and chest thrust out? Perhaps he has come from behind his desk, walked up to you, smiled, arched his back, and thrust his upper body in your direction? If so, watch out. He may be subconsciously announcing his dominance over you. If you are a woman, he may be courting you instead.
The "chest thrust" is part of a basic postural message used across the animal kingdom—"standing tall." Dominant creatures puff up. Codfish bulge their heads and thrust our their pelvic fins. Snakes, frogs, and toads inflate their bodies. Antelope and chameleons turn broadside to emphasize their bulk. Mule deer look askance to show their antlers. Cats bristle. Pigeons swell. Lobsters raise themselves onto the tips of their walking legs and extend their open claws. Gorillas pound their chests. Men just thrust out their chests.
"Copulatory" Gaze
The gaze is probably the most striking human courting ploy. Eye language. In Western cultures, where eye contact between the sexes is permitted, men and women often stare intently at potential mates for about two to three seconds during which their pupils may dilate—a sign of extreme interest. Then the starer drops his or her eyelids and looks away.
No wonder the custom of the veil has been adopted in so many cultures. Eye contact seems to have an immediate effect. The gaze triggers a primitive part of the human brain, calling forth one of two basic emotions—approach or retreat. You cannot ignore the eyes of another fixed on you; you must respond. You may smile and start conversation. You may look away and edge toward the door. But first you will probably tug at an earlobe, adjust your sweater, yawn, fidget with your eyeglasses, or perform some other meaningless movement—a "displacement gesture"—to alleviate anxiety while you make up your mind how to acknowledge this invitation, whether to flee the premises or stay and play the courting game.
Baboon Love
Baboons gaze at each other during courtship too. These animals may have branched off of our human evolutionary tree more than 19 million years ago, yet this similarity in wooing persists. As anthropologist Barbara Smuts had said of a budding baboon courtship on the Eburru cliffs of Kenya, "It looked like watching two novices in a singles bar."
The affair began one evening when a female baboon, Thalia, turned and caught a young male, Alex staring at her. They were about 15 feet apart. He glanced away immediately. So she stared at him—until he turned to look at her. Then she intently fiddled with her toes. On it went. Each time she stared at him, he looked away; each time he stared at her, she groomed her feet. Finally Alex caught Thalia gazing at him—the "return gaze."
Immediately he flattened his ears against his head, narrowed his eyelids, and began to smack his lips, the height of friendliness in baboon society. Thalia froze. Then, for a long moment, she looked him in the eye. Only after this extended eye contact had occurred did Alex approach her, at which point Thalia began to groom him—the beginning of a friendship and sexual liaison that was still going strong six years later, when Smuts returned to Kenya to study baboon friendships.
At The Bar
Could these courting cues be part of a larger human mating dance?
According to David Givens, an anthropologist, and Timothy Perper, a biologist, who spent several hundred hours in American cocktail lounges watching men and women flirt, American singles-bar courtship has several stages, each with distinctive escalation points. I shall divide them into five. The first is the "attention getting" phase. Young men and women do this somewhat differently. As soon as they enter the bar, both males and females typically establish a territory—a seat, a place to lean, a position near the jukebox or dance floor. Once settled, they begin to attract attention to themselves.
Tactics vary. Men tend to pitch and roll their shoulders, stretch, exaggerate their body movements. Instead of using the wrist to stir a drink, men often employ the entire arm, as if stirring mud. The normally smooth motion necessary to light a cigarette becomes a whole-body gesture, ending with an elaborate shaking from the elbow to extinguish the match.
Then there is the swagger with which young men often move to and fro. Male baboons on the grasslands of East Africa also swagger when they foresee a potential sexual encounter. A male gorilla walks back and forth stiffly as he watches a female out of the corner of his eye. The parading gait is known to primatologists as bird-dogging. Males of many species also preen. Human males pat their hair, adjust their clothes, tug their chins, or perform other self-clasping or grooming movements that diffuse nervous energy and keep the body moving.
Young women begin the attention-getting phase with many of the same maneuvers that men use—smiling, gazing, shifting, swaying, preening, stretching, moving in their territory to draw attention to themselves. Often they incorporate a battery of feminine moves as well. They twist their curls, tilt their heads, look up coyly, giggle, raise their brows, flick their tongues, lick their upper lips, blush, and hide their faces in order to signal, "I am here."
Some women also have a characteristic walk when courting; they arch their backs, thrust out their bosoms, sway their hips, and strut. No wonder many women wear high-heeled shoes. This bizarre Western custom, invented by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s, unnaturally arches the back, tilts the buttocks, and thrusts the chest out into a female come-hither pose. The clomping noise of their spiky heels draws attention too.
Keeping Time
Body synchrony is the final and most intriguing component of the pickup. As potential lovers become comfortable, they pivot or swivel until their shoulders become aligned, their bodies face-to-face. This rotation toward each other may start before they begin to talk or hours into conversation, but after a while the man and woman begin to move in tandem. Only briefly at first. When he crosses his legs, she crosses hers; as he leans left, she leans left; when he smoothes his hair, she smoothes hers. They move in perfect rhythm as they gaze deeply into each other's eyes.
Called interactional synchrony, this human mirroring begins in infancy. By the second day of life, a newborn has begun to synchronize its body movements with the rhythmic patterns of the human voice. And it is now well established that people in many other cultures get into rhythm when they feel comfortable together. Our need to keep each other's time reflects a rhythmic mimicry common to many animals. Chimps sometimes sway from side to side as they stare into one another's eyes just prior to copulation. Cats circle. Red deer prance. Howler monkeys court with rhythmic tongue movements. Stickleback fish do a zigzag jig. From bears to beetles, courting couples perform rhythmic rituals to express their amorous intentions.
Wooing Messages
Human courtship has other similarities to courtship in "lower" animals. Normally people woo each other slowly. Caution during courtship is also characteristic of spiders. The male wolf spider, for example, must enter the long, darker entrance of a female's compound in order to court and copulate. This he does slowly. If he is overeager, she devours him.
Men and women who are too aggressive at the beginning of the courting process also suffer unpleasant consequences. If you come too close, touch too soon, or talk too much, you will probably be repelled. Like wooing among wolf spiders, baboons, and other creatures, the human pickup runs on message. At every juncture in the ritual each partner must respond correctly, otherwise the courtship fails.
The Dinner Date
Probably no ritual is more common to Western would-be lovers than the "dinner date." If the man is courting, he pays—and a woman instinctively knows her partner is wooing her. In fact, there is no more widespread courtship ploy than offering food in hopes of gaining sexual favors. Around the world men give women presents prior to lovemaking. A fish, a piece of meat, sweets, and beer are among the delicacies men have invented as offerings.
This ploy is not exclusive to men. Black-tipped hang flies often catch aphids, daddy longlegs, or houseflies on the forest floor. When a male has felled a particularly juicy prey, he exudes secretions from an abdominal scent gland that catch the breeze, announcing a successful hunting expedition. Often a passing female hang fly stops to enjoy the meal—but not without copulating while she eats.
"Courtship feeding," as this custom is called, probably predates the dinosaurs, because it has an important reproductive function. By providing food to females, males show their abilities as hunters, providers, worthy procreative partners.
Odor Lures
Every person smells slightly different; we all have a personal "odor print" as distinctive as our voice, our hands, our intellect. As newborn infants we can recognize our mother by her smell. Both men and women have "apocrine glands in their armpits, around their nipples, and in the groin that become active at puberty. These scent boxes differ from "eccrine" glands, which cover much of the body and produce an odorless liquid, because their exudate, in combination with bacteria on the skin, produce the acrid, gamy smell of perspiration.
Today in parts of Greece and the Balkans, some men carry their handkerchiefs in their armpits during festivals and offer these odoriferous tokens to the women they invite to dance: they swear by the results.
But could a man's smell actually trigger infatuation in a woman? This possible link between male essence and female reproductive health may provide a clue to attraction. Women perceive odors better than men do. They are a hundred times more sensitive to Exaltolide, a compound much like men's sexual musk; they can smell a mild sweat from about three feet away; and at midcycle, during ovulation, women can smell men's musk even more strongly. Perhaps ovulating women become more susceptible to infatuation when they can smell male essence and are unconsciously drawn toward it to maintain menstrual cycling.
A woman's or a man's smell can release a host of memories too. So the right human smell at the right moment could touch off vivid pleasant memories and possibly ignite that first, stunning moment of romantic adoration.
But Americans, the Japanese, and many other people find odors offensive; for most of them the smell of perspiration is more likely to repel than to attract. Some scientists think the Japanese are unduly disturbed by body odors because of their long tradition of arranged marriages: men and women were forced into close contact with partners they found unappealing. Why Americans are phobic about natural body smells, I do not know. Perhaps our advertisers have swayed us in order to sell their deodorizing products.
Love Maps
A more important mechanism by which human beings become captivated by "him" or "her" may be what sexologist John Money called your love map. Long before you fixate on Ray as opposed to Bill, Sue instead of Ceciley, you have developed a mental map, a template replete with brain circuitry that determines what arouses you sexually, what drives you to fall in love with one person rather than another.
These love maps vary from one individual to the next. Some people get turned on by a business suit or a doctor's uniform, by big breasts, small feet, or a vivacious laugh. But averageness still wins. In one study, psychologists selected 32 faces of American Caucasian women and, using computers, averaged all of their features. Then they showed these images to college peers. Of 94 photographs of real female faces, only four were rated more appealing than these fabrications.
As you would guess, the world does not share the sexual ideals of Caucasian students from Wyoming. Despite wildly dissimilar standards of beauty and sex appeal, however, there are a few widely shared opinions about what incites romantic passion. Men and women around the world are attracted to those with good complexions. Everywhere people are drawn to partners whom they regard as clean. And men in most places generally prefer plump, wide-hipped women to slim ones. Looks count.
So does money. From rural Zulus to urban Brazilians, men are attracted to young, good-looking, spunky women, while women are drawn to men with property or money. Americans are no exception.
These male/female appetites are probably innate. it is to a males' genetic advantage to fall in love with a women who will produce viable offspring; it is to a woman's biological advantage to become captivated by a man who can help support her young. As Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist, summed it up, "We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity."
Love At First Sight
Could this human ability to adore another within moments of meeting come out of nature? I think it does. In fact, love at first sight may have a critical adaptive function among animals. During the mating season a female squirrel, for example, needs to breed. It is not to her advantage to copulate with a porcupine. But if she sees a healthy squirrel, she should waste no time. She should size him up. And if he looks suitable, she should grab her chance to copulate. Perhaps love at first sight is no more than an inborn tendency in many creatures that evolved to spur the mating process. Then among our human ancestors what had been animal attraction evolved into the human sensation of infatuation at a glance.
Infatuation Fades
Alas, infatuation fades. As Emerson put it, "Love is strongest in pursuit, friendship in possession." At some point, that old black magic wanes. Yet there does seem to be a general length to this condition. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov measured the duration of romantic love, from the moment infatuation hit to when a "feeling of neutrality" for one's love object began. She concluded, "The most frequent interval, as well as the average, is between approximately 18 months and three years" John Money agrees, proposing that once you begin to see your sweetheart regularly the passion lasts two to three years.
Psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz suspected that the end of infatuation is also grounded in brain physiology. He theorized that the brain cannot eternally maintain the revved-up site of romantic bliss. As he summed it up, "If you want a situation where you and your long-term partner can still get very excited about each other, you will have to work on it, because in some ways you are bucking a biological tide."
Harem Building
Only 16 percent of the 853 cultures on record actually prescribe monogyny, in which a man is permitted only one wife at a time. Western cultures are among them. We are in the minority, however. A whopping 84 percent of all human societies permit a man to take more than one wife at once—polygyny.
Men seek polygyny to spread their genes, while women join harems to acquire resources and ensure the survival of their young. If you ask a man why he wants a second bride, he might say he is attracted to her wit, her business acumen, her vivacious spirit, or splendid thighs. If you ask a women why she is willing to "share" a man, she might tell you that she loves the way he looks or laughs or takes her to fancy vacation spots.
But no matter what reasons people offer, polygyny enables men to have more children; under the right conditions women also reap reproductive benefits. So long ago ancestral men who sought polygyny and ancestral women who acquiesced to harem life disproportionately survived.
Man Is Monogamous
Because of the genetic advantages of polygyny for men and because so many societies permit polygyny, many anthropologists think that harem building is a badge of the human animal. But in the vast majority of societies where polygyny is permitted, only about five to 10 percent of men actually have several wives simultaneously. Although polygyny is widely discussed, it is much less practiced.
Whereas gorillas, horses, and animals of many other species always form harems, among human beings polygyny and polyandry seem to be optional opportunistic exceptions; monogamy is the rule. Human beings almost never have to be cajoled into pairing. Instead, we do this naturally. We flirt. We feel infatuation. We fall in love. We marry. And the vast majority of us marry only one person at a time.
Pair-bonding is a trademark of the human animal.
Unfaithfully Yours
Although we flirt, fall in love, and marry, human beings also tend to be sexually unfaithful to a spouse. Americans are no exception. Despite our attitude that philandering is immoral, regardless of our sense of guilt when we engage in trysts, in spite of the risks to family, friends, and livelihood that adultery entails, we indulge in extramarital affairs with avid regularity.
A survey of 106,000 readers of Cosmopolitan magazine in the early 1980s indicated that 54 percent of the married women had participated in at least one affair, and a poll of 7,239 men reported that 72 percent of those married over two years had been adulterous.
Why? From a Darwinian perspective, it is easy to explain. If a man has two children by one woman, he has, genetically speaking, "reproduced" himself. But if he also engages in dalliances with more women and, by chance, sires two more young, he doubles his contribution to the next generation. Those men who seek variety also tend to have more children. These young survive and pass to subsequent generations whatever it is in the male genetic makeup that seeks "fresh features," as Byron said of men's need for sexual novelty.
Unlike a man, a woman cannot breed every time she copulates. In fact, anthropologist Donald Symons has argued that, because the number of children a woman can bear is limited, women are biologically less motivated to seek fresh features.
Sexual Variety
Are women really less interested in sexual variety? My own modest proposal is that during our long evolutionary history most males pursued trysts to spread their genes, while females evolved two alternative strategies to acquire resources: some women elected to be faithful to a single man in order to reap a lot of benefits from him; others engaged in clandestine sex with many men to acquire resources from each. This scenario roughly coincides with common beliefs: man, the natural playboy; women, madonna or whore.
In a study by Donald Symons and Bruce Ellis, for example, 415 college students were asked whether they would have sex with an anonymous student of the opposite sex. In this imaginary scenario, participants were told that all risk of pregnancy, discovery, and disease was absent. The results were those you would expect. Males were consistently more likely to say yes, leading these researchers once again to conclude that men are more interested in sexual variety than women are.
But here's the glitch. This study takes into consideration the primary genetic motive for male philandering (to fertilize young women). But not the primary motive for female philandering—the acquisition of resources.
There is no evidence whatsoever that women are sexually shy or that they shun clandestine sexual adventures. Instead, both men and women seem to exhibit a mixed reproductive strategy: monogamy and adultery are our fare.
Parting
We all have our share of troubles. But probably one of the hardest things we do is leave a spouse. From the tundras of Siberia to the jungles of Amazonia, people accept divorce as regrettable—although sometimes necessary. They have specific social or legal procedures for divorce. And they do divorce. Moreover, unlike many Westerners, traditional peoples do not make divorce a moral issue. The Mongols of Siberia sum up a common worldwide attitude, "If two individuals cannot get along harmoniously together, they had better live apart."
Why do people divorce? Bitter quarrels, insensitive remarks, lack of humor, watching too much television, inability to listen, drunkenness, sexual rejection—the reasons men or women give for why they leave a marriage are as varied as their motives for having wedded in the first place.
Overt adultery heads the list. Sterility and barrenness come next. Cruelty, particularly by the husband, ranks third among worldwide reasons for divorce. I am not surprised that adultery and infertility are paramount. Darwin theorized that people marry primarily to breed.
The Four-Year Itch
Hoping to get some insight into the nature of divorce, I turned to the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Divorce generally occurs early in marriage—peaking in or around the fourth year after wedding—followed by a gradual decline in divorce as more years of marriage go by. The American divorce peak hovers somewhat below the common four-year peak. Purely as a guess, I would say that this may have something to do with American attitudes toward marriage itself. We tend not to marry for economic, political, or family reasons. Instead, as anthropologist Paul Bohannen once said, "Americans marry to enhance their inner, largely secret selves."
I find this remark fascinating—and correct. We marry for love and to accentuate, balance out, or mask parts of our private selves. This is why you sometimes see a reserved accountant married to a blond bombshell or a scientist married to a poet. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the American divorce peak corresponds perfectly with the normal duration of infatuation—two to three years. If partners are not satisfied with the match, they bail out soon after the infatuation wears off. So there are exceptions to the four-year itch.
Divorce Is For The Young
Another pattern to emerge from the United Nations data regards "divorce with dependent children." Among the hundreds of millions of people recorded in 45 societies between 1950 and 1989, 39 percent of all divorces occurred among couples with no dependent children, 26 percent among those with one dependent child, 19 percent among couples with two, 7 percent among those with three children, 3 percent among couples with four young, and couples with five or more dependent young rarely split. Hence, it appears that the more children a couple bear, the less likely they are to divorce.
This pattern is less conclusively demonstrated by the U.N. data than the first two. Yet it is strongly suggested and it makes genetic sense. From a Darwinian perspective, couples with no children should break up; both individuals will mate again and probably go on to bear young—ensuring their genetic futures. As couples bear more children they become less economically able to abandon their growing family. And it is genetically logical that they remain together to raise their flock.
Planned Obsolescence Of The Pair Bond
Marriage clearly shows several general patterns of decay. Divorce counts peak among couples married about four years. And the longer a couple remain together, the older the partners get, and probably the more offspring they produce, the less likely spouses are to leave each other.
This is not to say that everybody fits this mold. But Shakespeare did. Etched in Shakespeare's marriage and in all these other divorces recorded from around the world is a blue print, a primitive design. The human animal seems built to court, to fall in love, and to marry one person at a time; then, at the height of our reproductive years, often with single child, we divorce; then, a few years later, we remarry once again.
[Via Psychology Today]
Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce
In describing these strategies, I make no effort to be "politically correct." Nature designed men and women to work together. But I cannot pretend that they are alike. They are not. And I have given evolutionary and biological explanations for their differences where I find them appropriate.
Flirting
Women from places as different as the jungles of Amazonia, the salons of Paris, and the highlands of New Guinea apparently flirt with the same sequence of expressions.
First the woman smiles at her admirer and lifts her eyebrows in a swift, jerky motion as she opens her eyes wide to gaze at him. Then she drops her eyelids, tilts her head down and to the side, and looks away. Frequently she also covers her face with her hands, giggling nervously as she retreats behind her palms. This sequential flirting gesture is so distinctive that [German ethologist Irenaus] Eibl-Eibesfeldt was convinced it is innate, a human female courtship ploy that evolved eons ago to signal sexual interest.
Men also employ courting tactics similar to those seen in other species. Have you ever walked into the boss's office and seen him leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows high, and chest thrust out? Perhaps he has come from behind his desk, walked up to you, smiled, arched his back, and thrust his upper body in your direction? If so, watch out. He may be subconsciously announcing his dominance over you. If you are a woman, he may be courting you instead.
The "chest thrust" is part of a basic postural message used across the animal kingdom—"standing tall." Dominant creatures puff up. Codfish bulge their heads and thrust our their pelvic fins. Snakes, frogs, and toads inflate their bodies. Antelope and chameleons turn broadside to emphasize their bulk. Mule deer look askance to show their antlers. Cats bristle. Pigeons swell. Lobsters raise themselves onto the tips of their walking legs and extend their open claws. Gorillas pound their chests. Men just thrust out their chests.
"Copulatory" Gaze
The gaze is probably the most striking human courting ploy. Eye language. In Western cultures, where eye contact between the sexes is permitted, men and women often stare intently at potential mates for about two to three seconds during which their pupils may dilate—a sign of extreme interest. Then the starer drops his or her eyelids and looks away.
No wonder the custom of the veil has been adopted in so many cultures. Eye contact seems to have an immediate effect. The gaze triggers a primitive part of the human brain, calling forth one of two basic emotions—approach or retreat. You cannot ignore the eyes of another fixed on you; you must respond. You may smile and start conversation. You may look away and edge toward the door. But first you will probably tug at an earlobe, adjust your sweater, yawn, fidget with your eyeglasses, or perform some other meaningless movement—a "displacement gesture"—to alleviate anxiety while you make up your mind how to acknowledge this invitation, whether to flee the premises or stay and play the courting game.
Baboon Love
Baboons gaze at each other during courtship too. These animals may have branched off of our human evolutionary tree more than 19 million years ago, yet this similarity in wooing persists. As anthropologist Barbara Smuts had said of a budding baboon courtship on the Eburru cliffs of Kenya, "It looked like watching two novices in a singles bar."
The affair began one evening when a female baboon, Thalia, turned and caught a young male, Alex staring at her. They were about 15 feet apart. He glanced away immediately. So she stared at him—until he turned to look at her. Then she intently fiddled with her toes. On it went. Each time she stared at him, he looked away; each time he stared at her, she groomed her feet. Finally Alex caught Thalia gazing at him—the "return gaze."
Immediately he flattened his ears against his head, narrowed his eyelids, and began to smack his lips, the height of friendliness in baboon society. Thalia froze. Then, for a long moment, she looked him in the eye. Only after this extended eye contact had occurred did Alex approach her, at which point Thalia began to groom him—the beginning of a friendship and sexual liaison that was still going strong six years later, when Smuts returned to Kenya to study baboon friendships.
At The Bar
Could these courting cues be part of a larger human mating dance?
According to David Givens, an anthropologist, and Timothy Perper, a biologist, who spent several hundred hours in American cocktail lounges watching men and women flirt, American singles-bar courtship has several stages, each with distinctive escalation points. I shall divide them into five. The first is the "attention getting" phase. Young men and women do this somewhat differently. As soon as they enter the bar, both males and females typically establish a territory—a seat, a place to lean, a position near the jukebox or dance floor. Once settled, they begin to attract attention to themselves.
Tactics vary. Men tend to pitch and roll their shoulders, stretch, exaggerate their body movements. Instead of using the wrist to stir a drink, men often employ the entire arm, as if stirring mud. The normally smooth motion necessary to light a cigarette becomes a whole-body gesture, ending with an elaborate shaking from the elbow to extinguish the match.
Then there is the swagger with which young men often move to and fro. Male baboons on the grasslands of East Africa also swagger when they foresee a potential sexual encounter. A male gorilla walks back and forth stiffly as he watches a female out of the corner of his eye. The parading gait is known to primatologists as bird-dogging. Males of many species also preen. Human males pat their hair, adjust their clothes, tug their chins, or perform other self-clasping or grooming movements that diffuse nervous energy and keep the body moving.
Young women begin the attention-getting phase with many of the same maneuvers that men use—smiling, gazing, shifting, swaying, preening, stretching, moving in their territory to draw attention to themselves. Often they incorporate a battery of feminine moves as well. They twist their curls, tilt their heads, look up coyly, giggle, raise their brows, flick their tongues, lick their upper lips, blush, and hide their faces in order to signal, "I am here."
Some women also have a characteristic walk when courting; they arch their backs, thrust out their bosoms, sway their hips, and strut. No wonder many women wear high-heeled shoes. This bizarre Western custom, invented by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s, unnaturally arches the back, tilts the buttocks, and thrusts the chest out into a female come-hither pose. The clomping noise of their spiky heels draws attention too.
Keeping Time
Body synchrony is the final and most intriguing component of the pickup. As potential lovers become comfortable, they pivot or swivel until their shoulders become aligned, their bodies face-to-face. This rotation toward each other may start before they begin to talk or hours into conversation, but after a while the man and woman begin to move in tandem. Only briefly at first. When he crosses his legs, she crosses hers; as he leans left, she leans left; when he smoothes his hair, she smoothes hers. They move in perfect rhythm as they gaze deeply into each other's eyes.
Called interactional synchrony, this human mirroring begins in infancy. By the second day of life, a newborn has begun to synchronize its body movements with the rhythmic patterns of the human voice. And it is now well established that people in many other cultures get into rhythm when they feel comfortable together. Our need to keep each other's time reflects a rhythmic mimicry common to many animals. Chimps sometimes sway from side to side as they stare into one another's eyes just prior to copulation. Cats circle. Red deer prance. Howler monkeys court with rhythmic tongue movements. Stickleback fish do a zigzag jig. From bears to beetles, courting couples perform rhythmic rituals to express their amorous intentions.
Wooing Messages
Human courtship has other similarities to courtship in "lower" animals. Normally people woo each other slowly. Caution during courtship is also characteristic of spiders. The male wolf spider, for example, must enter the long, darker entrance of a female's compound in order to court and copulate. This he does slowly. If he is overeager, she devours him.
Men and women who are too aggressive at the beginning of the courting process also suffer unpleasant consequences. If you come too close, touch too soon, or talk too much, you will probably be repelled. Like wooing among wolf spiders, baboons, and other creatures, the human pickup runs on message. At every juncture in the ritual each partner must respond correctly, otherwise the courtship fails.
The Dinner Date
Probably no ritual is more common to Western would-be lovers than the "dinner date." If the man is courting, he pays—and a woman instinctively knows her partner is wooing her. In fact, there is no more widespread courtship ploy than offering food in hopes of gaining sexual favors. Around the world men give women presents prior to lovemaking. A fish, a piece of meat, sweets, and beer are among the delicacies men have invented as offerings.
This ploy is not exclusive to men. Black-tipped hang flies often catch aphids, daddy longlegs, or houseflies on the forest floor. When a male has felled a particularly juicy prey, he exudes secretions from an abdominal scent gland that catch the breeze, announcing a successful hunting expedition. Often a passing female hang fly stops to enjoy the meal—but not without copulating while she eats.
"Courtship feeding," as this custom is called, probably predates the dinosaurs, because it has an important reproductive function. By providing food to females, males show their abilities as hunters, providers, worthy procreative partners.
Odor Lures
Every person smells slightly different; we all have a personal "odor print" as distinctive as our voice, our hands, our intellect. As newborn infants we can recognize our mother by her smell. Both men and women have "apocrine glands in their armpits, around their nipples, and in the groin that become active at puberty. These scent boxes differ from "eccrine" glands, which cover much of the body and produce an odorless liquid, because their exudate, in combination with bacteria on the skin, produce the acrid, gamy smell of perspiration.
Today in parts of Greece and the Balkans, some men carry their handkerchiefs in their armpits during festivals and offer these odoriferous tokens to the women they invite to dance: they swear by the results.
But could a man's smell actually trigger infatuation in a woman? This possible link between male essence and female reproductive health may provide a clue to attraction. Women perceive odors better than men do. They are a hundred times more sensitive to Exaltolide, a compound much like men's sexual musk; they can smell a mild sweat from about three feet away; and at midcycle, during ovulation, women can smell men's musk even more strongly. Perhaps ovulating women become more susceptible to infatuation when they can smell male essence and are unconsciously drawn toward it to maintain menstrual cycling.
A woman's or a man's smell can release a host of memories too. So the right human smell at the right moment could touch off vivid pleasant memories and possibly ignite that first, stunning moment of romantic adoration.
But Americans, the Japanese, and many other people find odors offensive; for most of them the smell of perspiration is more likely to repel than to attract. Some scientists think the Japanese are unduly disturbed by body odors because of their long tradition of arranged marriages: men and women were forced into close contact with partners they found unappealing. Why Americans are phobic about natural body smells, I do not know. Perhaps our advertisers have swayed us in order to sell their deodorizing products.
Love Maps
A more important mechanism by which human beings become captivated by "him" or "her" may be what sexologist John Money called your love map. Long before you fixate on Ray as opposed to Bill, Sue instead of Ceciley, you have developed a mental map, a template replete with brain circuitry that determines what arouses you sexually, what drives you to fall in love with one person rather than another.
These love maps vary from one individual to the next. Some people get turned on by a business suit or a doctor's uniform, by big breasts, small feet, or a vivacious laugh. But averageness still wins. In one study, psychologists selected 32 faces of American Caucasian women and, using computers, averaged all of their features. Then they showed these images to college peers. Of 94 photographs of real female faces, only four were rated more appealing than these fabrications.
As you would guess, the world does not share the sexual ideals of Caucasian students from Wyoming. Despite wildly dissimilar standards of beauty and sex appeal, however, there are a few widely shared opinions about what incites romantic passion. Men and women around the world are attracted to those with good complexions. Everywhere people are drawn to partners whom they regard as clean. And men in most places generally prefer plump, wide-hipped women to slim ones. Looks count.
So does money. From rural Zulus to urban Brazilians, men are attracted to young, good-looking, spunky women, while women are drawn to men with property or money. Americans are no exception.
These male/female appetites are probably innate. it is to a males' genetic advantage to fall in love with a women who will produce viable offspring; it is to a woman's biological advantage to become captivated by a man who can help support her young. As Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist, summed it up, "We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity."
Love At First Sight
Could this human ability to adore another within moments of meeting come out of nature? I think it does. In fact, love at first sight may have a critical adaptive function among animals. During the mating season a female squirrel, for example, needs to breed. It is not to her advantage to copulate with a porcupine. But if she sees a healthy squirrel, she should waste no time. She should size him up. And if he looks suitable, she should grab her chance to copulate. Perhaps love at first sight is no more than an inborn tendency in many creatures that evolved to spur the mating process. Then among our human ancestors what had been animal attraction evolved into the human sensation of infatuation at a glance.
Infatuation Fades
Alas, infatuation fades. As Emerson put it, "Love is strongest in pursuit, friendship in possession." At some point, that old black magic wanes. Yet there does seem to be a general length to this condition. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov measured the duration of romantic love, from the moment infatuation hit to when a "feeling of neutrality" for one's love object began. She concluded, "The most frequent interval, as well as the average, is between approximately 18 months and three years" John Money agrees, proposing that once you begin to see your sweetheart regularly the passion lasts two to three years.
Psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz suspected that the end of infatuation is also grounded in brain physiology. He theorized that the brain cannot eternally maintain the revved-up site of romantic bliss. As he summed it up, "If you want a situation where you and your long-term partner can still get very excited about each other, you will have to work on it, because in some ways you are bucking a biological tide."
Harem Building
Only 16 percent of the 853 cultures on record actually prescribe monogyny, in which a man is permitted only one wife at a time. Western cultures are among them. We are in the minority, however. A whopping 84 percent of all human societies permit a man to take more than one wife at once—polygyny.
Men seek polygyny to spread their genes, while women join harems to acquire resources and ensure the survival of their young. If you ask a man why he wants a second bride, he might say he is attracted to her wit, her business acumen, her vivacious spirit, or splendid thighs. If you ask a women why she is willing to "share" a man, she might tell you that she loves the way he looks or laughs or takes her to fancy vacation spots.
But no matter what reasons people offer, polygyny enables men to have more children; under the right conditions women also reap reproductive benefits. So long ago ancestral men who sought polygyny and ancestral women who acquiesced to harem life disproportionately survived.
Man Is Monogamous
Because of the genetic advantages of polygyny for men and because so many societies permit polygyny, many anthropologists think that harem building is a badge of the human animal. But in the vast majority of societies where polygyny is permitted, only about five to 10 percent of men actually have several wives simultaneously. Although polygyny is widely discussed, it is much less practiced.
Whereas gorillas, horses, and animals of many other species always form harems, among human beings polygyny and polyandry seem to be optional opportunistic exceptions; monogamy is the rule. Human beings almost never have to be cajoled into pairing. Instead, we do this naturally. We flirt. We feel infatuation. We fall in love. We marry. And the vast majority of us marry only one person at a time.
Pair-bonding is a trademark of the human animal.
Unfaithfully Yours
Although we flirt, fall in love, and marry, human beings also tend to be sexually unfaithful to a spouse. Americans are no exception. Despite our attitude that philandering is immoral, regardless of our sense of guilt when we engage in trysts, in spite of the risks to family, friends, and livelihood that adultery entails, we indulge in extramarital affairs with avid regularity.
A survey of 106,000 readers of Cosmopolitan magazine in the early 1980s indicated that 54 percent of the married women had participated in at least one affair, and a poll of 7,239 men reported that 72 percent of those married over two years had been adulterous.
Why? From a Darwinian perspective, it is easy to explain. If a man has two children by one woman, he has, genetically speaking, "reproduced" himself. But if he also engages in dalliances with more women and, by chance, sires two more young, he doubles his contribution to the next generation. Those men who seek variety also tend to have more children. These young survive and pass to subsequent generations whatever it is in the male genetic makeup that seeks "fresh features," as Byron said of men's need for sexual novelty.
Unlike a man, a woman cannot breed every time she copulates. In fact, anthropologist Donald Symons has argued that, because the number of children a woman can bear is limited, women are biologically less motivated to seek fresh features.
Sexual Variety
Are women really less interested in sexual variety? My own modest proposal is that during our long evolutionary history most males pursued trysts to spread their genes, while females evolved two alternative strategies to acquire resources: some women elected to be faithful to a single man in order to reap a lot of benefits from him; others engaged in clandestine sex with many men to acquire resources from each. This scenario roughly coincides with common beliefs: man, the natural playboy; women, madonna or whore.
In a study by Donald Symons and Bruce Ellis, for example, 415 college students were asked whether they would have sex with an anonymous student of the opposite sex. In this imaginary scenario, participants were told that all risk of pregnancy, discovery, and disease was absent. The results were those you would expect. Males were consistently more likely to say yes, leading these researchers once again to conclude that men are more interested in sexual variety than women are.
But here's the glitch. This study takes into consideration the primary genetic motive for male philandering (to fertilize young women). But not the primary motive for female philandering—the acquisition of resources.
There is no evidence whatsoever that women are sexually shy or that they shun clandestine sexual adventures. Instead, both men and women seem to exhibit a mixed reproductive strategy: monogamy and adultery are our fare.
Parting
We all have our share of troubles. But probably one of the hardest things we do is leave a spouse. From the tundras of Siberia to the jungles of Amazonia, people accept divorce as regrettable—although sometimes necessary. They have specific social or legal procedures for divorce. And they do divorce. Moreover, unlike many Westerners, traditional peoples do not make divorce a moral issue. The Mongols of Siberia sum up a common worldwide attitude, "If two individuals cannot get along harmoniously together, they had better live apart."
Why do people divorce? Bitter quarrels, insensitive remarks, lack of humor, watching too much television, inability to listen, drunkenness, sexual rejection—the reasons men or women give for why they leave a marriage are as varied as their motives for having wedded in the first place.
Overt adultery heads the list. Sterility and barrenness come next. Cruelty, particularly by the husband, ranks third among worldwide reasons for divorce. I am not surprised that adultery and infertility are paramount. Darwin theorized that people marry primarily to breed.
The Four-Year Itch
Hoping to get some insight into the nature of divorce, I turned to the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Divorce generally occurs early in marriage—peaking in or around the fourth year after wedding—followed by a gradual decline in divorce as more years of marriage go by. The American divorce peak hovers somewhat below the common four-year peak. Purely as a guess, I would say that this may have something to do with American attitudes toward marriage itself. We tend not to marry for economic, political, or family reasons. Instead, as anthropologist Paul Bohannen once said, "Americans marry to enhance their inner, largely secret selves."
I find this remark fascinating—and correct. We marry for love and to accentuate, balance out, or mask parts of our private selves. This is why you sometimes see a reserved accountant married to a blond bombshell or a scientist married to a poet. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the American divorce peak corresponds perfectly with the normal duration of infatuation—two to three years. If partners are not satisfied with the match, they bail out soon after the infatuation wears off. So there are exceptions to the four-year itch.
Divorce Is For The Young
Another pattern to emerge from the United Nations data regards "divorce with dependent children." Among the hundreds of millions of people recorded in 45 societies between 1950 and 1989, 39 percent of all divorces occurred among couples with no dependent children, 26 percent among those with one dependent child, 19 percent among couples with two, 7 percent among those with three children, 3 percent among couples with four young, and couples with five or more dependent young rarely split. Hence, it appears that the more children a couple bear, the less likely they are to divorce.
This pattern is less conclusively demonstrated by the U.N. data than the first two. Yet it is strongly suggested and it makes genetic sense. From a Darwinian perspective, couples with no children should break up; both individuals will mate again and probably go on to bear young—ensuring their genetic futures. As couples bear more children they become less economically able to abandon their growing family. And it is genetically logical that they remain together to raise their flock.
Planned Obsolescence Of The Pair Bond
Marriage clearly shows several general patterns of decay. Divorce counts peak among couples married about four years. And the longer a couple remain together, the older the partners get, and probably the more offspring they produce, the less likely spouses are to leave each other.
This is not to say that everybody fits this mold. But Shakespeare did. Etched in Shakespeare's marriage and in all these other divorces recorded from around the world is a blue print, a primitive design. The human animal seems built to court, to fall in love, and to marry one person at a time; then, at the height of our reproductive years, often with single child, we divorce; then, a few years later, we remarry once again.
[Via Psychology Today]
Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce
$4.5 Million Water Bill for a New York Agency
One of the biggest water bill deadbeats in New York City is the Economic Development Corporation, according to an audit released by the city comptroller’s office on Monday.
William C. Thompson Jr., the comptroller, said that the corporation had not paid any water or sewer bills for 22 years at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a building of commercial and light industrial space controlled by the corporation.
The unpaid bills totaled $4.5 million.
In a press conference, Mr. Thompson said he was outraged that the agency was so delinquent, not only in failing to pay its bills but also in not contacting the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the water system, since 1989.
It was especially galling, he said, that city agencies owed millions for water at a time when rates have increased by double digits in recent years.
“Because E.D.C. fell down on the job, all that money is down the drain,” Mr. Thompson said.
As a result of his audit, Mr. Thompson said, the Department of Environmental Protection recently sent a $479,124 bill to the corporation, covering two years in arrears. In an agreement between the City Council and the department, no more than two years were sought.
Mr. Thompson said that his audit found that the corporation had, during the 2007 fiscal year, reported a net operating income of $7 million — money that he argued should be turned over to the city. The corporation, which promotes economic growth in the city, has argued that was not legally necessary.
After The New York Times reported in December 2006 that the city had failed to collect millions of dollars in overdue water bills, in large part because of poor bookkeeping, the city hired a consultant to find ways to get tough with deadbeat property owners.
City water officials have made some progress in reforming the collection process. Mr. Thompson said that he was concerned that many other city agencies were also delinquent in their water bills, and that he had called on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to conduct a citywide review.
When asked about the bills, Janel Patterson, a spokeswoman for the Economic Development Corporation, said in a statement: “We moved to address this issue in April, and E.D.C. has since brought the account current for the prior two years. Moving forward, D.E.P. will bill E.D.C. quarterly for water consumption at the terminal, which E.D.C. will pay promptly.”
In The Times’s review of city water records, many city and state agencies showed up on the delinquent list. When The Times asked about the governmental deadbeats, the city explained that in the case of city agencies, the water bills were handled as a kind of payment transfer, and sometimes a delay in that process could cause agencies to appear late in payment.
[Via NY Times]
William C. Thompson Jr., the comptroller, said that the corporation had not paid any water or sewer bills for 22 years at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a building of commercial and light industrial space controlled by the corporation.
The unpaid bills totaled $4.5 million.
In a press conference, Mr. Thompson said he was outraged that the agency was so delinquent, not only in failing to pay its bills but also in not contacting the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the water system, since 1989.
It was especially galling, he said, that city agencies owed millions for water at a time when rates have increased by double digits in recent years.
“Because E.D.C. fell down on the job, all that money is down the drain,” Mr. Thompson said.
As a result of his audit, Mr. Thompson said, the Department of Environmental Protection recently sent a $479,124 bill to the corporation, covering two years in arrears. In an agreement between the City Council and the department, no more than two years were sought.
Mr. Thompson said that his audit found that the corporation had, during the 2007 fiscal year, reported a net operating income of $7 million — money that he argued should be turned over to the city. The corporation, which promotes economic growth in the city, has argued that was not legally necessary.
After The New York Times reported in December 2006 that the city had failed to collect millions of dollars in overdue water bills, in large part because of poor bookkeeping, the city hired a consultant to find ways to get tough with deadbeat property owners.
City water officials have made some progress in reforming the collection process. Mr. Thompson said that he was concerned that many other city agencies were also delinquent in their water bills, and that he had called on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to conduct a citywide review.
When asked about the bills, Janel Patterson, a spokeswoman for the Economic Development Corporation, said in a statement: “We moved to address this issue in April, and E.D.C. has since brought the account current for the prior two years. Moving forward, D.E.P. will bill E.D.C. quarterly for water consumption at the terminal, which E.D.C. will pay promptly.”
In The Times’s review of city water records, many city and state agencies showed up on the delinquent list. When The Times asked about the governmental deadbeats, the city explained that in the case of city agencies, the water bills were handled as a kind of payment transfer, and sometimes a delay in that process could cause agencies to appear late in payment.
[Via NY Times]
The Internal Alarm Clock
Have you ever woken up five minutes before your alarm rings? This mysterious phenomenon isn't just bizarre coincidence. We are all equipped with our own internal alarm clocks and, best of all, they even have snooze buttons.
Jan Born and fellow researchers at the University of Lubeck in Germany have discovered what may be the first biological evidence for the curious ability to wake up at will. Anticipating the time you want to rise seems to trigger the release of hormones normally secreted by the body in times of stress. About an hour before you've planned to get out of bed, these secretions increase in preparation for the "stress" of waking.
In a three-night study, Born and team tucked 15 volunteers into bed at midnight the first night, and told them they would be woken at 6 a.m. on one night and 9 a.m. the other two nights.
When the volunteers knew they would be woken at six, levels of the central stress hormone adrenocorticotropin began rising around 4:30 a.m. But subjects expecting to wake at nine and rudely awakened at six experienced no such hormonal surge. Our bodies, in other words, note the time we hope to begin our day and gradually prepare us for consciousness, not unlike a snooze button.
But how can we set our own wake up calls? "I am convinced that eventually there will be a psychological technique to strengthen the ability to set the internal alarm clock," Born says. Cognitive self-instruction, in which a person drills himself in his plans for the next day, may wind the alarm, he says. For now, however, hang on to that little dream machine beside your bed.
[Via Psychology Today]
Jan Born and fellow researchers at the University of Lubeck in Germany have discovered what may be the first biological evidence for the curious ability to wake up at will. Anticipating the time you want to rise seems to trigger the release of hormones normally secreted by the body in times of stress. About an hour before you've planned to get out of bed, these secretions increase in preparation for the "stress" of waking.
In a three-night study, Born and team tucked 15 volunteers into bed at midnight the first night, and told them they would be woken at 6 a.m. on one night and 9 a.m. the other two nights.
When the volunteers knew they would be woken at six, levels of the central stress hormone adrenocorticotropin began rising around 4:30 a.m. But subjects expecting to wake at nine and rudely awakened at six experienced no such hormonal surge. Our bodies, in other words, note the time we hope to begin our day and gradually prepare us for consciousness, not unlike a snooze button.
But how can we set our own wake up calls? "I am convinced that eventually there will be a psychological technique to strengthen the ability to set the internal alarm clock," Born says. Cognitive self-instruction, in which a person drills himself in his plans for the next day, may wind the alarm, he says. For now, however, hang on to that little dream machine beside your bed.
[Via Psychology Today]
Monday, June 9, 2008
Michigan-shaped Meteorite Sells for $20K at Auction
DETROIT (AP) - A meteorite resembling Michigan's Lower Peninsula has been sold at auction, but bidders weren't quite as smitten with the mitten as the seller expected.
The 75-pound nickel-and-iron meteorite sold for $20,000 Sunday at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. It had been expected to sell for $32,500 to $40,000.
Michigan native Darryl Pitt, the meteorite's owner, says he is disappointed by the low price. He says he thinks the space rock is worth $50,000.
There was more interest in a three-quarter-ton nickel-iron meteorite that resembles the Indian subcontinent. It sold for $90,000.
The 75-pound nickel-and-iron meteorite sold for $20,000 Sunday at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. It had been expected to sell for $32,500 to $40,000.
Michigan native Darryl Pitt, the meteorite's owner, says he is disappointed by the low price. He says he thinks the space rock is worth $50,000.
There was more interest in a three-quarter-ton nickel-iron meteorite that resembles the Indian subcontinent. It sold for $90,000.
16,488 Condoms Ordered for Antarctic Base
Intrepid souls braving the cold climes of Antarctica clearly find traditional ways of keeping warm.
McMurdo Station has taken delivery of 16,488 condoms. The shipment last month constitutes a year's supply, ensuring the frisky can stay safe in the sack.
The station's manager, Bill Henriksen, said he was initially surprised by the delivery but said there was "not really" anything unusual about McMurdo staff.
"During the summertime we've got a normal population of 1100 people and this is for the year round not for the 125 people we have here in the winter," he said.
The last flight out of McMurdo before winter was on February 26. There will be no relief from winter's darkness until the first sunrise of spring, on August 20.
"There are some people that tend to get a little bit bored but, for the most part, people who come down here know how to occupy their time," Henriksen said.
The condoms would be freely available to staff avoiding any embarrassing purchases.
"Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable we'd prefer to just provide them and do it that way so that people don't do without."
[Via Stuff]
McMurdo Station has taken delivery of 16,488 condoms. The shipment last month constitutes a year's supply, ensuring the frisky can stay safe in the sack.
The station's manager, Bill Henriksen, said he was initially surprised by the delivery but said there was "not really" anything unusual about McMurdo staff.
"During the summertime we've got a normal population of 1100 people and this is for the year round not for the 125 people we have here in the winter," he said.
The last flight out of McMurdo before winter was on February 26. There will be no relief from winter's darkness until the first sunrise of spring, on August 20.
"There are some people that tend to get a little bit bored but, for the most part, people who come down here know how to occupy their time," Henriksen said.
The condoms would be freely available to staff avoiding any embarrassing purchases.
"Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable we'd prefer to just provide them and do it that way so that people don't do without."
[Via Stuff]
Watermelon Sold for $6,100
A jumbo black watermelon auctioned in Japan on Friday fetched a record $6,100, making it one of the most expensive watermelons ever sold in the country.
In a society where melons are a luxury item commonly given as gifts, the watermelon's hefty price tag followed another jaw-dropping auction last month, when a pair of "Yubari" cantaloupe melons sold for a record $23,500.
The 17-pound, black-skinned "Densuke" watermelon, a variety grown only on the northern island of Hokkaido, was purchased Friday by a marine products dealer who said he wanted to support local agriculture, according to Kyodo News agency.
The price was the highest on record for a Densuke watermelon, said Kazuyoshi Ohira, a spokesman for the Tohma Agricultural Cooperative in Hokkaido. Most retail at department stores and supermarkets for a more modest $188 to $283, Ohira said.
And what makes a watermelon worth $200, much less $6,000?
Ohira says it's the unusual black skin and unparalleled taste. "It's a watermelon, but it's not the same," he said.
[Via SF Gate]
In a society where melons are a luxury item commonly given as gifts, the watermelon's hefty price tag followed another jaw-dropping auction last month, when a pair of "Yubari" cantaloupe melons sold for a record $23,500.
The 17-pound, black-skinned "Densuke" watermelon, a variety grown only on the northern island of Hokkaido, was purchased Friday by a marine products dealer who said he wanted to support local agriculture, according to Kyodo News agency.
The price was the highest on record for a Densuke watermelon, said Kazuyoshi Ohira, a spokesman for the Tohma Agricultural Cooperative in Hokkaido. Most retail at department stores and supermarkets for a more modest $188 to $283, Ohira said.
And what makes a watermelon worth $200, much less $6,000?
Ohira says it's the unusual black skin and unparalleled taste. "It's a watermelon, but it's not the same," he said.
[Via SF Gate]
War and Inflation
The U.S. central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans would die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and civilians. No one pointed out that this institution would permit Americans to fund, without taxes, the destruction of cities abroad and overthrow governments at will. No one said that the central bank would make it possible for the U.S. to be at large-scale war in one of every four years for a full century. It was never pointed out that this institution would make it possible for the U.S. government to establish a global empire that would make Imperial Rome and Britain look benign by comparison.
You can line up 100 professional war historians and political scientists and talk about the twentieth century, and not one is likely to mention the role of the Fed in funding U.S. militarism. And yet it is true: the Fed is the institution that has created the money to fund the wars. In this role, it has solved a major problem that the state has confronted for all of human history. A state without money or a state that must tax its citizens to raise money for its wars is necessarily limited in its imperial ambitions. Keep in mind that this is only a problem for the state. It is not a problem for the people. The inability of the state to fund its unlimited ambitions is worth more for the people than every kind of legal check and balance. It is more valuable than all the constitutions ever devised.
The state has no wealth that is its own. It is not a profitable enterprise. Everything it possesses it must take from society in a zero-sum game. That usually means taxes, but taxes annoy people. They can destabilize the state and threaten its legitimacy. They inspire anger, revolt, and even revolution. Rather than risk that result, the state from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the central banking age was somewhat cautious in its global ambitions simply because it was cautious in its need to steal openly and directly from the people in order to pay its bills.
To be sure, it doesn't require a central bank for a state to choose inflation over taxes as a means of funding itself. All it really requires is a monopoly on the production of money. Once acquired, the monopoly on money production leads to a systematic process of depreciating the currency, whether by coin clipping or debasement or the introduction of paper money, which can then be printed without limit. The central bank assists in this process in a critical sense: it cartelizes the banking system as the essential conduit by which money is lent to the public and to the government itself. The banking system thereby becomes a primary funding agency to the state, and, in exchange for its services, the banking system is guaranteed against insolvency and business failure as it profits from inflation. If the goal of the state is the complete monopolization of money under an infinitely flexible paper-money system, there is no better path for the state than the creation of a central bank. This is the greatest achievement for the victory of power over liberty.
The connection between war and inflation, then, dates long before the creation of the Federal Reserve. In fact, in America, it dates to the colonial era, and to the founding itself. The fate of the Continental currency, printed massively during and after the Revolutionary war, for example, was a very bad omen for our future, and the whole country paid a very serious price. It was this experience that later led to the gold clause in the U.S. Constitution. Except for the Hamiltonians, that entire generation of political activists saw the unity of freedom and sound money, and regarded paper money as the fuel of tyranny.
Consider Thomas Paine: "Paper money is like dram-drinking, it relieves for a moment by deceitful sensation, but gradually diminishes the natural heat, and leaves the body worse than it found it. Were not this the case, and could money be made of paper at pleasure, every sovereign in Europe would be as rich as he pleased…. Paper money appears at first sight to be a great saving, or rather that it costs nothing; but it is the dearest money there is. The ease with which it is emitted by an assembly at first serves as a trap to catch people in at last. It operates as an anticipation of the next year's taxes."
But the wisdom of this generation, subverted by Lincoln, was finally thrown out during the Progressive Era. It was believed that an age of scientific public policy needed a scientific money machinery that could be controlled by powerful elites. The dawn of the age of central banking was also the dawn of the age of central planning, for there can be no government control over the nation's commercial life without first controlling the money. And once the state has the money and the banking system, its ambitions can be realized.
Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, the idea of American entry into the conflict that became World War I would have been inconceivable. In fact, it was a highly unpopular idea, and Woodrow Wilson himself campaigned on a platform that promised to keep us out of war. But with a money monopoly, all things seem possible. It was a mere four years after the Fed was invented under the guise of scientific policy planning that the real agenda became obvious. The Fed would fund the U.S. entry into World War I.
It was not only entry alone that was made possible. World War I was the first total war. It involved nearly the whole of the civilized world, and not only their governments but also the civilian populations, both as combatants and as targets. It has been described as the war that ended civilization in the 19th-century sense in which we understand that term. That is to say, it was the war that ended liberty as we knew it. What made it possible was the Federal Reserve. And not only the U.S. central bank; it was also its European counterparts. This was a war funded under the guise of scientific monetary policy.
Reflecting on the calamity of this war, Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1919 that "One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier."
There is always a price to be paid for funding war through the central bank. The postwar situation in America was a classic case. There was inflation. There were massive dislocations. There was recession or what was then called depression, a direct result of capital dislocation that masked itself as an economic boom, but which was then followed by a bust. The depression hit in 1920, but it is not a famous event in United States economic history. Why is that? Because the Federal Reserve had not yet acquired the tools to manufacture an attempt to save the economy. Instead, neither the Fed nor Congress nor the President did much of anything about it – a wholly praiseworthy response! As a result, the depression was brief and became a footnote to history. The same would have happened in 1930 had Hoover not attempted to use the government as the means of resuscitation.
Sadly, the easy recovery of 1920–1922 tempted the central bank to get back into the business of inflation, with the eventual result of a stock market boom that led to bust, then depression, and finally the destruction of the gold standard itself. FDR found that even fascist-style economic planning and inflation could not restore prosperity, so he turned to the ancient method of looking for a war to enter. Here is where the history of the United States and the Fed intersects with the tragic role of the German central bank.
The German government also funded its Great War through inflation. By war's end, money in circulation has risen fourfold. Prices were up 140%. Yet, on international exchange, the German mark had not suffered as much as one might expect. The German government looked at this with encouragement and promptly attempted to manufacture a complete economic recovery through inflation. Incredibly, by 1923, the mark had fallen to one-trillionth of its 1914 gold value. The U.S. dollar was then equal to 4.2 trillion marks. It was an example of currency destruction that remains legendary in the history of the world – all made possible by a central bank that obliged the government and monetized its war debt.
But did people blame the printing press? No. The popular explanation dealt directly with the Treaty of Versailles. It was the harsh peace imposed by the allies that had brought Germany to the brink of total destruction – or so it was believed. Mises himself had written a full book that he hoped would explain that Germany owed its suffering to war and socialism, not Versailles as such. He urged the German people to look at the real cause and establish free markets, lest imperial dictatorship be the next stage in political development. But he was ignored.
The result, we all know, was Hitler.
Turning to Russia, the untold truth about the Bolshevik revolution is that Lenin's greatest propaganda tool involved the sufferings by the Russian people during World War I. Men were drafted and killed at a horrific level. Lenin called this capitalist exploitation, based on his view that the war resulted from capitalist motives. In fact, it was a foreshadowing of the world that socialism would bring about, a world in which all people and all property are treated as means to statist ends. And what made the prolongation of the Russian role in World War I possible was an institution called the State Bank of the Russian Empire, the Russian version of the Fed.
The Russian war itself was funded through money creation, which also led to massive price increases and controls and shortages during the war. I'm not of the opinion, unlike the neocons, that the Russian monarchy was a particularly evil regime, but the temptation that the money machine provided the regime proved too inviting. It turned a relatively benign monarchy into a war machine. A country that had long been integrated into the worldwide division of labor and was under a gold standard became a killing machine. And as horrific and catastrophic as the war dead were for Russian morale, the inflation affected every last person and inspired massive unrest that led to the triumph of Communism.
At this juncture in history, we can see what central-banking had brought to us. It was not an end to the business cycle. It was not merely more liquidity for the banking system. It was not an end to bank runs and bank panics. It certainly wasn't scientific public policy. The world's major economies were being lorded over by money monopolies and the front men had become some of the worst despots in the history of the world. Now they were preparing to fight each other with all the resources they had at their disposal. The resources they did not have at their disposal they would pay for with their beloved machinery of central banking.
In wartime, the printing presses ran overtime, but with a totalitarian level of rationing, price controls, and all-round socialization of resources in the whole of the Western world, the result of inflation was not merely rising prices. It was vast suffering and shortages in Britain, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Austria-Hungary, the US, and pretty much the entire planet.
So we can see here the amazing irony of central banking at work. The institution that was promoted by economists working with bankers, in the name of bringing rationality and science to bear on monetary matters, had given birth to the most evil political trends in the history of the world: Communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and the despotism of economic planning in the capitalist West. The story of central banking is one step removed from the story of atom bombs and death camps. There is a reason the state has been unrestrained in the last 100 years and that reason is the precise one that many people think of as a purely technical issue that is too complicated for mere mortals.
Fast-forward to the Iraq War, which has all the features of a conflict born of the power to print money. There was a time when the decision to go to war involved real debate in the U.S. House of Representatives. And what was this debate about? It was about resources, and the power to tax. But once the executive state was unhinged from the need to rely on tax dollars, and did not have to worry about finding willing buyers for its unbacked debt instruments, the political debate about war was silenced.
In the entire run-up to war, George Bush just assumed as a matter of policy that it was his decision alone whether to invade Iraq. The objections by Ron Paul and some other members of Congress and vast numbers of the American population, was reduced to little more than white noise in the background. Imagine if he had to raise the money for the war through taxes. It never would have happened. But he didn't have to. He knew the money would be there. So despite a $200 billion deficit, a $9 trillion debt, $5 trillion in outstanding debt instruments held by the public, a federal budget of $3 trillion, and falling tax receipts in 2001, Bush contemplated a war that has cost $525 billion dollars, or $4,681 per household. Imagine if he had gone to the American people to request that. What would have happened? I think we know the answer to that question. And those are government figures; the actual cost of this war will be far higher—perhaps $20,000 per household.
Now, when left-liberals talk about these figures, they like to compare them with what the state might have done with these resources in terms of funding health care, public schools, head-start centers, or food stamps. This is a mistake because it demonstrates that the left isn't really providing an alternative to the right. It merely has a different set of priorities in how it would use the resources raised by the inflation machine. It's true that public schools are less costly in terms of lives and property than war itself. But the inflation-funded welfare state also has a corrosive effect on society. The pipe dream that the inflation monster can be used to promote good instead of evil illustrates a certain naïveté about the nature of the state itself. If the state has the power and is asked to choose between doing good and waging war, what will it choose? Certainly in the American context the choice has always been for war.
It is equally naïve for the right to talk about restraining the government while wishing for global war. So long as the state has unlimited access to the printing press, it can ignore the pleas of ideological groups concerning how the money will be raised. It is also very silly for the right to believe that it can have its wars, its militarism, its nationalism and belligerence, without depending on the power of the Federal Reserve. This institution is the very mechanism by which the dreams of both the fanatical right and the fanatical left come true.
The effect of the money machine goes well beyond funding undesirable government programs. The Fed creates financial bubbles that lead to economic dislocation. Think of the technology bubble of the late 1990s or the housing bubble. Or the boom that preceded the current bust. These are all a result of the monopolization of money.
These days, the American consumer has been hit very hard with rising prices in oil, clothing, food, and much else. For the first time in decades, people are feeling this and feeling it hard. And just as in every other inflation in world history, people are looking for the culprit and finding all the wrong ones. They believe it is the oil companies who are gouging us, or that foreign oil dealers are restricting supply, or that gas station owners are abusing a crisis to profit at our expense.
When Nixon imposed them in 1971, neither he nor his advisors believed that they would actually result in controlling inflation. Rather, the purpose was to redirect the target of public anger from the government and its bank over to retailers, who would become scapegoats. In this sense, price controls do work. They make people believe that the government is trying to lower prices while the private sector is attempting to raise them. This is the real political dynamic at work with price controls.
The question is whether you will be taken in by these tactics. It is long past time for us to take note that the cause of the real trouble here is not the manufacturers or even the war as such but the agency that has been granted a legal right to counterfeit at will and lower the value of the currency while fueling every manner of statist scheme, whether welfare or warfare. We need to look at the Fed and say: this is the enemy.
Note that the Federal Reserve is not a political party. It is not a recognized interest group. It is not a famed lobby in Washington. It is not really even a sector of public opinion. It seems completely shielded off from vigorous public debate. If we truly believe in liberty and decry the leviathan state, this situation cannot be tolerated.
If you really want to limit the state, you will have to give up your dreams of remaking the world at the point of a gun. Wars and limited government are impossible. Moreover, you must stop ignoring the role of monetary policy. It is a technical subject, to be sure, but one that we must all look into and understand if we expect to restore something that resembles the American liberty of the founders.
If you really want to stop war and stop the spying state, and put an end to the persecution of political dissidents and the Guantánamo camps for foreign peoples, and put a stop to the culture of nationalism and militarism, you must join us in turning attention to the role of monetary policy. The printing presses must be unplugged. It's true that this will also hit programs that are beloved by the left, such as socialized health care and federalized education programs. But so long as you expect the state to fund your dreams, you cannot expect that the state will not also fund the dreams of people you hate.
And let me say a few words to libertarians, who dream of a world with limited government under the rule of law, a world in which free enterprise reigns and where the state has no power to interfere in our lives so long as we behave peacefully. It is completely absurd to believe that this can be achieved without fundamental monetary reform.
In 1982, the Mises Institute held a large academic conference on the gold standard, and we held it in Washington, D.C. (There were scholarly papers and Ron Paul debated a Fed governor. Ron won.) Even back then, I recall that D.C. libertarians ridiculed us for holding such a meeting to talk about the Fed and its replacement with sound money. They said that this would make the Mises Institute look ridiculous, that we would be tarred with the brush of gold bugs and crazies. We did it anyway. And all these years later, the book that came out of that conference remains a main source for understanding the role of money in the advance of despotism or resistance to it, and a blueprint for the future.
Of course the Austrian tradition fought paper money and central banking from the beginning. Menger was an advocate of the gold standard. Böhm-Bawerk actually established it as finance minister to the Habsburg monarchy. Mises's book on the topic from 1912 was the first to show the role of money in the business cycle, and he issued dire warnings about central banking. Hayek wrote powerfully against the abandonment of gold in the 1930s. Hazlitt warned of the inevitable breakdown of Bretton Woods, and advocated a real gold standard instead. And Rothbard was a champion of sound money and the greatest enemy the Fed has ever had. But generally, I've long detected a tendency in libertarian circles to ignore this issue, in part for precisely the reasons cited above: it is not respectable.
Why this issue is not considered respectable: it is the most important priority of the state to keep its money machine hidden behind a curtain. Anyone who dares pull the curtain back is accused of every manner of intellectual crime. This is precisely the reason we must talk about it at every occasion. We must end the conspiracy of silence on this issue.
Far from being an arcane and anachronistic issue, then, the gold standard and the issues it raises gets right to the heart of the current debate concerning the future of war and the world economy. Why do the government and its partisans dislike the gold standard? It removes the discretionary power of the Fed by placing severe limits on the ability of the central bank to inflate the money supply. Without that discretionary power, the government has far fewer tools of central planning at its disposal. Government can regulate, which is a function of the police power. It can tax, which involves taking people's property. And it can spend, which means redistributing other people's property. But its activities in the financial area are radically curbed.
Think of your local and state governments. They tax and spend. They manipulate and intervene. As with all governments from the beginning of time, they generally retard social progress and muck things up as much as possible. What they do not do, however, is wage massive global wars, run huge deficits, accumulate trillions in debt, reduce the value of money, bail out foreign governments, provide endless credits to failing enterprises, administer hugely expensive and destructive social insurance schemes, or bring about immense swings in business activity.
State and local governments are awful and they must be relentlessly checked, but they are not anything like the threat of the federal government. Neither are they as arrogant and convinced of their own infallibility and indispensability. They lack the aura of invincibility that the central government enjoys.
It is the central bank, and only the central bank, that works as the government's money machine, and this makes all the difference. Now, it is not impossible that a central bank can exist alongside a gold standard, a lender of last resort that avoids the temptation to destroy that which restrains it. In the same way, it is possible for someone with an insatiable appetite for wine to sit at a banquet table of delicious vintages and not take a sip.
Let's just say that the existence of a central bank introduces an occasion of sin for the government. That is why under the best gold standard, there would be no central bank, gold coins would circulate as freely as their substitutes, and rules against fraud and theft would prohibit banks from pyramiding credit on top of demand deposits. So long as we are constructing the perfect system, all coinage would be private. Banks would be treated as businesses, no special privileges, no promises of bailout, no subsidized insurance, and no connection to government at any level.
This is the free-market system of monetary management, which means turning over the institution of money entirely to the market economy. As with any institution in a free society, it is not imposed from above, and dictated by a group of experts, but is the de facto result that comes about in a society that consistently respects private-property rights, encourages enterprise, and promotes peace.
It comes down to this. If you hate war, oppose the Fed. If you hate violations of your liberties, oppose the Fed. If you want to restrain despotism, restrain the Fed. If you want to secure freedom for yourself and your descendants, abolish the Fed.
[Via LewRockwell]
You can line up 100 professional war historians and political scientists and talk about the twentieth century, and not one is likely to mention the role of the Fed in funding U.S. militarism. And yet it is true: the Fed is the institution that has created the money to fund the wars. In this role, it has solved a major problem that the state has confronted for all of human history. A state without money or a state that must tax its citizens to raise money for its wars is necessarily limited in its imperial ambitions. Keep in mind that this is only a problem for the state. It is not a problem for the people. The inability of the state to fund its unlimited ambitions is worth more for the people than every kind of legal check and balance. It is more valuable than all the constitutions ever devised.
The state has no wealth that is its own. It is not a profitable enterprise. Everything it possesses it must take from society in a zero-sum game. That usually means taxes, but taxes annoy people. They can destabilize the state and threaten its legitimacy. They inspire anger, revolt, and even revolution. Rather than risk that result, the state from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the central banking age was somewhat cautious in its global ambitions simply because it was cautious in its need to steal openly and directly from the people in order to pay its bills.
To be sure, it doesn't require a central bank for a state to choose inflation over taxes as a means of funding itself. All it really requires is a monopoly on the production of money. Once acquired, the monopoly on money production leads to a systematic process of depreciating the currency, whether by coin clipping or debasement or the introduction of paper money, which can then be printed without limit. The central bank assists in this process in a critical sense: it cartelizes the banking system as the essential conduit by which money is lent to the public and to the government itself. The banking system thereby becomes a primary funding agency to the state, and, in exchange for its services, the banking system is guaranteed against insolvency and business failure as it profits from inflation. If the goal of the state is the complete monopolization of money under an infinitely flexible paper-money system, there is no better path for the state than the creation of a central bank. This is the greatest achievement for the victory of power over liberty.
The connection between war and inflation, then, dates long before the creation of the Federal Reserve. In fact, in America, it dates to the colonial era, and to the founding itself. The fate of the Continental currency, printed massively during and after the Revolutionary war, for example, was a very bad omen for our future, and the whole country paid a very serious price. It was this experience that later led to the gold clause in the U.S. Constitution. Except for the Hamiltonians, that entire generation of political activists saw the unity of freedom and sound money, and regarded paper money as the fuel of tyranny.
Consider Thomas Paine: "Paper money is like dram-drinking, it relieves for a moment by deceitful sensation, but gradually diminishes the natural heat, and leaves the body worse than it found it. Were not this the case, and could money be made of paper at pleasure, every sovereign in Europe would be as rich as he pleased…. Paper money appears at first sight to be a great saving, or rather that it costs nothing; but it is the dearest money there is. The ease with which it is emitted by an assembly at first serves as a trap to catch people in at last. It operates as an anticipation of the next year's taxes."
But the wisdom of this generation, subverted by Lincoln, was finally thrown out during the Progressive Era. It was believed that an age of scientific public policy needed a scientific money machinery that could be controlled by powerful elites. The dawn of the age of central banking was also the dawn of the age of central planning, for there can be no government control over the nation's commercial life without first controlling the money. And once the state has the money and the banking system, its ambitions can be realized.
Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, the idea of American entry into the conflict that became World War I would have been inconceivable. In fact, it was a highly unpopular idea, and Woodrow Wilson himself campaigned on a platform that promised to keep us out of war. But with a money monopoly, all things seem possible. It was a mere four years after the Fed was invented under the guise of scientific policy planning that the real agenda became obvious. The Fed would fund the U.S. entry into World War I.
It was not only entry alone that was made possible. World War I was the first total war. It involved nearly the whole of the civilized world, and not only their governments but also the civilian populations, both as combatants and as targets. It has been described as the war that ended civilization in the 19th-century sense in which we understand that term. That is to say, it was the war that ended liberty as we knew it. What made it possible was the Federal Reserve. And not only the U.S. central bank; it was also its European counterparts. This was a war funded under the guise of scientific monetary policy.
Reflecting on the calamity of this war, Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1919 that "One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier."
There is always a price to be paid for funding war through the central bank. The postwar situation in America was a classic case. There was inflation. There were massive dislocations. There was recession or what was then called depression, a direct result of capital dislocation that masked itself as an economic boom, but which was then followed by a bust. The depression hit in 1920, but it is not a famous event in United States economic history. Why is that? Because the Federal Reserve had not yet acquired the tools to manufacture an attempt to save the economy. Instead, neither the Fed nor Congress nor the President did much of anything about it – a wholly praiseworthy response! As a result, the depression was brief and became a footnote to history. The same would have happened in 1930 had Hoover not attempted to use the government as the means of resuscitation.
Sadly, the easy recovery of 1920–1922 tempted the central bank to get back into the business of inflation, with the eventual result of a stock market boom that led to bust, then depression, and finally the destruction of the gold standard itself. FDR found that even fascist-style economic planning and inflation could not restore prosperity, so he turned to the ancient method of looking for a war to enter. Here is where the history of the United States and the Fed intersects with the tragic role of the German central bank.
The German government also funded its Great War through inflation. By war's end, money in circulation has risen fourfold. Prices were up 140%. Yet, on international exchange, the German mark had not suffered as much as one might expect. The German government looked at this with encouragement and promptly attempted to manufacture a complete economic recovery through inflation. Incredibly, by 1923, the mark had fallen to one-trillionth of its 1914 gold value. The U.S. dollar was then equal to 4.2 trillion marks. It was an example of currency destruction that remains legendary in the history of the world – all made possible by a central bank that obliged the government and monetized its war debt.
But did people blame the printing press? No. The popular explanation dealt directly with the Treaty of Versailles. It was the harsh peace imposed by the allies that had brought Germany to the brink of total destruction – or so it was believed. Mises himself had written a full book that he hoped would explain that Germany owed its suffering to war and socialism, not Versailles as such. He urged the German people to look at the real cause and establish free markets, lest imperial dictatorship be the next stage in political development. But he was ignored.
The result, we all know, was Hitler.
Turning to Russia, the untold truth about the Bolshevik revolution is that Lenin's greatest propaganda tool involved the sufferings by the Russian people during World War I. Men were drafted and killed at a horrific level. Lenin called this capitalist exploitation, based on his view that the war resulted from capitalist motives. In fact, it was a foreshadowing of the world that socialism would bring about, a world in which all people and all property are treated as means to statist ends. And what made the prolongation of the Russian role in World War I possible was an institution called the State Bank of the Russian Empire, the Russian version of the Fed.
The Russian war itself was funded through money creation, which also led to massive price increases and controls and shortages during the war. I'm not of the opinion, unlike the neocons, that the Russian monarchy was a particularly evil regime, but the temptation that the money machine provided the regime proved too inviting. It turned a relatively benign monarchy into a war machine. A country that had long been integrated into the worldwide division of labor and was under a gold standard became a killing machine. And as horrific and catastrophic as the war dead were for Russian morale, the inflation affected every last person and inspired massive unrest that led to the triumph of Communism.
At this juncture in history, we can see what central-banking had brought to us. It was not an end to the business cycle. It was not merely more liquidity for the banking system. It was not an end to bank runs and bank panics. It certainly wasn't scientific public policy. The world's major economies were being lorded over by money monopolies and the front men had become some of the worst despots in the history of the world. Now they were preparing to fight each other with all the resources they had at their disposal. The resources they did not have at their disposal they would pay for with their beloved machinery of central banking.
In wartime, the printing presses ran overtime, but with a totalitarian level of rationing, price controls, and all-round socialization of resources in the whole of the Western world, the result of inflation was not merely rising prices. It was vast suffering and shortages in Britain, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Austria-Hungary, the US, and pretty much the entire planet.
So we can see here the amazing irony of central banking at work. The institution that was promoted by economists working with bankers, in the name of bringing rationality and science to bear on monetary matters, had given birth to the most evil political trends in the history of the world: Communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and the despotism of economic planning in the capitalist West. The story of central banking is one step removed from the story of atom bombs and death camps. There is a reason the state has been unrestrained in the last 100 years and that reason is the precise one that many people think of as a purely technical issue that is too complicated for mere mortals.
Fast-forward to the Iraq War, which has all the features of a conflict born of the power to print money. There was a time when the decision to go to war involved real debate in the U.S. House of Representatives. And what was this debate about? It was about resources, and the power to tax. But once the executive state was unhinged from the need to rely on tax dollars, and did not have to worry about finding willing buyers for its unbacked debt instruments, the political debate about war was silenced.
In the entire run-up to war, George Bush just assumed as a matter of policy that it was his decision alone whether to invade Iraq. The objections by Ron Paul and some other members of Congress and vast numbers of the American population, was reduced to little more than white noise in the background. Imagine if he had to raise the money for the war through taxes. It never would have happened. But he didn't have to. He knew the money would be there. So despite a $200 billion deficit, a $9 trillion debt, $5 trillion in outstanding debt instruments held by the public, a federal budget of $3 trillion, and falling tax receipts in 2001, Bush contemplated a war that has cost $525 billion dollars, or $4,681 per household. Imagine if he had gone to the American people to request that. What would have happened? I think we know the answer to that question. And those are government figures; the actual cost of this war will be far higher—perhaps $20,000 per household.
Now, when left-liberals talk about these figures, they like to compare them with what the state might have done with these resources in terms of funding health care, public schools, head-start centers, or food stamps. This is a mistake because it demonstrates that the left isn't really providing an alternative to the right. It merely has a different set of priorities in how it would use the resources raised by the inflation machine. It's true that public schools are less costly in terms of lives and property than war itself. But the inflation-funded welfare state also has a corrosive effect on society. The pipe dream that the inflation monster can be used to promote good instead of evil illustrates a certain naïveté about the nature of the state itself. If the state has the power and is asked to choose between doing good and waging war, what will it choose? Certainly in the American context the choice has always been for war.
It is equally naïve for the right to talk about restraining the government while wishing for global war. So long as the state has unlimited access to the printing press, it can ignore the pleas of ideological groups concerning how the money will be raised. It is also very silly for the right to believe that it can have its wars, its militarism, its nationalism and belligerence, without depending on the power of the Federal Reserve. This institution is the very mechanism by which the dreams of both the fanatical right and the fanatical left come true.
The effect of the money machine goes well beyond funding undesirable government programs. The Fed creates financial bubbles that lead to economic dislocation. Think of the technology bubble of the late 1990s or the housing bubble. Or the boom that preceded the current bust. These are all a result of the monopolization of money.
These days, the American consumer has been hit very hard with rising prices in oil, clothing, food, and much else. For the first time in decades, people are feeling this and feeling it hard. And just as in every other inflation in world history, people are looking for the culprit and finding all the wrong ones. They believe it is the oil companies who are gouging us, or that foreign oil dealers are restricting supply, or that gas station owners are abusing a crisis to profit at our expense.
When Nixon imposed them in 1971, neither he nor his advisors believed that they would actually result in controlling inflation. Rather, the purpose was to redirect the target of public anger from the government and its bank over to retailers, who would become scapegoats. In this sense, price controls do work. They make people believe that the government is trying to lower prices while the private sector is attempting to raise them. This is the real political dynamic at work with price controls.
The question is whether you will be taken in by these tactics. It is long past time for us to take note that the cause of the real trouble here is not the manufacturers or even the war as such but the agency that has been granted a legal right to counterfeit at will and lower the value of the currency while fueling every manner of statist scheme, whether welfare or warfare. We need to look at the Fed and say: this is the enemy.
Note that the Federal Reserve is not a political party. It is not a recognized interest group. It is not a famed lobby in Washington. It is not really even a sector of public opinion. It seems completely shielded off from vigorous public debate. If we truly believe in liberty and decry the leviathan state, this situation cannot be tolerated.
If you really want to limit the state, you will have to give up your dreams of remaking the world at the point of a gun. Wars and limited government are impossible. Moreover, you must stop ignoring the role of monetary policy. It is a technical subject, to be sure, but one that we must all look into and understand if we expect to restore something that resembles the American liberty of the founders.
If you really want to stop war and stop the spying state, and put an end to the persecution of political dissidents and the Guantánamo camps for foreign peoples, and put a stop to the culture of nationalism and militarism, you must join us in turning attention to the role of monetary policy. The printing presses must be unplugged. It's true that this will also hit programs that are beloved by the left, such as socialized health care and federalized education programs. But so long as you expect the state to fund your dreams, you cannot expect that the state will not also fund the dreams of people you hate.
And let me say a few words to libertarians, who dream of a world with limited government under the rule of law, a world in which free enterprise reigns and where the state has no power to interfere in our lives so long as we behave peacefully. It is completely absurd to believe that this can be achieved without fundamental monetary reform.
In 1982, the Mises Institute held a large academic conference on the gold standard, and we held it in Washington, D.C. (There were scholarly papers and Ron Paul debated a Fed governor. Ron won.) Even back then, I recall that D.C. libertarians ridiculed us for holding such a meeting to talk about the Fed and its replacement with sound money. They said that this would make the Mises Institute look ridiculous, that we would be tarred with the brush of gold bugs and crazies. We did it anyway. And all these years later, the book that came out of that conference remains a main source for understanding the role of money in the advance of despotism or resistance to it, and a blueprint for the future.
Of course the Austrian tradition fought paper money and central banking from the beginning. Menger was an advocate of the gold standard. Böhm-Bawerk actually established it as finance minister to the Habsburg monarchy. Mises's book on the topic from 1912 was the first to show the role of money in the business cycle, and he issued dire warnings about central banking. Hayek wrote powerfully against the abandonment of gold in the 1930s. Hazlitt warned of the inevitable breakdown of Bretton Woods, and advocated a real gold standard instead. And Rothbard was a champion of sound money and the greatest enemy the Fed has ever had. But generally, I've long detected a tendency in libertarian circles to ignore this issue, in part for precisely the reasons cited above: it is not respectable.
Why this issue is not considered respectable: it is the most important priority of the state to keep its money machine hidden behind a curtain. Anyone who dares pull the curtain back is accused of every manner of intellectual crime. This is precisely the reason we must talk about it at every occasion. We must end the conspiracy of silence on this issue.
Far from being an arcane and anachronistic issue, then, the gold standard and the issues it raises gets right to the heart of the current debate concerning the future of war and the world economy. Why do the government and its partisans dislike the gold standard? It removes the discretionary power of the Fed by placing severe limits on the ability of the central bank to inflate the money supply. Without that discretionary power, the government has far fewer tools of central planning at its disposal. Government can regulate, which is a function of the police power. It can tax, which involves taking people's property. And it can spend, which means redistributing other people's property. But its activities in the financial area are radically curbed.
Think of your local and state governments. They tax and spend. They manipulate and intervene. As with all governments from the beginning of time, they generally retard social progress and muck things up as much as possible. What they do not do, however, is wage massive global wars, run huge deficits, accumulate trillions in debt, reduce the value of money, bail out foreign governments, provide endless credits to failing enterprises, administer hugely expensive and destructive social insurance schemes, or bring about immense swings in business activity.
State and local governments are awful and they must be relentlessly checked, but they are not anything like the threat of the federal government. Neither are they as arrogant and convinced of their own infallibility and indispensability. They lack the aura of invincibility that the central government enjoys.
It is the central bank, and only the central bank, that works as the government's money machine, and this makes all the difference. Now, it is not impossible that a central bank can exist alongside a gold standard, a lender of last resort that avoids the temptation to destroy that which restrains it. In the same way, it is possible for someone with an insatiable appetite for wine to sit at a banquet table of delicious vintages and not take a sip.
Let's just say that the existence of a central bank introduces an occasion of sin for the government. That is why under the best gold standard, there would be no central bank, gold coins would circulate as freely as their substitutes, and rules against fraud and theft would prohibit banks from pyramiding credit on top of demand deposits. So long as we are constructing the perfect system, all coinage would be private. Banks would be treated as businesses, no special privileges, no promises of bailout, no subsidized insurance, and no connection to government at any level.
This is the free-market system of monetary management, which means turning over the institution of money entirely to the market economy. As with any institution in a free society, it is not imposed from above, and dictated by a group of experts, but is the de facto result that comes about in a society that consistently respects private-property rights, encourages enterprise, and promotes peace.
It comes down to this. If you hate war, oppose the Fed. If you hate violations of your liberties, oppose the Fed. If you want to restrain despotism, restrain the Fed. If you want to secure freedom for yourself and your descendants, abolish the Fed.
[Via LewRockwell]
Sunday, June 8, 2008
1999: 79 Percent Of Americans Missing The Point Entirely
According to a Georgetown University study released in 1999, 79 percent of Americans were missing the point entirely with regard to such wide-ranging topics as politics, consumerism, taxes, entertainment, fashion, and professional wrestling.
"From the overweight housewife who eats bag after bag of reduced-fat Ruffles, to the school board that bans Huckleberry Finn for using the word 'nigger,' to the Manhattan stockbroker who uses recycled-paper checks to pay for gas for his behemoth SUV, the tendency of Americans to really just not get it transcends all boundaries of class, color, religion, sexual orientation, and political persuasion," said Dr. Ronald Shaw of Georgetown's Center For American Studies.
Polling nearly 8,000 Americans on a variety of subjects, the study found that only 21 percent of those surveyed had even the slightest clue.
"Our research revealed that the thought processes of a large majority of Americans are profoundly and fundamentally flawed," Shaw said. "We came to define this peculiar deviation as 'having one's head up one's ass.'"
Offering an example, Shaw said that when a group of people who had undergone cosmetic surgery were asked, "Why do some individuals feel the need for cosmetic surgery while others do not?," 54 percent of them responded that people who opt for such procedures have greater self-worth than those who don't.
An SUV owned by one of the estimated 205 million Americans who are missing the point entirely.
"In other words," Shaw said, "they believed that people who don't feel the need to spend thousands of dollars on facelifts and collagen lip injections lack pride in their looks, failing to acknowledge their own wholesale buying into the notion that in our society, a person's value is determined by his or her appearance."
Another manifestation of the missing-the-point phenomenon, Shaw said, is college students' habit of purchasing posters that advertise products. "Companies normally pay to have their wares touted," Shaw said. "But an incredibly high number of college undergraduates are willing to plunk down $15 for a poster of the Taco Bell chihuahua or Budweiser lizards, enabling companies to generate revenue from something that is supposed to be an expense."
The study also cited the public's constant call for more wholesome, family-friendly movies that do not insult their intelligence, as well as its failure to patronize such films when they are offered.
"To date, Adam Sandler's Big Daddy has grossed $161 million, with a majority of its audience consisting of children under the age of 14," Shaw said. "Contrasting this is the challenging, critically lauded flop The Iron Giant, which has barely broken the $20 million mark."
Despite the preponderance of evidence supporting its findings, the Georgetown study has drawn widespread criticism from the American public.
"If I want to miss the point, that's my own business," said Ernie Schayr, a Wheeling, WV, auto mechanic. "If I want to complain about having to pay taxes while at the same time demanding extra police protection for my neighborhood, that's my right as an American. Most people in other countries don't ever get the chance to miss the point, and that's tragic. The East Timorese are so busy fleeing for their lives, they never have the chance to go to the supermarket during the busiest time of the week and complain to the cashier about how long the lines are and ask them why they don't do something about it."
[Via The Onion]
"From the overweight housewife who eats bag after bag of reduced-fat Ruffles, to the school board that bans Huckleberry Finn for using the word 'nigger,' to the Manhattan stockbroker who uses recycled-paper checks to pay for gas for his behemoth SUV, the tendency of Americans to really just not get it transcends all boundaries of class, color, religion, sexual orientation, and political persuasion," said Dr. Ronald Shaw of Georgetown's Center For American Studies.
Polling nearly 8,000 Americans on a variety of subjects, the study found that only 21 percent of those surveyed had even the slightest clue.
"Our research revealed that the thought processes of a large majority of Americans are profoundly and fundamentally flawed," Shaw said. "We came to define this peculiar deviation as 'having one's head up one's ass.'"
Offering an example, Shaw said that when a group of people who had undergone cosmetic surgery were asked, "Why do some individuals feel the need for cosmetic surgery while others do not?," 54 percent of them responded that people who opt for such procedures have greater self-worth than those who don't.
An SUV owned by one of the estimated 205 million Americans who are missing the point entirely.
"In other words," Shaw said, "they believed that people who don't feel the need to spend thousands of dollars on facelifts and collagen lip injections lack pride in their looks, failing to acknowledge their own wholesale buying into the notion that in our society, a person's value is determined by his or her appearance."
Another manifestation of the missing-the-point phenomenon, Shaw said, is college students' habit of purchasing posters that advertise products. "Companies normally pay to have their wares touted," Shaw said. "But an incredibly high number of college undergraduates are willing to plunk down $15 for a poster of the Taco Bell chihuahua or Budweiser lizards, enabling companies to generate revenue from something that is supposed to be an expense."
The study also cited the public's constant call for more wholesome, family-friendly movies that do not insult their intelligence, as well as its failure to patronize such films when they are offered.
"To date, Adam Sandler's Big Daddy has grossed $161 million, with a majority of its audience consisting of children under the age of 14," Shaw said. "Contrasting this is the challenging, critically lauded flop The Iron Giant, which has barely broken the $20 million mark."
Despite the preponderance of evidence supporting its findings, the Georgetown study has drawn widespread criticism from the American public.
"If I want to miss the point, that's my own business," said Ernie Schayr, a Wheeling, WV, auto mechanic. "If I want to complain about having to pay taxes while at the same time demanding extra police protection for my neighborhood, that's my right as an American. Most people in other countries don't ever get the chance to miss the point, and that's tragic. The East Timorese are so busy fleeing for their lives, they never have the chance to go to the supermarket during the busiest time of the week and complain to the cashier about how long the lines are and ask them why they don't do something about it."
[Via The Onion]
Bogota Museum Celebrates Laziness
An event organised by the Museum of Bogota had sofas, televisions, hammocks and beds - anything associated with the avoidance of work.
The idea was to get people during the holiday season to think about laziness and its opposite, extreme work, and perhaps reach some balanced conclusion.
Visitors had to be a bit active to see the show though as it closed on Sunday.
The exhibition, sponsored by the city government, attracted a lot of visitors perhaps keen to escape Bogota's traffic, the fast pace of life or the pressures of work.
Marcela Arrieta, the museum curator, told Associated Press news agency: "We always think about laziness as an enemy of work.
"So we wanted to explore that and make people think about the social issues implied in taking a nap, in being jobless or in feeling that maybe we are wasting time - so we want to ask ourselves about that."
[Via BBC News]
The idea was to get people during the holiday season to think about laziness and its opposite, extreme work, and perhaps reach some balanced conclusion.
Visitors had to be a bit active to see the show though as it closed on Sunday.
The exhibition, sponsored by the city government, attracted a lot of visitors perhaps keen to escape Bogota's traffic, the fast pace of life or the pressures of work.
Marcela Arrieta, the museum curator, told Associated Press news agency: "We always think about laziness as an enemy of work.
"So we wanted to explore that and make people think about the social issues implied in taking a nap, in being jobless or in feeling that maybe we are wasting time - so we want to ask ourselves about that."
[Via BBC News]
Chiquita Paid Foreign Terrorist Organizations
On March 14, 2007, Chiquita Brands was fined $25 million as part of a settlement with the United States Justice Department for having ties to Colombian paramilitary groups. According to court documents, between 1997 and 2004, officers of a Chiquita subsidiary paid approximately $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the AUC, in exchange for local, employee protection in Colombia's volatile banana harvesting zone. Similar payments were also made to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as the National Liberation Army (ELN) from 1989 to 1997. All three of these groups are on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
On March 19, 2007, Chiquita Brands admitted in federal court that the subsidiary company (which was subsequently sold) paid Colombian terrorists to protect employees at its most profitable banana-growing operation. As part of a deal with prosecutors, the company pleaded guilty to one count of doing business with a terrorist organization. In exchange, the company will pay a $25-million fine and court documents will not reveal the identities of the group of senior executives who approved the illegal protection payments.
Chiquita currently faces serious charges in a lawsuit issued in June 2007. According to the attorney of 173 family members of victims of the AUC militia this could be the biggest terrorist case in history and may put Chiquita out of business. "Terry Collingsworth, a lawyer with International Rights Advocates who is leading the multi-million dollar litigation, said: "This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks."
[Via Wikipedia]
On March 19, 2007, Chiquita Brands admitted in federal court that the subsidiary company (which was subsequently sold) paid Colombian terrorists to protect employees at its most profitable banana-growing operation. As part of a deal with prosecutors, the company pleaded guilty to one count of doing business with a terrorist organization. In exchange, the company will pay a $25-million fine and court documents will not reveal the identities of the group of senior executives who approved the illegal protection payments.
Chiquita currently faces serious charges in a lawsuit issued in June 2007. According to the attorney of 173 family members of victims of the AUC militia this could be the biggest terrorist case in history and may put Chiquita out of business. "Terry Collingsworth, a lawyer with International Rights Advocates who is leading the multi-million dollar litigation, said: "This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks."
[Via Wikipedia]
Single women should be ashamed of themselves!
Yes, it's happened again. An expert has proclaimed that single women, despite their protestations to the contrary, are completely miserable. According to Pam Spurr, an author and psychologist, single women who assert they are happy with their lives despite "their crushing loneliness and desperation" are not merely deluded, but outright lying. How does she know? Body language.
Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:
"She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: 'Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'"
Hmm. You don't suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?
No matter. Spurr goes on to describe the single women she sees in her practice, and quotes at length on their feelings of loneliness and desperation.
Let's focus on the source: Spurr is basing her despondent-women thesis on a) a woman she made uncomfortable at a party and b) women she sees in therapy. I would never go so far as to say that all people who go to counseling are unhappy, but generally they have something about themselves they are trying to work on -- and some of the women Spurr sees think they would happier with a partner. That's fine; it may even be true. But what about the millions of single women who don't seek therapy -- because they are perfectly satisfied with their lives?
And let's not forget the men: Study after study has found that married men are happier, are healthier and live longer than their unmarried counterparts -- so where are the articles bemoaning the plight of sad male singletons, huddled over pints with their buddies, ordering takeout in dingy apartments and haunted by generalized feelings of loneliness and despair?
Or does that just not sell?
[Via Salon]
Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:
"She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: 'Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'"
Hmm. You don't suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?
No matter. Spurr goes on to describe the single women she sees in her practice, and quotes at length on their feelings of loneliness and desperation.
Let's focus on the source: Spurr is basing her despondent-women thesis on a) a woman she made uncomfortable at a party and b) women she sees in therapy. I would never go so far as to say that all people who go to counseling are unhappy, but generally they have something about themselves they are trying to work on -- and some of the women Spurr sees think they would happier with a partner. That's fine; it may even be true. But what about the millions of single women who don't seek therapy -- because they are perfectly satisfied with their lives?
And let's not forget the men: Study after study has found that married men are happier, are healthier and live longer than their unmarried counterparts -- so where are the articles bemoaning the plight of sad male singletons, huddled over pints with their buddies, ordering takeout in dingy apartments and haunted by generalized feelings of loneliness and despair?
Or does that just not sell?
[Via Salon]
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Guantanamo Bay's Version of Justice
In the contentious history of Guantanamo Bay, Thursday was momentous. It was the first time senior al-Qa'eda suspects had been seen in public since the September 11 attacks on America nearly seven years ago, and the first time any had been charged in a US court.
Short of capturing Osama bin Laden or his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, this was as close as America will come to submitting leading perpetrators of the worst terrorist atrocity on its soil to the rule of law.
But justice is strange at Camp Justice. No images were allowed of the courtroom exterior - a boxed structure surrounded by high fences and razor wire plonked in the middle of a disused Second World War airstrip - let alone the inside.
advertisementThe defendants, who face the death penalty, have been denied habeas corpus, but some rights were over-respected at times, most notably when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the self-confessed mastermind of the attacks, complained that the court artist's sketch contained an unflattering nose.
The greatest abnormality, however, is the three to four years the detainees spent in the legal netherworld of CIA prisons before being brought to the US naval base on Cuba, where they were held incommunicado for a further 18 months.
In the meantime, of course, Guantanamo and the ghost prisons have become symbols of American oppression and hypocrisy, and many parts of the world will have difficulty trusting a verdict issued at the controversial base.
KSM and others were detained not with justice in mind, but to gain intelligence, whatever the methods, in a new kind of war. What was done in those early years after 9/11 is burdening the belated effort to serve justice now, when sadly there is apparently a body of evidence against the accused that would have passed muster in a conventional US court.
George W. Bush and his aides decided that both protecting America and prosecuting the accused by its own newly formed rules was worth the price in lost global reputation. History may vindicate them, but for now the greatest lesson of the Guantanamo trial is that justice delayed is indeed justice denied.
Judging from the healthy appearance and sharp wits of the five defendants, five years in solitary confinement, with torture here and there, does not necessarily break a man.
Far from it: the two most senior - KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh - clearly remained committed to violent jihad, and welcomed the prospect of martyrdom by execution.
The proceedings quickly demonstrated that terrorists have personalities, too. KSM was bombastic and condescending. Waleed bin Attash, accused of training some of the 9/11 hijackers, was chatty and excitable.
Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a 30-year-old Kuwaiti said to have sent £60,000 to the 19 suicidal terrorists, made the press gallery snigger. Told by the judge that US military lawyers were being provided free of charge, he snapped back that America "tortured me free of charge, too".
Even when the Pentagon is trying to treat guests well at Guantanamo Bay, it can be a mild form of torture. An unprecedented 60 members of the press were flown in from Andrews Air Force Base sitting buttock to buttock in a Hercules C130, on a five-hour flight that gave some impression of extraordinary rendition.
We were housed in tents that were comfortable enough, but the tropical night was cooled by air-conditioning units that revved up like a Sherman tank every 20 minutes. To compensate for this sleep deprivation programme, we were promised a trip to O'Kelly's Irish Pub as a farewell.
In more ways than one, Guantanamo is indeed a strange place.
[Via Telegraph]
Short of capturing Osama bin Laden or his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, this was as close as America will come to submitting leading perpetrators of the worst terrorist atrocity on its soil to the rule of law.
But justice is strange at Camp Justice. No images were allowed of the courtroom exterior - a boxed structure surrounded by high fences and razor wire plonked in the middle of a disused Second World War airstrip - let alone the inside.
advertisementThe defendants, who face the death penalty, have been denied habeas corpus, but some rights were over-respected at times, most notably when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the self-confessed mastermind of the attacks, complained that the court artist's sketch contained an unflattering nose.
The greatest abnormality, however, is the three to four years the detainees spent in the legal netherworld of CIA prisons before being brought to the US naval base on Cuba, where they were held incommunicado for a further 18 months.
In the meantime, of course, Guantanamo and the ghost prisons have become symbols of American oppression and hypocrisy, and many parts of the world will have difficulty trusting a verdict issued at the controversial base.
KSM and others were detained not with justice in mind, but to gain intelligence, whatever the methods, in a new kind of war. What was done in those early years after 9/11 is burdening the belated effort to serve justice now, when sadly there is apparently a body of evidence against the accused that would have passed muster in a conventional US court.
George W. Bush and his aides decided that both protecting America and prosecuting the accused by its own newly formed rules was worth the price in lost global reputation. History may vindicate them, but for now the greatest lesson of the Guantanamo trial is that justice delayed is indeed justice denied.
Judging from the healthy appearance and sharp wits of the five defendants, five years in solitary confinement, with torture here and there, does not necessarily break a man.
Far from it: the two most senior - KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh - clearly remained committed to violent jihad, and welcomed the prospect of martyrdom by execution.
The proceedings quickly demonstrated that terrorists have personalities, too. KSM was bombastic and condescending. Waleed bin Attash, accused of training some of the 9/11 hijackers, was chatty and excitable.
Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a 30-year-old Kuwaiti said to have sent £60,000 to the 19 suicidal terrorists, made the press gallery snigger. Told by the judge that US military lawyers were being provided free of charge, he snapped back that America "tortured me free of charge, too".
Even when the Pentagon is trying to treat guests well at Guantanamo Bay, it can be a mild form of torture. An unprecedented 60 members of the press were flown in from Andrews Air Force Base sitting buttock to buttock in a Hercules C130, on a five-hour flight that gave some impression of extraordinary rendition.
We were housed in tents that were comfortable enough, but the tropical night was cooled by air-conditioning units that revved up like a Sherman tank every 20 minutes. To compensate for this sleep deprivation programme, we were promised a trip to O'Kelly's Irish Pub as a farewell.
In more ways than one, Guantanamo is indeed a strange place.
[Via Telegraph]
Who Stole a 4 Tonne Railway Bridge?
Police in the Czech republic are trying to find out who stole a 4 tonne railway bridge from the border town of Cheb.
The company which was responsible for looking after the bridge raised the alarm when, ever alert, they noticed that the bridge wasn't there any more.
The bridge was on a disused stretch of line just outside Cheb.
Martina Hruskova, a spokeswoman for the Czech police, commented: 'We are not sure if it was taken for personal use or for its scrap value.' Exactly what that 'personal use' might be was left unsaid.
[Via Metro]
The company which was responsible for looking after the bridge raised the alarm when, ever alert, they noticed that the bridge wasn't there any more.
The bridge was on a disused stretch of line just outside Cheb.
Martina Hruskova, a spokeswoman for the Czech police, commented: 'We are not sure if it was taken for personal use or for its scrap value.' Exactly what that 'personal use' might be was left unsaid.
[Via Metro]
Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?
Marilyn Monroe was tricked into killing herself by Bobby Kennedy.
So says Dr Jack Hattem, who, backed up by secret FBI files, says the Hollywood bombshell was somehow fooled into believing she would be revived in time as part of a plot involving Senator Robert Kennedy, the brother of JFK, who was gunned down 40 years ago this week.
Instead, Monroe, who staged many fake suicide attempts throughout her life to gain sympathy, was left to die by staff and friends. It’s all in Hattem’s new book Marilyn Monroe: Murder By Consent.
Certainly, Marilyn Monroe may have been dead for 46 years, but that doesn’t mean that people have stopped speculating about the circumstances of her death. We spoke to Dr Hattem and listened to some of his more compelling claims, including where Kennedy was on the night of Marilyn Monroe’s death and why the recently unearthed Marilyn Monroe sex tape might not be the only one knocking about.
This is turning out to be quite a big year for Marilyn Monroe. Not only has Lindsay Lohan aped her by getting naked and covering herself with a net curtain, but a Marilyn Monroe sex tape has also apparently been uncovered in recent months. So with sex dealt with, what about death?
While it was ruled to be suicide, theorists have long had their doubts about the way that Marilyn Monroe died - and thanks to a set of FBI records released 20 years ago that have been inexplicably ignored until recently, those doubts seem to have some substance.
According to Dr Jack Hattem’s book Marilyn Monroe: Murder By Consent, Monroe died because Robert Kennedy, along with Monroe’s close ‘friend’ and Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, convinced her to make another fake suicide attempt.
Caught between his family, who wanted to play down its relationship with Marilyn Monroe and the fact Monroe was threatening to shop a red diary containing ‘pillow talk’ between the pair and confidential secrets about the Cuban Missile Crisis if he ever left her, Robert Kennedy and Rat Pack member Lawford hatched a plan to visit Monroe on the day of her death. Hattem said:
“It is my guess that they had discussed with her, in no uncertain terms, that they needed for her to fake a suicide attempt. They guarantee she would be woken up, and that the fake suicide attempt would gain her so much sympathy from 20th Century Fox - who had fired her - that she would get her job back. But they threatened her somehow. She could be talked into things, because she wanted desperately to be cared about.”
At the time, Kennedy denied the visit, claiming he was in San Francisco. Which he might have got away with, except for the fact the FBI just happened to be busy tracking both Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe at the same time. Hattem explained:
“The CIA had long considered Marilyn Monroe a threat to national security from the time she had married Arthur Miller, because they thought of him as a leftist. Then the FBI started listening in on her phone calls and tracking her - even to Mexico, where Bobby Kennedy had a fling with her. A private detective took an audio tape of Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn in an ‘affair’. The FBI was tracking Kennedy, their boss, all over the place and listening in on his conversations, possibly because Hoover wanted something on Kennedy - and he certainly got it, because as she was dying, they were listening in.”
Adding to the muddle is Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper Eunice Murray, who found her face down on her bed, and her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson.
Apparently, Monroe fired Murray on the day of her death - which Hattem suggests is why she didn’t rush to try and revive Monroe; and was sleeping with Greenson - who allegedly gave Monroe an extra-large dose of barbiturates on top of what she already had been given.
What’s most interesting, though, is Dr Hattem’s story of the conversation between Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford at around 4am the following morning:
“In the FBI files, the FBI is recording Kennedy saying to Peter Lawford ‘Is she dead yet?’”
Throw in the fact that all of Marilyn Monroe’s phone message disappeared, to later be discovered in the chief of police’s private files, and that her red diary could not be found - Hattem’s guess is that Kennedy had a large hand in it. He said:
“I’m certain Robert Kennedy stole it when he came by her house after she was dead.”
But if Robert Kennedy’s involvement in Marilyn Monroe’s death is rooted in fact so firmly that there’s even an FBI file on it, why hasn’t more been made of it?
“I think the reason is that everybody already believes the Kennedys killed her.”
[Via Heckler Spray]
So says Dr Jack Hattem, who, backed up by secret FBI files, says the Hollywood bombshell was somehow fooled into believing she would be revived in time as part of a plot involving Senator Robert Kennedy, the brother of JFK, who was gunned down 40 years ago this week.
Instead, Monroe, who staged many fake suicide attempts throughout her life to gain sympathy, was left to die by staff and friends. It’s all in Hattem’s new book Marilyn Monroe: Murder By Consent.
Certainly, Marilyn Monroe may have been dead for 46 years, but that doesn’t mean that people have stopped speculating about the circumstances of her death. We spoke to Dr Hattem and listened to some of his more compelling claims, including where Kennedy was on the night of Marilyn Monroe’s death and why the recently unearthed Marilyn Monroe sex tape might not be the only one knocking about.
This is turning out to be quite a big year for Marilyn Monroe. Not only has Lindsay Lohan aped her by getting naked and covering herself with a net curtain, but a Marilyn Monroe sex tape has also apparently been uncovered in recent months. So with sex dealt with, what about death?
While it was ruled to be suicide, theorists have long had their doubts about the way that Marilyn Monroe died - and thanks to a set of FBI records released 20 years ago that have been inexplicably ignored until recently, those doubts seem to have some substance.
According to Dr Jack Hattem’s book Marilyn Monroe: Murder By Consent, Monroe died because Robert Kennedy, along with Monroe’s close ‘friend’ and Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, convinced her to make another fake suicide attempt.
Caught between his family, who wanted to play down its relationship with Marilyn Monroe and the fact Monroe was threatening to shop a red diary containing ‘pillow talk’ between the pair and confidential secrets about the Cuban Missile Crisis if he ever left her, Robert Kennedy and Rat Pack member Lawford hatched a plan to visit Monroe on the day of her death. Hattem said:
“It is my guess that they had discussed with her, in no uncertain terms, that they needed for her to fake a suicide attempt. They guarantee she would be woken up, and that the fake suicide attempt would gain her so much sympathy from 20th Century Fox - who had fired her - that she would get her job back. But they threatened her somehow. She could be talked into things, because she wanted desperately to be cared about.”
At the time, Kennedy denied the visit, claiming he was in San Francisco. Which he might have got away with, except for the fact the FBI just happened to be busy tracking both Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe at the same time. Hattem explained:
“The CIA had long considered Marilyn Monroe a threat to national security from the time she had married Arthur Miller, because they thought of him as a leftist. Then the FBI started listening in on her phone calls and tracking her - even to Mexico, where Bobby Kennedy had a fling with her. A private detective took an audio tape of Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn in an ‘affair’. The FBI was tracking Kennedy, their boss, all over the place and listening in on his conversations, possibly because Hoover wanted something on Kennedy - and he certainly got it, because as she was dying, they were listening in.”
Adding to the muddle is Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper Eunice Murray, who found her face down on her bed, and her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson.
Apparently, Monroe fired Murray on the day of her death - which Hattem suggests is why she didn’t rush to try and revive Monroe; and was sleeping with Greenson - who allegedly gave Monroe an extra-large dose of barbiturates on top of what she already had been given.
What’s most interesting, though, is Dr Hattem’s story of the conversation between Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford at around 4am the following morning:
“In the FBI files, the FBI is recording Kennedy saying to Peter Lawford ‘Is she dead yet?’”
Throw in the fact that all of Marilyn Monroe’s phone message disappeared, to later be discovered in the chief of police’s private files, and that her red diary could not be found - Hattem’s guess is that Kennedy had a large hand in it. He said:
“I’m certain Robert Kennedy stole it when he came by her house after she was dead.”
But if Robert Kennedy’s involvement in Marilyn Monroe’s death is rooted in fact so firmly that there’s even an FBI file on it, why hasn’t more been made of it?
“I think the reason is that everybody already believes the Kennedys killed her.”
[Via Heckler Spray]
First Shoes Worn 40,000 Years Ago
Humans started wearing shoes about 40,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, new anthropological research suggests.
As any good clothes horse knows, the right outfit speaks volumes about the person wearing it. Now, anthropologists are tapping into that knowledge base, looking for the physical changes caused by wearing shoes to figure out when footwear first became fashionable.
Turns out, clothes really do make the man (and the woman), at least when it comes to feet. That's because wearing shoes changes the way humans walk and how their bodies distribute weight. If you wear shoes regularly, as most modern humans do, those changes end up reflected in your bones and ligaments.
Susan Cachel, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said science has known about the way wearing shoes affects feet since the early 20th century. Researchers have found several differences between feet that regularly wear shoes and those that don't.
For instance, wearing tight shoes can lead to bunions, which are painful enlargements of the bone or tissue in the big toe, she said. People who don't wear shoes have wider feet and bigger gaps between their big toe and the other four. And women who spend a lot of time in high heels wind up with smaller calf muscles.
Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, was the first person to apply this understanding of how fashion alters physical bodies to anthropology. He found a point in human history where the size of toe bones began to shrink. Combining that data with knowledge of how shoes change the way people walk, Trinkaus reasoned that smaller toe bones meant people had started wearing shoes.
While the oldest surviving shoes are only about 10,000 years old, Trinkaus' discovery pushed the adoption of footwear back to almost 30,000 years ago. He published that research in 2005. Now, thanks to analysis set to be published in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, Trinkaus has found that humans were probably wearing shoes even earlier, about 40,000 years ago.
Through thick and thin
Trinkaus' theory is based on a simple fact: Bone size isn't set in stone.
"Bone, at least to a certain extent, responds during a person's lifetime to the mechanical stresses placed on it," said Tim Weaver, a University of California, Davis, anthropologist. "If you work out at the gym, not only will your muscles get bigger, your bones will become thicker."
For most of their history, humans had big, thick toe bones. Trinkaus said this was because they were doing more walking, climbing and carrying than we do today. In fact, he said, all their leg bones were bigger as well, for the same reasons. This is true for both Neanderthals and the earliest modern humans.
But, around 40,000 years ago, that began to change. Trinkaus noticed that skeletons from this time period still had strong, thick leg bones, but their toes had suddenly gotten smaller. "They had wimpy toes," he said. "I tried to figure out what would take away stresses on the toes, but not the legs, and the answer was shoes."
First shoes, first tailors
While Weaver agrees with Trinkaus' theory, Cachel doesn't buy it. She pointed out that, not long after the time period Trinkaus looked at, humans apparently stopped being so active and all their limb bones, not just the toes, started to shrink.
"If the footbones are smaller, this probably reflects less walking and physical activity, rather than the invention of supportive footware," Cachel said.
Both Weaver and Cachel think that it would make sense for shoes to hit it big around the time Trinkaus thinks they did. Around 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, human culture went through a growth spurt.
"The archaeological record shows may changes, including the types of tools people were making and the first definite artwork, and the oldest needles for making clothing appear shortly afterward," Weaver said.
And Cachel said this was probably the time period where a population boom allowed for the first divisions of labor, meaning that, for the the first time, somebody could dedicate all their time to making better, more decorated clothing.
"It seems reasonable that there were changes in footwear around this time too," Weaver said, "But before Erik Trinkaus' study we didn't have any direct evidence."
[Via Live Science]
As any good clothes horse knows, the right outfit speaks volumes about the person wearing it. Now, anthropologists are tapping into that knowledge base, looking for the physical changes caused by wearing shoes to figure out when footwear first became fashionable.
Turns out, clothes really do make the man (and the woman), at least when it comes to feet. That's because wearing shoes changes the way humans walk and how their bodies distribute weight. If you wear shoes regularly, as most modern humans do, those changes end up reflected in your bones and ligaments.
Susan Cachel, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said science has known about the way wearing shoes affects feet since the early 20th century. Researchers have found several differences between feet that regularly wear shoes and those that don't.
For instance, wearing tight shoes can lead to bunions, which are painful enlargements of the bone or tissue in the big toe, she said. People who don't wear shoes have wider feet and bigger gaps between their big toe and the other four. And women who spend a lot of time in high heels wind up with smaller calf muscles.
Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, was the first person to apply this understanding of how fashion alters physical bodies to anthropology. He found a point in human history where the size of toe bones began to shrink. Combining that data with knowledge of how shoes change the way people walk, Trinkaus reasoned that smaller toe bones meant people had started wearing shoes.
While the oldest surviving shoes are only about 10,000 years old, Trinkaus' discovery pushed the adoption of footwear back to almost 30,000 years ago. He published that research in 2005. Now, thanks to analysis set to be published in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, Trinkaus has found that humans were probably wearing shoes even earlier, about 40,000 years ago.
Through thick and thin
Trinkaus' theory is based on a simple fact: Bone size isn't set in stone.
"Bone, at least to a certain extent, responds during a person's lifetime to the mechanical stresses placed on it," said Tim Weaver, a University of California, Davis, anthropologist. "If you work out at the gym, not only will your muscles get bigger, your bones will become thicker."
For most of their history, humans had big, thick toe bones. Trinkaus said this was because they were doing more walking, climbing and carrying than we do today. In fact, he said, all their leg bones were bigger as well, for the same reasons. This is true for both Neanderthals and the earliest modern humans.
But, around 40,000 years ago, that began to change. Trinkaus noticed that skeletons from this time period still had strong, thick leg bones, but their toes had suddenly gotten smaller. "They had wimpy toes," he said. "I tried to figure out what would take away stresses on the toes, but not the legs, and the answer was shoes."
First shoes, first tailors
While Weaver agrees with Trinkaus' theory, Cachel doesn't buy it. She pointed out that, not long after the time period Trinkaus looked at, humans apparently stopped being so active and all their limb bones, not just the toes, started to shrink.
"If the footbones are smaller, this probably reflects less walking and physical activity, rather than the invention of supportive footware," Cachel said.
Both Weaver and Cachel think that it would make sense for shoes to hit it big around the time Trinkaus thinks they did. Around 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, human culture went through a growth spurt.
"The archaeological record shows may changes, including the types of tools people were making and the first definite artwork, and the oldest needles for making clothing appear shortly afterward," Weaver said.
And Cachel said this was probably the time period where a population boom allowed for the first divisions of labor, meaning that, for the the first time, somebody could dedicate all their time to making better, more decorated clothing.
"It seems reasonable that there were changes in footwear around this time too," Weaver said, "But before Erik Trinkaus' study we didn't have any direct evidence."
[Via Live Science]
Thursday, June 5, 2008
How to Eat Wild Food
It is every good-lifer's fantasy: pop down the garden, pick up a couple of freshly laid eggs, sling them in a pan with some home-grown herbs and voilà: a delicious, nutritious meal, fresh from nature and not a Tesco delivery van or carbon footprint in sight.
Prue Leith, the veteran cookery writer, has shared one such recipe with readers of Good Housekeeping magazine - but instead of drawing quiet nods of approval, she has elicited a furious response from bird-lovers. The problem is that Prue's eggs weren't from humble hens but were lifted from the nest of a Canadian mother goose. According to a very stern man from the RSPB, it is illegal to take wild birds' eggs just to make an omelette. Bad, bad Prue.
Why such a fuss over a bird that is neither endangered nor native to Britain? Indeed, in some parts it is even considered a pest for driving out local species. And since Ms Leith, as she patiently pointed out, didn't take all the eggs, how much harm could her meal from nature's pantry have done?
Therefore, in the spirit of support for Leith's fearless eco-cookery, here are ten ways in which you, too, can enjoy nature's free bounty. Bon appetit.
Squirrel fishing
Common in the US, this is the sporting practice of attempting to lift squirrels into the air using a peanut tied to a piece of string or fishing line, and (optional) some kind of fishing pole.
Squirrels often grapple playfully with the nuts while the fisher closes in skilfully. Squirrels are jittery creatures, and a delicate approach is required. The expert squirrel fisher must maintain a balance between himself and the little varmint if he or she is to be rewarded with a supper of grey squirrel.
Dandelion Coffee
Gather the roots of a dandelion plant: about 25 small roots should be enough for one cup. Wash, pat dry and roast in the oven at 200C for about 20 minutes. They should turn into brown, dry sticks. Grind these in a blender or coffee grinder, and add one or two tablespoons to boiling water. Allow to steep for a few minutes, then drink. Dandelion coffee is caffeine-free and has a pleasing, vaguely chocolatey taste.
Nettle tea
You can use all parts of the plant for this, including the root. Add boiling water to a pot of leaves and infuse for ten minutes or, if you are using the body and roots of the plant, simmer these gently in a pan of boiling water for a few minutes.
Cider
First collect your apples - any variety will do, but the sweeter and riper the better. Then pulp them. To begin with, keep quantities small and use an electric kitchen juicer or blender. The more traditional method is to stand above a strong bucket half-full of apples and hit the fruit repeatedly with a heavy object. The apples then need to be pressed in a kitchen press. The resulting juice should be poured into a cleaned and sterilised wooden keg (from home brewery shops). Fill the keg to the top (a half-full keg is a surefire recipe for vinegar). There is no need to add yeast, as fermentation will take place naturally - just leave the bung loose on the keg to allow in some air. After a couple of days you will begin to see white froth bubbling up through the bung-hole. Wait for several weeks until fermentation has stopped, then replace the bung. It will take about eight months for your cider to be drinkable.
Mushrooms
There is nothing so delicious as a freshly picked mushroom fried in a little wild garlic and parsley. You can find some wild mushrooms at any time of year. The best, however, appear in autumn: penny buns, chanterelles, field mushrooms and dozens of other varieties.
Foraging is not straightforward: you must know your mushroom varieties, as many are poisonous and a few (often those easily mistaken for edible varieties) deadly. So be careful: go picking with an expert, or do your homework. The British Mycological Society and the Association of British Fungus Groups offer reliable guides.
Chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius)
These grow particularly well in Scotland and in Scandinavia, where they are highly prized. The bright orange colour makes them easy to spot. Clean carefully with a soft brush and trim the bases. Sautée in butter with garlic and parsley and serve as a side dish, or add to omelettes or pasta dishes. Chanterelles don't dry well, so use them fresh.
Penny bun (Boletus edulis) and Bay boletes (Boletus badius)
Members of the boletus family can be recognised by the sponge-like underside of the cap and bulbous, fleshy base. Penny buns are highly prized, and both these and the bay boletes are delicious. Good young specimens can be served raw, with a drizzle of olive or truffle oil.
Inspect older mushrooms carefully (they are prone to maggots); you may need to discard the stems. Once cleaned, they are delicious sautéed in olive oil or used in pasta dishes, cooked with potatoes or in risottos. Keep dried ones on hand to make a vegetable stock.
Wild garlic
This plant (Allium ursinum) grows in woodland, in, near or among bluebells, and is identifiable by its green, garlic-like smell and long, lush leaves, similar in appearance to those of Lily of the Valley. It grows in late winter and throughout spring. Towards the end of the season it bursts into white flowers.
Foraging for wild garlic in woodland is fairly straightforward. You will find it in semi-shaded, moist conditions, and the smell is unmistakable.
Unlike domestic garlic, wild garlic is known for its leaves rather than its bulb. The bulbs, like the flowers, are edible but there are fewer of them. The taste is slightly milder than domestic garlic. The leaves are delicious raw or cooked, and work well in salads and soups (additional information on bbc.co.uk/food).
Rose-petal perfume
To make a small bottle, assemble 1.5kg of petals (no stamens) and 1.5l of water. Combine in a pot, bring to the boil and simmer for two hours. Strain through a cheesecloth several times until all the pulp is gone. Let the perfume cool completely and pour into an airtight container. Add a few drops of odourless alcohol to help to preserve it. If possible, keep it in the fridge.
Blackberry cheek and lip tint
Blackberry juice on lips will stain them dark; finish with a slick of Vaseline for a glossy effect. A few drops of juice on the cheeks will bring a healthy, antioxidant flush to the sallowest of complexions.
Snails with wild garlic
They are available year-round but best found in late October and November, when they start hibernating in nooks and crannies.
If you are collecting snails before their hibernation, store and starve them for a few weeks to clear out any unhealthy residues of poisonous plants. Then boil them alive before removing them from their shells, gutting and washing. To cook, fry them with butter and wild garlic.
Crayfish/shrimping
Our native freshwater crayfish are being pushed out by aggressive American competitors - so eating the invading red signal crayfish, which has taken over many rivers in the south of England, is a patriotic duty.
Catching them: Use modified lobster pots, a rod and line or even bare hands.
Distinguishing them: The US crayfish, unlike the British type, has a distinctive red underside to its claws.
Cooking them: Place live in a bucket of clean water for a few days to clean out their insides, then boil in salty water - perhaps with fennel - or just throw them on the barbecue.
Note: From a conservation viewpoint, trapping on an ad-hoc basis can be counterproductive as it removes only the larger crayfish, which eat the smaller ones. So to save the British crayfish, trap all year round (apply for permission from the Environment Agency).
[Via Times Online]
Prue Leith, the veteran cookery writer, has shared one such recipe with readers of Good Housekeeping magazine - but instead of drawing quiet nods of approval, she has elicited a furious response from bird-lovers. The problem is that Prue's eggs weren't from humble hens but were lifted from the nest of a Canadian mother goose. According to a very stern man from the RSPB, it is illegal to take wild birds' eggs just to make an omelette. Bad, bad Prue.
Why such a fuss over a bird that is neither endangered nor native to Britain? Indeed, in some parts it is even considered a pest for driving out local species. And since Ms Leith, as she patiently pointed out, didn't take all the eggs, how much harm could her meal from nature's pantry have done?
Therefore, in the spirit of support for Leith's fearless eco-cookery, here are ten ways in which you, too, can enjoy nature's free bounty. Bon appetit.
Squirrel fishing
Common in the US, this is the sporting practice of attempting to lift squirrels into the air using a peanut tied to a piece of string or fishing line, and (optional) some kind of fishing pole.
Squirrels often grapple playfully with the nuts while the fisher closes in skilfully. Squirrels are jittery creatures, and a delicate approach is required. The expert squirrel fisher must maintain a balance between himself and the little varmint if he or she is to be rewarded with a supper of grey squirrel.
Dandelion Coffee
Gather the roots of a dandelion plant: about 25 small roots should be enough for one cup. Wash, pat dry and roast in the oven at 200C for about 20 minutes. They should turn into brown, dry sticks. Grind these in a blender or coffee grinder, and add one or two tablespoons to boiling water. Allow to steep for a few minutes, then drink. Dandelion coffee is caffeine-free and has a pleasing, vaguely chocolatey taste.
Nettle tea
You can use all parts of the plant for this, including the root. Add boiling water to a pot of leaves and infuse for ten minutes or, if you are using the body and roots of the plant, simmer these gently in a pan of boiling water for a few minutes.
Cider
First collect your apples - any variety will do, but the sweeter and riper the better. Then pulp them. To begin with, keep quantities small and use an electric kitchen juicer or blender. The more traditional method is to stand above a strong bucket half-full of apples and hit the fruit repeatedly with a heavy object. The apples then need to be pressed in a kitchen press. The resulting juice should be poured into a cleaned and sterilised wooden keg (from home brewery shops). Fill the keg to the top (a half-full keg is a surefire recipe for vinegar). There is no need to add yeast, as fermentation will take place naturally - just leave the bung loose on the keg to allow in some air. After a couple of days you will begin to see white froth bubbling up through the bung-hole. Wait for several weeks until fermentation has stopped, then replace the bung. It will take about eight months for your cider to be drinkable.
Mushrooms
There is nothing so delicious as a freshly picked mushroom fried in a little wild garlic and parsley. You can find some wild mushrooms at any time of year. The best, however, appear in autumn: penny buns, chanterelles, field mushrooms and dozens of other varieties.
Foraging is not straightforward: you must know your mushroom varieties, as many are poisonous and a few (often those easily mistaken for edible varieties) deadly. So be careful: go picking with an expert, or do your homework. The British Mycological Society and the Association of British Fungus Groups offer reliable guides.
Chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius)
These grow particularly well in Scotland and in Scandinavia, where they are highly prized. The bright orange colour makes them easy to spot. Clean carefully with a soft brush and trim the bases. Sautée in butter with garlic and parsley and serve as a side dish, or add to omelettes or pasta dishes. Chanterelles don't dry well, so use them fresh.
Penny bun (Boletus edulis) and Bay boletes (Boletus badius)
Members of the boletus family can be recognised by the sponge-like underside of the cap and bulbous, fleshy base. Penny buns are highly prized, and both these and the bay boletes are delicious. Good young specimens can be served raw, with a drizzle of olive or truffle oil.
Inspect older mushrooms carefully (they are prone to maggots); you may need to discard the stems. Once cleaned, they are delicious sautéed in olive oil or used in pasta dishes, cooked with potatoes or in risottos. Keep dried ones on hand to make a vegetable stock.
Wild garlic
This plant (Allium ursinum) grows in woodland, in, near or among bluebells, and is identifiable by its green, garlic-like smell and long, lush leaves, similar in appearance to those of Lily of the Valley. It grows in late winter and throughout spring. Towards the end of the season it bursts into white flowers.
Foraging for wild garlic in woodland is fairly straightforward. You will find it in semi-shaded, moist conditions, and the smell is unmistakable.
Unlike domestic garlic, wild garlic is known for its leaves rather than its bulb. The bulbs, like the flowers, are edible but there are fewer of them. The taste is slightly milder than domestic garlic. The leaves are delicious raw or cooked, and work well in salads and soups (additional information on bbc.co.uk/food).
Rose-petal perfume
To make a small bottle, assemble 1.5kg of petals (no stamens) and 1.5l of water. Combine in a pot, bring to the boil and simmer for two hours. Strain through a cheesecloth several times until all the pulp is gone. Let the perfume cool completely and pour into an airtight container. Add a few drops of odourless alcohol to help to preserve it. If possible, keep it in the fridge.
Blackberry cheek and lip tint
Blackberry juice on lips will stain them dark; finish with a slick of Vaseline for a glossy effect. A few drops of juice on the cheeks will bring a healthy, antioxidant flush to the sallowest of complexions.
Snails with wild garlic
They are available year-round but best found in late October and November, when they start hibernating in nooks and crannies.
If you are collecting snails before their hibernation, store and starve them for a few weeks to clear out any unhealthy residues of poisonous plants. Then boil them alive before removing them from their shells, gutting and washing. To cook, fry them with butter and wild garlic.
Crayfish/shrimping
Our native freshwater crayfish are being pushed out by aggressive American competitors - so eating the invading red signal crayfish, which has taken over many rivers in the south of England, is a patriotic duty.
Catching them: Use modified lobster pots, a rod and line or even bare hands.
Distinguishing them: The US crayfish, unlike the British type, has a distinctive red underside to its claws.
Cooking them: Place live in a bucket of clean water for a few days to clean out their insides, then boil in salty water - perhaps with fennel - or just throw them on the barbecue.
Note: From a conservation viewpoint, trapping on an ad-hoc basis can be counterproductive as it removes only the larger crayfish, which eat the smaller ones. So to save the British crayfish, trap all year round (apply for permission from the Environment Agency).
[Via Times Online]
At Least $200 million in Cash Was Gathered in Hubbard's Name
For roughly three decades Hubbard ran the notorious Church of Scientology, a "religion" he formed to "clear" mankind of misery. It came complete with finance dictators, "gang-bang security checks," lie detectors, "committees of evidence" and detention camps. In 1977 the FBI sent 134 agents, armed with warrants and sledgehammers, storming into Scientology centers in Los Angeles and Washington. Eleven top church officials, including Hubbard's third wife, went to jail for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping over 100 government agencies, including the IRS, FBI and CIA. Hubbard could hold his own with any of his science fiction novels.
Amid all the melodrama, at least $200 million in cash produced by his strange creation was gathered in Hubbard's name, and there is believed to be much more in organization assets: The Church of Scientology has proved to be one of the most lucrative businesses around. If Forbes had known as much as it knows now, after interviewing dozens of eyewitnesses and examining sworn testimony and court records in both criminal and civil cases, Hubbard would have been included high on The Forbes Four Hundred.
There is something that Forbes still doesn't know, however. It is something no one may know outside a small, secretive band of Hubbard's followers: What is happening to all that money?
Hubbard himself has not been seen publicly since 1980, when he went underground, disappearing even from the view of high "church" officials.
That's in character: He was said by spokesmen to have retired from Scientology's management in 1966. In fact, for 20 years after, he maintained a grip so tight that sources say since his 1980 disappearance three appointed "messengers" have been able to gather tens of millions of dollars at will, harass and intimidate Scientology members, and rule with an iron fist an international network that is still estimated to have tens of thousands of adherents - all merely on his unseen authority.
How could Hubbard do all this? As early as the 1950s, officials at the American Medical Association were warning that Scientology, then known as Dianetics, was a cult. More recently, in 1984, courts of law here and abroad labeled the organization such things as "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister and dangerous," while Hubbard himself was described as "a pathological liar" and "a charlatan and worse."
But the central fact is the money: hundreds of millions of dollars last seen in the form of cold cash or highly negotiable securities. "It's a perfect story about greed and lust for power," says William Franks, who was driven out of the organization in 1981, when he was the church's chairman of the board and its executive director international, the post Hubbard officially relinquished 20 years ago. "If you understand it on that basis, and stay away from the 'religious' aspects, it makes perfect sense."
A few facts about Hubbard's early life are known. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Neb. on Mar. 13, 1911. After serving in World War II, he wrote a 1947 letter to the Veterans Administration in which he complained of his "seriously affected" mind and "suicidal inclinations" and pleaded for help. Hubbard was nevertheless a moderately successful science fiction writer. In 1949, addressing a writers' convention, he reportedly said, "If a man really wants to make $1 million, the best way would be to start his own religion." In 1950 he published the book that would ultimately make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. In 1951, during his second divorce, Hubbard's wife claimed that he was "hopelessly insane" and that he tortured her. Three years later, his "church" was born.
It did not act much like a church. Through the 1950s and much of the 1960s, Hubbard emphasized the "scientific" nature of a therapeutic technique he invented. He called it "auditing." He said it could cure illness, restore sight to the blind and improve intelligence and appearance. Hubbard argued, in his best-selling book, that inner turmoil sprang from mental aberrations he called "engrams" caused by past traumatic events, and could be eliminated by identifying, recalling and reliving the events. Eliminate your engrams, eliminate your turmoil. A similar process is routine to most conventional methods of psychotherapy, a fact Hubbard presumably was aware of. On this unlikely base he built his $400 million empire.
Hubbard constructed a device he called an E-meter, actually a simplified lie detector, to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects go over intimate details of their past. Auditors (later also called ministers) would conduct sessions with this device and zero in on Hubbard's engrams. Psychiatrists say a successful session of going over long-suppressed traumas can produce a sense of personal relief and euphoria. That brought the troubled subject back for more, money in hand. Lots of money. A large organization began to form, with "franchises" around the country. There are a lot of troubled people out there.
Side by side with his "scientific" treatments, Hubbard pitched a body of religious beliefs - reincarnation and the like - and claimed tax-exempt status as a religion. It was not long before some of his auditing subjects were drawn into what became a fast-growing cult. Some of them became fanatics who would do virtually anything at Hubbard's command.
Unfortunately, the tax ploy and the big money drew the attention of the IRS: A ruling stripped him of his tax-exempt status in 1967.
But by then the money was so big Hubbard was able to buy a 342-foot oceangoing ship, the Apollo. On it, he withdrew from his government persecutors and cruised safely in international waters with an adoring retinue of followers. The IRS was later able to prove in court that he was meanwhile skimming money, at least $3 million in 1972 alone, and laundering it through schemes involving phony billings, a dummy corporation in Panama and secret Swiss bank accounts.
In 1971 a U.S. federal court finally upheld an FDA ruling that Hubbard's "scientific" claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing would no longer be labeled as a scientific treatment. But Hubbard was resourceful. The way around the ruling was to call the meters and auditing strictly "religious sacraments" and therefore beyond the FDA's reach. Hubbard's Scientology counselors had already begun calling themselves ministers. Now they took to wearing black and clerical collars. Chapels were constructed in Scientology centers around the country. "Franchises" became "missions," "fees" became "fixed donations," and "theories" became "sacred scriptures." The money got even bigger.
The system works like this: Prospects, normally spoken of as "raw meat," are offered a free 200-question "personality test" to determine whether counseling (which means auditing) is needed. ("Auditing is always needed," says one former counselor.) Scientology services range from a communications workshop for $50 to the more popular one-on-one auditing sessions that soon cost anywhere from, get this, $200 to more than $1,000 an hour. Special training courses go for $12,000 and up.
How can anyone, except the very rich, afford to spend $200 to $1,000 an hour on counseling? Plus pay for the books and other materials in which Hubbard did a lively side business? Some newcomers are encouraged to become "field staff members," who recruit new raw meat on the streets for commissions to pay for their own services - they get 10% to 15% of all services rendered to the piece of meat they bring in. Others go into the business side for a piece of the action. Since it is not uncommon for people to spend more than $100,000 over a decade for their salvation, "The registrars were making good bucks, buying Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes," says one defector, Bent Corydon, "and the best counselors were paid on a performance scale." Corydon, who once ran the biggest single Scientology mission, left in 1982 to start his own auditing religion.
For the less enterprising, another way to afford the religion is to sign a contract for up to a billion years (reincarnation, remember) and join church staff. After signing a note obligating themselves to pay for all services rendered in the event they break their employment contracts and waiving all rights to sue, these members receive free auditing, room and board, a structured and controlled environment, and a small allowance - less than $25 per week in the early 1980s - in return for labor that can average as much as 15 hours per day.
Ultimately subjects are "cleared" - that is, pronounced cured of engrams. But Hubbard was no dummy. He added more and more steps, each usually more expensive than the last, for his cult followers. Already, in the early 1950s, Hubbard found that the prior lives of individuals also required auditing by the hour. In the late 1960s, Hubbard had another revelation: Humans are actually composed of clusters of spiritual beings, stemming back millions of years. Now those spiritual beings had to be audited! Preposterous? Perhaps, but "eventually you lose the ability to even form a belief about these things," says a former high-level Hubbard aide, Gerald Armstrong. "Hubbard says, 'Jump,' you say, 'How high?' Hubbard says, 'I have new technology,' you say, 'How wonderful.'"
The "meat" would have successive, increasingly strange levels of "clearing" revealed to them only gradually, of course, and only as they seemed ready to "flow up the bridge," in the peculiar jargon that developed within the organization. In 1981 yet more new revelations were issued, but only after income from existing levels had dropped off. "If you don't have the money, you're a slave," sums up Howard Rower, a successful New York real estate developer who ran a Manhattan "mission" until 1983. "And if you have money, you're fawned all over until you don't have any money."
The good ship Apollo got filled with hundreds of the most thoroughly programmed of Hubbard's signees. On board, life became very peculiar. Frank Watson, a chiropractor then in his 50s, told Forbes he was thrown overboard five times, sometimes blindfolded, for minor infractions. The drop was 26 feet. One Tanja Burden testified she was required to serve at the age of 13 (both parents were Scientologists) as Hubbard's personal slave, helping him dress and preparing his toiletries. There are many more such tales.
And the money kept pouring in. But things started to get too hot for Hubbard. One by one, foreign countries began closing their ports. England, Greece, Spain, Portugal. France convicted him in absentia for fraud.
In 1975 he gave up the Apollo and touched down in Clearwater, Fla., which became another headquarters to go with the first one in Los Angeles. Hubbard evidently essayed a counterattack on his main persecutors: Former insiders say he had already gone underground for a year in a modest apartment in New York's borough of Queens while he planned a campaign dubbed Operation Snow White. This operation planted Scientologists in low-level positions in government agencies. It also sent followers to burglarize and rifle files or plant wiretaps. Adroit Freedom of Information Act filings by Scientologists caused the government to bring much of its evidence from its Scientology investigations into one office in Washington; his people then repeatedly burglarized the government's office, obtaining even those documents the government had no intention of releasing.
It was the discovery of this campaign that sent the startled G-men to Scientology headquarters, search warrants and sledges in hand.
Even though his fall guys insulated Hubbard from jail that time, he knew he was in trouble. "Hubbard told me at one time the biggest mistake we made was going religious and that we should have kept it straight as a business," says a former high "church" official who doesn't want his name used. "That would have avoided all the trouble with the IRS."
Besides the feds, Hubbard and his organization were getting sued by disaffected former Scientologists. In 1980 Hubbard went underground again, supposedly at a ranch in the small California town of Creston, a 3 1/2 hour drive north of Los Angeles. Not even Chairman and Executive Director William Franks, then administrator of the entire Church of Scientology, could speak to him or see him. All communications were via telex or written or oral messages carried back and forth by three trusted messengers - David Miscavige and Patrick and Anne Broeker, a husband-and-wife team. All three were young adults who had been indoctrinated for four or more years. According to defectors, Miscavige, whose father was a Scientologist, grew up in suburban Philadelphia and then England. Miscavige is said to have joined church staff at age 16, and reportedly has only a ninth-grade education. They say he is mean, a bully who acquired power through an ability to intimidate and an image he created that he represented Hubbard's wishes. In the early 1980s he was claiming to see Hubbard once a week. He joined with the Broekers, with whom Hubbard was presumably living at the time, and is now said to share power with them. Anne reportedly has a sixth-grade education and joined the organization when she was 11 (Bill Franks says he once taught the three Rs to Anne and others). She is said to be as ruthless as Miscavige. Pat, however, is said to have finished high school. He has been married at least three times and is said to have married his way up the hierarchy, with one Hubbard female aide after another.
Their credibility in the organization, however, was not total. "I truly believe that Hubbard really died in 1980 and that this involves a scam on top of a scam," the now-disaffected Chairman Franks told Forbes.
Now things really started hopping. The messengers and their agents - more formally, the Commodore's Messenger Organization, or CMO - soon took two major steps. One was an extensive two-year purge of the organization that drove away hundreds of longtime adherents. It was not hard. "Wild paranoia permeates the whole organization." says Don Larson, who served as the church's $25-per-week "finance ethics officer," for which read "enforcer." Larson claims he alone brought nearly 300 recalcitrant Scientologists to "Rehabilitation Project Forces" at Scientology centers around the world over a period of 14 months, until his own detention and departure in late 1983. "I was the hatchet man," says Larson. "I was responsible for all sorts of Gestapo-type stuff."
In these sadistic detention programs, staff members would be coerced into performing hard labor, eating leftovers out of buckets and sleeping on floors. Some were reportedly kept against their will.
The other move was to step up the flow of money dramatically. Among Larson's duties were levying fines on wealthy auditing subjects, whose intimate auditing sessions had been transcribed in writing, and forcibly dunning mission holders (franchisees) for millions of additional dollars for Hubbard agents. "In 1983," says Larson, "I manipulated a half-million-dollar inheritance out of Bob B------. He was naive as hell. D.M. [David Miscavige] called me up in the middle of the night [about Bob B------]. . . . He wanted the money.
"What's all this got to do with religion?" Larson muses. "I can't believe the things I did."
"The question was always how to get more money into Hubbard's pocket and how to hide that from the IRS," says Franks, who was responsible for investing about $150 million of church reserves in 1980, most of it held in foreign currencies. "There was literally cash all over the place. There would be people leaving from Florida for Europe with bags of cash on a weekly basis. There were hundreds of bank accounts." In 1981 Franks started taking Hubbard's name off these accounts as signatory - 15 years after Hubbard was said to have retired from the church - to hide the connection to church funds they represented.
Instead, much of the organization's cash reportedly wound up in the Religious Research Foundation (RRF), which former church members say was a Liberian shell corporation with bank accounts in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. RRF was set up by three otherwise unimportant board members who had submitted their resignations in advance. The RRF was used as a way station for money from the church to the unseen Hubbard's own accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Franks claims that RRF accounts alone totaled well over $100 million by 1981. "RRF was as good as Hubbard," says he.
In 1980 Laurel Sullivan, for seven years Hubbard's principal public relations official, was put in charge of an internal operation called Mission Corporate Category Sortout (Hubbard liked military jargon and organization), at the behest of Miscavige. Sullivan says she planned ways to juggle the church's corporations to shield the unseen Hubbard from legal liability and to ensure that the income lines to Hubbard from the church could not be traced.
A separate corporation called Author Services, Inc. (ASI) was formed to manage Hubbard's financial affairs and, apparently, those of the church as well. According to Howard Schomer, ASI's treasury secretary in 1982, he sent up through Hubbard's messengers weekly updates on Hubbard's net worth from ASI. Schomer says Hubbard was pulling in well over $1 million a week through ASI when he, Schomer, left and that Hubbard's net worth, through ASI alone, had risen more than $30 million in a nine-month period in 1982. Schomer, who never saw or spoke to Hubbard after 1975, says that when he became visibly troubled about these matters, he himself was subjected to a ten-hour "gang-bang sec check," an increasingly common experience among church members, which in this case included being accused of being a CIA spy, threatened with jail and physical harm and spat upon by Miscavige. Schomer is now suing Hubbard's estate, Miscavige, the Broekers and ASI for $225 million.
A particularly handy device to get money to Hubbard was back-billing the church for Hubbard's past services. According to Schomer and others, Hubbard's weekly gross income was the most important statistic kept by ASI, and it was ordained that the income keep rising. Explains Schomer: "[Say] last week's income for Hubbard was $750,000 and this week is down. In order to keep the graph on its vertical trend to $800,000, they would come up with the figure to be used and then find something that would justify that kind of money to Hubbard, like special courses or E-meters that he had once designed. Each item had potential values put on them."
The most remarkable transaction of all took place in 1982, when sources say Hubbard or his agents sold some of his copyrights for a reported $85 million (including $35 million said to be earmarked for his projected mausoleum) and donated his trademarks, which were also valued at $85 million, to still another corporation, Religious Technology Center. (This dual transaction created an offsetting deduction, thanks to the donation, which made the sale effectively tax-free.) The head of Religious Technology Center also happens to be the very same man who notarized the document that authorized a key part of the transaction - David Miscavige.
Altogether, Forbes can total up at least $200 million gathered in Hubbard's name through 1982. There may well have been much more. All this time Hubbard remained unseen by anyone in the church, from Franks on down. Only the three messengers were seen.
Yet the money machine was still grinding on nationwide and in some foreign countries. It soon developed that Hubbard had other books to sell - a seemingly endless succession of science fiction novels started appearing in 1982, reviewed by critics in less than admiring terms. Church officials publish these under the name Bridge Publications, paying Hubbard a royalty on each sale. Harvey Haber, who served as Hubbard's personal literary representative, says the order went out in 1982 to local Scientology missions and individual members to buy up specified numbers of copies. It added up, he reports, to tens of thousands of copies, many of them bought only to be warehoused by the church. Sometimes single orders for 20 or 30 copies would be placed. But usually neatly dressed young adults would appear in bookstores and buy 2 or 3 copies apiece of Hubbard's books, usually for cash. The first such novel, Battlefield Earth, soon began appearing on best-seller lists. Battalions of neatly dressed customers have been buying ever since. By now, most Hubbard books have appeared on several best-seller lists. Much of the buying seems concentrated on the B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks chains, which seem to be doing a land-office business, even while other bookstores nearby report little interest in Hubbard's novels. Millions in royalties were taken after 1981 in this fashion. All of this money went to Author Services, controlled by the messengers.
But Hubbard's old nemeses had not forgotten him. In late September 1985, the Internal Revenue Service sent a letter to the Church of Scientology, warning that it might indict Hubbard for tax fraud. But Hubbard may have had the last laugh.
Jan. 23, 1986 was the date on Hubbard's new will. It dealt with copyrights he still owned. They and any royalties would belong to a special L. Ron Hubbard trust. Hubbard's third wife was provided for. (Hubbard's son from an earlier marriage was long ago disaffected and disinherited.) And it set instructions for dealing with his remains. The body was to be cremated immediately following death, his ashes scattered. No autopsy was to be allowed.
Hubbard died the next day, on Jan. 24, according to followers who were at his deathbed. They called the coroner early on the 25th. The doctor who signed the death certificate, citing as cause of death a "cerebral vascular accident," gave as his address a medical center in Los Angeles that was founded by Scientologists. But there are those who believe Hubbard died in 1980, and still others who believe he died sometime in between. We may never know.
Shortly thereafter, the Associated Press reported that the Church of Scientology had announced that 99% of Hubbard's estate had been left "to the church." Sources say a policy letter was posted in Scientology offices across the country announcing who was now officially in charge: Pat and Anne Broeker and David Miscavige.
Since then, the Church of Scientology has been on a big marketing blitz, with heavy promotions on television and thick color inserts in newspapers on the life of Hubbard, "the greatest humanitarian in history." This promotes the books, the royalties on which go into the Hubbard trust.
The "church" itself, meanwhile, faces its strongest challenge for survival. Annual income, reportedly about $150 million in the early 1980s, is now thought to be half that in the wake of the purges. Membership is down. The church claims more than 6 million active members, a figure it has used for 15 years. But some defectors put the real figure at less than 50,000. Moreover, an IRS criminal investigation is gathering momentum in Los Angeles, and new litigation has flooded the courts. Awards for damage and personal suffering are being made, some in the tens of millions of dollars, to former members as well as external critics. One attorney alone, Boston-based Michael Flynn, has represented 25 ex-Scientologists and is giving advice on a class-action suit.
Hundreds of defectors worldwide have formed their own religions or for-profit auditing businesses, generally charging rates under $100 an hour. Among the new competitors is the man who once served as Hubbard's personal auditor, the much-revered David Mayo, who co-authored some of Hubbard's sacred texts and is now writing his own scriptures.
So, as the original enterprise shrinks, a new, ungovernable cottage industry grows up around it. It was created by the messenger's purges, and it further undermines the organization that the messengers inherit. If psychotherapy by lie detector really is a useful technique, there is plenty of competition around now, in effect called into being by the messengers' own deeds.
[Via Forbes Magazine (October 27, 1986) ]
Amid all the melodrama, at least $200 million in cash produced by his strange creation was gathered in Hubbard's name, and there is believed to be much more in organization assets: The Church of Scientology has proved to be one of the most lucrative businesses around. If Forbes had known as much as it knows now, after interviewing dozens of eyewitnesses and examining sworn testimony and court records in both criminal and civil cases, Hubbard would have been included high on The Forbes Four Hundred.
There is something that Forbes still doesn't know, however. It is something no one may know outside a small, secretive band of Hubbard's followers: What is happening to all that money?
Hubbard himself has not been seen publicly since 1980, when he went underground, disappearing even from the view of high "church" officials.
That's in character: He was said by spokesmen to have retired from Scientology's management in 1966. In fact, for 20 years after, he maintained a grip so tight that sources say since his 1980 disappearance three appointed "messengers" have been able to gather tens of millions of dollars at will, harass and intimidate Scientology members, and rule with an iron fist an international network that is still estimated to have tens of thousands of adherents - all merely on his unseen authority.
How could Hubbard do all this? As early as the 1950s, officials at the American Medical Association were warning that Scientology, then known as Dianetics, was a cult. More recently, in 1984, courts of law here and abroad labeled the organization such things as "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister and dangerous," while Hubbard himself was described as "a pathological liar" and "a charlatan and worse."
But the central fact is the money: hundreds of millions of dollars last seen in the form of cold cash or highly negotiable securities. "It's a perfect story about greed and lust for power," says William Franks, who was driven out of the organization in 1981, when he was the church's chairman of the board and its executive director international, the post Hubbard officially relinquished 20 years ago. "If you understand it on that basis, and stay away from the 'religious' aspects, it makes perfect sense."
A few facts about Hubbard's early life are known. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Neb. on Mar. 13, 1911. After serving in World War II, he wrote a 1947 letter to the Veterans Administration in which he complained of his "seriously affected" mind and "suicidal inclinations" and pleaded for help. Hubbard was nevertheless a moderately successful science fiction writer. In 1949, addressing a writers' convention, he reportedly said, "If a man really wants to make $1 million, the best way would be to start his own religion." In 1950 he published the book that would ultimately make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. In 1951, during his second divorce, Hubbard's wife claimed that he was "hopelessly insane" and that he tortured her. Three years later, his "church" was born.
It did not act much like a church. Through the 1950s and much of the 1960s, Hubbard emphasized the "scientific" nature of a therapeutic technique he invented. He called it "auditing." He said it could cure illness, restore sight to the blind and improve intelligence and appearance. Hubbard argued, in his best-selling book, that inner turmoil sprang from mental aberrations he called "engrams" caused by past traumatic events, and could be eliminated by identifying, recalling and reliving the events. Eliminate your engrams, eliminate your turmoil. A similar process is routine to most conventional methods of psychotherapy, a fact Hubbard presumably was aware of. On this unlikely base he built his $400 million empire.
Hubbard constructed a device he called an E-meter, actually a simplified lie detector, to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects go over intimate details of their past. Auditors (later also called ministers) would conduct sessions with this device and zero in on Hubbard's engrams. Psychiatrists say a successful session of going over long-suppressed traumas can produce a sense of personal relief and euphoria. That brought the troubled subject back for more, money in hand. Lots of money. A large organization began to form, with "franchises" around the country. There are a lot of troubled people out there.
Side by side with his "scientific" treatments, Hubbard pitched a body of religious beliefs - reincarnation and the like - and claimed tax-exempt status as a religion. It was not long before some of his auditing subjects were drawn into what became a fast-growing cult. Some of them became fanatics who would do virtually anything at Hubbard's command.
Unfortunately, the tax ploy and the big money drew the attention of the IRS: A ruling stripped him of his tax-exempt status in 1967.
But by then the money was so big Hubbard was able to buy a 342-foot oceangoing ship, the Apollo. On it, he withdrew from his government persecutors and cruised safely in international waters with an adoring retinue of followers. The IRS was later able to prove in court that he was meanwhile skimming money, at least $3 million in 1972 alone, and laundering it through schemes involving phony billings, a dummy corporation in Panama and secret Swiss bank accounts.
In 1971 a U.S. federal court finally upheld an FDA ruling that Hubbard's "scientific" claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing would no longer be labeled as a scientific treatment. But Hubbard was resourceful. The way around the ruling was to call the meters and auditing strictly "religious sacraments" and therefore beyond the FDA's reach. Hubbard's Scientology counselors had already begun calling themselves ministers. Now they took to wearing black and clerical collars. Chapels were constructed in Scientology centers around the country. "Franchises" became "missions," "fees" became "fixed donations," and "theories" became "sacred scriptures." The money got even bigger.
The system works like this: Prospects, normally spoken of as "raw meat," are offered a free 200-question "personality test" to determine whether counseling (which means auditing) is needed. ("Auditing is always needed," says one former counselor.) Scientology services range from a communications workshop for $50 to the more popular one-on-one auditing sessions that soon cost anywhere from, get this, $200 to more than $1,000 an hour. Special training courses go for $12,000 and up.
How can anyone, except the very rich, afford to spend $200 to $1,000 an hour on counseling? Plus pay for the books and other materials in which Hubbard did a lively side business? Some newcomers are encouraged to become "field staff members," who recruit new raw meat on the streets for commissions to pay for their own services - they get 10% to 15% of all services rendered to the piece of meat they bring in. Others go into the business side for a piece of the action. Since it is not uncommon for people to spend more than $100,000 over a decade for their salvation, "The registrars were making good bucks, buying Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes," says one defector, Bent Corydon, "and the best counselors were paid on a performance scale." Corydon, who once ran the biggest single Scientology mission, left in 1982 to start his own auditing religion.
For the less enterprising, another way to afford the religion is to sign a contract for up to a billion years (reincarnation, remember) and join church staff. After signing a note obligating themselves to pay for all services rendered in the event they break their employment contracts and waiving all rights to sue, these members receive free auditing, room and board, a structured and controlled environment, and a small allowance - less than $25 per week in the early 1980s - in return for labor that can average as much as 15 hours per day.
Ultimately subjects are "cleared" - that is, pronounced cured of engrams. But Hubbard was no dummy. He added more and more steps, each usually more expensive than the last, for his cult followers. Already, in the early 1950s, Hubbard found that the prior lives of individuals also required auditing by the hour. In the late 1960s, Hubbard had another revelation: Humans are actually composed of clusters of spiritual beings, stemming back millions of years. Now those spiritual beings had to be audited! Preposterous? Perhaps, but "eventually you lose the ability to even form a belief about these things," says a former high-level Hubbard aide, Gerald Armstrong. "Hubbard says, 'Jump,' you say, 'How high?' Hubbard says, 'I have new technology,' you say, 'How wonderful.'"
The "meat" would have successive, increasingly strange levels of "clearing" revealed to them only gradually, of course, and only as they seemed ready to "flow up the bridge," in the peculiar jargon that developed within the organization. In 1981 yet more new revelations were issued, but only after income from existing levels had dropped off. "If you don't have the money, you're a slave," sums up Howard Rower, a successful New York real estate developer who ran a Manhattan "mission" until 1983. "And if you have money, you're fawned all over until you don't have any money."
The good ship Apollo got filled with hundreds of the most thoroughly programmed of Hubbard's signees. On board, life became very peculiar. Frank Watson, a chiropractor then in his 50s, told Forbes he was thrown overboard five times, sometimes blindfolded, for minor infractions. The drop was 26 feet. One Tanja Burden testified she was required to serve at the age of 13 (both parents were Scientologists) as Hubbard's personal slave, helping him dress and preparing his toiletries. There are many more such tales.
And the money kept pouring in. But things started to get too hot for Hubbard. One by one, foreign countries began closing their ports. England, Greece, Spain, Portugal. France convicted him in absentia for fraud.
In 1975 he gave up the Apollo and touched down in Clearwater, Fla., which became another headquarters to go with the first one in Los Angeles. Hubbard evidently essayed a counterattack on his main persecutors: Former insiders say he had already gone underground for a year in a modest apartment in New York's borough of Queens while he planned a campaign dubbed Operation Snow White. This operation planted Scientologists in low-level positions in government agencies. It also sent followers to burglarize and rifle files or plant wiretaps. Adroit Freedom of Information Act filings by Scientologists caused the government to bring much of its evidence from its Scientology investigations into one office in Washington; his people then repeatedly burglarized the government's office, obtaining even those documents the government had no intention of releasing.
It was the discovery of this campaign that sent the startled G-men to Scientology headquarters, search warrants and sledges in hand.
Even though his fall guys insulated Hubbard from jail that time, he knew he was in trouble. "Hubbard told me at one time the biggest mistake we made was going religious and that we should have kept it straight as a business," says a former high "church" official who doesn't want his name used. "That would have avoided all the trouble with the IRS."
Besides the feds, Hubbard and his organization were getting sued by disaffected former Scientologists. In 1980 Hubbard went underground again, supposedly at a ranch in the small California town of Creston, a 3 1/2 hour drive north of Los Angeles. Not even Chairman and Executive Director William Franks, then administrator of the entire Church of Scientology, could speak to him or see him. All communications were via telex or written or oral messages carried back and forth by three trusted messengers - David Miscavige and Patrick and Anne Broeker, a husband-and-wife team. All three were young adults who had been indoctrinated for four or more years. According to defectors, Miscavige, whose father was a Scientologist, grew up in suburban Philadelphia and then England. Miscavige is said to have joined church staff at age 16, and reportedly has only a ninth-grade education. They say he is mean, a bully who acquired power through an ability to intimidate and an image he created that he represented Hubbard's wishes. In the early 1980s he was claiming to see Hubbard once a week. He joined with the Broekers, with whom Hubbard was presumably living at the time, and is now said to share power with them. Anne reportedly has a sixth-grade education and joined the organization when she was 11 (Bill Franks says he once taught the three Rs to Anne and others). She is said to be as ruthless as Miscavige. Pat, however, is said to have finished high school. He has been married at least three times and is said to have married his way up the hierarchy, with one Hubbard female aide after another.
Their credibility in the organization, however, was not total. "I truly believe that Hubbard really died in 1980 and that this involves a scam on top of a scam," the now-disaffected Chairman Franks told Forbes.
Now things really started hopping. The messengers and their agents - more formally, the Commodore's Messenger Organization, or CMO - soon took two major steps. One was an extensive two-year purge of the organization that drove away hundreds of longtime adherents. It was not hard. "Wild paranoia permeates the whole organization." says Don Larson, who served as the church's $25-per-week "finance ethics officer," for which read "enforcer." Larson claims he alone brought nearly 300 recalcitrant Scientologists to "Rehabilitation Project Forces" at Scientology centers around the world over a period of 14 months, until his own detention and departure in late 1983. "I was the hatchet man," says Larson. "I was responsible for all sorts of Gestapo-type stuff."
In these sadistic detention programs, staff members would be coerced into performing hard labor, eating leftovers out of buckets and sleeping on floors. Some were reportedly kept against their will.
The other move was to step up the flow of money dramatically. Among Larson's duties were levying fines on wealthy auditing subjects, whose intimate auditing sessions had been transcribed in writing, and forcibly dunning mission holders (franchisees) for millions of additional dollars for Hubbard agents. "In 1983," says Larson, "I manipulated a half-million-dollar inheritance out of Bob B------. He was naive as hell. D.M. [David Miscavige] called me up in the middle of the night [about Bob B------]. . . . He wanted the money.
"What's all this got to do with religion?" Larson muses. "I can't believe the things I did."
"The question was always how to get more money into Hubbard's pocket and how to hide that from the IRS," says Franks, who was responsible for investing about $150 million of church reserves in 1980, most of it held in foreign currencies. "There was literally cash all over the place. There would be people leaving from Florida for Europe with bags of cash on a weekly basis. There were hundreds of bank accounts." In 1981 Franks started taking Hubbard's name off these accounts as signatory - 15 years after Hubbard was said to have retired from the church - to hide the connection to church funds they represented.
Instead, much of the organization's cash reportedly wound up in the Religious Research Foundation (RRF), which former church members say was a Liberian shell corporation with bank accounts in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. RRF was set up by three otherwise unimportant board members who had submitted their resignations in advance. The RRF was used as a way station for money from the church to the unseen Hubbard's own accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Franks claims that RRF accounts alone totaled well over $100 million by 1981. "RRF was as good as Hubbard," says he.
In 1980 Laurel Sullivan, for seven years Hubbard's principal public relations official, was put in charge of an internal operation called Mission Corporate Category Sortout (Hubbard liked military jargon and organization), at the behest of Miscavige. Sullivan says she planned ways to juggle the church's corporations to shield the unseen Hubbard from legal liability and to ensure that the income lines to Hubbard from the church could not be traced.
A separate corporation called Author Services, Inc. (ASI) was formed to manage Hubbard's financial affairs and, apparently, those of the church as well. According to Howard Schomer, ASI's treasury secretary in 1982, he sent up through Hubbard's messengers weekly updates on Hubbard's net worth from ASI. Schomer says Hubbard was pulling in well over $1 million a week through ASI when he, Schomer, left and that Hubbard's net worth, through ASI alone, had risen more than $30 million in a nine-month period in 1982. Schomer, who never saw or spoke to Hubbard after 1975, says that when he became visibly troubled about these matters, he himself was subjected to a ten-hour "gang-bang sec check," an increasingly common experience among church members, which in this case included being accused of being a CIA spy, threatened with jail and physical harm and spat upon by Miscavige. Schomer is now suing Hubbard's estate, Miscavige, the Broekers and ASI for $225 million.
A particularly handy device to get money to Hubbard was back-billing the church for Hubbard's past services. According to Schomer and others, Hubbard's weekly gross income was the most important statistic kept by ASI, and it was ordained that the income keep rising. Explains Schomer: "[Say] last week's income for Hubbard was $750,000 and this week is down. In order to keep the graph on its vertical trend to $800,000, they would come up with the figure to be used and then find something that would justify that kind of money to Hubbard, like special courses or E-meters that he had once designed. Each item had potential values put on them."
The most remarkable transaction of all took place in 1982, when sources say Hubbard or his agents sold some of his copyrights for a reported $85 million (including $35 million said to be earmarked for his projected mausoleum) and donated his trademarks, which were also valued at $85 million, to still another corporation, Religious Technology Center. (This dual transaction created an offsetting deduction, thanks to the donation, which made the sale effectively tax-free.) The head of Religious Technology Center also happens to be the very same man who notarized the document that authorized a key part of the transaction - David Miscavige.
Altogether, Forbes can total up at least $200 million gathered in Hubbard's name through 1982. There may well have been much more. All this time Hubbard remained unseen by anyone in the church, from Franks on down. Only the three messengers were seen.
Yet the money machine was still grinding on nationwide and in some foreign countries. It soon developed that Hubbard had other books to sell - a seemingly endless succession of science fiction novels started appearing in 1982, reviewed by critics in less than admiring terms. Church officials publish these under the name Bridge Publications, paying Hubbard a royalty on each sale. Harvey Haber, who served as Hubbard's personal literary representative, says the order went out in 1982 to local Scientology missions and individual members to buy up specified numbers of copies. It added up, he reports, to tens of thousands of copies, many of them bought only to be warehoused by the church. Sometimes single orders for 20 or 30 copies would be placed. But usually neatly dressed young adults would appear in bookstores and buy 2 or 3 copies apiece of Hubbard's books, usually for cash. The first such novel, Battlefield Earth, soon began appearing on best-seller lists. Battalions of neatly dressed customers have been buying ever since. By now, most Hubbard books have appeared on several best-seller lists. Much of the buying seems concentrated on the B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks chains, which seem to be doing a land-office business, even while other bookstores nearby report little interest in Hubbard's novels. Millions in royalties were taken after 1981 in this fashion. All of this money went to Author Services, controlled by the messengers.
But Hubbard's old nemeses had not forgotten him. In late September 1985, the Internal Revenue Service sent a letter to the Church of Scientology, warning that it might indict Hubbard for tax fraud. But Hubbard may have had the last laugh.
Jan. 23, 1986 was the date on Hubbard's new will. It dealt with copyrights he still owned. They and any royalties would belong to a special L. Ron Hubbard trust. Hubbard's third wife was provided for. (Hubbard's son from an earlier marriage was long ago disaffected and disinherited.) And it set instructions for dealing with his remains. The body was to be cremated immediately following death, his ashes scattered. No autopsy was to be allowed.
Hubbard died the next day, on Jan. 24, according to followers who were at his deathbed. They called the coroner early on the 25th. The doctor who signed the death certificate, citing as cause of death a "cerebral vascular accident," gave as his address a medical center in Los Angeles that was founded by Scientologists. But there are those who believe Hubbard died in 1980, and still others who believe he died sometime in between. We may never know.
Shortly thereafter, the Associated Press reported that the Church of Scientology had announced that 99% of Hubbard's estate had been left "to the church." Sources say a policy letter was posted in Scientology offices across the country announcing who was now officially in charge: Pat and Anne Broeker and David Miscavige.
Since then, the Church of Scientology has been on a big marketing blitz, with heavy promotions on television and thick color inserts in newspapers on the life of Hubbard, "the greatest humanitarian in history." This promotes the books, the royalties on which go into the Hubbard trust.
The "church" itself, meanwhile, faces its strongest challenge for survival. Annual income, reportedly about $150 million in the early 1980s, is now thought to be half that in the wake of the purges. Membership is down. The church claims more than 6 million active members, a figure it has used for 15 years. But some defectors put the real figure at less than 50,000. Moreover, an IRS criminal investigation is gathering momentum in Los Angeles, and new litigation has flooded the courts. Awards for damage and personal suffering are being made, some in the tens of millions of dollars, to former members as well as external critics. One attorney alone, Boston-based Michael Flynn, has represented 25 ex-Scientologists and is giving advice on a class-action suit.
Hundreds of defectors worldwide have formed their own religions or for-profit auditing businesses, generally charging rates under $100 an hour. Among the new competitors is the man who once served as Hubbard's personal auditor, the much-revered David Mayo, who co-authored some of Hubbard's sacred texts and is now writing his own scriptures.
So, as the original enterprise shrinks, a new, ungovernable cottage industry grows up around it. It was created by the messenger's purges, and it further undermines the organization that the messengers inherit. If psychotherapy by lie detector really is a useful technique, there is plenty of competition around now, in effect called into being by the messengers' own deeds.
[Via Forbes Magazine (October 27, 1986) ]
Coffee Health Myths Explained
For a long, long time, researchers have been investigating the impact drinking coffee has on the human body. This article focuses on some of the more common misconceptions related to coffee and health. It is important to realize what the studies are actually saying and not to draw incorrect conclusions based on reading the study.
1. Unfiltered Coffee Increases Health Risks
Two recent studies have been published citing that drinking coffee which is unfiltered as in the French Press method are associated with an increase in LDL (bad) cholesterol and or homocysteine levels.
The first study, by Dr. Marina Grubben et al, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition was conducted in the Netherlands. It involved studying 64 healthy adults drinking six large cups of unfiltered coffee or another beverage during a two week period. The results showed that there was an increase in homocysteine levels of 10% in individuals who consumed the unfiltered coffee. They linked this to an increased risk for heart disease by 10%.
In another study, participants drank unfiltered coffee for two weeks and were compared to those who drank filtered coffee. There was an increase in serum LDL cholesterol of 2mg/dl for those drinking unfiltered coffee. After two weeks, they switched to filtered coffee and the serum cholesterol returned to baseline.
These studies, while interesting, don't tell us anything about long term effects. A two week study does not give us an answer to the long term risk of drinking unfiltered coffee. In the homocysteine related study, the control group didn't even drink coffee. Yet the way this has been reported is that it is healthier to drink filtered coffee. A more recent study has shown that homocysteine levels did not drop when drinking filtered coffee. There has been trouble isolating the cause. Is it the caffeine? Who knows? More research is needed.
2. Coffee Leads To Heart Disease
It has long been thought that coffee, as a stimulant, would lead to various forms of heart disease. The recent literature. however, suggests that coffee is safe in moderate doses. Recently, one researcher, Warren G. Thompson, M.D., noted in a 1994 literature review on this subject: "The largest and better studies suggest that coffee is not a major risk factor for coronary disease."
Additionally, a major study conducted by Willet, et al., examined data collected from more than 85,000 women over a 10-year period. Upon adjusting the data for known risk factors such as smoking, they found no increased risk of CVD for women who drank six or more cups of coffee per day.
A 1990 study by Diedrich, et al., looked at 45,000 men. It found no link between coffee, caffeine and CVD in men who drank four or more cups of coffee per day.
3. Coffee Causes Ulcers
Often times, when people see me drinking a cup of coffee -- they give the warning "You shouldn't drink coffee, it will give you ulcers." The thinking, until recently, was that excess stomach acid caused ulcers and that coffee would contribute to the stomach acid. Recent studies however show that most ulcers are caused by a particular bacteria, namely Helicobacter pylori . Those ulcers can be cured easily with antibiotics. An important distinction to make is that while coffee or spicy foods for that matter don't cause the ulcers, they may serve to aggravate existing ulcers.
4. Coffee Is Bad For Reproductive Health
Miscarriage, low birth weight, infertility. These are all commonly associated with being increased with coffee consumption. However, there has been little convincing evidence that a moderate amount of caffeine during pregnancy will cause these conditions.
Scientists have had trouble linking consumption of coffee to miscarriage. There are many confounders in this area. As an example, it has been found that women who don't experience nausea during pregnancy are more likely to miscarry. This could be due to them being less likely to stay away from foods and beverages that cause nausea. Therefore, coffee could be lumped in together with many other things that are consumed that should be avoided.
Low birth weight in children has not been proven even at high caffeine consumption levels in women. A 1993 study by Larroque, et. al., found that women who consumed more than 800 mg of caffeine daily had no greater risk than women who did not.
Furthermore, studies have also shown that women who drink more than three cups of coffee daily are at no increase risk of infertility or delayed conception.
Conclusion
Certainly, there have been many other studies conducted on coffee and health and many more will be performed in the future. But
1. Unfiltered Coffee Increases Health Risks
Two recent studies have been published citing that drinking coffee which is unfiltered as in the French Press method are associated with an increase in LDL (bad) cholesterol and or homocysteine levels.
The first study, by Dr. Marina Grubben et al, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition was conducted in the Netherlands. It involved studying 64 healthy adults drinking six large cups of unfiltered coffee or another beverage during a two week period. The results showed that there was an increase in homocysteine levels of 10% in individuals who consumed the unfiltered coffee. They linked this to an increased risk for heart disease by 10%.
In another study, participants drank unfiltered coffee for two weeks and were compared to those who drank filtered coffee. There was an increase in serum LDL cholesterol of 2mg/dl for those drinking unfiltered coffee. After two weeks, they switched to filtered coffee and the serum cholesterol returned to baseline.
These studies, while interesting, don't tell us anything about long term effects. A two week study does not give us an answer to the long term risk of drinking unfiltered coffee. In the homocysteine related study, the control group didn't even drink coffee. Yet the way this has been reported is that it is healthier to drink filtered coffee. A more recent study has shown that homocysteine levels did not drop when drinking filtered coffee. There has been trouble isolating the cause. Is it the caffeine? Who knows? More research is needed.
2. Coffee Leads To Heart Disease
It has long been thought that coffee, as a stimulant, would lead to various forms of heart disease. The recent literature. however, suggests that coffee is safe in moderate doses. Recently, one researcher, Warren G. Thompson, M.D., noted in a 1994 literature review on this subject: "The largest and better studies suggest that coffee is not a major risk factor for coronary disease."
Additionally, a major study conducted by Willet, et al., examined data collected from more than 85,000 women over a 10-year period. Upon adjusting the data for known risk factors such as smoking, they found no increased risk of CVD for women who drank six or more cups of coffee per day.
A 1990 study by Diedrich, et al., looked at 45,000 men. It found no link between coffee, caffeine and CVD in men who drank four or more cups of coffee per day.
3. Coffee Causes Ulcers
Often times, when people see me drinking a cup of coffee -- they give the warning "You shouldn't drink coffee, it will give you ulcers." The thinking, until recently, was that excess stomach acid caused ulcers and that coffee would contribute to the stomach acid. Recent studies however show that most ulcers are caused by a particular bacteria, namely Helicobacter pylori . Those ulcers can be cured easily with antibiotics. An important distinction to make is that while coffee or spicy foods for that matter don't cause the ulcers, they may serve to aggravate existing ulcers.
4. Coffee Is Bad For Reproductive Health
Miscarriage, low birth weight, infertility. These are all commonly associated with being increased with coffee consumption. However, there has been little convincing evidence that a moderate amount of caffeine during pregnancy will cause these conditions.
Scientists have had trouble linking consumption of coffee to miscarriage. There are many confounders in this area. As an example, it has been found that women who don't experience nausea during pregnancy are more likely to miscarry. This could be due to them being less likely to stay away from foods and beverages that cause nausea. Therefore, coffee could be lumped in together with many other things that are consumed that should be avoided.
Low birth weight in children has not been proven even at high caffeine consumption levels in women. A 1993 study by Larroque, et. al., found that women who consumed more than 800 mg of caffeine daily had no greater risk than women who did not.
Furthermore, studies have also shown that women who drink more than three cups of coffee daily are at no increase risk of infertility or delayed conception.
Conclusion
Certainly, there have been many other studies conducted on coffee and health and many more will be performed in the future. But