I recently stumbled on this interview with Alan Bishop from the sadly now defunct Arthur Magazine. Alan is probably best known for founding, along with his brother (guitar genius) Sir Richard Bishop and drummer Charles Gocher, the seminal group the Sun City Girls. The Sun City Girls were insufferable punks from Arizona who enjoyed taking the piss and played an unpredictable mixture Arabic, Asian, Gamelan, hardcore punk, and free jazz, (or occasionally incredibly sloppy covers of classic rock numbers) depending on how their modds. The SCGs came to a sad end when the groups when Gocher died of a mysterious illness, leaving Richard to his solo career and allowing Alan to focus on his other love: recording other people's music.

Alan Bishop (along with his brother, Richard) founded the label Sublime Frequencies, which periodically issues what can best be called travel soundtracks. They will record stuff they heard in markets, right of the radio and elsewhere and then walk around accosting the locals or anyone who will listen until they figure out who recorded what, and where they can find more. The label has put out everything from Tuareg music from northern Niger to Burmese pop music to Syrian wedding music to North Korean radio. Suffice it to say, they tend to capture stuff that no one else in the West is listening to. The labels' Group Inerane release: Guitars From Agadez Vol. 1 is a burst of loud guitars, hand clapping, feedback and aggression that makes Black Flag sound like Pat Boone.

What I think is great about Sublime Frequencies is that they edit bizarre and exotic stuff in a completely non-Orientalist way. The music is not treated as fetish properties or overly scholarly documents but rather as a collection of sounds presented within the context that they were (a) heard and (b) aspects of the culture they emerged from. The label does this without losing it's sense of humour. When song names are unknown (which is frequently the case), the label invents their own, often irreverent but still descriptive English titles. The liner notes also frequently make intuitive sense, though would never be the type of narrative expressed by ethno musicologists or most reissue labels. For example, Alan Bishop's notes to Princess Nicotine: Folk And Pop Sounds Of Myanmar: How do they do it? Are they smarter? Are they better? How can it be ignored or denied? How is it possible that one of the most unique, perfectly composed and performed, intense and awe-inspiring musical legacies the world has ever known is looming north of the equator physically tucked-between world cultural giants India, China, and Thailand, without more than a whisper from ethnomusicologists or those who define themselves as “purveyors of world music”? Not only are the roots of this music unique, but so are the results after incorporating outside instrumentation from modern colonial and (unavoidable) international influence. What the Burmese have done with a piano is so precise in the adaptation to their existing form and melody that one would think they invented it. Burmese music has a very distinct sound and whatever instrument is assimilated into its core only seems to magnify the original intent without depending upon outside ideas relating to each component utilized.And a clip from the music described below:

Or from the liner notes to the Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra compilation:The equator runs through only ten countries on earth and I bet that you cannot name them all without consulting a map. Indonesia is one of them and the only nation in Asia with the equatorial stripe impaling it. There are so many different cultures spread-out on this chain of islands that it would take several lifetimes to experience them all properly. Within this umbrella of diversity is one of the world's richest and most dazzling sound museums.In a way, what is being achieved with Sublime Frequencies is something very much akin to what Alan Lomax was trying to do: namely to document various musical forms, stemming from sources both folk and professional. Like Lomax, Sublime Frequencies is a vehicle for exposure to new musical sounds and ideas from people who are genuine enthusiasts for the music. The judgements are left to the listener. Further, Alan Bishop appears to be well aware of the political dimensions that music can take on, and specifically the political dimensions behind many of the SF releases.

An example of this can be found in the quotation below. Alan Bishop is discussing a couple of (then) recent compilations of music from North Korea and Iraq that the label had decided to release following Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Speech. Where questioned about whether people would obviously add political anecdote to their discussions of these discs, Bishop responded: We don’t worry about that. It is what it is. Everybody plays the role of an unqualified judge, so all that is routine now. When people start worrying about what other people will say about their work, they are dead and successfully under hypnotic control. Most people are not qualified to even discuss politics because they mimic what any dolt could hear from pundits on television. They are mimics, not free thinkers.We can see this continued engagement with representing aspects of musical culture from other Countries the US remains at odds with. A recent SF release features surf pop instrumentals from Pakistan in the 60s and 70s:

The type of music that Sublime Frequencies releases is not necessarily going to appeal to everyone - a lot of it has been released because it consciously sounds alien to Western audiences. That aside, it is impossible to deny the quality of much of it and it is great to see these musical ideas made available.

The final clip, below is from the Syrian wedding singer Omar Souleyman's live album. Souleyman plays a combination of traditional Syrian folk music and electronic music. His long travelling group includes an electric Saz player (a middle eastern string instrument - sort of a compact Oud) a keyboardist with sampler, and a poet and writer who whispers poetry into Souleyman's ear (while in performance) which Souleyman then transposes into song lyrics live.

It is often tragedy, outrage or joy that conspire to force one to write. Writing at it's best is a compulsion, with words pouring out in torrid waves and smashing onto the page. Words can be weapons, far deadlier than any sword, or they can be tools of diplomacy, the well crafted essay shifting the Zeitgeist and molding it as though it were something malleable. Very few writers can be said to truly matter - to have the necessary brain and talent to shift debate. This can be said all the more so for political writers: pamphleteers - the ill fancied bastard children of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and Orwell. Those that can make a difference are few and far between.

Christopher Hitchens was one such writer. For him, to write was a compulsion -an almost animal response to the world in all of it's joys, sufferings and inequities. At his best, Hitchens seemed able to meld tragedy, outrage and joy into a singular kinetic whole - a fire breathing prophet one moment, a demure coiner of witticism the next. The man could take complicated political, social or literary issues - score a cheap though frighteningly funny joke on the back of them - and make an often controversial point that forced one to come to recalibrate ones belief system. I certainly can't say that I agreed with him on everything, but Hitchens served as one of the architects of my intellectual foundation and I will remain indebted to him.

Hitchens liked to encourage the young, and clearly liked it better when one disagreed with him. The man clearly lived for intellectual debate and rarely lost. His skill at winning debates, and his ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - even in those rare occasions where the facts seemed to stand against him probably earned him as many supporters as critics. Yet there he was, always there with a striking and original one-liner and an opinion. Always an opinion.

I had the pleasure of meeting him twice. The first time was a drunken flurry of conversation and ideas - the man seemingly unfazed by mega doses of Johnny Walker as we, sitting on Monona terrace in Madison, Wisconsin one cold October afternoon managed to polish off the better part of a bottle of the stuff. The man was magnanimous with both his time and his whisky (although he did appear to drink most of the bottle with almost no debilitating effect whatsoever, while I was rapidly in my cups, so to speak). I still remember looking at him, even then, and thinking that he looked like he was made of some kind of parchment - the cigarette smoke and whisky clinging to his skin and infusing him with the essence of the pages of a book that he lived to turn. Despite the omni present booze and smokes, it was the love of the printed word that always was the most telling and that was perhaps his deepest addiction. Still he was no sedentary creature confined to a library - Hitchens was someone who exuded energy and who wrung from life everything it could give him and then some.

I met him again a couple of years later on a rainy night in Portland, he saw me in a crowd, astoundingly remembered me, served a refutation to the one point I felt I had bested him at years earlier and remarked how the dreary Portland rain overjoyed him because it reminded him of his boyhood in Portsmouth. Stubborn to end, but stubborn with purpose. I will , his have to write a longer essay about Hitchens' uneasy relationship with the Left, his flirtations with neo-conservatism and the rest. Despite this, even where I disagreed with Hitchens, I tended to respect his rationale for believing what he believed.

While his death seemed eminent for some time - very few people walk away from Stage IV Esophageal cancer (a malady which even if detected in it's early stages is often considered a death sentence) - Hitchens' death still feels like a shock. This may be because, for so long, he seemed to cheat the odds with his apetites for self destruction. Despite his diagnosis, part of me seemed to hold on to the belief that he would somehow cheat the odds and live to be 100 - if anything as an act of spite designed to give the incredulous a bloody nose. Sadly it was not to be. Wherever you are when you read this, raise a drink to Christopher Hitchens. The world will be a drearier, sadder and most importantly, less interesting place as a result of his passing.

Let us take pause for a moment and consider what may be the most important, and most missed point that Obama made during his visit to the Jay Leno show the other day: Obama views the Occupy Wall Street Movement as being equivalent to the Tea Party.

To wit quoth the President:

Look, people are frustrated. And that frustration expresses itself in a lot of different ways. It expressed itself in the Tea Party, it's expressing itself in Occupy Wall Street ... Everybody needs to understand that the American people feel that no one is looking out for them right now.So basically, both are manifestations of frustration - but in painting them with the same broad stroke it reinforces with a false extremist left vs extremist right dichotomy.

The reality of course is that Occupy Wall Street is that it is the first nominally leftist protest movement in a while, and has still yet to find it's principle cause, however is a means of for a lot of people who have been divested of a real future of systematic economic and social corruption to express their problems with that system. It is a form of political civil society in the vain of John Stuart Mill and with strong academic roots. The Tea Party meanwhile are a bunch of wealthy and middle income white people who want to pretend they are an aggrieved minority and drive back what little is left of the social state to satisfy their own short term games.

I know it's an election cycle and all, but common Obama, you can at least pretend to be part of the left.

"Anger cannot be dishonest." - Marcus Aurelius

This morning I woke up thinking I may be allowing the single most important moral imperative of my generation pass me by. Though I have been vocally supportive of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and have attended one in Portland – my lack of more in depth engagement with said protests is telling. My difficulty with engaging has more to do with a personal discomfort with mob mentality – I think sloganeering can be important to drive group solidarity - I just find it unpalatable to utter them. I also share Adam Curtis’ discomfort with individualist and heavily decentralized driven protest movements, as the lack of predefined goal and rationale dilutes message and allows for the easy infiltration and misdirection of a movement by opportunists and the nefarious. This was the very problem that is presently seeing the declared advances of the so-called 'Arab Spring' rolled back, while elections prove problematic in many of the involved countries.

At the same time, I feel that the re-engagement with ideas and the venting of anger and frustration at the appropriate targets is a necessary. The recklessness of Wall Street in particular and how the United States has conducted capitalism in particular has endangered the retirements and futures of much of it's population. The gradual regression of middle class incomes against inflation (something I talked about here) further intensifies matters. Why more ire is not being directed at the Obama administration - an administration which may even be more corporatist than that of the administration directly before it - speaks more about wishing to avoid feelings of culpability on the part of Wall Street protesters than anything. That said, it is time that this country began to look at what unregulated capitalism has wrought - both in terms of human and environmental costs borne elsewhere. I agree with Chris Hedges in his book "The Death of the Liberal Class" when he points to the fact that many supposed liberals have been co-opted by money and the capitalist system and have become apologists for powerful economic interests that practice institutional violence against the poor. The policies of the Obama presidency is clearly symptomatic as is the branding as an extremist of anyone who is willing to speak out about the disadvantaged in terms of economic policy. This is also clear in the terror of third-party candidates and the vilification of Ralph Nader as a spoiler, despite the 10 million registered Democrats that voted for Bush in the 2000 election is further proof that Nader is one of the few still willing to express ideas that run counter to what the modern American liberal consensus has sold-out to.

I think where the protests are most successful is in that they have returned, to some extent, conversations about Capitalism and most importantly social class to the fore. Thus, we have the rebirth of Marxist analysis of economic and political systems without the determinist trappings of applied Marxism. Marx may have been wrong about a good many things, however he at least presented a tangible counter ideology to free-market capitalism, which has proven itself a force similarly virulent to the old Soviet Command economies. The triumph of singular ideology is always going to lead to extremes and human misery because ideologies can never explain the complete picture and often, by nature, willing to sacrifice human beings at the expense of self-reaffirming. Pragmatism and competing notions of how to structure economies and governmental systems tend to lead to better outcomes in that they encourage us to look at data and develop systems that most effectively serve humanity in it's variety.

This dialogue is crucially important as so much of our culture has become commoditized. The death of Steve Jobs and his subsequent veneration says it all. Steve Jobs was an incredibly skilled salesman who managed to more completely integrate the seamlessness of consumerism and identity politics built around products into our lives. Instead, he seems to be weirdly regarded by many as a singular force for good in the world, despite his repeatedly documented unkindness and unpleasantness. That so many people seem to feel so strongly about someone who effectively sought to sell them more firmly on a consumerist lifestyle and asked them to define themselves through products (no matter how well designed) should be seen as chilling. Instead people seem to have expressed genuine loss - which speaks to the extent of Jobs' success. This has of course manifested itself in my generation with Hipsters - a vapid leisure class whose sole rationale for existing seems to be to define themselves by insuring that their consumer choices are cooler than anyone else. They, like the recent consumerist driven looting in North London, are the end-result of late Capitalism. Creatures that exist not to create, but only to destroy and perpetually consume.

Valid questions are being asked, in one form or another, by the Occupy Wall Street movement. These include not just questions about the Free-market capitalism, but also about the roll of higher education, whether institutions should be allowed to charge the usurious rates that condemn students to decades or even lifetimes of indebtedness to financial institutions and why a country of the affluence of the United States cannot create living wage jobs or provide adequate health care or affordable housing for much of it's population. Whether this movement will inspire to appropriate terror in politicians to shift thinking somewhat in Washington or if entrenched financial interests will find convenient means to undermine change remains to be seen. Economic ideology has been skewered so far to one-side of the debate that the centre may be beginning to come apart. This is cause of hope as it may prove to drive an eventual restoration of civil society altogether.

1951

At the Birdland club in New York Charlie Parker is onstage playing the tune "Koko" and incorporates the main theme from Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s "the Firebird" into his solo. Stravinsky, who is visiting New York, is sitting in the front row and spills his scotch in ecstasy.

Parker had tried to contact Stravinsky previously while on a tour of West Germany and had purportedly been playing bits of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in his solos, but before the New York club date, he had never managed to connect with the Russian composer.

Stravinsky would later go on to try to write Orchestral jazz pieces. They sound a lot like Gil Evans arrangements.

1982

It is April and The Clash have just finished recording what was to become their biggest selling album “Combat Rock.” The band are gearing up for a tour in support of the album, but are mired by internal strife. Drummer Topper Headon has a crippling addiction to heroin and is being told to either clean up or leave by the rest of the group. Meanwhile guitarist Mick Jones and front man Joe Strummer are locked in a battle for power for the ideological and existential future of the band. Manager Bernard Rhodes decides that what is needed is a publicity stunt to help sell the new album, and hopes the success of the new album may help bring internal cohesion to the band. It is decided that Joe Strummer would “disappear” for a few days, while checking in with Bernie throughout this period.

Strummer took this to heart, and really did disappear. He went to Paris for three weeks, without once contacting the rest of the band or Rhodes. When asked what he had been doing upon his return Strummer notes, “I grew a beard and ran the Paris marathon.” It was not Strummer’s first marathon - he had run the London marathon in 1981 and would run it again in 1983. His training regimen apparently consisted of simply drinking 10 pints of beer the night before the race.

The Clash would eventually collapse after the firing of Mick Jones by Strummer and bassist Paul Simonon. Headon had already been given the sack and the band had toured with their original drummer Terry Chimes throughout 1983. Strummer and Simonon tried to resuscitate the Clash with two replacement guitarists and a back to basics approach, but this failed miserably. Strummer would spend years in the Wilderness, doing soundtrack work here and there, before reemerging in the late 90s to some success with his new group, the Mescaleros. Jones would front Big Audio Dynamite. Strummer would die of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect at the age of 50 in December of 2002. It could have killed him at any point during his life. Strummer and Jones reunited at an impromptu gig only a week before Strummer’s death in support of higher wages for British firefighters. Both said that the old magic was still there.

For those that believed Dubai to be the final frontier in human hubris, The Guardian has put together a handy profile of holiday the ultra wealthy, the flagship projects being the 'space hotel' and new 'artificial countries'. The latte of these described as: "billionaires may soon be able to buy their own artificial countries – built in international waters on oil rig-type platforms – where they can indulge in their dictatorial fantasies." These artificial countries in particular seem to have taken a page (a-la the failed, 'World Project') from Dubai's already particularily bulbous book of projects that only those with far too much money and far too little sense might initiate.

The Guardian article continues:

Peter Thiel – who co-founded PayPal and who was one of Facebook's earliest backers – has revealed that he wants to create communities that would be run according to extreme laissez-faireideals. According to Details magazine, he wants to build artificial islands – based on oil-rig designs – that would be a "kind of floating Petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage and few restrictions on weapons." A billionaire's dream venture, in other words.

Indeed, the desire to build ones own floating oil-rig country strikes one as equal parts Machiavelli, PT Barnum and Ayn Rand at her most adolescent. The opulence and sheer wrong headedness of these endeavors has now left Dubai looking sheepish by comparison. Alas, with Dubai financially on the brink, how can they ever fight back against the opulence on offer. Is a solid gold pyramid suspended above the desert via maglev too much to ask? Come on Dubai: the world needs you to rise to the challenge.

1979

Elvis Costello is completely drunk at the bar at the Columbus, Ohio, Holiday Inn. He is sitting with Stephen Stills and journalist Bonnie Bromlett. Stills is deeply annoying Costello who in turn is going out of his way to be obnoxious in order to offend Stills. Stills keeps banging on about old soul musicians. In order to get Stills’ goat, Costello refers to Costello to James Brown as a "jive-ass nigger", then upped the ante by pronouncing Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant nigger". Bromlett is appalled by Costello's language and writes up the exchange in her column igniting a tinder box of media accusations directed at Costello.

Costello almost immediately apologized for the incident in the cold light of morning, indicating that he had only said what he had in order to annoy Stills and because he had been drunk. Costello pointed to his work with Rock Against Racism, and swiftly recorded 'Get Happy!!!': an album of largely obscure soul covers that went far to demonstrate Costello’s long-standing love of soul music – but controversy over the incident continued to follow Costello. In a Rolling Stone interview with Greil Marcus, Costello recounts an incident when Bruce Thomas was introduced to Michael Jackson as Costello's bass player and Jackson said, "I don't dig that guy..."

Costello remained mortified by the incident and declined an offer to meet Charles as a result of long standing guilt and embarrassment - though Charles himself had apparently long-since forgiven Costello ("Drunken talk isn't meant to be printed in the paper"). Costello’s ongoing championing of black music, from soul to jazz to blues would eventually see the incident put behind him.

One of the songs on Costello's 'Get Happy!!!' album, entitled ‘Riot Act’, deals with the incident.

1964

The Rolling Stones are recordings sessions at the legendary Chess Studios in Chicago. The label owner, Leonard Chess, tells the stones that there is someone who really wants to meet them. The Stones are taken around the corridor and into one of the studio rooms which is being painted. There they find Muddy Waters, paint brush in hand and white paint rolling down his face painting touching up the roof of the studio. Waters looks to at the Stones, laughs and says, “I like what you boys are doing with my music.”

Muddy Waters (born McKinley Morgansfield), like most black blues musicians, did not sell many records until the late 60s when a white blues audience, having their attention drawn by white rock groups like the Stones and the Beatles began to listen to the original versions of the blues classics that were the staple of many early rock bands. At the time that the Stones first met him, Waters would occasionally take odd jobs, when not working, to try to make ends meet. He lived in a very modest house in a working class neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. Waters, along with Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Little Walter and a score of others would be the first to electrify the blues, effectively inventing the template that rock and roll would be built upon.

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards would worship Waters - the Stones even taking their name from the Waters song "Rollin' Stone". Richards and Waters would eventually become good friends and Richards would actively advocate for Waters' music citing it as one of his main influences for picking up the guitar in the first place. Richards notes that whenever the Stones were in Chicago, he would stay with Muddy and his wife, where he fondly remembers that: “Every morning, you would be pulled out of bed, thrown in the bath tub, and shoved full of food – whether you wanted it or not.”

1955

High School music teacher Harry Colomby (who’s brother Jules worked as a recording engineer for Signal Records) was involved in the jazz scene in New York. He was watching Art Blakey & the Jazz Messnager play. Blakey was to come to Colomby’s high school the next day and play a concert for the students. Colomby had come to insure that Blakey knew the way to the school and the time that he was scheduled to appear. It was already 1:30 AM, and Colomby had to teach a class the next day at 7:30. At around this time, Thelonious Monk walked into the club. Colomby had met him before, but it took someone yelling “Hey Monk!” for him to make the connection. It took Monk a couple of minutes to recognize Colomby, but once he did, he asked Colomby if he could give him a ride home. Colomby said, okay, but that he had to be up at 6:30. Monk assured him that he just wanted to see Blakey for a couple of minutes, so once Blakey’s set had ended, they both went up to see him.

Monk proceeded to involve himself in a lengthy conversation with Blakey, much to the distress of Colomby. Finally, Monk tried to draw Colomby into the conversation:

“You’re a s school teacher?” Monk asked. “Yeah,” replied Colomby, “And I have to get up very early. I’ll probably only get an hour or two of sleep.” He added with a bit of a laugh. “You don’t need much sleep,” offered Monk, “Really, I haven’t slept for two days myself. You feel more alert with less sleep.”

Finally, Monk was ready to go at around 3:00 AM. As he was driving him home, Colomby noted that Monk was his favorite musician. Monk wasn’t receiving the accolades that he would later, but Colomby stated that he should just keep doing his thing and that he would make it big eventually. Monk seemed to like this, it was what he was planning on doing anyways, and by the end of the car trip had hired Colomby to become his manager.

Colomby would remain Monk’s manager for the rest of his musical career. Monk would gain enormous national prestige in 1964 when he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, one of only five jazz musicians to do so in the history of the publication. Colomby always referred to Monk as "a man of great personal courage and great dignity."

Those that know me well will know that I take certain perverse pleasures in outstanding acts of human hubris. There is something fascinating about processes, frequently by determinist ideologies, that drive the creation bubble economies built around perversities (the Dutch 15h century 'Tulip mania' is a favorite dinner party topic) or monuments to extreme arrogance or ostentatious wealth teamed with no sense (the mad proposals for Paris of Le Courbusier and the 'stupid buildings' of Dubai excellent example of the former and then latter). Wrong-headed attempts at social engineering may be among the most Schadenfreude rich. To wit, I've been reading a lot about I've been reading up a lot on Biosphere 2 recently (which came out of the commune and ecology movements of the late 60s) which I think is one of the more fabulous and flawed ideas that humanity has attempted. Biosphere 2 something of a pitch-perfect example of a fraught pseudo-scientific concept being used to underpin a crazed enterprise with disastrous results.

Housed in a stretch of the Arizona desert, a recent Cabinet magazine article on Biosphere 2 described it as:

...[A] three-acre complex of interconnected glass Mesoamerican pyramids, geodesic domes, and vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland, a farm, and a salt-water ocean with a wave machine and gravelly beach. This was Biosphere 2—the first biosphere being Earth—a $150 million experiment designed to see if, in a climate of nuclear and ecological fear, the colonization of space might be possible. The project was described in the press as a “planet in a bottle,” “Eden revisited,” and “Greenhouse Ark.The project caught the national imagination. Discover, the popular science magazine, declared the mission “the most exciting venture to be undertaken in the US since President Kennedy launched us towards the moon.” Tourists came by the busload to peer through the glass at the bionauts, trapped in their vivarium like laboratory rats (the project was an acknowledged precursor to the Big Brother reality-TV show). Over the first six months, 159,000 people visited, including William S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary.

Biosphere 2 had a prominent role in the most recent Adam Curtis documentary cycle: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. Over the course of that series, Curtis made the case that a false notion of ecology - notably that natural systems are in any way balanced - promoted a mechanistic (almost Descarte-like) view of the world that resulted in the creation of non-hierarchical institutions that failed to govern effectively, enabled the abuse of minorities and proved damaging in the long-run to the notion of a 'common good'.

In a promotional article for that series, Curtis provides a slightly different summary of the Biosphere 2 project and it's eventual collapse:

Biosphere 2 was a giant sealed world. Eight humans were locked in with a mass of flora and other fauna, and a balanced ecosystem was supposed to naturally emerge. But from the start it was completely unbalanced. The CO2 levels started soaring, so the experimenters desperately planted more green plants, but the CO2 continued to rise, then dissolved in the "ocean" and ate their precious coral reef. Millions of tiny mites attacked the vegetables and there was less and less food to eat. The men lost 18% of their body weight. Then millions of cockroaches took over. The moment the lights were turned out in the kitchen, hordes of roaches covered every surface. And it got worse – the oxygen in the world started to disappear and no one knew where it was going. The "bionauts" began to suffocate. And they began to hate one another – furious rows erupted that often ended with them spitting in one another's faces. A psychiatrist was brought in to see if they had gone insane, but concluded simply that it was a struggle for power.Then millions of ants appeared from nowhere and waged war on the cockroaches. In 1993 the experiment collapsed in chaos and hatred....

Curtis concludes the piece:

...At the end of Biosphere 2 the ants destroyed the cockroaches. They then proceeded to eat through the silicone seal that enclosed the world. Through collective action the ants worked together and effectively destroyed the existing system. They then marched off into the Arizona desert. Who knows what they got up to there.

What was so wrong-headed about Biosphere 2 was it was Utopianism projected onto non-scientific assumptions under the guise of being 'good' science. Like with many economic models, you can build as many fancy mathematical equations you want on top of a false assumption, but that hardly makes the assumption any more accurate. That biosphere 2 ended with a colony of ants - a 'superorganism' structured, surprisingly, almost as a fascist state* - obliterating an army of cockroaches and escaping into the wild is almost too perfect a metaphor for the whole endeavor. The arrogance of attempting to control and 'game' natural systems deserves no less.

Surprisingly, the near starvation conditions resulting from Biosphere 2's food production shortages and shortcomings were actually recommended and promoted by the doctor tasked with monitoring and advising the bionauts on their health and nutrition. The doctor you see had pioneered said diet and believed that it's test within the context of Biosphere 2 was proof of it's efficacy. After all, though the bionauts appeared half-starved and weak, they were relatively free of disease. To this day, there remains nutritional pseudo-cults that believe (admittedly with some evidence) that these diets may greatly prolong human life spans and guard against illnesses. One gets the feeling that the ascetic demands of the diet are such that, salubrious health affects aside, death may be preferable option.

Perhaps the most clear lesson is, as with the human race's experiments with Social Darwinism, Communism, Fascism, American style capitalism and other absolutist ideologies that promise Utopia of one sort or another - any belief system that relies on various rationale rather than pragmatism seem doomed to collapse under their own self-importance and hubris. The human desire to build Utopia seems to frequently result in dystopia instead.

Our finest achievements are indeed visionary, but are flexible and perhaps the best that can be said for them is that they succeed in meeting particular needs with limited maintenance. As our ability to 'know' natural systems, let alone control them is highly limited - thus our ability to effectively 'play god' also remains limited. Certain grand ideas can be effective, but they are not always the ideas that stir the public imagination. Because we think we can know everything, the solutions we arrive at tend to be those that play towards our desire for simple, or elegant solutions that sweep all considerations into a single, satisfying package. This is not how organisms or natural systems actually work however, creating a disconnect that can often be dangerous. Thinking 'big' is not the problem - thinking ideologically is.

As for Biosphere 2: after the 'bionauts' were eventually evacuated, the project went bankrupt in a cloud of disgrace. In the 90s it was resealed and resuscitated as a research station by the University of Arizona and the research project was eventually taken over by Columbia University in New York. While certain breakthroughs about how microclimates or biological phenomena operate in a closed system may yet be derived through the ongoing operation in some way of Biosphere 2, what remains most educational remains social. This does not simply constitute the break-downs and power relationships of the 'bionauts' while they 'manned' Biosphere 2, but rather the ideological system and thinking patterns that built Biosphere 2 in the first place. It may also be the hardest of lessons to learn.

__

*All insects are fascists, which was why Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers was so effective (almost more so the Paul Verhoeven film adaptation) - you were left wondering which society was the more totalitarian, that of the 'bugs' or that of the humans that waged war against them.

1952

Miles Davis, Max Roach and Charles Mingus are driving from New York to San Francisco in Roach’s new car. While Miles and Roach share a good rapport, both are annoyed by Mingus who talks a blue streak and continually accuses the two of being insufficiently responsive to the black rights movement. Because of Mingus’ large physical size and often terrifying temper (he is purported to have chased musicians around the studio with a fire axe, among other incidents) the other two humor Mingus. At one point Mingus poses the question:

“If you were to see an animal and you’re driving your new car, and the animal is in the street, would you swerve to keep from hitting him and crash your car, or would you try to stop or would you just hit it?

Roach responded, “Well, I’d hit the motherfucker, because what should I do, stop and get all fucked up if a car is behind me? Miles agreed with this logic.

Mingus angrily growled back, “See there, you got the same ideas that white people have; that’s just how a white man thinks. He would hit the poor animal, too, wouldn’t care if he killed him or not. Me? I would smash up my car before I would kill a little defenseless animal.”

Upon arriving in San Francisco, Roach and Davis thought that they were finally rid of Mingus, but Mingus needed to borrow the car. Roach leant it to him only to have a wheel sheered off by Mingus later that day. It transpired that, driving along, Mingus had swerved to miss a cat that had run into the road and had crashed into a fire hydrant.

1978

Joy Division, fresh from signing a deal with Factory records had holed up in Strawberry Studio’s in Stockport, England. Producing them was drug swollen and soon to be legendary producer Martin Hannett. As the band attempts to cut “She’s Lost Control”, Hannett becomes increasingly dissatisfied at what he is hearing being played by drummer Stephen Morris, who is playing a typical rock back beat. Hannett first had Morris change his drum pattern to that from the Ronnettes’ song “Be My Baby”, because he wanted something that sounded “colder and lifeless.”

Hannett remained unhappy with what is coming back through his speaker cans and, despite using one of the first digital recording boxes, continued to insist that the drum sound was “leaking”. Finally, Hannett ordered the drum kit taken apart, and a more minimal kit reassembled using pieces taken from the toilet, on the roof the studio. This proved to give the track the distinct, almost industrial sounding drum sound that Hannett had wanted for the band.

Joy Division singer Ian Curtis would later hang himself. The rest of the band would solider on, initially with vocalist Kevin Hewick, before guitarist Bernard Sumner took over vocal duties and the band was rechristened New Order.

Hannett would continue to produce records and pioneer new uses of recording technology before his eventual dug and alcohol fueled demise in 1991. At the time of his death he had exploded to over 360 pounds.

S&P, mustering 'foul and pestilent congregation of vapours' now appears to be threatening to downgrade France's credit rating as well. Paul Krugman appears to take issue with this in a recent blog post, and rightfully so. The French economy weathered the storm of the financial crisis well, showing modest growth, retaining jobs and organized labour has prevented the Sarkozy government from imposing serious austerity measures. The European Central Bank has done a great deal to assist the struggling Italian economy in a move to help stabilize the Euro. Certainly, France has not balanced it's budget, but this is because it is doing the sensible thing in times of recession by continuing social spending and thus insuring that money continues to move through the economy.

This said, it would appear that S & P decision is largely ideological. Has S & P drunk deeply of the Tea Party ideology and is now consumed by the notion of demanding deficits be balanced? I think the French economy is one of the safer economies to bank on. Their are several features holding the French economy back, but it is not as though France is pursuing policies that result in undue risk. It should also be noted that many of France's problems are more circumstantial than structural. All in all, S & Ps rumored considerations remain somewhat baffling.

1964

Iconoclastic Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould is waiting backstage at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, preparing to play a concert. He is approached by a janitor who wants an autograph. Gould obliges, writing across the 8 X 10 glossy photo of himself that he is handed:

“Glenn Gould, Los Angeles, April 10th, 1964: The Final Concert.”

Gould had yet to tell anyone that he was retiring from the concert circuit, though he had always stated that he preferred the level of control granted to him in the recording studio to live performance.

Gould would continue to record until just before his death in 1982. This output included not simply recordings of classical works - Gould also wrote and recorded radio programs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on non-musical subjects. Most notable among these was “The Idea of North”.

The Obama Administration has called for an an extension of tax-cuts in order to "stimulate the economy" in the face of ailing stock markets.* Because those ongoing tax-cuts for the wealthy has thus far been ever so-effective in stimulating the economy and creating jobs. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The administration's response appears to be a fairly compelling exhibit 'a'.

Meanwhile, economists overwhelmingly hold that increasing spending on social programs is a far better way to stimulate the economy and create jobs than tax cuts. Tumbling share prices and lack of investor confidence are all issues that would be rapidly remedied through a robust jobs creation program and stimulus programs that built or repaired public infrastructure and helped small-businesses gain access to lending.

I've previously written that Obama is far more in line with far right economic ideology, however, his lack of any comprehensible policy vision, a willingness to apparently muddle through is a very real problem. Obama's anemic positions have annoyed moderates, such as Robert Reich, as well as the progressives that elected him. Drew Weston argues meanwhile that Obama failed to create a pertinent national narrative that holds the financial industry publicly accountable, in the same way that Teddy Roosevelt and FDR did, and thus has avoided the policies that would naturally flow from that narrative. To me, one of the big differences is that both Roosevelt's were incredible people- strong charismatic leaders with strong, progressive agendas. Teddy Roosevelt in particular was something of a superhuman, capable of subsisting on almost no sleep and armed with both a photographic memory and near pathological need to win and push himself. Obama is simply not made of the same stuff.

Part of Obama's response may have something to do with a tendency, observed in neuroscience, that people, in the face of data that would disprove their positions, are more likely to retrench their positions than to head that data. If Obama is genuinely sold on the free-market capitalism that his economic team, notably Rubin and Geithner espouse, then he is likely to ride this wave of cognitive dissonance to electoral defeat to a Tea Party ideologue - like the illustrious Rick Perry. Such joy.

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*As as afterthought, as far as the current stock market palpitations go, I have to agree with Paul Krugman: why anyone should care what S & P should have to say about US securities, regardless of their rationale, when they only recently gave junk bonds 'A' ratings in the lead up to the current financial crisis, is something of a mystery. China is justifiably angry, but has been arguing that the US needs to live within it's means (and 'be nice to the Countries that lend it money') for some time.

With the grotesque business of the debt ceiling negotiations finally apparently concluded, and the far right largely triumphant - pushing nearly $3 trillion in austerity measures with no tax-increases - despite the foolishness implicit in trying to balance a budget during a recession - we should now, as Dean Baker argues here, turn our attention to what the economy is actually doing. Growth has all but stopped and unemployment has exploded. Baker notes:

On Friday, the commerce department released data showing the economy grew just 1.3% in the second quarter. Even worse, it revised down the first quarter growth number from 1.9% to just 0.3%. This means that the economy was growing at just a 0.8% annual rate over the first half of 2011. This is well below the 2.5% pace that is necessary just to keep unemployment from rising.Of course, unemployment has been rising, with the June figure hitting 9.2%. That is up from a post-recession low of 8.8% in March. The unemployment rate does not give the whole story, since many of people have lost hope of finding a job and given up looking for work altogether. The employment to population ratio (EPOP) – the percentage of the population with jobs – has fallen back almost to its low point for the downturn. The EPOP for African Americans has hit new lows in each of the last three months.Instead of worrying about US debt being downgraded on the Standard and Poor index by Moody's, perhaps politicians should be worrying about how to actually create jobs - most commonly done by governments through vigorous spending on social programs, infrastructure improvement or replacement projects and other stimulus programs rather than worrying about debt. The whole idea that there is some inherent benefit to a government always operating a balanced budget is non-nonsensical anyways, and current measures seem to be benefiting exclusively corporations who are (a) loathe to pay their taxes, and (b) cutting jobs anyways.

I'm getting tired of carping on about the economy on this blog. Everyone is tired of hearing me carp on about the economy. The problems remains, until we hold elected officials responsible, and require them to push a sensible program that would create jobs, require meaningful financial reform, require corporations and the very rich to pay their fair share of the tax obligation rather than continuing to play these increasingly dangerous ideological games that have no relation to how much of the population actually lives or how economies work.

The humanity has been ripped from people. It's time to adjust policies such that humanity is brought back into discussions about the economy, fiscal policy, taxation and programs expenditure. As the late Joe Strummer once wisely said: "Without people, you're nothing."

As we enter the 11th hour and 59th minute of furious deliberation on the debt crisis, Paul Krugman has made the most sensible point about the whole mess thus far: namely that the media's decisions to portray this debate in an even handed fashion despite the obvious extremist position that the GOP is taking.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion. So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

This debate has been so extreme that even David Brooks managed to see the forest for the trees for once, despite, true to form, rapidly returning to his overarching approach of 'even handedness'. As it stands, what is being pressed is pure heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, which is a bit rich. I think Boehner et al, are using their current stalling tactic as a means of pushing their plan at the last possible moment and try to pass it on the grounds that their is no way of coming up with an alternative. Never mind the fact that the Reid plan has been ready to go for some time and was scored more highly by the Budgetary Committee.Meanwhile, Dean Baker argues repeatedly that the Republicans will inevitably have to cut a deal as those most inconvenienced by the failure to raise the debt ceiling increase are Wall Street interests that the party is aligned with. Baker notes:

This fact is essential in understanding the endgame on the debt ceiling. Suppose that we get to the dates in August when the Treasury has reached the limit of its ability to shuffle accounts and literally can no longer pay its bills. Secretary Geithner will at that point make an announcement that in three days there is an X billion payment on Treasury bonds coming due. He will say that the government does not have the money in the bank and will therefore have to miss this payment.The markets will then go into turmoil. We will see the same sort of plunge in the stock market that we saw when the House voted down the TARP the first time back in September of 2008. At that point, the Wall Street boys will be screaming their heads off at Speaker Boehner and the rest of the Republican leadership. The news media would all be running clips with depression footage, telling us that another Great Depression looms just around the horizon.

Despite the intransigence of the Tea Party, one cannot underestimate the power of Wall Street. Besides, the Tea Party, despite their populist rhetoric, largely represent strong corporate interests at the end of the day and will eventually be made to bight the bullet and agree to something. They seem to merely be trying to agree to things on their own terms with a compromise only coming once a means of saving face in front of their base can be concocted.

One does get the sense, however, that Obama is not a strong negotiator. Then again, his position is already largely to the right, and as I have written repeatedly previously, he has done little to secure much in the way of progressive legislation, or even reign in the extreme right, over the course of his presidency. The administration's negotiation position in the debate runs something like the following clip:

The ongoing ridiculous debt ceiling debate (touched on in my last post) has further pointed to what many of us guessed from the onset about would be liberal messiah Barrack Obama, namely that he is clearly a creature of the far right. Yet the partisan nature of American politics has created a culture within which, for a leftist to point a finger at the failings of the administration, one is to commit an act of betrayal worthy of Benedict Arnold. It is similar to Christopher Hitchens' often-voiced complaint (some might say he never tires of repeating) that progressive people made the worst sorts of excuses for Bill Clinton while he was president, regardless of his lapses, either ideological or personal. I think this is a pertinent observation and that the tendency to make excuses for ones own 'side' frequently prevents politicians from not doing a better job.

To wit, Glenn Greenwald, in the pages of The Guardian has convincingly argued that the Obama administration is as determined as anyone to gut what have been the core of the the Democratic policy since the New Deal. As was pointed out to me by my friend Nick, the most prescient statement from within the whole piece may very well be the following:

The nature of American politics is that once a policy is removed from the partisan wars – once it is adopted by the leadership of both parties – it is removed from mainstream debate and fortified as bipartisan consensus. That is why false claims in the run-up to the Iraq war, endorsed by both parties, received so little mainstream journalistic scrutiny. And it's why the former Bush lawyer and right-wing ideologue Jack Goldsmith – back in May 2009 – celebrated in The New Republic the fact that Obama was doing more to strengthen Bush/Cheney terrorism policies than his former bosses could have ever achieved: by embracing the very terrorism approach he once denounced, Obama was converting it from rightwing radicalism into into the official dogma of both parties, and forcing his supporters to defend what were, until 2009, the symbols of rightwing evil.Greenwald hits the nail firmly on the head here. As we can see with the Clinton administrations' embrace of both free-trade and welfare reform within the 1990s, the moment an issue is co-opted by both political parties, it becomes official party dogma. I recall being repeatedly chided by fellow 'leftists' for asking questions of policies articulated by the inchoate and then latter Obama campaign. The sectarian nature of the response was shocking, especially during the (troublesomely ephemerally brief) debates about TARP. The venom that would be rapidly directed when one questioned exactly how the Democratic congress planned to help people keep their homes by giving hundreds of billions to the commercial banking industry painted questions asked about who's interest was being served, and why, with a mist of poison.

This may have had something to do with the issues at hand. Discussions of the economy and financial sector reform beget discomfort and quiet distress in many people. Many people simply do not like to talk about the finer points of fiscal policy because many of the loopholes that need to be closed are difficult to fully comprehend, (and thus easy to apply partisan sensibility to), and fear is being used as the primary vehicle by both Republicans and Democrats in any discussion of economic policy, acting as a catalyst for that discomfort. Secondly, a close examination of how the financial sector seems to influence political decisions seems to invalidate much of what people like to think about the democratic process. This challenges the very nature of what people think they understand about government.

After all, people have an understanding of politics that often the politician they support will pragmatically (or cynically, depending on ones outlook) cut deals with the opposition, where no one quite gets exactly what they want but a legislative docket is moved forward. They believe that, their elected officials, at base, share many of their deeply held political convictions. At the same time, the voting records and lifestyles of the majority of career politicians should lead us to believe that the priorities of these people are largely not our own - which is why the process of angrily and bitterly holding politicians accountable is so important. Instead of shouldering this responsibility, many have simply allowed their beliefs about how policy should be written to be ignored as their party- which has become the far greater cipher for self-identification than the actual issues - remains in office.

Obama remains a master of this process. By outlining throughout the 2008 presidential campaign center to far right political stances (with the odd scrap, usually on a culture war issue, thrown to progressives) while cloistering his language in that of the civil rights movement, he was able to create an image of genuine progressive leadership potential to many people, despite his very clear conservative stance on many issues. Obama, has been remarkably honest on the campaign trail in that he seems to genuinely attempting to carry out the policies he campaigned on. The distinction has been that people did not read his policy stances literally, and instead were captured by the rhetoric with which he articulated those policies.

This most clearly plays itself out in Obama's economic, and specifically, preferred taxation policy. Obama initially elected to last year portray, in this case inveigle, his decision to not end the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthy as a deal he had to cut with the Republicans in order to maintain welfare benefits for a few thousand Americans. This struck many as a terrible exchange, and further, by forgoing billions in potential tax-revenue, how would the federal government pay for those benefits? The current budgetary talks, where Obama has led by offering two trillion in austerity measures demonstrates just how deeply his commitment to assuring those welfare benefits really ran. This has been further compounded by an unwillingness to raise taxes in any meaningful way for the most wealthy. (I have written more about this here.) As Ezra Klein among others points out, Obama has absolutely no real interest in letting the Bush era tax cuts expire, thus any gamesmanship the administration may be locked into seems to be (if you will tolerate me abusing a metaphor) variances in which shades of grey hedge fund managers should get their next Brooks Brothers suit cut in. This is because Obama is hand-in-glove with the financial sector and thus asking for reasonable taxation rates for bankers and the other wealthy would prove pungent towards Obama's economic 'base'.

The most striking outcome is how similar both parties stances on the issues have become, largely because at the end of the day, they serve very similar financial interests. The federal government has become almost exclusively vehicle for advancing the interests of banks and the defense industry and that this has intensified, and become more nakedly apparent over the last couple of decades. I think that local government remains overwhelmingly a far more capable and willing to act in the public interest, but this is beginning to be eroded by a groundswell of economic conservative populism. Further, local government can only go so far. This aside, I think that people intrinsically are less willing to give up local government that national however because the sense of scope makes the fight feel more winnable.

The only natural solution to the these problems of governance then is to either try to force bottom-up change through progressive action by local municipalities while simultaneously doing what tired old Chris Hedges keeps advocating and voting for third-parties as a means of insisting on better federal policy outcomes. People remain complacent and an injection of anger, as Stephan Hessel argues, may be a necessary outcome, but this business of partisan co-option seems to indicate that this point of civic outrage may only come at a point when the social state is so badly eroded it may prove unrecoverable. One also wonders how well, or what type of policy demands can be articulated at any point when rationality has been abandoned in favor of the passions of a mob. Still, anger seems better than the present system in which beliefs are allowed to die through a grubby process of negligence then made to dance macabre, come election cycle, by way of sweeping oration and rigor mortis.

The notion that economies will somehow 'austere' themselves back into economic growth - perhaps best illustrated in the current budget negotiations in the United States and in the the emergency measures being undertaken in Greece - is perhaps the most damaging economic misconception being peddled today. The notion that drastically cutting already limited services, especially at a time when populations are more dependent upon them, is not only irresponsible, but represents a form of wishful thinking. Simply reducing spending, or balancing a budget, cannot in and of itself serve as an engine for economic growth. Indeed, deficit spending on large-scale stimulus projects in order to put people back to work - or to subsidize wages in the short run (as Germany recently did to great success) in order to prevent people from being laid off seems the best way to insure that money remains flowing through the economy. As Paul Krugman has repeated many times in his New York Times editorials, the economy is best served when people are capable for spending money. Simply cutting services reduces consumer spending possibility and makes everyone suffer.

More worryingly, the Democratic Party in general and the Obama administration in particular has continued down the neo-liberal route of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush Administrations. As Krugman has also noted, the Obama administration has effectively shed itself of it's real economic advisers, turned to ex-Wall Street insiders for policy formulation and pursued policies that have (a) largely been far more amenable to banks than to citizens, and (b) allowed the Republican party to insist on even more extreme cuts. Meanwhile, the nominal taxation rate for the richest 1% stands at a staggeringly low 31% and the US is well on it's way, as new research demonstrates, to becoming one of the least equitable countries on Earth. With that inequity, as the book The Spirit Level (previously discussed on this blog both here and here) indicates, is that we will be faced with the greatly elevated host of social ills associated with that inequity. Indeed, the notion that taxation rates may return to 35% for the top 1% of earners, generating potentially billions in revenue is being vehemently opposed by the Republicans in the debt ceiling debates, with the Obama administration seeming perhaps willing to cave into even these extreme demands.

Recent statements by Obama, such as:

“Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”There is clearly very little real difference between the type of statements that represent free-market orthodoxy, the very orthodoxies that have seen the financial industry bailed out again and again while the Middle and Working Classes are forced to pay the bills.

Matt Taibbi, in typical clear eyed form, has come to the following conclusion about the Democrats:I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that theywant to go into that briar patch.Late last year, the economist Joseph Stiglitz published a thoughtful editorial entitled 'Alternatives to Austerity' in which he came to a similar conclusion, outlining a very clear plan for how austerity measures might be avoided and the economy, through modest increases in the nominal taxation rate for the riches, disentanglement from foreign wars, and the closing of laws to prevent the financial industry from running rough-shod over regulators and the system as a whole would secure a healthier economy. He acknowledges that these solutions are unworkable because they would be certain to be opposed by those at the top and the financial industry as a whole.

Further, much as the Bush administration used raw fear as a means of garnering public acquiescence for their misadventure in Mesopotamia, current politicians are using debt panic as a means of advancing further economic policies that are beneficial to corporate interests but highly damaging for the public as a whole. Most recently these attacks have been launched as a means of stripping Social Security of funding. This was exactly the same mechanism of aspersion that was used to bail out the financial sector, first with TARP and then with the additional measures. The public was told that we needed to act before the economy melted down. Panic was sounded and instead of meaningful, measured and thoughtful response that might have saved people their homes and jobs, we instead press forward with a policy of further corporate welfare.

This is exemplified by the recent discovery (via a freedom of information request) that in 2008, Timothy Geithner lent Goldman-Sachs an additional $30 billion from a discretionary fund at .01% interest. This at a point in time where HUD was going wanting for a few hundred million to help keep people in their homes. This is the sort of act of government mis-use of public funds that can cause ones blood to curdle. Yet, in the face of this, austerity still remains the preferred government mechanism.

And of course, the austerity measures, without fail, hurt the poorest far more than they do the rest of the population.

I was recently sent the following article by John Lanchester on the current Greek crisis, where the full affects of this rush towards austerity as an economic balm is being felt. The article should be read in full, but Lanchester summarizes that most Greek's are only dimly aware of how their countries economic evils began, and do not feel to have personally enjoyed the fruits for which they are now being made to pay the costs. Further, austerity hardly represents a sound means of putting the Greek economy on sound footing and simply insures at least a decade of misery. To restate the point that I began this post with:

That was the old plan A, and it didn’t work. Papandreou made deep cuts across public-sector spending, but two things went wrong. One, the Greek economy kept crashing. Economists have varying theories about the practical effects of ‘austerity’, meaning sharp cuts in public spending. To an outsider, it’s a little alarming how they differ about something so big and basic as the effect of large public spending cuts. But if you ignore the economics and look at the history, it seems to be the case that you can’t simply cut your way to growth. (There are a couple of contentious counter-examples, but this is the broad rule.) Holding public spending flat while other parts of the economy grow is historically a more valid model – and, by the way, holding public spending flat is in itself a huge struggle, being roughly what Mrs Thatcher did in the UK. So the first problem was that the Greek cuts led to a worsening of the Greek predicament: the economy kept contracting, and unemployment hit a record high of 16.2 per cent. The second problem was that those richer Greeks who had never fancied paying their taxes showed no increased desire to do so, and, much worse, the state showed no new ability or desire to make them. Without the ability to raise more tax, the old plan A was invalid.And thus, we shall see the poor continue to have crucial services cut cruelly and inhumanely from beneath them while the structural problems implicit within the financial system that wrought the current financial crisis remain ignored and we continue taxation and recovery policies that serve exclusively corporate interests. It's enough to make one sick. If there was hope for the Obama administration to embrace it's rhetorical progressive stance, now would be the time for it to prove that this is the case. Instead, the administration is hamstrung by it's corporate largess. The dishonesty is chilling.

A recent article on sovereign debt article represents precisely a regular gripe I have with The Economist. To me, the magazine advances a prose style that comes across as completely anodyne while advocating for economic policies that positively bellicose in their affirmation fundamentalist Chicago-school economic policies. This is done seemingly despite their reportage suggesting very different conclusions be drawn. Despite the rather clear picture we have now that extensive de-regulation of markets got us into the current economic mess, the magazine seems delighted to continue to cheer for it on the grounds that rapid capital flow is always a good thing. Any economic problem, no matter how complicated, seems to be solvable through further deregulation, regardless of cause and regardless of how non-intuitive that response may be. It is as if the articles are written and then the editors return to insert seemingly unrelated conclusions that reaffirm the magazines ideology.

To wit, their argument is flawed in that 'a' does not follow 'b': after stating that the high savings rate, a result of higher regulation, more difficulty in moving money and reserves requirements under the Bretton-Woods system, was instrumental in allowing for rapid debt elimination following World War II, the article then goes on to state that:

Fortunately, the financial world is a far more liberal, multipolar place than it used to be. The Bretton Woods system fractured amid the inflationary pressures of the 1970s, around the time the rich world embarked on a three-decade process of financial liberalisation. Capital now flows quickly and easily around the world in search of high returns. New regulations in the West have done little to change that. China, too, is easing its financial controls. It is difficult to imagine how the genie of liberalisation can be stuffed back into its lamp. (Emphasis added) Thus, as always with the magazine's reasoning, easing financial controls - despite what the article just told us, is somehow, sans explanation and taken as a matter of orthodoxy - a good thing and any problems or costs borne of that process should be borne by populations through painful austerity measures. To The Economist, the fortuitousness of deregulation allowing for the easy flow of capital across markets should not distract us from the fact that it was perhaps that easy flow of capital that allowed for massive increases in consumer debt and the elimination of savings that undermine the ability of economies to recover from debt. Try to follow that logic.

What follows is testimony to be delivered tomorrow evening before the Washington County Boards of Commissioners:

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As a transplant to Oregon some 14 years ago, what I have found so compelling about the state, and which has rooted me here is the natural beauty of the place and the willingness of legislators in the state to protect that natural beauty. In the Portland area, this has traditionally gone beyond simply protecting natural amenities, but also in controlling urban sprawl such that engorge itself upon the surrounding agricultural land. As many urban theorists, including Lewis Mumford and Murray Bookshin have noted, cities work best when they are ringed by surrounding agricultural land that supplies those cities with food and green space. By historically protecting agricultural land from development through comprehensive land-use management across the wider Portland area via Metro, Portland has been able to mitigate urban sprawl, re-invest in itself as a vibrant city, and enable Portlanders access to locally produced foods and wines.

Dense urban development, including access to local foods and wines are important today – they enable mass transit linkages and make cities more generally sustainable. As fuel prices continue to rise, and as formally sprawling, car dependent areas across the country, such as Detroit, find themselves forced to contract in size – the wisdom of the Portland model for controlling urban growth proves to be all the more apparent. Our land-use policies should reflect the urbanization choices and opportunities of both the traditional city and of the future – dense urban development with preserved agricultural land - rather than those simply of the last 50 years. It is for this reason that the urban and rural reserves process currently being undertaken by Metro is crucially important. It is also why I feel that Metro is making an enormous error of judgment in designating some 352 acres of the Helvetia area as an urban reserve area.

The Helvetia area to the immediate North of Hillsboro represents an important example of an active agricultural area that supports the Portland area and helps to make Portland the City that it is. According to the Oregon Department of Agriculture, Helvetia boasts the best soil in the state currently given over to cultivation (other areas with equivalent soils have been paved over, and thus ‘lost’ for cultivation). It also boasts a vibrant local wine industry – a point that is especially important due to the primacy the state places upon protecting Oregon Pinot Grape cultivation. Helvetia represents an important breadbasket for the Portland metro area – and one which will continue to prove more important as time goes on. Additionally, the Helvetia area, due to its stunning natural beauty, is also well-loved by those in the Portland area seeking respite from the city and is a popular destination for cyclists.

The idea that much of this area could easily be transformed into suburban strip development and suburban homes through the extension of Hillsboro is jarring and should be rejected as poor policy by both Washington County and by Metro as a whole. I take no quarrel with the need to allow for some urban growth beyond the current urban growth boundary, and feel that the urban and rural reserves designation process outlined by Oregon Senate Bill 1011 represents a sound mechanism for which to go about determining future urban growth areas. Further, I understand full well that, as identified by Harvey Moloch, Cities are ‘growth machines’ and that Hillsboro feels compelled to grow in some way – however agricultural land preservation is a stalwart of the Oregon idea, and this sort of encroachment into rural areas currently proposed represents a rejection not only of the legacy of former governor Tom McCall, but also of Metro’s very raison d’etre.

Indeed, the inclusion of Helvetia within the proposed urban reserves designation was previously rejected prior to Ordinance 740 and the reopening of the reserves designation process. Residents of Helvetia, preservation organizations - including 1000 Friends of Oregon and others had protested the inclusion of Helvetia within the reserves area last year. Indeed, all of the 624 acres the county and Metro identified in 2009 as suitable for growth north of Cornelius were rejected last fall by the state Land Conservation and Development Commission. A workable compromise had been largely agreed upon by all involved parties that would protect Helvetia from development pressures.

All that remained was a final vote on the process, which was scheduled to occur this past November. The elevation of former Hillsboro mayor, Tom Hughes, to Metro President has changed this. Hughes, in his roll of mayor of Hillsboro had long called for the inclusion of Helvetia as an urban reserve and he opted to enact a Byzantine law in order to reopen a process that had, after much conflict been largely agreed upon. Indeed, this move appears in many ways hubristic – the closeness of the election for Metro President hardly gives Hughes a mandate to enact whatever policies he would like, and I find it to be a violation of the Democratic process and the consensus derived agreement that had previously been achieved.

Ordinance 740 was derived through a single nine and a half hour meeting from which many of the affected stakeholders were absent from the table. This new ordinance changes some 352 acres east of Groveland Road from undesignated to urban reserves (Area D) and leaving only around 233 acres west of Groveland Road as undesignated. This proposed process of urbanization would destroy the community presently within the Helvetia area. It would strip Helvetia of its agricultural riches and transform the area into featureless suburbia – what James Howard Kunstler calls “the geography of nowhere”. Indeed, the unease of numerous metro counselors in adopting this process speaks to the likely negative impacts of the process. Councilor Carlotta Collette noted that "It's only with deep reluctance that I do this." This hardly represents the ringing endorsement of process that Hughes portrays this as.

Further, the rationale for preserving the remaining 88 acres on the northwest corner of Helvetia Road (near the interchange as urban reserves (Area 8B)) in last year's Ordinance 733 was said to be put aside to accommodate interchange improvements. This designation also appears to be unnecessary as road improvement can occur regardless of designation and the designation to designate this 88 acre corridor enables urbanization on the north side of the Sunset, opening up the rest of the area to urbanization. As a result, this too seems to be a bridge too far.

It is for these reasons that I strongly urge Washington County to uphold the democratically agreed upon consensus that was arrived upon in Ordinance 733 and to reject Ordinance 740. To do anything else would be to both disrupt the Democratic processes within the state and hinder the long-term resilience of the greater Portland area while simultaneously depriving it of one of its greatest natural assets.

Photo thanks to http://mikasavela.tumblr.com

Christopher Hitchens once posited something to the effect that one could tell that life was no longer worth living when one no longer woke up angry. Nonagenarian French resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, seems to have taken this adage to heart with with the recent publication of his 13-page pamphlet entitled Indiginez-Vous! Hessel's argument is a clarion call for the left. It elevates several issues dear to the left: destruction of the environment, Israeli colonization of Palestine and the gradual erosion of the public sector, and demands response to these issues in the form of non-violent resistance.

As the New York Times notes, Hessel's biography as a resistance hero and as a co-author and signatory of the International Declaration of Human Rights is part of what gives Indiginez-Vous! it's importance. Hessel's long-standing modesty and belief in privacy further strengthens his case. Hessel himself notes that much of what he is saying in the pamphlet are simply the things that many left-wing people believe and likens the moral imperative he felt to resist the Nazis as similar to the impulse one should feel in engaging with many of the pressing issues of the day. He is right in this, but the surprise success of Indiginez-Vous! speaks to a certain deficiency within the left that has traditionally been filled by important moral thinkers especially in highly literary societies like Hessel's native France where writers are frequently elevated as public figures. Additionally, many writers are creatures of the left. Thus, the loss of literary moral guidance has undermined the ability of the left to act. This is a point that has been well-addressed by the late historian Tony Judt in his essay on Albert Camus, The Best Man in France and in his last book published while still alive, Ill Fares The Land.

Judt, who died of Lou Gehrig's disease last year, argues that Camus presented an important moral touchstone for French, and wider western society. While many of Camus' philosophical works were not particularly well regarded, his novels and World War II era journalism, appearing largely in the underground newspapers Résistance and Combat, while Camus was active in the French underground, have helped to inform the moral sense of much of post-war Europe. Camus' moral clarity in the face of fascism, colonialism and other pressing issues catapulted him to a position of preeminence in French society. Judt argues that, despite the erosion of Camus' stature within French literary circles over the second half of the 20th century, the surprise success in the publication of his incomplete, autobiographical novel The First Man in the early 1990s (at the hight of the decadent and corrupt Mitterrand years) spoke to a long-standing need for moral guidance. Thus Camus, in some way returned from the grave to reignite the fires of moral leftism, much as Hessel, now in his late 90s has again done so.

France, however, is a country, that while at times growing complacent has never fully lost it's revolutionary zeal. The public sector unions remain strong in France and frequent strikes prevent the impingement of basic rights, liberties and Social Democratic tendencies in such a way that France, despite well-over a decade of Conservative control, and the rise of the far-right in the form of the odious Jean-Marie Le Pen has never lost it's residual leftist resonance. Indeed, the French Revolutionary ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité have never become watered-down platitudes in the same way the Democratic constructions of the American republic have been.

The Fourth Republic has not always embodied those ideals: the deportation of the Roma - a source of supreme injustice and anguish noted by Hessel - a clear example of failing to live in accordance with them. Despite this, the basic provision of health, education and public services for a population must be tantamount within a just society. These are all ideals traditionally of the left, with Social Democracy being the great social compromise created by the World War II generation as a means of preventing the collapse of civil society that led to that war and it's inhuman cruelties. These institutions are currently what are under attack by the right and remain, to my mind, things worth fighting for.

The erosion of Social Democracy and the grand institutions of the state, which had previously served as a bulkhead against iniquity and despair for many, are at the center of Judt's book, Ill Fares The Land. Similarly to Hessel, Judt argued in favor of traditional leftist beliefs and for re-engagement with the roots of those beliefs. The deregulations of Reagan, Clinton, Thatcher and the two Bush's and others paved the way for the naked greed worship of the financial sector and the loss of civic sense. The free-market ideology of Clinton in particular, taken with the administration's decision to cave to Republican demands and gut the welfare and social security systems has permanently shifted the debate. With the Democratic Party in the United States traditionally serving as the party of social security institutions, Clinton managed to permanently shift the party away from it's traditional base and into the same free-market, exploitative abyss as advocated by Reagan.

Especially shocking in the number of former hippies - a traditionally leftist faction - that would go on to vote for Reagan. However, the emphasis on the self, and the rejection of traditional institutions that characterized the hippie movement, should have even proven telling. While certain institutions overthrown were traditional vehicles of racism or repression for minority groups, the underlying emphasis on the self, on Dionysian pleasure-seeking above all else eventually led to a reaffirming notion of self-efficacy at the expense of all else. This is a point argued by Judt, and taken a step further by the French novelist Michel Houllebecq. Houllebebcq argues, in his novel The Elementary Particles, that the eventual logical outcome of the orgiastic self-worship that characterized much of the 1960s and 70s, was violence in the form of self-indulgent, De Sade-esque serial killers. The paradigm has eventually merged with that of nakedly individualistic paradigms, and, as Adam Curtis argues convincingly in his documentary series The Trap, warped our sense of freedom.

The destruction of the welfare programs that provided basic services to the indigent has proven especially telling in affirming, to many, the narrative of the Right within the United States which largely ascribes virtue to avarice and equates vast material wealth as an entitlement to those most fit. This paradigm is vulgar and destructive to the very fabric of good civics, it leaves most of society out, yet it continues to prevail. This ideology has spread such that, even with the ever present Elephant in the room of Anthropogenic Climate Change, which threatens the ability of all of us to meet basic needs, we as a society remain unwilling to engage as a society and give up certain material wants in order to insure a viable future.

Further, media continually feeds us a master narrative that encourages further consumption, degrades the poor as being in some-way unworthy and encourages further propagation and worship of the idea of the individual at the expense of society. It achieves this by perverting facts, in it's focus on the fringes and by continually pulling the twin levers of fear and greed in the levels it pulls. The shift away from standard reporting and towards talk radio and blogging degrades straight reporting and hinders science-driven public policy by enabling various agendas - frequently those advanced by moneyed interest - often cloaked as news to predominate.

We also have an element of gawking, in which celebrity has been further elevated and has driven dissociation from events and from each other. We have come to identify with the singular rather than with the collective. Thus even acts of charity become referendums on the greatness of the individual - and thus we have been given the celebrity missionary that I have previously addressed here and here.

Belief in the public sector has been largely swept aside by the twin brutalities of individualistic neo-liberal economic policies and the selfishness of public sector bureaucracies - many of which have begun to act merely for self-preservation than for their intended purpose of providing basic services. However, the attacks on these bureaucracies by the far right, which in America has become the mainstream right, elucidates their need for self-preservation.

Thus we have seen the rise of the Tea Party within the United States. The Tea Party is the ultimate vehicles for self-edification. It creates a bizarre duality by which upper middle class white people adopt an attitude of victimization. They genuinely begin to feel that they are some kind of aggrieved minority despite their holding absolutely every advantage within American society. They then utilize this notion as a rationale for tearing apart what remains of the public sector. They seem to genuinely seek the dismantling of even the last vestiges of social equity and basic social services.

Thus we see the attack on public sector Labor Union in Wisconsin - unions that largely exist to provide the basics for retirement to people that have given their careers to serving the public. The movement seeks to demonize the public service and characterize them as greedy leeches upon the tax-payer. In reality, the public sector is largely comprise of talented people who selflessly forgo greater financial rewards to thanklessly help educate, provide basic services for, or improve society as a whole. These are people who seek only security and a decent retirement in return for their sacrifice. In the United States, this is one of the last remaining enclaves of the compromise that created the New Deal and the policies that have helped so many to realize their potential. The Tea Party threatens to wipe this out and to thrust us back into the ages of deregulation and destitution for the disadvantaged. Effectively, they seek to eliminate the notion of society altogether.

Hessel's few words then are important because they glide, knife-like into the festering belly of injustice. They are an elucidating blade crafted to help return steel to the left. Hessel's pamphlet, though not particularly well-written, resonates because it articulates a vision of what the left used to stand for and what it appears to have lost.

My grandfather though of a slightly younger generation than Hessel was similarly moved. His belief in opposition to the evils of fascism, and belief for equal justice were unshakable. When World War II broke out and claimed his native Belgium, he was only 17. He had tried to run away from home several years earlier to fight against Franco in Spain. The war stripped him of his childhood but never his sense of humor. Like Hessel, my grandfather was imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp, escaped to serve in the French Resistance, and unlike Hessel, eventually joined the American Army and saw action in the Battle of the Bulge and elsewhere.

The genuine compassion, even for the Germans he fought against, and the dedication to social justice that my grandfather quietly carried is true of many Europeans of a certain generation. The promise of social democracy was that it, as Judt noted in Ill Fares the Land, created a system, driven by compromise rather than deterministic ideology that genuinely created a better world. The institutions of the state were developed in accordance with empathy and understanding with the generation returning home from war developing these institutions in order to create security and opportunity for all thus mitigating future reasons to go to war. Despite decades of degradation of the social state, it remains a set of ideals worth fighting for.

As Albert Camus said:

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.This should be the stated view of the left. Rather than a dull focus on avarice or material acquisition, it is our interactions with each other and our common humanity - that will enable us to tackle the social issues of the day - that allow us to realize that grandeur.

The ability of urban planning to continually renew itself and to rejuvenate old ideas can be breathtaking. This is certainly the case with the pilot EcoDistricts Initiative currently being implemented in Portland. The EcoDistricts are existing city districts for which new environmental and sustainability technology s being implemented. The technologies include the latest in green building technologies- and in one case, the 'living' building (that I previously posted about here), district energy (which is when heating a cooling systems stretch across the whole of a district through shared pipes, thus allowing for centralized efficiencies) and new solar and wind platforms.

Each of the five pilot EcoDistricts represents a different type of area and community. Portland State University (PSU) is an inner-city University, while the Gateway neighborhood is a predominantly residential development. The five pilot programs can be seen below:

What each of these districts have in common is that they are all urban redevelopment districts (URDs) and thus each is open to Tax-Increment Financing (TIF) which allows for far greater flexibility in the types and scope of projects that can be built. Further, each is developed around existing transit corridors - with connectivity between EcoDistricts and the wider Portland area preeminent as a planning consideration. Future potential projects include the 'Foothills' development in Lake Oswego (assuming the Portland to Lake Oswego transportation project, aka the Lake Oswego Streetcar is built), the Portland Zoo and parts of Beaverton.

Development in each of the districts, while being held to certain environmental standards (the idea behind the EcoDistricts is that they be ecologically sound) is to largely be determined by the existing communities and through various community directed initiatives. The idea behind this approach is to merge new technologies (characterized as 'hardware') with a strong ecological civil society component (characterized as 'software'). What this means is that, communities will be empowered to make changes, within certain ecological and environmental frame-works.

Additionally, instead of treating each of these districts a though they are discrete, the EcoDistricts projects seeks to derive development ideas not simply from the community within the EcoDistrict, but also in how the districts interact (through transit corridors) with the wider urban core. The rationale for selecting districts around predominantly light rail and streetcar linkages was to further reaffirm regional linkages while advancing ecological, technological, developmental, equity and civil society goals. How well these goals are achieved, and how well the disparate communities seize the opportunities that this project affords them remains to be seen.

One of the things that is most interesting to me about the EcoDistricts is that the program appears to be a modernization and rehabilitation of an old planning idea: Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities. Howard laid out his ideas in the slim volume To-morrow: A Peaceful Path To Real Reform (later reprinted under it's more commonly known title, Garden Cities of Tomorrow). Howard articulated a view of 'garden cities' small communities built around the concept of a fixed community size, stratification of sectors but including a wider mix of uses and guaranteeing access to nature. The idea was was to prevent urban sprawl and to allow for livable, walkable communities distinct from the slums of Victorian London. Each of the Garden Cities (of which two were built in Britain: Letchworth and Welwyn) was to include employment, residential space and commercial space. Unlike the EcoDistricts (which encourage mixed-use development) these were to be separated but near by each other.

Most commonly missed in discussions of Howard's idea however, was the notion of regional rail linkages that would tie the garden cities to greater London. This omission was in part due, as the planning historian Peter Hall notes in his Cities of Tomorrow, to a failure to reprint all of the graphics included in the first edition of the book in the Garden Cities of Tomorrow version. The omitted map made clear the wider regional connections. These regional rail linkages were what was to make the idea work.

Connection of the garden cities with a larger Central City allowed from greater flexibility of uses within a given garden city, specialization of industry (allowing for wider regional economic linkages) and wider environmental vitality. While the notion of environmentalism, as we hold it today did not exist in Howard's time, the notion of preserving green and agricultural space, and of protecting people from pollution (particularily the smog and acidic fogs of Victorian London - a product of a coal based industrialization process) certainly did. The idea of the garden cities was to provide respite from the worst excesses of inner city industrialization while preserving green space through comprehensive land management and planning directed development while still retaining strong regional transportation and socio-economic linkages with the central city.

In a way then, this process is very similar to the EcoDistricts. Certainly, the EcoDistricts encourage some cutting edge technologies, however, many of the planning tools used in the development of the garden cities were cutting edge for their time. Further, they took advantage of the rail lines, which were the ultimate symbols of modernity at the time. This notion, in some way persists with the re-emergence of streetcars and light rail within urban areas - and which are the vehicles from linkages between EcoDistricts and between EcoDistricts and inner-city within Portland.

Similarly, the notions of regional planning and comprehensive land-use that characterize the Portland regional planning model (and make Portland a case-study for planning practice across the United States) were brought to Portland by architect and historian Lewis Mumford, who was inspired by the garden cities of Howard along with the regional planning models of the Scottish land-scape architect Patrick Geddes. Mumford had urged Portland to adopt regional planning models stretching across the river and into Vancouver as far back as the 1950s, long before Oregon's comprehensive land-use laws came into effect with the creation of the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) under the governorship of Tom McCall in 1973 and the eventual creation of Metro, the metropolitan governance model that has managed development in the Portland area since 1979.

With the EcoDistricts, we can see certain logical extensions of many of the older planning ideas that have long characterized Portland. Indeed, the EcoDistricts are large driven by new green building technologies and planning ideas, however the notions that underpin them remain old. With the absence of much heavy industry in the Portland area (and with industry being, as a whole, far cleaner than it was during the Victorian period), mixed-use development, rather than stratification of uses has become the preferred method of development.

However, the underlying idea behind both the garden cities and the EcoDistricts in livability. This is a notion that will continue to characterize planning and inform urban development patterns well into the future. The trend towards re-urbanization is one that may encourage other old planning ideas to return. Dubai, through it's seemingly endless appetite for large-scale monumental (some, including me, would say "stupid") buildings seems to have embraced the City monumental movement, despite the obvious environmental and ecological violence that seems to characterize many of the buildings.

As some of the development that we see, particularily in Asia, continues to be out of scale in ways that would irritate the urban theorist Jane Jacobs, certain notions of livability through human-scaled development and strong regional transportation linkages are being reaffirmed elsewhere.* The EcoDistricts represent the rehabilitation of one such idea. Perhaps others are also due for reconsideration.

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* This is not to say that all-large scale building development is bad. The urban economist Edward Glaeser makes a compelling case for large buildings, particularily in Asia in his recent book Triumph of the City. Glaeser gives Jane Jacobs some credit but notes that she was not right in all of what she said in her seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

My good friend, Nick "Arkan" Meyers, has started a blog, "Completely Reasonable". His first post on Thomas Friedman is worth reading. It is as good a deconstruction of Friedman's tendency towards the specious as you will see outside of a Matt Taibbi column.

For the record, I think the Friedman column raises a number of questions, notably: what is going on here? Google Earth? The Beijing Olympics? The Various [Proper Noun] "Factors"? Is he trying to title the next Robert Ludlum novel? Do any of these 'concepts' that he appears intent on linking have anything to do with one another? Do they have anything to do with the Arab uprisings at all? Does the mustache now do the bulk of the thinking?

Nicholas Kristof's most recent New York Times column, "Is Islam the Problem?", has stirred much controversy. In the column, Kristof addresses the issue of, preeminently, capitalist development in the Middle East. He begins with the position that the Arab world historically served as the seat of scientific and intellectual preeminence and has, since 1200, declined to a secondary position to the West. Kristof's column is largely a summary of the research of Timur Kuran, who examines various Islamic rationale for the lack of capitalist economic development in the Middle East, much of which Kristof, using Kuran, debunks.

Kristof's critique then, for what it is, is a fairly mild one. He concludes, quoting Kuran, that:"Islam isn’t the problem and it isn’t the solution, it’s simply a religion."Despite this, Kristof was taken to task on Twitter by Devika Bakshi. Bakshi argues that much of Kristof's piece relies on "obscured assumptions and specious claims". She notes that Kristof's piece advances Western-style economic development as a logical and desirable end-outcome without considering cultural differences. She also accuses Kristof of unfairly asserting the Arab-world to be backwards, stating:

Easy to call another system backward when one assumes one's own as civilizational apex and measures all others else against it.

This may be a bridge too far, as the sole point in Kristof uses the term backwardness in his column is as follows:

Many Arabs blame outsiders for their backwardness, and cope by rejecting modernity and the outside world. It’s a disgrace that an area that once produced outstanding science and culture (giving us words like algebra) now is an educational underachiever, especially for girls.

Despite this, Bakshi's critique seems to ring true. Kristof seems to be guilty of using Orientalist precedents about progress in history betraying a notably Western-centric orthodoxy. Further, Kristof seems to have developed a complex whereby he expends many words in defense of Islam (as he did in this column and in his critical review of Ayan Hisri Ali's most recent book) while taking a jaundiced view of Arabs and Arab leadership as a whole (as he did, most famously in his attack on Yasser Arafat, linked here and previously critiqued by me here).

Kristof seems to lack genuine cultural understanding of Arab political or cultural positions in general. Kristof does raise some important considerations: I agree with him that inequitable treatment of women - especially in an educational system- needs to be addressed, as despite various cultural justifications for it, it undermines self-determination and self-efficacy for women in many Arab countries.

This does not necessarily mean that simply defending Islam from it's critics represents anything of a more nuanced position. Kristof seems to have conflated not critiquing Islam with genuinely understanding Arab peoples, culture and motivations. It also ties his hands in adequately rending critique in cases where particular reads of Islam may be suspect. His emphasis on using 'white savior' figures in his narratives further undermines his credibility (as per the rationale suggested in my "Troubles with Foreign Aid" series of posts).

In the end, it is almost as if Kristof has adopted the trappings of developing wider cultural understandings without actually doing so.

Debates about food systems are very much in vogue at the moment. These issues are especially salient because they include numerous linked corollaries, including everything from public health, legal issues, globalization, resource security, climate, social justice and others. The industrial food systems that many Americans are dependent upon are in many ways non-sustainable, require food to be shipped thousands (limiting local resiliency in the face of crisis), are controlled by corporate interests who have hindered the ability of farmers to alter practices, and are contributing to obesity and other health problems.

Further, the industrial food system is further supported by a gargantuan program of subsidy that serves as a form of corporate welfare that further limits the extent to which medium and small-scale farmers (the very farmers the subsidies are said to be in place to benefit) can compete. Things seem to be very much amiss within our wider food systems - problems that journalists and social critics such as Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, (the latter of who's work I have reviewed here) have brought to the fore of the general consciousness.

An especially controversial issue is that of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). GMOs have seen proponents and critics across the board. Especially among scientists - there is little consensus. Some scientists see GMOs as a means of improving both crop yields and food security, while others view them vehicles for continued corporate control of food production. Some countries, notably France and Japan have banned GMOs and GEOs (Genetically Engineered Organisms) entirely. There remain a multitude of questions around the genetic safety of GMOs as well as to the extent to which scientists can safely tinker without reducing us to mono-cropping.

Thousands of previously eaten grain, fruit and vegetable varietals have already disappeared as a result of the industrialization of our food systems with varietals selected frequently because they travel well and keep for long periods of time rather than for taste. Some in plant science argue that they are in fact improving plant safety, and it is unfair to claim that what they are doing is creating 'Frankenstein crops' as they are most commonly just altering or introducing one or two genes. However, many of the changes made by large-agricultural business companies has been to transforms perennials into annuals, thus driving farmer dependency upon companies for seeds every year - for which in many developing countries, usurious rates are charged - and diminishing overall food system security

The ability of large argro-business firms such as Monsanto to patent genetic material and then sue farmers for cross-contamination is problematic. It is highly dubious as to whether a firm should even be able to patent genetic material or a gene sequence within food. As most crop-varietals have already undergone millennia of genetic manipulation by farmers through cross-breeding, in order to improve yields and improve crop edibility and robustness, it seems farcical that a company - and most simply use software to highlight genetic strains in plants that share common features and then seek a patent - should be able to patent plants at all.

Cross contamination regularly occurs accidentally when wind carries seed from trucks as they travel down the road. Monsanto meanwhile regularly (and illegally) collects soil samples from farms in order to demonstrate cross-contamination and thus infringement upon it's patents and then litigate. This has resulted in mass protests against attempts by large-seed companies, especially in developing countries such as India where farmers, as a result of litigation by Monsanto have committed suicide.

This controversy is further compounded by large-scale illegal agricultural subsidies that benefit many of the large agri-business companies in the United States. These subsidies effectively serve as a mechanism of corporate welfare, especially for those companies that are actively suing farmers, when ironically, organic farmers should be suing them for contamination. As Joseph Stiglitz notes in a recent editorial:

Corporate welfare accounts for nearly 50% of total income in some parts of US agro-business, with billions of dollars in cotton subsidies, for example, going to a few rich farmers, while lowering prices and increasing poverty among competitors in the developing world.

Clearly the status quo remains unacceptable, and if farm subsidies are to exist they should be to the benefit of the small and medium-scale farmers for whom the subsidies were initially envisioned.

Perhaps the most vocal and eloquent critic of GMOs and the current corporate led globalization of food systems is Vandana Shiva. I have long been an admirer of Shiva and have recently had the pleasure of seeing her speak several times. Shiva posits that agricultural systems need to be re-localized and organic. She is a proponent of urban agriculture and speaks at length about the problems associated with corporate driven agriculture systems which are exploitative of farmers. Shiva's extensive scientific credentials, strong rooting in her locality, sharp sense of humour and general sense of righteousness make her a ferocious opponent to Monsanto and other large agri-business companies.

Perhaps Shiva's greatest strength is that her righteous indignation is tempered by effective activism. Shiva has developed a seed bank in her native India to insure that farmers have access to many of the crop varietals that they have traditionally eaten. In this way, Shiva is changing the world and how we interact with our food system.

As the realities of peak-oil, general fuel price volatility and the impacts upon food prices for bio-fuel production, Shiva's advocacy for the re-localization of agricultural production appears to address the frequently overlooked elephant in the room. Knowing that many of these issues will be further compounded by anthropogenic climate change further strengthens her position.

Perhaps the greatest problem with GMOs is that they represent a short-term solution as a means of improving crop-yields and developing resistance to particular pests, however in the long run, they merely further wed us to an agricultural system that is ailing and that cannot serve us in the future. Though one may quibble with some of Shiva's positions, one cannot help but feel that she is certainly on the side of history. It would be fools errand to not heed her warnings and implement policy that is responsive. Otherwise, that daily question of 'what to eat?' may become all the more pressing.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed a pair of articles I wrote here on the topic of gun control were picked up by Gun Pundit. I have a few exchanges with various gun rights fundamentalists that commented on my posts. None of them appeared particularly interested in what I was writing or in responding to the studies that I repeatedly pointed them to, with one of them finally dismissing all studies on the dangers of guns to have been discounted in a grand meta-study - for which the poster who cited it appears unwilling to name or send me a link to. The main interest then has been to advance an ideological point - namely that nothing should impinge the rights to private gun-ownership whatsoever.

Once I discovered where these stray commentators were coming from, I started checking-in periodically on Gun Pundit because I was curious. Despite the typical shop talk and mulling over the minutiae of various weapons specifications, what emerges is a rather chilling world view. Certainly posts detailing open-carry laws on college campuses have been disturbing, but three recent posts in particular each demonstrate something galling about the views of the self-stiled 'responsible gun-owners' who visit the site.

Post 1, on the subject of an automatic border guard/gun on the North/South Korean border sees the principle blog author, Murdoc, entering into a sort of lazy moral equivalence:

Not really an option for the Mexican border, but I could be convinced otherwise. Yes, the Mexican border is not the same as the North-South Korean border. But it’s still an important border to control. Too bad more politicians don’t think so. [Emphasis added]

So here in a single statement, though we see the seed planted for an idea, then dismissed but just as quickly reopened as an option. The implication here is that, the Mexican-American border is not really a war zone, however perhaps it would not be too much a stress to plant automated sentry cannons. While the author does not come out completely in support of this statement, he remains open to the idea.

Never does it seem to enter his mind that such a device would effectively exist to murder impoverished Mexicans, many driven into the US as a result of illegal American agriculture subsidies which allow for the dumping or surpluses on the Mexican market which undercut local producers (despite higher overall production and environmental costs).

Effectively, what is being said here by the author is that he could be convinced that Mexican peasants should be treated as though they are in the middle of a war zone. The vulgar and dehumanizing subtext of xenophobia within this post speaks for itself and it is ugly.

Post 2, on the subject of carrying a shotgun into the library via open-carry laws seems to carry a several self defeating logics:

Sure, points will have been made. Those points will be remembered for about three minutes, unless it’s a point good for the anti-gun crowd, in which case the point will be remembered forever and ever as a basic truth about guns. Like the basic truth about how guns are twice as likely to kill a family member as an intruder in a home defense situation and the basic truth about how no one needs a semi-automatic assault weapon for anything except killing people. You do not dilute opposition and win allies by irritating and intimidating and scaring people. You’ve got to be smarter than that.

Murdoc here quotes an earlier post, however the context remains the same. What is telling about this post is that he seems to note that guns are indeed harmful to the general public, however, the roll of responsible gun-owners should be to show the way forward. While I appreciate that Murdoc seems to advocate for fewer abuses of open-carry laws as a means of intimidation - and that he seemingly through syntax-error seems to agree with me that guns are dangerous to the public as a whole - the underlying problem to me is not that people abuse open-carry laws but that gun laws in which abuse of spirit of the law can constitute carrying a loaded shotgun into a public place in the first place is the bigger problem.

Murdoc's conclusion that: "You've got to be smarter than that." gives away the game. Clearly, he is ideologically alright with people carrying loaded shotguns into public libraries but is deeply concerned with winning the public relations war as seething liberals (like myself) tend to seize of this type of thing.

Post 3, detailing Chicago's recent population loss, titled 'Rats from a sinking ship' is also quite confusing. Blog Author Murdoc cites another blog that states:

This will mean loss of representation for the city, which strengthens the pro-gun position in Illinois, and weakens the anti-gun position.

Before Murdoc himself concludes:

Sooner or later, Chicagostan is going to be allowed back into the Union.

Despite the seeming tautological redundancy of the first statement (strengthens/weakens) this post seems to imply that the City of Chicago has somehow separated from the Union and formed it's own country - however this nation's independence is deterministically timestamped. Or perhaps it is merely that Gun Pundit sees fit to unilaterally dismiss whole municipalities from the Union that do not share it's proclivities. The title of the piece alone implies a gloating almost adolescent triumphalism in response to implied social attitude changes that have been stated largely without evidence. These are some very strange causal links that have been implied here.

On the whole then, as strange as it was to have had my piece held up as "typical liberal irrational fear of guns" by Gun Pundit - never mind that this blog's readership is quite small and that I am not a policymaker or public opinion shaper - it has been even stranger to spend the time to digest some of Gun Pundit's content. In some ways, it was almost flattering to be held up as the anti-thesis on everything believed on the site. At the very least, I am starting to understand the rhetorical and ideological weirdness Sadhbh Walshe must have to wade through every week in order to file her column.

In approaching the subject of Colonel Qaddafi and the current protests in Libya, it is hard to know where to begin. The title of this piece is, after all, something of a misnomer. The titular Colonel in the Marquez novella No One Writes to the Colonel is a man isolated through his heroic non-complicity in the corrupt and violent political system around him. Qaddafi on the other hand is isolated due to semi-heroic embodiment of such as a system in the face of impossible odds. As Qaddafi's position becomes increasingly untenable he appears to retreat ever further into the maddeningly contradictory persona that he has created for himself. Indeed, perhaps it is his role as something of a clown, replete with his grandiosity and which is in turn isolating, that prevents people from taking Qaddafi as seriously as they should.

My experience in meeting the Colonel (I would say conversing, but you never really have a conversation with Qaddafi, it's more that he talks at you) has left me feeling perennially compelled to respond to the man. In my initial piece, I noted that I found him to come across as a far more reasoned thinker than many of his critics would state and that much of the bluster was for show. Qaddafi has, as of recent, done everything from calling for the abolition of Switzerland as a result of some minor slight by the Swiss in response to gross illegality by Qaddafi's family members operating in Switzerland to repeated attempting to import Italian models as part of cultural tours with the aim of converting them to Islam, in some vainglorious and inane attempt to cosmetically 'improve' the Libyan gene pool.

Despite his very obvious megalomaniacal tendencies, his willingness to express his moods through awful sartorial hyperbole and the seeming pedantic weirdness of his response to recent events in the Middle East - his response to seeing both Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali ejected from their countries on Fridays was to weirdly abolish the day of Friday from the calendar - Qaddafi has largely responded to protest movements with a steely violence reminiscent of Hafez al-Assad's destruction of the town of Hama in response to an assassination attempt on his life. Despite Qaddafi's idiosyncrasies making him something of a figure of mirth, his actions force one to take him very seriously.

Certainly, the hundreds of unarmed protesters that have been murdered by Qaddafi's security force speak to this. The regime has resorted to shooting, on-site, anyone found on the streets of Tripoli, grinding a city of two-million to halt in a noxious and brutal fit of pique. The regime had previosuly stated that peaceful protesters "risk suicide by army hands" a notion that is as chilling as it is oxymoronic. Additional reports have alleged that the regime may be employing West and Southern African mercenaries against it's citizenry to avoid qualms from within the military to prevent qualms from being voiced regarding orders to murder fellow Libyans. Indeed, many of the shooters are apparently soldiers from Chad integrated into the military as a means of thanks for supporting Qaddafi in his foreign escapades their during that countries protracted civil war. Qaddafi has declared that he will not leave Libya peaceably under any condition and that he will "die a martyr".

While Qaddafi's clinging to power has been of the utmost vulgarity directed against Libyans, it has also affected international events. Libya pumps some 2% of the World's oil and as oil companies and field workers have fled the country, international oil prices have climbed sharply and stocks have dropped. In the 40 years since Qaddafi seized power in Libya, his regime has, to it's credit invested many of these oil revenues into services and improvements for many, however, the Colonel's increasing weirdness has limited further improvements and hurt the plight of Libyans, as has his tendency towards isolation in the face of his failed expansionist ventures. Qaddafi's actions, especially his seeming contempt for those he governs, and his rather limp acknowledgement that he could understand the anger of young towards his regime that they "should be forgiven for being mislead" after being caught up in the movements to depose nearby regimes - increasingly undermine whatever claims to legitimacy Qaddafi may have still had.

While no one may write to Colonel Qaddafi, in something of the sense that Marquez expressed, certainly we will remain compelled to write of him. Qaddafi's staggeringly barbarous response to the popular Democratic protest movements by Libyan's to rid themselves of this crazed and petty tyrant indicate what should have been clear all along - despite the entourage of Amazonian glamour-model bodyguards, Bedouin tents in Central Park and nonsensical bombastic pronouncements - Qaddafi is certainly a figure who must be taken deadly seriously.

Below is an article I have tried, and failed to flog to all manner of magazines and publishers for several years. I've more or less made peace with the notion that it will never get picked up by a magazine, either respectable or otherwise (especially now that traditional long-format journalism appears to be pitiably convulsing in it's death thralls) I decided to post the piece here.

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I

Pontius Pilate remains one of the most despised figures within the Biblical canon. He has been charged with ordering the crucifixion of Christ - an image that has been joyously co-opted by Christian religionists and transformed into a macabre badge of their faith. This vilification of Pilate for said crucifixion comes despite the doctrinal necessity of this crucifixion as a central tenant of Christianity. Surprisingly, and despite his vilification, Pilate is not even given credit for being decisive in his orders. He is portrayed as ever vacillating, eventually stating that he can find no fault with the accused and is said to “wash his hands” of the whole ordeal. This version of Pilate bears little resemblance to the highly competent, efficient and at times, ruthless Pilate of secular accounts of the period; or even with early versions of the gospels. Indeed, the equivocating, weak-kneed Pilate was not invented until immediately following the Edict of Milan in AD 313 and foundation of the first Ecumenical Council in AD 325. These acts allowed for official Roman tolerance of the then inchoate Christian religion and, much to the surprise of Rome, paved the way towards eventual mass Roman conversion to said religion.

This “reform” of Pilate is thought to have occurred to shift blame from the Romans for the crucifixion of Christ, to the Jews: a group who have, throughout history, grudgingly served as teleological punching bag fodder for their co-monotheists. Anti-Semitic opportunism does not seem to be the only point by which the concept of Pilate breaks down. Pilate is treated dramatically differently when carried across Christendom - from the Eastern Orthodox Church, in which Pilate is semi-exonerated and his wife, Claudia Procula, is canonized for her apparent role is attempting to discourage Pilate from involving himself in the Jesus, (or more correctly: Yeshua) affair; to the Ethiopian Church, which celebrates the so called “Acts of Pilate”, and argues that Pilate did all he could to save Christ. As a result, the Ethiopian church has canonized the man whom Mikhail Bulgakov called “the knight of the golden lance, the cruel Procurator of Jerusalem.” Myths also swirl around Pilate’s fate after he was transferred from his post at Judea. It has been said that Pilate, in a state of torment wandered the expanses of Rome, only to eventually commit suicide. An enormous body of fiction and myth has been invented to explain Pilate’s eventual fate. The Roman historian Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiae has Pilate exiled to Gaul after falling out of favor with Caligula. The Mors Pilati (Or Death of Pilate) sees the body of the decapitated Pilate being thrown into the Tiber, only to be “rejected” by the river on account of his evil spirit and then taken to Vienne and sunk in the Rhone, which in turn, also rejected Pilate’s body which was then thought to have finally been disposed of in the Lausanne Lake. The head was apparently dispatched to a desolate mountain near the Franconian city of Forcheim where it, according to local legend and with no small irony, re-emerges to haunt the towns’ inhabitants every Easter. Eerie.

While these myths play heavily into both Christian and regional pagan mythologies - and pre-existing pagan mythologies were certainly both adapted and exploited by Christendom - they tell us very little about what Pilate was actually like. More importantly Pilate’s actions as Procurator of ancient Judea were likely perfectly in line with what was expected of him by Rome. Pilate was not simply efficient and ruthless in his governance, but he also he s trove to keep the peace. Pilate emerges as a nominally very fair pro-consul, whose acts of brutality have more to do with response to the instability of the times than of any personal propensity for evil. Pilate appears to have been a man of the Roman Imperial institution thru and thru. The execution of any Jewish would-be-messiahs, (here enter the character of Jesus, stage left) would in all likelihood have been carried out by Pilate with the utmost of expediency and in line with the norms of Pax Romana.

Despite Christian claims otherwise, the means by which Jesus is depicted to have been executed, namely crucifixion was fairly standard and would not have been seen as excessively brutal. Doctrinal issues aside (and here the question must be asked: “how can one both die for the sins of humanity and never really die at all, and do both at the same time?”), the execution of Jesus, or Yeshua in the original Hebrew, seems to have been fundamentally in line with Roman legal norms. If this is the case, then it must be argued that Pilate acted correctly, and furthermore, if one is to extrapolate from the Christian, decidedly determinist version of events, and Jesus’ execution upon the cross was indeed a necessity for the salvation of humanity, then Pilate can certainly not be faulted for having done his duty – indeed, it can be said that he in fact did us a favor.

II

What is known about Pontius Pilate in secular accounts - beginning with early Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who documented, with great verve and panache, the Jewish war against Rome between AD 66 and 70 – differs greatly from the biblical version of events. While the trial and crucifixion of a man named Jesus or Nazareth does not enter Josephus’ account; and indeed, secular evidence of Christ’s existence remains specious at best, Josephus does talk about the character of Jesus’ would be executor, the apparently rather grim Proconsul of Roman Judea. In the aftermath of the Jewish War, Rome, which had allowed Judea to nominally self govern under the Jewish King, Herod, decided that it needed to reassert control. Under the rule of Claudius in Rome, Pilate, a cavalry commander or German extraction, was tapped as to restore order to Rome. Pilate himself, under strict Roman military guidelines could only control a small police force within Judea himself, and was forced to call upon rival Roman commanders to bring to bear any substantial military forces within the region. As a result, Pilate was forced to, either by necessity, fearing dependence on possible rivals to heavily, or by natural inclination to resort to extreme violence in suppressing any Jewish uprisings. Pilate acted swiftly and brutally during his reign to insure order and in what he believed to be the public good; as Josephus notes:

“At another time he used the sacred treasure of the temple, called corban, to pay for bringing water into Jerusalem by an aqueduct. A crowd came together and clamored against him; but he had caused soldiers dressed as civilians to mingle with the multitude, and at a given signal they fell upon the rioters and beat them so severely with staves that the riot was quelled.” (Josephus, Jewish War Book 2., pages 175–176.)Pilate’s methods were so exceptionally brutal, even for a Roman, that Claudius’ successor Tiberius eventually removed Pilate on charges of “excessive brutality against the Jews.” – which in light of many of the regular practices of the time, it is clear that Pilate must have truly been monstrous in many of his practices of repression. Pilate then can be said to have practiced Machiavelli’s doctrine of preferring to be feared rather than loved, a good fourteen centuries and some change before Machiavelli.

Indeed, even the Vatican has begun to tow this line on Pilate despite previous attempts at whitewash. During the Vatican II era upheaval, the Catholic Church made attempts to resolve some of its differences with the other major monotheisms. On this note, it passed an edict requiring Pilate to be in no way portrayed as at all sympathetic or weak. Notably as part of the same edict, the Jews were no longer to be portrayed as a bloodthirsty mob – a clear attempt to make up for thousands of years of Catholic fueled anti-Semitism. This has been largely observed by the majority of Catholics; with the notable exception of certain fundamentalist Catholic splinter cells; including the one to which Mel Gibson and his intellectually repugnant “Passion” play belong.

This is not to say that Pilate did not try to keep the peace, limit casualties and insure order. The time at which he took power was an exceptionally touchy one: direct Roman control had only recently been restored to ancient Judea, in retaliation to Jewish insurrection – the end result which saw the removal of the ineffectual Jewish dauphin cum Roman collaborator Herod Agrippa. It is clear that Pilate’s methods were cruel partially as a matter of necessity. It was because of this that Pilate’s reign lasted a full 10 years, despite positively gleeful reports of suppression sent by Pilate to Rome. It is also clear that not only were Pilate’s methods thought necessary for results by Rome; but also that he acted as a mitigating factor to prevent further violence in many cases. For example, Pilate was notably praised by the Jews for his willingness to do away with Roman battle standards in the vicinity of Jewish temples. The Roman concern surrounding Jewish belief dealt more with the threat it posed to Pax Romana as a nationalist rallying point than as religion as a whole, and as a result, Pilate and Rome as a whole, were nominally supportive of Jewish religious practices, notably including the ongoing existence of Jewish temples and allowances made to Jewish civil servants serving within Judea for the weekly Sabbath, policies that while introduced under Agrippa were retained by Pilate. This is a point that is even carried in biblical scripture: one of the key reasons Judas Iscariot joined Jesus was because Judas believed that Jesus was building his base in order to push for Jewish independence from Rome – a point which surely must have come to the chagrin of Judas in light of Jesus’ embracement of pacifism, which was likely a factor in Judas’ eventual betrayal of Jesus. If Jesus did in fact exist, he was executed by Rome not because his monotheism disturbed some Roman sensibility, but rather because the fear was that he posed a nationalist threat to the Roman Empire[1]. It is because of this that Jesus was tried for sedition (along with at least two others) for his decision to preach against Rome, going so far as to incite insurrection at the height of Passover - a normally politically charged time - and not for his hopes of founding a new Monotheistic cult within Judaism.

III

One is left to speculate wildly upon the character of Pilate’s most famous victim. Jesus’ (or Yeshua in the original Hebrew) very existence must be called into question, as he is certainly not, as Christopher Hitchens has become fond of putting it, “a figure in history”, as his existence is not confirmed in any account of ancient Judea outside of the bible[2]. Indeed, it is difficult to take the Bible seriously as a historical work, even if one is willing to strike from the record its more fantastical elements. This is even more so the case in detailing the life of Christ due to the problem of endlessly contradictory accounts of Jesus’ life. Taken with the seemingly superficial purging of the Gnostic gospels from the record, (and why shouldn’t Judas or Mary Magdalene’s account of proceedings not be taken into account?) the fact that that universally loving Jesus, portrayed by Luke, Paul and Matthew would not, pardon the pun, be nailed down, until those books were written well over a half century following the crucifixion. This leaves only the less than magnanimous Jesus of the gospel of Mark as the sole, “immediate” article of record - and here the word must be stretched as even this came decades post-Christ’s death. One is left to wonder if, even if Jesus really did exist, if what he actually stood for was really “all that and a bag of chips”. Mark says nothing of miracles, Sermon’s on the Mount, Beatification. Further questions are raised when we look at the conditions under which some of these gospels were written. With the gospel of Paul, we must also take into account the notion that Paul was trying to construct a religion that would encompass the breadth of the Roman Empire. This meant that Jesus potentially needed to become far more “internationalist[3]”, and yes, open to pan-ethnic charity than the good Samaritan-less Jewish nationalist of Mark’s account.

But let us pause from examining the inconsistencies in the ecclesiastical record to note that, the Romans themselves kept fairly good records of criminal proceedings, dating to the period of Christ, and there exists no record of any public trial or proclamation of execution concerning any Yeshua (or any last minute options of pardon), though admittedly, many would be messianic figures were likely put to the cross, or worse, for opposition to Roman rule. The claim has been made that Josephus carried an account of Jesus’ life, however this part of the account of Josephus was proven to be a forgery – the alterations demonstrated to have been conceived of centuries after the genuine work was completed. These added passages have been thoroughly excised by scholars; though those desperate to make a secular case for Jesus’ existence still occasionally make reference to the false passages.

But even if we are to withhold our doubts about the existence of Christ, what of the punishment metered out of Christ’s fate? Crucifixion, though ghastly by modern standards, was at the time no more severe than any of the other appalling practices of the day. This was, after all, the first century in which “flaying”, crucifixion and worse were the normal and widely practiced ways of doing away with malcontents. Compared to some of the other options, crucifixion was not the worse, and steps were taken to ease the suffering of those being crucified. For example, those that were nailed up were not allowed to die of heat stroke or of thirst – a point made clearly in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which depicts the Mathew the Levite looking on as his beloved Yeshua is revived by the Roman honor guard by use of a wet sponge on a stick. The fetishizing of Jesus’ death during the middle ages in the form of “passion” plays, often carrying deeply anti-Semitic underlying allegory (Catholics tended to forget that Jesus was a Jew), however the end suffered by Jesus was no worse than that suffered by the countless others who were also tried as dissidents. This likely indicates that, had he existed, the Romans saw him as no greater a threat than that of a common criminal, who if caught, were likely have suffered similarly. Finally the irony of using the symbol of the cross to symbolize Christianity seems to be more insured that more attention be paid to how Jesus met his end than in what he said - much of which appears to be either apocryphal or self contradictory.

IV

The modern re-appraisal of Pontius Pilate, from the early 20th century, but carrying its roots further back, is an interesting idea. Here is, a case in which a seemingly one-dimensional anti-Christian boogieman is transformed into in many ways a sympathetic figure. In my mind, the two most important two writers in this process of reappraisal are Mikhail Bulgakov in his wonderful The Master and Margarita and Alexander Karazakov in his The Last Temptation of Christ (later made into a film by Martin Scorsese, starring Wilhelm Defoe in the titular role and David Bowie as Pilate.). In both, Pilate is treated as human, and while both play, to some extent into the myth of a troubled and vacillating Pilate, reluctant to put Jesus to the sword, (or more accurately hammer, nail and plank), neither portrayal make Pilate appear as if the situation is beyond him and both work avoid the trap of simply blaming the Jews.

In Bulgakov’s work, Pilate, referred to as the cruel knight of the golden lance, is temporarily relieved of debilitating migraine headaches, by Yeshua, who he puts to death anyway, understanding that doing so means that he will never again find permanent relief from the pain. In a perverse way, the ongoing cerebral agony will remain Pilate’s cross to bear. While part of the biblical component of the story, taking the form of a novel that drive’s its author to madness and forcing his lover into a deal with the devil to free him from it, deals with the actions of Mathew as he attempts and to save Yeshua from the cross, eventually cutting him down (and thus settling the reincarnation problem), the principle moral figure seems to be Pilate himself, who is forced to make the decisions that he does, including forgoing the lone emollient to his agonies as a result of his position. The story then is as much the tragedy of Pilate as it is of Yeshua, and one is genuinely made to feel for Pilate and the sacrifice he must make as dictated by his position and reputation. He is also interestingly portrayed as a nominally fair ruler. Pilate’s own sufferings are mirrored in those of Yeshua, Mathew and The Master himself who is compelled to author the story, though he knows that its source is likely diabolic.

Karazakov on the other hand treats Pilate as something of a technocrat. He does his job, washes his hands of the incident, but remains human, even questioning the logic of the punishment he meters out. While this Pilate is less dimensional than that of Bulgakov, the dialogues between him and his wife and the demonstrations of decency make for a balanced vision of Pilate. And indeed, it seems to have been Karazakov’s aim to humanize the whole of cast of characters. Judas is portrayed in equally sympathetic light – a Jewish nationalist disturbed by Christ’s portrayal of the principle of an emancipated Judea in favor of wider proselytizing. Even Jesus, is portrayed in a less than immaculate fashion, shown to have Earthly cravings (including a sexual fantasy about Mary Magdalene while on the cross), and otherwise further humanized. This Pilate also seems to come closest to his secular portrayal in Josephus’ account and elsewhere.

In the end though, perhaps the greatest of the modern Pilate re-appraisals seems to have been that raised by the Monty Python troupe in their wonderful Biblical comedy, The Life of Brian. There, Pilate is portrayed as a lisping twit who can barely keep his own army from exploding into jeering laughter, let alone the (semi) hostile Judean population[4]. In the end, though heroic other attempts have been made to rescue the character, this remains my favorite, if only because it’s simply too damned funny not to be. This choice is no less arbitrary than any of the others, and certainly it lacks the niceties of a supporting historical record (though it is not necessarily the least factually accurate of the options discussed). Let’s just say that to buy into this depiction of Pilate requires something less than a leap of faith.

The point rests however, in that, no matter which version of Pilate one ascribes to, logically, he is far more “just” a character than his detractors - and much of Christian mythology would lead us to believe. While Pilate’s means of enforcement was at times callous, this brutality was limited to insuring law and order, which can in the end be argued to have saved lives through the assurance of stability and the reigning in of Jewish on Jewish aggression, as had previously ripped through the Jewish world in the form of ferocious conflict between Hellenistic Jews and the Macabees. This can be taken a step further in noting that despite his often-brutal means of enforcement, secularists should view Pilate as a rather efficient and pragmatic Roman bureaucrat – above all a creature of his times - whereas, for those self-identifying as Christians, how to assess Pilate becomes far more complicated. As Pilate’s action vis-à-vis Jesus are a necessity for the Christian doctrine of Christ dying for the sins of humanity and then eventual being resurrected, should Pilate – the New Testament’s greatest villain, no less - not be viewed as, in some way, an enabler of the messianic? If this is the case, the centuries of Christian doctrinal scorn heaped upon Pilate is, as a whole, wantonly misplaced. The underlying irony of this is perhaps that which is truly transcendent.

[1] This is a point made explicitly by historian Michael Grant, (see: Grant, Michael History of Rome pages 256-272).

[2] Here it must be noted that this is not the case with all messianic religious figures, there exists a great deal of historical evidence that proves that, the Prophet Muhammad, for example, did in fact exist as a figure in history.[3] As Robert Wright notes in “One World, Under God” a recent article on the globalizing monotheisms in the April, 2009 Atlantic Monthly (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200904/globalization-religion)[4] Reg: “…But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Xerxes: “Brought peace?” Reg: “Oh, peace? Shut up!”

The New Yorker recently ran a pair of pieces by Jonah Lehrer on the decline effect in science.* The decline effect is one of those topics that does not seem to receive adequate coverage because it (a) can be bedeviling to get one's head around, (b) it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable because it speaks to a potential problem with the scientific method and with falsification, and (c) seems to open the door to specious hucksterism, such as climate-change skepticism and creationism because the decline effect seems to implicate underlying problems in all science as a whole. As a result, one sees very little written about the decline effect in either popular media or in scientific publications despite it's pressing importance. Indeed, regarding the last of these three rationale, it is something of a shock that the political right has not seized on the decline effect as more of a cause célèbre.

In order to discuss the decline affect, we must be clear what we are talking about - both in terms of how the scientific method operates and what the decline effect indicates. Lehrer does an excellent job of breaking down the idea in the first of his New Yorker pieces as follows:

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: [Professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, John] Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

Members of the scientific community have reacted to the Lehrer piece with irritation, while others have stated that the decline effect is simply 'science correcting itself' - a statement that could not more completely miss the point.† While scientists are entitled to feel defensive about their methods - indeed the rigor required of a double-blind study would be very difficult to improve upon - it still seems that there is some element of 'gaming' results. The tendency of academic publishers to favor studies that see positive correlations rather than negative does not help matters.

Lehrer seems to point to the decline effect being most likely a product of the combination of manipulations and inconsistencies of study sample sizes, etc, on the part of scientists in order verify their suspicions taken with a statistical error produced by using that old chestnut of:

α = 0.05due to the ease it provides in calculations (most notably via the old standard of the slide rule). However, errors introduced by computational mistakes or manipulation thus providing significantly stronger correlations than may exist have been procedurely corrected for over time and the emphasis on reproducibility of studies is supposed to insulate against this. The decline effect seems other in that correlations appear to disappear over time, and to do so gradually. As Lehrer notes, the falsification process outlined by Karl Popper in The Nature of Scientific Discovery was designed to take place in a single grand experiment rather than through this piecemeal process.

The question becomes, with certain types of errors - most specifically manipulations by researchers, consciously or unconsciously to get the results they want perhaps acting as known errors, to what extent do unknown errors play into the decline effect? With science being our best device for understanding and interpreting the world around us, to what extent does the decline effect seem to question the very basis that we are capable of carrying out objective science altogether? Certainly, it must beg questions about the efficacy of almost any study.

Despite this, we also have thousands of studies in which the science and data do some to be rigorous, results are constantly reproducible with similar statistical spreads and results appear to be intuitively right, in that they reflect what we see through less rigorous forms of observation. Certainly, it would be fools errand to use the decline effect as a rationale to dismiss science as a whole as a flawed ontological mechanism. Importantly, those elements of science, such as climate change or evolution that are more commonly dismissed for ideological reasons tend to be those that have been the most widely studied and which have shown repeated and non-declining confirmation

What needs to be understood about the decline effect is, what can be learned from it in order to determine objectively what is going wrong and thus how to correct for it. Certainly, an adjustment of the α used as the norm may be an important step, as would still tighter controls upon methodology to prevent insertion of researcher bias are important first steps, but the phenomena of the decline effect itself needs to be more widely studied. Thus far, meta-studies of the studies that have 'suffered' from the decline effect appear inconclusive. This however, merely speaks to the need for further study.

Perhaps what should be understood in discussing the decline effect is that, while questioning certain assumptions within science it does not devalue science or the scientific method. That the decline effect seems to produce seemingly patterned errors speaks to an error or series of errors that is systematically being introduced to rather than one that is randomly occurring. It speaks to the need for greater oversight in study construction and execution to guard against error.

As humans, we have a genetic tendency to want to intuit things. We appreciate the observable and tactile and our brains seek out patterns that appeal to us emotionally or aesthetically. Science does not operate under the same set of limitations, however as science is conducted by humans, the occasional error will be introduced. It is the roll of the scientific method to limit the number of errors that can occur, however, as Popper noted, definitive Truth remains unknowable, and we must perpetually falsify those truths that we do arrive at as a means of bringing us ever closer to that unreachable position of what is. The decline effect is perhaps best interpreted as a feedback mechanism. It illuminates certain shortcomings in our current modus operandi and demands of us that we falsify and refine anew. We must perpetually destroy the intellectual frame-works that we build in order to better understand. Science exists as a method of discovery rather than speaking to absolutes. This process is almost, to a the definition postmodern, in its rationale.‡ We should not despair of this, but rather to respond and learn as such are the wages of discovery.

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* The whole of Lehrer's first piece should be read as a primer to this piece for those that have not previously encountered the decline effect. He does a wonderful job of breaking down the idea and presenting it within context.

† Many thanks to my friend Nick 'Arkan' Meyers for these links and for his thoughts on the decline effect which have helped to shape my thinking on this subject.

‡ Post modernism is best defined, from a scientific perspective, as the perpetual negotiation and renegotiation of difference.

English firebrand Thomas Paine certainly knew something about revolution - having long advocated for the American revolutionary and serving as one of the intellectual bulwarks that informed his friend Thomas Jefferson (who called him "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination.") and later serving as voice of reason during the French Revolution in his attempts to prevent the execution of the King and the wider reign of terror. I had intended to mark his birthday, which passed on February 9th, as the character of the Egyptian protesters is very Paine-esque.

I have a special affinity for Paine - not merely because of his position as a pamphleteer (of which blogging can be viewed as something of a modern equivalent) and a liberal reformist, but also as a result of Paine's involvement in Urban Planning. Paine briefly worked a bridge-designer and urban developer in his native England - something between an architect and civil engineer. It would not be too much to fall back on a trite and overused expression and call Paine a true "Renaissance Man" as indeed, he was very much a beneficiary of that era and it's emphasis on liberalism, rationality, art and science.

The lack of memory of Paine within the American canon (despite seeming near idyllic worship of the other 'founding fathers' of the constitution) is puzzling as Thomas Jefferson himself had a statue commissioned of Paine. This likely has something to do with Paine's deep hostility towards organized religion (which Jefferson certainly shared). He made a point of seeing Christianity as simply a new variation of the old creation myths of antiquity, declaring:

The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.He goes on to compare the idea of Christ to to it's apparent source material of ancient Egyptian mythology, with Christ being compared to Egyptian Messianic figure of Horace. More importantly, Paine believed in the tradition of secular humanism, inherited from Spinoza and the other secular moralists, that would go on to nourish other great recent moral thinkers, including George Orwell, Albert Camus and Bertrand Russel among others. Much of this alternative form of morality: built on reason, compassion and empathy underpins the Social Democracies of Europe today and Paine was one of the figures who gave this position substance.

It is time then to perhaps rehabilitate Paine as a figure not just of the left, but of one of supporter of struggles of resistance and self-determination as a whole. In these heady days in which much of what makes the United States civilized is again trying to be dismantled by the radical right (frequently citing ecclesiastical justification), and repressed peoples are organizing in attempts to force the re-establishment of civil society in many countries, Paine's ideas represent something of a clarion call for those that will listen.

The popular movement in Egypt has today succeeded in ousting Hosni Mubarak, with power now residing with the military. Whether this augers a new era of genuine Democratic leadership within Egypt, as the United States' UN Ambassador Susan Rice seems to believe at a speaking engagement I attended earlier this evening here in Portland, or whether Omar Suleiman will be able to subvert the process. Mubarak had remained in power for the better part of 30 years and will likely be missed by very few. Let us hope that whatever government results from this shake-up that it is responsive to local needs and is not as easily subverted as the similar protest movement in Tunisia now appears to have been.

Thanks to my friend Ascher at Hungèer, Cluod for the above photo, and check out his brilliant portrait of Mubarak here.

Ongoing protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square have seen Egypt's Vice-President, the odious Omar Suleiman threaten or warn of (depending on one's ideological read) a coup d'etat if protesters are not willing to accept the Mubarak regime's timeline for transition from power. There are questions as to whether the regime is willing to honor this deal that it is advancing, or is simply trying to buy time in order to further advance it's organs of repression and quell the protests indefinitely.

The American response meanwhile, has been to dither as the White House has claimed to support the Democratic movement in Egypt while failing to pull funding from the regime. This despite a large percentage of Americans supporting Egyptians right to self-determination. This clinging to the old power order, represents the sort of cynical policy long-advanced by the likes of Henry Kissinger, and demonstrates, as Noam Chomsky notes not so much a fear of radical Islam, but a fear of independence for Egyptians, as doing so may undermine American hegemony. Indeed, as Chomsky notes, the United States has long backed some of the vilest regimes in region, and particularly those that have advanced Islamic fundamentalism in the region as a means of retaining American control:

A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological centre of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most brutal of Pakistan's dictators and President Reagan's favorite, who carried out a programme of radical Islamisation (with Saudi funding).

This in itself may be a null argument. As I mentioned in my last post on Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which by dint of it's organization, seems most likely to seize the reigns of power in Egypt in the event of a power vacuum, does not seem to be the fundamentalist group it is made out to be. While the occasional (though increasingly rare) rhetoric of the group may be worrisome to some Israelis, it remains largely a moderate organization. A recent interview with several of the group's leaders in the Guardian seemed to indicate that though the group refuses to negotiate with the Mubarak regime (which has outlawed it), the main thrust of the Brotherhood seems to be basic human rights. Further, there is a real push towards pluralism in the group's position:

"If we can build a wide coalition instead, this would be good," Erian says. "This is our strategy for many reasons: not to frighten others, inside or outside, and also because this is a country destroyed, destroyed by Mubarak and his family – why would the rebuilding task be only for us? It's not our task alone, it's the job of all Egyptians." He adds: "The Muslim Brothers are a special case because we are not seeking power through violent or military means like other Islamic organisations that might be violent. We are a peaceful organisation; we work according to the constitution and the law."

As I have previously noted, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to understand quite fully the implications of Egypt's dependence on the outside world. Further, the group does not appear to be fundamentalist in any way and instead to be a reasoned a pluralistic body that uses Muslim nationalism as it's fulcrum. This makes it not particularly different from say, the moderately Islamic Justice and Development (AK) Party in Turkey.

As protests continue, and despite the government's best efforts at repression, Egyptian self-determination is, in many ways, beginning to take on the whiff of the inevitable. The question has increasingly become, to use an old joke, how much longer will the Mubarak regime play the part of the Egyptian fish: living in De Nile (denial)?

Chiliean economist Manfred Max-Neef, in the brief video below, advances a biting critique of neo-Liberal economic theory in very much the same vein as my recent 'Society, The Economy & The Environment' post. He argues that much of the development economics taught today is at odds with the implementation of economic policies as experienced by much world's poor. This has resulted in a 'value-free' science that fails to address the multitude of human needs in pursuit of economic bottom lines and has proven destructive towards communities, civil society and the environment.

A friend of mine recently told me that, as a child, he used to fantasize about being trapped in Powell's Books. It's a fantasy that I can imagine myself sharing. To roam the isles in that vast, immaculately organized font of writing. It is the type of place that can make you forget hunger pains and simply give in to the singular pleasure of the printed word. For those non-Portlanders that haven't been, it is the sweep and majesty of the place that is what is truly wonderful about it. Powell's is one of the largest independent bookstores in the country, and unlike The Strand in New York - the only place that comes close to it, is well-organized and easy to navigate.

As an unrepentant and compulsive bibliophile, the Powell's Burnside store represents, not just an institution, but a four-story tall city block of unprecedented pleasure. I am a veritable junky for the printed word, and Powell's represents the preeminent place to slink for my drug of choice. My love affair with Powell's began the moment I set foot in the place at the tender age of 14 as a new arrival to Portland and has only grown with time. Certainly, it has been love/hate at times, especially on those rainy days when I found myself loaded down with new purchases - distraught that I could not find a used copy of a longed for volume and my pocket book stinging as a result. Despite this, it is a love that has always bloomed anew. The $100 or so there I can drop in a single visit always feel like something of a bargain for the splendor of literature - a tribute to some benign and kind literary god rather than a business transaction. Being able to browse the store's brimming shelves and extracting that perhaps not-so-rare or previously unknown treasure is part of what makes Portland the livable a place it is.

This said, today's news then that the grand institution was being forced to shed some 31 employees - a veritable 7% of it's total staff came as a shock and a blow. Powell's has noted, in an internal e-mail memo that:

Sales for this fiscal year are down and we expect this trend will continue. The largest decreases have been in new book sales. We see this as a clear indication that we are losing sales to electronic books and reading devices.

Thus, we are seeing the potential death knell of an institution that I love as sounded by some cynical piece of gadgetry. Regardless of advancements in liquid paper technology and the rest, there is something I find deeply vulgar about the printed word being replaced by e-book readers. The technology represents, certainly something new and compelling, but it compromises the whole tactile sensation of reading that partially makes up the experience. The weight of a book in my hands, the aesthetic and stylistic decisions made by the printers and importantly - the element of discovery - the ability to stumble upon some previously unknown gem on the shelf at a used book store are things that, to me, are worth fighting for.

Indeed, while there is a compelling argument to be made, with continually changing digital formats and the like for the retention of printed documents to insure the permanence of preserving human thought as put to paper - the preservation of Powell's as institution that puts Portland on the map may be of equal importance. While certain scholastic and bookish dinosaurs like myself have nothing but the utmost of resentment for the new digital formats - and Powell's is likely to survice in some form - the idea of it being reduced to a shell of itself, and indeed one that tourists will continue to come to see for years and begin to wonder what the big deal was all along. This trend speaks to our declining literary and attention spans, our increased tendency to demand instant gratification, and our longstanding cultural decline. As marvelous as technology can be, it's affects on the language as a whole and on discourse can makes one feel as though the barbarians are pounding at the gate. Powell's is one of those rare institutions that serves as a bright shining light of civilization. The existence of Powell's promotes literacy and a love of words - what cause could be higher?

So, though I am loathe to advocate mindless consumerism, drop by Powell's, browse the still ample shelves and maybe buy a book. In doing so, you are, in some small way, defending civilization.

One of my heroes, John McPhee, was recently interviewed in the Paris Review as part of the publication's 'Art of Nonfiction series'. McPhee's great subject was America and his writing has focused on technical, ecological and infrastructure considerations across the United States. His corpus, when taken together feels as though it might encompass the breadth of the United States. McPhee was one of the founders of so-called new journalism'. His style of writing, while including elements of fiction, never devolved into the sort of angry polemic that characterized his most notable contemporary, Hunter S. Thompson. McPhee has a way of enlightening certain aspects of things that might not otherwise be apparent. I still remember rereading McPhee's piece on the Atchafalaya river basin from his book, The Control of Nature in late 2005 and realizing that, despite the mismanagement following Katrina, the very idea of controlling a river as powerful as the Mississippi could only be an act of hubris.

The interview linked to is eminently worth reading - as are previous 'Art of Nonfiction' interviewees, which has included the great Ryszard Kapuschinski among others.

One of the major developments thus far overlooked by this blog has been the successful Internet organized protest movements in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. Thus far, Tunisia's Ben Ali has been forced into exile in France while similarly long-serving despots Hosni Mubarak and Ali Abdullah Saleh have both agreed to step down. The use of communications technology as a mechanism for mass organization of protesters has been particularly impressive - especially in Tunisia where controls upon the Internet have been semi-draconian.

Indeed, despite numerous previous protest movements in opposition to autocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa, one wonders if these protests would have been nearly as successful in their aims. The Arab world in certainly no stranger to effective protest movements - even before mass dissemination of communications technology, decentralized and rapidly responsive protest movements have seen some success - as was the case of the first Palestinian Intifada, well-documented in Thomas X. Hammes' The Sling and the Stone. Hammes' a retired marine colonel, characterizes these types of protest movements as '4th generation' asymmetrical warfare. it is clear that the implementation of technology has further allowed for mass resistance, and preferably for more responsive, pluralistic and democratic governments to come.

The motivations for these resistance movements are interesting in and of themselves. In both cases, shame in response to potential international denigration following revelations about corruption seem to be pressing. In Tunisia, the prevalent story seems to be that, while Ben Ali was long known to be debauched, it was the exposure of his corruption to the outside world (via the WikiLeaks diplomatic leaks) that motivated Tunisians, largely to save face, to seek his immediate removal. This was a link drawn by Gaddafi in neighboring Libya, who ever desiring to shackle his fortunes to a proven 'winner', apparently viewed the leaks as 'diabolic' and has stated his support for Ali after Ali had been removed to Paris. So much for playing to populist sympathies of Tunisians for the colonel then.

As Mubarak's withering regime writhes and grasps for the remaining tendrils of power, largely by visiting violence upon protesters, there remain several pertinent points about Egypt that are worth keeping in mind. Firstly, the United States has a hand in supporting the Egyptian regime. We subsidize Mubarak to the tune of around $1.5 billion annually, largely to placate the Egyptian government and insure that it remains on civil terms with Israel and ostensibly to fight creeping "Islamic extremism", most specifically the Muslim Brotherhood. While some percentage of this money disappears into Swiss bank accounts and the like, some of it has gone to strengthen the military, largely to the detriment of the Egyptian people. Further, the United States has provided many of the sinews currently of repression currently being employed by the regime. The American stance should be one of solidarity with Egyptian protesters, less we risk the venom of whatever government succeeds Mubarak.

Secondly, Egypt remains firmly dependent upon outside aid to both feed it's economy (tourism and shipping through the Suez Canal being key) as well as to feed it's population, with Egypt importing nearly 40% of it's food. This means that, even if a new regime is made up of largely Muslim Brotherhood members, who despite being an illegal organization under the current regime, has it's ranks largely filled with educated professionals, and as a result, is likely to take positions of moderation. Egypt is dependent on it's interactions with the rest of the World and no regime would be foolish enough to damn the whole of the population. Further, the Muslim Brotherhood has shifted radically from it's ideology following the state execution of Sayyid Qutb, who according to Adam Curtis (in the excellent The Power of Nightmares mini-series) represents the ideological father of modern Islamic reactionary thought. Indeed, even the Islamism of Qutb called for ongoing Western-style scientific and technological advancement in the Arab world while simultaneously embracing Islamic legal codes. These Islamic legal norms have their roots in the Ottoman Empire and have historically been a perceived source of fair arbitration in the face of despotic rule, hence the reason for their popularity even among many more secular Arabs. As a result, even an Islamic regime in Egypt is likely not to be feared and is likely to continue to support modernization efforts.

Thirdly, Egypt is undergoing demographic and humanitarian upheaval. Much of Egypt - like Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria Libya and elsewhere in North Africa and the wider Arab World - is under 25. This population is currently of reproductive age and underemployed. Urban development and infrastructure remain heavily lacking for many Egyptians and large-scale informal squatter and slum settlements represent standard living conditions for many. One of the reasons for Nasser's ongoing popularity in Egypt has little to do with foreign policy - despite nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Nasser's legacy includes, after all a quagmire in Yemen and terrible losses incurred during the 1967 Six-Day War - and has more to do with his emphasis in investment in the Egyptian population, in both infrastructure and education that saw living standards rise for many.

The recent, though not unexpected, revelations that the Palestinian Authority has failed to advance the aims of the Palestinians has once again opened the Middle East peace process to intense scrutiny. In fairness, this is hardly the first case of colossal failure of leadership on the part of the Palestinian powers that be at the expense of the hostage population that it serves. Arafat may have earned the disdain of the late Edward Said, who famously called him the 'Petain of the Palestinians' in an Irish Times editorial due to his naked corruption and willingness to effectively give-up Palestinian claims to legitimacy during the Oslo Talks of the early 90s, however the current leadership appears determined to go even beyond that in it's willingness to bend to Israeli wishes.

The whole business had an air of predictability about it. That the United States refused to acknowledge anyone but the ineffective and slack jawed Mahmoud Abbas for leadership (despite the slightly brisker tones now taken with Israeli leadership)- promising to cut funds in the event of Hamas ascendancy or that the previous regime offered up the crass proposed move of Palestinians to South America, likely resulting in their further ghettoization. The selling out of the estimated 2 million Palestinian refugees living sub-human and stateless existences in refugee camps by Palestinian leadership feels like something or a forgone conclusion. And this taken with the effective selling East Jerusalem. After all, these people were never going to be accepted by Israel due to their demographic considerations and, even if their return could be secured, would have proven a resettlement headache for Fatah and the PLO - which has problems of it's own: notably retaining it's ongoing Kleptocracy while fighting a civil war with the Islamists.

Further, the ability of Israel to pursue hard line positions and to still reject peace agreements, even when aided and abetted by their partners in negotiation. Indeed, the niggardliness of spirit extended on the part of Israel to the Palestinians remains as galling as it ever has. Meanwhile, the human costs of these transactions are, as always, borne almost exclusively by Palestinian civilians who have seen civil society collapse, who have seen the repeated de-development of their lands in the face of ongoing colonial expansion by Israel, who have been deprived of water, arable soil and markets and worse.

Israeli policy over the years has been nakedly transparent in it's aims: land-use has been leveraged as a weapon to advance Israeli colonial aims and to destroy Palestinian autonomy, and economic and social vitality. The outcome of this policy has repeatedly been the conversion of Palestinian lands into suburban strip development for Israeli settlers. The rationale defending these actions has always been one of self-defense with the perennial underlying irony being that Israel has most frequently acted the aggressor. This has further been re-affirmed by, as Gershom Gorenberg has noted in his excellent The Accidental Empire, an Israeli fetish for rural, bucolic ideals and rejection of the 'urban' - rooted in the Torah - that further serve as a justification to colonize the countryside in the name of Zionist self-determination. The Palestinian leadership has been an ever splintering mass of fundamentalism, vulgar anti-Semitic violence and cronyism since even before Arafat died, however, the impetus remains firmly upon Israel to 'make' peace as it is Israel alone who has the power to do so.

Not that they will. The ongoing conflict has no end. Much like the Russian conflict in Chechnya, the war is far too lucrative for the interested leadership structures to end. Both the Israelis and the United States benefit economically through defense spending and various arms agreements. It is also the rationale for the United States to provide to Israel upwards of $4 billion a year in direct aid, and for frequently fundamentalist Christian congregations in the United States - believing the reoccupation of the whole of the 'holy land' by the Jews to be a necessary doctrinal condition to bring about the rapture - pour an additional $4-6 billion into Israel's coffers. Similarly, it is too lucrative for surrounding plutocratic Arab states who need Israel as a perpetual bogeyman and the Palestinians are repressed Arab brothers in the region who can be pointed towards when questions are asked of their own leadership. This socio-economic-psychological situation is such that the involved parties will continue to conspire in one way or another to propagate the cycle of violence. When Nicholas Kristol asked several years ago if the then still-alive Arafat was 'capable of peace', he more accurately should have asked if any of the involved parties are capable of peace?

The answer, of course, is an almost certain no. That is not to say that many Israeli and Palestinian citizens (or perhaps 'residents' is the better term in the Palestinian case - as they, for all intensive proposes remain stateless and thus without concrete nationality) it is more that leadership in the Leventine, with the foreign governments (most notably the United States) providing the funding that are incapable. This has resulted in the failure of humanism and indeed, of humanity within the region. The outcome has had a brutalizing effect upon Jew and Arab alike. As positions further harden and atrophy, the willingness to embrace common strains of humanism and pluralism continues to diminish and the all that will remain is, as T.S. Eliot famously put it, 'fear in a handful of dust'.

A recent Guardian editorial speaks to the impossibility of gun control in America. As I recently noted the Giffords shooting in Arizona as an example for the need for stronger gun control legislation, many of the responses to my piece have noted the impossibility of gun control in the United States, a sentiment echoed in the Guardian.

The argument advanced is that the majority of the country would like stricter gun control, however it is a fringe group, in the form of the NRA that is able, through the control of gun-loving swing voters. As a result, the argument goes, gun control is rendered impossible as those swing factions manage to leverage incredible political clout preventing Congress from acting.

This is similar to the argument leveraged against health care reform. While a wide margin of Americans were initially said to have supported socialized medicine, lobbying on the part of pharmaceutical companies and right-wing minority groups largely prevented meaningful reforms for decades. This also resulted in the watered-down set of health care reforms that were eventually passed last year that seem to leave nobody happy, although this will likely change as more of the benefits of the reforms kick in. Misrepresentation of what makes-up the current health care legislation may also further undermine it's popularity.

The question becomes, what prevents gun control from following a similar set of problems? Equally importantly, while more people support stricter gun control in the immediate aftermath of the Giffords shooting, as memories of the shooting fade, this is likely to again be less the case. Reports that the Giffords shooting has resulted in a run on Glocks in Arizona is further terrifying that the odds appear long for gun controls.

Despite this, just because gun controls are likely to be politically unpopular does not make them any less necessary. It is true that the United States possesses a much stronger gun culture than that found in Europe, and once guns have been purchased, it appears incredibly difficult to see them removed from circulation, and this is a real shame. The assault weapons ban should be reinstated because it reduced the overall number of assault weapons in circulation (even if it didn't eliminate them altogether) while the elimination of open-carrying laws would limit the number of hand-guns within public venues. People should not be allowed to brandish weapons in public places, and the whole idea of allowing concealed weapons is, at best, an utterly insane idea because it places the general public at a whole of increased risk. This is because the mere presence of guns makes them much more likely to be used.

Additionally, the other argument against gun control has been that it is hypocritical because alcohol, which is widely available has been implicated in far more crimes and accidents than guns have. As a result, why focus on guns when we should be focusing on alcohol as well? I think that this argument is fallacious and misleading. While I agree that alcohol poses a net societal harm, the design behind alcohol, unlike an assault weapon, is not to kill. It is true that alcohol impinges judgement and frequently results in people making foolish choices that can have deadly consequences, however alcohol is not, a weapon in the same way an assault weapon is.

Further, substance addiction and specifically alcohol abuse, is a very different problem than that of weapons availability and must be responded to Alcohol is more strictly controlled than weapons availability and must be responded to differently. Their exist rehabilitation and clinical programs to mitigate negative personal and societal impacts of alcohol misuse, whereas, this is not a possibility for gun misuse. Gun misuse is a zero-sum game that is likely to result in death or injury for the victims. This is not a forgone conclusion with alcohol abuse, and moreover, the net affect of someone drinking one too many is unlikely to result in problems unless the person decides to drive or behave in a violent or inappropriate fashion after imbibing.

It is true that many gun owners, like many drinkers, will behave responsibly and the argument goes, it is unfair for them to suffer as a result of what a few violent and disgruntled individuals do. Again, this comes down to an argument about what the intent of legislation should be, the affect upon society and what the intent of the substance or thing posing a risk to society is. A gun has one primary purpose, and that is to do violence. The supposed function of a gun to deter violence, through threat, is a secondary function. Our societal relationship with alcohol is probably unhealthy, but our relationship with guns is equally unhealthy, and it can be argued that the unhealthy exercise of guns, specifically assault weapons, has much more to do with the primary purpose of guns.

Again, this is different from the ownership of a rifle say for hunting, where the primary purpose is slightly different. The hunting industry has done much to self-regulate and serves several important conservationist purposes in culling herds, targeting invasive species and using revenues to restore natural habitats. Hunters are not using assault weapons however, and it can be soundly argued that the rationale behind owning an automatic pistol and behind owning a hunting rifle shows discreet difference.

The sort of gun control I endorse would be something akin to the Swiss system. If a person wants a gun, say for hunting, they would be required to submit a proposal as to why they wanted the weapon, undergo extensive psychological screening, and participate in a gun safety course. Assault weapons, extended magazines and the like should not be legally available to civilians and concealed weapons should not be legally allowed. This should also apply to law-enforcement officers, as in Britain, in which very few uniformed policemen carry a gun, which has been shown to reduce the incidence of police violence and accidental killings of the innocent by the police, which have been abundant within the United States. The purpose behind gun control should be to establish a more healthy relationship with guns with the aim (no pun intended) towards greater safety and health across society as a whole. Gun rights should be treated with the gravitas that guns, with all of their life-ending power, should command. To continue with the status quo is unethical in that it favors the rights of the few as the expense of wider safety and security for society as a whole.

The paradigm of current economic thought seems to disconnect it from the notions of sustainability that we will be required to embrace to construct a salient future for ourselves. As we face the wider environmental problems of global warming, peak oil, and food inflation; the assumptions inherent to neo-liberal economic theory leave us at a disadvantage in tackling these already potentially insurmountable issues. Further, many of these neo-liberal assumptions have resulted in a culture of economic gangsterism that has seen recession for the last two years. Indeed, it is the very dogmatism of neo-liberalism and the pathological pursuit of economy growth and maximized returns that has created many of the problems that we are facing now.

I remain unconvinced that the field of economics as it stands, and the tendency on the part of economists to think a certain way, and to agree on certain assumptions, even when they fly in the face of reality, will provide us with a vehicle to construct a salient and stable future. At the same time, economics as a field remains an incredibly important tool for analysis and prediction. What is needed then is a fundamental shift in the way we think about economic theory and in what we 'assume' about human interactions. As Thomas Kuhn noted, the paradigm we ascribe to dictates the way we frame and conceptualize issues. While paradigms can be useful, they are to a certain sense determinist in how we interact with the world and what we assume to be true. This poses an inherent danger, and the assumptions being made as the driving force behind our economic interactions, and what is rational behavior are at the moment driving us on a course that may in the end be disadvantageous.

The assumptions made in neo-liberal economic theory and in game theory about human nature seem to be highly fallacious. To economists, humans will behave barbarously to promote their self-interest whenever given the opportunity at the expense of the collective and of society as a whole. Free market economists such as Milton Friedman and Frederic Von Hayek then add the twist that this behavior is to be promoted as only a perfect equilibrium of avarice will somehow promote an ideal equilibrium in which everyone strives to meet their needs. The dogma behind this is not only terrifying, and as Adam Curtis does well to argue in the BBC documentary series The Trap, is a perversion of Isaiah Berlin's concept of negative liberty, but seems to fundamentally untrue do to another inherent human instinct towards cooperation.

The mere existence of society, and the fact that we have managed to make it this far without having raped, murdered and robbed each other at every turn does much to discredit these assumptions about human selfishness. It occurs to me that we have a fundamental biological imperative to cooperate, just as other "pack animals" have used this genetic advantage to prosper. It can even be argued that this ability of group cooperation is a form of natural selection, though this is highly debatable. The point stands however that the behavior that neo-liberal economic theory would lead us to believe is rational is in many ways pathological, and a strict adherence to these notions of rationality is very dangerous. It is also dehumanizing as it strives to ascribe to human beings inherent economic value.

Previously, Keynesian economics was an attempt to rationalize this cooperative sense, and to speak of human capital, many of the economic meltdowns that resulted from the implementation and over extension of Keynes theories saw serious economic problems across Western Europe, while the tyranny of Isaiah Berlin's positive liberty saw a particularly ruthless strand of social Darwinism take root in the form of the Soviet system. However, the sort of winner takes all free market system, with its assumption that growth at any cost is good, regardless of long-term environmental degradation and resource scarcity concerns has in and of itself resulted in a similar sort of social Darwinist mentality that would rob us of as a future as a species. In the end, a new way of thinking about economics is necessary for the sake of conservation or preservation. Social accounting and environmental accounting, while growing increasingly in importance in economics curricula rarely goes far enough into calling into questions these ideologies. Meanwhile, the field of Environmental Economics, while producing some important regulatory market mechanisms remains heavily indebted to game theory, which is in turn based on the models of John Nash and the potentially dangerous assumptions that underlie them.

The now largely ignored and recently deceased John Kenneth Galbraith rejected the technical analysis and mathematical models of neoclassical economics as being divorced from reality. Just as the economist Veblen did before him, Galbraith asserted that economic activity cannot be distilled into inviolable laws – it is rather was a complex product of the cultural and political. He believed that economists tended to ignore those crucial factors that are not amenable to axiomatic descriptions. Galbraith was a lifelong Keynsian and as Keynes ideas were gradually relegated in favor of neoclassical sensibilities, Galbraith was increasingly relegated to the fringes: only hauled out as an example of the deceptiveness of the "old ideas" whenever certain neoclassical models needed to be justified to the public. What is shocking about this, is that, with his refusal to implement mathematical models, which really prove nothing, Galbraith was one of the few in the economics field that was willing to call into question not just the limitations of the economic paradigm, but also to practice genuine Popperian falsification of his ideological bent.

Only a handful of pre-eminent economic thinkers: Paul Volcker, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman (to a point) and Amatrya Sen among them, are disciples of this school of economics - and Stiglitz came to these conclusions only after defecting away from the neoclassical approach after growing increasingly frustrated at his position in the World Bank. This is, however, the tradition that I argue needs to be reclaimed and built upon if the field of economics is to serve us well in the future.

While economic growth remains important, sustainable growth is far more important. Economists talk endlessly of "discounting" – the idea that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, however, if the rending of a dollar today means that there is no tomorrow, then the whole of the debate becomes null. Conservationism is incredibly important – however even the terminology conservationism reduces our natural environment to little more than resources to be consumed at some future date. More important I feel is the notion of 'preservationism' – or the concept that certain natural resources should be preserved and remain untouched as they have inherent value. Notably, forestry and other plant life hold an important roll in carbon sequestration – pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere – and staving off global warming.

I put it to you that we must define our values as a society, and for economists to reconsider and redefine the limits to what is rational behavior. Perhaps it is not so irrational for people to work together or to accept less than optimum return on their investments if doing so means that our planet, our way of life and our general well being are not negatively and harmfully impacted. The world of economics is one of perpetual cognitive dissonance in which one set of notions of what is rational action are put forward while we continually see people sacrifice their economic best interest in order to act humanely and intelligently towards a sustainable future. The environmental activist and journalist Bill McKibben calls this the "durable future" in his book Deep Economy and I think that this terminology is useful. Where we need to go with the field of economics is not necessarily a return to the Keynesian so much as it is a simple question of assumption and of what constitutes economic rationality for the individual and whether this flies in the face of the interest of the public interest.

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When I originally wrote this piece several years ago but I think it has only gained in relevance from when I first wrote it as, if anything, the current economy has further underlined the points that I sought to make. Additionally, I think while the Obama seemed to initially convince many people that it would be in some way different, the repeated decision to marginalize Paul Volcker while empowering the likes of Timothy Geithner has meant that the Obama administration has retained the neo-liberal economic policies and mindsets that have have supported by both parties since the Clinton Administration. Indeed, I was fiercely critical of the way fear and intimidation were used in the fall of 2008 to rush through TARP with minimal oversight and in such a way that was highly beneficial to corporations while failing to serve the public interest.

I feel that events have only further justified that criticism. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur have have had the most succinct critique of TARP, arguing in favor of policies directed in avoiding foreclosures in cases in which borrowers could still afford to make payments rather in in direct support to the lenders themselves. While a subsequent bill was used for this purpose, it was insufficient and the Obama administration failed to regulate the process of foreclosure, costing many people - including a sizable number who had not defaulted on their mortgages, their homes. Meanwhile, the United States is no closer to signing a climate deal or implementing any form of market mechanisms to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, our firm belief in free-market orthodoxies are causing us to fail to address both the social and the environmental outcomes of economic activities.

The upshot thus far has been the advancement of alternative economic systems in Europe. The French have begun developing a new economic measure other than simply GNP and GDP encompassing not simply typical economic metrics but also costs of environmental mitigation, life cycle consideration, social costs and general societal happiness. Similarly, the British government has begun collecting data on happiness and general well being across the United Kingdom. This move was likely inspired by researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's book The Spirit Level, which makes the case through a series of studies that more equitable societies tend to fair better across almost every health, social and environmental indicator.

The book has caused a stir in many circles because speaks with numbers and repeatedly demonstrates strong correlations between equity and societal well being. Equally importantly, it articulates an alternative view to simply economic vitality as to what a society should look like and speaks to the long-standing success of the series of compromise agreements that constitute Social Democracies. Finally, The Spirit Level articulates a set of outcomes that speak to the roll of civil society and the wider social compact that appear to be at odds with neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. It is through an economic focus that includes environmental and social considerations that we might constitute a more healthy and more diversely and richly prosperous society altogether.

One of the more striking features of the modern American experience is the skepticism and ignorance of science and the scientific method throughout much of American society. This is especially startling when one considers the number of both scientific and technological innovators that are American in origin, American-based or both. While it is a fallacy to equate technological advancement directly with science, the two are intrinsically linked, and we find ourselves in a position in which we are collectively worshipful of technology yet fundamentally non-scientific in much of our thinking. That most American adults lack even a cursory understanding of basic sciences and instead rely on a series of delusory tautologies is chilling. Further it belies the problems that we face in garnering support data-driven public policy. When one in five Americans hold that the Sun revolves around the Earth, a belief abandoned by science in the 17th century, or that over half of the American population continues to believe in the almost fascicle misinformation that is ‘intelligent design’, what hope is there to enable people to grasp a science as multifaceted as anthropogenic climate change? The epistemological and metaphysical contortions necessary for those involved in the science dependent modern world to hold these beliefs must be staggering, as are the misinformation campaigns spread by proponents of one non-scientific position or another for people to be able to persist in a science-driven society without understanding or caring to understand the implications.

Additionally, this tendency to believe in non-scientific is not limited merely to the political right and the fundamentalist religious. Those typically on the left and claiming a basic understanding of the scientific frequently reject basic sciences in order to advocate for non-empirically justifiable outcomes that belie a fundamental lack of understanding of basic sciences. A clear example of this is the popularity of ‘colon cleansing’ through juice fasting and other measures which proponents argue is about removing surplus ‘toxins’ that accumulate in the body. While this is a relatively benign misapprehension, it still represents something deeply problematic. A basic understanding of biology and human anatomy makes clear just how asinine this belief is. Internal organs have evolved to flush themselves naturally of anything noxious that may accumulate in them at, basically the same rate no matter what your diet, assuming you are not afflicted with some ailment preventing them from functioning. The belief that organs need to be cleansed is grounded in marketing hype, a distinctly, almost puritanical American obsession purity of essence and other assorted new-age mumbo-jumbo rather than in anything that resembles science. However, the belief is held and advanced even by people who are involved in scientifically relevant things for a living.

These sorts of erroneous beliefs call into question the abilities of those engaged in science or technology driven fields, including agricultural sciences and others. A further example that I was recently made aware of is bio-dynamic agriculture, which has been described as “an occult form of alternative agriculture” by researchers and involves the combination of sensible organic agricultural features with the cesspool of hucksterism that is astrology. Again, while this tendency seems harmless and biodynamic is, at base, simply organic farming and yields nearly identical results, the belief in the demonstrably bogus advanced by, in the case of biodynamic farming, the discredited creationist hack Rudolf Steiner, does damage to the credibility of those advancing said positions. These types of distortions seek to undermine the primacy of the scientific method in both how we see the natural world, and in discourse about public policy. It effectively is the same impetus that feeds climate deniers or those that do not believe in evolution.

This is not to say that the Western conception and ideal of medicine or science has a moratorium on the truth. While many seem to lack a basic understanding of biology, the tendency is to dodge the issue by citing the wisdom of Eastern medicines detached from Western practice or understanding. Indeed, many so-called Naturopathic and Eastern cures have been studied and shown to be efficacious and present solutions that may indeed not be intuitive to Western medicine. However, this does make all of them useful, and the onus must be upon the individual to understand the basics of biology and anatomy to determine that these solutions genuinely do make intuitive scientific sense rather than appealing to some more primal or ephemeral belief system. Or worse, if these belief systems inadvertently point towards a puritanical ethic focused on the natural that rejects the modern, while still hypocritically reveling in the modern – the result being the perpetually re-enforced worship of naked technology while dismissing the science that underpins that technology. To wit, there is ignorance that is innocent because it can be addressed and remedied, and then there is ignorance that is pernicious because it is willful.

Perhaps the rejection of the scientific stems from an oversaturation in science by previous generations. The tendency, in many parts of society in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century was to develop pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and to develop scientific sounding rationales to support them. This process gave way to what James Burke has argued is the most destructive ideology that humanity has thus far developed in the form of Social Darwinism. While Darwin had long held that evolution worked on such as a slow-scale it could never be applied to societal and human tendencies, the mis-application of Darwin’s ideas led to popular eugenics and other fallacious beliefs that provided justifications for incredible human death and suffering – indeed for the intellectual dismantling of the very shared humanity that evolutionary science demonstrates.

Despite this, increased scientific rigor, a shared scientific process, peer review and Popperian Falsification have all gone far to strengthen scientific methodologies and control the claims that can be made. This has only strengthened scientific efforts and further strengthened the claims of the scientific method to be our pre-eminent vehicle for understanding natural phenomena. While sciences have advanced in such a way that, as Thomas Kuhn noted in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in order to fully grasp or even carry meaningful dialogue on the minutiae of certain sciences, extensive training is required, basic scientific education remains highly accessible. The wonders of the natural world, as we continue to discover them, as so much more beautiful, compelling and moving than any alternative justification developed prior to our developing the means to measure these things. Yet, in many fields, we continue to just scrape the surface and as we continue to learn more the wonders of the natural world can only gain further focus. As a society, we must strive to develop basic understandings of sciences across the board. The importance of this lies not only in developing better, more data-driven public policy, but also in aiding us in understanding natural phenomena, most pressingly global climate change which are likely to yield violent social upheavals or even make the planet uninhabitable for ourselves. Indeed, it is our exploitation of technology without fully grasping the science and thus outcomes of its use that is driving climate change. That the United States, as a result of the American lifestyle re-enforced by the anti-science slant of many Americans is responsible for such a large percentage of greenhouse gas emissions is telling. Addressing the state of scientific understanding in America may well prove to be the most important of features for humanity. The willingness to actively reject the vulgar, counter-scientific drivel advanced at every strata of American society remains pressing, for it is the first step towards furthering crucial scientific educations.

The near fatal assault on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon, Arizona (which killed six and placed another twelve people in hospital) yesterday points towards a wider trend towards violence and militancy within the US. This perspective, while not necessarily endorsed by the raging and imagery of the political right, is certainly advanced by the rhetoric used frequently by the far right. This rhetoric seemingly endorses violence, and in the face of rising anti-government militarism within the United States, this rhetoric clearly helps to re-enforce much of what we see in the United States. That right-wing political commentators such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck seem to endorse these militant groups as patriots but then change their rhetorical tunes in the face of violent incidents like this one is deeply vulgar. Further, this rhetoric, placed in the hands of those already mentally unstable and compounded by the problem of far to easily accessible hand-guns in the United States seems to have further contributed to Congresswoman Giffords’ shooting.

To whit, Sarah Palin's Political Action Committee website until today included a map of the US with "crosshairs" centered on various House Democrats throughout the country, including Giffords, introduced by the ‘tweeted’ tagline: "Don't retreat, instead - RELOAD!" This violent imagery was re-enforced by Giffords’ Tea-Party backed opponent, Jessey Kelly, who ran an ad which said: "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jessey Kelly."

Michael Tomasky in the Guardian draws the very obvious linkage between this type of rhetoric and what happened in Arizona. Giffords had previously received death threats for her decision to vote the Health Care Bill earlier this year, and further had previously had her campaign office shot at. All in all, the celebration of heavily armed radicals as Patriots by the right further re-enforces the long tradition of violence directed towards elected leaders and may serve as a means of re-affirming, if not emboldening, those who are mentally unstable and willing to inflict violence on others to make political points. Again, the tendency remains chilling.

What fails to be adequately dealt with however is the ease of handgun availability as a further contributing factor. In most other developed countries, even given the destitute ideology of the shooters, strict gun control laws would have made it far more difficult, if not impossible for the shooter to bring his plans to fruition.

There are mounds of data indicating that guns pose a net societal harm, that gun ownership rates correlate with crime rates - particularly with homicide rates where a gun is involved, that countries with stricter gun laws tend to see less overall violence, that the presence of a gun in the home is likely to increase the occurrence of homicide, as well as numerous cases that document easy gun access and insurrection seemingly going hand-in-hand. In Arizona, where gun ownership is high and Tea Party members were said to frequently carry and brandish handguns at rallies, this vicious incident has retrospectively taken on something of an air of inevitability.

What should come out of this is, not only a greater willingness to address to address the underlying issues that allow fringe radicals to commit violence, but also much stricter psychological screenings that would seek to prevent those with violent tendencies or paranoid fantasies about the government from purchasing ordinance.

While the 2nd amendment holds that gun ownership is a clear civil right, it prefaces this with a clause justifying said right by noting the need for a ‘well regulated Militia’ being ‘necessary for the security of a free state’. The constitution had previously defined said Militia as being what we would today recognize as the National Guard. This makes sense in the face of the constitutional requirement that the army be disbanded following each major conflict – thus, gun-ownership seems to have been included by the constitutional framers on the grounds that re-invasion by the British, without a standing Army, was a very real consideration. However, this argument has been rendered null by omnipresence of the military today.

The argument that handguns are a necessary component for self-defense likewise does not hold water, as the majority of guns purchased for self-defense are not used that way. Supply and demand appear to be what affect guns and violent crime and rational gun control, with limitations on the number of guns allowed in circulation, could go far to preventing further incidents like this and making societal as a whole safer. Our current policies towards guns and our inability to effectively enforce what regulation does exist is something akin to arming the mad house. No individual right to arms and ‘perceived’ safety should compromise the greater right of society to genuine safety. This cowboy mentality within the United States, both towards guns, and to the political rhetoric used needs to be addressed before our streets are again stained crimson.

A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor about conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa has pointed to seemingly petty land-use conflicts - the type that are unfortunately the bread and butter of planning - as the culprit. (CSM has also provide a guide to existing land-use based wholesale conflicts currently in Africa while including potential future flash points.) Land-use conflicts however rarely take on the same mundane tone as land-use fights we see in the US, frequently waged over minutiae such as leaves from neighboring trees falling into gutters or fence colour choices affecting 'neigbborhood aesthetics' but are frequently matters of life or death.

Of course, many of these land-use issues are tied to resources, development control and questions of tenure; however it may be overly simplistic to reduce a conflict as long-standing and multifaceted as that in the DR Congo to merely one over herding rights, as the article seems to. Despite this, the land-use argument certainly carries a great deal of credibility.

From an urban development perspective (and by 2035 the United Nations predicts much of Africa will have become urban), land-use and tenure issues seem to be the most common causes of triggers of ethnic or religious conflict within Africa's burgeoning urban slums. Again, the nuance here is that while many of these conflicts take the form inter-ethnic, tribal or religious violence, the underlying root cause is usually one access to resources, most frequently potable water or development rights within a squatter community - with the underlying irony being that as these are squatter communities, no one has de facto legal rights to develop.

Despite this, possession is frequently 9/10ths of the law, and slum land-lords have been happy to illegally erect tin-sheds and then rent them out at usurious rates in places like Lagos, and to play one ethnic or religious group off against the other in cases where squatters begin to agitate for increased tenure security. Further complications stem from inconsistencies within competing legal systems - from colonial era (though still standing) laws and conflict with new laws passed post de-colonization to conflict with existing indigenous, though informal, tribal laws and norms holding precedence within many areas.

Security of land tenure is of greatest import for many African squatters. While many development projects, including housing and infrastructure improvements have been targeted towards slum denizens within Sub-Saharan Africa, often issues of tenure security have affected the ability of governments and development agencies to improve these communities. In planning better communities for slum denizens it is crucial that legal issues of land tenure be improved such that infrastructure and housing improvements can be made. However, the laws detailing land tenure security remain obsequious in many cases.

Thus many countries, for example one I have experience working in: Ghana, are seeking to mitigate conflict through the reform of land tenure laws and the normalization of traditional tenure conventions with the legal code. What this means is that increasingly traditional tribal chiefs who are making land-use decisions in practice will be further empowered to do so by the state, thus making their decisions formal land-use policy. This strengthens the legal legitimacy of 'traditional' semi-legal conventions while also allowing tribal chiefs to serve as conflict resolutions bodies.

While this on paper may appear to open the system-up to further graft, chiefs tend to have smaller areas of authority that many of the post-independence bureaucratic positions and have well-known customs for conducting business or concluding disputes, thus making their system in many ways more transparent - or at least, the rules and inherent biases built into such a system would be at least known to the involved parties. Tribal chiefs also have greater legitimacy in the eyes of many recent rural to urban migrants than formal written (easily and frequently forged) legal documents.

While the empowerment of traditional tribal chiefs to serve as 'customary land managers' may be in imperfect solution, it is one that has great deal of salience with many living in African cities and villages and the further empowerment of chiefs as land-managers could, in many ways mitigate land-use conflicts and thus prevent bloodshed.

If there is anything that galls it is the absolute smug sense of personal superiority that seemingly idealistic people of my generation view the developing world with, and their sense of self in ‘saving’ it. It is the mentality of the post baby-boomer generation – a generation that has had it so good, that feels entitled to college degrees from small and expensive liberal arts colleges, to travel, and gadgets and their own cars from the age of 16 onwards. It is the view of a generation in which the notion of ‘self’ and self-advancement that was novel for the boomer generation has, as Evelyn Waugh might have had it, become habituated settled-opinion rather merely world weary exclamation. It is a jaundiced view that inflates self worth, forgoes the ideas and inherent value of those being ‘served’ and assaults betterment of the collective in favor of the glorification of the individual while simultaneously inveigling the notion of service to the collective.

In the end, the motivation has nothing to do with the experience, the culture or the problems being addressed and everything to do with advancing a grotesque sense of self-edification. As Theroux noted there is something unfinished about Africa that attracts the Messianic above all else. With this approach comes the extension of Western ideals, ideologies and specifically self-edification. The notion of going to ‘save’ Africa has little to do with Africa the continent and more with Africa, the imaginary place of Western imagination. A land completely lacking capacity, choked by mysticism and in need of a savior. And it is not hard to become a savior – all that is required in this view of the world is to give up material comfort for a couple of years in order to garner the praise and adoration craved for the foreseeable future.

This mentality is not much different from the Mission Civilisatrice of the colonial era – that once popular notion advanced by former colonial powers that Western colonial abuse of Africa was somehow justified because Africa was little more than a continent of reckless savages in need of civilization being brought to them. Thus, people could go to Africa to ‘come good’ - to prove their worth by teaching the native peoples how to be proper Westerners. This has been updated within the current Messianic mentality which continues to infantilize African peoples. Thus, white kids with undergraduate degrees can join the Peace Corps and feel that they are off to save the Dark Continent. That the very limited survival ‘skills’ offered by a group of largely privileged white kids boasting liberal arts degrees might improve Africa simply by them deigning to be there may be what is most shocking.

The Peace Corps is a wonderful experience, granted, however one must realize that the PCV is gaining far more from the experience than the community that the PCV is placed in. The limitations placed on Peace Corps Volunteers mean that, basically no matter how strongly one believes in ones work, and no matter the extent to which one can do ‘good’ that will always be limited. The exchange is a completely otherworldly experience within a radically different culture that can provide long term benefit if one, in the Aristotelian sense, one acknowledges that self-examination provides the sinews for a life worth living. This is not to say that the Peace Corps is easy – it isn’t. It is difficult to be the ‘other’ within another culture especially when one grows up accustomed to creature comforts and inter-connectivity. However, it is more to say that the limitations placed on the average PCV mean that Peace Corps is pre-eminently a chance to grow and learn as an individual rather than to ‘save the world’.

The tendency however seems to be towards an almost gloating sense of self worth. A deep rooted solipsism that is reinforced by numerous external inputs at home, where people will treat you as though you are somehow sainted for having worked in Africa, and by a series of Orientalist inputs that make up a constantly re-affirming mechanism for self-affirmation. As the profile of Peace Corps Volunteers has been changed in order to be ‘more representative of mainstream Americans’ this tendency has been further advanced. We have seen increasingly would be Messiahs or those that would, as one member of cohort I trained with did, smuggle suitcases of bibles into Muslim countries in the hope of bringing ‘salvation’ to the locals.

The picture linked here is what set me off on this meditation. The identity of the individual will remain anonymous to protect the guilty, hence the reposting rather than a link to the original. I feel the photo in every way represents the critique I am advancing. Every element of the photo screams of a form of brinksmanship, open to only the privileged and white: a sort of sneering, smug self-indulgence demonstrating both Messianic delusions while simultaneously trying to leverage those into a point of gamesmanship over other well-meaning white people convinced that they too are ‘saving the world’. Even if it meant in jest, the joke fails to meet even the minimum standards or mirth because it is so nakedly and un-ironically indicative of how vulgar the Western view of Africa is.

Having discussed agency and policy level problems in the previous post, one must move on to the problems that stem from the tendency to try to solve problems in Africa and elsewhere by simply throwing money at them and in hoping for the best. This approach has traditionally dominated traditional development strategies instituted by large global development agencies. Macro-scale projects have traditionally been attempted everywhere from West African locales like Lagos, Nigeria to East African ones like Kigali, Kenya and throughout Southern Africa. Of the many large infrastructure and other projects attempted, very few saw completion.

In many places, weak civil societies and corrupt governments simply enabled funds to disappear into Swiss bank accounts while incomplete projects often rotted or were scavenged for scrap materials by the urban poor. This is not to say that large-scale infrastructure projects are not necessary or desirable within Africa – and indeed in countries like Senegal and Burkina Faso, good- governance models and appropriate oversight has helped to see important infrastructure built.

What development agencies have increasingly learned it that smaller-scale, incremental projects with tightly controlled budgets and external oversight, frequently implemented in partnership with more transparent governments or local NGOs has frequently resulted in good project completion. Powerhouse development capital organizations like the Gates foundation have frequently also learned from early mistakes and found ways to target funds such that they achieve more desired results.

Despite this, many charities, and especially celebrity driven ones have failed to learn from this process and have simply relied on the old model of throwing money at problems and hoping everyone will do the right thing. These phenomena have been best described by novelist, travel writer and former PCV Paul Theroux in a blistering New York Times editorial a few years ago.

In the appropriately titled, The Rock Star’s Burden, Theroux notes that dependence on foreign aid payments (drawing the distinction between those and funds for education, disaster relief, etc) and a glut of foreign aid volunteers have failed to generate meaningful results. Theroux states, using Malawi as an example:

I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.He goes on to state later in the piece that:

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth.

And Theroux is right. Celebrity charities further epitomize that, while also taking on a whole new level of ridiculous waste and egomaniacal banality. Marina Hyde, writing incisively and cogently in The Guardian, also targets Bono as the ultimate figure of celebrity Messianic excess. Hyde's piece is worth reading in full, however, her pointing to the paucity of good actually done by organizations like Bono's versus the money that has passed through them, the use of luxury consumerism as a vehicle to advance charity (as Bono's Product Red and most recent African aid tie-ins with Louis Vuton speak to) or the rampant hypocrisy of demanding his native Ireland give more to help Africa while simultaneously moving his assets out of the country into tax shelter.

Similarly, economist Jeffrey Sachs has been positively bellicose in his claims that poverty can be ended in our lifetimes if not for want of a few million dollars for mosquito nets in Africa. While mosquito nets are important as a vector for helping to prevent malaria, which kills millions every year across the continent, this it and of itself fails to address problems of urban slum development as a result rapid urbanization, ongoing poor governance and corruption, increased desertification in the Sahel and Sub-Sahara, global climate change, poor agricultural management and ongoing declining agricultural returns as population grows, and increased dependency on the West (and increasingly China).

However, the underlying problem remains that all of these projects create the illusion of helping Africa while also failing to effectively help improve government, services or combat poverty. Rather than implementing smaller scale projects, through effective locally based NGOs, run by Africans who actually speak the language and understand local needs, power relations and systems, the celebrity approach to aid and development is increasingly about giving the appearance that things are being done becasue money is moving around. This tendency, as we shall see in part three, also is problematic when discussing young people who go to Africa and elsewhere to 'make a difference'.

There is often something immediately crass and altogether guileless in how the United States conducts international development activities. This is true of both the way agencies and branches of government attempt to give aid or engage in so-called ‘nation building’, how private organizations give aid moneys and in the candor of idealistic young people involved in development. Most importantly, the penultimate failing of aid and aid workers today is that they largely fail to meet the needs of the communities that they purport to serve.

The underlying problems seem to be that policy seem to fall into the following categories: (1) developed to meet some form of macro-derived foreign policy aim based on an a priori set of criteria and as a result is non-responsive to human outcomes, (2) agencies and/or individuals simply hurling money at problem regions, frequently driven by (3) celebrities or other individuals trying to experience messianic self-edification via international development.

In each of these cases, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s sufficiently silly comic quasi-roman a clef, The Ugly American appears to be the most appropriate comment upon US practice. Indeed, it is this tendency, a combination of willful cultural ignorance, a specifically American sense of wanting to be part of the “save the world” set and the notion that simply throwing money at a problem will solve it that exemplify the content of The Ugly American and render development patterns meaningless. In this essay I will deal with all 3 of these tendencies as a separate post.

(1) From a policy perspective, a couple of examples from my own experience spring immediately to mind. The first involved a State Department briefing being put on by a DC Think Tank regarding a new policy being jointly advanced by the State Department and Department of Defense at the height of the Iraq War. In those heady days of 2006, the government had finally realized that something wasn’t working and were finally willing to take a gamble on something else. As a result the Provincial Reconstruction Teams or PRTs seemed to be one way.

PRTs had been in use for the last couple of years in Afghanistan and would factor heavily upon Bush's ‘new way foreword’ for Iraq, which later became ‘the surge’. The idea behind the PRTs is that they would be small, well-equipped teams designed to deal on a province-by-province basis with various reconstruction problems. The panel I attended was made up of the State Department official heading up the PRT program in Iraq (and who, like every state department official I met in Washington was a very blonde lady with a Virginia accent), an NCO who ran a PRT in Afghanistan (also a blonde lady with a southern accent) and filling in for a the scheduled DOD panelist, a think tanker who had studied PRTs (a blonde man with a Virginia Accent). So this quasi-Aryan super-panel was going to solve Iraq’s problems once and for all with a new, more culturally sensitive approach. I was skeptical, but nothing could have prepared me for what followed.

The PRT lecture itself was ludicrous in that, despite receiving very detailed information on the inter-agency nature of the PRTs, exact, to the penny, cost-accounting as to how the PRTs were to be funded by percentages by the different agencies, and what sort of state department employee made good PRT material; no one actually said what the PRTs specifically would do. The State Department lady seemingly joked about how they certainly hope to equip at least half the teams with an Arabic speaker in each of these 60 person or so teams, but noted that this goal wasn’t really ‘realistic’. She also stated that actually including Arabic speakers should not necessarily be a priority - which seemed a somewhat counter-intuitive to put it lightly, as the PRTs would be dealing one-on-one with Iraqi civilians in helping them rebuild the country. Actual communication or dialogue with Iraqis however seemed less important than the lofty goal of ‘fixing’ Iraq. Actually asking people what they wanted or needed is apparently not part of the State Department’s standard operating procedure.

What should have been the nadir of the presentation came when someone got up and asked something to the effect of:

"Well, we know these PRTs are going to be flexible, but can you give us some examples of what it is they do exactly in Afghanistan?"

Fair question one would think, however all of the panelists were hard pressed to say. Eventually, the state department lady decided she would give the question a go, noting: "We are teaching them proper professionalism. This means teaching Afghans that it’s unacceptable to wear sandals to work and things like that." At this point my already dropped jaw came unhinged. One would think that perhaps the Afghan sense of ‘business casual’ was not the pre-eminent problem facing that troubled state. Things went on to get slightly worse when, while discussing the possibility of political assassination of foreign leaders, which would "have drastic and harmful geopolitical consequences for the United States"; the state department lady had trouble controlling her very visible giggling.

A second anecdote that springs to mind involves the activities of USAID in Niger. USAID is a government run food aid organization that delivers surplus agricultural product to places in the world with food shortages. While this is an important and useful practice, the protocols under which USAID operates have severely hindered its ability to successfully combat starvation. Specifically, USAID will only issue food aid in cases that a child can be diagnosed with the medical condition starvation. This means the full distended stomach and everything else. The problem with this procedure is that, once someone can be diagnosed with starvation, because the body has gone so long since having food, it stops to manufacture the enzymes needed to break down foods. What this means is that, if a person begins to eat again, they will likely die of stomach infection from being unable to handle the micro-organisms that live in everything we eat. Starvation requires hospitalization, careful monitoring and medications to jump start the system once again. As a result, rather than simply triggering kids who were just very hungry and could have benefited from the food aid, USAID instituted a policy that simply put lives at risk.

Additionally, the food aid itself was a corn meal mixed with sugar – something not part of the typical Nigerien diet. As a result, people did not know how to prepare this corn meal and found it distasteful. I remember being fed a large plate of it while serving as a PCV in my village in Southern Niger by my neighbors when they had me to dinner. They believed, as a westerner, I would like the stuff. Remember again, this was food aid issued to them by USAID in order to help prevent starving children from dying. It was a combination of poor policy, an unwillingness to tie food aid to education or culturally appropriate protocols and realities that saw it being fed to me.

Tony Judt's follow-up piece on trains is also worthy of comment as he posits some important further notions about trains, modernism and civil society. Judt was a great humanist as well as historian - something that carried across in his final book Ill Fares the Land. Judt's outlook as a historian was to try to exemplify those elements that advanced that humanism, the most important of these he felt was civil society. Thus, in this peace on rails, Judt rightly equates the railway with civil society:

The railways were and remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit. They cannot exist without common accord (and, in recent times, common expenditure), and by design they offer a practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike. This is something the market cannot accomplish—except, on its own account of itself, by happy inadvertence. Railways were not always environmentally sensitive—though in overall pollution costs it is not clear that the steam engine did more harm than its internally combusted competitor—but they were and had to be socially responsive. That is one reason why they were not very profitable.

Thus the classical railway stations, many of them the product of the City Beautiful movement, were designed as great public monuments that would dominate the built environment and uplift the civic spirit. This notion is carried out in all of the great classical stations: Orsay, Grand Central Station, Gare de L'est, Waterloo Station, etc. Additionally, Judt makes the very salient point that trains exemplify comprehensive, rational use of public space. The notion of public space is rationalist and highly modernist. Thus the betrayal of public space is a betrayal of modernity:

If we cannot spend our collective resources on trains and travel contentedly in them it is not because we have joined gated communities and need nothing but private cars to move between them. It will be because we have become gated individuals who don’t know how to share public space to common advantage. The implications of such a loss would far transcend the demise of one system of transport among others. It would mean we had done with modern life.

It has been the US alone among Western Countries that has truly eviscerated in rail lines and allowed them to fall into absolute disrepair. Additionally, it has further been the United States that has most fully advanced the ideal of the singularity and triumph of the individual over the collective. Thus, the decline of civil society and the destruction of the Art Deco styled monuments to civil society are linked. Rex Putnam's work Bowling Alone continues to serve as the most important study on the decline of civil society and community within the United States, and while Putnam studied the decline of community bowling leagues, he could have just as easily studied the disappearance of trains and train stations from the American landscape. While others such as Richard Florida have attempted to refute Putnam by arguing civil society has merely morphed into new skills-based "creative" communities, this argument does not compel and rather speaks to an increasingly individualistic vision of self-edification rather than of a wider community.

Thus, rail, civil society and public space are all inextricably linked. The return of rail to the American landscape should be made pre-eminent. It represents a compelling use of public space and the reestablishment of civil society, and the good of society, versus that of the individual as cardinal. The railway is a means of establishing urban aesthetics and form, equity, regional linkage and civics in a very palpable way. As Judt notes, most of the the railway stations that survive retain the purposes and forms that they were built for. The generational failure of the baby boomers has been the taking of services for granted, followed by the eventual dismantlement of infrastructure and services in order to serve short term individual gains. Rail encourages, due to it's longevity in form, for us to think in terms of long-term outcomes. For civil society to prosper, perhaps railways must again prosper.

Rain pours from the heavens and collects in sheets in the parking lot of the Willow Creek Transit Center. Impervious surface interrupted only by the odd pothole providing a low point in which the rain waters can collect. It is water constantly in motion but also stagnant, shimmering with the diaphanous light cast by the streetlights. A spine of track cuts through the darkness and pulls this desolate stretch of Beaverton, this sterile, paved and ordered stretch of suburban strip development into the maw of Portland. Here in the darkness, the fog and the rain there is almost something strangely beautiful if not otherworldly about the suburbs. That absence of human activity – the very feeling that many suburban dwellers wanted – is finally pervasive. It takes the fog to depress the sounds of cars and the bright hiss of neon-lights from the unerringly uniform commercial strip development to create this. It takes that dampening of sight and sound, leaving only that singular gleam of the railhead: this strip of infrastructure that seems to stretch on into the infinity.

Without the rail, Beaverton is just suburban America: as easily situated here as anywhere. The same shops reproduced, with slight variation across the sweep or North America. It is real estate without place - human settlement without identity, or even a distinguishing birthmark. It represents a sterile ideal, isolated from the other. Suburbs are designed to keep them out. They reduce us into a singular non-identity based on uniform consumer spending choices rather than through ideas. Great stretches of this country are those descended from the suburban idea. These are people who now may feel some form of gripping nostalgia for strip malls, white walls and stucco; people who come to lack imagination because their sense of the world comes from watching rather than by doing. Novelty is developed in the fringe of narrow, often technologically motivated confines, rather than in any holistic sense. The suburbs, though they may be very temporary exude a sense of unchanging permanence. National brands seek to create a sense of perfect consistency, and their presence further reinforces this sense of temporal and emotional fixedness.

The irony is, as Joel Kotkin notes, the most innovative technology centers are suburban rather than urban. Sterile environs drive software and technology. Technology thrives on consistency. Just as cities hate stars, those distant nuclear orbs that remind them of their insignificance, technology hates the unpredictable daily innovation that takes place on city streets. It is crippled by the constant re-colonization of urban space and ideas to fill needs, only to fluidly dissolve. Technology, for all it's fluidity, for all it's willingness to dictate changes in how we live, thrives on static environs.

The rail line then is perhaps beautiful because it is subversive. It both reinforces and represents a real threat to the underlying order. It is deeply post-modern: infrastructure is order, but it represents an alternative order, open to definition, interpretation and inventiveness, while still providing a means of prolonging and reinforcing the suburban landscape around. It is a seed for nascent land-use reinvention. It allows entropy from the city access to hardened suburban lines.

The rain begins to pour harder as the train slides effortless through the sea of darkness and to the platform.

More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity. No competing form of transport, no subsequent technological innovation, no other industry has wrought or facilitated change on the scale that has been brought about by the invention and adoption of the railway. - Tony Judt

The late historian Tony Judt has an wonderful piece about trains in the current New York Review of Books. Trains have historically served vehicles of modernization, affecting everything from how we think about time (with the advent of the train schedule dramatically rearranging the Western lifestyle) to how we have historically planned cities.

Trains have historically gone far to assert social mobility firmly on behalf of the downtrodden - it has been said of the creation of the rail network in India did more to emancipate low-caste Hindus than anything done to reform the caste system- while also driving intra-regional connectivity. At the same time, as Judt argues, the rail system imposed a whole additional set of social classes based on what types of rail seating one could afford. The connection of European cities to each other through traditional (and now high-speed) rail networks has done much to drive the regional economic and social linkages that have allowed the European Union to thrive. Meanwhile, lighter rail has historically been the vehicle that allowed cities to grow and reduced near toxic densities in Victorian cities - the first suburbs were, after all, rail suburbs.

Rail has affected cities in other ways. The construction of rail-centers within cities was a monumental challenge, and many traditional rail centers have further served as vehicles to produce monuments, being a favorite construction project during the City Beautiful movement of the early 1900s and later. The great spines of architecture and infrastructure with their off-shooting vertebrae on which the rail system rested, while costly, became, much like the docks to previous generations (and the airports today) the lifeline of the city.

While much of the United States' freight shipping is still done by train, the percentage of goods shipped by rail is diminished every year. Additionally, the good most overwhelmingly shipped on trains is coal. Low-cost airlines have supplanted commuter rail in all about a few areas (New York and New England being notable exceptions), however, a new push is being made to develop high speed rail corridors within the United States. Most notable among these include a proposed Midwestern line that would connect Chicago with Milwaukee and the Twin Cities as well as a San Francisco to LA line (with a hope that this line could eventually be expanded to reach all the way North to Vancouver, BC - passing through Portland and Seattle).

Spearheading passenger high-speed rail connectivity has been an important aspect of President Obama's infrastructure redevelopment push and has helped to reinvigorate the idea of rail in the United States. The notion of developing the type of high speed, efficient and modern rail systems found in Europe is certainly one that appeals greatly. Trains, especially the modern variety, are comfortable, attract wide multi-social class ridership and represent one of the more environmentally friendly means of transportation. While the infrastructure requires large up-front infrastructure costs - high speed requires new tracks to be laid as it uses different technology and different rail gauges than it's historical counterparts - the sort of regional connectivity afforded by a well-integrated rail system in invaluable. France has been a model in this, having decided to extend high speed rail service to almost every city in France, allowing for easy, rapid connectivity to regional centers resulting in wider cultural exchange and improved economic, social and other benefits to it's population.

There remains, however, a great deal of dubiousness about high speed rail projects within the United States, with many recently elected conservative governors, notably in Ohio and Wisconsin seeking to block projects, and to forgo generous Federal funding in order to do so. The Economist notes that rail is increasingly becoming an ideological issue upon which political parties are fighting tooth and nail over. Many on the right have come to view high-speed rail as simply a Utopian liberal scheme, or worse, a white elephant for which the Federal government will simply endlessly pour money in the form of subsidy. This apparently ignoring the billions spent annually on both road maintenance - subsidizing both suburban expansion and the commercial trucking industry, which chews up roads through with heavy cars but also requires highways to be kept pristine to avoid snapping axles - and on the airline industry through lucrative, and potentially needless defense contracts to airplane makers.

Additionally, critics within the environmental community, most notably peak-oil theorist and general Malthusian James Howard Kunstler, has argued that it may be too late for high-speed rail, the push towards the development of rail represents simply falling into a technology trap, and that the money would be better spent in improving and maintaining our existent rail infrastructure, which has increasingly fallen into disrepair. Besides, Kunstler notes, few Americans even bother to take commuter rail as it is and the success of European rail lines likely has more to do with a long-established European culture of rail-ridership that does not exist in the United States. This argument remains a persistent voice that must be considered when promoting high-speed rail. Despite this, however, high-speed rail remains promising.

To me, the argument for high-speed rail trounces that against it. Rail is a technology that, as Judt notes, in a very modern sense links communities. While the personal car has always been viewed in the United States as the ultimate vehicle for personal freedom - Bruce Springsteen made a career of singing about ephemeral dreams of escape through the open highway - true cultural freedom, to me, lies with effective regional linkages that are accessible to the population at large. The notion of promoting trains requires thinking increasingly collectively, or in thinking about the us as a society rather than thinking in terms of freedom of the individual. More so than airlines, which are only open to the truly affluent and are hardly environmentally or economically sustainable to begin with, rail is the genuine vehicle of national and multinational linkage and connectivity. They are a technology that was historically revolutionary in a positive sense, and are a technology that can again be salubrious to the very way we organize our society to how we think.