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Tony Abbott, Andrew Bolt and ‘RESIGN, DICKHEAD’

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 11:35:00 +0000

lyndonmorley.com.au - The Nuts and Bolts of Contemporary Australian Political Discourse

‘RESIGN, DICKHEAD’ was one of the most popular signs at the Melbourne March in March last weekend — attracting the ire of Andrew Bolt. Banner creator Lyndon Morley sets the record straight.

Mr. Bolt,

In your article “Barbarians march in March”, 16 March 2014, I’m one of the creators and carriers of the “RESIGN, DICKHEAD” banner; one of the protesters whose “political discourse is conducted in the language of hatred and vilification”, in your words. I must say how flattered I am to have been insulted by the most vociferous, bigoted sycophant in the country.

First, I’d like to put my banner in perspective. Australia has a long cultural history of vulgarity in the appropriate context. The Australian Democrats campaigned to “keep the bastards honest” in 1980 and the word “dickhead” is surely no more offensive 34 years later. The TAC’s famous “bloody idiot” campaign, although not political in nature, is a reflection of Australian culture’s treatment of pertinent insults. While the context of the surrounding message is always more important than any subjectively vulgar sound-bite, the “RESIGN, DICKHEAD” banner is not a symptom of Australian culture so much as it is a result of a political landscape poisoned by the spiteful, ignorant rhetoric of the Andrew Bolts of our country.

You’re shocked and offended because someone had the audacity to insult your paragon PM but you’ve accomplished exactly what Master Murdoch intended for you: you’ve poisoned Australian politics with hate and spite. You seem to be upset simply because you’ve contributed to dragging political discourse in this country down so far that someone on the left-wing has finally stooped to a level you can actually understand.

I never personally chastised anyone for the “Ditch the Witch” fiasco or any of the rampant misogyny or ignorant vilification, as asinine as it all seemed. Just as I have and just as you do, all Australians are welcome to express their political views in whatever stupid way they want. For you to spew vapid, self-righteous indignation, however – when your own banal insults are thrown back in your direction – is a startling example of the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance you personify. While most of the protesters were conveying much more eloquent messages than me, I was waving around a big banner that was 50% the word dickhead. I’m not pretending to be a model of infallible virtue, I joined you and Abbott in the proverbial cesspit you’re turning Australian politics into. You’re the journalistic equivalent of a protester with a vulgar banner, except you’re neck deep and venting vapid rage like I’ve dirtied your shiny shoes.

As your puppetmaster Murdoch intended, your malicious input into Australian politics has succeeded in filling Australian politics with hateful remarks and vacuous insults. On the left-right scale, you have contrived to pull political discourse down. Are you really shocked that people have started participating in the landscape you fomented, or are you shocked because only the Bolts and the Abbotts are supposed to communicate in the language of childish derision?

The “RESIGN, DICKHEAD” sign was not clever, but it had to convey a powerful and succinct message so that it could be read from any distance amidst a crowd of thousands. You, Mr. Bolt, have the opportunity to spread your hateful messages to all of your dozens of readers without any apparent restriction on their length. You can use analogies and examples, you can present your argument with subtlety and nuance, but instead, you spew vapid lists of insults as if you also expect your message to be read from any distance amidst a crowd of thousands.

I intend to write a separate piece on why Tony Abbott is a dickhead and why I felt it was appropriate to direct that message towards him but here’s the synopsis:

Murdoch Family Inc and their subsidiary the LNP have turned Australian politics into a no-holds-barred bogan battleground of insults and insolence. While the NewsCorpParty is broadcasting every hateful remark it can use to whip its audience into a frenzy, it’s also easier to get time on the other networks by screaming obscenities than it is by conveying political goals.

If Tony Abbott hadn’t cut the ribbon on the floodgates of senseless ridicule in Australian politics, maybe my sign could be considered distasteful. If the Liberal party had renounced rather than adopted mockery in Australian politics, maybe I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

In the garbage dump you’re trying to help turn Australian politics into, I obviously feel it was appropriate to call the Prime Minister a dickhead. I can’t speak for everyone who dislikes the Prime Minister, but I think he needs to know how strongly that sentiment is felt. You can’t just sell off parcels of our country without being told you’re a dickhead. You can’t dredge our reefs, chop down our world heritage listed forests and kill our animals without being told you’re a dickhead. You can’t abolish our important scientific and social institutions, oppress minorities or defund education, health and welfare without being told you’re a dickhead.

I think it’s fair to call him a dickhead. I hope that it sticks, and that for the rest of his life, Tony Abbott is known as Tony Abbott the Dickhead PM. I hope people who meet his daughters say “Oh, your dad is the famous dickhead!”, and I hope his Wikipedia page ends up with an entire chapter dedicated to the dickhead aptronym. I hope it stains his life in such a way that it makes every Australian politician worry about what they’ll be called.

My sign was dumb, but it was not competing for the cleverest sign in politics, it was competing for attention in a political climate of one-liner stupidity; a political climate you and your Murdoch overlord are massively responsible for. If you’re so upset that you’re living in a country where people who disagree with you are willing to act like you, maybe you shouldn’t be a professional stone thrower or live in a political ideology that is as shallow, fragile and transparent as glass.

The only reason people like you exist is because a vacuum of hatred, fear and anger exists where right-wing perspectives are being proven obsolete. You are a relic of bygone ideology; a museum exhibit of lamented values from recent history. Like my sign, the only notable thing about you individually is that you are the loudest and most obnoxious of your kind. Like all of your kind, you are a vestige of redundant politics and you’ll fade away as your ageing audience go senile or die due to health cuts you demanded.

You are the enemy of civil political discourse. You’re not a journalist. You’re a propagandist. You’re a hatemonger. You’re PR for the Murdoch family. But at least you can pat yourself on the back for having pulled political discourse in Australia down to this level. You’re a dickhead too.

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Is Australia losing its empathy? @GuardianAus @romankrznaric

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 11:58:00 +0000

Syrian children and their mother in Aleppo, Syria, are traumatised after air strikes. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Roman Krznaric

Stereotyping, rife in today’s political debate, means we fail to see the real individuals behind the labels we impose on them

We’ve all done it. We walk down the street and see a homeless guy asking for some small change and we stride straight past avoiding his eye. Or we read about children in Syria being maimed and tortured and quickly flick over the page without a second of thought, continuing to munch on our toast.

These kinds of empathy failures are pretty normal. Although the neuroscientists now tell us that 98% of people have the ability to empathise, the reality is that we lead busy, stressful lives, and often feel we don’t have the time or energy to step into other people’s shoes, look at the world from their perspective – and give them some support. In other words, we fail to bring our neural circuitry to life, so our empathic potential lies dormant.

But something more serious is going on: Australia, the lucky country, is losing its empathy. A recent report based on a national survey by the Scanlon Foundation highlights some powerful statistics:

    Racial and religious discrimination is on the rise and at its highest level since surveys began in 2007 – 40% of people born in Asian countries such as India and Malaysia have experienced discrimination over the past 12 months
    There is growing anti-asylum seeker sentiment, especially against “boat people” – in 2011 23% of those surveyed thought people arriving in boats should be sent back, a figure that has risen to 33%
    The majority of Australians now think their fellow citizens can’t be trusted – social trust declined from 52% in 2012 to 45% in 2013.

What are figures like these telling us? Without anyone really noticing, communities are fracturing and social cohesion being eroded. More and more people are caught up in a culture of hyper-individualism where the question “what’s in it for me?” dominates their minds. They are turning their backs on socially marginalised groups such as asylum seekers and becoming less willing to trust others, or listen to the views of people whose beliefs differ from their own – whether it’s on issues such as climate change or private schools. The big picture is clear: there’s a growing empathy deficit that is creating new levels of social division.

In some ways these attitudes are surprising. You might expect them in a country that is suffering chronic economic recession, where people scapegoat immigrants and blame them for their economic woes. But Australia hardly qualifies on these grounds, having done better than most countries to survive the repercussions of the global financial meltdown in 2008.

It’s also a little strange for a nation that prides itself on its multiculturalism (of which I am a product, with a mixed heritage including Polish, Croatian, Romanian and Scottish). In fact, 84% of respondents in the Scanlon study said they thought multiculturalism had been good for the country, and 70% believed it benefited the nation economically.

On the other hand, it’s clear the prevalent political culture is hardly conducive to creating empathy, even if the past decade has seen growing recognition of the perspectives and rights of Indigenous Australians. Just think how much stereotyping remains a staple of the contemporary political scene. Politicians from across the spectrum frequently refer to asylum seekers as “illegals” – Tony Abbott’s government decreed that they should be described as such in all official correspondence – despite the Refugee Council of Australia and the United Nations pointing out that it is an inaccurate term since there is nothing illegal about seeking asylum.

“If you wanted to disenfranchise refugees, and leave the public thinking they have no rights, then call them ‘illegal’ over and over again,” the former Paul Keating speechwriter Don Watson told me. Politicians, he says, do everything they can to “keep any kind of empathy at bay”, finding language that “dulls the instinct to ask ‘What if that were me and my children in one of those boats, or in one of those detention centres?’” Thomas Keneally – author of the empathic bestseller Schindler’s Ark – has made similar remarks, commenting on the “racial hysteria” politicians have whipped up against asylum seekers.

It is this kind of stereotyping, where we fail to see the real individuals behind the labels we impose on them, that is at the root of the empathy crisis.

This empathy decline is not, however, Australia’s alone. Across the western world there is evidence of a growing empathy deficit. A study at the University of Michigan revealed empathy levels in the United States have dropped 48% over the past 40 years, with the steepest fall happening over the last decade. This means that fewer and fewer people are making the effort to extend their moral concern towards strangers, or to take into account the feelings and perspectives of others. In the UK, the empathy deficit is reflected in a chronic decline of social trust. In 1959 60% of people thought most other people could be trusted. That figure has now halved. A creeping, self-centred individualism has become dominant in public culture.

It all sounds a bit depressing. But there’s good news. There is a quiet revolution of empathic thinking and social action going on around the globe. With a little imagination, Australians could learn to harness the power of empathy to shift the contours of society. So what does this empathy revolution look like?

Intriguingly, empathy is a more popular concept today than at any moment in its history. It’s on the lips of everyone from the Dalai Lama to Barack Obama, from business gurus to happiness experts. Internet searches for the word “empathy” have more than doubled in frequency in the past ten years.

A major reason for this surge of interest is because of extraordinary new insights into the science of empathy. For more than three centuries we’ve been fed a dangerous piece of propaganda, which is that human beings are essentially selfish, individualistic creatures. But the scientific consensus has shifted in the last decade. We are also Homo empathicus: alongside our selfish inner drives is a more empathic, co-operative self.

Neuroscientists have discovered that almost all of us (exceptions include psychopaths) have a ten-section “empathy-circuit” wired into our brains. Damage part of it and you may be unable to recognise fear or other emotions on someone’s face. Evolutionary biologists have shown this co-operative, empathic self is a trait we share with our primate cousins, such as the hippie-like bonobo chimp. And psychologists have demonstrated that the empathic ability to step into another’s shoes and appreciate that their viewpoint may differ from our own develops in most children by the age of about two.

The problem is that we’re still not very skilled at tapping into our full empathic potential. But luckily empathy can be learned, like learning to ride a bike or drive a car. The best place to start is at school. I believe every child should have the right to take part in programmes such as Roots of Empathy, the world’s most successful empathy teaching initiative. Having started in Canada, it has now spread to countries such as New Zealand and Germany, and more than half a million children have done it. How does it work? The teacher is a baby.

True. A class of kids adopts a baby for the year, who visits every few weeks with a parent and an instructor from the programme. The children sit around the baby and discuss things such as: why’s the baby crying? Why is the baby laughing? What might she be feeling? This effort to step into the baby’s shoes is then extended outwards. What’s it like to be bullied in the playground, or to be made fun of if you’re in a wheelchair? The results are remarkable. A study in Scotland showed the programme boosted co-operative behaviour in 55% of pupils, decreased bullying and increased academic attainment. Roots of Empathy has been piloted in Western Australia. It’s now time to roll it out across the nation’s classrooms.

But we can’t wait 20 years for a new generation of empathic citizens to emerge. We also need to work on ourselves. On a personal level, try having a conversation with a stranger at least once a week. Get beyond superficial chatter and talk about the stuff that really matters in life – love, family, death or politics. Conversations with strangers are one of the best ways to overcome our prejudices and assumptions about others, and can cure us of making snap stereotyped judgements about people based on appearance or accent.

On the political level, we need to generate these kinds of conversations on a mass scale. One inspiring organisation that does this is the Parents Circle, which creates grassroots dialogues between Israelis and Palestinians. One of their most powerful projects was the Hello Peace phone line. Any Israeli citizen could call a free phone number and talk to a Palestinian stranger for up to half an hour, and Palestinians could similarly call Israelis. In its first five years of operation, more than a million calls were made.

Just imagine if there were similar phone lines (or online video dialogue projects) across Australia, which created conversations between climate change activists and climate change sceptics, between anti-immigrant advocates and new immigrants themselves, between bombastic politicians and their constituents who feel voiceless; between rich and poor, young and old. It would be the beginning of an empathy revolution. Not an old-fashioned revolution of new laws or policies, but something much more radical: a revolution of human relationships.

Roman Krznaric’s new book is Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution.

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Under Tony Abbott, political principles reach an all-time low - Ross Gittins @smh

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 11:44:00 +0000

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/under-tony-abbott-political-principles-reach-an-alltime-low-20140225-33ffk.html

We are witnessing history being made. Unfortunately, it's a history-making decline in standards of political behaviour. At least it proves we're not merely imagining that things were better in the old days.

Tempting though it is, one of the things incoming governments don't do is delve into the affairs of their predecessor. The papers of the old government aren't made available to the new masters. But all that is out the window with the Abbott government's decision to establish a royal commission into the Rudd government's handling of the home insulation program and provide it with Labor's cabinet documents.

It takes innocence greater than I can muster to believe the motive for the inquiry is to bring justice to the program's victims rather than to embarrass the Coalition's political opponents by raking over one of their more celebrated stuff-ups.
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Labor can take its lumps. The real pity is that a long standing convention seeking to limit political vindictiveness has been cast aside. One thing we can be sure of is that when next Labor returns to power it will lose no time in retaliating, as will that government's eventual Coalition successor. Advantage-seeking retaliation will become a bigger part of the political debate.

The man who set new lows in negativity and obstructionism in opposition is now taking us to new lows in government. In a more godly world, Labor would resist the temptation to sink to the level of misbehaviour set by its opponents, thus giving substance to its repeated claims of moral superiority. But so intense is the competition between the parties that this seems unlikely. Last week Bill Shorten promised to lead a constructive opposition and not oppose everything for the sake of it. It's a wonderful resolve - one which, if lived up to, many voters would find attractive - but I fear it's another take from Tony Abbott: almost tearful promises to sin no more, followed by an immediate resumption.

The great likelihood is that Labor in opposition will model its behaviour on Abbott in opposition, in conformity with that great moral precept: tit for tat. The sad truth is that, for politicians as for most of us, the moral compass that guides us asks: what's everyone else doing?

We take our ethics from our perception of the behaviour of those around us, particularly our competitors. We all see ourselves as more moral than the next person, but when challenged our defence is always: I'm no worse than he is. After all, he started it. Thus are our politicians locked in a race to the bottom. Rather than trying to counter our fear of foreigners, politicians have preferred to pander to it, vying to be the side whose mistreatment of asylum seekers goes so far it discourages any more from coming - all intended to dissuade them from risking their lives on a dangerous sea voyage, naturally.

So far have our standards sunk that we must now suffer the indignity of being lectured on human rights by the Chinese government.

Declining standards at federal level have been matched by bad behaviour at state level. For an example of state politicians willing to blatantly mislead their electorates, look no further than the Victorian and NSW governments' dishonest explanation for the looming jump of about 25 per cent in the price of household gas.

The true reason for the rise is that the building of natural gas liquefaction plants in Gladstone will soon allow gas producers on Australia's east coast to export their gas and obtain the much higher prices paid on the world market. The east coast will go from being outside the world market to inside it.

The price rise is thus inevitable unless governments were to prohibit the companies from exporting their gas, forcing them to continue accepting below-world prices. There has been no suggestion of penalising the gas producers in this way. Rather, state politicians have taken up the dishonest claim of the gas companies that permitting them to build new and controversial coal seam gas plants would somehow prevent gas prices from rising or force them back down. But as any student of economics could tell you, there's no way NSW and Victoria could ever produce enough natural gas to significantly affect the world price of gas.

The price of gas in NSW and Victoria would stay below the world price only if the new producers were compelled to sell their gas to local users at below the world price. Again, there's been no suggestion of this.

Last week the gas companies' illogical argument was taken up by the new NSW Minister for Energy and Resources, Anthony Roberts.

I'm prepared to believe Roberts may be economically illiterate, but I don't believe his advisers are - nor that they don't read the papers, where the scam has been exposed.

Although Roberts has replaced a minister who left the cabinet under a cloud, he seems uninhibited in his efforts to mislead the electorate.

It's hard to know whether he is simply seeking to advance the gas industry's vested interests or is setting up an alibi which allows the government to blame the inevitable jump in gas prices on those terrible people opposed to fracking.

Either way, his only crime is seeking to deceive voters. And these days that's the way everyone plays the political game, isn't it?

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John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar @smh

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 05:10:00 +0000

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/john-yudkin-the-man-who-tried-to-warn-us-about-sugar-20140212-32h03.html

Julia Llewellyn Smith

A British professor's 1972 book about the dangers of sugar is now seen as prophetic. Then why did it lead to the end of his career?

A couple of years ago, an out-of-print book published in 1972 by a long-dead British professor suddenly became a collector's item.

Copies that had been lying dusty on bookshelves were selling for hundreds of pounds, while copies were also being pirated online.

Alongside such rarities as Madonna's Sex, Stephen King's Rage (written as Richard Bachman) and Promise Me Tomorrow by Nora Roberts; Pure, White and Deadly by John Yudkin, a book widely derided at the time of publication, was listed as one of the most coveted out-of-print works in the world.

Pure, White and Deadly.

How exactly did a long-forgotten book suddenly become so prized? The cause was a ground-breaking lecture called Sugar: the Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at the University of California, in which Lustig hailed Yudkin's work as ''prophetic''.

''Without even knowing it, I was a Yudkin acolyte,'' says Lustig, who tracked down the book after a tip from a colleague via an interlibrary loan. ''Everything this man said in 1972 was the God's honest truth and if you want to read a true prophecy you find this book... I'm telling you every single thing this guy said has come to pass. I'm in awe.''

Posted on YouTube in 2009, Lustig's 90-minute talk has received more than 4.1 million hits and is credited with kick-starting the anti-sugar movement, a campaign that calls for sugar to be treated as a toxin, like alcohol and tobacco, and for sugar-laden foods to be taxed, labelled with health warnings and banned for anyone under 18.

Lustig is one of a growing number of scientists who don't just believe sugar makes you fat and rots teeth. They're convinced it's the cause of several chronic and very common illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes. It's also addictive, since it interferes with our appetites and creates an irresistible urge to eat.

This year, Lustig's message has gone mainstream; many of the New Year diet books focused not on fat or carbohydrates, but on cutting out sugar and the everyday foods (soups, fruit juices, bread) that contain high levels of sucrose. The anti-sugar camp is not celebrating yet, however. They know what happened to Yudkin and what a ruthless and unscrupulous adversary the sugar industry proved to be.

The tale begins in the Sixties. That decade, nutritionists in university laboratories all over America and Western Europe were scrabbling to work out the reasons for an alarming rise in heart disease levels. By 1970, there were 520 deaths per 100,000 per year in England and Wales caused by coronary heart disease and 700 per 100,000 in America. After a while, a consensus emerged: the culprit was the high level of fat in our diets.

One scientist in particular grabbed the headlines: a nutritionist from the University of Minnesota called Ancel Keys. Keys, famous for inventing the K-ration - 12,000 calories packed in a little box for use by troops during the Second World War - declared fat to be public enemy number one and recommended that anyone who was worried about heart disease should switch to a low-fat ''Mediterranean'' diet.

Instead of treating the findings as a threat, the food industry spied an opportunity. Market research showed there was a great deal of public enthusiasm for ''healthy'' products and low-fat foods would prove incredibly popular. By the start of the Seventies, supermarket shelves were awash with low-fat yogurts, spreads, and even desserts and biscuits.

But, amid this new craze, one voice stood out in opposition. John Yudkin, founder of the nutrition department at the University of London's Queen Elizabeth College, had been doing his own experiments and, instead of laying the blame at the door of fat, he claimed there was a much clearer correlation between the rise in heart disease and a rise in the consumption of sugar. Rodents, chickens, rabbits, pigs and students fed sugar and carbohydrates, he said, invariably showed raised blood levels of triglycerides (a technical term for fat), which was then, as now, considered a risk factor for heart disease. Sugar also raised insulin levels, linking it directly to type 2 diabetes.

When he outlined these results in Pure, White and Deadly, in 1972, he questioned whether there was any causal link at all between fat and heart disease. After all, he said, we had been eating substances like butter for centuries, while sugar, had, up until the 1850s, been something of a rare treat for most people. ''If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,'' he wrote, ''that material would promptly be banned.''

This was not what the food industry wanted to hear. When devising their low-fat products, manufacturers had needed a fat substitute to stop the food tasting like cardboard, and they had plumped for sugar. The new ''healthy'' foods were low-fat but had sugar by the spoonful and Yudkin's findings threatened to disrupt a very profitable business.

As a result, says Lustig, there was a concerted campaign by the food industry and several scientists to discredit Yudkin's work. The most vocal critic was Ancel Keys.

Keys loathed Yudkin and, even before Pure, White and Deadly appeared, he published an article, describing Yudkin's evidence as ''flimsy indeed''.

''Yudkin always maintained his equanimity, but Keys was a real a-------, who stooped to name-calling and character assassination,'' says Lustig, speaking from New York, where he's just recorded yet another television interview.

The British Sugar Bureau put out a press release dismissing Yudkin's claims as ''emotional assertions'' and the World Sugar Research Organisation described his book as ''science fiction''. When Yudkin sued, it printed a mealy-mouthed retraction, concluding: ''Professor Yudkin recognises that we do not agree with [his] views and accepts that we are entitled to express our disagreement.''

Yudkin was ''uninvited'' to international conferences. Others he organised were cancelled at the last minute, after pressure from sponsors, including, on one occasion, Coca-Cola. When he did contribute, papers he gave attacking sugar were omitted from publications. The British Nutrition Foundation, one of whose sponsors was Tate & Lyle, never invited anyone from Yudkin's internationally acclaimed department to sit on its committees. Even Queen Elizabeth College reneged on a promise to allow the professor to use its research facilities when he retired in 1970 (to write Pure, White and Deadly). Only after a letter from Yudkin's solicitor was he offered a small room in a separate building.

''Can you wonder that one sometimes becomes quite despondent about whether it is worthwhile trying to do scientific research in matters of health?'' he wrote. ''The results may be of great importance in helping people to avoid disease, but you then find they are being misled by propaganda designed to support commercial interests in a way you thought only existed in bad B films.''

And this ''propaganda'' didn't just affect Yudkin. By the end of the Seventies, he had been so discredited that few scientists dared publish anything negative about sugar for fear of being similarly attacked. As a result, the low-fat industry, with its products laden with sugar, boomed.

Yudkin's detractors had one trump card: his evidence often relied on observations, rather than on explanations, of rising obesity, heart disease and diabetes rates. ''He could tell you these things were happening but not why, or at least not in a scientifically acceptable way,'' says David Gillespie, author of the bestselling Sweet Poison. ''Three or four of the hormones that would explain his theories had not been discovered.''

''Yudkin knew a lot more data was needed to support his theories, but what's important about his book is its historical significance,'' says Lustig. ''It helps us understand how a concept can be bastardised by dark forces of industry.''

From the Eighties onwards, several discoveries gave new credence to Yudkin's theories. Researchers found fructose, one of the two main carbohydrates in refined sugar, is primarily metabolised by the liver; while glucose (found in starchy food like bread and potatoes) is metabolised by all cells. This means consuming excessive fructose puts extra strain on the liver, which then converts fructose to fat.

This induces a condition known as insulin resistance, or metabolic syndrome, which doctors now generally acknowledge to be the major risk factor for heart disease, diabetes and obesity, as well as a possible factor for many cancers. Yudkin's son, Michael, a former professor of biochemistry at Oxford, says his father was never bitter about the way he was treated, but, ''he was hurt personally''.

''More than that,'' says Michael, ''he was such an enthusiast of public health, it saddened him to see damage being done to us all, because of vested interests in the food industry.''

One of the problems with the anti-sugar message - then and now - is how depressing it is. The substance is so much part of our culture, that to be told buying children an ice cream may be tantamount to poisoning them, is most unwelcome. But Yudkin, who grew up in dire poverty in east London and went on to win a scholarship to Cambridge, was no killjoy.

''He didn't ban sugar from his house, and certainly didn't deprive his grandchildren of ice cream or cake,'' recalls his granddaughter, Ruth, a psychotherapist. ''He was hugely fun-loving and would never have wanted to be deprived of a pleasure, partly, perhaps, because he grew up in poverty and had worked so hard to escape that level of deprivation.''

''My father certainly wasn't fanatical,'' adds Michael. ''If he was invited to tea and offered cake, he'd accept it. But at home, it's easy to say no to sugar in your tea. He believed if you educated the public to avoid sugar, they'd understand that.''

Thanks to Lustig and the rehabilitation of Yudkin's reputation, Penguin republished Pure, White and Deadly 18 months ago. Obesity rates in the UK are now 10 times what they were when it was first published and the amount of sugar we eat has increased 31.5 per cent since 1990 (thanks to all the ''invisible'' sugar in everything from processed food and orange juice to coleslaw and yogurt). The number of diabetics in the world has nearly trebled. The numbers dying of heart disease has decreased, thanks to improved drugs, but the number living with the disease is growing steadily.

As a result, the World Health Organisation is set to recommend a cut in the amount of sugar in our diets from 22 teaspoons per day to almost half that. But its director-general, Margaret Chan, has warned that, while it might be on the back foot at last, the sugar industry remains a formidable adversary, determined to safeguard its market position.

Recently, UK food campaigners have complained that they're being shunned by ministers who are more than willing to take meetings with representatives from the food industry. ''It is not just Big Tobacco any more,'' Chan said last year. ''Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda and Big Alcohol. All of these industries fear regulation and protect themselves by using the same tactics. They include front groups, lobbies, promises of self-regulation, lawsuits and industry-funded research that confuses the evidence and keeps the public in doubt.''

Dr Julian Cooper, head of research at AB Sugar, insists the increase in the incidence of obesity in Britain is a result of, ''a range of complex factors''.

''Reviews of the body of scientific evidence by expert committees have concluded that consuming sugar as part of a balanced diet does not induce lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and heart disease,'' he says.If you look up Robert Lustig on Wikipedia, nearly two-thirds of the studies cited there to repudiate Lustig's views were funded by Coca-Cola.

But Gillespie believes the message is getting through. ''More people are avoiding sugar, and when this happens companies adjust what they're selling,'' he says. It's just a shame, he adds, that a warning that could have been taken on board 40 years ago went unheeded: ''Science took a disastrous detour in ignoring Yudkin. It was to the detriment of the health of millions.''

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Sweet poison: why sugar is ruining our health @telegraphnews

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 05:05:00 +0000

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/healthyeating/9987825/Sweet-poison-why-sugar-is-ruining-our-health.html

By Victoria Lambert

Each week the average Briton consumes 238 teaspoonfuls of a potentially toxic substance linked to long-term health problems – often without knowing it. But just how hard is it to go sugar-free?

Like it or lump it, few of us get through the day without adding sugar to our daily diet. We are a Pavlovian population made up of sugar, treacle and toffee addicts, drawn to the taste of sweetness like bees to honey. So ingrained is our desire that even writing about sugar now is sending my salivary glands into overdrive as my brain reacts to the very thought of it, whizzing neurotransmitters around to prepare my body for some serious glucose action. Perhaps you, while reading this, are reaching – almost unwittingly – for a chocolate Hobnob?

But that’s not a problem, is it? We could stop and eat a piece of cheese instead – any time we wanted. Or could we?

Maybe not. It seems that our desire to load up with sugar regularly may not be the cheeky reward-cum-energy boost we think it is. Increasingly, experts believe we can be truly addicted to sugar. French scientists in Bordeaux reported that in animal trials, rats chose sugar over cocaine (even when they were addicted to cocaine), and speculated that no mammals’ sweet receptors are naturally adapted to the high concentrations of sweet tastes on offer in modern times. They worried, in a paper published in 2007, that the intense stimulation of these receptors by our typical 21st-century sugar-rich diets must generate a supra-normal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction.

So if you feel like you are craving a chocolatey treat, that craving is more than just a figure of speech. You may be one of the world’s most common dependants: a sugar addict.

But take heart. Around the world, a growing body of expert opinion – the 'No Sugar’ movement – is leading a global fightback and warning that our sweet habit is completely out of control, leaving a nasty taste in the mouth of the body public. Sugar, whether added to food by you or the manufacturer, is the greatest threat to human health, bar none, they say. And unless we wise up and quit en masse, we don’t just risk personal obesity and disease, but national bankruptcy and collapse as the toll our ill health takes on our countries’ economies threatens to destabilise the modern world.

The movement is led by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar, numerous scientific and press articles, and presenter of “Sugar: the Bitter Truth”, a YouTube clip viewed more than 3,300,000 times. But 'No Sugar’ proponents also include Australian writer David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison and the new Sweet Poison Quit Plan, just out in the UK, as well as actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who reveals in her new cookbook It’s All Good that her family are not permitted to eat any refined carbs (let alone sugar), and even Andy Burnham, the Opposition Health Secretary, who called in January for high-sugar children’s foods such as Frosties and Sugar Puffs to be banned by politicians.

Lustig leads the field with his warning that not all calories are equal, because not all monosaccharides – the simplest forms of sugar, the building blocks of all carbohydrates – are equal.

At a basic level, sucrose, or table sugar (which is made up of equal molecules of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose) is not metabolised in the same way that a carbohydrate such as flour is.

He explains: ''An analysis of 175 countries over the past decade showed that when you look for the cause of type 2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetes, the total number of calories you consume is irrelevant. It’s the specific calories that count. When people ate 150 calories more every day, the rate of diabetes went up 0.1 per cent. But if those 150 calories came from a can of fizzy drink, the rate went up 1.1 per cent. Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories.”

Why is this? Well, look more closely through the microscope, and Lustig (and others) believe it is the fructose molecule in sugar that is to blame.

Lustig explains that instead of helping to sate us, some scientists believe that fructose fools our brains into thinking we are not full, so we overeat. Moreover, excess fructose cannot be converted into energy by the mitochondria inside our cells (which perform this function). “Instead,” he explains, “they turn excess fructose into liver fat. That starts a cascade of insulin resistance (insulin promotes sugar uptake from blood) which leads to chronic metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.”

Look online and you’ll see fructose described as “fruit sugar” – it’s the nutrient that nature put into apples and pears to entice humans (and birds) to eat them. So do we stop eating fruit in order to go sugar-free? It’s not that easy. Fruit is sweetened by fructose but it doesn’t contain very much, although you still shouldn’t eat very sweet fruit like grapes and melon to excess.

The problem lies in sources of sweetness like corn syrup, agave or maple syrup and honey, which contain a higher percentage of fructose than fruit, especially if they have been processed, meaning additional fructose is added in. Some agave nectars, for example, can be 92 per cent fructose, eight per cent glucose.

The food industry loves these sweeteners, especially high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), as they make every type of food more palatable – from soup to bagels, ketchup to bread. In the United States, HFCS is especially popular following governmental production quotas of domestic sugar, subsidies of US corn, and an import tariff on foreign sugar, making HFCS super cheap. As a liquid, it is also easier to blend and transport. In particular, it is used in low-fat foods (which would otherwise taste, says Lustig, “like cardboard”). His theory goes a long way to explaining why the low-fat diets which rose to popularity in the Seventies have coincided with a rise in obesity and related illnesses.

So before you can think about giving these sweeteners up, you have to turn label detective – and find them.

Thousands of miles away, nodding in agreement, is David Gillespie, a Brisbane-based lawyer turned researcher whose Sweet Poison books chart his own decision to stop eating sugar, resulting in him losing six stone without dieting in a year. He explains: “You are breaking an addiction, so you need to stop consuming all sources of the addictive substance. They are all hard to give up because they are addictive – but they are all easy to give up once you understand what you are doing and why.”

He adds: “Your palate adjusts significantly and quickly when you delete sugar. You can suddenly experience a whole range of flavours that either you didn’t know existed before or were muted by the presence of sugar. One thing people often remark on after they’ve been off sugar for a month or so is that suddenly they can smell it. They can tell you where the confectionery aisle or the breakfast cereal aisle is in a strange supermarket by smell alone.” What worries Gillespie, though, is not the candy by the checkout – but the fructose lurking in your ready-meal. “Very few of us are making conscious decisions about the sugar we eat,” he says. “The average Briton is consuming more than a kilo – 238 teaspoonfuls – a week, but I bet they’d be flummoxed accounting for more than a few teaspoons of that. Sugar is deeply and thoroughly embedded in our food supply.”

He’s right. We’re buying fewer bags of granulated sugar. And Defra statistics show that we’re consuming fewer calories from “free sugars” such as table sugar, honey and sugars found naturally in fruit juices – although at 13.9 per cent that is still higher than the recommended 11 per cent we should be aiming for – than in previous years.

Even the actual number of calories we consume has fallen: Defra figures show that there has been a long-term downward trend in energy intake since 1964, with average energy intake per person 28 per cent lower in 2010 than in 1974.

Yet, obesity rates continue to rise: currently 26 per cent of Britons are obese, half of us are overweight. This is a mighty problem: direct costs caused by obesity are now estimated to be £5.1billion per year. Obesity is associated with cardiovascular risk and with cancer, disability during old age, decreased life expectancy and serious chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and hypertension.

Like Lustig, Gillespie sees our inate weight problem as connected to the rise in consumption of hidden sugar. Unlike Lustig, Gillespie’s ideas were inspired personally, from looking down at a belly that was expanding year on merciless year, regardless of what trendy diet he tried.

“In 2002, my wife Lizzie and I had four kids under the age of nine,” he explains, “when I reached my maximum weight of 20 stone [127kg].” (Gillespie is 5ft 9in.) “I felt lethargic and unwell most of the time. When Lizzie announced our fifth child was to be twins, I had to do something.”

Gillespie began reading John Yudkin’s book Pure, White and Deadly, published in 1972, which also showed that consumption of sugar and refined sweeteners is closely associated with long-term disease.

Fascinated, Gillespie soaked up research papers which connected fructose (in particular) to fatty liver disease, to appetite stimulation, and to gout, diabetes, memory loss and, of course, obesity. He was shocked to learn “how many of our organs sugar systematically destroys without symptoms until it is too late. First the liver, then the pancreas, then the kidneys, and ultimately the heart.”

The more he learnt, the more Gillespie was determined to do something about his own eating habits. “I stopped eating sugar and immediately started losing weight – without adjusting anything else about how I lived.”

For Gillespie, the weight started dropping straight away, but the sense of addiction took a little longer to go: “At the two-four week mark I noticed I was no longer craving food and in particular I could leave things which I would have found difficult to bypass before.

“But I wasn’t feeling deprived. I ate what I wanted and as long as it didn’t contain sugar, the weight kept coming off. I had stumbled upon a way of fixing what had obviously been a broken appetite control system up to that point in my life.”

But there were setbacks: “I discovered the addictive power of sugar early in the process. I was out at a fundraiser and was served up a chocolate cake. I’d been off sugar for about a month and I didn’t want to waste it, so I ate it. I figured I’d be all right, but how wrong I was.

“The next day I had constant cravings for sugar and the gnawing desire to eat and drink everything available – clearly I’d crossed a threshold and needed to go through sugar withdrawal again. I did, and two weeks later was once again able to walk past chocolate without feeling any particular longing.”

His family were not left behind. “The kids didn’t like it,” he says, “but eventually they got used to it and their palates adjusted. Now they are pretty pleased with teeth that don’t have cavities, rarely getting colds and feeling energetic, with none of the highs and lows that come with sugar eating.”

That mood roller-coaster is one of the reasons Gwyneth Paltrow, in a blog entry on her website Goop, gives for quitting sugar: “Sugar gives you an initial high, then you crash, then you crave more, so you consume more sugar. It’s this series of highs and lows that provoke unnecessary stress on your adrenals. You get anxious, moody (sugar is a mood-altering drug) and eventually you feel exhausted.”

So is it time for everyone to accept a life of total abstinence? Not so fast, says the British Dietetic Association (BDA). “Sugar is not bad for you as part of a balanced diet,” says dietitian Sylvia Turner. “It has an important role in providing flavour and texture to foods. Just remember, sugar contains calories but few nutrients, so eating too much added sugar and sugary food and drinks instead of other healthy foods can make your diet less nutritious.”

She adds: “Some research suggests that sugary drinks make it harder for us to regulate the overall amount of calories eaten and a regular intake may be a factor contributing to obesity in children.”

And not all scientists agree with Lustig: a US study published last summer in the journal Diabetes Care suggested that fructose could have a positive role to play in the regulation of blood sugar in type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes. Even so, Gillespie points out: “The public have taken to the 'No Sugar’ movement. In Australia, hundreds of thousands of people have successfully quit sugar.”

And once the decision is made, it can be stuck to. “It’s no particular feat of willpower,” he promises. “I just make sure I don’t inadvertently consume fructose and the rest takes care of itself. My weight stays the same and I eat and exercise normally (not like a person on a diet). I am no more tempted to eat sugar again than a smoker who has successfully quit for 10 years would be tempted to light up again.”

Are you addicted to sugar?

1. Do you struggle to walk past a sugary treat without taking 'just one’?

2. Do you have routines around sugar consumption – for example, always having pudding, or needing a piece of chocolate to relax in front of the television?

3. Are there times when you feel as if you cannot go on without a sugar hit?

4. If you are forced to go without sugar for 24 hours, do you develop headaches and mood swings?

If you answered 'yes’ to one of the questions above, you are addicted.

Case study: Richard Dehn, 59, a retailer on Merseyside

I did my degree in hotel management and catering, and I’ve run a corner shop for more than 30 years. I’ve always been aware of the dangers of sugar and I remember reading a book about it called Pure, White and Deadly by John Yudkin, about five years before I started working at the shop.

I’ve got a very addictive nature and although I’ve managed to completely keep away from the other addictive and dangerous products we sell – alcohol and tobacco – for more than 20 years, I’ve always had a problem with sugar.

I’m lucky enough to be married to a superb cook, Sue, who has always prepared meals from natural ingredients, so I don’t eat ready-meals and I’ve never taken sugar in my tea and coffee. It’s really the hidden, refined sugar in other products that has been my downfall.

I think the main difficulty is that we work quite long hours, and it’s the easiest thing in the world for someone with a corner shop to go and have a Magnum or a handful – and I mean a handful – of chocolate Freddos or jelly babies, or a cherry muffin. You feel like the sugar rush will get you through the hours.

Then about eight years ago, I started to have serious health problems. I had an upset tummy all the time, I lost a lot of weight, and I really felt rotten. The doctor diagnosed IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and told me to eat more fibre. I then did a little extra self-diagnosis and had a stool test done, which revealed I had a Candida problem; this means bad pathogenic bacteria in my gut, which were feeding on the sugar I was eating.

I started taking probiotics and stayed completely away from all types of sugar for a year, meaning no sweets or fizzy drinks and also no fruit for the first couple of months. I could feel the benefits of it reasonably quickly, and gradually I got better.

However, just like every smoker who has tried to quit, I felt that I’d cracked giving up sugar and one chocolate bar wouldn’t do me any harm. From there it was a slippery slope, as one became three in a couple of days, and three became even more after that. I didn’t get as ill again and didn’t necessarily realise I had any symptoms from returning to sugar, but gradually I did get to a stage where I’d feel so tired during the day that I absolutely had to have a sugar rush. Even being more aware of the dangers of sugar since I’ve been ill hasn’t actually stopped me going for that hit on a regular basis.

Personally, I do believe that sugar is a poison. But this has still not stopped me poisoning myself on a regular basis over the years. At the moment I am trying, once again, to stay clear.
Read David Gillespie's tips on how to kick the sugar habit

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Sugar is as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco, warn health experts @telegraphnews

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 05:00:00 +0000

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10559671/Sugar-is-as-dangerous-as-alcohol-and-tobacco-warn-health-experts.html

By Sarah Knapton, Science Correspondent

Britain's obesity crisis could be reversed within five years if food companies reduced sugar in products by 30 per cent, health experts claim as they launch a new campaign to cut intake

Sugar has become as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco, academics have said as they call on the food industry to cut 30 per cent from processed in Britons’ cupboards.

Health experts claim the reduction could shave 100 calories from each person’s daily intake and reverse the UK’s growing obesity epidemic.

Later a group of health experts and academics come together to launch ‘Action on Sugar’, a campaign which is calling on the food producers to dramatically reduce levels of sugar in everyday products.

They are also asking companies to stop advertising sugary drinks and snacks to children claiming sugar has become ‘the alcohol of childhood.’

And they are calling on the government to fine those who do not meet reduction targets or impose a Sugar Tax.

Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Liverpool, UK, Simon Capewell says, “Sugar is the new tobacco.

“Everywhere, sugary drinks and junk foods are now pressed on unsuspecting parents and children by a cynical industry focussed on profit not health.

“The obesity epidemic is already generating a huge burden of disease and death.”

One in four adults in England is obese and these figures are set to climb to 60 per cent of men, 50 per cent of women, and 25 per cent of children by 2050. Three in every 10 children aged between two and 15 are overweight or obese.

Obesity and diabetes already costs the UK over £5billion every year which is likely to rise to £50 billion in the next 36 years.

Although sugary drinks are known to be a problem scientists say many people are unaware that flavoured waters, soups, ketchup and ready meals also contain large amounts of hidden sugars.

A can of Heinz tomato soup contains the equivalent of four teaspoons of sugar while a mug of Cadbury’s drinking chocolate holds six teaspoonfuls. A Yeo Valley vanilla yoghurt contains five teaspoons of sugar.

Last year a study by Oxford University suggested that a 12p tax on fizzy drinks would cut consumption by 15 per cent and mean 180,000 fewer obese adults.

The experts have calculated that reducing sugar in processed foods by between 20 and 30 per cent over the next three to five years they could remove 100 calories a day from diets, enough to halt or reverse the obesity epidemic.

They highlight children as a particularly vulnerable group because of the heavy marketing of sweets and sugary drinks towards youngsters.

Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, Canada, Yoni Freedhoff; “Not only has added sugar found its way into virtually everything we eat, but worse still, the use of sugar as a means to pacify, entertain and reward children has become normalized to the point that questioning our current sugary status quo often inspires anger and outrage.

“We need to re-relegate sugar to the role of occasional treat rather than its current role of everyday, anytime, crutch”.

Professor of Paediatric Endocrinology at the University Of California, San Francisco Robert Lustig added: “Children are the primary targets of marketing campaigns, and the least able to resist the messaging.

“That makes sugary drinks like the "alcohol of childhood", which makes them obese.”

Many companies have already signed up to the government’s Responsibility Deal to cut sugar by 10 per cent from their products but academics say it does not go far enough.

“We must now tackle the obesity epidemic both in the UK and worldwide,” said Professor Graham MacGregor,

“The present government and Department of Health Responsibility Deal has been shown to have had no effect on calorie intake and we must start a coherent and structured plan to slowly reduce the amount of calories people consume by slowly taking out added sugar from foods and soft drinks.”

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@SmithsonianMag A Thanksgiving day history lesson: Native Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 03:02:00 +0000

The Indians who first feasted with the English colonists were far more sophisticated than you were taught in school. But that wasn't enough to save them

By Charles C. Mann
Smithsonian magazine, December 2005,

On March 22, 1621, a Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to meet with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had brought along only reluctantly as an interpreter.

Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated. It was all Massasoit could do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness and overrun them. And the only solution he could see was fraught with perils of its own, because it involved the foreigners—people from across the sea.

Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter than the Natives, oddly dressed and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods—copper kettles, glittering colored glass and steel knives and hatchets—unlike anything else in New England. Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items for the cheap furs that the Indians used as blankets.

Over time, the Wampanoag, like other Native societies in coastal New England, had learned how to manage the European presence. They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would allow their visitors to stay ashore only for brief, carefully controlled excursions. Those who overstayed their welcome were forcefully reminded of the limited duration of Indian hospitality. At the same time, the Wampanoag fended off Indians from the interior, preventing them from trading directly with the foreigners. In this way the shoreline groups had put themselves in the position of classic middlemen, overseeing both European access to Indian products and Indian access to European products. Now, reversing long-standing policy, Massasoit had decided to permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time—provided they formally allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.

Tisquantum, the interpreter, had turned up at Massasoit’s home a year and a half before. He spoke fluent English, because he had lived for several years in Britain. But Massasoit worried that in a crisis Tisquantum might side with the foreigners. Samoset—the third member of the triumvirate—had appeared a few weeks before, having hitched a ride from his home in Maine on an English ship that was plying the coast. Because Samoset also spoke a little English, Massasoit had first sent him, not Tisquantum, to meet with the foreigners.

On March 17, 1621, Samoset had walked unaccompanied and unarmed into the circle of rude huts in which the British were living. The colonists saw a robust, erect-postured man wearing only a loincloth; his straight black hair was shaved in front but flowed down his shoulders behind. To their amazement, this almost naked man greeted them in broken but understandable English. He left the next morning with a few presents, returning a day later with five “tall proper men”—in colonist Edward Winslow’s words—with three-inch black stripes painted down the middle of their faces. The two sides talked inconclusively, each checking out the other, for a few hours.

Now, on the 22nd, with Massasoit and the rest of the Indian company hidden from view, Samoset and Tisquantum walked into the foreigners’ ramshackle base. They spoke with the colonists for about an hour. Then, Massasoit and the rest of the Indian party suddenly appeared at the crest of a nearby hill, on the banks of a stream. Alarmed, the Europeans withdrew to a hill on the other side of the stream, where they had emplaced their few cannons behind a half-finished stockade. A standoff ensued.

Finally Winslow exhibited the decisiveness that later led to his selection as colony governor. Wearing a full suit of armor and carrying a sword, he waded through the stream and offered himself as a hostage. Massasoit’s brother took charge of Winslow, and then Massasoit crossed the water himself, followed by Tisquantum and 20 of Massasoit’s men, all unarmed. The colonists took the sachem to an unfinished house and gave him some cushions on which to recline. Both sides shared some of the foreigners’ homemade moonshine and settled down to talk, Tisquantum translating.

Massasoit wore the same deerskin shawls and leggings as his fellows and, like them, had covered his face with bug-repelling oil and reddish purple dye. Around his neck hung a pouch of tobacco, a long knife and a thick chain of the prized white shell beads called wampum. In appearance, Winslow wrote afterward, he was “a very lusty man, in his best years, an able body, grave of countenance, and spare of speech.” The Europeans, who had barely survived the previous winter, were in much worse shape. Half of the original colony now lay underground beneath wooden markers painted with death’s heads; most of the survivors were malnourished. The meeting between the Wampanoag and the English colonists marked a critical moment in American history.
“A friendly indian”

"A Friendly Indian"

The foreigners called their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous Pilgrims. As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the services of Tisquantum, usually known as Squanto. In the 1970s, when I attended high school, a popular history text was America: Its People and Values. Nestled among colorful illustrations of colonial life was a succinct explanation of Tisquantum’s role:

A friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier, Capt. Miles Standish, taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians.

My teacher explained that maize was unfamiliar to the Pilgrims and that Squanto had demonstrated the proper way to plant it—sticking the seed in little heaps of dirt, accompanied by beans and squash that would later twine themselves up the tall stalks. And he told the Pilgrims to fertilize the soil by burying fish alongside the maize seeds. Following this advice, my teacher said, the colonists grew so much maize that it became the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving. In our slipshod fashion, we students took notes.

The story in America: Its People and Values isn’t wrong, so far as it goes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.

Tsquantum was critical to the colony’s survival. He moved to Plymouth after the crucial meeting and spent the rest of his life there, during which time he indeed taught the Pilgrims agricultural methods, though some archaeologists believe Tisquantum picked up the idea of fish fertilizer from European farmers, who had used the technique since medieval times. But America: Its People and Values never explains why he so enthusiastically helped the people who had invaded his homeland. Skipping over such complexities is understandable in a book with limited space. The lack of attention, however, is symptomatic of a larger failure to consider Indian motives, or even that Indians might have motives.

Much the same is true of the alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth. From the Indian point of view, why did he do it? The alliance was successful from the short-run Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England Indian society as a whole, because it ensured the survival of Plymouth Colony, which spearheaded the great wave of British immigration to New England. All of this was absent not only from my high-school textbooks, but from the academic accounts they were based on.

This omission dates back to the Pilgrims themselves, who ascribed the lack of effective Native resistance to the will of God. “Divine providence,” the colonist Daniel Gookin wrote, favored “the quiet and peaceable settlement of the English.” Later writers tended to attribute European success to European technology. In a contest where only one side had rifles and cannons, historians said, the other side’s motives were irrelevant. By the end of the 19th century, the Indians of the Northeast were thought of as rapidly fading background details in the saga of the rise of the United States—“marginal people who were losers in the end,” as James Axtell of the College of William and Mary dryly put it in an interview with me. Vietnam War-era denunciations of the Pilgrims as imperialist or racist simply replicated the error in a new form. Whether the cause was the Pilgrim God, Pilgrim guns or Pilgrim greed, Native losses were foreordained; Indians could not have stopped colonization, in this view, and they hardly tried.

But beginning in the 1970s, historians grew dissatisfied with this view. “Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, told me. “But that assumption—a whole continent of patsies—simply didn’t make sense.” Salisbury and other researchers tried to peer through the colonial records to the Indian lives beneath. Their work fed a tsunami of inquiry into the interactions between Natives and newcomers in the era when they faced each other as relative equals.

“When you look at the historical record, it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own destinies,” Salisbury said. “And often enough they succeeded”—only to learn, as all peoples do, that the consequences were not what they expected.

The Dawnland

More than likely Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.

Nor did Tisquantum think of himself as an “Indian,” any more than the inhabitants of the same area today would call themselves “Western Hemisphereans.” As Tisquantum’s later history would make clear, he regarded himself first and foremost as a citizen of Patuxet, one of the dozen or so shoreline settlements in what is now eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island that made up the Wampanoag confederation. The Wampanoag, in turn, were part of an alliance with the Nauset, which comprised some 30 groups on Cape Cod, and the Massachusett, several dozen villages clustered around Massachusetts Bay. All of these people spoke variants of Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language family, the biggest in eastern North America at the time. In Massachusett, the name for the New England shore was the Dawnland, the place where the sun rose. The inhabitants of the Dawnland were the People of the First Light.

Ten thousand years ago, when Indians in Mesoamerica and Peru were inventing agriculture and coalescing into villages, New England was barely inhabited, for the excellent reason that it had been covered until relatively recently by an ice sheet a mile thick. As the sheet retreated, people slowly moved in, though the area long remained cold and uninviting, especially along the coastline. Because rising sea levels continually flooded the shore, marshy Cape Cod did not fully lock into its contemporary configuration until about 1000 b.c. By that time the Dawnland had evolved into something more attractive: an ecological crazy quilt of wet maple forests, shellfish-studded tidal estuaries, thick highland woods, mossy bogs of cranberries and orchids, complex snarls of sandbars and beachfront, and fire-swept stands of pitch pine—“tremendous variety even within the compass of a few miles,” in the phrase of ecological historian William Cronon.

By the end of the first millennium A.D.,agriculture was spreading rapidly and the region was becoming a patchwork of communities, each with its preferred terrain, way of subsistence and cultural style. Scattered about the many lakes, ponds and swamps of the cold uplands were small, mobile groups of hunters and gatherers. Most had recently adopted agriculture or were soon to do so, but cultivated crops were still a secondary source of food, a supplement to the wild products of the land. New England’s major river valleys, by contrast, held large, permanent villages, many nestled in constellations of suburban hamlets and hunting camps. Because extensive fields of maize, beans and squash surrounded every home, these settlements sprawled along the Connecticut, Charles and other river valleys for miles, one town bumping up against the other. Along the coast, where Tisquantum and Massasoit lived, villages tended to be smaller and looser, though no less permanent.

Unlike the upland hunters, the Indians on the rivers and coastline did not roam the land; most shoreline families would move a 15-minute walk inland, to avoid direct exposure to winter storms and tides. Each village had its own distinct mix of farming and foraging—one adjacent to a rich oyster bed might plant maize purely for variety, whereas a village just a few miles away might subsist almost entirely on its harvest, filling great underground storage pits each fall. Each community was constantly “joining and splitting like quicksilver in a fluid pattern within its bounds,” wrote Kathleen J. Bragdon, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary. Such settlements, she remarked, have “no name in the archaeological or anthropological literature.”

“Sweet , Toothsome, and Hearty”

In the Wampanoag confederation, one of these quicksilver communities was Patuxet, where Tisquantum was born at the end of the 16th century. Tucked into the great sweep of Cape Cod Bay, Patuxet sat on a low rise above a small harbor, jigsawed by sandbars and so shallow that children could walk from the beach hundreds of yards into the water before it reached their heads. To the west, maize hills marched across the sandy hillocks in parallel rows. Beyond the fields, a mile or more away from the sea, rose a forest of oak, chestnut and hickory, open and park-like, the underbrush kept down by expert annual burning. “Pleasant of air and prospect,” as one English visitor described the area, Patuxet had “much plenty both of fish and fowl every day in the year.” Runs of spawning Atlantic salmon, shortnose sturgeon, striped bass and American shad filled the harbor. But the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village.

Tisquantum’s childhood wetu (home) was formed from arched poles lashed together into a dome covered in winter by tightly woven rush mats and in summer by thin sheets of chestnut bark. A fire burned constantly in the center, the smoke venting through a hole in the roof. The wetu’s multiple layers of mats, which trapped insulating layers of air, were “warmer than our English houses,” sighed the colonist William Wood. It was also less leaky than the typical English wattle-and-daub house. Wood did not conceal his admiration for the way Indian mats “deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long.”

Around the edge of the house were low beds, sometimes wide enough for a whole family to sprawl on together; they were usually raised about a foot from the floor, platform-style, and piled with mats and furs. Going to sleep in the firelight, young Tisquantum would have stared up at shadows of hemp bags and bark boxes hanging from the rafters. Voices would skirl up in the darkness: one person singing a lullaby, then another person, until everyone was asleep. In the morning, when he woke, big, egg-shaped pots of corn-and-bean mash would be on the fire, simmering with meat, vegetables or dried fish to make a slow-cooked dinner stew. Outside, he would hear the thuds of the large mortars and pestles in which women crushed dried maize into nokake, a flour-like powder “so sweet, toothsome, and hearty,” colonist Gookin marveled, “that an Indian will travel many days with no other but this meal.” According to one modern reconstruction, Dawnland diets at the time averaged about 2,500 calories a day, a higher level than those in famine-racked Europe.

Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of 7 and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, and they kept their offspring close by until they married. Boys like Tisquantum explored the countryside, swam in the ponds at the south end of the harbor, and played a kind of soccer with a small leather ball; in summer and fall they camped out in huts in the fields, weeding the maize and chasing away birds. Archery began at age 2. By adolescence, boys would make a game of shooting at each other and dodging the arrows.

The primary goal of Dawnland education was molding character. Men and women were expected to be brave, hardy, honest and uncomplaining. Chatterboxes and gossips were frowned upon. “He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love,” Wood reported. When Indian boys came of age, they spent an entire winter alone in the forest, equipped only with a bow, hatchet and knife. These methods worked, Wood added. “Beat them, whip them, pinch them, punch them, if [the Indians] resolve not to flinch for it, they will not.”

Tisquantum’s regimen was probably even more rigorous than that of his friends, according to Smith College’s Salisbury, for it seems that he was selected to become a pniese, a kind of counselor-bodyguard to the sachem. To master the art of ignoring pain, prospective pniese had to subject themselves to such experiences as running barelegged through brambles. And they fasted often, to learn self-discipline. After spending their winter in the woods, pniese candidates came back to an additional test: drinking bitter gentian juice until they vomited, repeating this process over and over.

Patuxet, like its neighboring settlements, was governed by a sachem who enforced laws, negotiated treaties, controlled foreign contacts, collected tribute, declared war, provided for widows and orphans, and allocated farmland. The Patuxet sachem owed fealty to the great sachem in the Wampanoag village to the southwest, and through him to the sachems of the allied confederations of the Nauset in Cape Cod and the Massachusett around Boston. Meanwhile, the Wampanoag were rivals and enemies of the Narragansett and Pequots to the west and the Abenaki to the north.

Sixteenth-century New England was home to 100,000 Native people or more, a figure that was slowly increasing. Most of them lived in shoreline communities, where rising numbers were beginning to change agriculture from an option to a necessity. These larger settlements required more centralized administration; natural resources like good land and spawning streams, though not scarce, needed to be managed. In consequence, boundaries between groups were becoming more formal. Sachems, given more power and more to defend, pushed against each other harder. Political tensions were constant. Coastal and riverine New England, according to the archaeologist and ethnohistorian Peter Thomas, was “an ever-changing collage of personalities, alliances, plots, raids and encounters which involved every Indian [settlement].”

Armed conflict was frequent but brief and mild by European standards. The catalyst was usually the desire to avenge an insult or gain status, not conquest. Most battles consisted of lightning guerrilla raids in the forest. Attackers slipped away as soon as retribution had been exacted. Losers quickly conceded their loss of status. Women and children were rarely killed, though they were sometimes abducted and forced to join the victors. Captured men were often tortured. Now and then, as a sign of victory, slain foes were scalped, and in especially large clashes, adversaries might meet in the open, as in European battlefields, though the results, Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island Colony, noted, were “farre less bloudy, and devouring then the cruell Warres of Europe.”

Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family and familiar custom. But the world outside, as Thomas put it, was “a maze of confusing actions and individuals fighting to maintain an existence in the shadow of change.”

And that was before the Europeans showed up.

“Beautiful of Stature and Build”

British fishing vessels may have reached Newfoundland as early as the 1480s and areas to the south soon after. In 1501, just nine years after Columbus’ first voyage, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real abducted more than 50 Indians from Maine. Examining the captives, Corte-Real found to his astonishment that two were wearing items from Venice: a broken sword and two silver rings.

The earliest written description of the People of the First Light was by Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian mariner-for-hire commissioned by the king of France in 1523 to discover whether one could reach Asia by rounding the Americas to the north. Sailing north from the Carolinas, he observed that the coastline everywhere was “densely populated,” smoky with Indian bonfires; he could sometimes smell the burning hundreds of miles away. The ship anchored in Narragansett Bay, near what is now Providence. Verrazzano was one of the first Europeans the Natives had seen, perhaps even the first, but the Narragansett were not intimidated. Almost instantly, 20 long canoes surrounded the visitors. Cocksure and graceful, the Narragansett sachem leapt aboard: a tall, long-haired man of about 40 with multicolored jewelry dangling about his neck and ears, “as beautiful of stature and build as I can possibly describe,” Verrazzano wrote.

His reaction was common. Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating a nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in. Native New Englanders, in William Wood’s view, were “more amiable to behold (though [dressed] only in Adam’s finery) than many a compounded fantastic [English dandy] in the newest fashion.”

Evidence suggests that Indians tended to view Europeans with disdain. The Huron in Ontario, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly and just plain smelly. (The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal hygiene.) A Jesuit reported that the “savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.”

For 15 days Verrazzano and his crew were the Narragansett’s honored guests—though the Indians, Verrazzano admitted, kept their women out of sight after hearing the sailors’ “irksome clamor” when females came into view. Much of the time was spent in friendly barter. To the Europeans’ confusion, their steel and cloth did not interest the Narragansett, who wanted to swap only for “little bells, blue crystals, and other trinkets to put in the ear or around the neck.” On Verrazzano’s next stop, the Maine coast, the Abenaki did want steel and cloth—demanded them, in fact. But up north the friendly welcome had vanished. The Indians denied the visitors permission to land; refusing even to touch the Europeans, they passed goods back and forth on a rope over the water. As soon as the crew members sent over the last items, the locals began “showing their buttocks and laughing.” Mooned by the Indians! Verrazzano was baffled by this “barbarous” behavior, but the reason for it seems clear: unlike the Narragansett, the Abenaki had long experience with Europeans.

A Small Ship

During the century after Verrazzano, Europeans were regular visitors to the Dawnland, usually fishing, sometimes trading, occasionally kidnapping Natives as souvenirs. (Verrazzano had grabbed one himself, a boy of about 8.) By 1610, one historian has estimated, Britain alone had about 200 vessels operating off Newfoundland and New England; hundreds more came from France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. With striking uniformity, these travelers reported that New England was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later the British nobleman Ferdinando Gorges tried to found a community in Maine. It began with more people than the Pilgrims’ later venture in Plymouth and was better organized and supplied. Nonetheless, the local Indians, numerous and well armed, killed 11 colonists and drove the rest back home within months.

Tisquantum probably saw Champlain and other European visitors, but the first time Europeans are known to have affected his life was in the summer of 1614. A small ship hove to, sails a-flap. Out to meet the crew went the Patuxet. Almost certainly the sachem would have been of the party; he would have been accompanied by his pniese, including Tisquantum. The strangers’ leader was a sight beyond belief: a stocky man, even shorter than most foreigners, with a voluminous red beard that covered so much of his face that he looked to Indian eyes more beast than human. This was Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas fame. According to Smith, he had lived an adventurous and glamorous life. As a youth, he claimed, he had served as a privateer, after which he was captured and enslaved by the Turks. He escaped and awarded himself the rank of captain in the army of Smith. Later he actually became captain of a ship and traveled to North America several times. On this occasion he had sailed to Maine with two ships, intending to hunt whales. The party spent two months chasing the beasts but failed to catch a single one. The fallback plan, Smith wrote later, was “Fish and Furs.” He assigned most of the crew to catch and dry fish in one ship while he sailed up and down the coast with the other, bartering for furs.

Despite Smith’s peculiar appearance, Tisquantum and his fellows apparently gave him a tour, during which he admired the gardens, orchards and maize fields, and the “great troupes of well-proportioned people” tending them. At some point a quarrel occurred and bows were drawn, Smith said, “fortie or fiftie” Patuxet surrounding him. His account is vague, but it seems likely that the Indians were hinting at a limit to his stay. In any case, the visit ended cordially enough, and Smith returned to Maine and then England. He had a map drawn of what he had seen, persuaded Prince Charles to look at it, and curried favor with him by asking him to award British names to all the Indian settlements. Then he put the maps in the books he wrote extolling his adventures. In this way Patuxet acquired its English name, Plymouth, and the region became known as New England.

Smith left his lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, behind in Maine to finish loading the other ship with dried fish. Without consulting Smith, Hunt decided to visit Patuxet, and, once there, he invited some Indians to come aboard. The thought of a summer day on the foreigners’ vessel must have been tempting. Several dozen villagers, Tisquantum among them, canoed to the ship. Without warning or pretext the sailors tried to shove them into the hold. The Indians fought back. Hunt’s men swept the deck with small-arms fire, creating “a great slaughter.” At gunpoint, Hunt forced 19 survivors, including Tisquantum, belowdecks, then sailed with them to Europe, stopping only once, at Cape Cod, where he kidnapped seven Nauset.

In Hunt’s wake, the outraged sachems of the Wampanoag and Nauset confederacies vowed not to let foreigners rest on their shores again. Because of the “worthlesse” Hunt, lamented Gorges, the would-be colonizer of Maine, “a warre [was] now new begunne between the inhabitants of those parts, and us.” Despite European guns, the Indians’ greater numbers, entrenched positions, knowledge of the terrain and superb archery made them formidable adversaries. About two years after Hunt’s offenses, a French ship wrecked at the tip of Cape Cod. Its crew built a rude shelter with a defensive wall made from poles. The Nauset, hidden outside, picked off the sailors one by one until only five were left. They captured the five and sent them to groups victimized by European kidnappers. Another French vessel anchored in Boston Harbor at about the same time. The Massachusett killed everyone aboard and set the ship afire.

“God’s Good Providence”

The Pilgrims had refused to hire the experienced John Smith as a guide, on the theory that they could simply use the maps in his book. In consequence, as Smith later crowed, the hapless Mayflower spent several frigid weeks scouting Cape Cod for a good place to land, during which time many colonists became sick and died. Landfall at Patuxet did not end their problems. The colonists had intended to produce their own food, but had neglected to bring any cows, sheep, mules or horses. (They may have had pigs.) To be sure, the Pilgrims had intended to make most of their livelihood not by farming but by catching fish for export to Britain. But the only fishing gear the Pilgrims brought was useless in New England. Only half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter.

How did even that many survive? In his history of Plymouth Colony, Governor William Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food. After two days of nervous work, the company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done.”

The Pilgrims’ lack of preparation was typical. Expeditions from France and Spain were usually backed by the state, and generally staffed by soldiers accustomed to hard living. English voyages, by contrast, were almost always funded by venture capitalists who hoped for a quick cash-out. Decades after first touching the Americas, London’s venture capitalists still had not figured out that New England is colder than Britain despite being farther south. Even when they focused on a warmer place like Virginia, they persistently selected as colonists people ignorant of farming; the hope of fleeing religious persecution uppermost in their minds, the Pilgrims, alas, were an example. Multiplying the difficulties, the would-be colonizers were arriving in the middle of a severe, multiyear drought. Jamestown and the other Virginia forays survived on Indian charity—they were “utterly dependent and therefore controllable,” Karen Ordahl Kuppermann, a New York University historian, has written. The same held true for the adventurers in Plymouth.

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople. Huddled in their half-built village that first terrible winter, the colonists rarely saw the area’s inhabitants, except for the occasional shower of brass- or claw-tipped arrows. After February, glimpses and sightings became more frequent. Scared, the Pilgrims hauled five small cannons from the Mayflower and emplaced them in a defensive fortification. But after all the anxiety, their first contact with Indians went surprisingly well. Within days Tisquantum came to settle among them. And then they heard his stories.

No record survives of Tisquantum’s journey across the Atlantic, but Hunt—John Smith’s renegade subordinate, who had kidnapped Tisquantum and more than a score of his fellows— would have tied or chained and jammed the Indians into whatever dark corner of the hull was available. Presumably they were fed from the ship’s cargo of dried fish. Smith took six weeks to cross the Atlantic to England. There is no reason to think Hunt went any faster. The only difference was that he took his ship to Málaga, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. There he intended to sell all of his cargo, including the human beings.

In fact, Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest—the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III had proclaimed that “Indians themselves indeed are true men” and should not be “deprived of their liberty” and “reduced to our service like brute animals.”) The priests intended to save both Tisquantum’s body, by preventing his enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to Christianity, though it is unlikely they succeeded in the latter endeavor. In any case, this resourceful man convinced them to let him return home—or, rather, to try to return. He got to London, where he stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while maintaining him as a curiosity in his town house. Meanwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a fishing vessel. He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Micmac and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one another.

Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be difficult, Tisquantum began looking for a ship to take him to Patuxet. He praised New England bounty to Thomas Dermer, one of Smith’s subordinates, who was then staying in the same camp. Dermer contacted Ferdinando Gorges, who despite his previous failures retained his interest in the Americas, and with Tisquantum sailed back to England and met with Gorges. Gorges provided Dermer with a fresh ship, and after touching land in Maine, they set out in May 1619 for Massachusetts.

The Europeans’ Secret Weapon

What Tisquantum saw on his return stunned him. From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty—“utterly void,” Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Gradually Dermer’s crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery 200 miles long and 40 miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained.

Looking for his kinsfolk, Tisquantum led Dermer on a melancholy march inland. The settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but full of untended dead. Finally, Tisquantum’s party encountered some survivors, a handful of families in a shattered village. These people sent for Massasoit, who appeared, Dermer wrote, “with a guard of fiftie armed men”—and a captive French sailor, a survivor of the Cape Cod shipwreck. Massasoit told Tisquantum what had happened.

One of the shipwrecked French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, likely spread by contaminated food, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia. The Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the recently infected fled from the dying, unknowingly carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them the dead were “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed up to 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.

Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand people and held sway over a confederation of as many as 20,000. Now his group was reduced to 60 people and the entire confederation to fewer than a 1,000. Both the Indians and the Pilgrims believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces. The Wampanoag, wrote Salisbury, the Smith historian, came to the obvious conclusion: “their deities had allied against them.”

Similarly, Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives...that he might make room for us.” Indeed, more than 50 of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease. The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land “without any [people] to disturb or appease our free and peaceable possession thereof, from when we may justly conclude, that GOD made the way toe effect his work.”

Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe, the New England epidemic shattered the Wampanoag’s sense that they lived in balance with an intelligible world. On top of that, the massive death toll created a political crisis. Because the hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring Narragansett had restricted contact between them, the disease had not spread to the latter. Now Massasoit’s people were not only beset by loss, they were in danger of subjugation.

After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum returned with Dermer to southern Maine—the home he had been trying to find no longer existed. But he couldn’t stay with the Europeans, either. He ended up returning to Massachusetts on foot—the long, risky journey through war-torn territory that he had wanted to avoid. Almost inevitably, Tisquantum was seized on his journey home, perhaps because of his association with the hated Europeans, and sent to Massasoit as a captive.

Once again, Tisquantum tried to talk his way out of a jam, filling Massasoit’s ears with tales of the English, their cities and powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according to a colonist who knew him, that if Massasoit “Could make [the] English his Friends then [any] Enemies yet weare to[o] strong for him”—in other words, the Narragansett—“would be Constrained to bowe to him.” Massasoit demurred, apparently keeping Tisquantum in a kind of house arrest. Within a few months, word came that a party of English had settled at Patuxet. The Wampanoag observed them as they suffered through the first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit concluded that he should ally with them—compared to the Narragansett, they were the lesser of two evils. Still, only when the need for a translator became unavoidable did he allow Tisquantum to meet the Pilgrims.

Massasoit told the Pilgrims that he was willing to leave them in peace (a bluff, one assumes, since driving them away would have taxed his limited resources). But in return he wanted the colonists’ assistance with the Narragansett. To the Pilgrims, Massasoit’s motive for the deal was obvious: the Indian leader wanted guns. “He thinks we may be [of] some strength to him,” Winslow said later, “for our pieces [guns] are terrible to them.”

From today’s perspective, though, it seems likely that Massasoit had a subtler plan. He probably wanted more to confront the Narragansett with the unappetizing prospect of attacking one group of English people at the same time that their main trading partners were other English people. Faced with the possibility of disrupting their favored position as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging such an incursion. If this interpretation is correct, Massasoit was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of Native politics. Not long before, he had expelled foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag territory. But with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its former communities, the best option seemed to be to allow the Pilgrims to remain. It would turn out to be a drastic, even fatal, decision.

First Thanksgiving

Tisquantum worked hard to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful that when some anti-British Indians abducted him, the colonists sent out a military expedition to get him back. Never did the newcomers ask themselves why he might be making himself essential. But from the Pilgrims’ accounts of their dealings with him, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.

Recognizing that the colonists would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few Native survivors of Patuxet and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship from Massasoit. To accomplish these goals, as Governor Bradford later recounted, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.

The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious Massasoit had sent one of his pniese, Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor. Sometimes Hobamok and Tisquantum worked together, as when the pair helped the Pilgrims negotiate a treaty with the Massachusett to the north. They also helped establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod after Governor Bradford agreed to pay back the losses caused by the colonists’ earlier grave robbing.

By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with “some ninety men,” Winslow later recalled, most of them with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.

All the while, Bradford wrote, Tisquantum “sought his own ends and played his own game.” Covertly he tried to persuade other Wampanoag that he could better protect them against the Narragansett than Massasoit. In case of attack, Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with as many Indian troops—plus the Pilgrims. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other Indians that the foreigners had “buried in the ground” a cache of the agent that had caused the epidemic and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.

Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment distrust of Massasoit among the Indians, he told the colonists that Massasoit was going to double-cross them by leading a joint attack with the Narragansett on Plymouth. Then he tried tricking the Pilgrims into attacking the sachem.

In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum went with a delegation of Pilgrims to the Massachusett in Boston Harbor. Minutes after they departed, according to Bradford, one of the surviving Patuxet “in seeming great fear” informed the settlers that the Narragansett and Massasoit were planning to attack. Apparently Tisquantum believed that the colonists, upon hearing this news, would rise up and kill Massasoit. Since Tisquantum was away, his hands would seem clean. Instead, everything went awry. Upon hearing the news of an impending attack, Bradford ordered the firing of a cannon to call back the delegation, including Tisquantum. Meanwhile Hobamok, who had acquired some English, indignantly denied the rumor. Then in a move that Tisquantum had not anticipated, Bradford sent Hobamok’s wife to Massasoit’s home to find out what he was up to. She reported that “all was quiet.” When Massasoit found out about the plot, he demanded that the Pilgrims send Tisquantum to him for a quick execution.

Bradford refused; Tisquantum’s language skills were too vital. Tisquantum is one of my subjects, Massasoit said. You Pilgrims have no jurisdiction over him. And he offered a load of furs to sweeten the deal. When the colony still would not surrender Tisquantum, Winslow wrote, Massasoit sent a messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off Tisquantum’s hands and head. To make his displeasure even clearer, he summoned Hobamok home and cut off all contact with the Pilgrims. Nervous, the colonists began building defensive fortifications. Between mid-May and mid-July, their crops withered for lack of rain. Because the Wampanoag had stopped trading with them, the Pilgrims would not be able to supplement their harvest.

Now a marked man, Tisquantum was unable to take a step outside of Plymouth without an escort. Nonetheless, he accompanied Bradford on a trip to southeast Cape Cod to negotiate another pact. They were on the way home when Tisquantum suddenly became sick. He died after a few days.

In the next decade tens of thousands of Europeans came to Massachusetts. Massasoit shepherded his people through the wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth lasted for more than 50 years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered by the colonists’ laws, launch what was perhaps an inevitable attack. Indians from dozens of groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New England.

The Europeans won. Historians attribute part of the victory to Indian unwillingness to match the European tactic of massacring whole villages. Another reason was manpower—by then the colonists outnumbered the Natives. Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, had been crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633. A third to half of the remaining Indians in New England died of European diseases. The People of the First Light could avoid or adapt to European technology but not to European germs. Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not control and did not even know they possessed.

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@onlineopinion The power of the Murdoch media to manipulate

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 01:31:00 +0000

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=15412&page=0

Rupert Murdoch uses a variety of weapons to bludgeon readers into submission.

In Australia, that includes techniques including publishing tame articles from a battery of credentialed economists.

Fairfax does the same. But Murdoch's economists are more numerous, better writers and by virtue of their broader reach have greater influence.

How do they manipulate their readers? With six strategies.

First. They repeat impressive-sounding propositions which they do not bolster with evidence. They do not because they cannot. Day in day out, week in week out, year in year out.

Oliver Marc Hartwich in The Australian this month:

"Australia's public finances are in a state of such obvious disrepair that no one would dream of awarding any prizes for sound fiscal management to an Australian treasurer today."

And yet the accolades keep coming.

Judith Sloan and Henry Ergas in The Australian this month:

    … it is beyond dispute that there was far-reaching waste in programs such as school halls and pink batts, with the latter also involving the tragic loss of young lives.

The opposite is true. Independent audits found minimal waste. The CSIRO found the rate of injuries and deaths fell to a quarter of the rate in the insulation industry during the Howard years. The pink batts were in fact remarkably successful.

But repetition in an authoritative tone has driven home the 'truth' to many.

Second. They ignore global context.

For decades now, Australia has been part of the international economy. By pretending it isn't, misinformation is conveyed without actually lying.

Professor Ergas in June:

    And until Labor's growth blockers are well and truly gone, an enduring return to the fiscal strength of the Howard years will remain a dream.

Growth blockers? Strength of the Howard years?

It is technically true that growth has been lower under Labor than under the Coalition. But when assessed in context, the dream run has been under Labor.

Consider economic growth in these 13 comparable countries in calendar 2006:

Australia 3.1%
Austria 3.8%
Denmark 3.1%
Germany 4.3%
Hungary 3.8%
Iceland 3.3%
Ireland 3.4%
Italy 3.0%
Netherlands 3.3%
Norway 3.3%

South Korea 4.6%
Spain 3.9%
Switzerland 3.5%

Average 3.57%. Australia was below average.

These are the members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development with 2006 growth between 3.0% and 4.6%.

Where are they now – growth during calendar 2012?

Australia 3.1%
Austria 0.7%
Denmark -0.9%
Germany 0.0%
Hungary -2.7%
Iceland 1.4%
Ireland -1.0%
Italy -2.8%
Netherlands -1.5%
Norway 1.9%
South Korea 1.5%
Spain -1.9%
Switzerland 1.4%

The average, excluding Australia's aberrant number, is negative 0.33%. Australia is now in a class of its own.

You won't see this analysis in The Australian.

Third. They deny the global financial crisis impacted Australia.

Oliver Marc Hartwich in The Australian this month:
    One of the great myths about the GFC is that stimulus 'saved Australia'. But is this actually the case? The answer, clearly demonstrated in these pages over recent weeks, is a resounding no. China's stimulus, the Reserve Bank slashing interest rates, and the formidable inherited fiscal position were what actually put Australia in good stead.

No, that has not been demonstrated. It has been asserted with no evidence. Because the actual evidence proves the opposite.

The data shows compellingly that other nations with strong trade with China were not saved. Other countries which slashed interest rates suffered badly. And economies with a fiscal position even more formidable still went backwards.

The only nation to emerge relatively unscathed was the only one which deployed stimulus spending big enough and fast enough.

Fourth. The sneaky rhetorical question which also avoids actual fibs.

Henry Ergas in June:

    And do events prove that the carbon tax, also the world's highest, is damaging our competitiveness for no environmental benefit?

Does independent data show there has been substantial environmental benefit post carbon tax?

Was the reduction in emissions during 2012-13 more than ten times the reduction in the previous 12-month period?

Was power generation down by 4.3 terawatt hours, equivalent to 2.2 percent, and were CO2 emissions down by 12.2 million tonnes, equivalent to 6.9 percent?

Fifth. They make things up.

Henry Ergas in June:

    … the Howard government ran structural budget surpluses every year averaging 1.4 per cent of GDP; while every year it has been in office, Labor has run structural deficits averaging 2.8 per cent of GDP.

And:

    … literally all the structural deficits were incurred on Labor's watch.

Both untrue. Accurate data shows the average budget surplus for the eleven years of the Howard Government was 0.79%. The average budget deficit during the five years under Labor has been -2.38%.

A Treasury paper in May showed clearly that Australia's structural deficit problem began in the Howard years:

    The estimates suggest that the structural budget balance deteriorated from the mid-2000s, with the point estimate of the structural budget balance falling into deficit just prior to the GFC.

Sixth. If you can't say something destructive about Labor, don't say anything.

Hence we find no economic analysis of lower overall taxes. No measurement of the vast increase in the nation's infrastructure. No exploration of the recent impressive rise in productivity. No appraisal of how the disadvantaged are faring better than ever.

And absolutely never any research into how Australia's global ranking lifted during the Whitlam administration, fell under Fraser, rose through the Hawke/Keating period, slipped back badly during the dismal Howard years, but rocketed to the top with Rudd and Gillard.

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Seven, Ten and Nine ban Anti-Murdoch ad from television

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 01:15:00 +0000

I'm just off the phone after dozens of radio interviews. Our member-funded ad calling out Murdoch's bias is causing quite a fuss.

Already, 830,000 people have seen the ad on air or online -- but now all three major TV networks are pulling it off air and refusing to run it.1. Some of the network representatives told us directly: they're not running the ad because they don't want to criticise Rupert Murdoch.

We've filed an official complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, but we can't wait for a ruling to take our next step. We have to get this message out, right now. So if the commercial channels are slamming the door we'll just go around them -- and go bigger.

If our proposed TV ads had gone through, we would have reached an additional 500,000 TV viewers by the election. But if each of us simply shares this video on Facebook, Twitter and over email we can shatter that number. Let's work together to reach 750,000 views online before the election.

Please click here to share the ad on Facebook

Click here to share the ad on Twitter

And then forward this email to everyone you know so they can do the same.

Why is this important? TV networks use a public good - the airwaves licensed to them by the Government. If networks decide who is allowed to advertise based on which messages they agree with, our democracy is seriously compromised. That's precisely why laws prevent the networks from refusing reasonable attempts by political parties to run ads during election cycles. But since GetUp members aren't a political party, the networks have decided that they can block our right to free speech -- purely because they don't like what we have to say.

They don't want our money - but we don't need them. We're already moving our advertising online, reaching hundreds of thousands more Australians. And if we all share this far and wide, we can make our impact even bigger.

Let's prove that in 2013 people power can beat the corporate blackout. Our democracy depends on it.

With determination,

Sam, for the GetUp team.

PS. To see how the events of the last few days have unfolded, including the great media coverage we've received since the ad was banned, click here: http://www.getup.org.au/whywewerebanned

[1] "Anti-Murdoch article banned from Television", The Age, September 3, 2013

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What is “good fiscal policy” in Australia? @conversationEDU

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 09:28:00 +0000

Fabrizio Carmignani

Associate Professor, Griffith Business School at Griffith University

The statement of Tony Abbott strengthens my impression that candidates (and Mr. Abbott above all) confuse the tools of fiscal policy with its objectives.

Tools vs. Objectives of fiscal policy

The objectives of fiscal policy are (i) to supply public goods that contribute to population’s welfare and economy’s long term growth and (ii) to help stabilise the cyclical fluctuations of the economy. The budget is a tool to achieve these objectives.

Therefore, fiscal policy should not be aimed at “balancing the budget”. Similarly, “a budget in the black” is not a good criterion to assess the success or failure of fiscal policy.

Of course, a budget persistently in deficit, leading to the accumulation of a large stock of debt, is harmful to the achievement of the objectives of fiscal policy. But this does not mean that the budget should always be in the black. Quite the contrary: the budget should be allowed to be in deficit when the economy is in a cyclical downturn. Furthermore, the budget should stay in deficit for all the time that is necessary to promote the recovery.

I have explained in a previous article why it is important to run fiscal policy counter-cyclically. In Australia, estimates indicate that the multiplier of government expenditure is positive and larger than one while the multiplier of taxes is negative. So, when the economy is in a downturn, an increase in expenditure and decrease in taxation will boost recovery. Conversely, in a boom, lower expenditure and higher taxes will prevent the economy from overheating.

Overall, the deficit realised in a downturn will be compensated by the surplus realised in an expansion, thus ensuring that the budget is balanced in the long-term and that debt does not accumulate to any significant extent.

So, when assessing fiscal policy, we should not be looking at whether the budget is in the black/red at some given point in time. Instead, we should be looking at the extent to which the fiscal policy instrument (i.e. the budget) moves counter-cyclically.

The cyclicality of fiscal policy in Australia

In order to provide some quantitative evidence for the assessment of fiscal policy in Australia, I have computed a measure of “counter-cyclicality” of fiscal policy for a group of seven countries. To compute this measure, I regressed the annual change in gross general government debt on the output gap. The output gap is defined here as the difference between potential output and actual output in percent of potential output. So, the output gap is positive when the economy is in a downturn.

The estimated coefficient of the output gap in this regression can be interpreted as a measure of counter-cyclicality: a positive coefficient indicates that fiscal policy is counter-cyclical and a negative coefficient indicates that fiscal policy is pro-cyclical.

The data for estimation are sourced from the IMF World Economic Outlook. Results are summarised in the Table below. For each of the seven countries, the Table reports the estimated measure of counter-cyclicality. For Australia, I have also reported two separate measures: one for the years of Labor governments (Hawke, Keating, Rudd I, Gillard, Rudd II) and the other for the Howard Government (the only Liberal government in the period covered by the data).

The relatively small number of observations available for estimation calls for some caution in the interpretation of results. However, even with this caveat in mind, it is clear that fiscal policy in Australia is markedly counter-cyclical. However, there is a clear difference between the Labor governments and the Liberal government of Howard. Under Howard, fiscal policy actually became pro-cyclical, which means that it contributed to destabilising the economy.

It should be noted that over the period of observation, Australia has achieved the highest rate of economic growth: 3.24% a year on average against 2.58% in the US, 2.25% in the UK, 2.11% in Japan, and less than 2% in the continental European countries.

Perhaps more importantly, from a fiscal policy-making point of view, Australia has experienced less cyclical volatility than all the other countries. I measure volatility by the standard deviation of the output gap. This is equal to 1.18 for Australia, 1.79 for France, and it is greater than 2 for all the other economies. In terms of volatility of the growth rate, Australia is second only to France (1.45 against 1.59).

Assessing Australian fiscal policy

The data indicate that the counter-cyclical stance of Australian fiscal policy has been conducive to the achievements of two key objectives: promoting long-term growth and stabilising the economy. While it might be difficult to establish the exact contribution of fiscal policy to long-term growth, the link between fiscal policy and cyclical stability is much more direct. If Australian people have benefited from a relatively stable economy in the past 25 years, it is thanks to the fact that fiscal policy has been run counter-cyclically, at least under the Labor governments.

The benefits of cyclical stabilisation should not be underestimated. A more stable economy encourages investments, which in turn strengthen the long-term growth potential of a country. Stability also allows for consumption smoothing, which raises individual’s welfare. Moreover, with a counter-cyclical fiscal policy, the government makes lower-income groups less vulnerable to the adverse consequences of recessions.

In light of all this, I think that Labor governments should be praised for their approach to fiscal policy-making in these last two decades. In particular, the increase in debt under the first Rudd government is a sign of competent policy-making: fiscal policy became strongly expansionary when the economy was hit by a strong negative shock and the country was at high risk of recession. Any different course of action, would have been a mistake.

It is also important to stress that the increase in debt did not make the debt to GDP ratio unsustainable. In fact, Australia is today one of the countries with the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio

In conclusion, I am not worried if a government increases debt in a time of recession. Actually, I would be worried if a government did not do that. In the same way, I am worried if a government plans its budgetary policy ten or so years ahead without any reference to or consideration for the cyclical fluctuations of the economy. It’s just not good fiscal policy-making.

Fabrizio Carmignani

Associate Professor, Griffith Business School at Griffith University

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Avaaz.org Monsanto vs Mother Earth

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 05:21:00 +0000

It’s unbelievable, but Monsanto and Co. are at it again. These profit-hungry biotech companies have found a way to gain exclusive control over the seeds of life – the source of our food. They’re trying to patent away varieties of our everyday vegetables and fruits like cucumber, broccoli and melons, virtually forcing growers to pay them for seed and risk being sued if they don’t.

But we can stop them from buying up Mother Earth. Companies like Monsanto have found loopholes in European law to have exclusive rights over conventional seeds, so we just need to close them shut before they set a dangerous global precedent. And to do that, we need key countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands -- where opposition is already growing -- to call for a vote to stop Monsanto’s greedy plans. The Avaaz community has shifted governments before, and we can do it again.

Many farmers and politicians are already against this -- we just need to bring in people power to pressure these countries to keep Monsanto’s hands off our food. Sign now and share with everyone to help build the biggest food defense call ever:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/monsanto_vs_mother_earth_rb/?tOiAAab

Once a patent exists in one country, trade agreements and negotiations often push other countries to honour it as well. That’s why patents change everything about how our food chain works: for thousands of years, farmers could choose which seeds they’d use without worrying about getting sued for violating intellectual property rights. But now, biotech companies are getting patents on the seeds and then charging farmers exorbitant royalty fees. And farmers can’t even save patented seeds for replanting the next season -- Monsanto has sued hundreds of them for practicing the age-old art of seed-saving and plant breeding. Monsanto and Co. claim that patents drive innovation -- but in fact they create a corporate monopoly of our food.

But luckily, the European Patent Office is controlled by 38 member states who, with one vote, can end dangerous patents on food that is bred using conventional methods. Even the European Parliament has issued a statement objecting to these kinds of destructive patents. Now, a massive wave of public outcry could push them to ban the patenting of our everyday food for good.

The situation is dire already -- Monsanto alone owns 36% of all tomato, 32% of sweet pepper and 49% of cauliflower varieties registered in the EU. With a simple regulatory change, we could protect our food, our farmers and our planet from corporate control -- and it's up to us to make it happen:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/monsanto_vs_mother_earth_rb/?tOiAAab

The Avaaz community has never been afraid to stand up to corporate capture of our institutions, from pushing back the Rupert Murdoch mafia, to helping ensure that telecoms keep their hands off our Internet. Now it’s time to defend our food supply from this corporate takeover.

With hope and determination,

Jeremy, Michelle, Oli, Dalia, Pascal, Ricken, Diego and the whole Avaaz team

SOURCES:

Conventionally-bred plants or animals should be exempt from patents, say MEPs (EU Parliament)
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/pressroom/content/20120509IPR44733/html/Conventionally-bred-plants-or-animals-should-be-exempt-from-patents-say-MEPs

President of the European Patent Office gives green light for patents on plants and animals (No Patents on Seeds)
http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org/en/information/background/green-light-for-patents-on-plants-and-animals

Monsanto: All Your Seeds Belong to Us (Mother Jones)
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/02/scotus-hears-monsanto-soybean-case

Seeds and Patents on Life (World Agriculture Report)
http://www.globalagriculture.org/index.php?id=2156

Structures and developments of the swiss and international seed markets through the a case study on certain vegetables varieties (Berne decleration, Swissaid and others) (German only)
http://www.evb.ch/cm_data/Saatgutmarkt_Juni_2012.pdf

Plant Patentability Questions Deepen In EPO Tomato Patent Case (IP Watch)
http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/06/13/plant-patentability-questions-deepen-in-epo-tomato-patent-case/

Tomato patent back before EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal (Europolitics)
http://europolitics.eis-vt-prod-web01.cyberadm.net/business-competitiveness/tomato-patent-back-before-epo-s-enlarged-board-of-appeal-art336003-7.html

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Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition: Clarify which of the IPA's 75 policies the Coalition plans to implement.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 04:54:00 +0000

https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/tony-abbott-leader-of-the-opposition-clarify-which-of-the-ipa-s-75-policies-the-coalition-plans-to-implement#share

Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition: Clarify which of the IPA's 75 policies the Coalition plans to implement.

The Coalition has consistently refused to unveil any policies; however Tony Abbott has indicated (in a speech to the IPA, now published on his web site) that his party supports the IPA's stance on many policy issues. These issues will adversely impact on millions of Australians.

Tony Abbott needs to state for the record which of the 75 policies the IPA published in August 2012 he and his party will take into the 2013 election, and which of these policies he and his party will pursue should they form government.

https://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/tony-abbott-leader-of-the-opposition-clarify-which-of-the-ipa-s-75-policies-the-coalition-plans-to-implement#share

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Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) - Here is the agenda of the extreme conservative group Tony Abbott calls "freedom's discerning friend"

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 03:44:00 +0000

Address to Institute of Public Affairs 70th Anniversary Dinner, Melbourne

It was the most exclusive of events: a glittering $500 minimum per head gala fundraising dinner last week for a right-wing think tank. Tony Abbott, Gina Rinehart and Rupert Mudoch took turns sharing the stage. Andrew Bolt was MC. Tony praised his fellow key-note speakers, especially Rupert, and promised the crowd a "big yes" to many of the think tank's list of 75 policies to radically transform Australia.

Read the IPA's 75 point list for Abbott

Repeal the carbon tax, and don't replace it. It will be one thing to remove the burden of the carbon tax from the Australian economy. But if it is just replaced by another costly scheme, most of the benefits will be undone.

Abolish the Department of Climate Change

Abolish the Clean Energy Fund

Repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act

Abandon Australia's bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council

Repeal the renewable energy target

Return income taxing powers to the states

Abolish the Commonwealth Grants Commission

Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol

Introduce fee competition to Australian universities

Repeal the National Curriculum Introduce competing private secondary school curriculum's

Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)

Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be 'balanced'

Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law

End local content requirements for Australian television stations

Eliminate family tax benefits

Abandon the paid parental leave scheme

Means-test Medicare

End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science,
Research and Tertiary Education

Introduce voluntary voting

End mandatory disclosures on political donations

End media blackout in final days of election campaigns

End public funding to political parties

Remove anti-dumping laws

Eliminate media ownership restrictions

Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board

Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency Cease subsidising the car industry

Formalise a one-in, one-out approach to regulatory reduction

Rule out federal funding for 2018 Commonwealth Games

Deregulate the parallel importation of books

End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws

Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP

Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit

Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database

Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food

Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities

Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools

Repeal the alcopops tax

Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including:
a) Lower personal income tax for residents
b) Significantly expanded 457 Visa programs for workers
c) Encourage the construction of dams Repeal the mining tax

Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states

Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold

Cut company tax to an internationally competitive rate of 25 per cent

Cease funding the Australia Network

Privatise Australia Post

Privatise Medibank

Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function

Privatise SBS

Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784

Repeal the Fair Work Act

Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them

Encourage independent contracting by overturning new regulations designed to punish contractors

Abolish the Baby Bonus

Abolish the First Home Owners' Grant

Allow the Northern Territory to become a state

Halve the size of the Coalition front bench from 32 to 16

Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade

Slash top public servant salaries to much lower international standards, like in the United States

End all public subsidies to sport and the arts

Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport

End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering

Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship

Means test tertiary student loans Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement

Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built

End all government funded Nanny State advertising

Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling

Privatise the CSIRO

Defund Harmony Day

Close the Office for Youth

Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme

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“Merchants of Death” Fly Under the Radar of U.N. Arms Trade Treaty

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 22:09:00 +0000

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/merchants-of-death-fly-under-the-radar-of-u-n-arms-trade-treaty/

Viktor Bout earned a few monikers in his heyday: “Merchant of Death”, “Sanctions Buster” and “Lord of War”. He’s the poster boy for illicit arms brokers – a guild of shadowy intermediaries who link arms suppliers to their end users.

While Bout sits in a jail in the southern U.S. state of Illinois, U.N. member states are concluding an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) – an international agreement that hopes to control a trillion-dollar industry and curtail the use of arms for human rights violations.

But “arms brokering” in general was hardly brought up during ATT negotiations at U.N. headquarters, from Mar. 18-28, even though Bout’s like-minded successors and contemporaries – many of who fuel the abuse of arms – remain at large.

“There’s something sinister here,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project, referring to the relationships between governments and arms brokers.

“Governments around the world depend on brokers to carry out their national security operations,” she told IPS, pointing out that brokers are the main facilitators of any arms trade.[related_articles]

“If you talk about including these actors (in the ATT), and if you talk about bringing stronger control, then you open a can of worms and put a lot of governments on the spot,” said Austin, who’s own efforts led to Bout’s capture.

The reason brokering was not discussed, suspected Austin, was that governments made up their minds about brokering before ATT negotiations even began.

“Had there more time for (member states) to better understand the role of brokers and transporters, than you might have seen a stronger lobby for brokering,” she said.

“I just think we ran out of time (to convince them),” she added.

Brian Wood, head of arms control at Amnesty International, told IPS that there is an absence of national and international regulations surrounding brokering. Over two-thirds of U.N. member states lack national laws regulating the activity.

The final ATT itself contains only one small paragraph on brokering, which starts, “Each State Party shall take measures, pursuant to its national laws, to regulate brokering under its jurisdiction.”

Wood noted the significance of the phrase “pursuant to its national laws”. He said, “If two-thirds of countries don’t have (national) laws regulating brokering, then (by definition) the activity is not going to be illicit.”

Andrew Feinstein, author of “The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade”, told IPS that individual arms brokers are closely linked with defence contractors, governments and intelligence agencies.

Many governments and corporations are largely intertwined with arms brokers, using them as intermediaries to pay bribes and conduct other shadowy activities, he explained.

“Virtually every individual broker who is engaged in massive illegal arms trading activity are at one time or another being accessed by one or more intelligence agencies in the world,” he said.

Feinstein noted that such collusions might have played out during ATT negotiations.

“Defence companies, defence contractors and the defence sector are enormously powerful,” he said. “The ways their voices are heard are through the power they wield over governments.”

“These industries have incredibly close relationships with governments… They have an access to government which is quite unique,” said Feinstein, who served as a member of parliament for the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.

He also noted the U.K.’s position in the ATT talks. “The U.K. has been positive about some of the (strong ATT) measures imposed, but the way in which the U.K. engages in the trade is that they use a huge number of intermediaries from the world for the illicit trade,” he said.

“I think the U.K. is supporting transparency measures with the knowledge that the really big players (U.S., Russia and China) are going to put it back, and I don’t think they’re actually going to be that disappointed with it,” he added.

Feinstein warned that if the final ATT is too watered down, it might be worse than not having a treaty at all.

“It (would) effectively provide a stamp of approval for the status quo as it currently functions, a status quo that only intensifies conflict… and most ironically make the world a more dangerous place,” he said.

Who are the arms brokers?

Wood of Amnesty International told IPS, “The top arms brokers are what I call professors of the arms trade.

“They work systematically. They have a breadth of technical and legal knowledge. They have commercial acumen. They know the right people, and they’ll offer a ‘one-stop-shop’ type of service,” he said.

However, few people have a clear view of the arms brokering network. “No one has a list of arms brokers, because the governments don’t control them… We (only) get a snapshot of what’s happening,” said Wood.

The most “nefarious” brokers are the ones who are corrupt and who work to circumvent U.N. arms embargos, he added.

Feinstein, who spoke with an arms dealer as recently as last week, told IPS, “They have certain common characteristics. The first that strikes me about all of them is that they’re all these absolutely charming, larger than life, charismatic characters.”

Another characteristic, said Feinstein, is that “to a sociopathic extent”, these brokers are unable to comprehend the effects of their actions.

“They justify in the most compelling ways that what they do is actually good for the world, using phrases like ‘in defence of humanity’ and ‘arming people to keep the peace’,” he said.

“They’re unable to see the other side of what they do, the real human consequences of the ways they make huge amounts of money,” he added.

Brokering in the future

“Arms brokering thrives on globalisation,” said Wood, co-author of “The Arms Fixers: Controlling the Brokers and Shipping Agents” with Johan Peleman.

“There’s loads of submarkets for different things, thousands of products… this is tens of thousands of items being traded every day,” said Wood.

“The arms market themselves have become more differentiated,” he explained. “A lot of the stuff that’s traded are parts or components, so they’re not the finished systems.

“You have a lot of people who specialise in particular kinds of equipment. It’s a niche market,” he added.

“If they are not regulated… people may wake up and realise that brokers have taken them for a ride,” he warned.

Netflix: a house of cards or the new HBO? @conversationedu

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:19:00 +0000

http://theconversation.com/netflix-a-house-of-cards-or-the-new-hbo-12750

In arguably the TV event of 2013 so far, House of Cards – a $100 million, 13-episode TV series starring Kevin Spacey, directed by David Fincher, and commissioned by Netflix, premiered exclusively online available only to Netflix subscribers in North and South America and in Scandinavia.

Metacritic, a site that aggregates critics’ reviews, reported that it received generally favourable reviews. It was also popular with viewers, and quickly became Netflix’s most-streamed program ever.

This is good news for Netflix. Over the past 18 months the company had been in dire straits, during which time it received a lot of press for its bold international expansion as well as its financial difficulties. Some observers postulate that it could become the next HBO, while others doubt that it will even survive the next five years.

So what is going on? How can a company that could be teetering on the brink spend $100 million commissioning a TV series, let alone push ahead with global expansion? Is Netflix’s business model sustainable? And if it is, what does its entry into original programming mean for the future of television?

Netflix built its brand with a compelling proposition as a virtual video store, where customers had 24/7 access to order DVDs online and rentals were shipped to subscribers via the US postal service with a postage-paid return envelop and no late fees, for a monthly subscription of $7.99. Netflix won customers away from the major video chains at the top end of the mass market; Redbox DVD kiosks focused on attracting cost-conscious customers; bricks-and-mortar behemoths like Blockbuster slid into oblivion.

In order to prepare customers for an eventual transition from physical disc rentals to streaming video rentals, Netflix introduced its “Watch Instantly” streaming service for about 10,000 titles from a much larger library, as a free value-add within the monthly subscription price in 2006. In doing so, it became the first mover of any scale in this emerging space.

The streaming video on demand (VoD) market for movie and TV shows only really took off in 2011, as Netflix was joined by Hulu Plus and Amazon’s streaming service for its Prime customers and annual revenue for SVoD (subscription VoD) in the US market online grew exponentially from only $4.3 million in 2010 to $454 million in 2011 +10,000%.

Total revenue for the online movie market (including SVoD, rentals and sell-through) tripled from $389 million in 2010 to $963 million in 2011.

Netflix had consistently met its financial targets and its share price rocketed to peak at $291 after it announced plans to expand into 43 Latin American countries following its previously successful international expansion into Canada.

Then it made an almost catastrophic mistake when it attempted to drive subscribers towards a faster transition away from physical DVDs to streaming. Netflix announced that it was splitting the two services, rebranding the DVD-only rental business as Qwikster with a monthly sub of $7.99 for DVD rentals only, and hiking the monthly subscription price more than 60% to $15.98 if customers wanted to have both DVD rentals plus streaming. Or, for $7.99, customers could continue to subscribe to the streaming-only Netflix Instant service.

The customer backlash was immediate and severe. DVD subscription churn increased significantly as angry customers departed in droves — one million per quarter. Netflix’s share price nosedived from its record high of $291.23 bottoming out at $52.81 per share in mid-2012.

Netflix quickly backtracked, abandoning the price increase, dumping new DVD rental service Qwikster and apologizing to customers. But the damage was done; a PR disaster ensued. The brand suffered badly and so did earnings.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

In December 2012, Moody’s downgraded Netflix ratings on two out of three scales – the CFR and Probability of Defaulting.

The rationale for Moody’s downgrade was that Netflix faced significantly higher risks transitioning from a high contribution margin DVD business to a lower margin, fixed-cost streaming service that would require a much higher level of subscribers to break even, in a market with low barriers to entry and intensifying competition some who might have differing motivations for entering this market, deeper pockets and might be prepared to undercut Netflix in order to take market share.

It also expressed concern about the damaging loss of many DVD customers following the Qwikster debacle, and speculated that streaming customers are likely to be “less sticky” than Netflix traditional DVD base, so it anticipated greater subscriber churn. This in turn would require Netflix to ensure a superior product offering to competitors and to deepen engagement with customers to attract sufficient volume of new subscribers and reduce churn to maintain market leadership and restore past levels of profitability.

Moody’s did, however, acknowledge that Netflix certainly had potential to increase its subscriber base and co-exist with rivals in a US market comprising 80 million US broadband households. Forbes magazine speculated that there could be up to 120 million broadband households in the US by 2019.

What options does Netflix have?

Raise prices

Following the angry customer backlash triggered by a hike in fees, Netflix has little choice currently than to stick to the $7.99 price-point. Management have taken a price hike off the table in the medium term. It is significant too that Hulu initially launched at $9.99, but was forced to reduce to $7.99 after it failed to gain any traction.

Increase the subscriber base

Netflix is the leading premium content streaming service in the American markets, way ahead of its domestic rivals. It currently also has the largest global footprint as Amazon operates only in the US and Europe (LoveFilm) and Hulu is only in US and Japan. No other direct competitor has truly global reach yet and a factor preventing truly global reach are territorial licensing restrictions that remain part of legacy contracts for existing release windows, but they impact Netflix, Hulu et al equally.

At the end of 2012, Netflix had 25.5 million in the US market and 33 million subscribers globally. Hulu Plus only had 3 million subscribers. Amazon does not release such data.

Concerns about Netflix being a company in transition are legitimate. DVD offered higher margins because once the cost of acquisition, warehousing, fulfilment, and postage were recouped, each video rental’s net was profit – split on a revenue sharing basis pre-agreed with the studio/network and Netflix, so the more times the unit was rented the more profit was realised leveraging economies of scale.

Streaming is different because it suffers from diseconomies of scale: as more popular rentals cost more to stream, a company will need more servers, and thus pay higher electricity bills. Add to that higher upfront establishment costs when entering new international territories, and profit margins are thinner. This means that to breakeven, Netflix requires many more subscribers in its home market (the US) than it did for DVD in order to achieve the same levels of past profitability – Moody’s estimated 35 million. Netflix has a solid base upon which to expand. It has increased its subscriber base by 4 million annually but that growth is slowing in the US market –hence the need for rapid expansion internationally.

In order to attract new subscribers and to reduce churn, Netflix must either pay premium prices for an exclusive window following theatrical release, as it has done with Disney in a deal that from 2013 provides Netflix with a range of Disney classics. From 2016, in a second stage deal, Netflix will have an exclusive window before pay TV for Disney, Marvel, Pixar and LucasFilm movies.

Add to this Netflix’s original programming such as Lilyhammer, House of Cards, and Arrested Development. Others will follow at the rate of five new series annually. These programs will premiere exclusively on the Netflix platform, which will allow it to differentiate itself from rivals.

Add value and package content at tiered price points

The traditional Pay TV model may become the preferred strategy for Netflix once Disney’s exclusive content deal activates in 2016 and Netflix has established its brand as a premium content provider. The key question is: if the only place highly engaged audiences can see a popular Netflix TV series or a Marvel or LucasFilm or Pixar movie in the first post-theatrical window is on the Netflix platform, will they pay a small monthly subscription? The history of pay TV indicates that they probably will.

Is Netflix the new HBO?

Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos recently stated that Netflix’s goal was “to become HBO before it becomes us”.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, Netflix added 2.05 million subscribers in the US market, one year after the Qwikster debacle. With 25.5 million subscribers, if Netflix were a cable company, it would rank second behind HBO (28-29 million subscribers) and considerably ahead of Showtime (21.3 million) and the rest of the pack.

Netflix’s commissioning of quality original programming, combined with premium content deals, will offer a compelling and differentiated value proposition to online audiences.

Netflix and the future of TV

If the programming strategies of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon et al succeed, we may see the emergence of the first serious competitors to challenge industry incumbents. We already know that the future of home video is online, as the DVD and BluRay become obsolete. Online television services with potentially global reach could prove a serious threat to pay TV opereators and major networks in the looming battle for eyeballs and audience engagement online.

Robert McChesney’s latest book, “Digital Disconnect:

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:06:00 +0000

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/digital_disconnect_20130326/

By Peter Richardson

For the last two decades, media historian and activist Robert McChesney has been telling a critical if largely unheeded story about American media, capitalism and democracy. Its general theme can be inferred from McChesney’s many book titles, including “Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy” (1997), “Rich Media, Poor Democracy” (1999) and “Our Media, Not Theirs” (2002). His overarching point is that media commercialization, from the early days of radio to the arrival of the Internet, has served American democracy poorly. For much of McChesney’s career, the roar of the digital revolution has drowned out his critique. But recent developments support it, and what seemed to be specialized concerns in the 1990s now bear directly on the role of media, old and new, in a healthy democracy.

McChesney’s latest book, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy,” begins with a simple but powerful claim: Most assessments of the digital revolution have failed to situate it in our political economy—not the textbook version, but how we actually do business and politics in America. “The ways capitalism works and does not work,” McChesney states plainly, “determine the role the Internet might play in society.” He fully appreciates the Internet’s transformative power and potential, but he quickly subjects the more extravagant forms of digital utopianism to well-deserved scrutiny. “The problem,” McChesney argues, “is that [Internet] celebrants often believe digital technology has superpowers over political economy.” The digital revolution has done nothing to ease U.S. income inequality, for example, and many experts think it has widened wealth gaps. Moreover, McChesney maintains, the expansion and consolidation of Internet power now pose grave risks to our key democratic institutions, including a free press.

McChesney builds his argument slowly, offering two early chapters on the history of capitalism and the political economy of communication. The first is an armchair survey of an enormous and complex literature, but he peppers it with arresting historical detail. Readers may be surprised that 19th century U.S. presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, frequently sounded like Occupy movement members when it came to questions of labor, capital and economic inequality. “The giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others,” Rutherford B. Hayes said after his stint in the White House, “is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons.” McChesney’s second chapter is similarly broad, reaching back to the origins of speech, writing and the printing press before concluding that the digital revolution is as significant as these precursors.

McChesney also draws on mainstream economics to discuss the crucial but frequently neglected notion of public goods, whose side effects tend to produce a healthier economy and society. Economists usually point to national security, infrastructure, law enforcement and education as the key examples of public goods, and though hard-core libertarians argue that companies can and should supply all of them, most economists maintain that free markets, left to their own devices, will fail to provide the appropriate quantity, mix and quality of public goods. For this reason, government investment in them is usually money well spent.

In a 2010 book co-authored with John Nichols, McChesney argued that political journalism is also public good, and he develops that point in “Digital Disconnect” by pinpointing two basic problems with market-oriented journalism today. The first is that the profit motive shapes the selection and presentation of news in ways that frustrate the goal of an informed (rather than an entertained or terrified) citizenry. For-profit media companies say they’re giving people what they want. If audiences like crime stories, even when crime rates are dropping, then crime stories it will be—along with generous doses of “entertainment news,” or thinly disguised advertisements for other media products. For these organizations, the public interest is a vague abstraction compared with profit maximization. When it comes to news, then, their operative principle is clear: It’s good dog food if the dog will eat it.

The second problem is that political journalism, the only kind the nation’s founders cared about, has always required some form of subsidy. Throughout the 19th century, the government supported newspapers through preferential postal rates and paid public notices. In the 20th century, advertisers picked up the bill for gathering, packaging and disseminating political news. But the digital revolution crashed that business model by decimating ad revenue and readership. Seemingly unaware of this history, U.S. news organizations continue to hope that their customers will eventually pay full price for a service that, in one way or another, has always been massively subsidized. It is a peculiarly American blind spot. Virtually every other advanced democracy supports public media and journalism more generously than we do. On a per capita basis, Canada furnishes about $20 of government support for every American dollar allocated to public media, and the United Kingdom outspends us 50 to one.

Yet even as serious American journalism craters, there are few calls for increased public support. Many reporters regard that support as a good way to turn government watchdogs into lapdogs. Although the evidence from other advanced democracies indicates the opposite, their suspicion is telling. Applying the same logic, corporate ownership and advertising should weaken business and economic reporting, but Americans consider these arrangements free of ideological taint. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to call for the elimination of the $446 million per year we now devote to all forms of public broadcasting, including children’s programming. It’s not about the money. The Pentagon spends $550 million per year on military music, and its annual budget for public relations—that is, the Pentagon-friendly packaging of war news—is $5 billion. It’s often said that the federal budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies. If so, the U.S. thinks that managing the war news is 10 times more important than all forms of public media combined.

The digital revolution so far has been disastrous for American journalism, but what about those cool new products and services? Proponents of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which privatized and commercialized the Internet, claimed that the measure would usher in a new era of innovation and competition. In McChesney’s view, that legislation delivered reasonably well on the first promise. Search engines and social media, for example, have created or radically altered whole industries, not to mention our daily lives, and McChesney offers Wikipedia, perhaps the world’s greatest reference work, as a shining example of the noncommercial use of the new technology.

But textbook-style competition in the Internet world was quickly thwarted when the telephone and cable giants entered the arena, and the concentrations of market power are now alarming. Google controls 70 percent of the search engine market and 97 percent of the mobile search market. Apple accounts for 87 percent of music downloads, and Amazon sells the vast majority of books and e-books purchased online. These outcomes reflect the superior goods and services offered by these firms, but consumers are already feeling the pinch of monopoly power. About 20 percent of U.S. households have access to only one broadband provider. The United States ranks 26th in average consumer download speed, but a study of 22 global cities concludes that we pay higher prices for that poorer performance. “Deregulation,” McChesney claims, “has led to the worst of both worlds: fewer enormous firms with far less regulation.” He compares the current state of affairs to the classic scene from “The Godfather: Part II,” in which kingpin Hyman Roth divides his birthday cake—decorated with a map of Cuba—among a small group of assembled mobsters. If citizens and consumers aren’t at the Internet table, McChesney suggests, we’re probably on the menu.

Despite the libertarian rhetoric that regularly issues from Silicon Valley, these empires would have been impossible without government-sponsored research on basic technologies. But as McChesney reminds us, the government has also partnered with these firms in less uplifting ways. We know, for example, that telecommunication giants cooperated with the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping program in 2001. After a whistle-blower exposed that operation, no one was prosecuted, and Congress granted retroactive immunity to those corporations. When President Obama took office, the domestic spying program continued, and his administration got tough—with the whistle-blowers. In 2010, the largest telecommunications companies helped the NSA intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, telephone calls and other types of communication every day. The following year, Google received at least 10,000 requests for information from law enforcement and national security agencies, and the company has indicated that it complies with 95 percent of those requests. If Silicon Valley leaders are truly concerned about liberty and privacy, re-examining their own corporate policies is a good place to start.

McChesney’s recommendations for reform, which he offers in his final chapter, include the regulation of digital monopolies, public investments in journalism, stricter advertising and privacy rules, and protections against warrantless surveillance. One doesn’t have to share his leftist politics to endorse these sensible measures; the question is, who will enact them? Obama is unlikely to pick a fight with the Internet giants; indeed, some observers wonder whether he knows how to fight. Nor are such monopolies restricted to the digital economy. We see similar concentrations of market power in finance, retail, food and agriculture, and many other major sectors of the economy. Trust-busting is the next big item on the political agenda, and we may need a new Progressive Era, complete with old-school muckraking, to accomplish it. The Internet can be a valuable tool in that effort, but as McChesney’s important work makes clear, our political economy won’t change with the click of a mouse.

Big companies' tax avoidance blatant and shameless - Paying your fair share is anathema to multinationals.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:43:00 +0000

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/big-companies-tax-avoidance-blatant-and-shameless-20130327-2gsx5.html

You're familiar, I'm sure, with the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich. It sounds tasty - but only to the big multinational companies that use it to avoid tax. According to the Assistant Treasurer, David Bradbury, in a speech he gave late last year, it's the device Google uses to pay very little Australian company tax on the profit it makes on an estimated $1 billion a year in Australian advertising revenue.

As Bradbury explains it - using media reports, he says, not inside information - the fine print of contracts Australian companies sign with Google says they're buying their advertising from an Irish subsidiary of Google.

Our rate of tax on company profits is 30 per cent, whereas Ireland's is 12.5 per cent. But that's just the start of the sandwich. The Irish subsidiary then pays a royalty payment to a Dutch subsidiary, but it's then paid back to a second Irish holding company of Google's, which is controlled in Bermuda - which has no company tax.

The media usually attribute the invention of the double Irish to Apple, Bradbury says. But evidence given to the British public accounts committee suggests Amazon paid no tax in Britain, despite about $4.9 billion in sales, by routing transactions through Luxembourg, where it faced an effective tax rate of 2.5 per cent.

The committee also heard that Starbucks paid no tax in Britain for three years, despite sales of about $1.8 billion, in part because of royalty payments for use of the brand.

With their government busy raising taxes and slashing government spending to get its budget deficit down, the Brits are pretty steamed up about multinationals not bearing their fair share of the tax burden.

In truth, governments in many developed countries are deciding tougher measures are needed to curb the multinationals' rorting of the system, and ours is no exception. It's a problem governments have been grappling with for decades, since the early days of globalisation and the rise of companies with operations in several countries.

Then, the game was simply for multinationals to shift their profits to countries where taxes were low. One way was for the part of the company in which taxes were lower to sell its products to subsidiaries in high-tax developed countries at inflated prices. The big countries developed rules to limit such ''transfer pricing''.

Another trick was for a subsidiary to borrow from head office most of the capital it needed, with head office then charging an interest payment that absorbed most of the subsidiary's profits. Our ''thin capitalisation'' rule limits interest deductions to $3 of debt for each $1 of share capital, and there's talk this may be tightened.

In a speech this month, Bradbury said you don't need to be doing business on the internet to use something like a double Irish scheme. ''What you do need is the global presence of a multinational enterprise and the ability to attribute a large part of your profits to intangible assets,'' he said.

And we know intangible assets - such as software, databases, patents, copyright and ''goodwill'' or ''brand value'' - play an increasingly important role in the global economy. In the US, investment in intangible assets has exceeded investment in tangible assets for more than a decade.

International legal arrangements rest heavily on the notion that income should be taxed in the country of its ''source''. When economic activity was dominated by farms, factories and mines, it usually wasn't hard to see that the source of income was where production was physically located.

But now ''the increasing importance of intangible capital to production challenges the very idea that we can always objectively determine where economic activity occurs,'' Bradbury said.

All this helps explain the emergence of ''stateless income'' - income not taxed in the source country of the production factors that gave rise to the income, nor in the ultimate parent company's jurisdiction. It's income that doesn't belong anywhere for tax purposes.

This, in turn, explains how the profits of US-controlled corporations in Luxembourg are equivalent to 18 per cent of its gross domestic product. For the Cayman Islands and Bermuda the proportions are more than 500 per cent of those countries' GDP.

Stateless income is not simply a product of transfer pricing abuses, but also arises from decisions about where to place financial capital within a multinational group. It involves exploiting differences in tax systems and hybrid instruments treated as borrowings in one country and shares in another.

Tricks such as these can place single-country businesses at a competitive disadvantage. They - and individual taxpayers - bear an unfair share of the tax burden.

But many big-business executives reject the notion that paying a fair share of tax is part of a broader social compact. Tax is just another business cost. If dodging it is legal, morality doesn't enter into it.

The Gillard government is working to ensure our transfer-pricing rules are up with world's best practice and the general anti-avoidance provision of our tax act is broadened to encompass the tricks multinationals try on.

It has asked Treasury to study what more can be done and will work to improve the information multinationals have to make public about their profits and tax payments.

And, with so many of its members feeling the budgetary pinch, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has had to lift its game in promoting multilateral action to limit tax rorting by global companies.

Forced adoptions apology was PM at her finest

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:25:00 +0000

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/forced-adoptions-apology-was-pm-at-her-finest-20130321-2giu5.html

Julia Gillard's speech apologising from the nation to the broken-hearted women whose babies were taken from them at birth, the children who were adopted out before there was the chance of a bond developing and the fathers whose names often never appeared on the birth certificates of their own children was perhaps her finest.

Given the political events beginning to swirl around Parliament House, there was symmetry here: an echo of Kevin Rudd's first and certainly finest speech as prime minister - the apology to Australia's stolen generations in 2007.

Almost 1000 mothers, fathers, grown children and fractured families sat row upon row in the Great Hall of Parliament House, all of them silent for long stretches, to hear the apology denied them for decades. Attendants held boxes of tissues at the ready. Yet there was little weeping. Those rivers, it was possible to imagine, had flowed years ago, and most of those in the Great Hall had wrapped their anguish behind walls.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott used his own experience of years believing he was the father of a child adopted out to empathise with the gathering. His speech, however, was interrupted by several women objecting loudly to his use of the term ''birth parent''. They were real parents, human mothers, they cried, and Mr Abbott found himself piling a personal apology to the offended upon the political apology, noting that he still had some things to learn, just as the nation did when it came to forced adoptions.

Ms Gillard was interrupted only by cheers and applause as she decried the ''shameful mistakes of the past''. Australia, she said, recognised that the practice of removing babies from mothers deemed by past standards unfit to raise a child ''continues to resonate through many, many lives''.

The apology for forced adoptions was one recommendation of a 2012 Senate inquiry, led by Greens senator Rachel Siewert, which found up to 250,000 babies were forcibly taken from their mothers. The practice was carried out by governments, hospitals, churches and charities - often illegally.
Branding it a ''cruel and immoral practice'', Ms Gillard said many mothers were tricked into signing the papers, drugged and shackled to their beds.

''For the loss, the grief, the disempowerment, the stigmatisation and the guilt, we say sorry,'' Ms Gillard said. ''To each of you who were adopted or removed, who were led to believe your mother had rejected you and who were denied the opportunity to grow up with your family and community of origin and to connect with your culture, we say sorry.''

Mr Abbott, having praised the ''eloquent and heartfelt statement'' by Ms Gillard, spoke about his former girlfriend Kathy Donnelly, who gave up her son Daniel for adoption in 1977. Mr Abbott thought for many years he was Daniel's father, only to discover - after meeting him and declaring parenthood - that Daniel was the son of another man.

''The late Kathy Donnelly was a beautiful person and a fine mother who loved all her children,'' Mr Abbott said. ''She deserved nothing but love and support, not coercive expectations, social stigma and - I say this with more than a pang of personal guilt - men in her life who had failed to live up to their responsibilities.''

'He's always inflating his numbers': Latham unleashes extraordinary diatribe on Rudd, Fitzgibbon and Richardson

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:20:00 +0000

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/hes-always-inflating-his-numbers-latham-unleashes-extraordinary-diatribe-on-rudd-fitzgibbon-and-richardson-20130321-2gik7.html

This is an edited transcript of former ALP leader Mark Latham speaking to 2UE's Paul Murray on Thursday morning.

"We go through this every time about the inflated Rudd numbers. Kevin Rudd put his hand up for the Labor leadership six times, and in each case he has dramatically inflated his numbers in leaks to the media.

"You had silly Kieran Gilbert on Sky News today saying: 'Oh, will it be like last time, when Rudd had the numbers and then they fell apart when the ballot was held – his numbers dissipated.'

"Well, he didn't have the numbers in the first place; I mean, I just get amazed at the gullible nature of the media where, time after time after time after time, they buy the Rudd BS.

"He's always inflating his numbers. He's now got [Graham] Richardson, who, more than any other person, has wrecked the modern culture of the Labor Party. Why is Richardson supporting Rudd, and in there working on the numbers? Because Gillard won't listen to him, you see.

"Richardson is all about difference, unless he's the main numbers man and the one they listen to, he goes to do you in. He did Rudd in three years ago. He made out that he was a part of the coup against Kevin Rudd because Rudd wasn't listening to him. Now he wants to be a part of a coup against Gillard because she didn't listen to him.

"Why don't people listen to Graham Richardson? I'll give you one good reason – he's the man that walked up to Eddie Obeid once and said: 'Here, on this platter for you, I've got a seat in the NSW upper house on behalf of the Labor Party.'

"How can the man who put Eddie Obeid into the NSW Parliament be wandering around talking about political judgment, calling the Prime Minister an idiot? The biggest idiot in Labor politics today is the man who put Obeid in Parliament: Graham Fredrick Richardson.

"I've had a gutful of the bloke who was a paid lobbyist for Ron Medich, who got into scandals about Swiss bank accounts. How can you say you're a Labor man when you've set up Swiss bank accounts? Swiss bank accounts worked for Kerry Packer.

"It's shameful that this man has any reputation, the man who set up the wheeling and dealing, 'whatever it takes' culture in the modern Labor Party. He's the bloke who wrecked the place and he walks around like he's got clean hands like Mother Teresa, knows all the numbers. All he knows how to do is put people like Obeid in Parliament ... and it's a real achievement in public life for Richardson, but 20 years after he made that decision, it is contributing to the destruction of the federal Labor government. He should crawl under the rock from which he came.

"I know Joel Fitzgibbon well. Fitzgibbon's first instinct in public life is panic, and you saw that yesterday when he's wandering down the corridors saying, 'we've only got 31 per cent of the primary vote'. He's an amateur. He's a buffoon. He is not someone who – when I was running for leadership against Beazley – who we thought was good enough to come into our council of war.

"If Rudd is relying on Fitzgibbon, again, it just points to the fact that he's got the dregs of the labour movement with him. People like Richardson and Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon's second instinct in life is to blabber non-stop, on and off the record, to the media; he's addicted to the media as badly as Rudd ...

"They won't have a ballot in the caucus board ... I'll tell you what the ballot should be for. It should be for the position of chief government whip, because in the Westminster tradition, that position of chief government whip held by Joel Fitzgibbon only has one duty: to be loyal to the leader.

"And if you're a person of honour and you recognise that you can't discharge that duty any more, you have to resign from that position. Not take the extra taxpayers' money that comes with it.

"When you talk about Fitzgibbon, you're talking about someone who is not only the dregs of the labour movement, he's totally dishonourable.

"He's totally dishonourable, if he was a man of honour he wouldn't be walking around pocketing that extra money as the chief government whip. Because he's the chief government leaker, he's the chief government destabiliser, and it's shameful, shameful that he remains in that position today.

"They should have a ballot in the caucus – it should be for Fitzgibbon's position. He should be sacked. But more importantly, we should have high standards and people of honour in the labour movement. Fitzgibbon is very representative; no surprise he's now hanging out with Richardson, it's very representative of all the things that have gone wrong in the culture of the modern Labor Party.

"I'd say, don't listen to idiots like Richardson and Fitzgibbon, don't trust a word of people of dishonour who've shamed the labour movement consistently for a long, long while.

"Don't listen to a bloke like Richardson who put a bloke like Eddie Obeid into the NSW Parliament, we should be better than that, we should have a culture in the Labor Party that's not about wheeling and dealing and doing whatever it takes, its about public policy and a vision for the Australian people. It's about looking after the battlers, caring about poverty, caring about inequality.

"Let's not get sidetracked into the dregs of the labour movement – people like Fitzgibbon and Richardson – we should be better than that. And if we've got some good ideas for the Australian people, let's put them forward.

"We made a decision about the leader 12 months ago. The honourable Labor thing to do is abide by that, put forward our ideas for the Australian people – and if we lose on election day, far better, far better to die on our feet than to live on our knees.

"I find this so upsetting, the modern Labor Party lives on its knees when it associates with people like Richardson and Fitzgibbon's culture of wheeling and dealing, of panic. The number merchants who care nothing for the real issues that concern Labor supporters, they just concern themselves about being a big wheel in the system.

"This is not the Labor Party of Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam and Keating. It's the Labor Party of people who should be just kicked straight out the door and told, if they haven't got the honour to stand up for what's right, they've got no place in the modern Labor system.

"That's what I'd be saying to the colleagues. It's true – unless you deal with the bad people, you bring yourself down and if you live in a bad culture, that's never going to get better."

The vast differences between the NBN and the Coalition's alternative @ABCtech

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 07:17:00 +0000

http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2013/02/21/3695094.htm

The Coalition's broadband policy slogan states that they will "Complete the current NBN cheaper and faster." This simply isn't true.

We'll continue to cover the sketchy claims of being 'faster' and 'cheaper' in other articles but for now we'll focus on the supposed similarities and differences.

The Coalition's NBN alternative is different by almost every measure. It uses different technologies to connect the bulk of the country; it has different uses and applications; it affects Australia's health service differently; it provides different levels of support in emergencies and natural disasters; it requires a different amount of power to operate; the cost of maintenance is different; the overall cost, the return on investment and the re-sale value are different; the management, ownership, governance, competition and monopoly factors will be different; it has a different life-span and upgradability issues; the effect on businesses (of all sizes) and GDP is different; the effects on television are different; the effect on Senior Citizens is different; the viability and potential for cost blowouts is different; the costs of buying broadband will be different; the reliability is different; the effect on property prices will be different; the timescale is different; the legacy is different. Ultimately, it has completely different aims.

In just about every case the Coalition's alternative compares unfavourably to the current plans - and usually in dramatic fashion. That's based upon the facts and the information currently available in the public domain.

There are few similarities: it appears that the Coalition's plans for Fixed Wireless technology and Satellite technology in rural areas may be similar (there's an near-total lack of detail in the Coalition's plans and much information is gathered through 'reading between the lines') but there are big questions regarding the differences in funding. Ultimately, the only obvious similarity is that people should be able to download web pages and videos a bit faster.

Here follows each facet listed in detail. In the spirit of crowdsourcing, and with the phenomenal success of it in terms of NBN research, if you can add any more information one way or the other, please contact us or leave the details in the comments.

Different technologies

The current NBN plans serve 93 per cent of the population with optic fibre. That means the current NBN will eventually provide absolute certainty that 93 per cent of the Australian population will have access to broadband that can operate at a known minimum speed and this speed will be future-proofed for at least the remainder of the century.

In contrast, the Coalition wants to use technology which relies upon Australia's existing copper networks. Consequently, all premises will have different connection speeds based upon their location and the haphazard quality of the copper line(s) that connects to each house. In premises with new(ish) copper that is in good condition and is near to an exchange/node cabinet, one might expect the claimed download speeds of 80Mb/s. However, over 80 per cent of the nation's copper network is over 30-years old and copper expires after 30 years - Telstra is currently in the process of ripping it up to make way for NBN fibre. Consequently most people won't get near such speeds (more on this here).

A standalone reason for the NBN is that it replaces the expired 'rotting' copper network. While we might be in one of the driest continents on earth, it can get very wet in our most popular settlements and water ingress is a perpetual problem. This manifests itself as low broadband speeds plus poor quality and unreliable phone calls.

The Coalition has not addressed copper's age and need for refresh with its choice of technology.

Different uses and applications

There's a more-detailed list of the main applications of fibre-based broadband here. In short it will revolutionise healthcare for everyone especially the elderly and those living in remote communities. It will revolutionise all levels of education (more here). It will revolutionise power distribution through the ability to micro-manage peak electricity demand (more here) plus assist in getting power back online quicker in times of emergency and disaster.

As Tasmania is discovering, it opens up a world of monitoring possibilities which can even help farmers.

Fibre also offers revolution to television with every household being able to access the bulk of the developed world's TV channels as well as a plethora of on-demand and other services. Potentially, more importantly, fibre is the only medium capable of broadcasting to the new Ultra High Definition "4K" TVs. These might be new now, but in 10 years' time they'll be common (more on this below).

Fibre also means an end to paying phone line rental and expensive phone calls. It also means ubiquitous crystal-clear, high-definition sound quality on phones which will please people whose technology requirements don't stray far from an old-fashioned telephone.

Telecommuting means many more people won't have to commute to work anymore and nor will they need to live in cities.

Other nascent technologies include 3D printing - an amazing thing which resonates with Star Trek's replicators. It's very real and happening, but should blossom with fibre.

Another potentially-innovative boost could come from Government services. For instance, if people could communicate with CentreLink by talking to their TVs instead of spending time travelling to offices, hardly any offices would be required - everything could be outsourced to a low-cost regional location. There are over 900 offices in Australia.

This isn't even scratching the surface. See here for more.

The Coalition's alternative does away with just about all of this. Those fortunate enough to have the country's very best copper connections should be able to access some of the above services. However, without everyone having access to such speeds, services are significantly less likely to develop. Ultimately, the Coalition has, thus far, said little about the uses of broadband beyond its ability to download web pages and YouTube-like video quicker.

Effect on Australia's health service

We've mentioned the prime benefits to education and power distribution above but it's worth dwelling on healthcare. The 'telehealth' (more here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) opportunities afforded by fibre are so dramatic that the savings to the vast $120bn (and rising) annual health budget will pay for the entire rollout on their own, while simultaneously revolutionising healthcare for all Australians, particularly the elderly and those living in rural areas. More on this, here.

In the US, the savings of have been rated at almost $80bn per year.

In New Zealand, it's NZ$5.9bn ($4.8bn) over 20 years. The larger size and GDP of Australia should amplify that figure dramatically.

The prime reasons for this involve the reliability, low latencies, ubiquitous coverage plus the fast download AND upload speeds of fibre. It means people can turn on their TV and talk face-to-face with a doctor. There are numerous cost saving and efficiency (and health) benefits here but primary examples include reducing ambulance journeys which take the old and infirm to their regular doctor's appointments (at a potential cost of up to several thousand dollars per trip). The elderly and infirm can also be monitored easily in their own homes without requiring expensive healthcare visits or housing in expensive care homes while hospitals can save $1000 per patient per night simply monitoring patients (while freeing up staff and beds). The potential benefits for rapid diagnosis and triage are self-evident.

Conversely, the 'VDSL' technologies which underpin the coalition's copper-based policy are the most unreliable in the industry. Much more so on old, rotting copper. Most of the above benefits won't exist.

(Quick note: Cisco's imminent standard on medical-grade broadband requires reliability, low latency, plus 5Mb/s upstream, 5Mb/s downstream plus at least 7 Mb/s of bandwidth 'overhead' to ensure stability. This is counter to a Cisco stat on Malcolm Turnbull's Blog, (here) where high-quality video was claimed possible at under 2Mb/s (720p, 15fps). Cisco now admits this is a mistake.)

Support in emergencies and natural disasters

National emergencies, whether fire or flooding, are becoming a part of Australian life. Consequently, the benefits of a fibre-based NBN are becoming increasingly important. Chattanooga is a global-example of a fibre-connected city. It's also been devastated with tornados. The city found:

    "With a fiber network deployed, [we] can now get near-real-time information when a catastrophe like that occurs. Faster info means faster recovery, and faster recovery means less time without the power needed to support emergency response efforts." More here.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Sandy recently caused "catastrophic failure" to the New York copper network with flooding while the fibre-based network was up and running very quickly:

    "unlike copper, fiber optics aren't damaged by the water. As part of this process, crews have already pulled fiber up the major corridors." More here.

Fibre is far more resilient and has even survived frozen mudslides with aplomb. It's also more resilient to lightning strikes (since glass doesn't conduct electricity).

The Coalition has not mentioned broadband-related plans in this area.

Amount of power required to operate

Fibre-based broadband requires very little power to transmit a full-speed signal over many kilometres. Conversely, a network based upon VDSL and wireless technologies require so much power that, according to Rod Tucker at Melbourne University, Australia will need to build two-to-three small new power stations to make it work:

VDSL requires double the amount of power to transmit at peak speed and also eight large batteries per node (of which there would be some 50,000 to 70,000, all of which would regularly need to be replaced at enormous expense.

A counter to this is that fibre-based phones can go dead in power cuts. However, any wireless home phone will do too, so it's an only an issue for those still using very-basic, traditional telephones.

The Coalition has not yet addressed this.

The cost of maintenance

The current copper network costs over $1bn each year to maintain. Over 80 per cent of it is over 30 years old and copper expires after 30 years. Increasing anecdotal evidence suggests Telstra has all but given up on regular maintenance and fixes issues only when broken (if at all) - what's the point in paying to maintain a network that is on its way to the scrap heap?

This is the self-same network that the Coalition plans to use as the basis of its broadband infrastructure. What also comes with this is increased maintenance work for some 50,000 to 70,000 'nodes' (large roadside cabinets).

Water is the enemy to copper. However, glass fibres are chemically stable and, by comparison, incredibly robust. They hardly suffer at all from rain or deluge. Fibre maintenance is much cheaper than that of copper.

The overall cost, the return on investment and the re-sale value

The NBN has been fully costed thanks to the $25 million KPMG-McKinsey Implementation Study and recently had its renewed corporate plan verified by Analysis Mason (an analysis firm which is often cited by the Coalition). Twice.

The net cost is zero and it will pay for itself in at least four different ways. Rather than using tax-payer's money that could be used on other things (a common myth) it sees Australia borrowing $27bn using its Triple-A credit rating (Australia is currently one of only seven countries in the world to have this. It provides us with the cheapest form of borrowing) to use in addition to another $11bn of private investment. This money ultimately comes back to the government with a seven per cent profit.

In addition, the cost savings to existing infrastructures, particularly health and power generation are such that the money saved from their annual bills will pay for the network on their own.

The cost of the Coalition's alternative hasn't been released but we have a rough idea. We are continually told that the Coalition won't release costings because it doesn't know what contracts have been entered into by the government and NBNco. The government disagrees with this but, for the sake of argument (and to avoid politics); let's say this area costs the Coalition nothing.

The basic build is generally agreed to cost around $15bn (likely the root of the Coalition's 'cheaper' claims). Next we add $3bn for Fixed Wireless and Satellite to rural and remote Australia. Then we must add the cost of obtaining a copper network.

Alan Kohler and Malcolm Turnbull recently discussed the matter here, here and here.

In truth, anyone reading this will have as good an idea of what that costs. Here's the premise: all of the Coalition claims about its 'FttN-based technology being around one-third or one-quarter of the cost of the current NBN' are based on overseas examples where an incumbent telco already owns a copper network (which presumably is well-maintained and in good condition). But neither the government nor NBNco own a copper network and that means it must obtain one. A new one would cost around $40bn and is subsequently non-viable. That means enacting an election promise to buy or lease Telstra's copper network.

How much do you think Telstra will charge? There are a few things to consider.

Firstly, Telstra has never, in its commercial history, done anything at its shareholders' expense.

Telstra itself said its copper network was "at five minutes to midnight" long ago:

    Former manager of regulatory strategy, Tony Warren, gave the Senate broadband inquiry details of the company's problems with its ageing copper network. He said ADSL, the high-speed internet service that runs over copper wires, was the bridging broadband technology Telstra was using until it replaced the network. He described ADSL as the "last sweat" of revenue Telstra could wring out of the 100-year-old copper wire network.

That quote was from 2003.

Since the NBN came knocking there is substantial anecdotal evidence from technicians and customers that subsequent maintenance practices have become 'fix only when broken' policies and as such the network is said to be in a sorry state and is barely fit for purpose.

So if Telstra sells cheap, does that mean the network is worth buying in the first place? If it is fit for purpose, and the government had no alternative but to buy or lease it, then bear in mind that Telstra recently charged NBNco $9bn just to lease the ducts which house the copper (many of which are collapsed, flooded and filled with crud).

When NBNco did a deal to migrate Telstra's customers over to the NBN it took more than 120 Telstra lawyers and over 30 NBNco lawyers two years to come to an arrangement.

With all this in mind, what do you think Telstra would charge? The Coalition says around $4bn - $5bn. Other commentators say it could be $20bn. That puts the cost of the Coalition's policy anywhere from a highly-optimistic $22bn to a possible $38bn. Until Telstra decides, there's no way of knowing. The amount being borrowed on the public's behalf by the government is currently $27bn for the NBN. Is $22bn (the very best case scenario) really significantly cheaper than $27bn?

Next there's the question of where the money would come from. It's difficult to envisage private companies investing in a copper-based network which is already moribund, literally on its way to the scrap heap and comes with enormous power bills, maintenance costs, no premium applications and no obvious return on investment. Could the Coalition be planning to spend tax-payers' money (capital expense) on the build? They've slammed the government repeatedly for doing that even though the claim is not true.

It's not clear why the Australian public would, en masse, subscribe to the new network. Do people really need extra speed for web pages and YouTube? We don't know what the Coalition's broadband is for. It hasn't mentioned any applications or benefits. What would the take up rate be?

Malcolm Turnbull recently and bizarrely said of the fibre-based NBN:

    "There is no evidence whatsoever that the massive increase in speeds delivered by fibre-the-home will deliver any extra value or benefit to Australian households."

One can't help but wonder what the reaction would be if that statement was read out at an international broadband conference. Nonetheless, pretending it's true for a moment, what are the benefits of the Coalition's alternative? Where's the value? How does it make its money back?

As we've seen, almost all of the cost savings to existing infrastructures would vanish. There's no visible or obvious business plan and leaving the market to its own devices (as stated) won't see a net return on government investment via subscriptions. Non-ubiquitous fibre adoption would significantly-curtail innovation or any boosts to GDP. That leaves resale value as the last vestige of the network being able to pay for itself.

But the question is then raised; who would buy a network that was declared moribund over a decade before it was started, that uses obsolete technology and comes with enormous liabilities in terms of power costs and maintenance?

Finally, once built, from what we can gather, the Coalition plans to upgrade the network to one similar to the current plans but it won't say how much extra that will cost. There are also big technological issues with this which we'll cover in a future article.

At present, without further information from the Coalition with regards to its costings, the available evidence strongly suggests that the Coalition's alternative will cost anywhere from $22bn to $40bn (plus power bills, maintenance and upgrade costs) with no obvious return on investment and it's not clear where the initial capital expense or investment will come from (another recent attempt at costing can be found here).

As such, without extraordinary detailing from a costings plan it appears that the Coalition's broadband alternative will be colossally more expensive than the current NBN and not cheaper by any reasonable definition.

The management, ownership, governance, competition and monopoly factors

The NBN will initially be operated by NBNco using a fixed wholesale price. Throughout this time it will make around a seven per cent profit. After completion it will likely be sold but the government will remain in control of maintenance (a good idea). The wholesale price drops over time (Page 67 of NBNco's coporate plan) and, once sold, will be subject to market forces - the initial requirement of them being artificially high (to subsidise the rollout to rural and remote Australia) will no longer exist.

This has been ignored by the Coalition which has said repeatedly that government-owned monopolies with fixed prices are traditionally more expensive because the wholesale price has little reason to drop long-term.

An enormous problem with the current system (and with networks around the world) is that incumbent operators are in charge of everything. Telstra both sells access to its network to resellers and is a reseller itself - one of the worst kinds of monopoly. However, in its deal last year, NBNco managed to structurally separate Telstra meaning no more monopoly. This came at the expense of an 11-month delay (for which NBNco was remorselessly criticized) but meant that several billion dollars were shaved off the overall build costs and the overall rollout duration was shortened. On balance, that's an extraordinary achievement for NBNco.

The new landscape generally sees NBNco selling access to the NBN at a fixed price regardless of the size of a service provider. As such many companies can go up against Goliaths like Telstra knowing that they're paying the same price. This is a near-ideal competitive platform. That said, a potential problem is that some smaller-scale players won't be able to afford the minimum AVC (Access Virtual Circuit) from NBNco. Their option will be to buy rolled-up NBN wholesale from the likes of Nextgen and AAPT. There will be a margin for those wholesale services.

At present customers are stuck with whoever can offer service in their area and, without a detailed explanation from the Coalition, their NBN-equivalent looks set to continue down this track. However, there are bigger concerns.

When Telstra last looked at implementing FttN in 2008 it said that sharing access to its cabinets with other service providers using all manner of different contractors would cause all manner of problems, that

    "In practice it would be a disaster for customers."

The whole document is essentially a testament to how the only way FttN can work is if it is owned and serviced by a monopoly.

Furthermore, there are big problems with technologies like Alcatel-Lucent's 'Vectoring' which is a FttN technology that has been promoted by the Coalition.

Thanks to Richard Chirgwin for the following explanation, but skip a few paragraphs if tech jargon makes you feel unwell:-

1. Alcatel-Lucent Zero-Touch vectoring is a single-vendor solution. Without vendor competition, you have a monopoly supplier.

2. Vectoring is incompatible with "local loop unbundling" [a term which means giving competing companies access to the copper connected to houses - a further explanation, with diagram can be seen here]. Vectoring needs all the lines to be driven from the same DSLAM [the technology which connects the premises to an individual ISP]. This is because every line needs to be tested, analysed, and optimised, constantly and on-the-fly, for vectoring to work. This means, if you have TWO DSLAMs running vectoring in the same local area, you'd end up with an "arms race". DSLAM-1 will try to optimise all of the lines under its control; this appears as noise to DSLAM-2, which adjusts its behaviour accordingly. This increases the noise on DSLAM-1, and so on. [More complications are discussed, here.

3. Low-density, long-loop areas are non-viable because you'd have a DSLAM serving fewer than 100 customers, because most cable fanouts today serve fewer than 100 customers. In other words - VDSL2 plus vectoring would serve more like 50 per cent of the country than 93 per cent (a rough estimate; significant time and resources would need to be spent turning that into hard data).

He continues:

    In the absence of wide adoption of the Vectoring standard, No telco will deploy a technology like vectoring on a wide scale.Experience suggests it would take at least 3-5 years. In other words "VDSL2 with Vectoring" deployment would be unlikely to start until 2017 or so. This puts it somewhat behind the NBN! You can't create a competitive tender with a single vendor to bid.

In addition to this, FttN cabinets creates so much noise on the network that you can only have one internet provider. The current exchange-based ADSL services from Australia's ISPs will no longer be available because their signals get drowned out.

It's not clear whether even the Coalition is aware of all of this. However, a first inkling made the public domain recently when Malcolm Turnbull said that areas with HFC coverage (one-third of the country) won't get a look in (troubling as many people in HFC areas can't get HFC connections), or will be at the back of the of any rollout. This means those areas will likely continue to be forced to continue to pay the highest broadband prices and lumbered with low upload speeds even on the best packages. More importantly, Multi Dwelling Units won't get a look in as Telstra does not connect cable to them unless the entire block pays to get connected. This also brought on the ire of some of Australia's major telcos who recognised that they'd be forced into negotiating with a monopoly provider and they weren't happy. We'll be examining how other countries have managed FttN in another article. For now though, it's also worth noting the inconsistency of the Coalition's argument. On the one hand it recently stated that it wants to keep the HFC network - but only if Telstra chooses to give all the money back that it's in the process of receiving for selling it.

Any suggestion that an NBN monopoly inflates prices is already disproved as nonsense. There are many plans available right now and they are practically all better value and/or cheaper than existing alternatives. Lifehacker has a great list here.

A final consideration is for existing government-owned monopolies. The Governments already own public infrastructure like the electricity network and the road and railway networks. It does this to facilitate economic growth and social benefits.

Where that infrastructure has been privatised, the results have been mixed. Regulatory intervention is frequently required to maintain services and competition, and prices (for example in the electricity sector) have risen in spite of the expected efficiencies of private ownership.

The question is raised, why should the communications network be any different? This is exacerbated by recent Australian history which illustrates conclusively that our private companies can't achieve similar goals on their own even though Telstra spent enough money on its own network, in the past decade, to build the NBN on its own. Optus was a close second in spend.

Ultimately, it's easy to dismiss NBNco as a monopoly that causes inflated prices - that's actually what it says on paper. However, the net result is an ultra-competitive, level playing field with low prices. Unless a detailed alternative is released by the Coalition we're forced to assume that its "market-driven" plans will only cause local monopolies, duopolies and inflated prices because that's what all of the available information and overseas examples (such as the United States, Canada and New Zealand), currently point towards.

Different life-span and upgradability

The durable, chemically-unreactive nature of fibre means it has aced advanced aging tests which show it works flawlessly after 65-years. Even an advanced field "test" - where a cable washed out of a frozen Oregon mountain in a mudslide - showed "no degradation in fibre/cable performance" after a battery of tests.

There's currently no reason to think it won't last into the next century. Upgrading performance at this time doesn't require removing the fibre - just simply upgrading the electronics at the ends. The current long-distance data speed world record over fibre is "one petabit per second over 50 km" and in the lab, 100 petabit per second speeds have been achieved. Improvements are constant.

The bandwidth of light is the theoretical limit - and right now, we're only held back by the speed of the devices we attach to each end of the fibre. An uninterrupted FttH network can reach into the Terabits/second without replacing the glass. In short, once built, you won't need to rebuild a fibre network for generations.

The Coalition's alternative is based upon Australia's copper network. Copper reacts badly to water and performance degrades when corroded. Telstra itself said this needed replacing within the next 15 years - ten years ago.

The Coalition has suggested that once built, it will look into upgrading and that this cost-spreading method is more efficient. Slogans that have been used against this are, "Do it once, do it right" and "Buy cheap. Buy Twice."

Basically, the Coalition has two choices: One, to rip up its own FttN infrastructure and build exactly what we're building right now. Two, perform a more-elaborate upgrade which converts FttN cabinets into NBN-like FttP. This would need to happen as soon as the initial build was completed (possibly even sooner) according to traffic-usage forecasts.

We'll be examining the realities and worldwide existing examples in a separate article.

For now, though, it's worth noting that the current Coalition plan requires spending tens of billions of dollars on an infrastructure that we already know needs to be replaced/upgraded. If there are efficiency gains in doing this, it's not clear where they are.

The effect on businesses (of all sizes) and GDP

The boost to business has been measured (by IBM) at $1 trillion over the next few decades while last year a Deloitte study stated that the digital economy will increase from $50bn to $70bn per year in the next five years due to expectations from the NBN. Also a Nielsen study found that 93 per cent "of Australian businesses believe that participation in the digital economy is important to their on-going business strategy" and 75 per cent said "National broadband infrastructure will increase their ability to engage in the digital economy."

Meanwhile the OECD (and others) believe that the NBN will increase GDP by at least one per cent ($15bn per year). That's before cost savings and revenue from the system itself. As such the NBN would cover the cost of capital in just two years.

There are also huge benefits through general telework, telepresence, telecommuting. And backup.

Much is made of Australia's falling productivity and reliance on mining. However, innovation and growth in the services sector afforded by the NBN can provide a welcome fillip.

Technology companies, large business and small business leaders alike literally haven't shut up about 'The Cloud' for two years. Why? Because of its propensity to balloon productivity and slash costs. Business owners of all sizes, for instance will no longer need to buy computer and communications hardware in one expensive blow any more - they can switch from Capital Expense to Operating Expense - paying monthly fees to use only the services they need.

The savings are enormous. Why spend a fortune on a new server that has a short life expectancy and requires expensive support when you can rent one in the cloud? For further reading on business and the cloud see the Parallels studies here plus the many Business Blogs on ABC Tech.

Global business and governments at all levels are talking about the move into the cloud and Australia becoming the first nation to provide ubiquitous fibre presents many opportunities.

Fibre is best because it offers reliability, high bandwidth in both directions and low-latencies. Only the very best copper networks in the world can come close to offering this.

The alternative is to pay for specialised services at inflated prices. Telstra's NAS is a successful example, but the basic lesson here is that everyone could have access to such services with a fibre-based NBN.

The Coalition might just be the only government entity not to even refer to the importance of the cloud or broadband benefits to business in general. It is the future of the digital economy and that represents a significant-and-growing part of the global economy. The Coalition dearly needs to address its support for the cloud and describe how its copper-based policy ties into it.

The effects on Television

One of the new industries that NBN will bring is called Multicast. This allows things like live events to be broadcast more-easily and cheaply - think Group Nine rugby Grand Final plus concerts. It also has the potential to revolutionise traditional sports coverage - the AFL's Andrew Demetriou is on the record as wanting to sell direct to the public as is happening with US sports. While NBNco's current tariff model lacks a direct-to-content-owner option, it would be unlikely to ignore a revenue opportunity if it became clear that all the major sports want in.

Ultra High Definition "4K" TVs are now on sale in Australia. While the initial price is high ($16,000 for the first 84-inch models) the price will drop rapidly. In ten years' time they will be common. However, the only way to broadcast a native signal is to use fibre optic cable as the data requirement is so high.

Video on demand is flourishing globally with the likes of Sony now focusing on building TVs that will primarily display 'internet-based' rather than 'broadcast TV'. With ever-larger TVs appearing on the Australian market and with High Definition proving to be increasingly popular and with multiple televisions residing in homes, the strain on the internet infrastructure will be enormous. As long-term licensing agreements expire in Australia, more and more premium content will become available over the next decade and we'll see US-like traffic usage where one-third of ALL internet download traffic comes from video distribution service, Netflix.

For people who struggle to get good-quality access to Australia's main broadcast channels, having the choice of almost any channel in the developed world will be transformative.

However, sticking with the copper network means that multicast is ruled out and that video downloading will depend upon the connection to which each premises has plus how many people within the premises are using the connection at once - traffic can easily stack up.

The Coalition has not mentioned this area.

The effect on senior citizens

A common myth of the NBN is that it doesn't benefit the elderly - primarily those that don't use computers. It's hard to understate how wrong this is. At the most basic level, there'll be no more phone line rental, most calls will be free (globally) and those that do cost will cost very little.

The real benefit is telehealth. A minor example is that senior falls cost Australia $500,000,000 each year. NBN allows doctors to monitor patients doing their daily exercises and track mobility degeneration. Being able to talk directly to a doctor, just by turning on a television, potentially saves the country so much money in transport via ambulance (up to and over several thousand dollars per journey - not to mention the sometimes, hundreds of kilometres of travelling each month) that it would be well-worth buying seniors High Definition TVs just for the savings. Innovative solutions are also appearing which use Microsoft's Kinect Sensor to check whether people are getting out of bed in the morning, moving round the house and even doing their exercises. This can save a fortune by delaying admittance to expensive residential care homes. And it means seniors can stay in their homes for longer.

Another class of patient that would benefit from telehealth is those whose immune systems are suppressed, either by disease (AIDS is only the most famous, not the only immune-suppressing disorder) or by treatment either with steroids or a large number of chemotherapy drugs. Wherever possible, such patients need to avoid hospital, both for their benefit and so they don't become "Typhoid Mary" carriers of resistant bacteria to others.

The potential cost savings from not having to touch infectious patients are also substantial.

There are many other benefits to seniors. This is particularly important with so many baby boomers hitting retirement age - apparently there are over 800,000 65th birthday's every month. The cost of senior care is escalating and NBN can dramatically reduce the costs while improving the life of everyone involved.

While some of this may be possible with the Coalition's alternative, coverage will be haphazard, dramatically reduced and fewer services will be developed due to a lack of broadband ubiquity. We'll be covering more on the effects on seniors in future articles.

The viability and potential for cost blowouts

The current NBN plans have been well documented and verified. It's now just a case of getting on with it and following them. There will doubtless be delays - at present the state of Telstra's ducts is a concern. Wireless towers in the country are another.

But the pitfalls facing a FttN implementation are enormous.

The bad state of the ducts is a double problem for the Coalition because the technology also relies upon the quality of the copper within those ducts and most of it is over 30 years old. In NBNco's case, where the Telstra duct is declared unusable, it makes its own new one. For the Coalition to do this would involve rolling out new copper - a ridiculous notion.

Indeed, much of the justification for the Coalition's alternative is that FttN is cheaper in overseas countries. However, this doesn't take into account the realities and challenges that overseas markets are facing or deal with the fact that Australia's geography, population density and, most-importantly, the standard of copper is not comparable to anywhere else.

1. Over 80 per cent of Australia's copper network is thirty years old and copper expires after thirty years. There are frequently reports of people who can't make phone calls when it's raining. One even reported that they can't get a dial tone when the wind blows such is the decrepitude of an overhead line. The copper network is an expired asset and if a government wants to literally spend tens of billions of tax payer's dollars acquiring it, a substantial condition report simply must be performed.

2. The Coalition's FttN technology node requires mains electricity power being connected to every single cabinet in the street. NBN contractors have already queried how this could possibly be achieved as local power companies are the only ones who can install power to infrastructure. The notion of coordinating electrical engineers with NBN engineers without massive delays, across 50,000 to 70,000 nodes drew very cynical comments from leading NBN contractors.

One reason that was brought up by NBN engineers was that many turrets aren't near power lines and so the cost of power connection explodes due to having to dig up whole streets. This has been seen in the UK where the standard cost of connecting a node to power has frequently ballooned from 2000 UK Pounds to 25,000 UK Pounds.

Such areas are then considered 'not economically viable.' Each cabinet has to be assessed on an individual basis. Any implementation study for FttN needs to factor in this cost and add an enormous contingency fund for the potential 1200+ per cent blowouts. In the UK, where such blowouts occur, the public don't get upgraded broadband. Geography means this problem is exacerbated in Australia.

Andrew Ferguson of the UK's ThinkBroadband says of his country's rollout:

    "The install cost varies because sometimes the power is available a metre or two away, and other times a new trench across a road with all the associated costs is needed, and worst case there may be extra upgrades to the power capacity in the area to support the powered cabinet. So it is not a simple city versus rural issue, but down to specifics of each cabinet, e.g. rural cabinet with a street light nearby should be pretty cheap, but a city cabinet may need a busy pavement to be crossed which costs money to put back to an acceptable standard."

3. Citigroup performed an analysis of the Coalition's alternative, for the purpose of analysing future Telstra share performance. It states:

    "While the Coalition policy represents the low cost alternative, it does little to reform the telecom industry, it effectively winds the reform process back three years and it still faces significant budgetary, political and legislative hurdles. We believe a major policy change will be difficult to achieve for the Coalition."

There's an entire section titled, 'Significant Hurdles' on page 8 which is worth reading. An interesting point says,

    "We understand the Coalition will need to re-draft and pass new legislation, to enforce functional and structural separation under a revised broadband policy. This could take up to 18 months to prepare and pass. The Greens Control the Senate: Any new legislation will be subject to Senate approval, currently controlled by the Greens, a strong supporter of the NBN. This poses a major obstacle given the current state of the Senate."

4. According to one senior technician, Telstra's convoluted maintenance system has made FttN all but unviable. By using third-party technicians for repairs, maintenance and installations over the years, and through expecting them to "spend 30 minutes on hold to Telstra HQ" in order to inform them of the work carried out, there is now substantial anecdotal evidence to say that normal procedure is to fix the job in any way possible and leave without documenting what happened. This has been going on for many years. An audit which preceded Telstra's last FttN attempt found that one-third of the lines connecting to turrets do not go where they are supposed to. That means, that every single copper line in every single turret has to be tested with one engineer at the turret and another in someone's home in order to document which line is connected where. As such, the supposed, great-cost-saving, "FttN is simply a case of replacing turrets with cabinets", that happens in other countries, is not possible in Australia.

Performing such an audit on every single copper strand left in the network would prove enormously costly and time consuming. By all accounts, since the NBN came knocking, there has been little-to-no enforcement of many maintenance procedures meaning that the situation is now substantially worse than before.

This all means that audits of line quality, proximity to mains power and of accuracy of documentation, need to be performed in Australia whereas it hasn't (apparently) been necessary (at least to the same extent) in other countries. The potential for cost blowouts and delays is astronomical and it is for these reasons that many have said, it's better to rip it all up and start again.

But that's not all.

One of the cornerstones of the Coalition's broadband policy is to get superfast broadband to people who don't already have decent broadband. A survey is being used to identify them:

    "A key element in our approach is to enable us to identify and prioritise those areas with the least adequate services."

But many such people don't already have broadband because they are either too far from an exchange or are connected to poor-quality copper FttN technology won't fix all of these issues.

There's also the question of expecting the general public to know about their broadband needs and opportunities. How can the uninformed make a decision?

The survey continues; "This information will enable us to ensure that if we are elected to Government the roll out of the NBN can be accelerated and targeted at the communities which need upgrades most."

The question that needs to be answered is, "How?" It's not obvious how a copper-based solution would work in Australia and any notion of moving to wireless is untenable.

More questions can be found, here.

As this graph from European FttN-provider, Asotel, illustrates. If you're more than 2KM from the node right now, FttN isn't going to help you at all.

At 2km from the node, ADSL speeds are similar to VDSL speeds.

Ultimately, how does the coalition's policy provide good copper-based broadband to people who don't already have it when a major reason they don't have it already is because of the copper-based network?

Could the Coalition's plan really be as unsophisticated as spending tens of billions of dollars on incredibly-elaborate and complex processes (with a very-low likelihood of success) on amp'ing up the copper in the hope that it might squeeze a few more megabits down the pipes?

The costs of buying broadband

We've already seen the costs of NBN broadband plans. Generally speaking, they offer better performance and better value than anything that's come before. Here's Lifehacker's extensive list.

In addition to this, there will no longer be a requirement of paying phone line rental to Telstra - an off-the-bat saving of $23 to $90 per month - and all phone call prices will be slashed if not free altogether - worldwide.

However, the Coalition's alternative, without details as to the contrary, appear to reinstate local monopolies and duopolies which usually ensure higher prices. For instance, in an area where Telstra charges $110 per month for cable internet access (the top, mainstream copper-based internet access in the country) and the only other option is Telstra NBN which gives better performance - would Telstra charge more or less for the 'NBN' connection?

The monopoly situation is dealt with individually above. However, it's worth noting that Canada suffers from horribly-high prices in this regard. So does the US and its patchwork quilt of corporate territories and so did New Zealand although it's now following Australia's lead with the fibre-based NBN.

A telling example is described here: MP George Christensen asked why NBN was building wireless in Mackay when it already had it. He also said that the speeds and prices of NBN were inferior.

However, a quick look at the cited prices showed that NBN plans offered ubiquitous coverage at a lower cost with higher speeds and superior data caps.

This needs to be addressed by the Coalition as its claims of prices being driven down through market-driven competition sound reasonable on paper, but in reality - as experienced within Australia and around the world - it invariably (to the best of our knowledge) means higher prices.

The reliability

Fibre offers the best reliability of any broadband connection that you can get. This is particularly important if you are hooked up to hospital monitoring, need to contact a doctor urgently or are running a business.

The lack of reliability in FttN also means that many of the applications, which can pay for the rollout, will be unavailable. It's also worth considering that in times of emergency, it's far easier to return power to emergency services and communities when they are using fibre. See Emergencies and natural disasters.

Effect on property value

NBN connections are already appearing in property listings on Domain and RealEstate.com.au along with proximity to schools and parking. There are plenty of conversations among online communities to show that early adopters are consulting NBNco's roll-out map to gain insight in where to live. It's already having an effect on NBN-ready Tasmania.

It's fair to say that of two neighbouring, identical properties - one with NBN and one without - the one WITH will command a premium.

Conversely, there have been mutterings from uninformed members of the public about refusing their NBN connection despite it being free. It's fair to say that doing so will lose value as connecting back to it will cost thousands of dollars and not happen straight away.

Interesting discussion is surrounding NBNco's Network Extension Program which lets people in Fixed Wireless zones upgrade to fibre if they pay a 'not-for-profit' price. The problem is that the price is very high - there have been few enquiries but one house was quoted at $150,000. (Another alternative is connecting your own fibre which some farmers have been doing in the UK.)

One wonders, however, would paying this money add $150,000 (at least) to the house's value? Does this represent a trifling expense for a business setting up in an area of low property value?

In Kansas City, USA, where Google fibre is being deployed, property is becoming more attractive and attracting start-up businesses because of the top-notch broadband. Data centre operators are also looking at cheap Australian real estate to set up shop.

The effects of the Coalition's policy are less clear cut. Some have said that having the large fridge-sized FttN cabinets outside your house will lower value. It probably depends on the premises' outlook. Some won't care, but as Selling Houses Australia tells us repeatedly, they are likely to polarise buyers and reduce the market - some will view them as monstrous carbuncles some will recognise the potential for really fast internet.

Are the large, fridge-sized cabinets a comforting reminder of man's ability to generate broadband?
Or a Monstrous Carbuncle on the face of a much-loved, elegant friend... that lowers property value?

Different Timescale

The bulk of the current NBN is scheduled to finish in 2021. Thus far it's on track but we'll know much more in the next few months.

The Coalition says it will complete its rollout much quicker. This appears to be based upon timeframes seen in countries like the UK where the process for upgrading to VDSL basically involves adding FttN cabinets to the street. In a standing start, this is definitely the faster option (ar least for suitable areas). But in Australia, and with several years already passed, the race is not nearly so simple: NBNco has a big head start and the Coaltion has much-bigger and unpredictable hurdles (see The Viability) to navigate.

Furthermore, as Richard Chirgwin points out:

    "Since 2009, BT has rolled out FttN (in BT parlance, fibre-to-the-cabinet) services in 1376 exchange areas. At around 340 exchange areas per year, it would take eight years for Australia to put VDSL2 into all the areas now covered by ADSL2+."

(In the linked article, Chirgwin also points out that the UK is not ahead of us and that it's slow-starting rollout, is also scheduled to ramp up quickly.)

The government and NBNco has spent years planning the rollout, negotiating with the incumbents, negotiating with contractors and building trial sites.

If elected later this year, what's the earliest the Coalition could start building? Let's be optimistic and say 2015. How long to build FttN in ideal circumstances? The number that gets bandied about is five years (although, as Chirgwin says above, it's lilkely eight). Straight away, that puts the finish date at 2020. Is that really significantly quicker? Is 2019 or 2018 'much quicker' for that matter? These are incredibly-optimistic figures.

At present, and without a very detailed implementation study it's frankly impossible to see how the Coalition could implement its policy significantly quicker than the current plans. According to the facts and available information, it could just as easily take much longer.

The legacy

A traditional justification of spending billions on national infrastructure is that it lasts for generations. Australia has many prominent examples including The Overland Telegraph, The Snowy Mountains Scheme, The Sydney Harbour Bridge, all of which got panned by public and politicians at the time and all of which are still famous around the world. All of them were built with an eye on future requirements.

Australia will be the first country in the world to have ubiquitous Fibre-to-the-Premises, we already know what many of the revolutionary benefits will be and we know it will operate happily up to the next century.

In contrast the Coalition's alternative already needs to have its subsequent upgrade factored into its building plans. We also know that data requirements and speed will outstrip its capabilities by 2017 (see below) - when it might not have even started to be built yet (see The Viability).

Sydney's Harbour Bridge only needed one lane when it was built. Now, after being assisted by the Harbour Tunnel there is talk of adding extra layers to boost capacity. It's unlikely that even the visionaries predicted that. However, the data forecasts for global broadband are clear - broadband requirements will outstrip the performance of copper-based solutions within the next several years. We're already being held back by the copper-based constraints.

It raises the question that if the Coalition wants to build a network for Australians that is "sufficient for their needs" which needs are those? The ones of the general public in 2013 or of the nation in 2020?

Source: Cisco VNI

According to Cisco's world-leading VNI index (which is what governments and businesses around the world use to base infrastructure decisions upon), the amount of data moving over the internet has doubled since 2011. It will double again well before 2020. The trend is for it to keep rising.

The level of growth has driven discussion about the internet reaching its limits and how only fibre deployment can stop that happening.

This raises the following questions; are Cisco's forecasts wrong? Should expensive new infrastructure last generations? The Coalition's plans are to spend $20bn-to-$40bn of tax payer's money on infrastructure that can barely cope with today's requirements and certainly won't in the next several years.

The following graph was put forward by members of Australia's technology community to illustrate the long term, future-proof benefit of choosing fibre now.

In 10-to-20 years' time what will we think when looking at this graph? Source: Cabidas

Ultimately, the Coalition has only mentioned current needs. It needs to address the specifics of Australia's future requirements and the compatibility of its policies with Cisco's world-leading VNI forecast.

Other countries

It's fair to say that the Coalition is basing most, if not all, of its policy based on rollouts in other countries. We've demonstrated why Australia is largely incomparable above. Nonetheless, Malcolm Turnbull has criticized the ABC for not examining what's happening overseas.

In truth, we have been. The problem is: finding relevant positive role-models is challenging. The broad situations in countries like the USA (interesting, slightly-related-to-Australia debate, here) and Canada are only good if you like the thought of monopolies and duopolies exploiting the public by offering inferior services at inflated prices. Canada is stuck with some of the worst data charges in the Western World. The corporate and patchwork nature of America means most people rail against internet access. A few hot spots, like Seattle, Kansas City (and here), and
Chattanooga (see also here and here), which are independently-deploying NBN-like FttP, are seeing enormous benefits from doing so. The US government is pushing for fibre across the whole country.

Also note, an Atlanta city rival recently said, "Having a fiber-optic broadband system like Chattanooga's in 2013 is like having an airport like ours was in 1963."

But the main issue is that every country in the world is moving to fibre and it's not hard to find political leaders in each and every country saying why - Angela Merkel, at last year's CeBit exhibition (the largest tech show in the world) said in her keynote that fibre was the future. This was echoed by the conference partner, Brazil, through President Dilma Rousseff. (Incidentally 2013's theme is "Shareconomy" based upon the cloud.)

Indeed, countries moving to fibre include Israel, China, America, France, Korea, Singapore and UAE.

Japan is too, but the Japanese cultural attitude to infrastructure construction makes it incomparable to other countries - they build things for the future and barely think twice about the cost. It already had one of the best copper networks on the planet.

There's a full list here.

But we'll focus on two that are particularly-relevant just briefly(ish). The Coalition constantly refers to the UK as a model for its alternative deployment. The UK's broadband policies have led to wildly-varying services. FttN works quite well in a limited number of areas. However, the underlying policy of getting a downright-laughable minimum 2Mb/s connection to the whole country has spent years of failing very hard.

Nonetheless, fibre is appearing from some providers.

Having recently returned from spending three weeks there, a common theme was to get fibre to avoid being left behind by the French. The overriding problem they have, however, is a total lack of money, (they're facing a triple-dip recession). Some comments are telling, none more so than from the country's Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt.

From Delimiter:

    "[He] said the impact of the Internet on modern economies was "now well-documented by a number of studies", accounting for a major proportion of growth in gross domestic product...

    "My nightmare is that when it comes to broadband we could make the same mistake as we made with high speed rail. When our high speed rail network opens from London to Birmingham in 2026 it will be 45 years after the French opened theirs, and 62 years after the Japanese opened theirs. Just think how much our economy has been held back by lower productivity for over half a century. We must not make the same short-sighted mistake..."

    "We simply will not have a competitive broadband network unless we recognise the massive growth in demand for higher and higher speeds," he said. Consequently, Hunt said he viewed fibre to the node/cabinet as only a short to medium term solution, referring to an earlier report by the UK's House of Lords into the matter.
    "Whilst I am talking about the House of Lords report, let me address a further misunderstanding," he said. "They suggest that fibre to the cabinet is the sum of the government's ambitions. They are wrong. Where fibre to the cabinet is the chosen solution it is most likely to be a temporary stepping stone to fibre to the home - indeed by 2016 fibre to the home will be available on demand to over two thirds of the population."

The House of Lords report said that broadband was a, "fundamental strategic asset."

Meanwhile, BT's former CTO said;

    "Fibre to the cabinet is one of the biggest mistakes humanity has made," he said. "It ties a knot in the cable in terms of bandwidth and imposes huge unreliability risks... It is a shame...

    "What are the leaders doing? There is Sweden in greater Europe, and in the Far East you have Korea, Japan and China. They have a minimum level of 100 Mbps. That is where they start," Cochrane said.
    "They are rolling out 1Gbps, but they are planning for the next phase of 10Gbps. To return to an earlier point, if you have got fibre to the cabinet and you are relying on copper, I can tell you that the network is going to collapse on copper when you get to 1Gbps. It will collapse much earlier."

There's more glowing praise and comparisons here plus some more recent developments, here and here.

Some have noted how the UK squandered its Natural resources (North Sea Oil) wealth without investing it for the future. Could that be a warning to Australia?

Meanwhile, in New Zealand...

New Zealand is probably the most relevant example. The Coalition used to cite New Zealand as an example for broadband implementation. This seems to have died down since New Zealand started copying Australia's NBN.

Of particular interest is that while no Cost Benefit Analysis has been performed for Australia, it has for New Zealand. Interestingly, the associated pecuniary benefits of New Zealand's benefits are so high that they would pay for Australia's NBN. That's impressive for a country whose GDP is almost 90 per cent smaller than Australia's. One wonders, what would the benefits to Australia amount to?

    "[The report] uses a 'grass-roots' analysis to quantify the likely end-user economic benefits, called consumer surplus gains by economists, of a sample of high-speed broadband applications across the healthcare, education, business and agriculture sectors. The broadband applications considered include online doctor consultations, remote learning, teleworking and online farm management tools among a number of others. It calculates that the economic benefits to New Zealand end-users of the high-speed broadband applications considered will amount to NZ$32.8 billion ($26.8 billion) over 20 years."

The subsequent diagram "shows how this is calculated across the four sectors."

The NZ Cost Benefit Analysis illustrates the potential of an Australian Cost Benefit Analysis.

    In the healthcare domain, the savings considered as part of the analysis included lower hospital admission and test costs, fewer emergency room visits, lower travel-related costs, lower long-term prescription drug costs, faster access to physicians and faster care delivery leading to savings in government expenditure on healthcare. The result was a NZ$5.9 billion [$4.8 billion] consumer surplus over 20 years.

    In the education domain, the savings considered are those that result from lower costs of skill enhancement, as well as reduced cost of course materials and savings on field trips. The result was a NZ$3.6 billion [$2.9 billion] consumer surplus over 20 years.

    Business services-related savings are achieved through improved productivity, lower travel-related costs, lower network and communication expenses, and savings (as well as new revenues) from the cloud-enablement of applications. The result in this domain was the largest - NZ$14.2 billion [$11.6 billion].
    Economic gains in the dairy industry relate to increased dairy farm productivity and were calculated at NZ$9.1 billion [$7.4 billion] over 20 years. Annually the combined GDP impact of the build, and the consumer surplus from the applications, are worth about the same to New Zealand as the money we earn every year from our wine exports.

Once again, if the efficiency gains are worth this much money for New Zealand, what would they be worth for Australia?

Why is this so long?

Firstly, balance: if you're not thorough, you get swept away in the sea of opinions. Secondly, it's a resource for others in the media to help with groundwork and research. Thirdly as a resource for myself - future articles needn't be so long if I can link back to articles like this. Fourthly, it aims to answer any counter that someone puts towards an individual element.

This has all worked successfully before (video games and the Oslo massacre, the internet filter and the NBN a few times.

Furthermore, and this echoes Malcolm Turnbull himself, I too am sick of 'one-line sound bites' and the public being uninformed.

Too long; didn't read? Click here.

Conclusion

Comments like the following appear all over mainstream media, almost completely unchallenged, and they may even be ramping up:

"The approach we will take - we plan to take is about a quarter of the cost and a quarter of the time to provide an upgraded broadband service than the approach of fibre-to-the-premises that that Government is insisting the NBN Co take."

"There is no evidence whatsoever that the massive increase in speeds delivered by fibre-the-home will deliver any extra value or benefit to Australian households."

"There is not one contractor in Australia that believes the Government is going to roll out its National Broadband Network for $32 billion. Expectations are as high as $60 billion, $70 billion or even $100 billion for the National Broadband Network.

These statements are demonstrably untrue and some border on the ridiculous. This naturally raises questions about media and politics in Australia. Feel free to discuss them below, but I'm sticking with the technology debate.

We'd like to discuss the technical details, but this rarely happens and discussions increasingly descend into resembling shambolic accusation fests like this and, sadly, this.

What's most important, however, is that the fundamental aims of the Coalition's policy don't appear to be possible. The technology and governance minefield ahead of it needs a detailed map that navigates all the hurdles mentioned above in order for the following statement to ring true:

"Our broadband policy is to complete the national broadband network, but to do so sooner, cheaper - less cost to the taxpayer - and much more affordably for consumers and that is our plan."

It's not 100 per cent impossible, but based on the available information, it seems like it.

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@WaleedAly Labor has lost the plot, and the narrative @NationalTimesAU

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:36:00 +0000

Waleed Aly

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/labor-has-lost-the-plot-and-the-narrative-20130221-2eua9.html

If you're inclined to take a long-term view of politics, the hand-wringing on whether Julia Gillard should stay or go is really just so much white noise.

Labor is in crisis, but not principally for the reasons that occupy the commentariat.

A party without a narrative is reduced to seeking your support as a lesser evil. Hence Labor's focus on Tony Abbott.

It's not about a bitterly divided caucus, or political miscalculations such as the ham-fisted Nova Peris saga. It's not even simply about policy missteps such as the creation of an impotent mining tax.

Labor's problems are not nearly so managerial and technocratic. They are much, much bigger than that.

Labor's problem is ideological. It doesn't really mean anything any more, and probably hasn't since Paul Keating lost power in 1996. Sure, Labor has had its moments - most notably in its campaign against WorkChoices, which jolted its ideological memory and gave it a momentary reason to exist.

But this was no ideological revival. It was reactive: a political opportunity well taken rather than a world view reborn.

Only John Howard's pro-business, anti-union zeal, unencumbered by any resistance in the Senate, made this possible. After WorkChoices, much as before it, what then?

This isn't an optional, esoteric extra. Governments ultimately thrive on narrative. Voters are not merely electing a suite of set policies. They are electing a party that will respond to future, unforeseen policy questions. They therefore need to know what you're about. That's what a clear consistent story tells them.

A party without a narrative is reduced to seeking your support as a lesser evil. Hence Labor's focus on Tony Abbott.

Every successful government can be summarised in a phrase or two. Bob Hawke: a new, deregulated, globalised economy. Keating inherited that story, then added Asia, a growing economic power in our backyard we should embrace by shedding our British skin. Howard was about nationalism, security and capital's triumph over labour. Everything - asylum seeker policy, counterterrorism, foreign affairs, even unsolicited social commentary about minority groups - was tailored to fit the story.

Exactly what story has Labor told us since 2007? It began with something about ''Australian working families'', but that too was a relic of the WorkChoices campaign. After that, it has been mostly a blancmange of conflicting messages. Perhaps it started when Kevin Rudd wanted to be ''tough but humane'' on asylum seekers. It took Gillard only a matter of days as Prime Minister to continue the incoherence, declaring both that the number of boat people arriving in Australia was much smaller than many imagined, before swiftly going on to reassure those worried about invading hordes that their concerns were legitimate, and that they're ''certainly [not] racist''. We learn nothing from this about how Labor sees asylum seekers. We learn only that it's trying to please everyone.

The problem persists even in Labor-friendly policy areas. Take education, where the Rudd government announced a bold new focus on literacy and numeracy, much as Howard might have. More recently, it commissioned the Gonski review, but tied its hands on the question of private school funding so the panel couldn't even consider cutting it. Then it pledged a response it is yet to detail or fund.

Indeed, its only real response to date has been a bill it hailed as the most important of last year, but which had nothing in it at all. Explicitly. It has a section specifically saying the bill creates no rights or obligations on anyone - especially the government. To paraphrase, ''section 10: this legislation does not exist''.

Even Labor's most significant reform, the carbon tax, merely symbolises the party's ideological malaise. The government's heftiest achievement isn't even its own policy. Indeed, it was so infamously promised not to be its policy.

Remember the citizens' assembly? That was Gillard's pledge before the last election: a random gathering of ordinary people who would somehow reach a consensus on pricing carbon. That's a process, not a policy. It's the kind of thing you do when you want to announce something but you're not prepared to commit to a compelling vision of your own.

As the opposition hammers it on Labor's broken pledge to deliver a surplus this financial year, the government seems to have found some coherence. Confronted with falling corporate profit (and therefore falling tax revenue), it had a choice: either keep finding cuts that would make lots of people unemployed and deflate the economy, or prioritise jobs and growth. It's a nice line. It sounds like a Labor line. But it follows years of saying the opposite; of elevating the surplus to some inviolable standard of good economic management; of saying the main game was giving the Reserve Bank ''room to cut interest rates''. And this in the face of the ever-lengthening queue of economists advising to the contrary.

In short, Labor had bought wholly into the Coalition's narrative for no discernible reason. It conceded the philosophical debate, then lost the political fight. So now, when it has finally found a Labor story to tell, it sounds convenient and insincere. Labor has become a liberal party, so it isn't even convincing when it sounds like itself.

That's not about incompetent leadership; it is the flipside of the Hawke/Keating legacy. Once Labor embraced a deregulated, liberal economy, the political landscape was forever changed, leaving a diabolical question for subsequent Labor leaders: what exactly is the point of Labor politics? The compromise has been to talk about Labor's ''reforming tradition'', but reform is an act, not an ideology. WorkChoices was a reform, too.

Labor has been chasing its base ever since. Often it watched helplessly as workers became small business owners and turned into Howard's socially conservative battlers. Labor cannot offer them industrial protection, and desperately doesn't want to offend their cultural sensibilities, which is why it says things like ''tough but humane''.

The result is that Labor cannot even compete on social and cultural politics. Hence the flight to the Greens, the party Gillard so venomously dismissed this week as a ''party of protest''. To which the most devastating reply is surely: ''Fine. But what are you?''

Waleed Aly is the presenter of Drive on Radio National.

Authenticity Is The New Bullshit @gapingvoid

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 05:45:00 +0000

http://gapingvoid.com/authenticity/

[Note: If you like what you see, please subscribe to my daily cartoon newsletter, thanks.]

[gapingvoid.com was launched back in May, 2001. Here are some of the things I’ve learned since then:]

1. We’re all connected.

I know that’s old news. We all know that, thanks to the Internet, everything is just one click away. But do we actually act like we know that; are we actually living it?

2. The jobs waiting for me after I finished college, simply aren’t there anymore.

And yet the schools still act like they are. That’s partly the fault of the schools, sure, but it’s also party the fault of the parents.

3. It’s not enough to be good at doing the work, you have to be good at creating your own platform.

If you think of your job as just a paycheck, and not as a platform, you’re doing something wrong.

4. Own something.

When I was just starting out, I was just one more piece of paper in a tall stack of resumes. I didn’t have to present myself that way, I just assumed that was the done thing. That was an expensive mistake.

5. Everybody is just as scared as you.

Nobody knows the future, especially our current future. Google, Facebook, Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, Madison Avenue… they’re all as clueless as we are. The Internet changed everything. The rise of China and India changed everything. And one day this future will be something we’re thankful for.

6. How to be successful: Find out what matters, find out who it also matters, then carry on.

It isn’t rocket science. If you have something that you care about, chances are there are other people who also care about it. These people are easy to find, on the Internet. Try to find out what they’re hungry for, and try to feed that hunger. It shouldn’t be too hard, if you stay relatively pure-of-heart.

7. Food is medicine. So are people.

Karma is spiritual. But it’s also emotional and physical. Be careful about what you let into your body and your brain.

8. It’s either a platform, or it’s something that will eventually drown you.

I loved my first job, working in a bar. Sure, it was low paid and noisy and stressfuland al that, but I didn’t care. I was eighteen years old even then, I knew that this job was giving me something I would never get in school– access to adults. I saw it as something much bigger than a meager paycheck, I saw it as my platform into manhood… which is was.

9. Have one eye looking out, one eye looking in.

You have your inner life, you have your outer life. Art and religion meets business and science, whatever. Both need to be talking to each other in a constructive way, or your life will just end in failure.

10. Be nice. Be helpful. The alternatives won’t make you happy.

“Nice guys finish last” might work on Wall Street or in the court of Emperor Nero, but for 99.99% of humanity, we’re simply not made to act that way.

11. You were born to be happy.

Unless something truly wrong is going on– war, plague, famine, pestilence etc– nature made us to enjoy our lives. So if you’re not happy in spite of everything happening around you, it’s probably because you’re doing something wrong, probably something to do with your relationships.

12. Fail like a child.

And keep on failing like a child. Until you die. Enough said.

13. You must discover what your real joy is.

Nobody discovers what their real joy is right away. It’s an ongoing dialogue, even with super talented people.

[Note: If you like what you see, please subscribe to my daily cartoon newsletter, thanks.]

14. Small Art can be just as powerful as Big Art.

Summer, 2011. A friend of mine was in Paris, where she went and checked out the massive Anish Kapoor sculpture, Monumenta 2011, on exhibit at Le Grand Palais.

This got me thinking…

I like Kapoor’s work. He makes very big art.

I, on the other hand, make very small art i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. And the prints aren’t too large, either.

Though I like a lot of “Big Art”- Kapoor, Serra, Gormley, Smithson etc etc– I’m pretty happy I stuck with “Small Art”.

Small Art can impact another person on a meaningful level, just as powerfully as Big Art. Fifteen lines from Shelley’s Ozymandias had as much impact on me as fifteen hundred pages of Tolstoy’s War & Peace did, as much as I loved the latter.

And Small Art is A LOT less hassle to make.

And you can make more of it. More often. Without bankrupting yourself or putting your life on hold for months on end.

And perhaps more importantly, there’s the “Personal Sovereignty” angle. With Small Art, there’s no need to wait for someone else to deem it worthy beforehand, no need to wait nervously for the rich patron, the movie studio exec, or the illustrious museum director to give it the greenlight. There’s no need for the politics or the schmoozing or the bureaucracy.

Or the sleaze and corruption. The Big Art world is rife with that, as we all know full well.

With Small Art, you just go ahead and make it, and then it exists, and the rest is in the hands of the gods. Your work is already done, and you can get to bed at a decent hour. And not lose any sleep over it, either.

Hey, it worked for Joseph Cornell, Saul Steinberg and Edward Gorey… three artists who I rate WAY higher than Kapoor or Serra.

And what is true for Art is probably true for your thing, as well. Worry less about how BIG you want your business to be, instead think about how much LOVE you actually want to give out while your still have time left on this earth. “Meaning Scales”.

Exactly…

15. We are ready for the third age of education: The Creative Age.

A lot of people worldwide are relying on America not becoming, like I said, a second-rate nation. Even some of the people who don’t particularly like America.

And how is that going to happen, exactly? How are we going to remain at the top of our game, or at least, make a damn good show of it?

The same way we’ve always done it: by creating new, interesting products and ideas that people need, want, value and are inspired by.

To massively over-simplify, there were two main phases in the history of education, pre-industrial and industrial. The first meant only the clergy and the sons of the elite were properly educated. Then along comes the second, industrial phase, which meant universal education on a mass-scale, that emerges along with the “Age of Reason”, the industrial revolution and the whole modern era.

As Seth Godin famously likes to talk about, in this second, industrial phase, schools became little more than factories, churning out young people educated enough to work in bigger factories one day. Whether we’re talking blue collar or white collar, it didn’t matter, it’ still a factory job, basically. You’re still a cog in the factory machine, basically. This factory-model was perfect for when the factory was still the cornerstone of the industrial economy. A factory-centered model for a factory-centered world. This was true whether in elementary school in Iowa, or Harvard Business School in Cambridge, your reality was the factory because your career was the factory. Own the factory, work in the factory, live near the factory, become the factory. Factory, factory, factory…

And of course, this factory-centric model which worked fine for a hundred-plus years is now broken. We can no longer compete long-term that way. Just owning a factory doesn’t give us the same edge it used to, the same economic security, as anyone who’s ever tried competing lately in the global economy has been finding out.

A new model is needed.

WE ARE READY FOR THE THIRD AGE OF EDUCATION: THE CREATIVE AGE.

Personally, I had a pretty good formal education, where I learned the basics– reading, writing, math, a bit of science, history, languages and a wee smattering of the arts. I learned to study and pass tests. Like most students, I learned how to learn, basically. I leaned how to work in a foctory, basically.

I don’t think that’s enough anymore, as the THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of under-employed and unemployed university graduates with good grades in Europe and America will testify. They passed all their tests fine, they all ticked off the right boxes… and yet, look at them now, poor things.

Kids in the future are simply not going to leave school with this big, bumper crop of plum jobs waiting for them to fill, not like they used to. In the future, kids will leave school and increasingly be expected to create their own viable realities.

Like David Gergen alluded to, these young adults will be expected not just to do the work, but expected to ACTUALLY invent something. Create something, not just obey orders, not just fulfill some sort of social role.

And somehow, we have to teach our schools how to teach our kids exactly that. It’s not going to be easy.

HOW DO YOU BEST PREPARE FOR THE CREATIVE AGE?

As I see it, there are basically two ways, at least if you go at it from a college-age, entrepreneurial, startup mentality. One is the more risky path advocated by my wonderfully lucid friend, Jason Calacanis, to forget college and instead, “Spend Your College Tuition on Being Mentored and Starting a Company.” That’s probably what I would have chosen for myself, nowadays. That, or apprenticing for a master at something, the way English tailors learn their craft, or how the advertising legend, Dave Trott used to hire kids right off the street in London and give theme a chance at writing ads (Hence the earlier Jiro/Mastery reference]. Learning on the job, as it were. The street-fighter’s approach. Tough, brutal, intense, but nonetheless a first-class education in the University of Life.

The second way is what I see Len Schesinger trying to do at Babson College.… shaking things up… evolving the idea of school (business school, anyway) as not just a place of learning, but also as a place of DOING.

Where. Stuff. Gets. Done.

In the real world. Here and now.

Where students don’t just learn about running businesses, but are expected to actually start running businesses and making them viable. All while still getting good grades. It’s a pretty intense curriculum, but hey, the best students seem to thrive at it.

Michael Dell’s company was started in a dorm room. Ditto with Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, my cartooning career was, too.

This is the idea of a college as not just a seat of learning, but an incubator, of sorts.These days, business schools like Babson aren’t just competing with Harvard or Wharton, they’re competing with Y Combinator and 500 Startups. The most talented kids in the country aren’t waiting around for the grownups in the ivory towers to get their act together. They’re already inventing their own futures; they’re in a hurry.

I don’t have all the answers. All I know is that it’s already happening. It’s already begun, the genie is already out of the bottle… and it’s damn exciting to watch.

[PS: This chapter only took me a short morning and a couple of hundred words to write. Ideally, it would’ve taken me a couple of years and enough words to fill an entire book. I’m sorry if it’s incomplete, I’m sorry if there are massive holes everywhere. It’s a vast minefield of a subject that’ll take the cleverest people in the land more than a few decades to work out fully. But like I inferred, it still damn exciting to think about. I just hope we’re all up for it.]

16. “My work doesn’t belong in galleries, it belongs in offices…”

I get asked all the time: “Why don’t you show in art galleries?”

And I always answer the same: “Because my work doesn’t belong in art galleries, it belongs in office cubicles.”

Even if you go back to the 1990’s, back when I was starting out, it was the same story. I always liked making art SPECIFICALLY for the workplace. I always liked making work that pushed that aspect of human existence further in the right direction.

After family, the time you spend in your place of work is the most important arena of your existence. That is where you go to find out, over time, who your true self really is.

And your true self needs art around it, your true self needs constant reminding that your true self ACTUALLY exists.

Your true self needs TOTEMS around that INSPIRE it on a daily basis.

That’s what I hope the cartoons help articulate, help bring to the surface. Unlike most of the knucklehead art you see around the gallery scene…

Besides, it’s a niche most other artists don’t really think about– they’re too busy trying to conquer other worlds. Which is fine, even if those other worlds are already too crowded; already SATURATED with the froth of other knuckleheads.

“My work doesn’t belong in art galleries, it belongs in office cubicles.”

It’s not a bad life, I suppose…

17. “Only Connect.”

As artists and/or marketers and/or business people, it’s not enough to just think about the money and the ROI. We need to know that we “connected”, somehow. Deeply so, sometimes.

Or else we just become very dull, making very dull stuff for very dull people, living very dull lives.

Which except for the occasional faceless corporation, is not much of a sustainable business model.

E.M. Forster’s very famous advice to aspiring authors had a mere two words: “Only connect.”

Exactly. In both art and business.

Only connect.

Think about it.

18. Creativity comes after the fact.

Kids come up to me and ask me all the time…

Kid: How do I get a “creative” career-thing going like yours?

Hugh: Make something. Grab a piece of paper and a pen or whatever and get cracking…

Kid: What if it isn’t any good?

Hugh: Then you’re screwed.

Kid: Ok, what if it’s pretty good, but it’s still going to take me another twenty or thirty years before the world understands it?

Hugh: Then you’re slightly less screwed.

At that point, they’re already sick of asking me any more questions and so they move on, unhappy. Oh well…

The thing is, people think there’s some set of ideal conditions out there, floating independently in space, that somehow have be met, some magic fairy boxes that need to be ticked off, before you can go and “be creative”, whatever that means.

“I’ve got to quit my job, leave my wife, move to India and become an opium addict yada yada yada…” “I’ve got to drop out of college, move to New York and carry on a forbidden and tumultuous lesbian affair with a Japanese novelist twice my age yada yada yada…”

Actually, no. The way to be creative is to make stuff. You wake up in the morning, have some breakfast, hit the work bench and get on it with it.

Or not. Maybe you’d rather just hang out, light a joint and watch Star Trek reruns. Your call.

You can’t plan for creativity. You can only plan to do the work.

Whether it ends up being “creative” or not, is decided later. Long after you’ve finished the thing and moved on to something else.

That’s what I mean by it coming “after the fact.”

And so there we are.

[Note: If you like what you see, please subscribe to my daily cartoon newsletter, thanks.]

19. The Era of Career-On-Autopilot is over.

Hardly a morning goes by these days without me hearing some story on NPR Morning Edition about American economic woe. People who’ve been working hard all their lives, suddenly can’t afford presents for their kids. Those kind of stories. They’re sad as hell, and they seem to be getting more and more frequent.

At the same time I keep seeing news stories like this one from the WSJ, Christmas 2011: About how competition in Silicon Valley for engineering talent is so fierce, they’re fighting over interns now:

Silicon Valley’s talent wars are going younger.

Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response — sometimes even luring candidates away from college.

And then there was another 2011 story from the BBC, about how Brazil has now overtaken the UK as the world’s sixth largest economy.

A lot of the world is in flux, so it seems. And to this cartoonist, it has a simple enough explanation:

The Great Convergence is upon us, and our friend, the Internet is accelerating the process. This would be happening with our without “The 1%” misbehaving themselves– whatever the mainstream media and the Occupy Wall Street crowd might say.

The good news is, if you have a talent, the world wants it, and it has never been so easy to show your talent to the world.

The bad news is, especially for us fat & lazy Americans, is that the great, century-long era of Prosperity-on-Autopilot is over.

The world still wants serious talent. And it still wants people doing the grunt work: pushing mops, digging ditches, waiting tables, answering phones, flipping burgers etc..

It’s the people in the middle that nobody knows what to do with anymore. And the politicians who claim that they do, are lying.

It’s probably too late for my generation, that ship has already sailed. But for the kids out there reading this, who are just starting out?

Learn how to work hard, work long hours. Find something you love, and then excel at it. Above all else, learn how to create, learn how to invent. That’s your only hope, really.

Like I said, no more Autopilot.

20. Find The Holy in everyday activity.

My friend, Euan Semple is probably the guy who convinced me to switch from PC to Apple, about five years ago.

“Even opening up the cardboard box is a religious experience!”, he said.

Heh. A slight exaggeration, certainly.

But then I’m thinking… Perhaps not?

As somebody who likes to study religion, I’ve always thought that one of the more interesting questions in the world to ponder is, “What is Holy?”

Exactly. Holy. What does it actually mean?

And the same with Unholy…

When a mundane act (such as the opening of a cardboard box) is elevated (in this case, by great package design), we experience what the mystics call “The Divine”.

This doesn’t have to mean a strong belief in God, either way. They’re called mystics for a reason: the whole thing is indeed a mystery. Call it “God” if you will, call it something else completely. The mystery remains, either way.

Work, whether business or craft or just plain hard, sweaty labor, is far more interesting, fun and meaningful when one can channel one’s own sense of divinity into it, religious or otherwise. This is how we find the Holy in everyday life, religious or otherwise.

This is how we plug into “The Mystery”.

Steve Jobs knew this, instinctively. It was glaringly obvious.

21. “Culture Hacking” is the next trillion-dollar industry.

SO WHAT COMES AFTER ADVERTISING? The Golden Age of advertising– the “Mad Men” era– started about 50 years ago, with people like David Ogilvy, George Lois, Bill Bernbach leading the way, and shops like Weiden & Kennedy, BBH, Fallon, BMP, GGT, CDP and Goodby following in their wake.

This golden age came to an abrupt end, when our friend the Internet came along, with a lot of people on Madison Avenue suddenly starting to fear for their jobs.

So if traditional advertising is “dead”, what comes after it? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for the last ten years, ever since I launched gapingvoid back in 2001.

Though I wasn’t paying too much attention at the time, the answer kinda-sorta came to me back in 2004, in a line I wrote in The Hughtrain:

The hardest part of a CEO’s job is sharing his enthusiasm with his colleagues, especially when a lot of them are making one-fiftieth of what he is. Selling the company to the general public is a piece of cake compared to selling it to the actual people who work for it. The future of advertising is internal.

You can call it “Internal Advertising” if you want; I find that a bit old-school, frankly. I prefer the term “CULTURAL HACKING”- changing your company’s fortunes NOT by trying to directly change what the general public thinks of you, but by trying to change what YOU think of you.

Improving the company by improving the culture, by subverting the culture via counterintuitive means. Exactly.

And yes, Culture Hacking also drives the Occupy Wall Street movement and AdBusters. Same idea, different aims (And if you read Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces”, you’ll learn that the same riff goes back to punk rock, 1950s French Marxism, early 20th-Century Dadaism, even back to the Middle Ages…].

The new business model will be the intersection of the three following things: Purpose, Company Culture and Media.

i. Purpose: It’s the “Why” of what you do, it is not the product, it is the Purpose-Idea, as expressed by Mark Earls, or “The Why” as expressed by Simon Sinek.

ii. Company Culture is informed by “Purpose”, it is that actions that a business takes each and every day to remind people of their purpose. Purpose is a set of beliefs, and Culture is the expression of those beliefs in business (Action).

iii. Media: Advertising, PR, earned media, paid media, call it what you will. Once you have a “Purpose” and a company “Culture”, those two things inform all of your advertising, PR, communication, social interaction and points of contact with the outside world. From your logo, to your ads, Social Media, How your planes and trucks are painted, etc. It all informs, reinforces and feeds each other.

Culture Hacking is why “Delivering Happiness” became an international best seller. Culture Hacking is why people flock to Nevada in droves to take the Zappos tour. Culture Hacking is why people will one day pay Jenn Lim and Tony Hsieh millions of dollars for the services of the “Delivering Happiness” company.

This is also why Rackspace, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Babson College hired us (gapingvoid) to draw cartoons for them. This is why we produce Cube Grenades. This is why big PR firms like Weber Shandwick or Edelman, if they get it right, will steal millions of dollars’ worth of business AWAY from traditional Madison Avenue agencies.

Culture Hacking is all about creating social objects. Exactly.

[One more time:] Stop wasting your life in the traditional advertising-era quicksand. There’s a new game in town. Culture Hacking is a multi-billion dollar industry, still in its infancy. Get in early if you can…

22. Never go mainstream.

Back when I was a kid and aspiring to be a professional cartoonist one day, I had this dreadful fear hanging over my head:

That the only way to become successful as a cartoonist, was to go mainstream. Cute and cuddly, warm and fuzzy. In the world of the big money cartooning, there was little room for “Edge”.

Check out the traditional US Sunday comics section of any newspaper, and you’ll see what I mean. Utter, cutey-pie dreck.

I just couldn’t see myself doing it. My stuff was just too “out there”, and when I tried to reign it in, it just made it worse.

Of course, that was before the Internet came along and changed everything…

Anybody who courts the mainstream deserves everything they get. There’s far more action in niches.

[Further Reading: The Cluetrain Manifesto, Delivering Happiness, Creative Age, Tribes, The Hughtrain and Lipstick Traces. All must-reads to better understand this brave new world of ours. Plus my friends at Laughing Squid and PSFK always seem to have their fingers on the pulse…]

23. People must treasure you.

Not too far down the road from my house in Far West Texas, my friend, Glenn Short and his team make, and I kid you not, the best store-bought beef jerky I have ever tasted (And I have tasted A LOT over the years). The Lights Jerky Company is phenominal, check it out.

After a few years struggling to get it off the ground, business is booming. I met one of his people last night, drinking beer over at The Railroad Blues. He was just EXHAUSTED at the end of the day from busting his ass, filling orders. It was, how you say, the right kind of exhaustion to have…

Out here in the Texas desert mountains, where it’s ALWAYS been a tough place to make a living, I’ve noticed three kinds of business:

1. THE LOST CAUSES. New ones open and close all the time. Well meaning people who don’t really get what they’re doing, don’t really get what their customers are after, don’t really get much, in spite of their often valiant and kind-hearted efforts. Retired school teachers from Dallas, who never run a business before, who just moved out here recently because they liked the scenery, who SUDDENLY decided to go into the restaurant business or whatever. These places usually close down in less than nine months. They’re not uncommon.

2. THE COMMODITIES. Stuff you’d expect to see out here. Gas stations. Convenience stores. Fast food joints. Nothing too special, but they provide some needed service, same as any where else. Nice local people working there and all, but nothing to write home about.

3. THE TREASURED. These are the rarest birds. Products that are not only INSANELY GREAT, but are done with such, imagination, love, flair , or even just plain ol’ hard work and good manners, failure JUST isn’t an option.

And treasured they are. If you live out here long enough, you start to realize soon enough that if you don’t ACTUALLY TREASURE the businesses you love, I mean REALLY treasure them more than you would in a big city, say, these places will just close down eventually, just blow out of town like tumbleweeds. Their unique magic will be gone, forever, without nothing to take their place.

And people KNOW that.

Lights Jerky is one of these. So is The Pizza Foundation, The Marfa Book Company, Harry’s Bar, The Murphy Street Raspa Compaany, Novak’s Barber Shop, Tacos Del Norte,The French Grocer and The Saddle Club, just to name a few.

And yes, these businesses are Social Objects. When something happens in one of these places– somebody loses their job, or somebody gets sick etc– news travels WAY faster around town than with the other places. Because people ACTUALLY do care. BECAUSE they are treasured, the social dynamic is far more intense than in say, a national fast food chain.

And what is true in small-town West Texas is true in any big city. You don’t have to be Amazon or Apple or IBM or McDonalds to be a social object. You can be a small jerky company, bookshop or taco stand. As I’ve always said, “Meaning scales”.

But The Treasure Factor HAS to be there, somehow.

Is your business treasured? Or do people just give you money? Serious question…

24. Blogs are like hammers.

Blogs are like hammers. They are tools for building stuff.

When you talk about building a house with a carpenter, you don’t mind him talking about his hammer for a while.

Nobody minds indulging a craftsman, within reason.

“This hammer is great for this,” he’ll gush. “This hammer is great for that…”

So you think yes, hammers are good things, and indeed his hammer looks like a particularly fine example.

But eventualy you’re going to interrupt his joyous ode to hammers. After a couple of minutes you’re going to abruptly change the subject:

“Cool. Now let’s talk about the ACTUAL HOUSE you’re going to build for me…”

And if the carpenter is any good, he won’t have any problem with that.

25. Beware of Gurn-nomics

It’s not a bag gig, I suppose…

You have a successful blog, read by lots of people, where you dole out lots of advice on how to create a successful blog, read by lots of people. And you rake in the cash doing so.

i.e. You’re a “Guru”.

I’ve been there myself. I’ve shared TONS of my tricks of the trade over the years, which has indirectly helped my bottom line no end… And I have to say, it’s a good feeling to think you’re actually helping people in real and meaningful ways.

Sure, compared to how most people have to pay their bills, being a “guru” is not a bad gig, not a bad gig at all. And there’s some good ones out there, doing a splendid job helping people move their lives forward. No wonder why so many other people are also chasing after the very same gig, themselves.

But guru-dom has never sat well with me, somehow, no matter how good it was for business. And for the longest time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it why that was.

Then recently I got talking to an old friend, somebody who spent a lot of time practicing as an Eastern mystic, who studied under REAL gurus and knew all about gurudom. The closet thing to a real Holy man that I ever had the privilege of calling a friend.

Then one day he just gave it up completely. Just totally stopped. As he explained in his email:

I found enlightenment to be overrated. It turns out that when this comes about, all of the Karma in your life comes due at once… both good and bad. I’ve had to pay the sufi master three times to get out of town and leave me alone.

Many groups, end up in a sycophantic embrace and I found that to be distasteful, be careful. Since we live so many lives, There is plenty of time for this state to take effect. I’d advise anyone to take it slow. However, there are a few good ones out there, who really aren’t into all these shenanigans. At least that’s my experience.

Really believe that knowing the future creates a boring life, no surprises any more. Remote viewing opens one up to things that one would rather not know. Powers of healing, brings all kinds of sick people around from all over the place and you end up tripping on them. Deciples, needy and clinging. More and more I think that it is all about gaining the ability to hang in there and keep it together in the face of life’s shit-storms. I especially like the ability to make people laugh at the absurdityof it all. You already have that power.

[…]

There is a big difference between being an influencer with a blog and being a guru. But the same kind of thing applies. I never tried it because I never really had anything meaningful to say. If I said it, then there always seemed to be a certain “falsness” to it. The influencers have a cannonical form, that requires talking more than listening, and feigning listening, which is taken as agreement, when maybe it’s not. Which is dishonest. Charisma is a way of crapping on half the people you meet in such a subtle way, then they thank you for it.

Yep. That sums up a lot of my feelings. Something about the job-tile, “Guru” just kinda makes me queasy. I just don’t think I like the baggage, the “karma” that comes with it; I just don’t think I like the guru-nomics of it all.

I don’t want to write for DISCIPLES, I want to write for MY PEERS. There’s a difference, a BIG one.

i.e. I don’t want to write about how I can help random people do great work, I want to TRY to do great work myself, and CELEBRATE other people who are ALREADY doing it.

You don’t get successful because some enlightened being told you how. You get successful because somehow circumstances forced you to ACTUALLY put your balls on the line. And this has always been the case.

But maybe I’m weird for thinking that…

26. How to really use the Internet

I remember my first really big Internet “A-Ha!” moment like it was yesterday.

It was about a decade ago, just after the DotCom crash, around the same time I first heard about blogging.

I had just heard from somewhere that Salon.com, one of the first big-time magazines to launch exclusively online (that was still a big deal in those days) had blown through $60 million setting itself up, before the crash. Was it ever expected to make back its investors’ money? Of course not.

Sixty. Million.

Then I heard from somewhere that Arts & Letters Daily, a blog that appealed to the same kind of reader as Salon, had been set up for a couple of grand; I think $10K was the number.

People would tell me at the time that yeah, of course Salon was more expensive. It had an office in San Francisco and a big staff of proper journalists. It had all the overhead of conventional magazines, minus the paper and printing press. A&L Daily was just an aggregator blog that pointed to interesting bits and pieces across the web.

Yes, that was true, but as a random, semi-educated dude looking for a place that offered me something interesting to read on a regular basis, I preferred A&L Daily to Salon.

As far as I could see, A&L Daily was not only a better product, it was offering its better product for ONE SIX-THOUSANDTH the cost of Salon. For 0.0166% the overheads.

The idea that media could now be viably made for not just pennies on the dollar, but MICRO-PENNIES, hit me like train. BAM!

So I started blogging. The rest is history.

Ten years later, my only disconnect would be, with this amazing opportunity that hyper-cheap media offers us, why are so many of us squandering it?

While others Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare for hours on end about what hipster food truck they’ve just been to or what dumb TV show they just watched, my young cartoonist friend, Austin Kleon is using social media to transform his life and career (and the lives and careers of others).

This is a totally different league of Internet use I’m talking about. And Austin is just one example. So am I. So is John T Unger or Willo O’Brien of Willotoons fame. I could give hundreds of others.

The Internet has given you a HUGE, life-changing opportunity that simply didn’t exist a generation ago. Don’t waste it. A life just surfing the net for hipster-friendly dumbass stuff is no less a waste of a life than sitting in front of the television.

The way to use the Internet is to be more like Austin or Willo or John. Use it seriously.

[Note: If you like what you see, please subscribe to my daily cartoon newsletter, thanks.]

27. Learn how to present.

Earlier today I was thinking of certain “thought leader” friends of mine, people that I know personally. Rockstars in their field.

Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Kathy Sierra, Gary Vee, Prof. Brian Cox, Joi Ito, Ben Hammersley, Doc Searls etc.

Looking for a common thread, it suddenly hit me– besides being hugely talented in their field and the aforementioned rockstardom, what else do they have in common?

SHORT ANSWER: PRESENTATIONS. They’re all REALLY REALLY good at standing in front of a crowd and wowing them. Every one of them. I’ve seen them. They knock your socks off. No wonder they get invited to speak at TED, SXSW and other places. No wonder they’re able to command the big bucks for doing so.

And then, when you look at the great world-changing figures in history, you see the same. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Cicero, Winston Churchill, or Shakespeare’s fictional Henry V (“We band of brothers, we happy few” etc.)- it’s right there, front and center. The presentation.

And then if you read your ancient history, what were the most privileged people in Rome and Athens taught how to do as part of their classical education? That’s right. The art of Oration. Again, presentation. This explains why getting on the debating team at Oxford or Harvard is still considered a big deal for anyone in the know.

For anybody who ever aspires to lead.

So the question I’m asking is, if presentation is SUCH an obvious part of the magic leadership formula throughout the ages, and leadership is so integral to success, why isn’t presentation better taught in schools nowadays? Why aren’t third graders taught how to use Powerpoint, as standard? Why isn’t presentation emphasized as highly as say, grammar or history or math or athletics?

The reality is, the average person doesn’t spend one-hundredth the time working on their presentation skills, as they do on their hobbies or watching TV or going to the gym or whatever.

I think that might be a mistake…

[AFTERTHOUGHT: Yes, I know. Presentation isn’t everything. Steve Jobs’s legendary keynotes wouldn’t be nearly so impressive if Apple products sucked etc. But that’s not an excuse, either.]

28. Avoid drama.

Why are some people such drama queens?

Why do some people get so obsessed with the little stuff, the gossip, who said what to who, who’s sleeping with who, who’s no longer sleeping with who…?

The short answer: Because it gives them something to do.

Life is short. You’d think we would have learned by now, how to make better use of our VERY limited time here on Earth.

Apparently not…

29. Keep it new. Keep it fresh.

The Internet changed my life. Totally, utterly transformed it. Of course it did. In a very short period of time. A couple of years, tops.

And then there’s also my Internet-famous rockstar friends: Those who, similar to myself, somehow managed to create these interesting, web-enabled, prosperous, functioning little online micro-empires of their own. Internet mavens like Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Mike Arrington, Seth Godin, Brian Clark, Sonia Simone, Loic Le Meur etc etc.

If you read gapingvoid, chances are you know what I’m talking about. You’re probably one yourself, or if you’re not, you’re probably aspiring to be more like that. At the very least, you’ll probably have a few friends like that.

In other words, this “Internet-Transformed Life” is not something alien to you. You GET it. It’s around you all the time.

And heck, even of you’re not one of these so-called rockstar folk, your life has still been transformed utterly, whether you’re aware of it or not. You may not be “Internet-famous”, but try imagining your life without it. Try going a year without Facebook or Google or Twitter or even even email and Internet access. Imagine going without it while still holding down your current job and getting your bills paid.

I’m guessing that would be difficult.

It certainly would be impossible for me. I don’t even want to think about it.

Hey, guess what? This state of affairs is permanent. It’s never NOT going to be transformative, it’s never NOT going to be changing everything and utterly central to fulfilling your needs. Certainly not in our lifetimes.

The Internet is here to stay, and it’s constantly re-inventing itself, and the world that surrounds it.

And yet we still take it for granted, even after all it’s done for us. It’s only been available en masse for little over a decade and already it’s no big deal. Twitter and Facebook? Dude! That’s so 2007!

It’s a mistake to think like that. So blogging is past-tense. Same with Facebook or Twitter. Who cares? The Internet is SO MUCH BIGGER and long-term than any of that. That’s like comparing a bottle of Perrier with the Pacific Ocean.

If the Internet doesn’t seem new and fresh to you, you’re doing something wrong, end of story. You are basically extinct, end of story.

That’s my advice to any adult, regardless of age, class, race, nationality or gender.

Keep it new. Keep it fresh. By any means necessary.

30. To my jaded veteran blogger friends: Get over yourselves.

People think that blogging has changed a lot in the last few years, far from the heady early blogging days of 2000 – 2005 etc etc.

Hmmm. Maybe. Certainly having things like Twitter and Facebook make it easier for people to natter to each other without having to write continual blog posts first… the latter is certainly time consuming, and people are already way too busy.

Actually, the business model for gapingvoid hasn’t changed very much over time. I can only handle so many projects at one time– a dozen at the most. So as a way of generating business, I only need enough readers to attract one new possible collaborator every so often.

Which works out to be how much? Maybe one out of ten thousand readers. Or something.

Whatever the final numbers might be, compared to the ad-driven blogs like Gawker or Techcrunch, they’re relatively small ones. And Thank God for that, “Audience” is a bitch.

And then there is the fun of drawing and posting cartoons on the blog. In business terms, that really can’t be measured. All that can do is create good karma. But I enjoy it immensely so what the hell… same is true for the daily newsletter cartoons.

I keep hearing the same complaint a lot these days. That blogging isn’t as much fun or as interesting as it used to be. It used to be subversive. It used to be cutting edge. Now it’s mainstream and boring. That kinda thing.

To my jaded veteran blogger friends: Get over yourselves. Blogging hasn’t changed, you have. What’s happening on the Internet isn’t important; What’s important is that the world knows how you intend to change it. Right here. Right now.

Same as it ever was…

31. Winning is for losers.

Everybody wants to be on the winning team.

Some people don’t care what team they’re on, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, so long as they’re winning.

I’ve been around those people all my life. Most were forgotten, by me and everybody else.

Some people don’t mind if they win or lose, as long as they don;t get hurt.

Some people don’t mind losing, so long as they get to play the game they want to play.

And then there’s the people who want to win, and win big, but ONLY if they somehow manage to improve the game overall.

Not just raise THEIR game, but raise THE game altogether. Even if when they’re losing, they seem to manage it.

Those people have the most fun. They’re also the most fun to play with.

And they also seem to win the most, over time.

32. Get yourself a good creation myth.

i. Silicon Valley was born in 1939, when Messieurs Hewlett & Packard started their company in a small garage in Paulo Alto.

ii. In his book, “Delivering Happiness”, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh speaks of in great length about “The Loft”, a place where all his friends used to hang out and party, and how this sense of “meaningful gathering” went on to inform the core values of his now-famous shoe company.

iii. A very dated-looking photograph from 1978. Eleven young, goofy-looking techies. They turn out to be the founding members of Microsoft, including Bill Gates.

iv. Michael Dell founding his computer empire in his dorm room at the University of Texas.

v. Ben & Jerry’s started making ice cream in a converted gas station in Vermont.

vi. The business guru, Tom Peters often writes about how his time as a young man serving in the US Navy helped evolve his now-famous worldview.

vii. Rock star physicists, Brian Cox talks passionately about the Big Bang Theory.

viii. How a despondent, burned-out, second-rate advertising copywriter FINALLY got his groove when he started drawing cartoons on the back of business cards.

ix. The Beatles playing those early gigs at The Cavern Club in Liverpool.

x. The famous tech blogger, Robert Scoble talking about his job working in a discount camera store, back when he was a kid.

xi. How a bunch of young, angry social misfits start a small nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire, in 1916 Zurich [at the height of World War One] and in the process invent Dada, one of the 20th Century’s most influential art movements.

xii. Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin.

So… What do these all have in common?

They’re all Creation Myths. That’s right; just like The Garden of Eden.

We humans seem to need them, somehow. They manage to articulate who we really are, somehow. The help explain our core values, somehow.

And for whatever reason, REALLY successful people are even more likely to have them, even more likely to need them, somehow.

Does your schtick have a good creation myth? If not, maybe it needs one?

Think about it.

33. Follow your bliss.

After a decade or so since I last devoured his books, these last few weeks I’ve been happily, gloriously rediscovering the work of Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist.

My story is a common one among Campbell fans. A clueless, socially inept, lost kid with no idea about what to do or where to fit in the world, and suddenly along comes Joe Campbell with three simple, life-changing words:

“FOLLOW YOUR BLISS”.

Boom! A moment of total clarity. A moment of incandescent lucidity.

Of course! FOLLOW YOUR BLISS! What else is there worth doing, besides that? How better to spend one’s life?

At the time, it made total sense. I mean, REALLY!!!!.…

I only first heard of Joseph Campbell the day I read his obituary, back in 1987 (A fact that still makes me sad, I’m not quite sure why). I then checked him out at the bookstore, and I found his work, quite frankly, mind-blowing. Transformative!

A floodgate of possibility being opened. Whoosh! Like being hit by a spiritual tidal wave.

But the thing is…

Joseph may have told me to follow my bliss, but he never told me how. He really didn’t have to many concrete tips or pointers. He just told his readers to just do it.

Much to our chagrin, it was something we were just going to have to figure out all by ourselves…

I was a bit intimidated by that. I think we all are, when we first encounter Campbell’s work. Do we have what it takes, do we have the guts to take what he said, make the necessary sacrifices etc etc and ACTUALLY apply it to our own lives?

I remember that fear well, a quarter century later…

So, now that I’m older, now that it seems I’ve followed my bliss pretty well, and it also seems to have panned out pretty OK for me creatively and careerwise, I now have young people asking me the very same question that Joseph’s students once asked him – “How do I do follow my bliss?”

Experience taught me well that there’s is no definitive answer. There is no instruction manual.

You just decide to do it, and then you go and do it. Or not. Whatever. It’s your call. It’s your path.

And it takes as long as it takes. Decades, maybe. An entire lifetime, even. There is no timeline. Nor any guarantees that you’ll succeed.

Nobody can do it for you. Nobody can go there for you– that mysterious place where the central energy of your being finds its source. Yes, you may fail in your quest to find it. But that risk is what makes it so damn powerful and interesting.

And Joseph Campbell would’ve told you the exact same thing.

Thinking about this earlier this evening, I drew the above cartoon just for the heck of it. I hope you like it, but I’m fine if you don’t.. Those little squiggly abstract drawings I do; well, that’s my bliss. Your bliss is something else. Your bliss is your own, not mine or anyone else’s.

Bliss. You have it within you, we already know that. The question is what you’re going to do about it.

34. The product doesn”t get to kick ass until the user kicks ass, first.

I remember the day, back in the early 1990s, when I first came across the great business writer, Tom Peters. Most TV shows are forgotten within hours of watching, but this one still stays with me, two decades later.

Tom was doing a PBS program on the Mittelstand, those amazingly plucky, medium-sized German companies that somehow manage to compete successfully on a global level, in spite of their relatively small size.

Tom was interviewing Horst Brandstätter, the owner and CEO of Playmobil, the famous German toy company.

And this is the part I REALLY remember– to paraphrase:

TOM: Hmmm… These Playmobil toys of yours… they do amazingly well, all over the world. So what’s their secret? What do they do that’s so interesting?

HORST: It’s not what the toy does that’s interesting. It’s what the child does with the toy that’s interesting.

BOOM! A moment of clarity. One that sticks with me, like I said, twenty years later.

When I was doing that cartoon work for Intel last month- “A processor is an expression of human potential”, I was still thinking about what Horst had said, all those years ago. Very much so.

What Horst said is true, whether you’re running a small mom n’ pop cheese emporium in Greenwich Village, or a multibillion titan like Intel: To borrow heavily from Kathy Sierra, the product doesn’t get to be kick-ass until the user kicks ass first.

Don’t talk about yourself. Talk about something else. Aim for something higher. Talk about the user. Remember Playmobil. Never forget the child playing with it.

I know I like to yack on endlessly about “It’s all about human potential.” I know its cliche, but then again, I’m not wrong, either. This is why we exist. To find out.

Thanks, Tom…

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Sonny Bill Williams & Khoder Nasser - Sonny days on a road less travelled

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 22:36:00 +0000

http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-union/union-news/sonny-days-on-a-road-less-travelled-20130202-2ds06.html

Code-hopping superstar Sonny Bill Williams and his manager, Khoder Nasser, make no apologies for how they do business, writes Steve Kilgallon.

It will please some people to learn that when Sonny Bill Williams walked out on a $2 million, five-year contract in Sydney, flew to France in secret and decided to play for a team owned by a multi-millionaire, he found himself at his lowest ebb. Back in Australia, he was being taunted as Money Bill, or if you were particularly clever, $onny Bill, the man who had swapped loyalty for lucre. "It wasn't about money,'' Williams says now. "Although everyone said it was … I felt like I was being abused by the authorities, and had to make a stand for myself.''

So he borrowed $750,000 from his friend Anthony Mundine to buy his way out of his contractual obligations in Australia and redirect his career on his own terms. "And at that point,'' Williams says. "I had nothing to lose. I had no money, I was in debt. It was the lowest of the lows.''

Five years later, Williams is an All Blacks world champion, boxing professionally, making a return to his first sport, rugby league, which is expected to add millions to the game's bottom line. He has reached this career zenith, it could be argued, by taking a ground-breaking approach in which he refuses to be a forelock-tugging serf to sport's powerbrokers. Emboldened by his experience in French rugby, Williams now signs only short-term contracts - and negotiates fiercely, not least for the freedom to box.

Williams's new approach to the business of sport seems to be influencing others. When he demanded "flexibility'' from the NZRU, other players followed his lead; when he made it clear that rugby league authorities could not dictate his off-season activities, others wanted dispensation to earn big bucks in Japanese rugby during their downtime. Deep inside, Williams says, he remains the shy Samoan boy in the corner of the dressing room. "You have to force yourself not to be, because you hate to admit it, but the world is sometimes not a nice place.'' So how did this man rewrite all the rules of the sports business?

You might re-direct the question to Williams's manager, Khoder Nasser, the Sydney-raised son of Lebanese Muslims, once described in a News Ltd paper as a man with ''no basic values'' who had turned footballers into mercenaries.

Nasser fell into sports management by chance; after befriending a young Mundine, then a brilliant if outspoken league star for St George, he was anointed Mundine's manager despite a CV that stretched to stints in a cafe and a chemist. Nasser says he's simply fortunate, a sports fanatic living the dream. "I get to be in an intimate position to watch it all unravel,'' he says. "Dead serious, I am extremely lucky. I find myself in an extremely privileged position.''

Yet he is a fearsome and unusual negotiator. Nasser works alone, acts for only a handful of clients. Doesn't own a computer. Prefers a handshake to contracts, even with his own clients. Says he isn't interested in sponsors, fringe benefits and other fripperies, but simply "works out a number'' and concentrates on it. He explains his approach by saying: "Everyone can search for a better and better deal. Where does it end? You look at the contract, you think, 'I am getting screwed here, I gotta push a bit more here.' I think, 'I am happy, he's happy,' that's it.''

Nasser thinks most sports organisations are greedy, have a "siege mentality'' and want to "cheat'' the regular athlete of what he's worth. He says agents would be redundant if the authorities were honest. "But in the world of business, people sometimes think it is better to rob the other person.'' At this, he flashes a manic grin; while this is his first interview in more than two years, Nasser enjoys being provocative.

Nasser sees his small roster - he represents only Williams and the Waikato-born Wallabies star Quade Cooper, and until a split last year over a failed US boxing promotion, Mundine - as a positive, arguing agents with multiple clients collude with administrators.

And it also suits him because he says his approach works only because he represents exceptional athletes. Otherwise, ''they walk all over you. Khoder gonna walk in and say, 'This guy is worth $100,000?' and they say, 'Well f--- you, he can have $50,000 or you can f--- off.' You can't do shit, you got nothing. I am absolutely powerless [without talent].''

Williams dumped his first manager, Gavin Orr, ''after finding out a few things'' and because he was uncomfortable with being touted around different clubs. He knew Nasser socially from hanging out at Boxa, a Sydney cafe Nasser co-owns with Mundine, and asked him to take over his affairs. Critics chart this as the point Williams began to rebel; he went on to infamously walk out on the Bulldogs and flee to France over a contract dispute.

''People go on about him [Nasser] being money-hungry, but he's doing all right for himself, he honestly doesn't need me,'' Williams says. "He may rub a lot of people up the wrong way, but he's always straight to the point: yes or no. Other managers like to bargain and use clubs. We say yes or no. We can do it, or we can't. That's what I love. I don't want to f--- people around. Khoder is going to be a man about it. If someone rings, and they will if I am playing well, he will say we can either do it or we can't. Go ask the NZRU, we have always been straight up with them.''

So I did ask the NZRU chief executive, Steve Tew, how he found negotiating with Nasser. ''Everyone in here found Khoder very straight up, which was refreshing,'' Tew says unhesitatingly. ''Obviously, he has a different way of doing things. He has a very clear view of what he wants for his clients and he puts it on the table. We had very efficient negotiations; no mucking around. He's very easy to deal with: he tells you what he wants.''

Yes, says the New Zealand Sky TV chief executive John Fellet, who has agreed every broadcast deal with Nasser (whose fighters are unique in having had every one of their bouts on pay-per-view television) on a handshake. "It suits me fine, and it suits him fine. He has always kept every commitment.''

Tew says Williams wasn't the only beneficiary of the NZRU's ''flexibility'' which he says is forced upon the union by the ''structural disadvantage'' of having less money than everyone else. ''You know,'' he says, "we let the captain of the All Blacks fly a high-performance glider, which is not without risk either.''

But, says one sports official who enjoyed less successful dealings with Nasser, of course he'd say all that: "Tew has to say he is a genius, but he is the most annoying bugger to deal with. Being difficult does not equal genius.''

Yes, he's awkward. Williams's official return to league this season was delayed for five weeks because Nasser refused to sign up to the National Rugby League's mandatory agent accreditation scheme. The eventual compromise was a public claim that Williams had done his own deal. Nasser hates the NRL, calls them "a bunch of antiquated people who have no foresight''. Later, just in case I'd missed the antipathy, he rings to offer further, increasingly tart criticism, culminating in the suggestion one senior employee is there only as a social experiment to keep him off the streets.

The hatred stems from the NRL's unwillingness to be as "flexible'' as Tew and company. Nasser has a dream. That he could sign Williams to a league club who would offer time off to play for the All Blacks and box when he wished. Why not? ''I'd like to ask them, does any player make as much money as they were willing to give to the CEO of the NRL?'' That a banker, David Smith, got that job at a $1.2 million salary, riles him. ''Look at the wonderful state the world is in because of bankers.''

Nasser studied economics at the University of Wollongong. Nasser and his clients invest in property, and only property, but none of them has a mortgage. This is inspired by the Muslim faith that he was born with and Williams and Mundine adopted, but he's quick to point out that it was once a Christian tenet, too. "This interest and mortgage bullshit has only become a modern phenomenon,'' Nasser says. "I believe in the cash currency, not living in the future. You live with what you have now.''

He proffers an example: a sportsman early in his career who signs a five-year, $2 million deal. His manager suggests the sportsman borrow $2 million to buy property. But really, that $2 million income is but $1.2 million after tax and living expenses. And usually the player is under pressure to financially support family. He struggles even to meet interest payments, so when the five years is up he's left with nothing. This sounds less like allegory than a precise description of Williams's situation when he ran from the Bulldogs.

''Don't live in the future,'' Nasser counsels. ''Careers are quick and can end at any time. Sonny can cross the road and it's all finished. And if he's got a $1 million loan with the bank, do you think they are going to do me a favour?

''The worst things a manager can do for a sportsman is get him into debt and into a false sense of security. Without that, you know exactly what you've got, and what you are worth.''

When he arrived in France, Williams was almost immediately injured. Compartment syndrome is a deeply painful lower-leg injury which predominantly strikes Polynesian athletes. Williams found he could run for just 20 minutes. So he began taking painkillers just to train. He doubted he would ever succeed at rugby. But the anonymity of life in southern France gave him a new perspective. Having lived only in Sydney and Auckland and gone further afield only to Britain on a rugby league tour, he realised that the world extended beyond sport.

"I had to grow up,'' he says. "I had to fight some pretty tough demons.'' He says he found religion, found peace, found form, and found he was wanted. He could have stayed in France beyond his two years, and been well paid for it. "I could have had a pretty good life out there,'' he says. But this renaissance had given him the confidence to ignore any false sense of security, to take another punt, a huge salary cut, and come home to New Zealand. "It was a massive risk - but what if I accomplish something? It's massive rewards as well. And things rolled from there. You still have your ups and downs. But I was a lot mentally stronger.''

During the depression, however, he agreed to return to rugby league in 2013 with the Sydney Roosters on a handshake deal, seeing it as an escape route if rugby failed. When it didn't, he refused to back out. "A lot of people won't believe that,'' Williams says, "because of the way I left the Bulldogs. But there, I felt like I had a deal, and they [reneged]. I don't want to sound brash, but you can't sugarcoat it.'' The Bulldogs, he says, also shaped him. "But not in the sense people think. That it's about money. It's quite the opposite.'' But he says, somewhat sorrowfully, he has long since given up on trying to influence public opinion; Nasser, in contrast, is rather gleeful about his ongoing feud with sections of the Sydney media. "Have you ever seen a crew more vilified than ours?'' he chirps.

Combine the experience of good (France) and the bad (Sydney), and Williams believes it made him strong enough to keep choosing challenge over comfort - and to tell people what he's worth. "What I think about,'' he says, "is what is, A, going to get the best out of me, B, where I am going to be happy and, C, pretty much back to A, I know I've got to perform. So if you put yourself into situations where you have to perform, it is risky - you can sit back and bank on what you did last year, or you can take the risk and do something.''

Nasser is spruiking now. He's awkward, but he's also a charmer. Convivial. He wants this story to be about the boxing. Williams fights the veteran South African Francois Botha in Brisbane this Friday, his sixth pro fight, roughly Nasser's 50th show.

On fight nights, the famously scruffy Nasser - usually wearing sandals, sportsgear, a backpack, untrimmed beard - will shuffle around with a sheath of complimentaries, hiding beneath the brim of his baseball cap. "The Lebanese Robert De Niro,'' Fellet quips. Invited to watch a fight night close up, Fairfax Media's Greg Baum concluded it was a shambles, albeit a shambles that worked. Nasser liked the story.

Boxing began as fun for Williams, but now shapes as a possible career. He denies any long-term plan. Nasser has one, but won't say what it is. ''I would never want my son to be a boxer but if he was I wouldn't mind him being represented by Khoder,'' Fellet concludes. "He seems genuinely interested in the long-term career. Some of the things he does may seem schizophrenic - from rugby to league to boxing - but they have a masterplan.''

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"Long Distance Revolutionary": Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Journey from Black Panthers to Prison Journalist @democracynow

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 01:01:00 +0000

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/1/long_distance_revolutionary_mumia_abu_jamals

AMY GOODMAN: Eddie Vedder, singing "Society," here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. The song is in this new documentary that’s premiering in the United States tonight. It is called Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal_. And we’re joined now by its filmmakers. The film was written, produced and directed by Steve Vittoria, produced by Noelle Hanrahan, as well, of Prison Radio Project. Steve Vittoria, a longtime documentary filmmaker. death">We recently featured his 2005 documentary, One Bright Shining Moment, about Senator George McGovern. We’ll speak with them in a moment, but we wanted to bring you an exclusive, extended look at Mumia’s early life in Philadelphia’s Black Panther Party and as a radio reporter. In this excerpt, you hear from Mumia Abu-Jamal’s sister and former colleagues.

UNIDENTIFIED: It was gone, forever.

REPORTER: Ozora, let me ask you: What did Cassius say to you when you stepped into the ring and shook hands with him before the Terrell fight?

MUHAMMAD ALI: Muhammad Ali, no Cassius.

REPORTER: Excuse me, Muhammad Ali.

UNIDENTIFIED: "'Cassius Clay' is a slave name. I didn’t choose it, and I didn’t want it. I am Muhammad Ali."

TERRY BISSON: He had a few great teachers. And one of them, who was from Kenya, taught the kids Swahili. And Mumia thought this was super cool, and so he decided he was going to take a Swahili name. He called it "Mumsia" at first, because he didn’t quite get it right.

LYDIA BARASHANGO: I guess that’s when I kind of gave him props. You got a new name. You know, this is really great. You dropped your slave name.

TERRY BISSON: I don’t know what his mother thought of that. I’m not sure he insisted that she call him Mumia.

LYDIA BARASHANGO: "I don’t care nothing about that stuff! I named you Wesley Cook! That’s your name! I don’t care what you try to call yourself! You’re Wesley Cook!" And she fought it for so long. But I know that Mumia went through some days where he ignored her calling him Wesley Cook. You know, "I changed my name, Mom."

GOV. GEORGE WALLACE: In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

TERRY BISSON: George Wallace is running for president in '68. The civil rights movement is in full cry in the South. The country is changing. It's being led by groups like SNCC and the Panthers. Mumia wanted to be part of that change.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: George Wallace was a candidate on the American Independent Party, very, very right-wing, although he probably wouldn’t be considered very right-wing in terms of America’s political context today, would he? We were four black kids, teenagers, from North Philadelphia. And this avowed white supremacist, this racist from the depths of the South, dared to come to our city. Well, we went down to the Spectrum. There were tens of thousands of white people, you know, waving flags. And you had George Wallace making his standard stump speech.

GOV. GEORGE WALLACE: And I want to tell you this, that anybody who raises any money and blood and clothes for the Viet Cong communists, who are today hitting American servicemen, are guilty of treason under the Constitution of the United States.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: At that time, we weren’t very original, so the only thing we said was "Ungawa! Black Power! Ungawa! Black Power!"

GIANCARLO ESPOSITO: "Black Power! Ungawa! Black Power!" They shouted, "Wallace for president! White power!" and "Send those niggers back to Africa!" We shouted, "Black Power! Ungawa!" Don’t ask what "Ungawa" means; we didn’t know. All we knew is it had a hell of a ring to it.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: The police surrounded us, you know, in a matter of moments and escorted us—rather roughly, I should say—out of the Spectrum. There were people spitting on us. "Nigger this, nigger that." I remember being pummeled and being beaten to the ground. And I remember looking around, and I saw a pant leg. It was blue and had a stripe on it, so it told me this was a cop. So, doing what I was taught to do all my life, I said, "Yo, help! Police!" You know? I remember the guy walking over very briskly and his foot going back, kicking me in the face, kicking me. And I’ve always said "thank you" to that cop, because he kicked me straight into the Black Panther Party.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mumia Abu-Jamal in the new documentary, Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal, that is opening around the country starting today. The producer, writer, director of the film, Steve Vittoria, joins us, as well as the co-producer, Noelle Hanrahan of the Prison Radio Project. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! These last few minutes you just heard Mumia on the phone directly from prison, but you just visited him yesterday, Steve.

STEPHEN VITTORIA: I was there with him yesterday. It was another one of our extraordinary visits together. I know it’s hard to believe that you go to a, you know, maximum security prison, and when he was on death row, and you have a good time. It’s really hard. It’s not a good time for Mumia, but he makes it a good time. What we’ve tried to do with the film is capture Mumia’s personality, the compassion, the love that Mumia has for people, because ultimately I think that’s what true revolutionaries—that’s where they come from. They come from a place of love. I made the film because, you know, you wake up in a country, Amy, and you realize that the country is being run by mass murderers, economic rapists and general, run-of-the-mill psychopaths, so I started to look for some sanity. And for me, I found sanity in a dark, dank hall on death row in Pennsylvania. I had been a longtime reader of Mumia’s material, listening to the incredible broadcasts that you guys have broadcast. And my partner, Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio, has—a Herculean task—gotten his voice out all over the world. I wanted to offer some sanity. You know, John Pilger says that we have made the unthinkable normal in this world, and the normal unthinkable. I wanted to offer a ray of hope and some sanity, that Mumia, I think, offers all of us. You know, the people in this country have been offered war and violence and no healthcare and, you know, horrific contribution to the death of the planet. Mumia offers the opposite of that. And people ask me, they say, you know, "Well, how do you make a film about someone so radical?" I don’t think Mumia is radical at all. What I find radical are people that can lob cruise missiles into neighborhoods. So that’s what we’re trying to do: We’re trying to offer sanity.

AMY GOODMAN: From McGovern, subject of one of your films, to Mumia Abu-Jamal, what’s the trajectory?

STEPHEN VITTORIA: It’s a huge trajectory. George, as you know, was a—he was sort of his own—

AMY GOODMAN: The former senator, former presidential candidate.

STEPHEN VITTORIA: George McGovern. He was—he was a revolutionary within the system. I don’t know if that can ever work. George tried, and he made some changes. But real change comes from outside the system, and I think that Mumia is a bright, shining example of that.

AMY GOODMAN: Noelle Hanrahan, you have been making possible the broadcasts of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life for many years, of his voice from prison, from death row, which Steve said is a Herculean task. We’ve run some of his commentaries. Why this film is important? It doesn’t focus on his case, actually.

NOELLE HANRAHAN: The state has always tried to minimize what Mumia means to the movements and also as Mumia as the journalist. And what we do is show you why his voice is important, and it deconstructs the right-wing narrative of that. If Mumia Abu-Jamal had been on the streets, had been able to be a reporter for the last 30 years, we may not be in this situation. The suppression of his voice, I believe, is directly related to what he has to say. And Prison Radio humanizes prisoners. It brings prisoners’ voices into the public debate and dialogue. I trust that this country needs that information and that we can make better decisions if we hear these people. Mumia happens to be an extraordinary journalist, reporting from an extraordinary place. And he demands to be into the public debate and dialogue.

AMY GOODMAN: The film opens today in New York City. It’s at Cinema Village and will run through the weekend, right through Super Bowl Sunday, and around the country, Steve?

STEPHEN VITTORIA: Yes. We start in New York City. We go to Seattle. We go to Miami. We go to New Orleans. And then we open in Los Angeles, my new home town, on March 1st, and on from there. So it’s—New York is our launch, and it’s really, really important to the success of the film.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Cinema Village here in New York. And in Los Angeles in March, it will be at the Beverly Hills Laemmle. This is Democracy Now! I want to thank you both for being with us.
STEPHEN VITTORIA: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Steve Vittoria, director, producer, writer of the film, Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal. Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio co-produced this film. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’re going to talk Super Bowl Sunday. We’re going to talk about brain injuries. We’re going to talk about the dangers football players and others face, with someone who knows, with a former football player himself, who now runs a major brain injury institute at Harvard University. Stay with us.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/1/mumia_abu_jamal_the_united_states

In a rare live interview, Mumia Abu-Jamal calls into Democracy Now! as the new film, "Long Distance Revolutionary," about his life premieres in New York City this weekend. After 29 years on death row, he is now being held in general population at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution – Mahanoy. "How free are we today, those who claim to be non-prisoners? Your computers are being read by others in government. Your letters, your phone calls are being intercepted," says Mumia Abu-Jamal. "We live now in a national security state, where the United States is fast becoming one of the biggest open-air prisons on earth. We can speak about freedom, and the United States has a long and distinguished history of talking about freedom, but have we exampled freedom? And I think the answer should be very clear: We have not." In 1982, Mumia was sentenced to die for killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He has always maintained his innocence and is perhaps America’s most famous political prisoner. In 2011, an appeals court upheld his conviction, but also vacated his death sentence. It found jurors were given confusing instructions.

Guest: Mumia Abu-Jamal, former death row prisoner. For decades, Abu-Jamal has argued racism by the trial judge and prosecutors led to his conviction for the killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Last year, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside his death sentence after finding jurors were given confusing instructions that encouraged them to choose the death penalty rather than a life sentence.

Links "Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey With Mumia Abu-Jamal" Film Website

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Website

Editor's Picks "Long Distance Revolutionary": New Documentary Tells Untold Story of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Life Journey Oct 22, 2012 | Story

Exclusive: Mumia Abu-Jamal Speaks from Prison on Life After Death Row and His Quest for Freedom Apr 25, 2012 | Story

NAACP: Mumia Abu-Jamal Victory over Death Penalty Signals Turning Tide Against Capital Punishment Dec 15, 2011 | Story

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu Calls for Release of Mumia Abu-Jamal Dec 08, 2011 | Story

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, we’d like to ask you to stay on the phone as we move from the death of Mayor Koch to a new documentary, which you also are in. That documentary is premiering in theaters today. It’s called Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to die for killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He has always maintained his innocence, is perhaps America’s most famous prisoner. In 2011, an appeals court upheld his conviction, but also vacated his death sentence. It found jurors were given confusing instructions. When prosecutors said they would no longer pursue the death penalty, Mumia Abu-Jamal was transferred into the general prison population. In a moment, we’re going to play an excerpt from the film, but first we’re joined by Mumia Abu-Jamal himself from prison in Pennsylvania, not SCI Greene, where he was on death row, but in—well, Mumia, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you tell us where you are?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Good morning. I’m in the eastern side of Pennsylvania for the first time in a quarter of a century—actually, more. It’s called Mahanoy—don’t ask me what it means; I have no idea. But it’s not far from Philadelphia and pretty close to New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us what it means to no longer be on death row?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Well, I could, but I’d be lying, because I call this "slow death row." "Life" in Pennsylvania means life. Pennsylvania has one of the largest "life" populations of any state in the United States. It had the distinction of having the absolute highest number of juvenile lifers of any state in the United States—indeed, of any jurisdiction in the world. So, that should give you some sense.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, if you’re still there, if you’d like to ask Mumia Abu-Jamal a question?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Mumia, I know that over the years—it’s been a while since we’ve talked, but over the years this enormous movement has developed around the world demanding your freedom and your—and insisting on the unjust nature of the trial that occurred many years ago in your case. Your reflections on this enormous movement that has developed and its role in terms of the prison-industrial complex, in general, and your case, in particular?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Well, I think it is the essence of a grassroots movement, because it came from the bottom, not from the top. These were people who—many of whom I knew in freedom and who would not let me go and would not leave me alone and held on to me despite every challenge. At the core, of course, are people that I fell in love with many years ago, known as the MOVE Organization. And so, from several members of the MOVE Organization—Pam Africa, Ramona Africa—they built around them a grassroots organization that is in many ways unprecedented in organizing. You know, I’ve studied movements. I’ve been in movements all my life. I’ve, you know, written a few history books about the stuff. But to be in the core of it and see it is another thing, and it’s nothing less than remarkable. And it continues to grow, to build, and to demand an end to mass incarceration, an end to what I’ve called "slow death row," an end to solitary confinement, you know. It’s a vibrant movement. Like every movement, it ebbs, it flows. But to be perfectly honest, it’s still with us, and anyone who denies that either is blind or a fool.

AMY GOODMAN: Mumia, are you still appealing your case?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Yes. I have always appealed. I have always fought. And there’s no reason to not do so now. In this point in time, we are kind of in an interim, because we had kind of a shadow sentencing with no presence, no arguments, no briefs, no anything. You know, we kind of got an order one day saying, you know, "You’re a lifer." That isn’t what the rules provide. And so, there’s been certainly resistance on that score. But, you know, anyone who knows anything about the case, anyone who’s read the Amnesty International report on the case, knows that my case is rife with new rules, all the time. So, this is just new rules.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, Mumia Abu-Jamal, did you witness the inauguration, the second inauguration of President Obama? And I’m wondering your thoughts.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: I did, indeed. It was with a mixture of sadness, in some respects, sadness at lost opportunities, but also a kind of wonder. I mean, you have to admit that Barack Hussein Obama is one of the most talented politicians and skillful political forces this country has ever seen. Now, it is also true that that is so largely because of certain constituencies in this country that pushed that candidacy; sadness because many of the hopes of many of those constituencies have been dashed. That’s the nature of politics in many ways: You run one way, and you rule another. And someone—I think it was Mario Cuomo—said that you—you run in poetry, but you govern in prose.

AMY GOODMAN: Mumia, as you are off of death row, or as you call it, "slow death row," what is it like to be there with other people? We wanted to speak to you yesterday on the phone, but you had an appointment at the law library which you didn’t want to miss. Talk about your life behind bars.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Well, let me talk about the men that are around me. It may not surprise you that a lot of these guys are black men. A lot of them are very old black men. I remember, and still feel, the shock of seeing a line of men in wheelchair being rolled to chow. I stopped, because you saw these wheelchairs coming out of the mist; I’ve never seen—I’ve never seen anything like that. But from this great expansive age. You can see very, very young men, men who don’t even shave. So, you can see the span of black manhood from teenagers—literally, teenagers—to men in their sixties and seventies and beyond. And it is a stunning thing to see. And the size. You know, there must be 2,200 men in this population, but the size is just stunning. And to be walking around in the midst of 400, 500 men is an experience, you know, that I had to relearn, because I had surely forgotten it.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re writing a book, yet another book, in prison? You’ve written a number of them.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Yes, yes. This is my second with a co-author, Steve Vittoria, the great filmmaker.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is joining us right here in the studio right now.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: We are, shall we say, Zinnian historians. So, we’re looking at the world, looking at the empire, through our own eyes and writing out of not just our research, although the research is extensive, we’re writing out of our hearts and out of our experiences. And in the spirit of Howard Zinn, it is from below, deep, deep below—

OPERATOR: This call is from the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy and is subject to monitoring and recording.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: But I assure you, we will present something richer than many people have ever seen before. It is a labor of historical lust, and great fun.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you calling the book?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Murder Incorporated.

AMY GOODMAN: Why that title?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Well, it comes from LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when he acceded to the presidency and he began getting reports about what was happening in Central America, he was famously quoted as saying "My god! We’re running a goddamn Murder Incorporated down here." And indeed they were.

AMY GOODMAN: Mumia, I know that your line is going to be cut off in a minute, and I was wondering what message do you have to people outside the bars right now?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: Well, increasingly, that space has expanded, because if you look inside the bars, you’re looking at millions of men and women and juveniles, as I noted before. But even beyond that, I mean, how free are we today, those who claim to be non-prisoners? Your computers are being read by others in government. Your letters, your phone calls are being intercepted. We live now in a national security state, where the United States is fast becoming one of the biggest open-air prisons on earth. I mean, we can speak about freedom, and the United States has a long and distinguished—

OPERATOR: You have 60 seconds remaining.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: —long and distinguished history of talking about freedom, but have we exampled freedom? And I think the answer should be very clear: We have not. And we’re becoming a less free nation every day. And I think people should rise up, and I think they should organize. And I think, frankly, they should raise hell. You know, if you don’t want to join our movement, join some movement, but damn it, do something, because we are in an age that we may never be able to capture again.

OPERATOR: You have 30 seconds remaining.

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: So—

AMY GOODMAN: Mumia, if the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the prisoner—the police officer who you were convicted of killing, is listening, what do you have to say to her?

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: That the struggle for justice and freedom did not end on December 9th, 1981; it began then. And she should join us, because our movement is growing.

AMY GOODMAN: Mumia, I want to thank you for being with us. Mumia Abu-Jamal, just cut off at SCI Mahanoy in Pennsylvania, the prison where he now resides. He was on death row in Pennsylvania for 29 years, now is in prison for life, award-winning journalist, chronicles the human condition. When we come back, we’re joined by two people who have made a film about his life, Long Distance Revolutionary. Stay with us.
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Complexity and Collapse - Empires on the Edge of Chaos

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 03:01:00 +0000

By Niall Ferguson

Summary: - Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.

There is no better illustration of the life cycle of a great power than The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the New-York Historical Society. Cole was a founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American landscape painting; in The Course of Empire, he beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day.

Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the first, The Savage State, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn. The second picture, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is The Consummation of Empire. Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt, and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls, and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes Destruction. The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over the fifth painting, Desolation. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.

Conceived in the mid-1830s, Cole's great pentaptych has a clear message: all empires, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall. The implicit suggestion was that the young American republic of Cole's age would be better served by sticking to its bucolic first principles and resisting the imperial temptations of commerce, conquest, and colonization.

For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists, and the public at large have tended to think about empires in such cyclical and gradual terms. "The best instituted governments," the British political philosopher Henry St. John, First Viscount Bolingbroke, wrote in 1738, "carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and, though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live."

Idealists and materialists alike have shared that assumption. In his book Scienza nuova, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico describes all civilizations as passing through three phases: the divine, the heroic, and the human, finally dissolving into what Vico called "the barbarism of reflection." For Hegel and Marx, it was the dialectic that gave history its unmistakable beat. History was seasonal for Oswald Spengler, the German historian, who wrote in his 1918-22 book, The Decline of the West, that the nineteenth century had been "the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and skepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money." The British historian Arnold Toynbee's universal theory of civilization proposed a cycle of challenge, response, and suicide. Each of these models is different, but all share the idea that history has rhythm.

Although hardly anyone reads Spengler or Toynbee today, similar strains of thought are visible in contemporary bestsellers. Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is another work of cyclical history -- despite its profusion of statistical tables, which at first sight make it seem the very antithesis of Spenglerian grand theory. In Kennedy's model, great powers rise and fall according to the growth rates of their industrial bases and the costs of their imperial commitments relative to their GDPs. Just as in Cole's The Course of Empire, imperial expansion carries the seeds of future decline. As Kennedy writes, "If a state overextends itself strategically . . . it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all." This phenomenon of "imperial overstretch," Kennedy argues, is common to all great powers. In 1987, when Kennedy's book was published, the United States worried that it might be succumbing to this disease. Just because the Soviet Union fell first did not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis.

More recently, it is Jared Diamond, an anthropologist, who has captured the public imagination with a grand theory of rise and fall. His 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is cyclical history for the so-called Green Age: tales of past societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural environments. Diamond quotes John Lloyd Stevens, the American explorer and amateur archaeologist who discovered the eerily dead Mayan cities of Mexico: "Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations, reached their golden age, and perished." According to Diamond, the Maya fell into a classic Malthusian trap as their population grew larger than their fragile and inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation, but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought, and soil exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally, collapse.

Diamond's warning is that today's world could go the way of the Maya. This is an important message, no doubt. But in reviving the cyclical theory of history, Collapse reproduces an old conceptual defect. Diamond makes the mistake of focusing on what historians of the French Annales school called la longue durée, the long term. No matter whether civilizations commit suicide culturally, economically, or ecologically, the downfall is very protracted. Just as it takes centuries for imperial overstretch to undermine a great power, so, too, does it take centuries to wreck an ecosystem. As Diamond points out, political leaders in almost any society -- primitive or sophisticated -- have little incentive to address problems that are unlikely to manifest themselves for a hundred years or more.

Did the proconsuls in Cole's The Consummation of Empire really care if the fate of their great-great-grandchildren was destruction? No. Would they have accepted a tax increase that would have financed a preemptive strike against the next millennium's barbarian horde? Again, no. As the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December made clear, rhetorical pleas to save the planet for future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now.

The current economic challenges facing the United States are also often represented as long-term threats. It is the slow march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- and not current policy, that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. According to the Congressional Budget Office's "alternative fiscal scenario," which takes into account likely changes in government policy, public debt could rise from 44 percent before the financial crisis to a staggering 716 percent by 2080. In its "extended-baseline scenario," which assumes current policies will remain the same, the figure is closer to 280 percent. It hardly seems to matter which number is correct. Is there a single member of Congress who is willing to cut entitlements or increase taxes in order to avert a crisis that will culminate only when today's babies are retirees?

Similarly, when it comes to the global economy, the wheel of history seems to revolve slowly, like an old water mill in high summer. Some projections suggest that China's GDP will overtake the United States' GDP in 2027; others say that this will not happen until 2040. By 2050, India's economy will supposedly catch up with that of the United States, too. But to many, these great changes in the balance of economic power seem very remote compared with the timeframe for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan and then their withdrawal, for which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.

Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole's artistic representation of imperial birth, growth, and eventual death is a misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?

WHEN GOOD SYSTEMS GO BAD
Great powers and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder -- on "the edge of chaos," in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in southeastern England.

Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of "fat tail" events -- the low-frequency, high-impact moments that inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in The Black Swan as "the narrative fallacy": the construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Drawing casual inferences about causation is an age-old habit. Take World War I. A huge war breaks out in the summer of 1914, to the great surprise of nearly everyone. Before long, historians have devised a story line commensurate with the disaster: a treaty governing the neutrality of Belgium that was signed in 1839, the waning of Ottoman power in the Balkans dating back to the 1870s, and malevolent Germans and the navy they began building in 1897. A contemporary version of this fallacy traces the 9/11 attacks back to the Egyptian government's 1966 execution of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist writer who inspired the Muslim Brotherhood. Most recently, the financial crisis that began in 2007 has been attributed to measures of financial deregulation taken in the United States in the 1980s.

In reality, the proximate triggers of a crisis are often sufficient to explain the sudden shift from a good equilibrium to a bad mess. Thus, World War I was actually caused by a series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914, the real origins of 9/11 lie in the politics of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and the financial crisis was principally due to errors in monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve and to China's rapid accumulation of dollar reserves after 2001. Most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.
To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of half a million ants or termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system, or what Charles Sherrington, the pioneering neuroscientist, called "an enchanted loom."

The political and economic structures made by humans share many of the features of complex adaptive systems. Heterodox economists such as W. Brian Arthur have been arguing along these lines for decades. To Arthur, a complex economy is characterized by the interaction of dispersed agents, a lack of central control, multiple levels of organization, continual adaptation, incessant creation of new market niches, and the absence of general equilibrium. This conception of economics goes beyond both Adam Smith's hallowed idea that an "invisible hand" causes markets to work through the interactions of profit-maximizing individuals and Friedrich von Hayek's critique of economic planning and demand management. In contradiction to the classic economic prediction that competition causes diminishing returns, a complex economy makes increasing returns possible. In this version of economics, Silicon Valley is a complex adaptive system; so is the Internet itself.

Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit center devoted to the study of complex systems, are currently looking at how such insights can be applied to other aspects of collective human activity, including international relations. This effort may recall the futile struggle of Edward Casaubon to find "the key to all mythologies" in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch. But the attempt is worthwhile, because an understanding of how complex systems function is an essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.

Whether the canopy of a rain forest or the trading floor of Wall Street, complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." A vaccine, for example, stimulates the immune system to become resistant to, say, measles or mumps. But administer too large a dose, and the patient dies. Meanwhile, causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation (such as trend analysis and sampling) are of little use. Some theorists of complexity would go so far as to say that complex systems are wholly nondeterministic, meaning that it is impossible to make predictions about their future behavior based on existing data.

When things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is very hard to say: a forest fire twice as large as last year's is roughly four or six or eight times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern -- known as a "power-law distribution" -- is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Some researchers claim that conflicts follow a similar pattern, ranging from local skirmishes to full-scale world wars.

What matters most is that in such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate -- and sometimes fatal -- disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment, threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade. But blaming such a crash on a policy of deregulation under U.S. President Ronald Reagan is about as plausible as blaming World War I on the buildup of the German navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

EMPIRE STATE OF MIND
Regardless of whether it is a dictatorship or a democracy, any large-scale political unit is a complex system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority -- either a hereditary emperor or an elected president -- but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social, and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems -- including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is rarely recognized because of the collective addiction to cyclical theories of history.

Perhaps the most famous story of imperial decline is that of ancient Rome. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, Edward Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history, from 180 to 1590. This was history over the very long run, in which the causes of decline ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of monotheism. After the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, civil war became a recurring problem, as aspiring emperors competed for the spoils of supreme power. By the fourth century, barbarian invasions or migrations were well under way and only intensified as the Huns moved west. Meanwhile, the challenge posed by Sassanid Persia to the Eastern Roman Empire was steadily growing.

But what if fourth-century Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome's fall was sudden and dramatic -- just as one would expect when such a system goes critical. As the Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins have argued, the final breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths in 410. Co-opted by an enfeebled emperor, the Goths then fought the Vandals for control of Spain, but this merely shifted the problem south. Between 429 and 439, Genseric led the Vandals to victory after victory in North Africa, culminating in the fall of Carthage. Rome lost its southern Mediterranean breadbasket and, along with it, a huge source of tax revenue. Roman soldiers were just barely able to defeat Attila's Huns as they swept west from the Balkans. By 452, the Western Roman Empire had lost all of Britain, most of Spain, the richest provinces of North Africa, and southwestern and southeastern Gaul. Not much was left besides Italy. Basiliscus, brother-in-law of Emperor Leo I, tried and failed to recapture Carthage in 468. Byzantium lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom of Odoacer, king of the Goths.

What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century -- inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle -- shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What Ward-Perkins calls "the end of civilization" came within the span of a single generation.

Other great empires have suffered comparably swift collapses. The Ming dynasty in China began in 1368, when the warlord Zhu Yuanzhang renamed himself Emperor Hongwu, the word hongwu meaning "vast military power." For most of the next three centuries, Ming China was the world's most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure. Then, in the mid-seventeenth century, political factionalism, fiscal crisis, famine, and epidemic disease opened the door to rebellion within and incursions from without. In 1636, the Manchu leader Huang Taiji proclaimed the advent of the Qing dynasty. Just eight years later, Beijing, the magnificent Ming capital, fell to the rebel leader Li Zicheng, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself out of shame. The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against British rule in North America in the 1770s seemed like a good idea at the time -- a chance for revenge after Great Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War a decade earlier -- but it served to tip French finances into a critical state. In May 1789, the summoning of the Estates-General, France's long-dormant representative assembly, unleashed a political chain reaction that led to a swift collapse of royal legitimacy in France. Only four years later, in January 1793, Louis XVI was decapitated by guillotine.

Although several narrative fallacies suggest that the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires were doomed for decades before World War I, the disintegration of the dynastic land empires of eastern Europe came with equal swiftness. What was impressive, in fact, was how well these ancient empires were able to withstand the test of total war. Their collapse only began with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. A mere five years later, Mehmed VI, the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, departed Constantinople aboard a British warship. With that, all three dynasties were defunct.

The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly. In February 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was at Yalta, dividing up the world with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. As World War II was ending, he was swept from office in the July 1945 general election. Within a decade, the United Kingdom had conceded independence to Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Egypt, Eritrea, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Madagascar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that the United Kingdom could not act in defiance of the United States in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire. Although it took until the 1960s for independence to reach sub-Saharan Africa and the remnants of colonial rule east of the Suez, the United Kingdom's age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA estimated the Soviet economy to be approximately 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy. This estimate is now known to have been wrong, but the Soviet nuclear arsenal was genuinely larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet less than five years after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff -- rather than gently declining -- it was the one founded by Lenin.

OVER THE EDGE
If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. All the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly, indeed, as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2009 of more than $1.4 trillion -- about 11.2 percent of GDP, the biggest deficit in 60 years -- and another for 2010 that will not be much smaller. Public debt, meanwhile, is set to more than double in the coming decade, from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019. Within the same timeframe, interest payments on that debt are forecast to leap from eight percent of federal revenues to 17 percent.

These numbers are bad, but in the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial, if not more so. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States' ability to weather any crisis. For now, the world still expects the United States to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the deficit seem overblown, and 2080 -- when the U.S. debt may reach staggering proportions -- seems a long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps a negative report by a rating agency -- will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.

Over the last three years, the complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust -- all because a bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the public begins to reassess the credibility of the monetary and fiscal measures that the Obama administration has taken in response. Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. As Thomas Sargent, an economist who pioneered the idea of rational expectations, demonstrated more than 20 years ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling: it is not the base supply of money that determines inflation but the velocity of its circulation, which in turn is a function of expectations. In the same way, it is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece -- it happened there at the end of last year, plunging the country into fiscal and political crisis.

Finally, a shift in expectations about monetary and fiscal policy could force a reassessment of future U.S. foreign policy. There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: if interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military expenditure is the item most likely to be cut because, unlike mandatory entitlements, it is discretionary. A U.S. president who says he will deploy 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and then, in 18 months' time, start withdrawing them again already has something of a credibility problem. And what about the United States' other strategic challenges? For the United States' enemies in Iran and Iraq, it must be consoling to know that U.S. fiscal policy today is preprogrammed to reduce the resources available for all overseas military operations in the years ahead.

Defeat in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of imperial fall. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in the annus mirabilis of 1989. What happened 20 years ago, like the events of the distant fifth century, is a reminder that empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline, and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. To return to the terminology of Thomas Cole, the painter of The Course of Empire, the shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.

A more appropriate visual representation of the way complex systems collapse may be the old poster, once so popular in thousands of college dorm rooms, of a runaway steam train that has crashed through the wall of a Victorian railway terminus and hit the street below nose first. A defective brake or a sleeping driver can be all it takes to go over the edge of chaos.

NIALL FERGUSON is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent book is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

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