Don't believe the lies, critically analyze!

Sonny Bill Williams & Khoder Nasser - Sonny days on a road less travelled

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — 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.''

Subscribe in a reader

"Long Distance Revolutionary": Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Journey from Black Panthers to Prison Journalist @democracynow

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — 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.
Subscribe in a reader

Complexity and Collapse - Empires on the Edge of Chaos

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — 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.

Subscribe in a reader

Want to make 2013 @GetUp the best year ever?

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 10:23:00 +0000

Want to make 2013 GetUp's best year ever?

It's an election year. A year with much of what we've fought tirelessly to progress - climate policy, renewable energy, marriage equality, asylum seeker reform, forest protections, poker machine reform, preventing coal and CSG expansion - at stake.

2013 will be a year where the imperative to come together and do what we do best - hold power to account and advance progressive issues - is more critical than ever. It's our chance to create solutions for the future that don't repeat the mistakes of the past; a year we can be proud to tell our grandchildren about.

If you're not convinced and need a quick reminder about how great our movement can be when it works together, take 3 minutes now to watch the below video for a beautiful summary, by GetUp members, of some of the amazing things you helped achieve in 2012:

https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/2012/thanks-for-2012/getup-in-2012

Herb Alpert, in 2012, more than 600,000 GetUp members banded together, chipping-in and turning out when it would have been easy to stay home. We didn't pick the easy fights. You went up against the most powerful forces in Australia; politicians from all parties, powerful lobby groups and some of the wealthiest corporations in this country.

Some people are saying the writing is already on the wall, but our movement wouldn't exist if we believed that. This year will see a tightly fought election, and the outcome - in the house and the Senate - is up for grabs. There's so much more at stake than who is elected. This is a year when public debate on the issues we most care about will be at its peak and together, we can change the tenor and outcomes of this election.

At the last two federal elections, GetUp members have run the largest independent campaigns Australia has ever seen. We've had more than 15,000 volunteers on the ground, distributed over 2 million issue scorecards, run successful High Court and Federal Court actions that gave over 169,000 Australians the chance to vote, and run the most effective issue advertising in Australia.

That's because we understand that politics is too important to be left to politicians, it takes all of us. So let's stride into 2013, bigger and better than ever, fighting to advance the issues we care about and defend the ground we've already gained. Together, we can make 2013 our best year ever.Click here to watch what our movement is made of.

Subscribe in a reader

What the Boom Won’t Leave Behind: Mining literature - Malcolm Knox

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 01:11:00 +0000

http://www.themonthly.com.au/mining-literature-what-boom-won-t-leave-behind-malcolm-knox-7112

Some of Australia’s best-known mining stories are about non-miners. Lewis Lasseter’s quest for the mighty reef of gold he saw, and lost, in Central Australia is a white man’s dreaming. Lasseter’s only rival as a subject for mining books is Lang Hancock, who seemed to embody a rough-hewn Westralian mining type yet was actually a private-schooled son of well-heeled pastoralists, a promoter and paper-dealer who only ever operated one mine, the blue asbestos seam at Wittenoom that would become the most lethal industrial disaster in Australian history. The most famed corporate story of Australian mining is Poseidon, the little nickel explorer whose share price went from a dollar to $280 in the mad summer of 1969–70. Poseidon gave its name to a boom, yet it was another non-miner, delisted in 1976 without having dug up anything of note other than its suspect and misrepresented drill samples.

The literature of mining, such as it is, faces this unique challenge: though the industry made Australia – made its roads, its railways, its ports, its towns and its cities – it lacks heroes, and in an existential sense seems inhuman. Aside from instants of discovery, mining has been the work of corporations rather than individuals. Even the discoverers are often compromised. Edward Hargraves found gold at Ophir, but then got himself a government job and spent his days fighting legal battles with his original prospecting partners who claimed he had defrauded them. Charles Rasp, discoverer of Broken Hill, packed up for Adelaide and Europe with his sweetheart Agnes, who lived a baroque life among the German aristocracy after Rasp faded away. Arthur Bayley and Paddy Hannan discovered Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie respectively, and soon left. John Campbell Miles, who found Mount Isa’s riches, disappeared for so long that he was, for decades, believed to be dead.

In their place came the faceless conglomerates of capital and expertise necessary to extract the minerals, refine and convert them if possible, or simply ship them out. If Australia’s mining history has leaders, they were magnates and managers, such as the Scotsman John Leslie Urquhart, who lost millions of pounds’ worth of mines in the Russian Revolution before saving Mount Isa; Guillaume Delprat and Essington Lewis, masters of efficiency and metallurgy in Broken Hill; James Crotty, the querulous soul who promoted Mount Lyell to greatness when he wasn’t battling for his reputation; and his rival Bowes Kelly, who led both BHP and Mount Lyell. Compared with explorers and bushrangers and soldiers, these men provide scant raw material for myth-making.

In this vacuum lies just one comprehensive history of Australian mining, published 49 years ago. Geoffrey Blainey’s The Rush That Never Ended grew out of the commissioned company histories he wrote about Mount Lyell, Mount Isa and Broken Hill. His deep research and rhetorical panache raised his work above the standard of the form; and it is instructive, looking back, to see how liberal the company executives were when it came to allowing Blainey to provide reasonably even-handed accounts. Yet, well written as his mining books are, they are marked by their origins. They lean to the mining companies’ side in labour disputes, and were written at a time, and in a mindset, that did not appreciate the larger questions of mining’s negative legacy on indigenous-owned land and on the natural environment.

The title of Blainey’s big history bespeaks an optimism that did not necessarily spread outside the industry. There were times when the rush did end. Between World War I and the 1950s, mining receded into the background of Australian life as the nation pursued a doomed dream of becoming a manufacturing power. The rush during which Blainey was writing, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, was soon to end in tears. The writer who found a better way into Australians’ insecurities about mining was perhaps Banjo Paterson: “I saw bank booms, land booms, silver booms, Northern Territory booms, and they all had one thing in common – they always burst.”

This anxiety is still the tense thread running through our mining narrative. What does a mining boom leave behind? Primary-school children around the country are taken to see the great monuments of mining, Bathurst and Ballarat, Mount Isa and Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie, and also their shadows, Hill End and Clunes, Duchess and Silverton and White Feather. This duality, of surviving inland cities and ghost towns, is the story of mining in a nutshell, and part of the reason for our deficit of national mining myths. Which is mining’s true legacy? The cities, the railways and roads, the dams and schools and hospitals, or the ghost towns, the poisoned streams and dust diseases, the dispossession of indigenous owners? If it’s both, how do we reconcile the opposites?

Erik Eklund’s informative Mining Towns (UNSW Press; $49.99) seeks to divine the future by looking at the history of six towns built on mining: Broken Hill, Mount Morgan, Queenstown, Port Pirie, Mount Isa and Kambalda. The longevity of Broken Hill and Mount Isa has been built on both the size of their lodes and the sense of community that grew from miners and managers negotiating a balance between fairness and productivity in isolation from the capitals. Queenstown, at the foot of Mount Lyell, had probably the best record of company welfarism, and Mount Morgan had its own independence, yet both have been reduced to remnants because their resources were exhausted. Port Pirie, as an industrial town, doesn’t quite fit the mould, yet Eklund uses its connection with Broken Hill – BHP moved its smelters to Port Pirie in its earliest days, beginning that company’s desertion of its home town – to underline his main thesis, which is that these towns are connected by a strong historical story, separate from that of the capital cities. Rather than seeing mining towns as distant feeders of profit and raw material to the capitals, Eklund traces the ‘horizontal’ connections between them. Broken Hill money, for instance, was instrumental in the growth of Mount Lyell, Port Pirie and Mount Isa. Engineers trained in the schools of mining at Broken Hill and on the Victorian goldfields spread their expertise nationwide. Mining families spent their lives moving between these towns and never living in the capitals. A kind of inland folk culture, formed around progress associations, churches, temperance societies, mining schools and trade union activism, replicated itself as the organic template of each of these towns.

Kambalda, south of Kalgoorlie, stands slightly outside this narrative because it is smaller and more recent than the others. Kambalda was the company town that Western Mining Corporation built after its nickel strike at Lake Lefroy in 1966. Unlike the Poseidons of the subsequent sharemarket boom, WMC was able to turn its discoveries into paying mining fields and a well thought-out modernist town at a remarkable pace. Yet Kambalda, with its Radburn-style town planning and elegant landscaping, has become more of a cautionary tale than an example for future mining booms. The very rapidity and efficiency of the extraction of minerals in our time militates against the slow, organic, patient growth of another Mount Isa or Broken Hill.

Paul Cleary homes in on this in the second of his books on the current boom. Cleary’s work, alongside books such as Dirty Money by Matthew Benns (William Heinemann; $34.95) and What the Frack? by Paddy Manning (UNSW Press; $4.99), provides a counter-narrative to the story of surging national wealth told by company and government financial reports. In Too Much Luck (Black Inc; $24.95), Cleary traced the growth of ‘Dutch disease’ in Australia – the erosion of manufacturing and other industries that suffer from a high dollar and over-investment in mining – and criticised the Australian government for failing to ensure the preservation of the wealth from the boom through fairer taxation and the sequestering of profits in a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund. In Mine-Field (Black Inc; $24.99), Cleary advocates greater regulation of the dark side of the boom, in particular the effects on agriculture of coal seam gas extraction and the effects on communities of fly-in fly-out (FIFO) and drive-in drive-out (DIDO) workforces.

Reading Cleary alongside Eklund, you cannot help asking what would happen if a Broken Hill or Mount Isa were discovered today. You would conclude that the least likely outcome would be the establishment of a century of communal life. Mount Isa limped along for 30 years before it made a profit. Broken Hill’s mining output dribbled from the 1920s to the 1960s before the town boomed again and hit its historic population high of about 31,000. In both cases, the towns, their people and, crucially, the mining companies battled on through decades of low commodities prices and metallurgical problems. There is an awe-inspiring marathon persistence in these companies and their workforces.

Would such a thing happen in today’s iron ore boom towns? Businessman Russell McKnight tells Cleary:

Karratha should be the Dallas of Australia. The industry should be run from up there. If it was 50 years ago, you would be turning that into a city. There’s a huge opportunity to develop the northwest in a sustainable way – they have got gas as well as iron ore.

Instead, Karratha and the other resources towns of the Pilbara have FIFO and inbuilt obsolescence. Cleary writes:

Instead of building new towns, as they did until the mid-1980s, mining companies now fly workers in from major cities and regional towns. As many as 100,000 mining workers live this way, and most of the projects are being designed around FIFO workforces. From the company perspective, FIFO offers an efficient and highly flexible model that removes the need for huge investment in building towns that one day may become ghosts.

The other end of the FIFO chain is in places like Margaret River, where the mining workers’ families live. Due to the impermanent populations and the contingency of people’s lives, there is a hollowing-out at both ends of the FIFO chain. In the Pilbara, workers work; in Margaret River, they shut down and relax. In both towns – as in the well-documented locations of the Bowen Basin in Queensland – there is a chronic shortage of volunteer community services such as charities, sporting clubs and rural fire brigades. Meanwhile, the pre-existing communities are pushed to the margins as rising rents and prices make the towns unaffordable for anyone except company-subsidised temporary workers.

Mining companies themselves would no doubt dispute Cleary’s account and point to their investments in town infrastructure. Rio Tinto, the biggest iron ore miner in the Pilbara, built Paraburdoo in the 1970s and has contributed many millions of dollars to roads, parks, schools and medical clinics in order to attract workers. Cleary’s books, as works of impassioned advocacy, do not aim to give the most thoroughly balanced view. But his main point still holds: governments do not intend to take overarching responsibility for the future of communities and the environment. They trust in self-regulation and hope for the best.

That Karratha will not turn into a Broken Hill or Mount Isa, let alone a Dallas, is due to fundamental changes in the nature of mining. As Rio Tinto’s recently announced shift to driverless trains illustrates, mining is an increasingly mechanised, decreasingly labour-intensive industry. Efficiencies are better served through highly flexible workforces. Gina Rinehart, should she ever become a miner herself by developing her Roy Hill iron ore deposit, would do so with a modern-day equivalent of the coolies and Kanakas who were brought into north Queensland in the 19th century. Guest-visa employees are the ultimate flexible workforce. During the 2008 financial crisis, the big miners laid off workers with savage speed and intensity. The same happened during the September 2012 iron ore price panic. Flexibility and efficiency are opposed to the dogged, humane persistence that kept the great mining towns going between booms.

The other telling factor, among the labour force that does exist, is the 12-hour shift that came into mining in the 1990s. The 12-hour shift crushes community life. Eklund recounts an ex-miner returning to Kambalda asking why the town was so quiet. He was told, “Everybody is either working or asleep.” Winning the eight-hour day was one of the first priorities of the miners’ trade unions more than a hundred years ago. The flow-on from an eight-hour day was that miners’ wives moved into the towns, children were raised, schools were built, and family and communal life evolved. The 12-hour shift, designed to facilitate FIFO and DIDO timetables, has done much to kill that. Cleary writes: “In the space of 15 years, the mining industry has rolled back a century of industrial relations progress by creating a business model that would impress Henry Ford.”

Perhaps the mining town that really warrants study today is Perth. Rio Tinto runs its iron ore mines from a control centre beside Perth Airport. Technicians sit at consoles and operate machines thousands of kilometres away. A future can be imagined where the mining town is itself a virtual construct, an office in a capital city with a minimal workforce on site. This does have one clear virtue: no more Wittenooms, no more black spit. The virtues of Broken Hill and Mount Isa must be weighed against the decades of lead dust floating through children’s bedrooms. Mechanised mining is a healthier business, even taking into account the uptick in road fatalities that Cleary notes, a result of tired DIDO workers driving long distances after 12-hour shifts.

The other argument that the miners may put forward is the big-picture instability of their markets. This is well illustrated in David Uren’s excellent primer on Australia’s relationship with China, The Kingdom and the Quarry (Black Inc; $29.95). Uren places the iron ore boom in the context of the two countries’ political, cultural and strategic ties. Not a book about mining per se, it nevertheless provides valuable and well-written background on the boom, especially when Uren tells the story of the iron ore price negotiations that led to the conviction of Rio Tinto’s negotiator Stern Hu and others, and the abandonment of the benchmark iron ore pricing system. Uren is a sanguine observer, critical of American paranoia over China and of Australia when it has echoed those fears. He situates Australian attitudes to its largest trading partner between the poles of “the two Chinas in the Australian mind: the bottomless market and the menacing other”.

This is another way of sketching the general Australian insecurity about mining. How reliable is it, and how must we find a path between exploiting its potential while the profits are there and being left high, dry and over-capitalised when they are not? A case study may be found in events subsequent to Uren’s publication in June. He praises the miners and the Chinese buyers for taking the leap from stable benchmark ore contracts to a more fluid scheme based on spot prices, and over the past four years this would have certainly worked in the miners’ favour. But, as the September price plunge showed, it can also bring the higher-cost miners undone. That is the market, but sadly for the workforce of Fortescue Metals Group and some other miners, a free-floating market is another reason not to settle in for a long future.

Eklund writes gloomily:

Fly-in-fly-out workers will not build a Broken Hill or a Queenstown, or even a company town such as Kambalda. The temporary camps and dongas will probably not be the subject of nostalgic reminiscence, and are unlikely to leave any substantial material remains. Space has been truly mastered by capital, but at what human cost?

The human cost will remain hard for Australians not only to quantify, but to conceptualise. The stories of mining will be more and more abstract, while sideshows such as Andrew Forrest’s tightrope act and the soap opera of the House of Hancock might provide entertainment but little insight into the real business of mining. The human cost is not easy to evaluate when the humans involved are an indistinguishable sea of day-glo and navy blue overalls controlled by vast logistical organisations and the disembodied power of international capital. Judith Wright’s satirical 1969 poem about mining, ‘The True Religion’, ends “The buck’s the thing.” It’s the bottom line of the poem, the bottom line of an industry, and insofar as that industry continues in its queer way to define the life of the nation, the bottom line for most of us.

Subscribe in a reader

A Dark Victory: Climate denialism, How vested interests defeated climate science: Robert Manne

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 01:06:00 +0000

http://www.themonthly.com.au/how-vested-interests-defeated-climate-science-dark-victory-robert-manne-5853

Some 20 years ago, climate scientists arrived at the conclusion that the vast acceleration in the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution was causing the temperature of the Earth to rise. Almost all agreed that we were facing a genuine crisis. Some came to believe that we were facing a catastrophe deeper than any other in the history of the human species. James Hansen of NASA, perhaps the pre-eminent climate scientist in the world, argues in Storms of My Grandchildren that if over the coming decades and centuries we continue to exploit all the fossil fuels that have lain under the surface of the Earth for hundreds of millions of years – all the coal, oil, natural gas and tar sands that have been or are yet to be discovered – then inevitably all the polar ice on Earth will melt, raising the level of the oceans by 75 metres and turning the planet into an alien, barren and unrecognisable place. He contends we have already passed certain “tipping points”.

So far nations and the international ‘community’ have failed conspicuously to rise to the challenge posed by these dangers. Since the Rio Earth Conference of 1992, which initiated the search for an international agreement, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by 40% or more. At Kyoto in 1997, a first, modest agreement was reached. It did nothing to prevent the pace of emissions increasing. Since the failure of the Copenhagen conference in 2009 to find a replacement for Kyoto, there has been no prospect of any new international agreement. Nothing was expected from the conference held at Rio in June on the 20th anniversary of the initial international gathering. Nothing was achieved. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker has captured perfectly the world’s response so far to the warning issued by climate scientists 20 years ago: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

As greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, as evidence of global warming has continued to grow, as the unwillingness of the world to act to curb emissions has become increasingly clear, a determination not to notice the looming catastrophe has taken hold of large parts of the population. At one level, this determination is psychological – the incapacity of a society of consumers to accept the need to sacrifice even a part of material prosperity to ensure the wellbeing of the Earth. At another level, the determination is political – the willingness of large numbers of people to listen to those who are telling them that the group of experts upon whom they customarily rely, the relevant cadre of trained and published scientists, have comprehensively got things wrong.

For reasonable citizens there ought to be no question easier to answer than whether or not human-caused global warming is real and is threatening the future of the Earth. Thousands of climate scientists in a variety of discrete disciplines have been exploring the issue for decades. They have reached a consensual conclusion whose existence is easily demonstrated. Every authoritative national scientific body in the world supports the idea of human-caused global warming. So does one of the most remarkable collaborative achievements in the history of science – the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in which the research findings of the world’s leading climate scientists, as outlined in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, are periodically presented to and then accepted by the governments of the world.

If a citizen was not convinced by this alone, three studies have been conducted that reveal an overwhelming core consensus. In 2004, Naomi Oreskes published in Science the result of her examination of the abstracts of every article in the world’s leading scientific journals published between 1993 and 2003 that was concerned with global climate change. There were 928 articles. Not one challenged the core consensus. In 2009, two scientists from the University of Chicago published in Eos the result of a survey they conducted among a group they called “Earth scientists”. They discovered that among those who called themselves climate scientists and who had published recently in the field, 97.4% agreed with the proposition that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures”. And, in 2010, the eminent climate scientist Stephen Schneider revealed in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that 195 (97.5%) of the 200 most published climate scientists were convinced by the evidence of anthropogenic climate change.

Consensus does not imply unanimity. Nor does it suggest that climate scientists are in agreement about the most difficult questions concerning either the past or the future – their calculations of temperature over the past centuries and millennia or their precise predictions about the pace and the nature of the changes that will be visited upon the Earth and its inhabitants as a consequence of the ever-accelerating injection of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It should go without saying that the existence of a consensus on the core issue of human-caused global warming does not provide any answers to the diabolically difficult public policy questions that arise for nations and the international community. What is clear, however, is that a rational citizen has little alternative but to accept the consensual core position of climate scientists. Discussion of this point should long ago have ended. That it has not is the most persuasive possible example of the feebleness of reason, the futility of argument and the failure of politics.

There are three possible words to describe the political movement that has sought to convince citizens to reject the core conclusion of climate scientists: scepticism, contrarianism and denialism. ‘Scepticism’ suggests an open mind. The minds of those who dispute the consensual core of climate science are closed. ‘Contrarianism’ is a term commonly used, even by some of those who are best informed, like the climate scientist Michael Mann. ‘Contrarian’ might be the right term for the small minority among climate scientists who have not accepted the consensual conclusion of their fellow scientists. The contrarian is a loner, perhaps cranky, but also genuinely independent of mind. Most of those who dispute the consensual conclusions of the climate scientists are not mavericks or heretics but orthodox members of a tightly knit group whose natural disposition is not to think for themselves. To dispute the conclusion drawn by climate scientists involves for them neither the open mind of the sceptic nor the cranky independence of the contrarian but the determination – psychological or political or both – to deny what those who know what they are talking about have to say. They are denialists.

Political denialism is not a general political movement of the world or even of the West. Recently, in Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism, James Painter outlined the results of a study of the profile of climate change denial in the press of six countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, India and China – in two three-month blocks of time – early 2007, and late 2009 to early 2010. Painter selected a quality newspaper on the Left and on the Right in five of the six countries studied. (China, of course, has no right-wing press.) In the official Chinese press and in both the right-leaning and left-leaning quality press in France, Brazil and India there was almost no sign of climate change denial. It was, however, a major element in the climate change journalism in both the US and the UK. Significantly, the profile of climate change denial was much greater both in the US and the UK in the later period. In addition, although the coverage of climate change scepticism was reasonably evenly spread between the right- and left-wing papers, the kind of coverage was very different. In opinion pieces and editorials, overwhelmingly the voices of climate change denial were uncontested in the right-leaning press and contested or dismissed on the Left.

Painter’s survey and others like it show that, as a political phenomenon, climate change denialism has grown greatly over the past two or three years. It is predominantly a phenomenon of the Right. While climate change denial as a psychological phenomenon occurs across the West, as a high-profile political phenomenon it exists almost exclusively in the English-speaking democracies. And although it has spread to Canada, Australia and the UK, within the Anglosphere its place of origin and heartland is the US.

*

The American climate change denialist movement was organised quite rapidly in the late 1980s in response to two main developments. One was James Hansen’s unambiguous and dramatic evidence of human-caused global warming and what this meant for the future of the Earth, as delivered to Congress in 1988. The second was the creation, in the same year and under United Nations auspices, of the IPCC at the initiative of Bert Bolin, the scientist who had been a prime mover in the identification and solution of the cross-border problem of acid rain.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt is the most important account of the movement’s political and intellectual origins. They show that by the time the problem of global warming moved from a concern of scientists to the centre stage of national and international politics, a small group of sometimes highly accomplished right-wing scientists existed inside a pro-Reagan scientific think tank, the George C Marshall Institute. The most important were Frederick Seitz, S Fred Singer, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. By the late 1980s this group had already been involved in a series of set-piece battles with those they thought of as the anti-capitalist scientific Left – in particular, the Union of Concerned Scientists – over a series of health, strategic and environmental issues: tobacco; Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ missile defence program and the ‘nuclear winter’ controversy; acid rain and the thinning of the ozone layer. The Marshall Institute intellectuals were Hayekian neoliberals who regarded arguments about the need for government economic regulation to prevent harm to health and environment as socialism by stealth. They were ideologically predisposed to disregard any problem that mainstream scientists attributed to market failure. They were also Cold Warriors who had once supported the Vietnam War and the neoconservative hawkish policies of the early Reagan administration. As the Cold War drew to its end in the late 1980s, these intellectuals transferred their fears from Reds to Greens, that is to say from communism to environmentalism. Their mindset morphed easily from the Cold War to the culture war.

As is now well understood, the key insight of climate change denial was the political potency of a technique pioneered in the struggle over tobacco in which both Seitz and Singer had been deeply involved – the manufacture of doubt. The principle was outlined in a now famous memo by a public relations adviser to the tobacco industry in 1969: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.” The logic here was simple. To inhibit government regulation of tobacco or chlorofluorocarbons or fossil fuels, the commercial interests involved did not need to demonstrate that their product was safe. All they needed to do was to create confusion and uncertainty in the public mind. George Monbiot, the Guardian journalist, discovered documents of a phoney grassroots movement, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, created in 1993 by the tobacco company Philip Morris. They showed that the ASSC intended to counter claims about the dangers of passive smoking by linking its propaganda with other instances of “junk science”, like global warming. A decade later, in preparation for the 2002 Congressional elections, the tobacco strategy of manufacturing doubt was explicitly linked to global warming in an infamous piece of political advice offered to the Bush Republican Party by the spinmaster Frank Luntz: “The scientific debate is closing but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science … You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” The tobacco strategy was likely to be particularly effective when applied to global warming because the scope of the proposed actions was so vast and the potential interference in the lifestyle of the general public so real.

In all contemporary societies the authority and prestige of science stands high. Of necessity, the struggle over global warming had primarily to be fought on the battlefield of science. As virtually all those with true expertise in the field of climate science were convinced that human-caused global warming was happening and that its potential for catastrophe was real, the climate change denialists had to construct an alternative scientific community, or what Oreskes and Conway call a “scientific Potemkin village”.

One method of building this village was to locate and then to heavily promote an alternative cadre of scientific experts who could be mobilised to create the necessary confusion and uncertainty. In the early days of the denialist campaign, the fossil fuel industry worked closely with a handful of climate change scientific mavericks – Richard Lindzen, Robert Balling, Patrick Michaels, Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon. One or two were genuinely distinguished climate scientists, like the fanatically anticommunist Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others were second-raters in the field of climate science. As journalist Ross Gelbspan revealed in his pioneering 1997 study of climate change denial, The Heat Is On, Michaels and Balling received hundreds of thousands of dollars from coal and oil corporations. Greenpeace USA conducted detailed research into the funding that Soon, of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had received since 2001 from fossil fuel corporations and conservative think tanks or foundations for his denialist-friendly publications on solar influence on climate change or on the resilience of the polar bear. The total came to over $1 million. The high profile of this handful of scientists over two decades has been critical to the success of the denialist movement. As careful research has shown, they have testified to Congress as frequently as the mainstream scientists. They have conjured the illusion of a hotly contested and evenly divided scientific debate, or what one scholar has called the “duelling scientists” false narrative.

This is not the only way the denialist Potemkin village has been built. James Hoggan in Climate Cover-up shows just how industrious the denialists have been in creating and promoting phoney scientist public statements. In 1999, the Global Warming Petition Project, known as the ‘Oregon Petition’, was organised by an obscure chemist and fundamentalist Christian, Arthur Robinson, and launched by Frederick Seitz. Eventually it was signed by 30,000 “scientists”, the overwhelming majority with an undergraduate degree unconnected to climate science. In 1995, the Leipzig Declaration was launched, promoted by S Fred Singer. Many of the supposed signatories had never heard of it. Many others had no climate science expertise. In 2007, the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank, published a list of ‘500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares’. Many scientists named on the list were furious, even “horrified”. Sometimes the efforts to mislead were astonishingly crude. One article, co-written by Robinson’s son, Noah, and Willie Soon, was printed in the exact layout of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In answer to the IPCC, the denialists created their own ersatz alternative, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

Yet there have been more serious attempts to sow confusion. One of the most powerful arguments of mainstream scientists is the near-total absence of peer-reviewed denialist publications. An obvious denier response was to characterise the peer-review process as corrupt and dominated by cronyism. Another was to create friendly peer-reviewed journals, like Energy and Environment. Yet another was to infiltrate first-rank journals. A New Zealander, Chris de Freitas, was appointed as an editor of the prestigious journal, Climate Research. Odd articles began appearing. Eventually one by Baliunas and Soon was published in 2003. It attempted to reinstate one of the by now standard myths of the denialist movement, namely that temperatures were higher during the “Medieval Warm Period” than in the past 20 years. The science was shoddy. Four reviewers had independently argued against its publication. The newly appointed editor-in-chief, Hans von Storch, was denied the right by the German publisher to print an editorial repudiating the article and resigned. Nonetheless the publication had done its work. It entered denialist cyberspace. Philip Cooney, a White House employee and former fossil fuel industry lobbyist, even recommended it to Vice President Dick Cheney as the knockdown refutation of the paper of which Mann was lead author, which was illustrated with the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that calculated the world’s temperatures over the past thousand years.

As important as the building of the scientific Potemkin village has been the effort to undermine the credibility of leading mainstream climate scientists through protracted campaigns of character assassination, which Mann has called the ‘Serengeti strategy’ – hunting down supposedly vulnerable targets one by one. An early and infamous instance was the campaign launched in 1995 by the Marshall Institute Cold Warriors, Singer and Seitz, against Ben Santer, a distinguished young climate scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Santer was a lead author for one of the chapters of the IPCC’s second assessment report in 1995. Essentially, because he had summarised studies that had been completed but not yet published and had edited his chapter under instruction to align it with the style of the others – he was asked to remove a concluding summary because in other chapters summaries were found only in the introductions – he was accused by Singer in the pages of Science and by Seitz in the Wall Street Journal of removing material and of scientific fraud. Seitz wrote that in “more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community … I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process”. Singer and Seitz were supported by the most important denialist lobby of the 1990s, the Global Climate Coalition, which published a report accusing Santer of “institutionalized scientific cleansing”. Seitz and Singer had brought to climate science the unmistakable mental and rhetorical habits of the Cold War, where opponents were enemies and differences were deliberate deceptions. Santer never really recovered from their attacks.

This was merely a beginning. As he explains in his poised and well-tempered Science as a Contact Sport, Stephen Schneider was a target throughout his career. In 1971, he had speculated about the possibility of global cooling. Forty years later, the know-nothing denialist and conservative columnist George Will, dismissed him as the “environmentalist for all temperatures”. More damaging was the persistence in cyberspace of a calumny based on the distortion of a comment Schneider had made in 1989 in an interview for the magazine Discover. He had spoken about the tension between his obligation as a scientist towards nuanced truthfulness and his responsibility as a human being to fight for the future wellbeing of the Earth. One passage of the interview read: “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” A journalist published the first sentence and omitted the second. For 20 years, on this basis, Schneider was defamed on denialist websites as a self-confessed liar.

He got off lightly. The attacks on Hansen have been remorseless and ruthless, especially once he became politically active. Michael Mann chronicles the process in fine detail in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. After his ‘hockey stick’ graph morphed from an illustration in a scientific paper to an icon of the climate change campaign, Mann became the sworn enemy of the denialists, the subject of a politically inspired Congressional investigation, never-ending vicious lampooning, public heckling, constant email abuse and a plausible death threat. What was interesting in all this was the steady rise in the degree of the verbal violence. Santer was merely accused of deception and fraud. After the ‘Climategate’ scandal broke in November 2009 – the leaking of over a thousand emails between climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – Marc Morano, the denialist operative and the political friend of our own former Senator Nick Minchin, argued that the climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged”. Even he was outdone by an ultra-right wing blogger, the late Andrew Breitbart, who called for “capital punishment for Dr James Hansen. Climategate is high treason.”

Naturally in a matter where so much was at stake for the fossil fuel industry, if doubt was to be manufactured and inaction engineered, serious money would be needed. The money was found both directly through fossil fuel interests and indirectly through wealthy conservative foundations whose involvement was as much a matter of libertarian anti-regulatory ideology as it was of commercial considerations. During the 1990s, probably the most important sources of denialist funds were American coal and electricity corporations like the Western Fuels Association, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association or the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of 50 or so corporations and trade associations. In the late 1990s, this alliance fell apart, beginning with the defection of BP. The largest source of funds for the denial campaign was now probably ExxonMobil. By 2006, its support for climate change denial had become so notorious that it was chastised in a letter from the head of Great Britain’s Royal Society, which was leaked to the press. Although in 2008 ExxonMobil announced that its funding of denial had ended, evidence soon emerged that this was not entirely true. Nonetheless, in recent years the most important sources of funds for climate change denial have most likely not been fossil fuel corporations but vastly wealthy and profoundly conservative foundations like Scaife and John M Olin.

The earliest study of climate change denial – Gelbspan’s The Heat Is On – offers a fairly simple and rather characteristic materialist explanation of the funding: “A major battle is underway: In order to survive economically, the biggest enterprise in human history – the worldwide oil and coal industry – is at war with the ability of the planet to sustain civilization.” Such an interpretation probably underestimates the importance of ideology – the anti-regulatory, anti-state market fundamentalism that shapes the funding agendas of the conservative foundations.

In recent years, massive financial contributions to climate change denialism and many other conservative causes have been made by the three foundations managed by Charles and David Koch. In the case of the Kochs, there is no need to choose between the material and ideological explanations of the millions they have injected into the cause of climate change denial. On the one hand, their vast fortune comes originally and still predominantly from oil and gas. On the other, as the sons of a right-wing oil man who did business in the Soviet Union, whose anticommunism was grounded in his firsthand observation of the terror under Stalin, and who became, following his return to the US, a founding member of the John Birch Society, they have remained faithful to their father’s heritage: deeply ideological anti-socialist, anti-regulation, anti-statist, low-tax libertarians.

The corporations and the conservative foundations sought to conceal their direct involvement by funding anti–global warming organisations, such as the dozens of market fundamentalist think tanks that became a vital dimension of the American political landscape during the Reagan era and beyond, and are at the centre of the climate change denial campaign. A study called ‘Defeating Kyoto’, by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, showed that in the build-up to the 1997 Kyoto conference, these think tanks – Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Marshall Institute – produced a large amount of denialist material on their websites, described with unusual wit as “consciousness lowering activity” and “the social construction of non-problematicity”. Another study, ‘The Organization of Denial’, whose lead author was Peter Jacques, looked at all the anti-environmental books published in the US between 1972 and 2005. Of the 141 such books, 132 were connected to one of the right-wing think tanks. These books were published at an ever-accelerating pace – six in the 1970s, 14 in the 1980s, 72 in the 1990s, and 49 between 2000 and 2005. The conservative think tanks also provided fellowships for many denialist scientists and helped arrange their access to the media.

Even more powerful than the right-wing think tanks were critically placed members of Congress who could assist in the prosecution of the anti–global warming struggle. Three names stand out: Dana Rohrabacher and Joe Barton, both members of the House of Representatives, and Senator James Inhofe. Inhofe’s greatest claim to fame is his description of climate change science as possibly the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. After Climategate broke, in imitation of an earlier senator, Joe McCarthy, Inhofe called for the criminal prosecution of 17 climate scientists. Rohrabacher was chairman of the committee on Energy and Environment following the resurgence of the Republican Party in the 1994 Congressional elections. As George E Brown, the ranking minority member of the committee, demonstrated in a prophetic article, ‘Environmental Science Under Siege’, at the 1995 hearings of this committee it was Rohrabacher who was primarily responsible for the partisan politicisation of climate science and for the injection of the voices of denialist scientists into the centre of American national debate.

A decade later the situation had further deteriorated. At a time when Republican environmentalists were fast becoming a ‘vanishing tribe’, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, Joe Barton, summoned Michael Mann to appear before Congress in 2006 and then acted as if he had summoned not a climate scientist but a criminal conspirator. Barton demanded detailed records covering every aspect of Mann’s scientific career – financial support, data archives, computer codes, evidence of his attempts to replicate research. He then commissioned an inquiry into Mann’s science by a politically friendly statistician, Edward Wegman.

Climate science was by now one of the most fiercely contested fronts in the increasingly bitter American culture wars. As in all such battles, the role of the media would prove critical. In ‘Balance as Bias’, a 2004 study that became famous because of its appearance in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, Maxwell and Jules Boykoff showed that by adhering to the journalistic convention of balance, between 1988 and 2002 the American prestige press had unintentionally aided the denialist cause. They had provided their readers with a misleading impression of a more or less equal divide between the overwhelming majority of climate scientists who were convinced that human-caused climate change was occurring and the handful of mavericks who were not. Maxwell Boykoff replicated the study later in the decade. He found that by 2005 and 2006, the prestige press, as opposed to the tabloid press, had replaced its earlier “balanced” coverage with accurate reports of the state of the science (though he had missed the drift towards denialism of the Wall Street Journal via its opinion pieces and editorials). However, when he surveyed American television, he found that denialist voices were common. With the ever-expanding influence of the Rupert Murdoch–Roger Ailes innovation, the 24/7 conservative populist propaganda cable channel, Fox News, they would become increasingly so.

More importantly, it was becoming clear that the most effective denialist media weapon was not the newspapers or television but the internet. A number of influential websites, like Watts Up With That?, Climate Skeptic and Climate Depot, were established. One of this online network’s early victims was Michael Mann. For this reason, he developed an excellent understanding of how the denialist disinformation distribution system operated. In The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars he analyses in some detail the attempted debunking of the paleoscientist Keith Briffa’s Yamal tree-ring analysis by one of the most remorseless denialists, the retired Canadian mining executive Stephen McIntyre:

First, bloggers manufacture unfounded criticisms and accusations. Then their close allies help spread them … Ross McKitrick writes an op-ed piece in the right-wing National Post more or less accusing Briffa of fraud … Individuals such as Marc Morano, Anthony Watts … UK Telegraph blogger James Delingpole … spread the allegations through the Internet echo chamber. That is all the justification that apparently is needed for commentators such as Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun to eventually propel the unfounded accusations onto the pages of widely read newspapers.

By the process Mann describes, a confected controversy of utter obscurity about ancient tree rings was presented within hours in living rooms on the other side of the world as knockdown proof that all of climate change science was a fraud.

Through the denialist websites a simple, endlessly repeated standard narrative had by now taken shape. Climate scientists, who were called “warmists”, were involved in a sinister conspiracy. They were deliberately conjuring an environmental panic that they knew was mendacious, and were lining their pockets with research grants at taxpayers’ expense. In addition, on the more extreme edges of the denialist movement, people like Marc Morano and Lord Monckton argued that climate scientists were engaged in an international conspiracy to destroy capitalism and to impose socialism and world government upon the unsuspecting masses. On some websites the Jewish ethnicity of some climate scientists was duly noted.

By now an ugly and altogether unrestrained language appeared on websites and in comments responding to articles that criticised denialists or merely accepted the conclusions of the climate scientists. This verbal violence is to the personal computer what road rage is to the motor car. No one knows how much is spontaneous and how much is somehow organised.

What is known is the demographic profile of the main contributors. A fascinating academic study of the American Gallup poll over ten years called ‘Cool Dudes’, once more by McCright and Dunlap, showed that ageing conservative white males are many times more likely than any other segment of the population to be denialists. The denialism has nothing to do with lack of education or ignorance. The more such people think they know about climate change the more convinced they are that the orthodox science is a fraud. To judge by the flood of vitriol that inevitably follows any online defence of climate science or criticism of the denialists, a goodly part of this group is very angry indeed. They seem to dislike being told that industrial capitalism is threatening the wellbeing of the planet and – to choose my words deliberately – that man’s ambition to achieve mastery over the Earth has spiralled out of control.

The aim of the verbal violence is clearly intimidatory. Morano – the inspirer of the ‘swift boat’ advertisements that converted presidential candidate John Kerry from Vietnam hero to coward – by now routinely published the email addresses of climate scientists on his website, Climate Depot. By the time of Climategate, most had become accustomed to frequent deranged abuse and occasional death threats.

*

As late as 2009, most writers on the politics of climate change were convinced that the denialist movement would fail. In 2005, Ross Gelbspan told James Hoggan “the denial campaign was kaput”. In 2006, George Monbiot wrote in Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning: “After years of obfuscation, denial and lies about climate change, all but the most hardened recidivists in the US government are re-branding themselves as friends of the earth.” In 2008, Gwynne Dyer argued in Climate Wars “the denial industry is in full retreat”. Shortly after, in Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway concluded: “Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate … Maybe now the tide is turning.” Mann tells us that by 2009, even among the climate scientists, a “troubling complacency” could be observed; many believed that “the climate wars had been won”.

This turned out to be a mistake. Towards the end of 2009, two principal events occurred. The first had nothing to do with the denialists – the abject failure of the Copenhagen conference, where rational hope that the Kyoto Treaty would be replaced by some more effective international agreement died. The second was all their work. By that time, a new breed of denialists, most importantly Stephen McIntyre, had been pursuing several leading climate scientists remorselessly, searching for methodological or empirical mistakes in their work and demanding from them, frequently with a blizzard of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, the raw data from which their conclusions had been drawn and even the computer codes they had devised. As a result, a small number of minor errors were unearthed – in Michael Mann’s statistical work, for example, or in the Chinese weather station data that had been used in a seminal study of the urban heat island effect. As soon as a real or supposed error was discovered, an article was published in a journal as prestigious as could be found. And as soon as it was published, the error’s existence became known to the world through the denialist echo chamber. The political logic was captured perfectly by Johann Hari in the The Nation: “The climate scientists have to be right 100% of the time, or their 0.01% error [is used to show] they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01% of the time for their narrative … to be reinforced by the media.”

This strategy was highly effective. For the climate scientists, pursuit by McIntyre was probably a greater source of frustration and anxiety than Morano’s vile abuse or even Joe Barton’s attempted Congressional inquisitions. One of those pursued by McIntyre was Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit. On the eve of the Copenhagen conference more than a thousand private emails to and from climate science colleagues were somehow acquired and published on denialist websites. This coup immediately made its way to the front pages of the newspapers and the television news in countries where the long denialist campaign had already raised questions in the public mind about the reliability of climate science. The actions of the denialists had been very carefully planned. They had already found damaging sentences in the emails – like the one concerning the need to “hide the decline” in temperature, or the one which said, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” – whose meaning could be twisted to suggest the fraudulence of climate science. Some of the emails revealed the intense frustration of the scientists. One email suggested that if peer-reviewed journals published denialists, the status of those journals should be reconsidered. In another, anxiety about McIntyre-style FOI harassment led to Phil Jones’s foolish suggestion that certain emails might need to be deleted.

Many journalists accepted the language that denialists had used as their frame – Climategate, the “smoking gun”, the “final nail in the coffin”. Even the best informed climate change journalists – like Andrew Revkin of the New York Times and Fred Pearce of the Guardian – treated the accusations of the Climategate conspirators with a far greater seriousness than they deserved. George Monbiot even called for Phil Jones’s resignation. Months later, when the political damage was already done, Jones was exonerated by three separate enquiries (Monbiot duly published a retraction: “It was unfair to call for his resignation”). In a culture war of this kind, where the enemy is so ruthless and the stakes are so high, ill-judged overscrupulousness by decent people anxious to appear fair can do real harm.

By now the denialists were on a roll. A serious error was discovered in the most recent IPCC assessment – a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might melt by 2035. A few essentially trivial ones followed. ‘Glaciergate’ was born. Just as a few email comments had been used to discredit all climate scientists in Climategate, so was one foolish error used to discredit the entire work of the IPCC in Glaciergate.

It was obvious that climate change denialism had influenced Americans more than elsewhere. Yet it was only after the combination of Copenhagen and Climategate that the denialists’ political victory in the US became clear. According to Gallup’s annual opinion polls on global warming, in 2008, 35% of Americans thought the media was exaggerating the threat from global warming. By 2010, the number had risen to 48%. In 2008, 58% believed that global warming was caused by human beings while 38% attributed it to nature. By 2010, 50% blamed human activity and 46% blamed nature. A 20-point difference had been reduced to four. It had taken 20 years of work, but the triumph of doubt over reason had been secured.

Global warming had never been a major political priority of the American people but the issue now seemed to drop off the map. In the year to 2010, according to one survey, climate change coverage on the networks’ Sunday shows fell by 70%. An even more remarkable achievement of the denialist campaign was transformation of climate change in the American public mind from a question of science to one of ideology. In the 1990s, climate change disagreements between Democrats and Republicans were modest. By 2010, there was a 30–40% gap between Democrats and Republicans and between self-identified liberals and conservatives on all the fundamental global-warming questions. Most extreme were Tea Party supporters: half say that global warming is naturally caused, and one fifth that it is not happening at all.

Yet there is more to this question than the movement of public opinion. Following the 2010 Congressional election it became clear that the Republicans had become the first major political party in the Western world to be wholly captured by climate change denialism. In April 2011, a bill was introduced into the House of Representatives to overturn the findings of the Environmental Protection Authority about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions. It received unanimous Republican support. A Democrat amendment supporting the science received just one vote from a Republican. In 2008, the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, had been almost as fervent about the danger of climate change as Barack Obama. In the 2012 contest for the Republican candidacy, every contender was and indeed had to be a climate change denier. A once nearly bipartisan issue had by now been transformed into contested territory in the increasingly bitter American culture war being fought between the political parties.

This destroyed all possibility of American participation in the international struggle against global warming. In 2008, Obama pledged that he would lead the world struggle to combat climate change. The words ‘climate change’ now rarely pass his lips. As Michael Mann points out, in 2000 Bill Clinton based his State of the Union on the solidity of the consensual core of climate science; in his 2010 State of the Union, Obama argued: “I know that there are those who disagree … But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.” A once idealistic President had been neutralised by the bloody-minded ideological intransigence of the Republican Party and the denialism and indifference pervading the political culture. If Obama had honoured his promise to lead the world in the struggle against global warming the chance of serious progress would still have been minimal, but with America’s withdrawal it is certain in the near term at least that nothing serious can be achieved.

In June 2011, a reporter from the New York Times attended the annual conference in Washington at what was then the most important denialist organisation in the United States, the Heartland Institute. It had about it, she said, “the air of a victory lap”. The jubilation was warranted. The long war the denialist movement had fought against science and against reason, in the US and throughout the English-speaking world, had indeed achieved a famous victory. This is a victory that subsequent generations cursing ours may look upon as perhaps the darkest in the history of humankind.

    Cold Turkey
    Coal’s Next Alibi
    Comment
    Comment
    When the Wind Blows

    Global Warming (62), Carbon dioxide (14), Greenhouse gas emissions (15), Climate sceptics (8), Climate denialism (6), Climate science (2), Vested interests (3)

Subscribe in a reader

David Foster Wallace, In his own words @intlifemag

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words

The world of letters has lost a giant. We have felt nourished by the mournful graspings of sites dedicated to his memory ("He was my favourite" ~ Zadie Smith), and we grieve for the books we will never see. But perhaps the best tribute is one he wrote himself ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

This is the commencement address he gave to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. It captures his electric mind, and also his humility--the way he elevated and made meaningful, beautiful, many of the lonely thoughts that rattle around in our heads. The way he put better thoughts in our heads, too. (Many thanks to Marginalia.org for making this available.)

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE in his own words As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Picture credit: Steve Rhodes/flickr

See our Notes on a Voice on David Foster Wallace

Subscribe in a reader

Down With Big Gun @Gawker @drewmagary

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 22:38:00 +0000

http://gawker.com/5968807/down-with-big-gun

Drew Magary

Ron Cohen is the CEO of Sig Sauer, the company that produced one of the guns that was used in Friday's Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre. You have probably never heard of Ron Cohen before. I know I never have. I tried to find a decent picture of him this weekend, but I came up empty. He may as well not exist.

In the wake of the shootings, Cohen's name has appeared in a grand total of one Google alert. This is by design. You aren't supposed to know anything about Ron Cohen or about Sig Sauer. Every time a tragedy happens and you, Mr. Gun Control Advocate, decide to lash out at the NRA, or at "our national obsession with guns," or at the classic straw man hunter who needs a 50-bullet clip just to chase down a squirrel, you're doing Ron Cohen, Sig Sauer, and everyone else at Big Gun a huge favor.

One of the amazing things about the gun control debate in America is the remarkable success with which gun manufacturers—Sig Sauer, Glock, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, The Freedom Group (yes, it's called the fucking Freedom Group)—have been able to avoid the conversation altogether. When you think of Glock, you think of a gun, and not of the company behind it. That needs to change. We've shit on cigarette companies for lying about cigarettes. We've shit on Roger Goodell and the NFL for underplaying head injuries. We're even making inroads against the sneaky bastards at BIG SUGAR for making us all hopeless fatasses. But here is an industry—firearms manufacturing—that makes products whose deadliness is disputed by NO ONE, not even the people who treasure those products. And yet the executives and shadowy international holding company execs—whose job is to flood the world with as many of these weapons as possible—skate by cloaked in blessed anonymity. Wanna know why nothing ever gets done about gun laws here in the US? This is why.

Gun manufacturers have successfully managed to shift virtually all blame for lax gun laws in America onto their lobbyists and their customers. It's no coincidence that companies like Sig Sauer, Freedom Group and Glock (which also made one of the weapons used in the killings) are privately held. They strive for minimum transparency, and they have achieved it. The NRA, bless its heart, is a front—a perfect little whipping boy designed to weather all of your abuse so that Ron Cohen can drive to and from his office without a reporter shoving a microphone in front of his stupid fucking face. They have taken phrases like "Gun control" and "the Second Amendment" and crafted them into permanent, bulletproof diversions. They've done such a good job of shielding themselves that Sig Sauer doesn't even feel compelled to issue a public statement when one of its weapons is used in a mass tragedy. They don't have to express their regrets or spew some bullshit about being dedicated to making sure guns are used safely. Higher profile companies have to send out public apologies when they send out a bad tweet. Big Gun does nothing and doesn't have to. Isn't that remarkable?

Gun manufacturers profit off of mass violence in America. See for yourself. Every time a massacre happens, gun sales go through the roof because liberals cry out for gun control, and then conservatives flee to buy as many guns as possible just in case those shady folks in the GUBMINT come calling for their precious arms. They've succeeded in getting gun owners to disguise their love of shooting shit under a bullshit pretense of one day having to form a militia just in case Hitler II gets elected President. And they've succeeded in letting those people fight their flame wars for them. You have to hand it the gun industry, really. It's an ingenious little sales cycle they've created. Every massacre draws attention to the product, yet somehow NEVER to the people ultimately responsible for their production. It's always the hunter that takes the brunt of liberal ire. Or the redneck, or the guy at the gun show selling them secondhand, or Mike Huckabee saying something fucking stupid. Meanwhile, Ron Cohen eats his dinner uninterrupted.

In order to succeed in preventing future massacres, it would be wise to publicly hold these people accountable. Here's how:

    1. Do not feed the trolls. Never say the phrase "gun control" or get into a message board argument with Jimbo3421 on Politico ever again. You've done nothing. In fact, you've done exactly what you've been trained to do. You are playing your role to perfection.

    2. Re-brand the gun debate. The greatest PSA campaign in the history of advertising is the Truth campaign, which did away with the traditional "smoking is bad for you" ads that proved ineffective. Instead, what the "Truth" campaign did was demonize tobacco companies—NOT demonize tobacco or tobacco users—and say THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING YOU OVER. They are lying to you and trying to kill you and they are getting rich while doing it. When you change the language, you change people's perception of what's really at stake. Make this a crime issue, not an endless discussion about what guns MEAN to everyone.

    3. Exposure. I suggest you do everything you can to draw attention to Ron Cohen, or Freedom Group CEO George Kollitides (here's a photo to get you started). You're gonna have to work hard, because these people go out of their way to remain hidden from view. Do not send an angry letter to Wayne LaPierre. He eats those for breakfast. Send your letters to THESE men. Why are these men not under any scrutiny? Have you ever seen ANY of these fuckers brought up in front of a Congressional subcommittee? Someone needs to put a microphone in front of Ron Cohen and ask him, "What are you doing to make sure your guns aren't used to kill children?" Then we can all watch him fumble for a decent answer and then we can call him a prick. These men need to be made famous, far more famous than Adam Lanza. People need to camp out by their lawns smoking weed and holding up signs that say OCCUPY GUN STREET.

    4. Lawsuits. There's no point in going to a politician to help make your community safer. They're pussies, and many of them helped engineer lucrative government contracts for these companies to equip our armed forces and local police departments. Ultimately, money is the only language the gun industry really understands. Everything else is white noise. Cigarette companies were sued into oblivion. The NFL is currently doing everything short of renaming the sport "tag" to avoid punishing class action decisions. When Sig Sauer sends its products out into the world, their responsibility for them apparently ends. Why? You could argue that it's grossly negligent to create a fucking machine gun—to craft a weapon made for war and then sell it to civilians because it helps expand your market share—and then let it go whenever the wind may take it. At least, some hippie dippy "activist judge" might see it that way, and then people might be forced to actually do something. (Update: A reader has pointed out that gun manufacturers cannot be sued when their products are used in crimes.)

    That's what needs to happen. We don't need everyone to argue about the same shit they've always argued about. I wanna throw up, it all seems so pointless. I have a three kids and I would like to live in a country where I don't have to worry about them getting fucking shot in the head any time they head off to homeroom. I would like to live in a country where I don't hop on the web and see photos of grieving parents screaming in agony because they are enduring the kind of anguish that will black out everything else they ever say or do. Currently, this country doesn't fit the bill. This is not a safe place. And Ron Cohen—FUCKHEADED ASSHOLE RON COHEN WHOSE NAME SHOULD BE IN BRIGHT SHINY LIGHTS ABOVE TIMES SQUARE SO THAT EVERYONE KNOWS PRECISELY WHO MAKES THE GUNS THAT ARE USED TO KILL PEOPLE—he is a big reason why.

    Image by Jim Cooke.

Subscribe in a reader

Obama flags gun law reform at Newtown vigil @abcnews

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:55:00 +0000

h ttp://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-17/obama-attends-vigil-for-newtown-shooting-victims/4431506

Video: Obama addresses vigil for mass shooting victims (ABC News)
Related Story: Drum wrap: a tipping point on US gun control?
External Link: ABC Religion: The massacre of the innocents
Related Story: Obama to join services for school massacre victims
Related Story: Obama under pressure to act on gun control
Related Story: US urged to consider Australia's gun laws example
Audio: US urged to learn from Australia's gun laws (AM)

President Barack Obama told America that "we will have to change" as he flagged gun law reforms at a Newtown, Connecticut vigil for the children and teachers massacred at a local school.

Mr Obama was speaking at the end of a day of church services held to remember the 20 children - all aged six or seven - and six adults killed by gunman Adam Lanza at the Sandy Hook primary school on Friday.

Lanza's main weapon was a .223 calibre Bushmaster assault rifle - a civilian version of the US military's M4 - which was registered to his mother, and officials say some of his young victims' bodies were riddled with as many as 11 bullets.

In an emotional address to grieving families, first responders and other mourners at a Newtown high school, Mr Obama said he would use "whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this".

"Because what choice do we have? We can't accept events like this as routine," he told the interfaith service.

"Can we honestly say that we're doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm?

"Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?

"I've been reflecting on this for the last few days, and if we're honest with ourselves, the answer is no.

"We're not doing enough. And we will have to change.

"Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?

"Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

"No single law, no set of laws, can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society.

"But that can't be an excuse for inaction.

"Surely we can do better than this. If there is even one step that we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that has visited Tucson, Aurora and Oak Creek, Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try."

Reading out the first names of the young victims as members of the audience wept, he said: "Let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory."

"Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts," he said earlier in the address.

"I can only hope it helps for you to know that you're not alone in your grief, that our world, too, has been torn apart, that all across this land of ours we have wept with you.

"You must know that whatever measure of comfort we can provide, we will provide it.

"Whatever portion of sadness that we can share with you to ease this heavy load, we will gladly bear it."

Video: Obama heads to Connecticut for vigil (ABC News)

Before the vigil, queues stretched for at least 200 metres outside the auditorium at Newtown High School, with adults standing in groups, some crying and hugging, others joining younger children, many of primary school age, in carrying teddies and cuddly toys as symbols of remembrance for young innocent lives ending in a hail of bullets.

Earlier, officials formally identified Lanza, 20, as the shooter who ran amok in the picture-postcard town.

They confirmed he shot his mother several times in the head at the house they shared before going to his old school and embarking on the killing spree with a military-style assault rifle.

Mr Obama has been under pressure to announce moves to toughen America's gun laws in the wake of the killings.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg led the calls for action on Sunday, saying "it's time for the president, I think, to stand up and lead and tell this country what we should do.

"It's so unbelievable and it only happens in America and ... and it happens again and again," he said.

"We kill people in schools, we kill them in hospitals, we kill them in religious organisations, we kill them when they're young, we kill them when they're old and we've just got to stop this."

A prominent Democratic lawmaker, senator Dianne Feinstein of California, promised to introduce a bill to ban assault weapons on the first day of the next Congress, January 3.

As he waited for the vigil to start in Newtown, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman called for a national commission on violence.

"These events are happening more frequently and I worry that if we don't take a thoughtful look at them, we lose the hurt and the anger that we have now."

Gallery: Sandy Hook school shooting

Subscribe in a reader

The new front page of Australian politics @abcthedrum

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 12:17:00 +0000

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4425720.html

Tim Dunlop

What role did social media play in the media's coverage of the Gillard-AWU scandal? Tim Dunlop looks at how Twitter shaped debate, filled the gaps and called the mainstream media to account this year.

Would Julia Gillard still be Prime Minister if there was no such thing as social media?

The question occurred to me as I was flicking through some material I've collected over the past year or so, looking at media coverage of everything from matters surrounding Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper, to asylum seekers, to the misogyny speech, to the recent relentless pursuit of the 20-year-old events to do with Julia Gillard's time at Slater and Gordon and work she did involving the AWU.

Much of this media work has been legitimate, the sort of thing we expect our fading fourth estate to pursue in the name of holding the Prime Minister - any prime minister - accountable.

Too much of it has been disgraceful, a mixture of partisan hackery, shoddy research, scandal for scandal's sake, and, of course, unreconstructed sexism.

There have also been the issues not reported, or played down. The classic case was the misogyny speech itself, which was all but ignored by the media the day after it was delivered, relegated to a second-order story amongst much blathering about "the context".

More egregious was the fact that so much of the Government's legislative agenda was ignored while journalists sucked the last life from the AWU story. As senior News Ltd journalist Malcolm Farr noted:

    This might come as a shock, but last week 11 bills were passed by the House of Representatives and Parliament that dealt with some of the most significant issues of the century so far....

    The really shocking news is that many, if not most, of the advances made by the Parliament on behalf of the nation were bipartisan decisions. The minority Government needed the support of the Opposition to get through its biggest legislative projects.

    Yet the public's appreciation of last week would generally be limited by the spectacle of politicians engrossed in themselves, directing all energies into personal wars of self absorption and neglecting their duties to the electorate.

Or, to put that final paragraph another way: the public wouldn't have a clue because no-one in the media reported it.

In amongst all of this, there was also Kevin Rudd's skilfully-crafted leadership challenge, where he used the media's own "rules" of non-disclosure of sources in order to both plant the story of his challenge and then deny planting it.

This worked so splendidly that there actually was a leadership challenge, and the mere fact that Rudd was thrashed in the final vote has not entirely stifled the speculation.

The other finger on the scale was the relatively easy ride the media gave to Tony Abbott for most of the period after the last election.

As I pointed out a few months back, "Tony Abbott is playing the media for fools, dishing up the sort of content that he knows they find... impossible to decline. By accepting it uncritically, they have created a positive feedback loop where he and the media now feed off each other."

It was only once the price on carbon was in effect that reality managed to confirm what the media had been ignoring, namely, that Mr Abbott's predictions of catastrophe were over-egged to the point of ridiculousness.

The point is, the media's coverage of federal politics tended to accentuate the negative for the Prime Minister, to downplay the positive, while doing the exact opposite to her opponents inside and outside the party.

She was being primed for a fall.

Normally, a prime minister would expect some pushback against such assaults from that band of supporters who have access to the op-ed pages and airwaves and who are willing to go into bat on behalf of their party's leader.

John Howard, for instance, could always rely on a merry band of yay-sayers, from business-group leaders to tenured conservative columnists and editorialists, willing (and able) to go public with their unflinching rationalisations for whatever he did, from children overboard, to weapons of mass destruction, to dealings with the AWB, to WorkChoices.

No matter how craven, unlikely or unbelievable his position was on a given issue, there was always that happy chorus willing to say on his behalf that up was down, black was white, and that of course low-paid workers had as much power in a wage negotiation as their bosses.

Julia Gillard has never cultivated an equivalent gaggle on the left. In fact, her political strategy has been to shun such people in pursuit of what is often called the battler vote.

So her position on matters like asylum seekers and equal marriage has not only isolated commentators who lean left and led them to attack her about these issues, it has also made them reluctant to openly support her, even in matters where they are on the same side.

The absence of such support for her in the public sphere has been happily filled by her enemies.

Where pushback has happened on her behalf - and the key moments have been in regard to the misogyny speech and the attacks on her over the AWU/Slater and Gordon matter - it has come not from the usual suspects on the op-ed pages, but on the sites of social media, on blogs, Twitter and Facebook.

The misogyny speech was the turning point, but it was actually social media's response to the AWU story that probably saved the Prime Minister.

There is no doubt the pressure was building. Day after day, in the Fairfax and News Ltd papers, and across radio and television, journalists repeated the mantra that the Prime Minister had questions to answers.

The Opposition devoted all their time in the last week of Question Time to what Julia Gillard did and didn't do 20 years ago, until finally, they accused her, inside and outside of parliament, of actually having breached the law.

Tony Abbott demanded an inquiry. The media concurred. But in the end, it all fizzled.

This was certainly because of overreach on behalf of her attackers, but that overreach was only put front and centre because of the reaction on social media.

It was Fairfax journalist Katharine Murphy who said that Twitter is now the front page of Australian politics, a comment I took to mean that it is the place where the politically engaged, professional and amateur alike, come to thrash out the events of the moment.

So when the SMH led with a story by Mark Baker on the Thursday of the final sitting week of parliament, after two days of the Opposition grilling the PM during Question Time, and claimed that "new" evidence showed the PM had contradicted herself, it seemed like the coup de grace had been delivered, that she had been caught out and that maybe her time was up.

But it took those on Twitter about two seconds to start questioning the article and about two minutes to demolish it. Users started pointing out that the central, damning claim of the piece - that Gillard had told the WA authority that the entity she set up was not a union - was rather less damning than the article suggested given the fact that the entity was, indeed, not a union.

From that point on, I'd suggest, the story went flat. Social media had reset the narrative, changing it from the final episode of The Killing, where the criminal is finally revealed, into the last scene of Waiting for Godot, where the smoking gun, like Godot, did not show up.

Interestingly, this social-media push back was not a particularly partisan thing, not in the traditional tribal sense. The rallying around was not just in support of the PM, but a push back against the media's ownership of the story, of the way they presented it. In other words, it was as much in defence of the audience as it was of Gillard, a point missed by those in the media who accuse social media of being a leftwing echo chamber.

And maybe it was the Coalition's failure to grasp the significance of social media - to understand that it is the new front page of Australian politics - that led them to overreach.

Still operating in a world where the mainstream media gets to write the narrative unchallenged, Mr Abbott and co moved in for the kill, accusing the PM of breaking the law. In a world without social media, this would've stood and, arguably, have created enough pressure for Gillard to step aside. At the very least, I suspect she would've had to announce some sort of inquiry.

But we don't live in that world anymore, and the overreach was called for what it was. Or rather, tweeted for what it was.
Of course, all of this has ramifications for more than Julia Gillard's prime ministership. It means that there are now, potentially, sufficient members of the public out there using social media and engaged enough in political discussion, to actually influence the day-to-day interpretation of political events.

Such citizens realise that our understanding of politics cannot be separated from the way the media report it, that reporters are not just bearers but also shapers of news, and these citizens are willing - and thanks to social media, able - to call bullshit if they think the media is constructing a story in way contrary to the facts or their own understanding of what is happening.

They may be relatively small in number - compared to the mass readership of a site like NineMSN - but social media allows them to speak much more directly with those in, with and around power than has previously been possible.

Still, at this stage, social media's effects are pretty much limited to the meta-conversation around politics: it is hardly a tool of some new, empowered, citizen-driven democratic discussion.

As well, for all their flailing and layoffs and loss of confidence, the mainstream media remain a singular force. They are embedded in structures of our society, the sinews of its power, in such a way that they still get to shape the way most people understand our politics. Social media can talk back to them, but they are still talking back to an agenda set by the mainstream.

So in the end, I don't know if social media did change the story sufficiently to save Julia Gillard's job, but it is interesting to consider: if the pushback had not come from Twitter and Facebook and all the blogs and little news sites out there, where would it have come from?

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and other publications. You can follow him on Twitter. His new book, News at the End of the World, will be released in 2013. View his full profile here

Subscribe in a reader

Stephen Lendman - Netanyahu's Israel @PRN_radio

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:14:00 +0000

Netanyahu's Israel

by Stephen Lendman

He's made Israel more unfit to live in than any of his predecessors. Palestinians have no rights whatever. Israeli Arabs have few. Most Jews are losing theirs incrementally.

Neoliberal harshness plans destroying Israel's safety net entirely. Budget cuts target housing, healthcare, education, employment and welfare.

Labor rights are eroding. So is public education. Disabled Israelis find it harder than ever to find jobs. Regressive taxes benefit business and wealthy elites. Others least able to afford it face growing burdens.

Poor Israelis are blamed for their own condition. Increasingly they're left on their own sink or swim.

Judicial help is absent. Courts reject petitions against cutbacks in income insurance and benefits for the elderly. Others affecting education and healthcare were denied. Even Israel's High Court is unsympathetic.

Former civil service officials complain. Diminishing social services harm growing numbers of Israelis. Netanyahu prioritizes eliminating them altogether.

The problem borders on grave. It gets little public attention. Waging war on Palestine and threatening Iran matter more.

Israel's most disadvantaged face growing poverty, homelessness, and hunger. Yad Eliezer addresses these problems. It says over 700,000 Israeli children are impoverished. It's many thousands more than that.

The gap between rich and poor increases annually. Depravation accompanies it. Netanyahu cut welfare instead of increasing it to help those most in need.

Ezrat Avot helps poor families. It says growing numbers "are simply not making it. There is a large proportion of society here who are working and don't have enough money for food."

Some are low income workers. Others work part-time or are partially disabled.

Israeli government data say one-fourth of Israelis are impoverished. It's double the OECD average. It's the second highest among OECD countries.

Food insecurity is a major problem. Families worry about getting enough to eat. Others face homelessness. Conditions are getting progressively worse.

Legislation systematically erodes social rights. Business and military priorities let vital social needs go begging.

In 2011, Israel had 442,200 officially poor families. They comprise 1,838,600 people. They include 860,900 children. Israel's total population numbers about 7.5 million.

In October, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) said one-third of Israelis risk impoverishment. In the past few years, conditions deteriorated significantly.

In 2000, 27% of Israelis risked impoverishment. In 2010, it was 31%. CBS said compared to EU countries, conditions in Israel are very bad and worsening.

The combination of low wages and rising cost of living affects growing numbers. Soaring home and rental prices top Israeli concerns. Prices are rising exponentially.

In some places like Hadera, they doubled in the past four years. Other than prioritize settlement construction, Netanyahu does nothing to address the problem. Growing numbers of Israelis are being priced out of house and home.

Unlike other parts of Israel's economy, housing is dispersed among many government agencies. They include:

    Interior Ministry planning bodies;

    Housing Ministry and Israel Lands Administration involved in selling property;

    Bank of Israel directed mortgage and lending policy;

    Finance Ministry tax policy; and

    Interior Ministry and Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry labor policies.

Systematic integrated policymaking is absent. Chronic problems affect builders. Slow planning approval creates bottlenecks. They last months or years. Land is in short supply where demand is greatest.

Mass privatization of Israel's economy and government-directed social safety net destruction exacerbate crisis conditions.

Many Israelis can't find affordable housing, feed their families properly, educate them, provide them proper healthcare, and make ends meet overall.

In summer 2011, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested for social justice. Smaller numbers came out last summer. Energy waned. Conditions haven't changed. Overall they got worse.

Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) Social and Economic Rights Department director, Tali Nir, said most Israelis know problems they face reflect "longstanding and systematic government policy."

Hardline Netanyahu governance toughened them. Doing so violates former social rights. They're disappearing in plain sight. What's most essential is heading for availability only for those who can afford it.

Conditions are grim unless ordinary Israelis force change. Nothing else will work.

Palestinians face much tougher harshness. It's shocking how much they endure with so little support.

On December 5, Electronic Intifada contributor Rami Almeghari suggested Israel's eight terror bombing days included chemical weapons use.

Hassan Doghmosh suffered severe face and neck burns. He's suffering horrendously from their effects. He may never fully recover.

His home was bombed. He has numerous shrapnel wounds. A neck artery was struck. Severe bleeding followed. His upper left eye was injured. He has bad chest and abdomen injuries.

Six-year old Abu Zour is in intensive care. His skull is fractured. Five-year old Nesma Qalajs suffered heart wounds. Normal blood flow is impaired. Another 450 children were injured. Some won't survive. Dozens of others were killed.

Patients report abnormal symptoms. A mother trying to protect her daughter during bombing fainted. She required hospitalization. A man with abdomen and leg injuries was admitted to Nasser hospital with a strange chemical smell.

Burns suggest nonconventional weapons use. They penetrate deeply and turn skin blue. During Cast Lead, Israel used white phosphorous and other terror weapons.

Generals tests new weapons in small and larger-scale conflicts. It's virtually certain illegal ones were used during Pillar of Cloud.

Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qedra said "it appears that Israel used some explosive weapons or ammunition that caused deep burns and deep wounds."

"In most cases of those killed, we have seen that bodies were either torn apart or completely burnt out. Also, many of those injured have had their lower or upper limbs amputated."

At least 50 severely injured Gazans remain hospitalized. Some were transferred to Egypt. Local and international human rights groups are gathering information on injuries sustained.

Experts will have final say on weapons Israel used to terrorize Gazan civilians. Accountability won't follow proof. Nor will grave war crimes be punished. Israel freely gets away with murder and much more.

Overnight, hundreds of Israeli soldiers stormed and ransacked 36 Barqa village West Bank homes. These type attacks occur pre-dawn. Dozens occur weekly.

Families are terrorized. One resident said soldiers forced family members in one room. Ransaking destroyed personal belongings. The next day, children didn't go to school. They had no clothes to wear.

One Palestinian said soldiers destroyed all their home's contents. Even livestock was killed. At issue is vengeful disregard for fundamental human rights.

Innocent civilians are assaulted. One observer called what happened payback for Palestine's UN upgrade. An IDF spokeswoman claimed weapons and Hamas affiliated items were found. She lied.

The attack reflected racist occupation harshness. They occur multiple times daily. Media scoundrels report nothing. Imagine the reaction if Palestinians assaulted Jewish communities this way.

On Thursday, Israeli soldiers attacked central Hebron civilians. Over 20 Palestinians were hurt. Residents said soldiers tried to detain an on-duty Palestinian police office.

Why wasn't explained. He resisted. Other Palestinian police officers tried to help him. Witnesses said IDF troops fired indiscriminately. Youths threw stones. Soldiers responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and live fire.

Three ambulances were needed to transport wounded Palestinians to a local hospital. Later reports will say other communities were attacked on the same day. So many happen, it's hard keeping track of how many and where.

Worst of all, no one is held accountable. At best, rhetorical hand slaps substitute for meaningful punishment.

Netanyahu and other hardliners believe punishing Palestinians isn't enough. They want real suffering inflicted. It comes in many forms.

In late summer 2011, forced Bedouin evictions began. Thousands in Israeli-controlled Area C were affected. They were ordered to leave. They were threatened with force if they refused.

They were displaced to a regional garbage dump. Their homes were demolished. They had no say. Israel wanted their land for Jewish development.

Most Bedouins were expelled from the Negev in 1948. Some lived on Israeli declared land. Others lived on private Palestinian land.

It doesn't matter. Palestinians Israel wants dispossessed get moved whether or not they agree. Few wish to go. Soldiers and bulldozers have final say.

Twenty Bedouin communities living in the E1 corridor now face likely eviction. Whether or not construction begins, Israel wants them out.

About 2,300 people are affected. They have no say. Israel freely violates their rights. A local Bedouin group hopes EU nations will intervene. Expect little more than rhetorical support.

Around 80% of Bedouins on Jerusalem's eastern periphery are refugees. Israel exiled their families from the Negev. Since Israel's occupation began, their rights have been repeatedly comprised.

They're moved at the whim of Israeli authorities. They're prevented from building permanent housing or connecting to essential infrastructure.

They're dispossessed on their own with no rights. Netanyahu enforced harshness inflicts greater punishment. Much goes on out of sight and mind.

Most Israelis don't know or care. Life in Occupied Palestine is harsh. Under Netanyahu, it's cruel, unjust and ruthless.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

Subscribe in a reader

Now it's Abbott with questions to answer @abcthedrum

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:33:00 +0000

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4401340.html?WT.svl=theDrum

An allegation of criminality (yet alone one against a Prime Minister) should not be made lightly, but it's now clear Tony Abbott was acting on a single erroneous news report, writes Jenny Hocking.

As the parliamentary year ends, the Gillard Government is where few pundits predicted it would be two years ago. Not only is it still in office, but it's presiding over a growing list of reforms - from carbon pricing and plain cigarette packaging, to paid parental leave and the National Broadband Network.

This week saw four of the Gillard Government's most significant reforms join that list - the first of the Gonski education bills, poker machine restrictions, the Murray Darling Basin plan, and an emblematic Labor reform, the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And although its reliance on the independents was expected to leave the Government vulnerable, even precarious, it is yet to lose a vote on the floor of the Parliament.

Minority government was not meant to be this easy. And, for Tony Abbott, it has not been. The knife-edge election result of 2010 was difficult enough for Abbott to accept, but the independents' protracted decision to support the minority Labor government has been almost unendurable. So close and still, two years later, so far.

Abbott has shown extraordinary discipline in pursuing the single-minded, single-focused strategy that he believed would quickly deliver him government. Parliamentary chaos and unworkability would see a short-lived 'Gillard experiment', with independents crossing the floor, an election, and the return of government to the Coalition. It was a brash, politically intense strategy and it was expected to quickly succeed.

The problem for Abbott and the Opposition is that it has not succeeded. Even more remarkable is that there is no plan B. The longer the Government has remained in office, with legislation passing and the once dire opinion polls shifting, the more intense the parliamentary destabilisation has become.

The Opposition appears wedded to an increasingly unpopular negative campaign of denunciation and denigration that is now starting to play against them. The reluctance to focus on policy, even to engage in critical parliamentary debates, was nowhere more apparent than with Abbott's absence from the House during the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. This long overdue critical social reform received an ovation from the public gallery, yet the Opposition saw fit to absent its senior leaders from the House. By handing to the crossbenches the crucial policy negotiations required of minority government, the Opposition is at risk of appearing irrelevant.

This week we saw the remarkable spectacle of the Opposition devoting every Question Time not to any of these critical policy matters, but to revisiting 17-year-old claims against the Prime Minister. The basic and repeated errors in much of the media reporting of the key event at issue - the incorporation of an association for which Gillard gave legal advice to her then-boyfriend 20 years ago - has left the media as tarred by this episode as it has the Opposition.

Once again, in question after question the Opposition demanded that Gillard prove her innocence of claims of increasingly Delphic obscurity, aided by media reports that at critical junctures proved incorrect. By the week's end, with no smoking gun, much less proof of any wrongdoing, in sight, the Leader of the Opposition ramped up his claims dramatically, publicly accusing the Prime Minister of criminal behaviour.

Speaking on national television, Abbott claimed that Gillard had made 'false representations' to the WA Corporate Affairs Commission in order to ensure the incorporation of the association. Abbott appeared to base his extravagant claim on an equally extravagant Fairfax report that morning that had all but accused the Prime Minister of fraudulent behaviour, a conclusion drawn by misquoting a document it had in its possession.

How extraordinary that those same media that had repeatedly demanded that the Prime Minister explain actions and recall meetings from 20 years ago had been unable to correctly describe a document that was right there in front of them.

By the time Abbott rose during the final Question Time to confront the Prime Minister yet again with recycled claims about her work as a lawyer 20 years earlier, the inaccurate Fairfax report had already been corrected. Given the opportunity to address the House for 15 minutes and substantiate his allegation that the Prime Minister had committed a crime, Abbott could not.

Most significantly, in an uncharacteristically weak and hesitant performance, Abbott would not repeat in the Parliament what he had publicly stated outside it just hours earlier. The prospect of misleading the Parliament appeared to concern Abbott more than mere public denigration of the Prime Minister, and 'conduct unbecoming' was as close as he was prepared to go.

In the end, it was clear that Abbott had declared Gillard's behaviour criminal on the basis of nothing more than the single erroneous Fairfax report. For his preparedness to so readily claim criminality and yet fail to substantiate it when given the opportunity, serious questions must now be asked of Abbott's position.

This strategy not only traduces the Prime Minister's reputation (and the Opposition has been quite open about that intention) but it also brings the Parliament and its processes into disrepute. Every member of Parliament should be deeply concerned about allowing this direction in parliamentary procedure to continue without sanction.

It was a fitting end to an abject week in Australian politics in which the most extraordinary claims were made against the Prime Minister, with more apparent concern for their political impact than their veracity. In some ways, the disturbing events of this week were the inevitable culmination of escalating claims of impropriety from an Opposition with nowhere else to go strategically but, to coin a phrase, 'up and up and up'.

An allegation of criminality is the most serious charge that can be levelled against the Prime Minister and is not one that should be advanced lightly. That it was so readily exposed has left Tony Abbott's position untenable.

Professor Jenny Hocking is Head of the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. The second volume of her biography of Gough Whitlam was recently released by MUP. View her full profile here.

Subscribe in a reader

Is the Opposition drowning in Whitewater? @abcthedrum

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:32:00 +0000

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-30/cassidy-drowning-in-whitewater/4398882?WT.svl=theDrum

During the Whitewater scandal, Bill Clinton's opponents went flat out to destroy the president and came up empty. As Barrie Cassidy writes, the Coalition better hope the AWU slush fund affair doesn't follow the same path.

There are uncanny similarities between the AWU scandal in Australia and the first major scandal of the Clinton administration, Whitewater - a story that I covered while based in Washington in the early 1990s.

The origins of Whitewater went back 16 years before Bill Clinton was elected.

In the late 1970s, Bill Clinton was Arkansas' attorney-general earning a modest $US35,000 a year, and his partner Hillary was a legal aid at a small Little Rock law firm.

An old friend Jim McDougal and his wife Susan approached the Clintons to invest in building vacation homes along the White River near Little Rock. Soon afterwards, the scheme failed, and to prop it up, McDougal made illegal transfers of money from his own savings and loan association, Madison Guaranty.

Then, a decade and half later, while McDougal was being investigated for that and other matters, the Clinton name turned up on documents. That set off a media and political frenzy, with numerous journalists digging back into the Clintons' past.

Bill Clinton insisted he had done nothing wrong; that he knew of no illegal activity and that when the investment went bust, he and Hillary remained a part of the Whitewater Development Corporation in name only and had no further involvement in any of McDougal's business enterprises.

Clinton said the McDougals were honest in their dealings with him, and that he had nothing to do with the management of the investment, and kept no records or books.

Susan McDougal said only that the Clintons had done nothing wrong. She eventually went to jail for contempt because she refused to give evidence to a grand jury.

The most damaging evidence came from a former Arkansas municipal judge and banker, David Hale, who worked with McDougal on the loan.

Hale, until the 1990s, said nothing about the Clintons. But once he was indicted on unrelated fraud charges, he cut a deal with the prosecutors, accepting a reduced sentence in return for evidence before the grand jury investigating Whitewater.

Hale alleged that Clinton had pressured him into making a loan to the McDougals. Because he had said nothing up until then, his testimony was dismissed by many as lacking in credibility and self-serving.

The story dragged on for many damaging months, but after three separate inquiries, there was nothing to link the Clintons with any of the criminal conduct committed by others.

The Democrats dismissed the episode as a witch hunt, and the Republicans were left frustrated that the scandal caught up so many but missed the biggest fish.

Clinton faced off against his chief political accuser, Senator Bob Dole, in the 1996 presidential election and won with 379 electoral college votes to 159, an improvement of nine electoral college votes on the 1992 election.

In the dying days of the scandal, an owner of one of the former Whitewater vacation homes hung a large sign out for the constant stream of reporters: "Go Home, Idiots."

If the "Go Home, Idiots" moment arrived in the AWU scandal, then it was probably around 4.15pm on Tuesday, when the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Julie Bishop, fronted a doorstop interview in Parliament's Mural Hall; though this time it was the reporters making the judgment that the allegations had gone too far.

Inadvertently or otherwise, Bishop had earlier left an impression with reporters that the Prime Minister had knowingly committed fraud. She had massively raised the stakes, effectively accusing the Prime Minister of corruption.

She had said:

... she (Gillard) and Wilson and Blewitt wanted to hide from the AWU that an unauthorised fund was being set up to siphon funds through it for their benefit and not for the benefit of the AWU.

The quote was put to her time and again at the 4.15pm doorstop and Bishop denied having said it. She eventually insisted her remarks applied to just Wilson and Blewitt, and not to Gillard. But for too long her obstinacy got in the way of clarity.

That, together with the secret meeting with Blewitt, was the moment when Bishop lost control of the prosecution. The fact that Tony Abbott was sitting mute in the Parliament, contracting out such serious allegations against the Prime Minister, wasn't helping the cause either.

The Republican strategy in the prosecution of the Whitewater story was to focus not so much on the end game, but to simply and constantly remind the public that the Clintons once associated with shady characters.

Stupidly, Coalition MPs were backgrounding journalists that that was their strategy in the AWU case as well.

At the end of the Whitewater media saturation, the public did not focus so much on shady characters from the past; they were left confused, certainly, but nevertheless satisfied that Clinton's opponents had gone flat out to destroy the president and came up empty.

That's the risk again for the opposition in this strikingly similar case; the breadth and volume of the media coverage - and the intensity and time committed to it by the Coalition - can only be justified if in the minds of the public there was ever a reasonable chance that the Prime Minister did something wrong.

To this point there has been no substantiated allegation of wrongdoing, and while that remains the case, the issue can only go one of two ways from here: either it will have a neutral outcome, or it will backfire on the Opposition.

Barrie Cassidy is presenter of the ABC programs Insiders and Outsiders. View his full profile here.

Subscribe in a reader

The Hard Life of an N.F.L. Long Shot

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:36:00 +0000

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/the-hard-life-of-an-nfl-long-shot.html

CHARLES SIEBERT

Last April 28, a splendid spring Saturday that fairly begged you to be outdoors, I spent all afternoon in front of my living-room TV, anxiously watching the last day of the annual N.F.L. draft, live from Radio City Music Hall. As big a football fan as I am, I had never seen any part of a draft, to say nothing of its final four rounds, which are a roughly seven-hour marathon that lasts until sundown. And yet, on that day, I sat riveted.

I had in front of me what’s known as a Draft Scout Player Profile: a starkly efficient, computerized summation of every draftable player’s past prowess and future prospects. I, however, was interested in only one, my nephew, my younger sister’s son. His specs were, of course, familiar to me. But somehow the officious, bare-bones alignment on my computer screen — in categories befitting a prize steer at auction — rendered him a complete stranger. And a rather impressive one at that.

Name: Pat Schiller. Number: 53. Position: Outside linebacker. Height: 6-foot-1. Weight: 234. College: Northern Illinois. Under “Pro Day Results” — his audition, essentially, before several N.F.L. scouts at the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University earlier in March — were 22 bench presses of 225 pounds, a 35-inch vertical leap and, for a linebacker, a head-turning 4.65 seconds in the 40-yard dash. Under his “Draft Scout Snapshot” was a link to game-highlight footage: a rapid-fire sequence of heat-seeking-missile launches into ball carriers; the all-out, “high-motor” mode of play that garnered No. 53 a team-leading 115 tackles in his senior year, along with second-team All Mid-American Conference and Northern Illinois’s Linebacker of the Year honors. As for Pat’s “Projected Round,” there was, after the word “stock,” a bright red, upward-pointing arrow, followed by the words “shot late.”

Some 800 miles west, meanwhile, in a two-story modern colonial on a neatly etched cul-de-sac in the western Chicago suburb Geneva, Pat lay on the living-room carpet, holding his golden retriever, Champ. Around the TV with him was his immediate family: his father, also named Pat, a longtime excavation contractor as well as an accomplished pianist and songwriter in the Billy Joel mode, with a couple CDs to his credit and a No. 6 single on a 2004 adult-contemporary-music radio chart; Pat’s mother, my younger sister, Cathy, a doctor’s medical assistant; my niece, Stephanie, a classically trained vocalist who now works in the admissions office at Northern Illinois University, her alma mater as well; and her fiancé, Michael. My nephew, my sister had told me, wanted to keep things low-key, wanted to avoid the roomful of slack faces and well-meaning condolences should things not go as hoped.

He was, in a sense, already chosen. Of the 80,000 or so who play college football every year, no more than 1,500 are even scouted by pro teams. On average about 300 of those players will be invited to show their stuff at the weeklong N.F.L. scouting combine held every February at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Hundreds more will perform at regional combines or at their college team’s pro days. Among the heads Pat turned was that of Ran Carthon, son of the New York Giants fullback Maurice Carthon. Ran Carthon was also a former N.F.L. running back before becoming a scout for the Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons called Pat four times in the previous week alone, the final call coming that Saturday morning.

“Stay by your phone for Rounds 6 and 7,” he was told.

What followed was a slow-motion combo to the gut. The Falcons’ sixth-round pick went to Charles Mitchell, a safety out of Mississippi State. In Round 7, they took Travian Robertson, a defensive tackle from the University of South Carolina. Four picks later, the Indianapolis Colts took as the draft’s last selection Chandler Harnish, the quarterback at Northern Illinois and my nephew’s close friend and college housemate.

“The room went kind of quiet,” Pat told me. “There was like this skipped heartbeat. And then the waiting started all over again.”

Seconds after the official N.F.L. draft ends, a whole other nether-draft begins, one far more frenzied and dramatic than the one at Radio City. From 1967, the year the N.F.L. instituted a joint draft with the more recently established American Football League, until 1976, the draft went 17 rounds, with about 450 players being selected. The current seven-round format totals about 250, leaving a vast countrywide bin of talented discards that general managers, coaches and scouts start madly ferreting through, like a group of shoppers who have been granted a limited after-hours spree for bargain-basement gems.

Not two minutes after Harnish’s selection that day, Pat’s phone rang. Ran Carthon was on the line. The Falcons wanted him.

“The truth is,” said Dave Lee, Pat’s agent, a partner of PlayersRep based in Cleveland, “when you get toward the bottom of the draft, basically from the fifth to the seventh round, the talent level isn’t all that different from that of the undrafted free agents. Teams at that point are just looking for guys that fit their system, and it’s anybody’s guess whether you’ll get drafted or not. The Falcons wanted speedy linebackers. Pat shows a lot of speed. They said, ‘We think it’s a great opportunity.’ They went through the reasons. Obviously we said, ‘We’re getting other calls,’ so we could play a bit with the signing bonus, but it was pretty easy to jump on their offer.”

A contract was soon faxed to the Schillers’ home, its terms at once bleak and beguiling. Up front, Pat would receive just a $1,000 signing bonus, along with per diem expenses of $155 during spring camp. Should he make it as far as preseason training camp beginning in late July, the payment would be the N.F.L. Players Association’s stipulated $850 a week. The big money, big for a rookie at least, was all in the offing: the standard first-year salary of $390,000 he receives only if he makes and remains on the 53-man roster for the entire season. Should he be picked for the team’s eight-man practice squad instead, he would receive a salary of $5,700 a week, amounting to $96,900 over a 17-week season and more if the Falcons made the playoffs.

Pat and Dave Lee were encouraged by the fact that the Falcons hadn’t picked any linebackers in the official draft. The team did, however, sign three other undrafted linebackers and a total of 23 undrafted free agents in all, the most of any team in the N.F.L. In the end, 623 undrafted free agents were signed in 2012 to the same basic contract that arrived at the Schillers’ home that evening. It all seems wildly prodigal. But not in terms of breaking owners’ bank accounts so much as players’ hearts. Two, maybe three, of the undrafted free agents annually signed by each N.F.L. team will make the 53-man roster. Of the 23 undrafted players on the Falcons roster at the start of last season’s minicamp, one player made the roster.

With a signed contract in hand that Saturday evening, my nephew descended the stairs to the family’s finished basement to use the fax machine in his father’s music studio. The Falcons ask that their players send such contracts back before midnight. It’s the undrafted free agent’s peculiar inversion of the Cinderella tale: having to rush to ensure the right to arrive at the N.F.L.’s ball in a pumpkin.

Six weeks later, his sculptured frame blurring in the gridiron-warble of a Georgia June sun, Pat was standing on the Atlanta Falcons’ practice field in Flowery Branch, learning the consequences of living his dream. Midway through the Falcons’ six weeks of spring-training sessions — each N.F.L. team’s yearly padless orientation ritual — Pat had just got what all first-year players in the N.F.L. most crave: a play, a “rep.” Reps for a rookie are but a few precious crumbs left after the daily scrums of the first and second teams — the “Ones” and “Twos.” It’s one of the crueller realities of the N.F.L.’s strictly enforced hierarchy, a classic Catch-22: what you most need in order to make a team as a rookie, especially an undrafted one, are opportunities to show what you can do. You have little chance of getting those, however, precisely because you’re a rookie. There are so few chances, in fact, that when a rep does come your way, the tendency is to get a bit greedy, to overplay.

Mike Nolan, a former defensive coordinator for the New York Giants, Jets and five other N.F.L. teams before being hired by Atlanta last winter, had just signaled for the “Threes,” with Pat at middle linebacker or “Mike,” to execute a “Dallas freeze,” a package featuring two blitzing linebackers. As one of the scheme’s designated blitzers, Pat shot toward the quarterback then deftly swerved inside a blocking fullback to get at his target. Another head-turning display, although in this instance for entirely the wrong reasons. Coaches love speed. They love schemes even more, and in that one Pat was designated to be the “contain man.” His responsibility was to go outside the blocking back to prevent the play from developing wide.

“Give me two good reasons,” Nolan’s voice boomed, “why you went inside.”

Pat went slack beneath a bowed helmet, then shrugged.

“That’s right!” Nolan replied. “Because there aren’t any!”

Over dinner that evening at the nearby Legacy Lodge on Lake Lanier, where the Falcons were staying throughout spring camp, that play came up, just as it would, Pat assured me, at team meetings the following morning.

“I heard ‘freeze,’ ” Pat said, “so I knew I was going to be one of the blitzers. I got that. But I treated it like a normal blitz, where you find any way you can to the quarterback. I didn’t realize I was the contain player. Unfortunately, in this league, you don’t get many chances, and that’s a blitz I’d only run maybe twice in the three weeks that I’ve been here. So you do all these things right and then you mess up the last one, and you’re getting yelled at. N.F.L. coaches will tolerate physical mistakes but not mental ones.”

Weeks earlier, when I first mentioned to Pat the possibility of my writing a story about his attempt to make the Falcons as an undrafted free agent, he was open to the idea. His time in N.F.L. camp, however, had altered his outlook. He called me the night before I got on a plane to go down to Atlanta.

“I think you might be wasting your time,” he said. “I mean you can still come down, but the story really can’t be about me anymore. I’m mostly just going to meetings and trying to learn the playbook. I’m kind of nobody around here.”

He paused a moment.

“Let’s see . . . how do I put this? You go from being one of the top players in college. O.K. not one of the top. If I were that, I would have been drafted. But I would say one of the top three to four hundred players. And then you come to the N.F.L. and, well, I’ve never felt so bad at a sport I know I’m good at.”

He still looked a bit beleaguered as we sat at the dinner table at Legacy Lodge. A pained twist of his torso and head roll elicited an inner ball-bearing rumble. I noted over the years the Hulk-like morphing of my nephew’s body toward the formidable adult frame that presently houses the same sensitive, soft-spoken kid. But at age 23, football’s ravages had him constantly making his own chiropractic adjustments. There was no thought, he said, of seeking out a trainer. Everything a rookie does in camp is documented, and visits to the training room leave the wrong impression.

“We have an expression here,” he told me. “ ‘You don’t make the club in the tub.”’

I had always followed Pat’s progress from afar, heard the hopeful murmurings about him “playing on Sundays.” And yet it was only now that I was getting a chance to really spend time with the guy. Watching his contortions that night, I started feeling guilty about my own delight in his achievements. I didn’t know whether to give him a pep talk or the suddenly more urgent seeming advice, given the very slim odds of his realizing his dream, to get out while he was still intact, both in body and in mind.

I thought of the conversation I recently had with his father about the constant threat of injury to his son, who had already overcome a badly shattered ankle in his freshman year of high school and a torn knee ligament at the start of his junior year at Northern Illinois.

“I don’t think of the knees and hips,” Pat’s father told me. “They can replace those now. The thing I’m most worried about is his brain. I’ve been reading a lot lately about concussions.”

My nephew told me that night that he had his share of concussions over the years but said he was never forced to leave a game or miss part of a season because of one.

“I’ve had it where I’ve been hit, and the lights go out,” he said. “You stand up, and it’s like, ‘Whew,’ and then you’re good. I’ve also had it two or three times where a play will be called and you have no idea what it is or what to do, and you’re just out there aimlessly wandering around the field. But it’s never been to the point where I wake up the next morning really sensitive to light or I’m getting sick from it.”

Another torso twist and head roll.

“You do get to this point,” he told me, “where you feel your body is telling you to chill out, take a break, but your mind stays on the prize. And part of that now is the paycheck. What gets me through coaches screaming at me and the way my body feels is the thought of that $390,000. I’ve talked to other guys here about it, like, ‘Is that O.K. to feel that way,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, man, don’t even think twice about that.’ ”

I knew that when he was a sophomore at Northern Illinois and still living at home, he witnessed firsthand the effects of the recent financial meltdown. His father told me that late in 2007 and into the first two months of 2008, he was still receiving a number of job bids, and his bank repeatedly asked him if he needed a higher line of credit. By March, though, clients weren’t able to pay him. He turned to the bank for the higher credit line, but by then the bank was drastically reducing his credit: cards with a $50,000 limit were cut to $2,000. By the fall of 2008, work had completely dried up, and Pat had no other choice but to close his business. To pay off his debts, he got whatever he could for his bulldozers, backhoes and trucks at unrestricted auctions, $200,000 machines going for as little as $50,000. He was soon getting up at 4 a.m. to drive backhoes at distant work sites.

“It’s tough seeing your dad break down,” Pat told me when I brought up the subject at dinner that night. “His name was now coming off the building he owned. Everything he’d worked for was gone. Everything you’ve seen in our house, all the nice stuff. That’s an illusion. He can’t really afford it anymore. He keeps it going for us. I remember thinking when everything was coming apart for him, O.K., I’ve got to help in some way. What am I good at that could also pay decent money? Well, I knew the answer to that one.”

Being an undrafted free agent in the N.F.L. is an extended exercise in ego abnegation. You’re not only stripped of your college number; you’re exiled from the N.F.L.’s mandated numerical bracket for your given position. Linebackers on all final team rosters must bear a number in either the 50s or 90s. Pat, for now, was given 45. As for his fellow undrafted competitors, Max Gruder, a linebacker from the University of Pittsburgh, wore 46; Rico Council, a middle linebacker from Tennessee State, 43; and Jerrell Harris, an outside linebacker for last year’s champions, Alabama, 49. Some days in practice, Pat wore 40 and then was switched back to 45. Coaches and fellow players, meanwhile, were constantly confusing Pat with a third-year safety, Shann Schillinger, whose seniority naturally merited his getting dibs on the nickname “Schill,” thus saddling my nephew with — for obscure reasons — “Patty Melt.”

Nolan kept calling Pat “Gruder” through much of minicamp. In a practice roundup in The Atlanta Journal Constitution one morning, my nephew — whom I watched the previous day grunt, sweat and double over with the rest of the squad — was listed as absent. After he made five tackles in the Falcons’ second preseason game against the Cincinnati Bengals later in August — finally turning coaches’ heads for the right reasons — the team statistician, apparently confused by the presence of two number 45s on the roster that night, credited Pat with none.

“Well,” Pat told me on the phone later, “at least they can’t erase my film. Can they?”

After one workout that spring, all the undrafted linebackers were headed back to the locker room with an extra helmet in hand bearing numbers in the 50s.

“Yep,” Gruder said, smiling. “We’re also the vets’ helmet lackeys.”

And water boys. At team meetings each morning, before taking their seats in the very front row — the better for the coach’s eviscerating explications of rookie screw-ups — the 40s brigade takes water and Gatorade to the veterans. The Falcons’ linebacker coach, Glenn Pires, told a story one morning from his days coaching for the Arizona Cardinals. The vets sat up front at the Cardinals’ team meetings, the rookies in the far back. Pires said a longtime veteran linebacker there had only to hold up a hand: one finger meant water, two Gatorade, three a cup of coffee.

Of course, getting things for vets is standard rookie boot-camp stuff. Getting any time with one of them is the real challenge. At practices each day, the Threes are forever pacing the sidelines, craning their heads to at least get mental images of the plays being run by the Ones and Twos. They sidle up to them afterward with questions. It’s as though rookies are kept penned in a mental cage of the playbook schemes they’ve been studying from the start of camp. You can almost hear the whirring of all the Xs, Os, arrows and bent-Ts inside their helmets, like so many gnats they would love to have swatted away with one good hit.

“They give you all this information,” Jerrell Harris told me after one practice. “But without the actual reps, if you don’t pick things up off the mental, then you’re just out there flying around.”

I always heard that rookies are overwhelmed at first by the speed of the game at the pro level. But everyone I asked about this had the same response.

“It’s not the speed,” the third-year linebacker Robert James told me. “It only seems like the game is a lot faster because you’re always trying to figure out what you’re doing and where you’re supposed to be. Once I began to learn the defenses, the game slowed down for me.”

Much of the learning in the N.F.L. begins with unlearning. In college, Pat told me, coaches stressed never crossover running with your feet so that you can keep your depth and be available to make a play. In the pros they tell you to crossover run.

“It’s no longer ‘keep your depth.’ ” Pat said. “In the N.F.L., everything is downhill right now. Get to the ball as fast as you can. Those things you perfected to a T in college are no good here.”

For Pat and the other free-agent linebackers, what made the N.F.L. learning curve especially steep was the lack of extra time on the side with coaches.

“You don’t get the patient schooling of college here,” Bart Scott, a Pro Bowl linebacker now with the New York Jets, who started out as an undrafted free agent, told me by phone. “It’s mostly on you to find ways to figure it out. To be mature. To be a man.”

I asked Scott what advice he would give Pat.

“Get with a vet and track him,” he said. “Everything he does. Learn it. Copy it. Then try to outdo it.”

The one veteran Pat said he had begun to bond with was the three-time Pro Bowl linebacker Lofa Tatupu. The Falcons had just signed Tatupu, the 29-year-old former Seattle Seahawk, to a two-year, $3.6 million contract to shore up the Mike position after losing their star middle linebacker, Curtis Lofton, to free agency.

“We’ve been out to dinner a few times,” Pat said. “A movie. He’s so generous. Doesn’t let me pay for anything. We were shooting pool here the other night, and somehow we got to talking about my highlight tape. We went up to my room to watch, and he’s like, ‘Hey, you got speed, man.’ Then he told me: ‘Look, you’re a rookie. You can’t control what you can’t control. I’ve seen lots of guys who should have made it get cut. The only thing you can control is what you do when you go in there.’ ”

At the Lodge one evening a few days before the close of spring camp, Tatupu stopped by our table, dwarfing it with his mesalike shoulders. His injured hamstring, he told Pat, was going to keep him out of tomorrow’s practice, and Akeem Dent, the Falcons’ current starting middle linebacker, would be away as well, tending to some personal business at home.

“You’re getting lots of reps with the Ones tomorrow, rook,” Tatupu said, heading off to his room. “Better study your playbook tonight.”

It had been maddeningly difficult to get any indication of how Pat was doing outside of the occasional tongue lashings in practice. I had an agreement with both Pat and the Falcons’ communications coordinator, Brian Cearns, that I wouldn’t tell Mike Smith, the head coach, or any of the other coaches that I was Pat’s uncle or ask them specific questions about his performance. I knew my share of football coaches in the past and could well imagine the guff Pat might get if word got around camp that the no-name undrafted rookie had a reporter uncle following him.

When I asked Pat for his own assessment of his play, he just shrugged.

“It’s hard to get a good measure,” he said. “You don’t hear anything about the good stuff. That’s just the way it is here.”

At the following practice, Pat got the promised reps with the Ones. It was always easy to tell when just the Threes were on the field. You couldn’t hear anything. Everybody was unsure of what they were doing, and so nobody talked. Now the vets were giving Pat his checks, he was chattering back to them, and, with the doors to his mind’s playbook-cage flung open, he was looking again like the guy in his own highlight reel; briefly playing in that realm of informed thoughtlessness that had turned scouts’ heads in the first place.

Driving his gray pickup back home in Geneva during a break a few weeks after the close of minicamp, Pat popped in a CD. He wanted me to hear the motivational music he listens to before games or personal workout sessions like the one we were driving to that July morning at the ProForce training facility in Batavia, the adjacent town. He still had another couple of weeks off before the start of padded, preseason camp at the end of July. But on the verge of his first and perhaps only crack at the N.F.L., he had no intention of relaxing. He reached over and ramped up the volume, his pickup trembling now as soaring chords and tribal chants swirled above the same slow, propulsive backbeat.

“O.K., don’t laugh,” he said. “But when I’m listening to this, I imagine myself running through a primeval forest somewhere with just a loincloth on and a huge hunting knife in my mouth. I’m really looking to kill something.”

I often found myself trying to construct some kind of half-baked genealogy of Pat Schiller’s athletic prowess, his possible pigskin pedigree. His paternal grandfather, Eddie Schiller, a k a the Blond Tiger, was a boxer in the late 1920s and early ’30s who fought, for a time, out of Kid Howard’s downtown Chicago gym. Pat’s father told me he was kept from the gridiron by his mother to preserve his fingers for the keyboard. On my sister’s side, there was my mother’s brother, my uncle Carl Valle, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound all-city lineman at James Madison High School in Brooklyn who went on to play two seasons at Boston College. Carl’s equivalently proportioned nephew, my cousin Ralph, knocked about as an offensive lineman in the semipros back in the 1960s, playing for the Brooklyn Mariners and the Long Island Bulls, the New York Giants’ former farm team, briefly making the Giants’ taxi squad in 1968 and 1969. And then there was my older brother Bob, a linebacker and offensive guard at Archbishop Stepinac High School, in White Plains. He went on to play at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. But the combination of an outsize will in a somewhat plodding, too-small frame led to so many concussions that he walked away before the start of his sophomore season.

Bob shaped my own football career. The summer of his sophomore year, appalled that I was still riding the bench as a wannabe fullback after my second season at Ossining High, he took matters into his own hands. Every day before dinner that summer, he put a helmet on my head, dragged me into the backyard, put me in the proper three-point guard stance and had me charge on his count into his bare, upward-flailing forearm. We did this until my face bled. We did it until I learned to get my face mask into his chest faster than his forearm could get to my face. I never sat on the bench again. By the end of two varsity seasons with only one loss, individual all-league honors and a late growth spurt that took me to 6 feet tall and 205 pounds, the college recruiters came calling. Mostly smaller schools like Bates, Colby and Colgate. Lehigh treated me to a New York Giants game. Brown had me up to Providence one weekend to meet with coaches and party all night with some players in their dorm.

Still, I knew I wasn’t going any farther with football. Even on game days, I always felt that I had one foot outside the experience. During pregame psyche drills with my friend, Mike Chernick — a standout fullback and middle linebacker who went on to play at Yale — the two of us would be on the sidelines, pounding on each other’s shoulder pads, growling. Occasionally I looked up and saw the wild whites of his eyes and thought, He really means this.

Pat Schiller really and wholly means it; he is all in. He flies around a football field overturning ball carriers with full-bore, joyous immersion.

“I enjoy hitting,” Pat told me as we pulled into the lot of the ProForce training facility in an industrial park on Batavia’s flat, barren outskirts. “Especially when you stop someone short on third or fourth down and you look up and the crowd’s going nuts and you’re like: ‘I did that. Me. You’re welcome.’ That’s cool. People always ask me, ‘Do you change when you get on the field?’ Before a game starts, I have my routine, I listen to my music and I walk out and look up at the crowd and I . . . I’m getting goose bumps right now talking about it. It’s crazy. My body is filled with emotions I can’t even describe. I come out of my body, and I’m like, ‘I’m going to kill somebody.’ I become this lunatic. And even when I start to come back down after the first few plays, I’m still a different person. You know, a savage. But when I first come out, it’s like a drug, I’m literally trembling, almost crying. I have so much emotion.”

For the next three hours that morning, ProForce’s founder and head trainer, Chris Browning, a defensive end and linebacker who starred at Batavia High School and Western Michigan University, had my nephew and his workout partner, Pat Brown, an undrafted free agent from the University of Central Florida who played offensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings in 2011, gasping for breath in the 90-degree, midsummer heat. This was their daily, self-imposed “off-weeks” regimen, designed with Browning, to get them in the best shape possible for the start of preseason camp now only a few weeks away.

Pulling thick steamship lines, they each took turns dragging a half-ton weighted sled atop which sat a screaming Browning, back and forth across ProForce’s hollowed-out industrial warehouse space. They repeatedly flipped an enormous tractor tire. They did position-specific agility drills tethered to wall-mounted resistance bands. Pat occasionally slipped out a side door to be sick and then bounded back inside to start anew.

Sitting afterward with the two Pats and Browning in his office, I realized I had before me the entire spectrum of the undrafted free-agent experience. Browning got eight phone calls from N.F.L. teams on the last Saturday morning of the 2002 draft. Four days later the Bears invited him to rookie camp, but he failed to make the team. The following season he was invited to try out with the New Orleans Saints and again failed to make the squad. He ended up playing Arena Football for the Chicago Rush, New Orleans Voodoo and Columbus Destroyers.

“Arena was very big then,” he said. “Guys could get a shot at the pros. For a lineman like me, you could make $60,000 to $80,000 a year. You didn’t have to mess with all the ups and downs of the N.F.L.”

No one knows those up and downs better than Pat Brown. Signed by the Carolina Panthers after the close of the 2009 draft, he was released, picked up and released again five times from 2009 to 2010.

“I lived in hotels the first two seasons,” he recalled. “It can be a bit of a shot to your ego. Getting told multiple times on multiple teams that you’re not good enough. Some guys can handle it. Some guys can’t. You just have to love it, because it’s mostly out of your hands.”

Brown just completed his first full season with the Vikings, and had playing time in 16 games. I asked him if he was finally feeling a sense of security.

“Never,” he said. “Never. I’m always looking over my shoulder. You don’t relax until you get that five-year, $25-million deal and so much money guaranteed. Then you know you’re an investment.”

Undrafted free agents are forever asking themselves how long they’ll stick it out; how long they’ll continue to work out and wait by the phone, forestalling a real job. When I asked Rico Council, he didn’t hesitate: “As long as it takes, man. Football is what I know. I’m going to be in it one way or another. I’d rather it be as a player.” Max Gruder told me that he would figure it out as he went, that he had a lot of other interests to pursue when he was done with football. Pat said he would probably give himself a full year of not getting anywhere and not hearing from anybody and then move on.

“I’d finish my degree in education,” he said. “I still have to do a semester of student teaching. But I’ll also not commit to anything serious for a while. I could end up playing in Canada. I’d do that.”

All of those in the tribe of the undrafted can cite the inspiring precedents for persistence; the well-known N.F.L. Cinderella-man tales they repeat to themselves like soothing bedtime stories. Kurt Warner quarterbacked for the Iowa Barnstormers in the Arena Football League and stocked groceries before his meteoric rise. James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers was cut four times and did a stint with the Rhein Fire of N.F.L. Europe before becoming a four-time Pro Bowl linebacker and, according to a poll last year of his fellow N.F.L. players, the most feared man in football. Chase Blackburn was back home in Marysville, Ohio, at Week 12 of last season, about to take a job as a middle-school math teacher when he got the call from the New York Giants. He ended up making the key interception of a fourth-quarter Tom Brady pass that set up the Giants’ game-winning drive in last year’s Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots.

“I’ve been telling your nephew, he may bounce around three or four times before he finds a home,” Browning told me. “That’s tough, but, hey, he’s young. Have fun. So few people get this experience. And don’t get too logical about it. He could get cut because of salary considerations. Some other guy’s agent might have a better relationship with the team. But then what if someone like Lofa goes down. Pat beats out the other undrafted free-agent linebackers and guess what, that boy is dressing.”

Later that evening, my last night in Geneva, Pat and I stopped into a few of the local haunts along his hometown’s historic main street (a location for the period film “Road to Perdition”). Wherever I went with “Mayor Schiller,” as one friend called him, drinks materialized and tabs disappeared. Owners, managers, friends and friends of friends all stopped by to ask how Pat was doing and to wish him well.

“It’s weird,” he said to me during a rare lull. “For some reason I’m cool because I’m able to play a game. And they don’t realize how hard and cutthroat it is now. They’ll say things like, ‘Hey, worst-case scenario, you’ll be on the practice squad.’ And I’m thinking, Are you kidding? That would be unbelievable. But these people are really counting on me, and I feel a lot of pressure to not let them down. That’s a big part of what drives me. And I like being the interesting guy, you know? I want to be talked about and turn heads when I walk into a place. Who doesn’t? It sounds so egotistic, but it’s what it is. And to think this is all going to be done one day, probably sooner than later, and I’ll have to face reality. Have a 9-to-5 job, not be Mr. Interesting anymore and never have the rush that I get before games. That’s scary to me.”

A week before Pat was scheduled to return to Flowery Branch for the five weeks of preseason camp, he received a text message from Lofa. He had torn a pectoral muscle while lifting weights. Less than a week later, the Falcons released Tatupu and signed Mike Peterson, 36, a 13-year veteran who wasn’t resigned by the Falcons at the end of last season after three years at linebacker. My nephew’s stock as a middle linebacker, Lofa’s intended role, had suddenly soared even as his heart sank.

“People keep texting or talking to me about what a big break Lofa’s injury is,” Pat told me. “But they don’t get it. This was the one guy I could really talk to about stuff. Plus, you just hate seeing anybody go down, especially someone that you were getting to know and feel closer to. But that’s the N.F.L. Injury is the No. 1 thing on a player’s mind.”

Two weeks later, in early August, I was watching Pat from the sidelines at the Flowery Branch facility as Keith Armstrong, the special-teams coordinator, closed a practice with a kickoff-coverage drill. Special teams, it is constantly stressed at N.F.L. camp, are about the only place for rookies to get reps in preseason games and “make good film.” One or two eye-catching plays can be enough to prompt a phone call from a team looking to fill roster holes constantly being opened by injury.

On Armstrong’s signal, one waterfall of would-be tacklers after another were unleashed — the Ones, followed by the Twos: swift, downfield flows soon met at staggered, eerily soundless intervals by pad-wielding blockers. A consequence of the heightened concern about concussions in the N.F.L. is that even fully padded practices have become largely clashless choreography, like ballet without the music: that singular symphony of crashing bodies we cringingly thrill to on game days.

All through camp, Nolan stressed being offensive on defense. The simple 11-on-11 math of football inherently favors the offense. It has a “12th man” in the form of a play only its players know. What Nolan wants from his defensive unit is to find ways to “change the math.” Players, especially linebackers, are expected to “shock and shed”: engage their respective blockers and then throw them off on the way to the ball. To stay within their defensive scheme and yet be fast and supple enough to invent ways to be offensive and make a play.

Pat seemed to be ever balanced on that edge between his natural speed and the confines of the scheme. When the Threes’ rotation came up in the kickoff-coverage drill that day, he was repeatedly the first one down the field. His swiftness, however, would soon send him flying past his scheme’s scripted pas de deux with a notably tardy counterpart. Seeing that his man wasn’t there, Pat just blew by and got directly to the ball carrier.

“Schiller?” Armstrong fumed in his deep, drill-sergeantese. “Schiller, you’re killing me!”

The only time I could get with Pat now was quick snatches of conversation along the sidelines after practice. Preseason camp days started at dawn and didn’t wind up until 10 p.m.: days of meetings, meals, practices, more meetings and then bed, all confined to the Flowery Branch facility. But as a sweat-drenched No. 45 headed toward the team locker room after kickoff-coverage drills that day, he gave me a knowing wink and smile as he passed.

Two days later, just hours before the Falcons’ first preseason game against the Baltimore Ravens, Pat exuded the same sense of inner assuredness, one that he, too, seemed surprised by. “It’s crazy,” he told me in the lobby of the team’s downtown Atlanta hotel. “We play tonight, but I’m not worried. I feel calm. The key thing the coaches are looking for is how fast we play with the right technique. If they see that your footwork is wrong or that you’re at all hesitant, that sends up red flags. That’s trouble. When you do things fast, it means you’re confident.”

From the Georgia Dome press box that night, I watched the Blond Tiger II pace the sidelines, still looking for some way out of his mind’s playbook cage. It wasn’t until midway into the third quarter that he took the field. Not on special teams, but as the Atlanta Falcons’ middle linebacker. On his first play in an N.F.L. game, a run off-tackle, he flew through the offense and brought the runner down at the line of scrimmage: speed and scheme melding at last.

He tallied four tackles for the night. In the postgame locker room, he and his fellow undrafted linebackers, Max Gruder, Rico Council and Jerrell Harris, were all wide-eyed from the adrenaline rush of finally having their first taste of N.F.L. action. As he dressed, Pat handed me his cellphone to read the pregame text he received from Lofa: “Tear it up tonight!”

The last three weeks of preseason whirled by in a maddening vortex of Sphinx-like silence from the coaching staff about the makeup of the final roster and increasingly rampant speculation by everyone else. My younger brother, Joe, was sending me so many e-mails with the latest blog predictions that I finally had to repeat to him Pat’s admonition to me way back in minicamp, when I kept citing blog posts picking him as the most likely to make team.

“Ignore that stuff,” he said. “It’s not really based on anything.”

By the night of the Falcons’ final preseason game against the Jacksonville Jaguars on Aug. 30, the original 90-man roster had been cut to 75. Gruder was the only linebacker released. The final cuts down to the 53-man roster would be made by noon the next day.

The math of making an N.F.L. roster seems straight forward. There are 40 or so players who are Ones and Twos on offense and defense. Then there is a punter, at least one kicker, a long snapper and often a third-string quarterback. This leaves just a handful of positions available. The Falcons’ starting linebackers were set: Akeem Dent would be the starting middle linebacker with Mike Peterson as his backup. Sean Weatherspoon and Stephen Nicholas would play on either side. For the other two backup linebacker spots (if the Falcons decided to go with six), Spencer Adkins, a three-year veteran from the University of Miami, and Robert James, an undrafted free agent from Arizona State who spent the last two seasons on the practice squad, seemed favorites. It would be up to the three remaining undrafted free-agent linebackers to find some way to change that math.

I watched that final preseason game on TV. Pat didn’t get a single rep on special teams, but he played the better part of the second half at middle linebacker in an inspired trance, calling checks, conducting the defense and taking down ball carriers like a seasoned pro. On one sweep, he shocked and shed two blockers, did a full 360-degree turn and somehow found the running back again, taking him down for a loss.

He ended up tying Akeem Dent for the team lead in tackles with eight. In the postgame locker room, thoroughly drained by the Florida heat, he had to hydrate intravenously.

“I was dead,” he told me later. “Played something like 60 reps. My sweat was sweating. I went into that game thinking, This is the last time you’re ever going to put on a helmet. I did everything like I did in college. Wore my face paint. Got into a zone. Didn’t give a damn what anybody thought or said. I was out there just flying around. I was a savage. Whether I got cut or not was out of my hands, but I never felt more at peace. I had no regrets.”

Coach Pires made a point of stopping by Pat’s locker. “He said: ‘You played your tail off tonight. No matter what happens tomorrow, you’ve got to be proud,’ ” Pat told me.

At just past 9:30 the following morning, Pat was back at the Flowery Branch facility getting a long-craved training-room massage when he got a phone call. It was from the Falcons’ football-operations office. They wanted to see him in the team-meeting room.

“I knew right then,” Pat told me. “I’m thinking, You have got to be kidding.”

Followers of HBO’s N.F.L. training-camp series “Hard Knocks” know this moment well: the solemn handing over of the team playbook, the heart-to-heart send-off by the coach. The Falcons, however, have players turn in their playbooks at the end of each week. Pat entered the meeting room empty-handed to see 16 other teammates with the same empty expressions. Among them were the other undrafted free-agent linebackers, Rico Council and Jerrell Harris, and also Spencer Adkins. The team was going with only five linebackers. Robert James got the fifth spot.

They all sat there together, quietly talking about how lousy it felt, as one by one each player was escorted up to Smith’s office. Pat was among the last three guys to be called. After waiting well over an hour, he now found himself sitting before Smith and the general manager, Thomas Dimitroff.

“They shook my hand,” Pat said. “Coach Smith did all the talking. I can’t remember his exact words. I was half-listening. I was so bummed. I’m getting cut. The thrust of it was that of all the players in camp, I was one of the guys who’d improved the most from week to week. He said: ‘You played your heart out last night. We really feel you’re going to be playing in this league somewhere. Unfortunately, we’re releasing you. We just don’t have a spot available for you now, but if anything changes, we’ll call you.’ I thanked them for the opportunity, and that was about it.”

Downstairs, he noticed a group of five players sitting off to one side.

“I went over and asked them what’s up,” Pat told me. “They said they were being kept around for the practice squad. That’s when it all really hit me that I was finished.”

At 11:56 that morning I received an e-mail from Pat’s father.

“C, Patrick was released. He’s not in the mood to talk to anyone at this time. FYI Pat.”

On the hour drive south that afternoon from Flowery Branch to Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, my typically text-happy nephew numbly watched as one message after the next came in. The veteran linebackers Stephen Nicholas and Sean Weatherspoon both texted to say how great he played against the Jaguars and that he shouldn’t be surprised if he got picked up by someone right away. Pires, the linebacker coach, phoned as well. None of it was helping.

Back home that night, his parents wanted to take him to dinner. They purposefully chose a place in Elgin, a couple of towns over. “Mayor Schiller” couldn’t bear the thought of coming face to face with any of his eager hometown followers. His reputation, however, clearly extended beyond one suburb’s borders.

“We’re just sitting down,” Pat told me, “and sure enough this waiter comes over. ‘Hey you’re Pat Schiller. You play for the Falcons, right?’ And I’m like: ‘Well, not anymore, dude. Just got cut.’ ”

In his old bed that night, beneath the framed photo of the Blond Tiger that he keeps above a pair of bronzed boxing gloves, Pat felt deeply conflicted about being back home. He said he hated himself for liking it so much, right down to the warm heft of his dog Champ and the chance to just hang low for a while and heal.

He slept well into the following morning, got up around 11 a.m. and shortly after noon headed out the front door with his father to shop for a new laptop. By then, Pat told me, he was beginning to take some stock in what Smith, his teammates and his agent all told him: he had made good film.

“But dude,” Pat told me, “I’ve got to admit, I was thinking, If someone is going to call, I hope it’s two or three weeks from now. I was really looking forward to some time off.”

Pat and his dad had just climbed into the cab of his pickup when his phone rang. It was the Falcons. They wanted to know if Pat would consider coming back to be on their practice squad.

“Consider?” Pat told me. “I mean a couple of weeks off would have been nice. But to play for the team whose guys and system I know?”

He was back in Flowery Branch by 9 that night, having never unpacked his bag.

Six weeks later, I flew down to Atlanta to watch the Falcons’ away-game matchup, against the Washington Redskins, on TV with Pat. There’s a certain ghostly quality to being on an N.F.L. practice squad. You work all week with the team, attend all the same meetings, eat the same meals, accrue all the same weekly bumps, aches and bruises and yet walk the sidelines in the team’s official civilian clothes for home matchups and don’t travel for away games. An injury to one of the Falcons’ five active-roster linebackers could have Pat dressing for the next game. He could also be dropped at a moment’s notice for a needed backup at another position. Or he could be picked up by any of the league’s other teams for their active roster, forcing Pat to pack his things and break the lease he signed on the two-bedroom town house in Atlanta’s northern suburbs.

The farthest Pat had previously lived from home was the place that he and Chandler Harnish shared near the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, just 25 miles from Geneva. His parents took care of most of his bills, including car and gas and his auto and health insurance. His mother did his laundry at home. He never balanced a checkbook. Now, before a small whiteboard in his narrow kitchen, the two of us stood reviewing the monthly cost of living his dream.

Rent: $975

Furniture rental: $400

Gas/power: $55

Car: $310

Fitness: $30

Cable: $40

He knew he could save more of his weekly $3,500 paycheck (after taxes) if he bought furniture. But to stay as mobile as possible in case of a sudden call to another team, he chose to rent: the headboard and clothes dresser in the bedroom; a spare wood table with four metal chairs in the dining room; and the L-shaped leather living-room sofa with a coffee table/ottoman. All the pieces seemed to barely touch the carpeting, as if they, too, were somehow keenly aware of just how provisional the life is that they’re furnishing. The air mattress in his guest bedroom was a last-minute donation from his former practice-squad mate Bryce Harris. Harris was signed by the New Orleans Saints to fill a hole in their roster during the first week of the season, just days after he moved into a condo a few doors down from my nephew’s.

“It’s not easy,” Pat said, “having to pick up everything just like that, break your lease, go to a new town and learn a whole new system. But, hey, for $390,000 a year, you break your lease.”

He told me he feels much more relaxed now with his teammates, more like one of the guys, but is still very aware of where he stands in the N.F.L.’s strict hierarchy.

“You have to know your place,” he told me. “And believe me, I know. I’m always the first guy at meetings, and I’m the first guy back in the room after breaks. I still get the vets water and Gatorade. I dropped over $100 at Costco the other day on bulk candy, fruit roll-ups, Starbursts, beef jerky, sunflower seeds. We’re in there watching film for hours, so that’s my contribution.”

He occasionally goes out with some of the other guys on the practice squad, but not much with the veteran linebackers.

“I talk more now about the game with them,” he said, “and they’re all cool guys, but I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, you want to hang out?’ You don’t want to be that guy. Everybody does their own thing. They’re living their lives. But it’s not like I sit at home and say: ‘Oh, this is so sad. I don’t have any friends.’ It gets lonely at times. But I just kind of chill, and I find things to do.”

That afternoon, Pat and I sat in front of his new flat-screen TV — the only thing in his place other than a coffee maker that he bought — watching his teammates’ come-from-behind victory over the Redskins, the Falcons fifth win against no losses. Pat watched like any modern-day, tech-savvy youth: a MacBook Air propped on his belly, an iPhone beside him, deftly surfing the Internet, fielding and sending texts between plays and during commercials, eyes darting between multiple screens until a play propelled him off the sofa with a thunderous roar.

“That’s it!” he yelled at the tight end Tony Gonzalez. “Give me more of that Y.A.C.” (yards after contact).

Somehow it wasn’t until we were watching postgame highlights that either of us noticed the backup linebacker, Robert James, whose former place on the practice squad Pat now held, had come into the game sometime during the fourth quarter. Pat sat bolt upright, grabbed the remote and scrolled back through the game to determine the precise moment James entered. He then went to the Falcons’ game thread on his computer, eyes narrowing, lips slightly parted in anticipation.

“Stephen Nicholas,” he muttered. “Ankle.”

For the next two days of my visit, we were on the Stephen Nicholas ankle watch. Texts and calls came from all directions. Everyone Pat knew, it seemed, was aware of Nicholas’s ankle. Gruder, with whom Pat had only exchanged a couple of text messages since Gruder was released in August, wrote, “You getting called up this week?” Chris Browning of ProForce phoned to ask the same thing. Over dinner the following night, the number of Dave Lee, Pat’s agent, flashed up on Pat’s cellphone. Pat held the phone to his ear. A protracted silence.

“No, dude,” he finally interrupted. “That’s a funny story. I just thought you were calling about something else.”

He hung up. A moment later he looked down with a quizzical head tilt at another call coming in.

“Crazy,” he said. “You see a number pop up you don’t know, and you think: This is it. A team calling to pick me up.”

Nicholas’s ankle injury turned out to be less serious than originally thought. But in the Falcons’ seventh game of the season, the linebacker Sean Weatherspoon was carted off the field with his own ankle troubles. He was out of the lineup for the next two games. When I checked with Pat a few days before the Falcons’ game against the Arizona Cardinals, Weatherspoon’s status was being listed as questionable, and the Weatherspoon ankle watch was still on.

“Who knows?” Pat told me. “But if the call comes, I’m ready.”

My last night with him in Atlanta, we went back to his town house after dinner to watch a little Monday-night Football. During a break in the action, he led me into his clothes-and-sneaker-strewn bedroom to show me the huge walk-in closet he felt would allow him to send back his rented dresser. I noticed that the dresser was topped with all manner of balms, unguents and painkilling medications: a 23-year-old with the medicine cabinet of a septuagenarian.

Somehow, it was only then that I felt the full weight of what my nephew had managed to pull off: the ridiculous odds he overcame; all the excellent players he beat out. I suddenly felt more like one of his hometown acolytes than an uncle to a kid who grew up a thousand miles and, in terms of life experiences and career pursuits, a world away from me. A kid I only came to know at this juncture because he is so good at a game that I, like millions of others, so love to watch.

“Dude,” he said, as I stood staring at his dresser. “I swear to God, if someone tells me right now there’s some miracle body cream out there that would make me feel 100 percent and prevent me from getting hurt but that could also cause cancer or liver damage down the line, I’d use it in a heartbeat. I would.”

He picked up an empty bottle of anti-inflammatory pills and tossed it in the trash.

“Even if I make it,” he said, “the average career is what, three or four years tops. But if I get hurt now, I’m gone. It’s nothing personal. If I’m injured, I’m dead weight. I’m stealing their money. Do you know how many linebackers there are sitting home right now that want my job? Hundreds. I mean, let’s get real. As much as Coach Smith or Coach Pires might like me, it would be: ‘Hey, it’s been a fun ride. You’re a good kid. But see ya, Schiller!’ ”

Charles Siebert is a contributing writer and the author, most recently, of “Rough Beasts: The Zanesville Massacre, One Year Later.”

Subscribe in a reader

@democracynow U.N. Special Rapporteur Calls for Global Protection of Gaza Civilians from U.S.-Backed Israeli Assault

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:23:00 +0000

Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, calls on the international community to help defend the people of Gaza from the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli assault. "It’s time, it seems to me, for the international community to take some responsibility for protecting the people of Gaza," Falk says. "The responsibility to protect norm was very self-righteously invoked in relation to Gaddafi’s Libya, but there’s utter silence when it comes to the people of Gaza." Falk is a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and the author of more than 50 books on war, human rights and international law. We also speak with Raji Sourani, an award-winning human rights lawyer and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza.

Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and the author of more than 50 books on war, human rights and international law. He now teaches at University of California at Santa Barbara.

Raji Sourani, an award-winning human rights lawyer. He is the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza. He is on the executive board of the International Federation for Human Rights.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the attack on Gaza, we’re joined by Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories. He’s a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author of more than 50 books on war, human rights, international law. He now teaches at University of California at Santa Barbara. We’re also joined by Raji Sourani, joining us from Gaza City, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

I wanted to go to Richard Falk right now. Can you talk about international law in relation to what has happened so far? The latest numbers we have, at least 95 Palestinians have been killed, at least half of them believed to be civilians, since the Israeli assault began last week. The number of Palestinians wounded, over 600. At the same time, Palestinian rocket firings were about 75 on Sunday after a two-day average of 230 rockets. According to Israeli government statistics, Israel has carried out over 1,350 attacks since launching the offensive last week. The number of Israelis that have been killed is three. Your response to what is taking place?

RICHARD FALK: I share very much the legal assessment that Raji Sourani has been offering a few minutes ago. There is no question in my mind that to launch this kind of all-out attack on a defenseless civilian society is something that must be viewed with the greatest alarm by those that take international law and international humanitarian law seriously as a way of governing the behavior of sovereign states.

And in this setting, it’s particularly shocking because there existed a diplomatic alternative. It was clear that Hamas had agreed to an informal truce and had proposed, through its Israeli interlocutor, a long-term truce, and there’s no question that this was a choice made by Israel to assassinate a Hamas leader—in fact, the person that had endorsed the truce—a few days after it had been established. So one has to question any kind of recourse to this kind of violence in a setting where a peaceful alternative seems to have existed and was rebuffed. And that’s—that’s a very serious element that’s been almost totally ignored in the media reaction in the West, particularly the United States, and certainly in the Obama misleading presentation of the issue as the right of a country to defend itself. There’s—no one questions that right. The question is: When and how is it appropriate?

And here, as before in 2008, when Israel launched a similar devastating attack on the population and people of Gaza, there were alternatives, and this kind of approach to security ends up with a new cycle of violence at higher levels of intensity. So it’s time, it seems to me, for the international community to take some responsibility for protecting the people of Gaza. The responsibility to protect norm was very self-righteously invoked in relation to Gaddafi’s Libya, but there’s utter silence when it comes to the people of Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Gilad Sharon, the son of the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who remains in a coma, wrote in an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post over the weekend, quote, "We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

"There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing."

Richard Falk, that’s—those are the words of the son of Ariel Sharon.

RICHARD FALK: And those words have also been repeated in more or less those same terms by the deputy prime minister of Israel, and it is a shocking embrace of criminality, of crimes against humanity of the most severe kind. Indeed it has a genocidal edge to it, when you talk about depriving a population of its entire infrastructure, as if that’s the way to produce security. It’s a very perverse notion, and, as I say, in a setting where it is clear that if Israel were prepared to lift the blockade and to—which is unlawful form of collective punishment that is prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention—and was willing to deal with the governing authorities in Gaza as if they’re a political actor, this would produce real security, at least as a foundation for the relations between this portion of the Palestinian people and the state of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Raji Sourani back into the conversation to respond to Israeli President Shimon Peres saying that the country is being pushed to fight against its will, talking about Israel.

PRESIDENT SHIMON PERES: This strange war, we don’t have any ambitions or any claims of this war. We don’t want to get rid of—by war with Hamas, we don’t want to change the state of Gaza. We don’t want to fire at all. But we were left without a choice.

AMY GOODMAN: That is the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, saying "We [were] left without a choice." Raji Sourani, three Israelis have been killed by the rocket fire, about 80 wounded. Your response?

RAJI SOURANI: Well, I mean, it’s very interesting what Mr. Peres is saying. Even he blames the victim. I mean, we are criminals because we push them to kill us, to bomb us, to destroy us, to launch a war against us. That’s obscene. That’s the absurd. I mean, it’s too much.

Regarding Gilad Sharon, a Dahiya doctrine, it’s not a theory; it’s a practice. And this practice had happened during the Lebanon war. And I’m sure, with all the introductions we have for Gaza for the last six days, that the worst is yet to come. In the last five days, things were going really—I mean, every day worse than the other. But in the last 24 hours, things are escalating in a very drastic way. Just half an hour ago, ambulance with a doctor and nurse has been targeted and killed. These are the last victims, I mean, we are having in Gaza. And all over Gaza, there is no safe haven.

What triggered this war really? What triggered it? The assassination of one of Hamas leaders who was negotiating with the Egyptian and the Israelis the truce. And that’s what triggered, Amy, everything. Mr. Peres is forgetting that Gaza, for the last seven years, suffer a criminal siege, suffocating socially and economically 1.7 million people, unable to move in or out, and no movement for goods whatsoever. And they shifted Gaza to be a first-class, human-disaster-made, de-developed place. And, you know, they are practicing all kinds of suffocation on it through that criminal siege, which all international human rights organizations said this is illegal, inhumane, as Mr. Falk rightly said.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji Sourani, President Obama, the Israeli government, the U.S. media, overall, says what’s triggered this Israeli military assault on Gaza are the missiles, the rocket attacks that are coming from Gaza.

RAJI SOURANI: It’s not true at all. It’s not true at all. There was assassination, and there was bombing immediately after assassination all over Gaza Strip. And this you can—being asked by any local observer, whether local, international, neutral or—I mean, these are given facts. But obviously, U.S. and Mr. Obama try to provide Israel with full excuse, with full legal, political immunity to do whatever they want to do against Gazans. This is—this is unjust. This is unfair. This makes U.S. on the same foot, I mean, equal to Israel and real partner of what they are doing, of war crimes or crimes against humanity, against Gazan civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has announced plans to travel to Egypt to seek a ceasefire, but many residents of Gaza say they’re skeptical of Ban’s trip to the Middle East. This is one resident of Gaza named Yousif.

YOUSIF: [translated] I do not welcome him, because he came here during the last war, 2008-2009, and did nothing for us. He will come again for the second war but will never do anything for us. He will speak about taking action but will not do anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you share that view, Raji Sourani?

RAJI SOURANI: I want him to come, and I want him to be the real international conscience of the most important system on earth, the U.N., in order to bring rule of law, not the rule of jungle, to this part of the world. Gaza is not part of his visit. He’s going to Israel, and he’s going to the West Bank. But those who need his visit, Gazans, he’s not going to visit them. And he, in advance, once and again, blamed the victim. He says, you know, Gaza deserve what had happened, for simple reason: They are bombarding Israel. Once again, Amy, it’s Kafka. It’s absurd. How can occupied people, those who are entitled by law, by international humanitarian law, to protection, can be victimizers for belligerent, criminal occupation practicing war crime, not this time, but just in Cast Lead operation, as well, and wasn’t held accountable?

AMY GOODMAN: The latest news around the attack on the media center: On Sunday, six Palestinian journalists wounded when Israeli missiles slammed into the offices of the Hamas TV station, Al Aqsa, and the Lebanon-based Al Quds TV, a number of international media outlets, including Fox, CBS, Sky, have used the studios in targeted buildings. One of the victims lost his leg. And I’m looking at a tweet from the Netanyahu spokesperson, Ofir Gendelman, who said, "No Western journalists were hurt during the IAF operation aimed to destroy Hamas’ military comm. situated on the roof of a media building." And I’d like to get the U.N. rapporteur Richard Falk’s response.

RICHARD FALK: It is clear that any kind of deliberate attack on journalists is itself a deliberate, intentional war crime. The U.N. has clearly declared that journalists are civilians. And this isn’t as if there is an attack on a communications system that manipulates the weapons that Hamas has been using. It is an attack on journalists that are doing their professional job, and it represents an attempt by Israel, I suppose, to avoid any kind of effort to tell the story of what is really happening. And we’re thankful to media personalities such as yourself that are at least trying to get at the truth of what is going on and the terrible ordeal that the people of Gaza are once again subjected to without the kind of protection that international law and international morality should be according them.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji Sourani, what is life like on the ground right now? You are in your office. How are Gazans dealing with the attacks right now?

RAJI SOURANI: Well, I mean, if you are sitting in my office, I mean, you will hear the bombs, I mean, all over the place. Every minute or two passes, I mean, you will hear, you know, one bomb from Apache or a drone or F-16 hitting, bombing. And just half an hour ago, the Shoroq Tower, where these journalists were targeted at dawn yesterday, have been bombed again, under fire right now at this tower. For the second consecutive time in less than 30 hours, this tower has been targeted. And this tower, I mean, full of media people—yesterday, six has been injured, one have leg amputated. And again, I mean, they are doing this once and again. And yesterday, another building full of journalists were actually threatened to evacuate. And they sent message to international journalists—not Gazan journalists, international—to evacuate and leave the place. And we went there, all the human rights organization leaders, in solidarity, I mean, with them, and we held a press conference at that building, in front of that building, and in solidarity with them.

Once and again, Israel feel immune: they are not going to be held accountable. They count too much in U.S., and they count too much in Europe, and they know that, you know, they are not going to be criticized or blamed, as far, I mean, all these superpowers giving them that protection. And that’s why they feel almost having a free hand to do whatever they want to do.

And by the way, yesterday, when they bombarded al-Dalo three-stories house, and they killed these 12 people, 10 from one family, they said, "Well, we committed minor mistake. We just didn’t pick the right house. We think the house which was supposed to be targeted, the one next to it." So they mean, I mean, even choosing houses, choosing inhabited houses, choosing houses full of civilians, it’s very legitimate target for one reason, because the owner of that house is in Hamas or Fatah or belong to this or that group. This is a clear policy, again Israel putting in the eye of the storm civilians, and they are doing a Dahiya doctrine. And I believe all introductions, especially in the last 24 hours, indicates in a very clear way that the worst is yet to come. And I’m anticipating and expecting soon, I mean, drastic change and much more killings and injuries and destruction going to happen in this part of the world, as if what had happened so far is not enough.

AMY GOODMAN: As you were saying, Raji Sourani, this is a tweet from the BBC: "Tower block gaza housing offices Arab tv channels & Al Aqsa tv of Hamas hit 3 times. Reports 7 injured." And we are showing live on Democracy Now! right now the tower where the—where the Palestinian media is. And for our radio listeners, you can go to our website at democracynow.org to see those images. As we wrap up, what you feel needs to be done now? Raji Sourani, you wrote a piece called "History is Repeated as the International Community Turns Its Back on Gaza," referring to what happened four years ago soon after President Obama was elected the first time in that interim before he was inaugurated, similar to what we’re seeing now, with Operation Cast Lead. What about the world community? What about Egypt now with a president from the Muslim Brotherhood? Who are you looking to to help? And I want to put that question also to Richard Falk after.

RAJI SOURANI: I want a free, committed people across the globe break this conspiratorial silence and to ask for rule of law and justice for this part of the world. All what we want, rule of law, not the rule of jungle. And Israel is effectively doing the rule of jungle in this part of the world. I think and I’m sure if Israel were held accountable in Cast Lead operation, wouldn’t dare to do this. As a citizen of the world who believes in the world of law, asking individuals, groups, states, to do something effective to have an end for this criminal offensive by Israel. Egypt and other states, they are good, but I don’t believe, I mean, they are in capacity to stop that. I think what we need, something very simple: very strong intervention to have an end for this crime and to bring peace to this part of the world, which only can it be brought by one thing: have an end for this Israeli belligerent occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Raji Sourani, do you also call on Hamas to stop hitting Israel with their missiles?

RAJI SOURANI: Well, right of self-determination and right of self-defense, it’s a very basic fundamental right for any occupied people, but that should be abide with the rule of law, as well. And I think, you know, we should be on higher moral ground than this Israeli belligerent occupation.

Subscribe in a reader

Palestinian Loss of land 1946-2010

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:39:00 +0000

Subscribe in a reader

The Top Twitter Clients for Android @twicca_en softonic_en

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 03:32:00 +0000

The Top Twitter Clients for Android

Niamh Lynch

If you're looking for a Twitter client for Android, you're spoiled for choice. There's a ton out there, and lots of them are very, very good. We've taken a look at some of the most popular, breaking them down by Appearance, Advanced Features and whether or not they are Power-User Friendly. Which one came out on top? Read on to find out!

Just a note: even though we looked at 9 apps, not all of them were included in the test. There's a limit to how many you can thoroughly test for one article, so I cut the field down to size subjectively - I cut the ones I don't like!

Two of the apps I didn't test came as pre-installed clients on the test phone - Swift and Peep. Both of them are good, but not great, covering the basics, but not much else. I also looked at Twidroyd, but didn't like the interface and found it a little buggy. HootSuite was also looked at, but again, I didn't like the interface or the two-step process for managing messages. Last, but not least, we checked out Seesmic. I'm not a fan of this app, but gave it a fair test anyway. Again, the two-step message process annoyed me, as well as the fact that feels a lot like the official Twitter app - but less intuitive.

In the end, we were left with four apps: Plume, Twitter, TweetCaster and Twicca

Appearance

Appearance is a hard one to pin down as it is so subjective. Even so, there are usability issues at stake that make one app just that little bit easier to use than another.

Plume: this app looks smooth, with nice customization options and small buttons that are actually very easy to use. You'll be able to add a significant dose of color to this Twitter app, and there's lots of other customization options. On the downside, the More option feels amateurish and it's none too fast, but if you like to pimp your Twitter, this app is sure to appeal. 8/10

Twitter: the official Twitter app is clearly labeled and easy to use. It's got a quite a sober, grown-up look, which is a real change from earlier versions, which looked downright childish. It hasn't got many skins or visual changes available, but it is very easy to navigate. If you're looking for a more straightforward, serious look, the official Twitter app will be perfect for you. 7/10

TweetCaster: TweetCaster is a hard one to pin down. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the interface, which is brightly colored and slightly cartoony. It also uses a wide variety of menu types, which makes it feels a little chaotic. Add that to the visible ads across the bottom of the screen and, as far as appearance goes, TweetCaster doesn't do too well. At the same time, it's simple to use and its options are easily accessible from the timeline. Even so, this ease of use doesn't really compensate, so from me at least, TweetCaster loses a few points. 6/10

Twicca: Twicca is by far my favorite app in terms of appearance. There are only two themes - light or dark, but tweets can be color coded and the whole app has a lovely, minimalist approach. Menus and options are well integrated and the timeline is easily visible and nicely designed - top marks! 9/10

Advanced Features

Plume: None of these apps really skimp on advanced features, but Plume is really something. Between notifications, available languages, picture hosting services and sharing, this app has more options than you'll know how to handle. Pair that with easily managed geotagging and SSL access (to make tweeting extra safe) and this app really impresses. 9/10

Twitter: Again, the official Twitter app is not top of the class. Geolocation was hard to manage, and there's not a lot to the notification options available. As far as image hosting and URL shorteners go, Twitter is pretty average. It's not all bad though - the official app does have good trend following options and you can scan your phone contacts to find new people to follow on twitter. 7/10

TweetCaster: TweetCaster is another middle of the class student when it comes to basic features. Images, URL shortening and notifications are all more or less ok. It does have a few things that its competitors don't, however, namely video support (for built-in uploading to TwitVid), universal update (timeline, mentions, lists, etc.) and a cool shake to update option. Probably the jewel in TweetCaster's crown is the tweet filter, however, something that the competition don't offer at all. 8/10

Twicca: Like everything else about the app, Twicca keeps things simple. All the apps options - and there's lots of them - are really easy to access, clear laid out and easily visible. Among the strong points are notifications and sharing options and, of course, easily toggle-able geolocation. 7/10

Power Users

Are you a Twitter power user? Well, if you manage more than one account, need to tweet on a very regular basis, or need to manage multiple lists, you probably are. And that means that you'll need a twitter app that's got just a little bit more. How do our apps line up?

Plume: this little app starts off well. For a start, you can add multiple accounts, and modifying your profile is no problem at all. Unfortunately, however, Plume seems to struggle at peak times, and despite fantastic overall configuration options, there's not much you can do about your lists. 7/10

Twitter: Twitter's own app fails miserably at the first hurdle - you can't add multiple accounts! That's a pity, because you can properly modify your profile from the app, as well as managing lists and followers. It's not the best app if you need serious control over your tweeting however - it's just not as powerful as other apps. 6/10

TweetCaster: TweetCaster seems to have it nailed - multiple accounts, profile editing, list and follower management all come naturally to this app. There are a host of other useful features too, such as quick follow, a Tweet filter, refresh all and some excellent follower tools. 9/10

Twicca: this is another app that does it well. Multiple accounts, in-app profile and list editing and a whole host of goodies hidden in the settings make Twicca really impressive. Unfortunately, managing followers isn't quite as easy as with other apps - although it can be done - but in the general context of this app's abilities, it's something we can overlook. 9/10

The Verdict!

As yuu can see from our test, none of these apps are exactly slackers. Even so, on this occasion, Twicca comes out on top, closely followed by Plume. TweetCaster's downfall is its appearance, while Twitter dropped on an overall lack of advanced features. That said, people use Twitter in very different ways, and one writer's cons can be another user's pros. If you've got the time, check them out yourself. If not, stick with Twicca (if you like lots of configurability) or Plume (for a nice balance between form and function) and you can't go wrong!

Subscribe in a reader

@thenextweb Forget apps and useless startups: These four African girls have created a pee-powered generator

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 05:13:00 +0000

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/11/07/forget-apps-and-other-useless-startups-these-four-african-girls-have-created-a-pee-powered-generator/

What have you built lately? 14-year-olds Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, Faleke Oluwatoyin, and 15-year-old Bello Eniola have created a urine powered generator.

All over Africa, young men and women have missioned across the country and arrived in Lagos, Nigeria. All they want to do is show off what they have made. Maker Faire Africa is more than your typical startup event: it actually shows off innovations, inventions, and initiatives that solve immediate challenges and problems, and then works to support and propagate them. Put another way, this isn’t just a bunch of rich people talking about how their apps are going to change the world.

These four girls may not end up doing that either, but their efforts definitely stand more of a chance than yet another hyper local social cloud app. Their efforts should not go unnoticed, because if this is what they’re doing as teenagers, I really hope they have the funding they need to be revolutionizing lives when they’re adults.

Here’s how it works:

    Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which cracks the urea into nitrogen, water, and hydrogen.
    The hydrogen goes into a water filter for purification, which then gets pushed into the gas cylinder.
    The gas cylinder pushes hydrogen into a cylinder of liquid borax, which is used to remove the moisture from the hydrogen gas.
    This purified hydrogen gas is pushed into the generator.
    1 Liter of urine gives you 6 hours of electricity.

If this doesn’t motivate you to go out and start thinking about how you can really make an impact, then I don’t know what will. If urine isn’t your cup of tea, then I recommend you go and read Paul Graham’s essay Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas. In particular, pay attention to number three and number seven. Everyone else, go back to trying to figure out if you should target Android, iOS, or both.

Subscribe in a reader

Obama the moderate Republican: What the 2012 election should teach the GOP @slate

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 08:18:00 +0000

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/11/obama_the_moderate_republican_what_the_2012_election_should_teach_the_gop.html
Cheer Up, Republicans

You’re going to have a moderate Republican president for the next four years: Barack Obama.

Dear Republicans,

Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. I’ve been there many times. You’re crestfallen. You can’t believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country.

Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican.

I know how stupid that sounds. Barack Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. For five years, conservative politicians and media told you he was a raving socialist. In the heat of the campaign, when you’re trying to beat the guy, it’s hard to let go of that image of him, just as it’s hard for Democrats to see past the caricatures of Mitt Romney. But now that the campaign is over and you’re staring at a second Obama term, the falsity of the propaganda may come as a relief. By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.

Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred. It’s way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last year’s debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didn’t even come from higher tax rates. Now he’s proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.

Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation. Personal responsibility—insisting that people carry private insurance so we don’t have to bail them out in emergency rooms and hospitals—was a Republican idea. Same with Wall Street reform: There’s nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other people’s money in ways that would force us to bail them out again. Even Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal echoed the market-based emissions-control policies of the 1990 Bush administration and the 2008 McCain campaign. And last year, when the EPA proposed a new air-pollution limit, Obama ticked off environmentalists by killing it on the grounds that it might jeopardize the recovery.

Remember how Democrats ridiculed George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq? Obama copied it in Afghanistan. He escalated the drone program, killing off al-Qaida’s leaders. He sent SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden. He teamed up with NATO to take down Muammar Qaddafi. He reneged on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. He put together a globally enforced regime of sanctions that is bringing Iran’s economy to its knees. That’s why Romney had nothing to say in last month’s foreign policy debate. No sensible Republican president would have done things differently.

Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.

Subscribe in a reader

10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America @postmasculine

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:52:00 +0000

http://postmasculine.com/america

Imagine you have a brother and he’s an alcoholic. He has his moments, but you keep your distance from him. You don’t mind him for the occasional family gathering or holiday. You still love him. But you don’t want to be around him.

This is how I lovingly describe my current relationship with the United States. The United States is my alcoholic brother. And although I will always love him, I don’t want to be near him at the moment.

I know that’s harsh, but I really feel my home country is not in a good place these days. That’s not a socio-economic statement (although that’s on the decline as well), but rather a cultural one.
I realize it’s going to be impossible to write sentences like the ones above without coming across as a raging prick, so let me try to soften the blow to my American readers with an analogy:

You know when you move out of your parents’ house and live on your own, how you start hanging out with your friends’ families and you realize that actually, your family was a little screwed up? Stuff you always assumed was normal your entire childhood, it turns out was pretty weird and may have actually fucked you up a little bit. You know, dad thinking it was funny to wear a Santa Claus hat in his underwear every Christmas or the fact that you and your sister slept in the same bed until you were 22, or that your mother routinely cried over a bottle of wine while listening to Elton John.
The point is we don’t really get perspective on what’s close to us until we spend time away from it. Just like you didn’t realize the weird quirks and nuances of your family until you left and spent time with others, the same is true for country and culture. You often don’t see what’s messed up about your country and culture until you step outside of it.

And so even though this article is going to come across as fairly scathing, I want my American readers to know: some of the stuff we do, some of the stuff that we always assumed was normal, it’s kind of screwed up. And that’s OK. Because that’s true with every culture. It’s just easier to spot it in others (i.e., the French) so we don’t always notice it in ourselves.

So as you read this article, know that I’m saying everything with tough love, the same tough love with which I’d sit down and lecture an alcoholic family member. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It doesn’t mean there aren’t some awesome things about you (BRO, THAT’S AWESOME!!!). And it doesn’t mean I’m some saint either, because god knows I’m pretty screwed up (I’m American, after all). There are just a few things you need to hear. And as a friend, I’m going to tell them to you.
And to my foreign readers, get your necks ready, because this is going to be a nod-a-thon.

A Little “What The Hell Does This Guy Know?” Background: I’ve lived in different parts of the US, both the deep south and the northeast. I have visited most of the US’s 50 states. I’ve spent the past three years living almost entirely outside of the United States. I’ve lived in multiple countries in Europe, Asia and South America. I’ve visited over 40 countries in all and have spent far more time with non-Americans than with Americans during this period. I speak multiple languages. I’m not a tourist. I don’t stay in resorts and rarely stay in hostels. I rent apartments and try to integrate myself into each country I visit as much as possible. So there.

(Note: I realize these are generalizations and I realize there are always exceptions. I get it. You don’t have to post 55 comments telling me that you and your best friend are exceptions. If you really get that offended from some guy’s blog post, you may want to double-check your life priorities.)
OK, we’re ready now. 10 things Americans don’t know about America.

1. Few People Are Impressed By Us

Unless you’re speaking with a real estate agent or a prostitute, chances are they’re not going to be excited that you’re American. It’s not some badge of honor we get to parade around. Yes, we had Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison, but unless you actually are Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison (which is unlikely) then most people around the world are simply not going to care. There are exceptions of course. And those exceptions are called English and Australian people. Whoopdie-fucking-doo.
As Americans, we’re brought up our entire lives being taught that we’re the best, we did everything first and that the rest of the world follows our lead. Not only is this not true, but people get irritated when you bring it to their country with you. So don’t.

2. Few People Hate Us

Despite the occasional eye-rolling, and complete inability to understand why anyone would vote for George W. Bush, people from other countries don’t hate us either. In fact — and I know this is a really sobering realization for us — most people in the world don’t really think about us or care about us. I know, that sounds absurd, especially with CNN and Fox News showing the same 20 angry Arab men on repeat for ten years straight. But unless we’re invading someone’s country or threatening to invade someone’s country (which is likely), then there’s a 99.99% chance they don’t care about us. Just like we rarely think about the people in Bolivia or Mongolia, most people don’t think about us much. They have jobs, kids, house payments — you know, those things called lives — to worry about. Kind of like us.

Americans tend to assume that the rest of the world either loves us or hates us (this is actually a good litmus test to tell if someone is conservative or liberal). The fact is, most people feel neither. Most people don’t think much about us.

Remember that immature girl in high school, who every little thing that happened to her meant that someone either hated her or was obsessed with her; who thought every teacher who ever gave her a bad grade was being totally unfair and everything good that happened to her was because of how amazing she was? Yeah, we’re that immature high school girl.

3. We Know Nothing About The Rest Of The World

For all of our talk about being global leaders and how everyone follows us, we don’t seem to know much about our supposed “followers.” They often have completely different takes on history than we do. Here were some brain-stumpers for me: the Vietnamese believe the Vietnam War was about China (not us), Hitler was primarily defeated by Russia (not us), Native Americans were wiped out largely disease and plague (not us), and the American Revolution was “won” because the British cared more about beating France (not us). Notice a running theme here?
(Hint: It’s not all about us.)

We did not invent democracy. We didn’t even invent modern democracy. There were parliamentary systems in England and other parts of Europe over a hundred years before we created government. In a recent survey of young Americans, 63% could not find Iraq on a map (despite being at war with them), and 54% did not know Sudan was a country in Africa. Yet, somehow we’re positive that everyone else looks up to us.

4. We Are Poor At Expressing Gratitude And Affection

There’s a saying about English-speakers. We say “Go fuck yourself,” when we really mean “I like you,” and we say “I like you,” when we really mean “Go fuck yourself.”

Outside of getting shit-housed drunk and screaming “I LOVE YOU, MAN!”, open displays of affection in American culture are tepid and rare. Latin and some European cultures describe us as “cold” and “passionless” and for good reason. In our social lives we don’t say what we mean and we don’t mean what we say.

In our culture, appreciation and affection are implied rather than spoken outright. Two guy friends call each other names to reinforce their friendship; men and women tease and make fun of each other to imply interest. Feelings are almost never shared openly and freely. Consumer culture has cheapened our language of gratitude. Something like, “It’s so good to see you” is empty now because it’s expected and heard from everybody.

In dating, when I find a woman attractive, I almost always walk right up to her and tell her that a) I wanted to meet her, and b) she’s beautiful. In America, women usually get incredibly nervous and confused when I do this. They’ll make jokes to defuse the situation or sometimes ask me if I’m part of a TV show or something playing a prank. Even when they’re interested and go on dates with me, they get a bit disoriented when I’m so blunt with my interest. Whereas, in almost every other culture approaching women this way is met with a confident smile and a “Thank you.”

5. The Quality of Life For The Average American Is Not That Great

If you’re extremely talented or intelligent, the US is probably the best place in the world to live. The system is stacked heavily to allow people of talent and advantage to rise to the top quickly.

The problem with the US is that everyone thinks they are of talent and advantage. As John Steinbeck famously said, the problem with poor Americans is that “they don’t believe they’re poor, but rather temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” It’s this culture of self-delusion that allows America to continue to innovate and churn out new industry more than anyone else in the world. But this shared delusion also unfortunately keeps perpetuating large social inequalities and the quality of life for the average citizen lower than most other developed countries. It’s the price we pay to maintain our growth and economic dominance.

In my Guide to Wealth, I defined being wealthy as, “Having the freedom to maximize one’s life experiences.” In those terms, despite the average American having more material wealth than citizens of most other countries (more cars, bigger houses, nicer televisions), their overall quality of life suffers in my opinion. American people on average work more hours with less vacation, spend more time commuting every day, and are saddled with over $10,000 of debt. That’s a lot of time spent working and buying crap and little time or disposable income for relationships, activities or new experiences.

6. The Rest Of The World Is Not A Slum-Ridden Shithole Compared To Us

In 2010, I got into a taxi in Bangkok to take me to a new six-story cineplex. It was accessible by metro, but I chose a taxi instead. On the seat in front of me was a sign with a wifi password. Wait, what? I asked the driver if he had wifi in his taxi. He flashed a huge smile. The squat Thai man, with his pidgin English, explained that he had installed it himself. He then turned on his new sound system and disco lights. His taxi instantly became a cheesy nightclub on wheels… with free wifi.

If there’s one constant in my travels over the past three years, it has been that almost every place I’ve visited (especially in Asia and South America) is much nicer and safer than I expected it to be. Singapore is pristine. Hong Kong makes Manhattan look like a suburb. My neighborhood in Colombia is nicer than the one I lived in in Boston (and cheaper).

As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way behind us. They’re not. Sweden and South Korea have more advanced high speed internet networks. Japan has the most advanced trains and transportation systems. Norwegians make more money. The biggest and most advanced plane in the world is flown out of Singapore. The tallest buildings in the world are now in Dubai and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

What’s so surprising about the world is how unsurprising most of it is. I spent a week with some local guys in Cambodia. You know what their biggest concerns were? Paying for school, getting to work on time, and what their friends were saying about them. In Brazil, people have debt problems, hate getting stuck in traffic and complain about their overbearing mothers. Every country thinks they have the worst drivers. Every country thinks their weather is unpredictable. The world becomes, err… predictable.

7. We’re Paranoid

Not only are we emotionally insecure as a culture, but I’ve come to realize how paranoid we are about our physical security. You don’t have to watch Fox News or CNN for more than 10 minutes to hear about how our drinking water is going to kill us, our neighbor is going to rape our children, some terrorist in Yemen is going to kill us because we didn’t torture him, Mexicans are going to kill us, or some virus from a bird is going to kill us. There’s a reason we have more guns than people.
In the US, security trumps everything, even liberty. We’re paranoid.

I’ve probably been to 10 countries now that friends and family back home told me explicitly not to go because someone was going to kill me, kidnap me, stab me, rob me, rape me, sell me into sex trade, give me HIV, or whatever else. None of that has happened. I’ve never been robbed and I’ve walked through some of the shittiest parts of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

In fact, the experience has been the opposite. In countries like Russia, Colombia or Guatemala, people were so friendly it actually scared me. Some stranger in a bar would invite me to his house for a bar-b-que with his family, a random person on the street would offer to show me around and give me directions to a store I was trying to find. My American instincts were always that, “Wait, this guy is going to try to rob me or kill me,” but they never did. They were just insanely friendly.

8. We’re Status-Obsessed And Seek Attention

I’ve noticed that the way we Americans communicate is usually designed to create a lot of attention and hype. Again, I think this is a product of our consumer culture: the belief that something isn’t worthwhile or important unless it’s perceived to be the best (BEST EVER!!!) or unless it gets a lot of attention (see: every reality-television show ever made).

This is why Americans have a peculiar habit of thinking everything is “totally awesome,” and even the most mundane activities were “the best thing ever!” It’s the unconscious drive we share for importance and significance, this unmentioned belief, socially beaten into us since birth that if we’re not the best at something, then we don’t matter.

We’re status-obsessed. Our culture is built around achievement, production and being exceptional. Therefore comparing ourselves and attempting to out-do one another has infiltrated our social relationships as well. Who can slam the most beers first? Who can get reservations at the best restaurant? Who knows the promoter to the club? Who dated a girl on the cheerleading squad? Socializing becomes objectified and turned into a competition. And if you’re not winning, the implication is that you are not important and no one will like you.

9. We Are Very Unhealthy

Unless you have cancer or something equally dire, the health care system in the US sucks. The World Health Organization ranked the US 37th in the world for health care, despite the fact that we spend the most per capita by a large margin.

The hospitals are nicer in Asia (with European-educated doctors and nurses) and cost a tenth as much. Something as routine as a vaccination costs multiple hundreds of dollars in the US and less than $10 in Colombia. And before you make fun of Colombian hospitals, Colombia is 28th in the world on that WHO list, nine spots higher than us.

A routine STD test that can run you over $200 in the US is free in many countries to anyone, citizen or not. My health insurance the past year? $65 a month. Why? Because I live outside of the US. An American guy I met living in Buenos Aires got knee surgery on his ACL that would have cost $10,000 in the US… for free.

But this isn’t really getting into the real problems of our health. Our food is killing us. I’m not going to go crazy with the details, but we eat chemically-laced crap because it’s cheaper and tastes better (profit, profit). Our portion sizes are absurd (more profit). And we’re by far the most prescribed nation in the world AND our drugs cost five to ten times more than they do even in Canada (ohhhhhhh, profit, you sexy bitch).

In terms of life expectancy, despite being the richest country in the world, we come in a paltry 38th. Right behind Cuba, Malta and the United Arab Emirates, and slightly ahead of Slovenia, Kuwait and Uruguay. Enjoy your Big Mac.

10. We Mistake Comfort For Happiness

The United States is a country built on the exaltation of economic growth and personal ingenuity. Small businesses and constant growth are celebrated and supported above all else — above affordable health care, above respectable education, above everything. Americans believe it’s your responsibility to take care of yourself and make something of yourself, not the state’s, not your community’s, not even your friend’s or family’s in some instances.

Comfort sells easier than happiness. Comfort is easy. It requires no effort and no work. Happiness takes effort. It requires being proactive, confronting fears, facing difficult situations, and having unpleasant conversations.

Comfort equals sales. We’ve been sold comfort for generations and for generations we bought: bigger houses, separated further and further out into the suburbs; bigger TV’s, more movies, and take-out. The American public is becoming docile and complacent. We’re obese and entitled. When we travel, we look for giant hotels that will insulate us and pamper us rather than for legitimate cultural experiences that may challenge our perspectives or help us grow as individuals.

Depression and anxiety disorders are soaring within the US. Our inability to confront anything unpleasant around us has not only created a national sense of entitlement, but it’s disconnected us from what actually drives happiness: relationships, unique experiences, feeling self-validated, achieving personal goals. It’s easier to watch a NASCAR race on television and tweet about it than to actually get out and try something new with a friend.

Unfortunately, a by-product of our massive commercial success is that we’re able to avoid the necessary emotional struggles of life in lieu of easy superficial pleasures.

Throughout history, every dominant civilization eventually collapsed because it became TOO successful. What made it powerful and unique grows out of proportion and consumes its society. I think this is true for American society. We're complacent, entitled and unhealthy. My generation is the first generation of Americans who will be worse off than their parents, economically, physically and emotionally. And this is not due to a lack of resources, to a lack of education or to a lack of ingenuity. It's corruption and complacency. The corruption from the massive industries that control our government's policies, and the fat complacency of the people to sit around and let it happen.

There are things I love about my country. I don't hate the US and I still return to it a few times a year. But I think the greatest flaw of American culture is our blind self-absorption. In the past it only hurt other countries. But now it's starting to hurt ourselves.

So this is my lecture to my alcoholic brother -- my own flavor of arrogance and self-absorption, even if slightly more informed -- in hopes he'll give up his wayward ways. I imagine it'll fall on deaf ears, but it's the most I can do for now. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some funny cat pictures to look at.

Subscribe in a reader

@democracynow Record Venezuela Turnout Hands Chávez Convincing Mandate to Continue Social Agenda

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 05:03:00 +0000

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/9/danny_glover_record_venezuela_turnout_hands

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has won his fourth presidential election in a race seen as his strongest challenge yet. With a historic turnout of 80 percent, Chávez took 54 percent of the vote, besting challenger Henrique Capriles’s 44.9 percent. We go to Caracas to speak with actor and activist Danny Glover, who traveled to Venezuela to monitor the election. Addressing the record turnout and the wide support for Chávez’s anti-poverty program, even among members of the opposition, Glover predicts that "we may find that certainly President Chávez and those [other Latin American leaders] who are re-elected will really create a new page in this history of this region."

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: We are on the road on a 100-city tour in Durango, Colorado. But first we turn to Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez has won his fourth presidential election, defeating challenger Henrique Capriles in a race widely seen as Chávez’s strongest challenge since his first victory in 1998. Chávez won 54 percent of the vote, with Capriles gaining just under 45 percent.
Tens of thousands celebrated in the streets of the capital Caracas after the results were announced. Chávez held a replica of the sword of independence hero Simón Bolívar during the victory celebration. At a rally outside the presidential palace, Chávez reached out to the political opposition and called for unity among Venezuelans.

PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ: [translated] To those who promote hate, to those who promote social poison, to those who are always trying to deny all the good things that happen in Venezuela, I invite them to dialogue, to debate and to work together for Venezuela, for the Bolivarian people, for the Bolivarian Venezuela. That’s why I start by sending these greetings to them and extending these two hands and heart to them in the name of all of us, because we are brothers in the fatherland of Bolívar.

AMY GOODMAN: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, speaking after winning another six-year term in office. In his concession speech later Sunday night, Capriles urged Chávez to recognize the voices of those who voted against him.

HENRIQUE CAPRILES: [translated] I hope a political movement that has been in power for 14 years understands that almost half the country does not agree with it. I ask those who remain in power for respect, consideration and recognition of almost half the country.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the significance of Chávez’s victory, we go to Caracas to speak with Danny Glover, American actor, film director, political activist. He’s been in Venezuela as an electoral monitor.

Danny Glover, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you tell us what you have observed in this fourth election of President Chávez?

DANNY GLOVER: Well, thank you, first of all, for having me on the show, Amy.
I had the opportunity to witness something very extraordinary in this hemisphere, and certainly in Venezuela: an election that was very clean, an election that—where the people had—were greatly enthusiastic on both sides about the prospect of another six years. And I witnessed—I went from polling stations, several polling stations, and talked to people, and through an interpreter, about what they felt about the voting process itself.

And the voting process is very, very meticulous and at the same time very thorough, in that you began with your voting card, then a fingerprint, then you vote. And then all of that is vetted through another process, including a mark on your hand, your thumb, a purple mark on your hand. So I witnessed this, and with the incredible enthusiasm around the polls.

And it’s on Sunday now. It takes place on Sunday, when there’s not a great deal of traffic on the street, and people voted to this or that. And they don’t sell liquor on Sunday as a result of the voting process, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Danny Glover, why did you go down to Venezuela? And talk about where you have spent your time.

DANNY GLOVER: Well, the first thing that—the reason I came, I was invited by the electoral commission to come here and be an accompaniment or a monitor. But my relationship with Venezuela has been one in which—it’s been over the last eight years, and even further than that, at the World Conference on Racism in 2001. I’ve been meeting African descendants in the region and had great discussions with them about the changes that were happening in the region and promoting more democracy, and perhaps understanding their own involvement. So, through TransAfrica Forum, we began to form these relationships, develop these relationships, which culminated in me coming to Venezuela in 2004, meeting with the Venezuelan Afro-descendancy groups there, and also meeting with the president. The president—certainly President Chávez expressed his—certainly expressed that they had not included within the 1999 constitution—looked out for—took into consideration the aspirations of Afro-descendants and, since then, has promoted programs in which they’ve improved the lives of Afro-descendants.

Well, during the day, we certainly—the day of the election, Sunday, we spent time here in Caracas. Then Monday, we went to the community of Barlovento, which is in Miranda state, was in Capriles’s—where he’s the governor of, the opposition leader is the governor of. We spent time talking to people and really understanding the real narrative around what this election means to people, poor people, people who have been affected by the changes that had happened in the—during the time of this regime, people who have been affected by the changes that have happened over the last 13 years. We—to people who talked about increased healthcare access, also increased education, also the building of co-operatives around chocolate, first of all, and also around bananas. And all of them expressed a sense of pride, a sense of also relief that President Chávez had been re-elected.

AMY GOODMAN: Danny Glover, I wanted to ask you about the comment of presidential candidate Mitt Romney. A day after Hugo Chávez won re-election, the Republican presidential nominee criticized the Obama administration for allowing Chávez to expand his influence in the region.

MITT ROMNEY: And here in our own hemisphere, where our neighbors in Latin America want to resist the failed ideology of Hugo Chávez and the Castro brothers and deepen ties with the United States on trade and energy and security, but in all these places, just as in the Middle East, the question is asked: where does America stand?

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mitt Romney. Danny Glover, your response?

DANNY GLOVER: Rate of poverty in the area, as much as 40 percent, near 40 percent over the last 13 years here in Venezuela. That is the experience all over the region. And part of it is associated with the integration. But once you get out in the field, you begin to talk with people who have worked their way—and not cash handouts, but worked their way—out of poverty. And that’s the real story of the achievement, not only in Venezuela, but in other places, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Danny, you have spent time with President Chávez. Were you with him when he voted? And how is his health? He has been treated for cancer now for quite some time.

DANNY GLOVER: Well, I saw someone—and I have not seen pictures of President Chávez over this ordeal in terms of his health and dealing with his cancer, but I just saw someone very energized and a little bit heavier than I remembered him from the last time I was here and saw him, which has been, I think, around—the last time I saw him was in New York, rather, about three years ago. So, he seemed to be very excited and energized. And certainly, those of us who were a part of the delegation who met him at his voting station were certainly taken by his vigor.

AMY GOODMAN: And Capriles’s warning, though of course he conceded the election, saying that Chávez should recognize the voices of those who voted against them, finally, Danny Glover?

DANNY GLOVER: Well, it seems as if the—and quite, quite frankly, 40 percent of the vote or 44 percent of the vote is quite substantial, in terms of this. And the question becomes, of course—and this is for others to think about and also write about—is that, what group of those were supportive of the agenda on the right, as opposed to those who were—wanted Chávez, specifically, out of office? And that’s very—that’s something very concerned, but you have 80—of a concern. But there were 80 percent of the population voted. I think some of us would wish that at least a portion that within our coming election. But 80 percent of people voted in this election. And people thought it was a turning point. It was a turning point for what the administration has attempted to do over the last 13 years. So, it’s certainly a question as he—as I listened to his own remarks on his concession speech, the fact that he kept pointing to the fact that there’s a large number of people, a great number of people, nearly half the population, as he expressed, that voted against what the regime has had.

But simply in looking at his platform, certainly, he adopted a great number of the platforms, the anti-poverty platforms, that had been adopted over the last 13 years. No one would suggest that these platforms or the programs have failed—greater access to healthcare, better healthcare, education. The number of young people in school and university has doubled over that period time. No one would argue with that. So it seems as if the people—that people who represent the opposition—and it’s not—certainly, this is my generalization—maybe, in some sense, feel that they’re building toward an eventual turn of events that would allow a more—a more adjusted sense of what change should be or what prosperity should be and where that should be and whose hands it should be in.

AMY GOODMAN: Danny Glover—

DANNY GLOVER: The reasons, we know, for the particular changes that have occurred over the last 13 years—

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much. Danny—

DANNY GLOVER: —is that the state has been able to take over the public sector, primarily the resources in oil, which were abundant, and everything else, and been able to use that to eradicate poverty. So, those are the real things. I think that there—because of the situation in the region itself and the integration in the region, we may find that certainly President Chávez and those who are re-elected will really turn out—create a new page in this history of this region.

AMY GOODMAN: Danny Glover, I want to thank you very much for being with us, American actor, director and activist. He was in Venezuela as an election monitor, speaking to us from Caracas.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, "All the Missing Horses: What Happened to the Wild Horses Tom Davis Bought From the U.S. Gov’t?" Stay with us.

"Harvest of Empire": New Film Recounts How U.S. Intervention Caused Mass Latin American Migrations Sep 25, 2012 | Story
New "Harvest of Empire" Film Examines U.S. Intervention in Latin America, Immigration Crisis Sep 21, 2012 | Web Exclusive
WikiLeaks in Latin America: Online Whistleblower’s Wide Impact in Region Where Assange Seeks Asylum Aug 03, 2012 | Story
Coup in Paraguay: Will U.S. Join Latin America in Condemning Ouster of President Fernando Lugo? Jun 25, 2012 | Story
Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up: Saul Landau on U.S.-Aided Anti-Castro Militants & the Cuban 5 Jun 11, 2012 | Story

Links

Subscribe in a reader

Gillard's 'misogynist' Abbott blast echoes around world

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:12:00 +0000

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/gillards-misogynist-abbott-blast-echoes-around-world/story-fncynkc6-1226492464967

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard's parliamentary broadside against Tony Abbott has made international headlines, with one news blog praising it as an 'epic speech' by a 'badass motherf***er'.

The 15 minute impassioned speech, in which Ms Gillard accused Mr Abbott of "peddling a double standard" and having a long history of sexism and misogyny, was uploaded to YouTube and viewed around the world.

The US-based, women-focused Jezebel.com blog, owned by Gawker media and boasting millions of readers, said the video was the "best thing you'll see all day: Australia's female prime minister rips misogynist a new one in epic speech on sexism".

"She basically ripped him a new [expletive]," the site said, excerpting several "choice quotes" from the "smackdown" and describing Ms Gillard as "one badass motherf***er".
In the UK, the conservative Telegraph described the speech as a "brilliant political pivot", saying she had turned "defending the indefensible" (the Peter Slipper scandal) into a speech that cleverly shifted the focus of the entire news story.

"Watching a female Prime Minister tear apart the male leader of the Opposition with such aplomb, composure - but most importantly armed with a brilliantly impressive set of insults - backed up with dates and times of when each shocking comment was said - was the best card Gillard, ever the political animal, could have played in such a situation," the reporter said.

The Guardian also republished the video, though without editorial comment.

And a writer for The Spectator said there was "much to admire" about the speech which had left Mr Abbott "carved to pieces".

In the US a blogger for the New Statesman compared Ms Gillard to the Incredible Hulk, beginning his report with "The Australian PM is angry. You wouldn't like her when she's angry."

A blogger at the influential Business Insider linked to the video, with the headline "An Australian politician shrinks in embarrassment, as the prime minister destroys him for being a misogynist". The article became a social media hit, spreading across Twitter and Facebook.

The speech also made headlines in South Africa, Canada and India.

Social media helped spread news of the speech, with "Gillard" hitting the top ten Twitter trends in Australia and also trending internationally.

In the UK actor Chris Addison, from hit political satire The Thick of It, retweeted a link to the video saying "This is the best smackdown I've ever seen. Glorious. Advance, Australia Fair!"

He then tweeted again: "That Julia Gillard speech is mesmerising. You can see the colour drain from him. Wonderful."

Subscribe in a reader

Decent Australia says enough is enough

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 09:34:00 +0000

Peter FitzSimons

Alan Jones. For shame, for shame! No, not the man himself. I refer, of course, to all those nasty, nasty people who have been ganging up on the broadcaster since the News Limited journalist, Jonathan Marshall, broke the story that at a Young Liberals function he had said the Prime Minister's father had "died of shame".

You see – at least according to several staggering columns that have been written since – Jones has actually become the victim in the episode! I mean, how dare those 110,000 people sign that petition and swear they'd never buy Jones sponsors' products, forcing them to withdraw. What sanctimony! What high-handedness! What blackmail!

Just today we had Macquarie chair Russell Tate saying that the people who have been doing this have been engaged in "cyber bullying".

They did not have the right to "decide for our listeners who and what they are going to hear on the radio station they choose to listen to, and on the other hand decide for Australian-based companies which media outlets they will or won't use to advertise."
"What we are seeing here is 21st century censorship, via cyber-bullying."

Actually, I beg to differ.

What has in fact happened in the last week has been the rise of decent Australia saying enough is enough. And yes, sponsors like Gerry Harvey have publicly worried that by withdrawing from the Jones program they are taking part in a lynch mob, but they misunderstand. What you are actually doing, Mr Harvey, is refusing to sponsor any further "lynch-mob radio".

All you need to do is listen to Jones on a good day. As the Bully-in-Chief, Jones' major exercise every day is to line up the day's targets and then excoriate everything about them and everything they stand for, impugning the worst possible motives to their every action, before putting them up on the wall and inviting the mob to call him up to throw their own stones, which they gleefully do for hours on end, outdoing each other in their sneering, hooting derision.

Sure, Jones does the whole thing under the guise of "journalism" and "fearless comment", but the vibe of the whole thing is exactly like a lynch-mob as he masterfully whips the mob up into ever greater rage over any number of sins, including such outrages as trying to help the environment by lowering carbon emissions. It has also been noted that he is never so vicious as when the target is a woman.

Most of Sydney has been aware of this for years without ever taking Jones seriously enough to do anything about it, but the Young Libs episode has changed that. For there, exposed, was the breathtakingly ugly essence of Jones.

Not one of you reading this could ever bring yourself to say what he did about the PM's father and yet Jones values are so twisted, so downright nasty, he could not only bring himself to say it, but actually think in an unguarded moment it was entertaining!

And the response since, has been wonderful. Yes, yes, yes, no doubt Jones ratings will go up next time as the mob rush back to defend Alan, but this time decent Australia – which is to say the vast majority of the country – is watching closely. Which sponsors will be there with him? I don't mean now. That is not the test. I mean six months and one year from now. Those sponsors are being watched. The sensible ones won't touch the Jones show with a barge-pole.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/decent-australia-says-enough-is-enough-20121007-2771n.html#ixzz28bWLNYQA

Subscribe in a reader

Tony Abbott may rue failure to tune out AlanJones

noreply@blogger.com (Nate Hornblower) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 11:42:00 +0000

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/abbott-may-rue-failure-to-tune-out-jones-20121002-26x3i.html

It's not really surprising Tony Abbott has rejected Labor's demand that he boycott Alan Jones' radio show on the grounds that "I am not going to ignore an audience of half a million people in Sydney".
It would be tough to pass on a program where the host introduces you as Jones did after the Coalition leader's budget address-in-reply in May.

"Tony Abbott ... last night confirmed everything I have been telling you about this fellow for some time," he enthused. "Abbott was utterly prime ministerial, he was outstanding. It was as good, in my opinion, as you can get. If you are looking for a future leader of this country in whom you can be proud, you saw him there last night."

Jones is obviously entitled to his opinion about Abbott, just as it is for Abbott to judge whether he wants to continue being back-slapped and agreed with by Jones. But in continuing this mutual admiration society, Abbott should probably take into account a few things beyond the tasteless comments about the Prime Minister's father, for which Jones has apologised.
To some extent the credibility of the endorser reflects on the person endorsed. While Jones is a strong supporter, his views don't always coincide with Coalition policy. And Jones and his guests have a propensity to back their views with "facts" that are highly questionable or flat out wrong, a kind of parallel reality that is unlikely to change with a change at The Lodge.

In a recent discussion about the carbon and mining taxes, for example, Jones said: "We are staring into the abyss of a continually shrinking economy. Out there in struggle street they understand that, but the government doesn't." And he then favourably quoted his guest's view that the carbon tax is the reason "the economy is shrinking".

Neither mentioned Australia's 21 years of consecutive economic growth, nor the fact that the economy is forecast to continue growing by at least 3 per cent a year for the next four.
In a discussion about "militant Muslim rioting" in Sydney, he asked whether Australia was "too soft" on the militants, and whether this was because "the Labor Party is cultivating the Muslim vote by going soft on militants".

He cited as evidence for the ALP's possible "softness" a statistic that 93 per cent of the 2 million Muslims who voted in May's French presidential election had chosen socialist Francois Hollande.
He did not mention that incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy had courted the far right with policies that upset many French Muslims, nor that in Australia policing is the responsibility of the state (Coalition) government, nor that in the recent local government elections a Lebanese-born Muslim became Liverpool's new Liberal mayor.

In another recent interview he repeated as "fact" his contention the world has not been warming, and then interviewed David Archibald of the Institute of World Politics (he is also listed as an "expert" by the climate-sceptic US think-tank the Heartland Institute and a director of the Australian sceptic group the Lavoisier Society).

Jones quoted approvingly Archibald's biblical-sounding prose, in which he maintains the carbon tax proves we are ruled by "evil men and evil women" and fulminates that "whoever of you breathed a word in favour of the carbon tax will bear the guilt of those broken lives and broken marriages to your graves. Your sin was not a love of nature but a loathing of your fellow man."

"Do some people in Canberra actually hate us?" Jones inquired. "They do," Archibald replied, calling on voters to "unleash their righteous anger" upon those who begat the tax.

The scientific community, from Chief Scientist Ian Chubb down, has decried climate science as being under "siege" from sceptics and their supporters.

But in Jones' alternative universe he cites approvingly Archibald's "sadness as a scientist ... that our scientific institutions" - including the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and many universities - "have failed in their duty to serve and protect the Australian people" by claiming that global warming is real only because "they want the money; they keep being funded by the government and they tell the government what they want to hear".

To complete his self-referencing echo chamber with its own, unique "facts", Jones follows many of his monologues against government policy with an invitation for listeners to complete a poll, which unsurprisingly shows that more than 90 per cent of them agree with Jones and disagree with the government, which allows him to denounce the government for "trashing democracy" because it is ignoring the views of ordinary voters.

I doubt Jones will ever advocate that Tony Abbott be put in a chaff bag and dumped at sea, but it probably wouldn't be long after the election of an Abbott government that he started campaigning for the abolition of any spending on the "hoax" of climate change, or a ban on any foreign investment in agricultural assets.

Having gone along with the fact-twisting distortions and dubious assertions behind some of his allegations against Labor, the Coalition leader could hardly complain.

Lenore Taylor is the Sydney Morning Herald's national affairs correspondent.

Subscribe in a reader

Don't believe the lies, critically analyze!

Sonny Bill Williams & Khoder Nasser - Sonny days on a road less travelled

"Long Distance Revolutionary": Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Journey from Black Panthers to Prison Journalist @democracynow

Complexity and Collapse - Empires on the Edge of Chaos

Want to make 2013 @GetUp the best year ever?

Top Reads of 2012 Monthly Wire: Ten of the best reads from around the world as featured in the Shortlist Daily.

What the Boom Won’t Leave Behind: Mining literature - Malcolm Knox

A Dark Victory: Climate denialism, How vested interests defeated climate science: Robert Manne

David Foster Wallace, In his own words @intlifemag

Down With Big Gun @Gawker @drewmagary

Obama flags gun law reform at Newtown vigil @abcnews

The new front page of Australian politics @abcthedrum

Stephen Lendman - Netanyahu's Israel @PRN_radio

Now it's Abbott with questions to answer @abcthedrum

Is the Opposition drowning in Whitewater? @abcthedrum

The Hard Life of an N.F.L. Long Shot

@democracynow U.N. Special Rapporteur Calls for Global Protection of Gaza Civilians from U.S.-Backed Israeli Assault

Palestinian Loss of land 1946-2010

The Top Twitter Clients for Android @twicca_en softonic_en

@thenextweb Forget apps and useless startups: These four African girls have created a pee-powered generator

Obama the moderate Republican: What the 2012 election should teach the GOP @slate

10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America @postmasculine

1. Few People Are Impressed By Us

2. Few People Hate Us

3. We Know Nothing About The Rest Of The World

4. We Are Poor At Expressing Gratitude And Affection

5. The Quality of Life For The Average American Is Not That Great

6. The Rest Of The World Is Not A Slum-Ridden Shithole Compared To Us

7. We’re Paranoid

8. We’re Status-Obsessed And Seek Attention

9. We Are Very Unhealthy

10. We Mistake Comfort For Happiness

@democracynow Record Venezuela Turnout Hands Chávez Convincing Mandate to Continue Social Agenda

Transcript

Related

Links

Gillard's 'misogynist' Abbott blast echoes around world

Decent Australia says enough is enough

Peter FitzSimons

Tony Abbott may rue failure to tune out AlanJones