But cousins of those Aleutian critters are now running roughshod in the South Pacific, with devestating environmental results:

With five species of bird found nowhere else on earth, Henderson Island – part of the Pitcairn group – is one of the richest wildlife islands in the world. However, non-native Pacific rats are threatening the future of several of these species. In particular, the rats are killing and eating 25,000 seabird chicks each year, including those of the Henderson petrel – a seabird with its only known breeding sites confined to the World Heritage site, which shares its name.

Plans are afoot declare war on the rats, but heavy weaponry is required—namely a fleet of helicopters capable of evenly coating an entire island in poison. Given Henderson’s remote location, that will likely mean calling in the MV Baldur, the region’s pre-eminent anti-rodent ship, which is essentially the pest control world’s version of an aircraft carrier.

Yes, there are large ships especially dedicated to large-scale rodent eradication. But given the rats’ ingenuity, it should be long before a deckhand on one of these missions is forced to utter those memorable words: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Tenor Saw was found dead on the side of the road in Houston after a performance he put on in August of 1988. The official cause of death was hit-and-run, not a rare occurrence in Houston to be sure, but the sudden murder of a superstar certainly warranted more scrutiny than the Houston police afforded Tenor Saw’s.

Suspicions among reggae listeners immediately fell on Nitty Gritty—the story was a drug deal gone bad—but the friends’ closest confreres deny that there was any animosity between the two. Nitty Gritty and King Kong both recorded tribute tracks in the years following, in part to protest their innocence in the murder. (Nitty Gritty was himself murdered a couple of years later in a Brooklyn record shop. The NYPD unsuccessfully pinned his shooting on his dancehall rival, SuperCat.) Sugar Minott, for his part, has insisted in interviews that the Houston club promoters beat Tenor Saw to death, to avoid paying him.

Rare live footage of the late Tenor Saw here and here.

Yet more than a decade since calls first arose for Habré to face justice, and despite the pleadings of august figures, the deposed dictator has yet to face trial. He remains under house arrest in Senegal, which years ago vowed to prosecute Habré instead of shipping him off to the International Court of Justice in Belgium. The latest reason for the delay? A squabble over money:

Senegal had said it wants all $38 million of the trial’s proposed three-year budget up front. It includes money to bring witnesses to Dakar and a third of the budget to reconstruct a courthouse, which some in the international community have deemed excessive.

That proposed trial budget is currently being negotiated. A delegation from the European Union and the African Union visited Senegal this spring, and a new draft of the trial budget is expected at the end of this month and could be finalized later this summer.

Though my eyes bulged a bit at the $38 million demand, it actually isn’t as outlandish as it sounds. War crimes and genocide trials tend to be absurdly expensive, largely out of the organizers’ tendencies to spend lavishly. In Cambodia, for example, the recently concluded trial of Comrade Duch was marred by accusations that the court padded its staff with scores of civil servants who earned up to $5,300 a month—over 50 times the average income for a government employee. And the overindulgence is not limited to Cambodia:

Cambodia isn’t the only court that has faced money problems due to a lack of accountability or financial controls, says Michael Johnson, the former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia who was also involved in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Chamber. He says the Bosnia court—eight courtrooms and about 400 defendants—is running about $10 million to $11 million per defendant. But other courts such as Rwanda—purely an international court (not a hybrid local/international as in Cambodia)—ran about $30 million per defendant; Sierra Leone was also high. In East Timor, another hybrid court came out at about $10 million per defendant, but critics say it ended up with a standard of justice that did not meet international criteria. “There is a real lack of accountability within the administration of these systems,” says Johnson, who favors a special adviser to monitor and cut costs.

Alas, there probably isn’t any meaningful way to cut these costs without poisoning the judicial process. The courts know that the work they’re doing is of great interest to nations with deep pockets, all of who are loathe to criticize the tribunals they’ve spent millions funding. To do so would call into question those courts’ legitimacy, and risk undermining the whole enterprise. And so when the viability of the international justice system is at stake, the millions that end up building ornate courthouses and fattening up civil servants is just the cost of doing business.

That is precisely what happened in Jamaica in 1949, shortly after the introduction of universal adult sufferage. For the first time, politicians were forced to address mass gatherings, a task that could only be accomplished with the aid of amplification technology. The main beneficiary of this development was a Kingston radio geek named Horace Leslie Galbraith, who had spent World War II in Britain working as a radar technician. Upon his return to Jamaica, he was the island nation’s pre-eminent electronics expert, and was thus enlisted by politicians to build 25-watt amplifiers that could be run off 12-volt car batteries—the only reliable means of ensuring that one’s voice could be heard while standing atop a car in front of thousands of onlookers.

Galbraith soon found, however, that his expertise was even more in demand among artists than politicians, as he recently explained to the Jamaica Observer:

“From the early thirties to the fifties there were exclusive clubs in Kingston with live orchestras led by George Moxey, Redver Cooke and Mapletoft Poulle, amongst others, which were patronised by the St Andrew well-to-do. For us ordinary people there were no live orchestras but, instead, large homes on Victoria Avenue, upper King Street and elsewhere, where they hired a radio phone with popular 78rpm records and the patrons paid from two to five shillings entrance fee,” Galbraith recounted.

“But the music from the scratchy 78rpm records at a radio phone dance was very poor and could only be heard by about 20 people. The sound quality needed to be improved. The music had to be enhanced — less noise, more clarity, “rounder” bass, voices to be brought out — and more power was needed. Having built the 25 watt amplifiers, I was sure I could build a better amplifier to improve our radio phone dances and set out to do so,” he stated.

Admitting that his trailblazing amplifier exceeded his expectation Galbraith concluded, “This first, ground-breaking model was sold to Tom Wong and was used to start his sound system called Tom the Great Sebastian. Within a few months there were sound system dances all over Kingston at various lodge halls, open air lawns and anywhere that could hold a crowd of 100 people and up. We supplied amplifiers to sound systems all over Kingston and the country parishes. Among the sound systems we supplied amplifiers to were Nicks, Prof, V Rocket, Hoshue, Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd (Downbeat) and many others all over Jamaica.”

Galbraith probably didn’t foresee how sound systems would eventually grow into Goliath-sized stacks, nor go mobile atop bikes. But such things did eventually become possible, and it all loops back to some politicians’ yen to get elected. Smart guy, that Bismarck. Though he looks like he could probably have used more hugs.

Jewett’s company, headquartered at the corner of Park and Tremont Streets in Boston, did a brisk business with the Union’s former enemies, as states below the Mason-Dixon line launched public programs to supply veterans with artificial legs. North Carolina led the way, though some recipients of the state’s largesse were careful not to rely too heavily on their Jewetts:

It became the first of the former Confederate states to offer artificial limbs to amputees. The General Assembly passed a resolution in February 1866 to provide artificial legs, or an equivalent sum of money (seventy dollars) to amputees who could not use them. Because artificial arms were not considered very functional, the state did not offer them, or equivalent money (fifty dollars), until 1867. While North Carolina operated its artificial limbs program, 1,550 Confederate veterans contacted the government for help.

One Tar Heel veteran, Robert Alexander Hanna, had enlisted in the Confederate army on July 1, 1861. Two years later at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Hanna suffered wounds in the head and the left leg, just above the ankle joint. He suffered for about a month, with the wound oozing pus, before an amputation was done. After the war, Hanna received a wooden Jewett’s Patent Leg from the state in January 1867. According to family members, he saved that leg for special occasions, having made other artificial limbs to help him do his farmwork. (One homemade leg had a bull’s hoof for a foot.) The special care helped the Jewett’s Patent Leg last. When Hanna died in 1917 at about eighty-five years old, he had had the artificial leg for fifty years.

I’d be curious to know whether Jewett’s invention had any influence on the celebrated Jaipur foot, another prosthetic innovation that has done wonders for economic development.

Fear not, I’m on the blogging case—and now without the royal “we” for good, having recently become convinced that the trope hasn’t aged well. Let me catch up on the e-mail backlog and deal with assorted other tasks, then I’ll be back here discussing rodent eradication, North African kidnapping, and 19th-century Irish banditry as soon as humanly possible. Stay tuned.

Growing up, Jack London was high atop my personal literary pantheon. The first time I read “To Build a Fire”, it absolutely rocked my world—I mean, who knew you could have a story in which the protagonist’s death-by-freezing could be portrayed in such a sweet manner? (That closing vision of “the old-timer on Sulphur Creek” still slays me to this day.) While it may be a stretch to say that I became a writer because of London, I certainly remember thinking to myself that I wouldn’t mind following in his ink-stained footsteps.

So imagine the terrible emotions I felt many years later upon seeing Unforgiveable Blackness, a documentary about the life of boxing champion Jack Johnson, in which London is revealed to have harbored some seriously twisted racial notions. (The clip above is only the tip of iceberg.) The boxing doc led me to look into London’s other writings involving race, particularly his 1911 novel Adventure, a book that doesn’t mince words in portraying the denizens of the South Pacific as less than fully human. So while scholars may forever debate the depth of London’s racism, and whether the likes of “The Yellow Peril” were actually anti-racist works in slight disguise, I’ve read enough to make my decision: The hero of my youth was not the sort of bloke I’d like my son to admire.

But does that mean I should also prevent my son from reading “To Build a Fire”, a story that doesn’t include the slightest whiff of London’s racial views? That’s a tough question, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot in light of Mel Gibson’s recent meltdown. As I listened to those tapes of Mad Max going genuinely mad, one of my first thoughts was, “How might this affect the love I have for Apocalypto?” In other words, how does one deal with finding out that one of your most beloved artworks was created by a man or woman whose personal behavior is (or was) odious?

The A.V. Club tackled this topic yesterday, at least in part. Much of the essay focuses on the issue of how artistic intent should factor into one’s enjoyment of the finished product. But the writer, Tasha Robinson, also delves into the question of whether or not we should let an artist’s gross personal failings affect the way we process their creative output:

I acknowledge that there are some excellent reasons to be aware of an artist’s opinions or real life when approaching their work. Hypocrisy is a big one—it’s hard to take Mel Gibson’s avowed, public devotion to religion (and his mega-successful religious film The Passion Of The Christ) seriously given his apparent private behavior. And I can similarly understand people not wanting to financially support work by a creator they consider reprehensible; I have no argument with people who refuse to see new Polanski movies because they don’t want to support the luxurious lifestyle of a rich fugitive from justice. Boycotting an artist due to personal reservations may mean you miss out on some great art, but if it keeps your conscience intact, it’s a valid personal choice. And on top of all that, some people may just want to avoid work where they know the creator had a purpose and a message in mind and is actively going to try to sway people with it, as with Lewis’ Narnia books, or John Travolta delivering Battlefield Earth as a testament to his own Scientology. (Yes, there are many other reasons to avoid that film. Don’t get distracted here.)

The essay ends with a good point: Art is (theoretically) eternal, but artists all wind up in the grave sooner or later. As a result, we should probably realize that there’s an important distinction between the two, and that art ultimately exists independently of the human mind that gave it to the world. Extending that logic a bit more, you could even say that art is akin to an artist’s child, and so we shouldn’t blame the progeny for the sins of the parent.

But if you don’t buy that reasoning, what’s the rule of thumb for determining when an artist’s reprehensible personal behavior is permitted to interfere with your admiration for their work? For starters, let’s face it, many great artists are or have been incredible jerks—though certain sins (such as spreading racial hatred) are obviously less forgivable than others (treating subordinates like dirt comes to mind). And do we give certain artists a free pass because they couldn’t help being products of their age? I have no doubt that John Milton didn’t exactly believe in the whole brotherhood-of-man thing, at least in the modern sense, but should I really let that color my perception of Paradise Lost?

So, throwing two big questions to the splendid commentariat: Have you ever fallen out of love with an artist you once adored, simply because you discovered that he or she was an execrable human being in real life? And for the parents in the crowd, how do you feel about your kids reading the classic works of writers who you wouldn’t want to break bread with?

I’m usually averse to attending egghead confabs, but I’d certainly make an exception for the upcoming Inaugural Rastafari Studies Conference, which will mark a half-century since the publication of the first academic treatise on the religion. Like all young faiths that manage to outlive their founders’ generations, Rastafari is now grappling with important questions regarding its future course. For instance, how does a messianic religion deal with inconvenient historical realities? And can a faith that once rejected human government as hopelessly wicked ever settle into a peaceful symbiosis with existing institutions?

If there’s a model for the Rastafari movement’s future, it may be the Quakers–a comparison first made in the classic 1966 paper The Rastafarian Brethren of Jamaica:

The early Quakers were not looked at with more misgivings by a society which saw them as coming “from the very rabble and dregs of the people,” as individuals who differentiated themselves from more sober citizens by their odd appearance, the peculiar nature of their devotions, and their habit of quaking and trembling when filled with the “spirit.” Seventeenth-century Quakers, like present-day Rastafarians, did not modify their beliefs when confronted by a hostile society, often used highly abusive language, and employed similar martial metaphors of pitching tents, drawing swords, and making ready for battle against the enemy. Rastamen would have understood George Fox’s concern in walking around Licthtfield shouting at the top of his voice, “Woe to the bloody city!”

A few hundred years later, of course, the Quakers are anything but bizarre–in fact, they count among their ranks a fair number of elites (Richard Nixon!), and the image of the friendly Quaker has become an American archetype.

I think it’ll take quite some time before a major American university adopts a Rastafari mascot. (Okay, okay, it’ll never happen.) But Rastafari has already gotten over the hump by surviving well past Haile Selassie’s rather anti-climactic demise. The question now is whether its adherents want to continue to define themselves as perpetual outsiders, or revise their theology to build the proverbial bigger tent.

I had to engage in a bit of uproarious guffawing upon reading this brain-dead take on New York’s long-awaited shift to no-fault divorce. The writer pleads for Governor David Patterson to veto the bill, using that tried-and-true “won’t somebody please think of the children!” logic lampooned so memorably on The Simpsons. Yet she conveniently ignores two key facts. First, as I recently discussed on Microkhan, there is zero evidence of a correlation between the adoption of no-fault divorce and higher divorce rates over the long-term; in fact, according to this paper (PDF), no-fault laws may actually lead to lower divorce rates.

More important, critics of liberalized divorce laws start with a false assumption: That in an ideal world, no marriage would end in divorce. But you know what? People and circumstances change over time, and a certain percentage of marriages are better off ending rather than limping along ’til death ends the sad charade. Marriages only benefit society when they free their participants to engage in productive endeavors; no societal good can come of partnerships in which the lion’s share of energy is devoted to jealousy and bile.

There is, of course, a downside to making divorce too easy, as such policies encourage impulsive splits. But my sense is that lawmakers the world over have generally erred on the side of caution when relaxing divorce laws, which partly explains why splits have recently been nosediving from the U.S. to England to Spain to Saudi Arabia.

True, the global divorce-rate trends are partly attributable to the lackluster economy, as well as the fact that people in the developed world are marrying later than ever. (It should come as no surprise that folks who get married before they’re full-fledged adults tend to get divorced a lot.) But there’s also something to be said for our species’ wonderful capacity for processing complex information. Immediately after divorce laws are relaxed, there is usually a brief spike in the divorce rate, as people rush to take advantage of their newfound freedom. But experience quickly teaches them that hasty divorce can have serious consequences, both fiscal and emotional, and society learns to treat the institution with the appropriate respect. And that’s something that intellectually honest conservatives should applaud, given that personal responsibility is one of their big hobby horses. Instead, many of them plead with government to keep saving unhappily married people from themselves. Curious, that.

There’s probably a lesson to be learned here about how other much-debated social reforms will inevitably play out over time. But I’ll leave that to the learned commentariat to discuss.