Last week, the wife and I went out for dinner to a new restaurant in our neighbourhood.  The food was awful and the service insulting.  Afterwards a few of the patrons gathered outside.  One man was particularly engaging and inspired us to take action.  We formed an angry mob, set fire to cars in the parking lot and threw stones and burning wood through the windows of the restaurant.

A few days later we went back to the restaurant and – this is the bit you’re going to find outrageous – their service had NOT improved!

Afterwards I led the riots.  We destroyed nearby shops and looted what we could.  Next week we’ll go back and see if they’ve recognised our concerns.

All of this may seem a somewhat surreal way of grappling with a bad customer experience. After all, if it was so dreadful, why not just refuse to go back?  If enough people stay away, wouldn’t the restaurant close and someone else have the opportunity of making a better go of it?

It would seem to make sense.  In the midst of municipal elections in South Africa, voters in numerous towns rioted and vandalised businesses in protest against a lack of service delivery by ruling African National Congress councillors.  Once the votes had been tallied, those same rioters returned those same councillors with an overwhelming majority.

This sort of errant behaviour isn’t limited to South Africa’s fledgling democracy.  Protestors at global summits often attack local businesses when expressing their frustrations.

Democratic governments often assume that Democracy is some natural order that people gravitate towards.  The US has been genuinely surprised that Iraqis and Afghanistanis didn’t become instant democrats when their previously autocratic rulers were removed.  Europeans appear authentic in their conviction that increased aid and negotiation will convert even the most recalcitrant of dictatorships into wealthy democracies.

The people at the receiving end of voting and aid don’t seem to see things the same way.  Their confusion, and the contradictions of the participants’ objectives, are what gives rise to conflict.

Consider the rural, traditional, approach to conflict resolution and discussion.  Whether it be the loya jirga of Afghanistan, the imbizo of Sub-Saharan Africa, or even the folkmoot of ancient Germany, all have a common pattern and purpose.

This is not democracy, it is agreement.  The participants at these gatherings expect to remain in negotiation until all agree.  This can take time.  Members of such a gathering will meet for days to discuss matters of group importance.  If there are people who disagree then the majority do not impose their will on the few.  Rather, they offer compromises until, eventually, an agreement is reached that suites everyone.

This isn’t something that happens only in rural backwaters or amongst unsophisticated societies.  The World Trade Organisation has the same approach to negotiation.  The Doha Round of trade talks started in November 2001.  No-one has any idea when they are likely to conclude, if at all.

Such a leisurely approach to law-making and arbitration can only work where the pace of life is slow and the complexity of relationships is moderate.  If the majority are subsistence farmers then a discussion that affects water rights or requires collective action does demand that everyone agree.  Where the pattern of life has changed, as division of labour creates increasing social complexity, such collective collaboration is impossible.

Complexity requires that individuals negotiate solutions for themselves and only when such processing reaches an impasse does one involve higher authorities.  Complexity also imposes time-constraints.  Others get on with their lives and leave the debatants to their problem.

Where faster solutions are required courts and calls to standard legal frameworks ease litigation.

Even the process of national rule has been converted from a process of negotiation with an hereditary ruling class to one of periodic and total renewal through general elections.  This is only the most obvious end of the chain of democracy.

The United States, the United Kingdom, did not become democracies because the “people” suddenly decided to have set elections.  They became democracies because their complex societies needed a fast and stable way of changing leadership and trying new ideas without having a war every time the prevailing tyranny fell.

If an entire town had to get together to discuss the poor offerings at their only restaurant and numerous ideas were proposed, shot down, and reproposed, nothing else would get done.  Far easier to simply allow anyone to open a restaurant and let individuals make up their own minds as to where to spend money.

Once people get used to this casual act of opinion-forming the obvious next step is to allow similar shopping amongst political representatives.

The problem in the world’s unstable places is one where the forms of democracy are imposed from the top while the institutions of individual interaction still offer no choice at all.

Aid agencies divide up countries into individual fifes.  They don’t compete for beneficiaries through innovative and diverse offerings.  They merely dish it out.  Even where businesses do exist, they are indistinguishable and collusion in pricing and offerings is normal; whether it be the regulated mobile phone services, or even the local grocery store.  Poverty offers little choice and little experience of choice.

With a foundation like that, it is unsurprising that people would rather negotiate with the rulers they know than try anything new.

Even nations with complex patterns of labour division have doubts about distributing choice all the way down to individuals.  Market collapses, such as the 2008 credit crisis, appear to reinforce the view that some things are best left to collective decision-making.

This reflexive return to centralisation is likely to be reversed.  A single person can only have strong opinions on a limited number of things.  A centralised decision-making system would have to have strong and consistent opinions on everything.  This isn’t possible and any act of centralisation must be to the detriment of individual choice, overall economic activity and democracy.

The real social divide is not of wealth and poverty, but of choice and monopoly.  If governments, social activists and aid workers are genuinely determined to promote democracy around the world, then the best way to start is through promoting consumer choice at its most basic level.

A person who has a real choice of business offerings will learn that changing a mind does not have to involve physical conflict.  And democracy really can be built one restaurant at a time.

Those 267,574 people who voted “no” — which would approve the same-sex marriage law — were not dissuaded by an anti-gay coalition of conservatives and churches wielding more than $3 million, including more than $2 million from out-of-state donors, according to a report by the National Institute On Money In State Politics.

Much of the sparring over the referendum was funded on both sides by groups outside the state of Maine. Given that gay marriage has been a wedge issue for years, that’s hardly surprising. But in Maine?

Those who backed the gay marriage law ponied up 12 to 1 over donors to the anti-gay donors and had more money — $5 million. But they lost. The institute’s report, written by Tyler Evilsizer, says:

The measure pitted conservative groups and churches against gay-rights groups, a few wealthy donors, and more than 10,000 smaller donors from Maine and around the country. Question 1 attracted over $9 million, or 72 cents of every dollar raised around Maine’s seven ballot measures. [emphasis added]

But press attention, money, and political capital focused on a wedge issue to divide people of good conscience and faith and divert their attention from far more pressing matters. Maine needs more attention to the condition of its roads, bridges and airports than it does in the bedrooms of loving, consenting adults who wish to make a lifelong commitment.

The blunt end of the money hammer used in Maine against gays was primarily wielded by a group called Stand For Marriage Maine. Like all political communicators and niche interest groups these days, it has a website. But its site is notably deficient. It does not have links such as “About Us” or “Who We Are.” Such links usually provide a list of financial supporters, coalition partners, and the names and contact data for organization officers and staff. Stand For Marriage Maine does not provide such information on its website.

Wading through the organization’s press releases and media stories is needed to learn that Marc Mutty is chairman of Stand for Marriage Maine, that Scott K. Fish is communications director (releases provide a phone number) and that Bob Emrich is a member of the group’s executive committee.

That lack of clear, easy-to-find disclosure makes it difficult for those interested in the issue to find out more about the bona fides of donors and supporters who worked to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.

Why not explain “Who We Are”? Only conjecture is possible. It is, perhaps, easier to operate in ideological shadows. According to Mr. Evilsizer’s report, here are the principal sources of money that drove the effort to repeal gays’ right to marry in Maine. A few groups are well known outside Maine.

StandForMarriageMaine.com | $2,650,052
Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland | $553,608
Focus On The Family Maine Marriage Committee | $114,500
Family Research Council Action | $25,000
Maine Marriage PAC | $11,539
Maine Grassroots Coalition | $9,410
Marriage Matters in Maine | $2,678
Maine4Marriage | $230
Proponents’ total $3,367,018

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, asked Maine ethics officials to investigate the organization. He said it was laundering money. His August letter

contained allegations religious organizations are hiding contributions to the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign. The letter reports how the National Organization for Marriage, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the national office of the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family had contributors give the money to their organizations, and in turn gave the money to the Stand for Marriage Maine to hide the donors’ identity.

But a federal judge ruled on Oct. 29 that the “state can compel the National Organization for Marriage to disclose the identities of donors who contributed to its effort to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.” In that story, the Portland Press Herald said NOM — based in Washington, D.C. — had funneled $1.6 million to Stand For Marriage Maine. A resolution of the lawsuit was “months away,” the story said — well after the Nov. 3 referendum. Mr. Evilsizer’s report contains a breakdown of donors to Stand For Marriage Maine showing NOM’s $1,622,152 donation.

But his report notes that financial supporters of gay marriage in Maine “from Away” were also plentiful. Those who supported the gay-marriage law raised $5,678,579.

The Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization,” donated $267,589 to the principal umbrella organization, No On 1 Protect Maine Equality. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave $139,056. Esmond Harmsworth, a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in Boston and New York, gave $100,000. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders of Boston gave $91,258.

The website of No On 1 Protect Maine Equality also has a “Who We Are” page that lists its coalition partners. Its “Contact Us” page list its physical address, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address. Its campaign manager is clearly identified as Jesse Connolly.

The gay marriage caravan now moves on, it seems, to New York state. Gov. David Patterson wants a same-sex marriage bill, passed twice in the state Assembly, on the floor of the Senate for debate on Tuesday.

And the money, both for and against, will likely move on as well.

You remember that story, don’t you? Was all over the press in July 2012? Oh, wait, that hasn’t happened yet. Still to come, so to say. Let me get my thoughts arranged.

It was in 2009 that airport security added the new full-body x-ray scanners to their arsenal of devices to humiliate and traumatise travellers. Sarah Barrett, head of customer experience at Manchester airport, says, “This scanner completely takes away the hassle of needing to undress.” Because we’ll do it for you.

Now, before you tell me that the images could hardly be described as pornographic, let me direct you to Two Girls One Cup. If this is sufficient to cause some people to immediately discombobulate themselves in their trousers, I’m fairly sure that security camera images will be hot-stuff. Plus, imagine the job advert:

“Wanted: mature individuals to look at images of naked strangers of all shapes, sizes and ages for hours at a time while alone in a secluded booth; don’t worry, it’s not child porn if you do it for security reasons.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I fully appreciate the security difficulties faced by the world’s major transit authorities. There really are people out there who are out to kill us. But there are lots of ways to cause mayhem in a public place without resorting to actually getting on a plane.

And, we live in the information age. If the image exists then the image is public. Telling us, as Sarah Barrett does, that, “The images are not erotic or pornographic and they cannot be stored or captured in any way,” is just so much bullshit. Give that security guard a camera-phone; oh, wait, he has one already.

Yes, the technology is possible. No, this is not an acceptable use of that technology. Find another way.

If beating terrorists involves giving away all the privacy, confidentiality, liberty and respect for the individual that we are supposedly fighting so hard for, then we’re not really beating the terrorists.

Maybe it’s just that this technology is lazy. These images should be digitised, processed and then only random bits shown to security for final analysis. There are ways to ensure that this is entirely depersonalised. Otherwise profiling is likely; age, gender, even cultural origin are likely to be visible in these images.

Leave the embarrassing personal pictures to teenagers posting on Facebook. The rest of us are just travelling, nothing to see. And nothing we want you to see.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves.

I’m not a purist when it comes to the “rationalism” of markets (the theory that every price includes all available information to reflect that price), but I do believe that in relatively unsophisticated African markets there are good reasons why farmers do not farm or invest in productive capacity:  weak rule of law, ineffective property rights, high taxes, bribery and corruption all add up to ensure that the cost exceeds the benefit of investment.

Anthony Mills, a soil scientist at the University of Stellenbosch contacted me regarding the difficulty of conducting development in Africa.  “The Zambian land tenure system is particularly problematic.  By law the land is owned by the President.  In practice it is owned by the chiefs.  The land is consequently probably even further from private ownership than in most developing countries.”

Yet, without any due acknowledgment of the political and legal environment standing in the way of growth and development, international projects duly waste cash on major interventions.  In 2004, the UN launched the Millennium Development Villages project in an effort to demonstrate how the goals for the Millennium Development Goals could be realised.

Promises of the Millennium

Millennium Promise was co-founded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs and the philanthropist Ray Chambers. The project work of the Millennium Villages are overseen by a Scientific Council composed of leading scientific and development authorities at the UN Millennium Project and The Earth Institute at Columbia University, both of which are headed by Sachs.

The project is a miserable example of the patronising and objectionable way in which development in Africa is imposed, as if like manna from a benevolent West.

The project hasn’t “failed” in the way a business would fail.  Jeffrey Sachs hasn’t been forced to live in a homeless shelter, and the villages themselves aren’t derelict.  My concerns have to do with the nature of the promises, and of the results.  My analysis is based using only their published information and claims (on their sites: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/ and http://www.millenniumvillages.org/).

Their objectives are an overwhelming mish-mash of wants and desires:

“In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide universal access and free distribution of long-lasting, insecticide treated bed nets to fight malaria; (ii) Achieve significant increases in staple crop yields; (iii) Ensure universal access to functioning health clinics; (iv) Increase primary school enrollments; and (v) Provide community access to improved and year-round water for consumption. In addition, the MVP emphasized cross-cutting interventions focused on addressing gender inequality; on community mobilization, participation and leadership; and on infrastructure for transport, energy, and information and communications technologies (ICT).”

“The Millennium Villages seek to end extreme poverty by working with the poorest of the poor, village by village throughout Africa, in partnership with governments and other committed stakeholders, providing affordable and science-based solutions to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty.”

Ending extreme poverty is a known quantity.  Numerous countries have done it (from South Korea to Brazil) and what is required mostly boils down to accountable government and rule of law, plus sound economic principles premised on enforceable property rights.

So much for the background.  Let’s look at the viability of these projects themselves.

The region chosen

“Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.”

According to a quick check, the bottom 20% earn roughly $350 to $450 per annum in this region.  I’m being generous here, since the MDP aims to work with the absolute poorest which the UN usually defines as people earning less than $1/day.

“Between 1990 and 2001, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day rose from 227 million to 313 million, and the poverty rate rose from 45 percent to 46 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of nourishment.”

This implies a total of 62 – 63,000 villages (at their requirement of 5,000 people per village) who fall into the project scope.

The investment

“Each Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years. This includes a cost of $250,000 per village per year (5,000 villagers per village multiplied by $50 per villager) and an additional $50,000 per village per year to cover logistical and operational costs associated with implementation, community training, and monitoring and evaluation. Note that this level of external support is fully consistent with the 2005 G8 commitments for official development assistance to Africa by 2010. The other $60 per villager per year will come from village members, local and national governments and partner organizations, making for total funding of $110 per person per year.”

This is a fudge.  Firstly, sure, the global community may have promised a grand total of $50billion in support, but that usually has strings attached, and includes a wide range of other bilateral investment.  So the full amount isn’t available.  Secondly, most African governments don’t spend their own money on internal development.  Thirdly, the villages have no money (since that is the reason they were chosen).  One way or another, all of that $110 will have to be donated.

That means we are investing $550k annually for each village over a five-year period (i.e. $2.75 million).  To reach all villages in the scope requires an investment of around $172 billion.

The return on investment

So much for the background.  One of the things I’m often asked on African tourism development projects is, “Does this town/area have good tourism potential for development?”  My answer is always this:  “Are there men and women by the side of the road selling curios?  If not, then no.”

People in Africa are not poor because they are ignorant of their own needs, or of how to earn a living.  Neither are they really victims of circumstances beyond their control.  Given the right environment, Africans are as capable of supporting themselves as is anyone else. When the Zimbabwe currency was worth less than spit, inflation was several trillion % and nothing was available for sale. A few months after the Zimbabwe government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in exchange for the US dollar everything is available, investment is happening and production is shooting up. Zimbabwe may even be entirely self-sufficient for food again by the end of next year. And that is without any major international intervention.

So, as far as the MDP villages are concerned, my first question is this:  “Are other villages visiting the MDP villages, becoming inspired, and copying this model?”

The answer is: No.  No-one is copying the villages.  No private investor has turned up and offered to do something similar.  Scratch that, George Soros turned up and made a spot donation of $50 million in 2006 to fund 33 villages.  But that is hardly investment.

There are a whole host of reasons that I can spot:

1. The investment changes nothing about the legal and economic situation in the country at hand; governments are still corrupt, infrastructure is still non-existent.  Even if the MDV were to produce a major food surplus, who would they sell it to and how would they get it to market?
2. The project makes a great deal of the village-based ownership structure.  This is a collectivist / communist system.  If no-one owns it, then there is little incentive for individuals to work harder, since everyone will get the same outcome.  Like most projects of this nature, the output will continue as long as the expensively-paid consultants are around, then it will return to its base level.  The only reason the Kibbutz system has lasted 100 years is the donations of both the Israeli government and of outside donors.  As soon as the Israeli government cut funding, then the Kibbutzim started to close.  Now only those most hardy (or the very few who have major industries earning revenue) are still functioning.  But at least the Kibbutzim were self-created.  The MDPs rely for their energy on do-gooder outsiders.
3. Who owns the investment?  If something intangible like a “village” owns the products of individual labour and investment, then what does a person with ambition do?  Can he/she sell their stake in the village and use the money to go to university, or buy a house?  Who decides on what the profits (should there be any) be spent on?

Even in the best-case scenario, all that you achieve is that a group of famished and unhealthy people are less famished and less unhealthy.  For an investment of $2.75 million.  Is it really sufficient to take people from earning $1/day to say $2/day?

What else could you achieve with that money?

You could build a nice, labour-intensive factory for $2.75 million.  Imagine the impact of 62,000 new factories on the central African economy?  And imagine all the things that would be required for such a thing to happen … roads, rule of law, healthcare, education.  All of which would be affordable if millions of people were earning proper salaries.

This isn’t happening.  There are no investors in Africa beyond a few resources and the inevitable mobile telephony.  Africa is 2% of the world economy.  To put the MDP investment in perspective ($110 per person), foreign direct investment in Africa is worth only $19 per person per year.

Whitey Basson of Shoprite, a major African retailer, put it best last week:  “It takes 15 inches of paper to cross a border in Africa.”  Africa’s countries are regularly ranked as the most appalling and corrupt places in which to do business.

The MDP villages do not change that situation.  The agricultural techniques behind the project may be sound, but the economics are a failure.

And, if the economics are a failure, then what is the point of the project?

The problem was deeper—Griffiths has written a straight history here, but without the philosophic context. We’re told that Paine was a great man, and we hear bits and pieces of his writings, and we see him engaged with both the American and French revolutions. But we don’t get a clue about his seminal importance, or about why Paine changed the world, and for the better. To be fair, Paine had such an eventful life that it’s difficult to get it all in a two and a half hour production. But what was left out was much of the meat, and the key to why Paine was important—one of the most important men who ever lived, in fact. It was still an enjoyable evening at the theatre—but also a frustrating one. If you knew something about Paine, you were probably bothered by what was left out; if you didn’t know much about Paine (which is certainly the case here in the UK), you left the theatre no wiser, really. I almost hate to say this, but this would have been a more interesting play if Tom Stoppard had written it. That way we wold have had endless conversations about the philosophical and political issues that Paine dealt with–and these were intensely important at the time, and still are.

Richard Attenborough has been trying to raise funds for a movie of Paine’s life for decades now. Attenborough also is behind this production, which actually seems to be adapted from the screenplay that Griffiths is developing for Attenborough (Griffiths was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for Reds). What a movie Paine’s life would make! I bet Craig T. Nelson would make a great elder Paine, with Ed Norton playing the younger Paine. As a young man, he apprenticed to his father’s trade as a staymaker, making corsets. He later ran away to sea and joined a successful privateer. His stays in London and Lewes before moving to the colonies were characterized by a range of activities, including attending Royal Society meetings in London. His peripatetic and not very successful businesses career included several years as an excise agent for the Crown, and after the death in childbirth of his first wife, his second marriage was never consummated, ending in a permanent separation. He made his way to the colonies (barely surviving the voyage) bearing the endorsement of Benjamin Franklin, whom Paine had met in London. In America Paine added an “e” to the spelling of his name, engaged in what he is now best now for, pamphleteering, and served in Washington’s army during the first years of the campaign. After the war, Paine engaged in anti-slavery activities (apparently writing the preamble to the Pennsylvania law that abolished slavery, the first of many in the United States), continued to write on behalf of the new American government, and pursued his scientific interests.

Following his return to England 1787, Paine spent most of his time writing pamphlets on various subjects, and designing and seeking funds for the construction of a single arch iron bridge. Paine received patents for his bridge in England, Scotland and Wales, and was able to develop a model for public view. (A version of the bridge was later built on the river Weir in Sunderland, although it appears Paine never received any funds from this.) Bridge design epitomized 18th century engineering technological and engineering investigations, given the importance of river traffic during this period. In 1791 he published the first instalment of Rights of Man, primarily as a response to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution. This book was also wildly successful (and, incidentally, has never been out of print), and led the English government to attempt to prevent its publication and circulation.

Fleeing to France in 1792, he was tried in absentia for seditious libel in England, and convicted, during which time he published the second instalment of Rights of Man. This laid out the foundations of the modern welfare state—including universal suffrage and state care for those over fifty. Initially he was welcomed by the new French government, to which he was appointed a member, but later fell out of favour by virtue of his support for the Girondists and his opposition to executing the deposed King. During the Reign of Terror, Paine narrowly escaped the guillotine he was meant to face by the efforts of his fellow prisoners while he almost died of fever. During his year in prison, he did manage to have The Age of Reason published, and it became Paine’s third best-seller, astonishing for a work whose main characteristic was an attack on organized religion, particularly Christianity. Eventually freed in 1794, he remained in France (apparently never learning to speak French) before finally returning to the United States in 1802, and published his fourth book, Agrarian Justice, an attack on land holdings, in 1797.

By this point Paine had become extremely unpopular in both England and the United States. In England, he had been declared an outlaw and under sentence of death following his conviction for seditious libel. In America, his attack on George Washington (which was not completely unjustified, since Washington apparently did nothing to get Paine out of French prison when he had the opportunity to do so), and the attack on Christianity in The Age of Reason, ensured that he was no longer a popular figure. He was even denied the right to vote. But Paine remained undaunted, even refusing a deathbed conversion in 1809 while he lay dying when pestered by priests. What a pain in the neck! What a movie!

The traditional view of Paine was that after an undistinguished career in England he somehow appeared, out of the head of Zeus, as a radical thinker in America. Griffiths’ play perpetuates this view to some extent, although it does make some nods to Paine’s interests in science and engineering—but these aren’t really developed as being integral to Paine’s character. Craig Nelson (yes, a different Craig Nelson), in his admirable biography of Paine published in 2007, argues, however, that Paine was not radical by Enlightenment standards—rather, he was square in the mainstream of much enlightenment thought. Paine, according to Nelson, is an example of what the Enlightenment produced in England, but even more so in America—-the self-made man who prospers from self-improvement.

As Nelson points out, Paine was born into the segment of the population that came to refer to themselves as “mechanics”—the purveyors of manufacturing and industry before the Industrial revolution. Paine spent several years in London attending lectures at the Royal Society and other scientific organizations. He spent time in coffee houses, forming friendships with other mechanics who were engaged in similar pursuits (and coming into contact with Franklin in the process). He bought himself a set of globes and various scientific instruments. His scientific interests were well-known at the time both in England and in America. He became an accomplished public speaker and debater. None of these attributes were unusual in late 18th century England or America. Following the colonist revolt, Paine returned to science, developed several inventions (for which he obtained patents), and pursued his interests in bridge design. His close friendships included the chemist Joseph Priestly.

It was precisely this segment of society, both in England and in America, that embraced the Enlightenment fully. The growth of the merchant class in England (and Scotland) and America was driven by mechanics who developed and embraced new technologies, new forms of business, new ideas of science, and new ideas of government. They were endless tinkerers. Their intellectual mentors were men such as Newton, and Hooke, and Franklin—especially Franklin. These were men who conversed regularly with one another through letters, or in coffee houses in cities such as London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham and Philadelphia. They represented the emergence of a meritocracy, and if this concept became popular in England, it found a virtual home in America. No wonder Americans were ready to listen to Paine’s arguments in favour of the natural rights of men to govern themselves, and against the evils of hereditary monarchies. Paine’s genius lay in his ability to present these views to as wide an audience as possible. Jon Katz, in a long article eminently worth reading, has suggested that Paine should be regarded as the moral father of the internet, and he’s right.

John Adams, second President of the new United States of America, had little regard for Paine, whom he considered a radical and a rabble-rouser. Here is how Adams described Paine in 1805:

I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a BitchWolf, never before in any Age of the World was suffered by the Poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.

For most of his life, this was often the view of Paine from those in power. Paine happily reciprocated, regarding Adams as a potential despot, on the basis of Adams’ support for the Alien and Sedition Acts, which represented the first (but, sadly, not the last) attempts by members of the American federal government to limit the rights of its citizens.

Paine was the most influential political writer of the 18th century. He was not a political philosopher, such as Hobbes, or Hume, or Locke. Paine was a proselytizer. He crystallized American and European discussion of two of the defining political questions of the age—why should we need kings? Why should not the creation and operation of government be the work of all men, and not a select few? Paine’s influence derives not solely from the fact that he was able to effectively articulate arguments that all men had the right to govern themselves, but also because he was able to explain these issues in a way that all men, not just the Republic of Letters, could take part in the discussion. As a result, Common Sense, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason were the best selling books of the 18th century. Paine chose not to profit from the books, donating proceeds to the American and French governments instead. Proceeds from Common Sense went to purchase mittens for Washington’s troops. Unsurprisingly, Paine was broke for much of his life.

After his 1774 arrival in the colonies he became, almost by accident, editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, which shortly thereafter became the most widely-read publication in the colonies. Paine’s writings, even before the publication of Common Sense, had a notable impact on the debate regarding whether America should declare itself independent from England. (America was not then “The United States of America”, a term actually coined by Paine.)

And pamphleteering was an established form of intellectual and political exchange during the 18th century. Paine was participating in an established literary tradition. Common Sense itself was a remarkable and unprecedented publishing phenomenon—-in its first year of publication, an estimated 250,000 copies were published (rising to about 500,000 over the next several years, including counterfeit editions), in a country of 3 million. It was translated into multiple languages, and was a best-seller in France. Paine’s pamphlets during the war (collectively given the title The Crisis), especially in the winter of 1776-1777, were of critical importance for maintaining support for the conflict during the early (and darkest) days of the war. The line “These are the times that try men’s souls” derives from the first of these, at a time when Washington’s army was in danger of collapsing.

But it was Common Sense that established Paine’s reputation. Prior to its publication, the majority of colonists (as well as the majority of delegates to the second Constitutional Convention, which convened in late 1775, and culminated in The Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776) were still in favour of some sort of negotiated settlement with England over the issues of taxation and the rights of colonists, according to Nelson. Following its publication in January 1776, sentiment swung strongly towards total independence from England.

What were Paine’s arguments? First, he argued for the superiority of representative government over a monarchy. Paine’s arguments here mostly focussed on the evils of monarchy and aristocracy, or any social system where power resided in hereditary privilege. (One wonders what he would make of the raging nepotism in today’s media.) The second argument focussed on why this was the appropriate time to break from England, and throws in lots of statistics on subjects such as the cost of maintaining navies. But Paine’s main argument, that America’s parent country was Europe, not England, had a particular resonance among Paine’s readership. While most of the leaders of America (and the revolution) were of English descent, Paine suggested that only about one-third of the colonists were of English descent—Paine believed the majority had come from a broad range of European countries. There’s a bit of sleight of hand here—there were significant numbers from Scotland and Ireland at that point, but Paine specifically does not call them English. In Pennsylvania, where Paine lived, Germans made up a third of the population by 1770. Paine would be including slaves in the population as well, and at 1770 there would have been about 700,000 slaves in the colonies. But, whatever Paine’s numbers, the arguments all carried weight, and had an immediate impact at the optimal time for the emerging nation.

Paine called himself as “a citizen of the world,” although he also insisted that he was an American citizen. But Paine spent most of his life in England and in France, not leaving for the colonies until his 37th year in 1774. He returned to England in 1787, from which he then had to flee following publication of Rights of Man in 1792. He went on to live in France for ten years, before returning to America in 1802, where he died in 1809. One is reminded of Nietzche’s comment to his mother that he wasn’t sure if he was a good German, but he hoped he was a good European.

This year is the 200th anniversary of Paine’s death, and the two Thomas Paine societies, the one here and the one in the US, have been having all sorts of events to commemorate the occasion. And not a moment too soon, either, considering the pressure on the rights that Paine held dear by any number of governments, including that of the United States, a government (and a country) which is unlikely to have ever emerged without Paine.

In Jack Shepherd’s wonderful short play, In Lambeth, Paine and William Blake are having a conversation in Blake’s garden the evening before Paine flees for Paris, while angry royalist mobs roam the streets. (The meeting really did take place.) Paine says of himself:

I’ve been called a firebrand! A fanatic! A traitor! A devil! Now that seems just a bit of an overstatement to me. I’m a fairly ordinary and above all a reasonable man. And I want the country to be governed in a reasonable way. And that’s all I want. But if that means turning the word upside down, then I’m the man to do it! And if it then entails taking the world by the ankles and giving it a God-almighty shake, then by jumping Jesus I’ll do that too!

And he did.

The above stamp is the only one ever issued anywhere to celebrate Paine, as far as I can tell. It was issued in 1968, and designed by Robert Greissmann, after a painting by John Wesley Jarvis.

(Full disclosure–much of this cribbed from an earlier post, to be found here)

I have seen snow before, but never lived in a place where snow thrusts itself into your daily life. The familiar landscape of fields, farmlands and wilderness was utterly transformed. I could see just how much wildlife lived around me. Bunnies hopped. Deer loped. Birds scratched.

I took a morning off, just to go see what the massive Port Meadow would look like. I got only a few yards on my bicycle before becoming glued in the snow. So I walked. It was magnificent.

I arrived in Oxford at the end of April 2008, leaving South Africa for good on 27 April: Freedom Day. Ironic. The day that South Africans celebrate as the day of the start of majority rule has now become my own private memorial to personal liberty.

A pain that only has one resolution

I have a friend who owns a micro-coffee roastery back in Cape Town. He has burned millions of rands over the past few years as he tries to get South Africans to enjoy high-quality coffee. It is killing him, that slow awful and agonising murder that the self-employed experience. Every day you are reborn and die again.

Business people aren’t the only ones to experience this pain. Maybe you had a relationship like that? A love which is on fire and filled with light and colour and texture, and agony. For you never quite connect in the most critical places; that of mutual respect, adoration and compromise. One of you is making all the running while the other lives exactly as they please, ignorant and immune to the consequences.

It’s a destructive relationship. You put everything you can in, but you’re burning yourself out.

Maybe that relationship turns around. But there comes a point where, no matter how that relationship ends up, it no longer has meaning for you.

I’ve been through a few of those. Personal, business and ideological relationships that I put my soul and spirit and determination into. Even where they worked I found that the success was ashes in my mouth.

South Africa had become like that to me and the only solution was to leave. Frank McCourt who, more than any recent writer, has done so much to lift the “glamour” of poverty had this to say:

“Very little is written about poverty…You see part of it. You see Dafur. You see Chad. That’s African poverty…you see this all the time. You almost become accustomed to it…you can send in rice…but that doesn’t heal them…beware of giving energy to desperate people. They are going to use it.”

Beware of giving energy to desperate people. Good advice. But, when I left, I also left behind a life, friends, favourite places, favourite things, and my fiancée.

Putting it in perspective

I had a long chat with a Swedish chap who was complaining, “Don’t you find England dangerous? I hate the public transport and I never feel safe. By the way, what’s South Africa like?”

I looked at him, dumbfounded. “If this is how you feel about the UK, you’ll probably not want to get off the plane when you arrive in SA.”

So, my perspective is coloured by a comparison to a country with one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, the highest rape rate, a government so corrupt that the cabinet now is dominated by convicted (and accused) fraudsters who have dismantled the judiciary and appointed apparatchiks to head up the newly emasculated state departments.

There’s a joke about Jacob Zuma, the morally suspect new president, which goes like this.

President Zuma suffers a heart attack while having sex with his seventh wife, a 14-year-old school-girl from the rural North. He gets taken, by accident, to a public hospital, but the doctors are out on strike and the nurses are all asleep in an unused theatre and he dies without ever receiving attention.

He ascends to Heaven and stands at the Pearly Gates where St. Peter greets him.

“Welcome to Heaven,” says Saint Peter, “Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a Communist around these parts, so we’re not sure what to do with you.”

“No problem, just let me in; I’m a good Christian; I’m a believer,” says Comrade Jacob.

“I’d like to just let you in, but I have orders from God Himself. He says that since the implementation of his new Affirmative Action Policy, you have to spend one day in Hell and one day in Heaven. Then you must choose where you’ll live for eternity.”

“But I’ve already made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven,” replies Zuma.

“I’m sorry … But we have our rules,” Peter interjects. And, with that, St. Peter escorts him to an elevator and he goes down, down, down … all the way to Hell.

The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a lush golf course. The sun is shining in a cloudless sky. The temperature is a perfect 22C degrees. In the distance is a beautiful club-house. Standing in front of it is Thabo Mbeki and thousands of other Communist luminaries who had helped him out over the years; Tokyo Sexwale, Peter Mokaba, Tony Yengeni, Schabir Shaik and thousands more. All the ANC leaders are there, everyone laughing, happy, and casually but expensively dressed.

They run to greet him, to hug him and to reminisce about the good times they had getting rich at the expense of ’suckers and peasants.’

They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar. The Devil himself comes up to Zuma with a frosty drink, “Have a tequila and relax, Jake!”

They are having such a great time that, before he realises it, it’s time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves as Zuma steps on the elevator and heads upward.

When the elevator door reopens, he is in Heaven again and St. Peter is waiting for him. “Now it’s time to visit Heaven,” the old man says, opening the gate.

So for 24 hours Zuma is made to hang out with a bunch of honest, good-natured people who enjoy each other’s company, talk about things other than money and treat each other decently. Not a kanga, or scantily-clad woman amongst them. No fancy country clubs here and, while the food tastes great, it’s not caviar or lobster. And these people are all poor. He doesn’t see anybody he knows and he isn’t even treated like someone special!

“Whoa,” he says uncomfortably to himself. “Robert Mugabe never prepared me for this!”

The day done, St. Peter returns and says, “Well, you’ve spent a day in Hell and a day in Heaven. Now choose where you want to live for Eternity.”

With the ‘Deal or No Deal’ theme playing softly in the background, Zuma reflects for a minute … Then answers: “Well, I would never have thought I’d say this. I mean, Heaven has been cool and all but I really think I belong in Hell with my friends.”

So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down, all the way to Hell.

The doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren scorched earth covered with garbage and toxic industrial wasteland, looking a bit like the eroded, befouled informal squatter camps around South African cities, but worse and more desolate.

He is horrified to see all of his friends, dressed in rags and chained together, picking up the roadside rubbish and putting it into black plastic bags. They are groaning and moaning in pain, faces and hands black with grime.

The Devil comes over to Zuma and puts an arm around his shoulder.” I don’t understand,” stammers a shocked Zuma, “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and a club-house and we ate lobster and caviar and drank tequila. We lazed around and had a great time. Now there’s just a wasteland full of garbage and everybody looks miserable!”

The Devil looks at him, smiles slyly and purrs, “Yesterday we were campaigning; today you voted for us.”

—-

Continue to Part 2: One year an immigrant: so you see…

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.

In this young century, however, Americans have suffered increased assaults on their rights — especially privacy — by their own government, all in the name of the proclaimed need for “national security.” Because of fear, government continues to attempt to foreclose on constitutional protections.

Government may erode constitutional guarantees in the absence of the watchful eye of the governed. Rights not exercised may become rights lost. It is an obligation of citizenship for Americans that they continually critique and comment on the actions of their government. That is how we shape our government. Failure to do so allows government to shape us and our rights instead.

At the moment, America has a slew of problems confronting it — record unemployment, a shrinking economy, two foreign wars, a two-party system run amok, and an enormous fiscal deficit, just to name a few.

As we toss the steak on the barbecue and watch the fireworks today, let’s keep in mind the rights and riches we do have, the historical cost of attaining them, and the future risk of losing them if we fail to speak up when government displeases us.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques.

If you’re thinking that’s as self-serving as it is transparent, never fear — the administration also has the interests of detainees at heart:

It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

Expediting martyrdom — never let it be said the United States isn’t a full-service detainer.

There’s something temporary about the word “detain” — as in “detained for questioning.” Also, harkening back to school days, “detention” sounds like a token punishment. But it’s beginning to look like many of the detainees held in preventive detention in Guantanamo will be detained unto all eternity. And we all know their punishment has been anything but token.

How did we get ourselves — and hundreds of likely innocent prisoners — into this fix? A good place to start is with the methods used to apprehend many of them. Turns out, taken together, they served as the catalyst for not only preventive detention but torture.

At the moment, the administration and the Pentagon are having a “what do we do now?” moment over the detainees. In a report for the Heinrich Boll Stiftung (Foundation) entitled Beyond Guantanamo: Restoring U.S. Credibility on Human Rights, Thomas C. Hilde lays out the alternatives (exclusive of the Obama administration’s absolutely revolutionary idea about pleading guilty without trial):
1. Military tribunals
2. Preventive detention and a national security court
3. Limited preventive detention for identifiable combatants
4. Civil criminal trials — try or release.

Just like the word detainee fails to do justice to imprisonment without trial, the positive connotations of the word “preventive” obscure that it’s not only illegal, but in duplicate. When applied to an attack on another nation, the term refers to the intention to head off future threats. But preventive leapfrogs right over “preemptive,” which, while also illegal, describes a threat that’s at least perceived as immediate.

Of course, the Obama administration has ruled out prosecuting those responsible for torturing the detainees. But, as Mark Drumble, author of Atrocity, Punishment and International Law, points out in Professor Hilde’s report, justice may not be served by prosecution anyway: “With pronouncement of sentence comes a rush to closure, absolution for the acquiescent, and the evaporation of collective responsibility.”

According to Drumble, gray areas exist between prosecuting and refusing to:

. . . the accountability process remains narrowly oriented to incarceration following. . . criminal trials. It is not a broader process that is yet comfortable with meaningful restorative initiatives, indigenous values, qualified amnesties, reintegrative shaming, the needs of victims, reparations, collective or foreign responsibilities, distributive justice, or pointed questions regarding the structural nature of violence in the international system.

Ah yes, the “structural nature of violence”: Realpolitickers wouldn’t touch that one with a ten-foot pole. If violence weren’t structural in nature they wouldn’t have jobs in the national security apparatus.

Bring ‘em back alive

It all began when we started offering money for information: from $5,000 (for alleged Taliban) to $25,000 (for alleged al-Qaeda). In 2005, the Associated Press reported on this not uncommon system, as practiced in Afghanistan, for capturing the enemy:

The U.S. Rewards for Justice program pays only for information that leads to the capture of suspected terrorists identified by name, said Steve Pike, a State Department spokesman. Some $57 million has been paid under the program, according to its web site.

Something got lost in translation, though:

In March 2002. . . Afghan intelligence [personnel] offered rewards for the capture of al-Qaida fighters — the day after a five-hour meeting with U.S. Special Forces. Intelligence officers refused to say if the. . . United States was paying the offered reward of 150 million Afghanis, then equivalent to $4,000 a head.

But. . .

That day, leaflets and loudspeaker announcements promised “the big prize” to those who turned in al-Qaida fighters. …

A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told AP [that] U.S. allies regularly got money to help catch Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. …

[A] prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for “a briefcase full of money” then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo.

“It’s obvious. They knew Americans were looking for Arabs, so they captured Arabs and sold them — just like someone catches a fish and sells it,” he said. …
A detainee who said he was a Saudi businessman claimed, “The Pakistani police sold me for money to the Americans.”

But when information seeking is bypassed and, instead, bounty hunters are granted the authority to haul in suspects without warrants, guess what takes a holiday? That’s right — evidence.

Professor Hilde writes:

The legal cases of these allegedly dangerous detainees are corrupted by the methods of evidence-collecting. Evidence gathered on the “battlefield” may be admissible in regular wars, but the traditional concept of “battlefield” means something quite different in the context of asymmetrical war with terrorist groups.

And that describes the best-case scenario in which evidence actually exists. But those collecting rewards for terrorists were only interested in the money, not evidence. In fact, even just evidence that those apprehended were fighters was nonexistent because insurgents wear neither uniforms nor dog tags. With insurgents, there’s no regurgitating rank or serial number.

Complicating the issue further, when a people who are occupied get a load of the invading force’s weaponry, their first thought is, how can I get them to use their firepower to my advantage? For instance, when the English arrived in Roanoke, it didn’t take long before the natives were conspiring to sic the English on enemy tribes.

Afghans either informed on or delivered personal enemies, along with any old warm body. As usual, the Bush administration acted without feeling at all constrained by history. The net result was that by paying a small fortune for innocent civilians and shipping them off to black sites and Guantanamo, Bush & Co. came off looking like monumental suckers, not to mention an embarrassment to the United States.

As for how bounties affect detention, let’s first examine what William Lind recently wrote:

. . . solve the issue of detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere by designating all of them as what they are, namely Prisoners of War [who] may be held until the war is over or exchanged.

But there’s no expiration date on the war on terror. Not only won’t there be any prisoner releases or exchanges, but, despite evidence they’re even fighters, the detainees were designated enemy combatants and, in effect, treated like war criminals.

Then, in the absence of evidence or even any idea about what information a detainee might have been privy to, we torture them until they get the message. Instead of repeating “I don’t know,” they make up stories. Or, to put it another way, if an administration is salivating at the thought of torturing, instituting a bounty system is a great way to facilitate the implementation of said torture regimen.

Bounties, by sheer dint of preceding and laying the groundwork for illegal detention and torture, are equal to them in culpability for the havoc we’ve wreaked on detainees. To preclude preventive detention and torture in the future, we need to enforce a policy of paying only for information, not scalps.

Burma’s ruling junta is another tiger that can’t change its spots. No doubt, its 12 generals are congratulating themselves over catching up Suu Kyi in a technical violation of her house arrest (allowing, however uninvited, an unauthorized visitor).

Aung Din, executive director of the US Campaign for Burma called it a “cunning scheme.” But there’s nothing clever or cunning about using the flimsiest and most obvious of legalistic pretexts to deposit Suu Kyi in Rangoon’s infamous Insein prison. Like many of the junta’s actions and policies, it’s heavy-handed, just like you’d expect from a tin-pot dictatorship. Even more pitiful, the junta seems to work at cross purposes with itself.

For example, the New York Times had just run a story entitled A Year After Storm, Subtle Changes in Myanmar. Last May, Cyclone Nargis, swept through the Irrawaddy Delta killing 85,000 and leaving 54,000 missing (presumed dead). The subsequent “surge of humanitarian aid,” reports the Times, “might have opened a breach in the political wall around Myanmar, including perhaps a new and softer line by the United States.”

If you’ll recall, the junta at first refused to allow aid organizations into the country. ” But now it “readily accepts air shipments of foreign aid,” though not by sea because “the xenophobic junta — still [fears] a seaborne invasion by Western powers. … [Also] the number of international aid groups allowed to work in Myanmar has doubled in the past year.”

The article quotes Frank Smithuis, director of Médecins Sans Frontières in Burma: “Look, the human rights record is shaky, yes, and it’s politically nice to beat up Burma, but the military has actually been quite helpful to us.”

“Shaky”? Try nightmarish. “Politically nice to beat up Burma”? There couldn’t possibly be any other reason besides politics that over 100 groups outside of Burma are working for its democracy and that the United States and the European Union have sanctioned it, could there?

More to the point, no sooner did a major American media outlet in effect pat the junta on the back for signs it was growing a conscience then the junta turned around and arrested one of the world’s most beloved women. Will the Times also praise the junta for allowing foreign media and diplomats to attend the trial? (Uh, probably not, since it only lasted one day.)

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was livid, declaring to a congressional hearing that the trial was “baseless” and that the 2010 elections were “illegitimate because of the way they have treated her.” Sure, the junta is an easy target, but the point is they shouldn’t be, especially since, post-Nargis, the world has been reaching out to it.

The UN and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) also censured Suu Kyi’s arrest, as did the European Union. Then the United States extended the current sanctions regimen, which wasn’t even up for reconsideration until the end of the year, when it expires.

Maybe the Times and the aid organizations quoted in the article, however well intentioned, were giving the junta too much credit. In the view of Asia Times Online’s Brian McCartan, the flow of aid that the junta allowed is regulated by The Aid Wall.

Many international aid groups are angling to extend their activities beyond the Irrawaddy Delta. … They complain that the junta has maintained restrictions in other parts of the country, effectively building an “aid wall” around the Nargis-hit delta. … the military rulers clearly still believe an extended relief effort could have political repercussions, including unwanted observers of its alleged human-rights abuses and empowerment of grassroots communities.

In fact…

. . . the humanitarian aid community’s outreach in the Irrawaddy Delta has not resulted in greater openness but rather represents the latest example of the junta’s well-worn open-and-closed strategy for maintaining power.

Supposedly the 12 generals of the ruling junta are preparing for next year’s elections. By mimicking democracy, they hope to seduce the United States and the European Union into removing sanctions. But imprisoning the Lady, as she’s known to Burmese, erecting an aid wall, and oppressing minorities such as the Karens and Shan are a funny way of showing you care about the West’s opinion.

Clearly, the junta doesn’t. Thanks to oil and gas deals, among other business transactions, it already has China and India in their economic corner. Sacrificing development from the West is a small price to pay to ensure that the junta endures.

The Bush administration went out on a limb to convince the Nuclear Suppliers Group to overlook India’s refusal to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. One can’t help but wonder why the United States can’t exact some sort of reciprocity from India. Expecting India to completely disengage from the junta is unrealistic. But asking it to withdraw specified deals in response to fresh human rights violations on the part of the junta shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Meanwhile one encouraging development has emerged as a result of Aung San Suu Kyi’s internment. Irrawaddy Magazine reports that East Timor President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta has teamed up with the Burma Lawyers’ Council. Together they intend to petition the International Criminal Court to begin investigations in hopes of charging the junta’s leader, General Than Shwe, with human rights abuses and violations of international law.

The ICC may not be able to haul him into court, but it will make it that much harder for India, if not China, to continue dealing with the junta.

The Saffron Revolution was triggered by Burma’s military dictatorship when it took the International Money Fund and its trademark “structural adjustment program,” as well as the World Bank’s advice, a little too literally. In one bold stroke, the junta, which has been ruling Burma with the proverbial iron fist since 1962, stopped subsidizing fuel. Prices rose at least 50%.

Imagine the chaos that would ensue if the United States Government pulled a stunt like that? Triple the effects on a semi-impoverished state like Burma.

As revolutionaries have a way of doing, the activists who initiated the 2007 protests leveraged economic mismanagement into a general call for reform. In the Southeast Asian tradition of Buddhist activism, monks soon joined in and gave the movement a shot in the arm. Also, they really hit the junta where it lives when many of the monks marched with their traditional alms bowls monks held upside down.

Thus did they signal that any donations the military gave them would be refused by the monks, whose blessings the regime relied on for whatever sense of legitimacy they could squeeze out of it. In retrospect, one wonders if severing the military from any pretense of a spiritual life freed it to act with even fewer ethical constraints than normally. Though, in fact, some in the military, including at least one of the ruling junta’s twelve generals, refused to cooperate in stamping out the demonstrations.

At the peak of the protests, the streets of Yangon and other cities filled with 100,000 people. Soon, though, the junta rounded up the monks — on the streets by day and in monasteries by night — and detained and even killed some. Soon the junta broke the back of the Saffron Revolution.

While the demonstrations were in progress, access to Burma was denied to foreign news crews by the junta. Into the the void jumped the Democratic Voice of Burma, a collective of 30 Burmese video journalists (VJs) determined to keep the world informed of events in Burma while also trying to retain their anonymity, lest they be imprisoned and even tortured. Burma VJs: Reporting From a Closed Country by director Anders Østergaard from Norway, where DVB is based, is their story.

The film is narrated by one of the VJs, code-named Joshua, who, early in the movement, is “made” by the Burmese authorities. He escapes to Thailand, where he acts as coordinator for the crew, who smuggle their footage across the border to him. From there it’s transmitted to Norway, where the DVB disperse it to the footage-starved BBC and CNN.

The director is forthcoming about staging Joshua’s scenes. Variety wrote that they “help to fill in the gaps, although some may grumble that it undermines pic’s status as a journalistic document of fact.” In fact, with their low lighting, these scenes are unassuming and critical to continuity.

Meanwhile, the DJs’ mini-cams drop the the viewer into the streets. You may have experienced this before with news footage or YouTube clips of Nepal in 2006 or Seattle in 1999. But not to this extent. In the beginning, despite the ubiquity of security, especially in plain clothes, flash mobs unfurl banners right smack in the middle of a marketplace and voice their protests.

At the time, geopolitical analyst F. William Engdahl wrote:

Myanmar’s “Saffron Revolution”, like the Ukraine “Orange Revolution” or the Georgia “Rose Revolution”. . . is a well-orchestrated exercise in Washington-run regime change, down to the details of “hit-and-run” protests with “swarming” mobs of monks in saffron, Internet blogs, mobile SMS links between protest groups, well-organized protest cells which disperse and re-form.

[The population] “is being used as a human stage prop in a drama scripted in Washington by. . . US intelligence asset[s]. . . to spark “non-violent” regime change. . . on behalf of the US strategic agenda [which includes use] of the strategic sea lanes from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea.”

Of course, that does nothing to detract from the legitimacy of the Burmese cause. Useful to each other, perhaps Washington and Burmese dissidents might best characterize their relationship as “Who’s zooming who?”

As the demonstrations escalate, Buddhist monks march as far as the eye can see. They and the students are met by the Burmese army, which surrounds and, at critical moments, opens fire on them. In one frightening scene, soldiers chase students and a VJ, his camera stashed in a bag at this point, up the stairs of a building while shooting at them.

After the crackdown, many of the monks dissolved into the countryside and some managed to find refuge in the U.S. and join the Burmese emigrant community here. At the special screening in Manhattan, a Q&A followed with the director and three of the Buddhist monks who were at the forefront of the movement. One, seen in the film rallying his fellows in thundering tones with a megaphone, had reverted back to a gentle Buddhist monk again, lending his cause just as much gravitas as did his activism.

Trying to find fault with Burma VJs is no mean feat. Forced to, here’s one — Joshua’s frequent use of the word “shooting.” It can be difficult to determine if he’s referring to the military shooting protesters with their guns or his crew shooting the protests with their cameras. That’s about it.

Random impressions. . . Practically on the street with the protesters, at times you want to reach out and pull them from the danger. . . Disdain for the junta is dripping from those lining Yangon’s broad boulevards as well as those looking on from apartment balconies. Imagine how difficult it must be to rule a country in which nobody likes you but those in your employ.

At one point, Joshua remarks: “I think I want to fight for democracy. But I think we better make a longer plan.”

But it’s already been a long time — 47 years. Watching the film it’s natural to wonder how best the United States can help. With our motives suspect, it might not be a good idea for us to intervene directly beyond sanctions. Even they’re of questionable value.

At the screening, DVB deputy executive director Khin Maung Win commented that the 100-plus that the junta killed in the Saffron Revolution represent an improvement over the 3,000 in the 1988 uprising. It would be sad to think such incremental progress is the best Burma can expect.

Trailing a string of national awards behind it, Burma VJs will play in New York City’s Film Forum from May 20 to June 2.

Even then, perhaps because it’s too close to sanctuary, the worst sanctions seems to bode is a slap on the wrist. In fact, all too often, that’s its effect on its intended targets in a state’s government, while the public suffers instead.

As if to confirm this, while visiting Japan and Indonesia in February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that 14 years of U.S. sanctions on Burma have made little impact on its ruling junta. Not only has there been no improvement in its human rights record, but the Burmese people have made little economic progress. Meanwhile, companies from South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, China, and India have rushed into the vacuum left by U.S. economic abstention.

First, the United States passed the Free Burma Act in 1995 to impose economic and trade sanctions on Burma for its wretched human-rights record. Next, in 1997, Bill Clinton issued a ban on most new investment in Myanmar. Then, in 2003, George W. Bush signed the Burma Freedom and Democracy Act, which ended the importation of all Burmese products. Incorporated in this bill were smart sanctions — like smart bombs, meant to zero in on a target — which barred Burmese government officials from access to their funds in U.S. banks and investment houses, as well as denied them or their families visas.

More targeted sanctions followed in 2006 and, in 2008, the late California congressman who co-chaired the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos, shepherded into law the JADE Act, which blocked the import of jade and other gems from Burma. Also, the European Union just extended its sanctions, which mirror those of the United States, for one year.

If none of this has yet proven effective, the question arises: Do sanctions ever work?

Sanctions’ biggest success story thus far has been South Africa, where they were credited with helping to end apartheid. Also, freezing 25 million dollars of North Korean funds brought Pyongyang back to the nuclear negotiating table, at least for a while.

On the other hand, a series of sanctions on Iran have failed to persuade it to abandon its uranium enrichment program. Nor have they weakened Fidel Castro’s grip on power. Then, of course, there’s they’re most appalling failure: Hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq died for lack of access to antibiotics and other drugs due to sanctions.

As for the net effect of sanctions on the Burmese, the case can be made that they’re not hurting them economically — because the people couldn’t have been much worse off than they already were. In fact, unless the regime surrenders control of oil, gas, gems, and agriculture, the development of a middle class is likely impossible.

In light of that, the head of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Asia, Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), has called for a more “constructive” policy on Burma. To accomplish the twin tasks of improving conditions for the Burmese people and opening up Burma to U.S. corporations, he favors confidence-building measures to expedite the repeal of sanctions.

Others, such as Chevron, one of the few American companies allowed to do business in Burma, call for rescinding the ban on new investments, while retaining the other smart sanctions. Interviewed for a 2008 Voice of America article, Gary Hufbauer, a sanctions expert, explains this line of thinking: “. . . if you can somehow deprive the elite of their bank accounts, of their schools in Switzerland [and] their travel. . . at least you don’t penalize ordinary people [with] widespread ill-health or malnourishment.”

Whoever came up with the term “smart sanctions” might have thought it was clever. But he or she forgot that, however designed to minimize civilian casualties, smart bombs gang aft aglay. Smart sanctions, too, court unintended fallout, such as junta members with suddenly depleted bank accounts rooting around for new and exciting ways to loot the Burmese people.

What about them? How do the people feel about sanctions imposed by other nations?

In 2001, before smart sanctions were instituted, a survey by Burmese exile publication Irrawaddy found that, concerned with economic development though they were, almost 80 percent of 200 Burmese workers, editors, journalists and lawyers polled favored keeping the sanctions in place. But in 2007, the BBC reported:

“Sanctions don’t work — they’re not the solution,” one elderly man said. … “We would like to have democracy, but the most important thing for us is to have peace, and enough food on our plates,” one woman said.

Then Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor recently told us: “When I was in Burma last year I asked a lot of people what they thought of the sanctions and they mostly were against it.” He also reminds us of an inescapable truth about sanctions in general — that they’re basically a “way to punish the Burmese people for having such an awful leadership.”

Many Burma watchers don’t expect a change soon. For example, Vice President Joe Biden, they note, was a key player in the JADE Act’s passage. Also, just last week, Agence France Presse reported, an assistant secretary for legislative affairs, Richard Verma, wrote a letter to Rep. Peter King (R-NY) asserting that sanctions would remain in place. But the first definite indicator of the Obama administration’s intentions towards Burma comes May 15, when it decides whether to extend Clinton’s New Investment Ban.

We’ll allow Irrawaddy the final word on sanctions:

“The most significant ’sanctioner’ on Burma is none other than the country’s ruling regime itself, which has created an environment in which genuine transformative economic activity is scarcely possible, let alone similarly efficacious foreign investment or trade.”

Cross-posted at Newshoggers and Huffington Post’s World.

We know the names of the evil ones, but for today we know seven other names, six from Poland one from France. Let us honor that request to be remembered.

Bronislaw Jankowiak
Stanislaw Dubla
Jan Jasik
Waclaw Sobczak
Karol Czekalski
Waldemar Bialobrzeski
Albert Veissid

As of today only Mr. Veissid has been found and contacted. He lives in France. It is known that Sobczak and Czekalski survived the death camp. Nothing is known of the other four.

The story is reported by the BBC and further information about the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is available here.

Thomas Hilde, editor of On Torture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) explains in an email (excerpted here with permission) the method — seldom cited — to the madness of modern torture. [Emphasis added.]

. . .torturing for information. . . requires as much torture as possible in order to make it meaningful information rather than simply raw data. Often, as with the Burmese junta, this just means hauling in people. . . with little or no reason for suspicion. . . torturing them all, and then plotting out the various individual bits of data to create a larger, meaningful narrative while tossing away the outlying data (from the insane, people who know little if anything, from the moments of a victim’s sheer delirium, etc.).

To update an analogy from a different context (from the great 19th-century philosopher, Charles Peirce). . . we can know with some degree of certainty that the goal of an archer or pub darts player was to hit the bulls-eye without him actually ever hitting it. But only if we have enough other data points from which to extrapolate. Three darts — say, off the board, in the inner ring, an inch above the bullseye — don’t tell us much. The true goal — the bullseye — would be revealed in the pattern left by, say, 183 darts, even if all of them miss the bulls-eye.

Same goes for information when the means of getting it make its veracity seriously suspect (i.e., torture victims will say anything). The more individual data points, the clearer the picture. More torture victims, better information. This is also why torture always tends towards institutionalization.

I think we should be very careful of focusing too much on the individual cases in trying to analyze the policy precisely because torture institutionalizes. But in the cases of KSM and Zubaydah, the ongoing torture may function in a similar way. … [My] guess is that they were trying to verify little bits of information gotten from him in other torture sessions or from other torture victims by trying to beat his mind into a malleable pulp.

It’s not that torturing for information doesn’t “work.” It’s that we’ve misunderstood the nature of torturing for information. I think that’s what Cheney is probably relying on if he is indeed saying that all the torture memos ought to be released because many will show that the torture “worked.”

In other words, volume, volume, volume — like, like. . . warrantless surveillance! In both practices, the extravagant expenditure of time and money required to mine wave upon wave of data suggests a regime less concerned about threats to the state than to itself.

The obsessive pursuit of information has traditionally been the mark of a regime that rules by force and sees enemies at every turn — like the Bush administration to a certain extent. If we wish to wipe that slate clean, we can scarcely grant the offending parties a free pass.

Addendum

Nor should we forget, as Professor Hilde reminds us, that the meaningfulness of the information extracted:

. . . is a function of fitting into the preexisting expectations and interpretive frameworks of the torturers. Factual verification may never be possible in many cases. Meaningfulness and factualness are not one and the same thing.

Any surprise is either the result of willful ignorance or the feigned sort that the Obama administration is proffering.  We certainly should not be surprised by the political manipulation of the issue.  Release the memos and the damning evidence with one hand, and sign the motion to prevent prosecution with the other.

There’s a very good reason that a government of Democratic control is not interested in seeing all this placed on the scales of justice: the upper echelons of the Democratic Party knew all about it.  They didn’t raise a finger to stop it then and have no intention of being dragged down with it now.

We all knew it was going on.  Senator Obama knew it was happening; he knew that the United States of Freedom and Democracy was torturing.  I must have missed the impassioned political oratory on the Senate floor calling on America to follow its better nature and rise above the level of totalitarian behavior.

Instead we get a “closure” of Guantanamo while arguing for Bagram to be free of legal meddling so that nobody can poke around the bloodstains.  We’ve gotten rock-solid assurances that all those black sites are “closed”, or will be closing, or might be closing if they’re not too valuable in our War on the Unnamed..since we don’t want to call it the War on Terror anymore.

Let me know when hope manages to change this sorry state of affairs, and do not bring the argument that we must “make Obama” do the right thing.  It seems to me that he swore on the Bible of his choice to uphold the Constitution.  That oath includes all treaties that the United States has signed and ratified, meaning all four Geneva Conventions that we spent the last eight years breaking. (and are almost assuredly still breaking)

If the man does not have the backbone to do what’s right then he has no more claim to lead this faltering union than his predecessor.

Until then we are no better than Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, or any number of tin-pot dictatorships throughout history.

“A judge is not supposed to do that. It’s not for judges to decide on foreign policy. They don’t run government and they don’t run foreign policy. There is separation of powers. They run the judiciary. I don’t comment on the judiciary.” (This after a judge in SA’s constitutional court sided with the current minister of health that it was unadvised to prevent the Dalai Lama from visiting).

“Tutu does not run government. Remember, he said he was not going to vote. If it were up to him, there would be no elections next month.” (In response to Archbishop Desmond Tutu declaring that he would now boycott the conference.)

Which got even the usually intelligent finance minister, Trevor Manuel, involved: “Is he just the spiritual leader of the Buddhists in Tibet or is he the one who on March 28 1959 established the government of Tibet in exile in the same way Taiwan was established to counter the legality of a single China?”

“The reason why the Dalai Lama wants to be here is to make a big global political statement about the secession of Tibet from China. He wants to do it on the free soil of SA,” Manuel said.

“I am sure he is welcome to come at any other time but we should not allow him to raise the global issue that will impact on the standing of SA. Quite frankly this has nothing to do with the PSL (Professional Soccer League). It is a matter of the relationship between states and that is what we have to stand up for.”

But, back to the continuing lunacy of the foreign minister:

“Foreign policy has to be discussed and has to be understood. But at the end of the day we can’t all conduct foreign policy. I’m not casting any aspersions on anyone. But the truth of the matter that foreign policy has to be conducted at one level and has to be co-ordinated.”

“China cannot bully us. But of course, they also have their own interests. As a country, they will further their own interests. But we are not hiding the fact that we want to have good relations with China – like everybody else in the world.”

“Human rights are also about jobs, education and shelter. You can’t divorce economic interest from human rights. Our [Bill] of rights is much more broader than that of many countries.”

“But when we took a decision on his visit we looked at what is the national interest -which includes making sure that the country runs, human rights, in the broad sense, are protected, people have food, shelter and jobs. What brings stability is the combination of each of all these rights.”

Which earned the following response from Professor Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute:

“We are disappointed that the South African government did not stand up to Chinese pressure, particularly bearing in mind the strong support the ANC got from abroad and the Norwegian Nobel Committee in its historic struggle against apartheid.”

And my take: claiming that denying the Dalai Lama entrance to a conference to discuss peace and global harmony is actually in the DEFENCE of human rights is the sort of double-speak gobbledygook you’d expect from a government with absolutely no respect for human rights. Claiming that Desmond Tutu, one of the greatest humanists alive, is in favour of the destruction of democracy because he WON’T vote in a political system that has become nothing but a collection of favouritism and corruption is just spurious bullshit.

About the only ANC/government representative who has said anything approaching sense is the current Health Minister, Barbara Hogan (who has now earned the ire of the unsackable Dlamini-Zuma): “Just the very fact that this government has refused entry to the Dalai Lama is an example of a government who is dismissive of human rights. I believe [the government] needs to apologise to the citizens of this country, because it is in your name that this great man who has struggled for the rights of his country… has been denied access.”

The government decision was, said the Dalai Lama, “another manifestation of one of the fundamental challenges to world peace as a whole: namely, a lack of understanding and mutual respect”.

“I believe religious, social and political leaders throughout the world have a responsibility to ensure principles triumph over the obsession with money and power.”

Except for the missing word “unearned” in front of “money and power”, I have no problem with those sentiments.

• California report recommends changes to adapt to rising sea level
• “Virtual” water exports a problem for Australia and the world
• An update on high voltage direct current transmission lines
• MIT develops new Li-ion battery that charges really, really fast
• New biodiesel stays liquid at colder temperatures

Limit development in low-lying coastal areas. Consider abandoning existing development in coastal areas likely to be affected by sea level rise. Require structures built along the coast to be able to adapt to higher sea levels. Discontinue federally subsidized flood insurance for existing property in low-lying coastal areas. Those are some of the recommendations made last week in the first report by California’s Climate Action Team and reported by the LA Times.

According to the LATimes article, the state of California has concluded that it’s best to plan now for rising sea levels in the future. And so the Climate Action Team is preparing 40 different studies into adaptation and mitigation strategies for the state, many of which are presently undergoing expert peer review, and plans on submitting a comprehensive report to the Governor later this year. The changes already proposed in this one report, however, are radical compared to what most states have been willing to consider to date. Most states have their heads in the sand over the issue of climate change, and while few states have as many different climates as California does (coastal, desert, mountains, etc.), all states will be affected sooner or later, to some greater or lesser extent.

Furthermore, if California is seriously considering abandoning coastal properties, shutting down and moving inland power plants and water treatment facilities and hospitals (like those shown in the image above), and forcing ports to build so that a meter or more of sea level rise is no big deal, then other states will begin to take this seriously as well. Some entire towns may have to be given to the Pacific, something that, until this report, I’d only seen seriously discussed in government circles by the English. And every time I’ve heard it suggested that maybe parts of New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt or that homes and towns in flood plains should be abandoned instead of rebuilt by taxpayer-funded federal flood insurance, people’s hackles rise in a hurry. Having the state of California suggesting these approaches as a “good” adaptation strategy truly is radical.

I have one major concern, however. The LATimes article points out that the Climate Action Team is using the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report as their baseline, but as I reported in the last week’s Carboholic, the IPCC predictions were overly conservative. So planning for a worst-case sea level rise from the IPCC estimates is already a case of too little, too late. So if the report proposes that 1100 miles of levees, built for $14 billion and with a yearly maintenance cost of $1.4 billion assumes 1.5 meters of sea level rise, what happens to the cost if that goes up by double, as several papers presented at the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen say it will? If nearly half a million people will live in flood plains by 2100 at the IPCC estimate, how many more people will be affected?

The gist of the recommendations in the report are ultimately going to stand regardless. As Mary Nichols, chairwoman of California’s Air Resources Board, was quoted as saying:

“The recommendations are sensible: Defend what is worth protecting, move what can reasonably be moved, try to avoid doing further harm, consult affected communities, prepare to respond to emergencies.”

It’s hard to argue with those.

———-

“Virtual” water exports a problem for Australia and the world

Everyone knows instinctively what water is and what you use it for. You turn on your tap, flush your toilet, drink a bottle of “spring” water, water your lawn, take a whitewater ride down rapids, go fishing in a reservoir – all of that is a use of water. So are the flowers you buy that were imported from Africa, or the shirt you wear that is made from Australian cotton or wool, or the lettuce on the salad you eat during December that was grown in the Imperial Valley of California. The difference is that this water is hidden, or in the parlance of an article from The Age, it’s “virtual” water. And environmental scientist Tim Jarvis is of the opinion that arid and drought-stricken Australia should export less of it’s virtual water.

“Australia is a massive net exporter of virtual water, in other words, water we take to grow crops that we grow for export, such as wheat, rice, cotton,” Mr Jarvis said.

“We have to address this fundamental discrepancy that exists between the fact we’re the driest country yet we’re one of the largest net virtual water exporters,” he said.

Jarvis’ comments about the export of virtual water applies far beyond Australia’s borders. California’s Imperial Valley is desert made ideal, year-round farmland through massive canals importing water from the Colorado River. That water is then exported to the rest of the United States, even those parts that have far, far more water than the desert southwest and the Mojave (which the Imperial Valley would very nearly be without irrigation). Ethiopia exports to Europe so that Europeans have fresh flowers year round, but those flowers contain huge amounts of water that could become quite scarce if Africa dries out as anticipated in the coming decades. Every agricultural product has a cost in virtual water that is used to produce the product, and that virtual water is exported and imported around the world. And this doesn’t even begin to take the huge water costs of resource extraction (settling ponds), energy production (fly ash ponds, steam turbines, and cooling), and even bottled water from overseas (Fiji, Switzerland, et al).

Water will eventually become a valuable commodity world wide, instead of the nearly-dirt-cheap resource it is today. When this happens, cities in deserts (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles) may find themselves without enough water to survive, at least at today’s population, without spending great amounts of money to import water. And regions that have sufficient water will have to fight off dryer regions that have designs on their water – some regions (like the Great Lakes) have already had to take action to prevent water from leaving the drainage.

What happens then is anyone’s guess, but resource conflicts over access to potable water aren’t outside the realm of possibility. Neither are mass migrations and environmental refugees from hot, dry areas to cooler, wetter areas – and all the cultural and social ramifications that such migrations bring with them. Which is why international diplomatic meetings like the World Water Forum, meeting in Istanbul this week, are so important.

———-

An update on high voltage direct current transmission lines

Alternating current (AC) has historically ruled electricity transmission. Because AC transmission enables the use of transformers to change the voltage from tens or hundreds of thousands of volts to 240 or 120 volts, it’s used all over the world and has been since the early 1900s. But AC is not the only game in town – direct current (DC) lines exist and are used in certain specific applications. For example, because DC lines have lower losses, they’re used to transmit electricity over extremely long distances. In addition, because different regional electricity grids are out of phase with each other, DC lines (which have little or no phase at all) are used to connect different regional AC grids to each other.

The New Scientist had an article last week on recent developments in high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. The article reports that there are a number of new HVDC lines being installed internationally, such as a 6.4 gigawatt, 2000 km long line from the Xianjiaba dam to Shanghai in China.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the idea of the “supergrid,” where HVDC lines are used to interconnect entire continents with electricity so that electricity created in one place (such as solar power in the U.S. desert southwest or the Sahara Desert or wind power from offshore wind farms in the windy North Sea) is available wherever it’s needed, no matter how far away that electricity is used. Not only that, but because HVDC lines are much less wasteful, huge gains in effective electricity production could be realized through improved transmission efficiency.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article, however, is an analysis that was performed by Gregor Czisch, an independent energy consultant who calculated that a $1.8 trillion investment in building a HVDC network in Europe would be enough to power the entire continent with renewable energy exclusively. This sounds like a lot until you consider that it’s only about 10% of what European utilities are already expected to spend on power plant construction by 2030. And the article claims that Czisch calculated that the completed grid could deliver 100% renewable electricity for less than 5 cents per kWh.

There remain some technological challenges – there’s no such thing as a high power DC circuit breaker at the moment, for example – and NIMBY politics will always play their part in anything as major as tens or hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission line, but there are no technological or political problems that appear insurmountable at this time.

———-

MIT develops new Li-ion battery that charges really, really fast

According to the Boston Globe, scientists at MIT have developed a new electrode that enables a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery to be fully charged 100 times faster than existing batteries. These new batteries, if commercially viable, could charge a cell phone in mere seconds, a laptop battery in less than a minute, or a plug-in hybrid/fully electric vehicle in mere minutes, instead of the hours that existing batteries require. This does assume that you have a sufficiently robust connection to the power grid that you don’t blow the main circuit breaker on the house every time you try to fast recharge your plug-in Prius.

At least two companies, A123Systems and Umicore, have already or are considering licensing the technology for commercialization.

———-

New biodiesel stays liquid at colder temperatures

One of the major problems with biodiesel is that it gels in the cold, turning into Jello® in the gas tank instead of flowing through fuel lines like petroleum-based diesel does. This problem has limited its usability in the winter and in cold environments in general. But according to the NYTimes blog GreenInc, Integrity Biofuels of Indiana may have solved this problem, and to prove it, they drove biofueled trucks in Alaska in the winter and ran a diesel electric generator down to -24 degrees Fahrenheit overnight without any problems.

The reason that biofuels gel at low temperature is that there are too many saturated oils, but Integrity has used urea to separate the saturated oils from the unsaturated ones, enabling them to create blends that should run down to -60 degrees F before turning into a gel. According to the GreenInc article, the cost of the reusable urea additive is about five cents per gallon.

While biodiesel has the same problems that any biofuel does, namely the conversion of food-producing farmland to produce fuel crops and questions about energy efficiency, biodiesel has one significant advantage – biodiesel can be made from used cooking oils harvested from the grease traps and fryers of tens of thousands of restaurants around the country and the world. Whether there’s enough used cooking oils to make a dent in diesel consumption is a question I haven’t investigated, but turning a waste product that was once landfill bound into a viable and environmentally-friendly product is always a good idea.

Image credits:
Pacific Institute
New Scientist

The Truth Commission was unlike any trial the world had ever seen.  In exchange for complete disclosure about all past crimes, both known and unknown, claimants would be given complete absolution.  In the case of this one sweaty white man, his victim had asked that he demonstrate how he had tortured him.

Waterboarding has become famous.  Place a thick, heavy and wet fabric over your victim’s head, and then hold them stationary.  It causes no lasting physical damage, but gives a very real sense of drowning.  Anyone who has ever had a similar experience knows it is terrifying.

That was the least of what the Apartheid government authorised in the name of keeping their power.  “Red Dust”, the film of Gillian Slovo’s seminal book, details one such hearing into the brutal torture and murder of a small-town activist.  If you can find a copy of the film, please watch it, for the ordinariness of the people involved.  The opening music alone will make you weep.

And so we come to the nub.  We expect authoritarian regimes to torture and abuse people.  The violence is there, not to gain knowledge from conspirators, but to terrify the millions, as Mao would have it.

But what to make of it when liberal democracies declare that torture is essential if they are to protect that society?  George W Bush would have you believe that torture has saved thousands of Americans by allowing torturers to extract information in order to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Maybe this is true.  Maybe the only way to find out the exact details of when a train will be bombed, or an airline hijacked and flown into a building, is by beating the shit out of someone who knows.

But have you thought about the consequences of such an allowance?

Who would be your torturer?  Who would break fingers, electrify genitals, smash bones and teeth; not out of rage or passion, but as job?  What sort of person is this?

And do you really want to create a society where such a job is ordinary?

For then you will discover what South Africa discovered, that once the law is extended to allow such people a place, then such people congregate.  If torture is legal, then torturers proliferate.  The law is distorted to honour torturers, to encourage their indoctrination and training.  And your society becomes a dark and evil place.

There is no middle ground.  Either you decide that torture is inexcusable under any circumstances, and accept the consequences of that choice.

Or you choose torture.  For everyone.

Speaking of perdition, somebody needs to throw another handful of clean coal in the brazier under Yasser Arafat, and hopefully someone has confirmed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s reservation for the spot next to Arafat’s. Bush and Kondi and Lord Cheney and Bad Will Ambassador John Bolton must be looking forward to occupying adjoining rooms with a view of the inferno in the LBJ Hilton, because they appear bent on squeezing in as much last minute evil as they can before a house drops on them.

Never tired of watching its own horror show, the Bush team is reprising the scenario it ran in Lebanon: Cheney goads Bush into giving tacit approval for Israel to launch a military offensive against a group of sand colored people who, in terms of relative firepower, amount to an ant colony. Kondi does her hair up like a fright wig and drags out the ceasefire process until Israel a) has killed all the sand colored people it wants to kill or b) starts getting its tohkes kicked by the sand colored people and wants mommy to make them stop it.

Take Two

Dick Cheney says Israel didn’t seek “U.S. approval” to begin the ground attack into Gaza. Heh. They didn’t seek “U.S. approval” before they attacked Lebanon, either. They sought Dick Cheney’s approval, and he gave it to them. Dick Cheney isn’t the “U.S.” He’s just the vice president, and the president of the Senate. He’s not in the military chain of command at all, and according to him he doesn’t even work in the executive branch of government.

No word yet on whether Israel got Dick’s permission to use cluster munitions on the sand colored people, this time or last time. Israel’s Haareetz says the Israeli Defense Force is aiming the cluster ammunition at “open areas.” I have trouble imagining Hamas placing suitable cluster bomb targets in the open. You might shell an open area to set off mines that could be buried there, but if you use cluster bombs to do that you’ll create another minefield on top of the one you’re trying to clear. Cluster bombs are made for killing people. Maybe the IDF is shelling open areas with cluster bombs as a humanitarian gesture, something to remind the Palestinians to stay in the closed areas where it’s safer, but I doubt it. Journalist Jamal Dajani of Link TV, posting from the Israel-Gaza border, judges Israel’s self described “surgical strikes” to be “as surgical as shooting chickens in a coop with a shot gun.”

Mr. Bush blames the Gaza debacle on Hamas, saying it has “once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization” with attacks on Israel. Bush didn’t mention that Israel broke the ceasefire in November when it sent ground troops into Gaza. Cheney probably didn’t let anybody tell Bush that part. Maybe it’s a moot issue; Israel has had Gaza under a blockade since January 2008, six months before the ceasefire went into effect. Since a blockade is an act of war imposed by armed force, one has to marvel at how even the most adroit Rovewellian can say with a straight face that a ceasefire exists within a blockade.

But then logic has never been a requirement of Bush administration rhetoric. Kondi says that, “Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of (Palestinian Authority) President Mahmoud Abbas.” The “illegal coup” she refers to was the January 2006 election in which Hamas won a large majority of Palestinian Parliament and ousted the corrupt, self-serving Fatah party. Fatah, you may recall, was the political organization of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who built a personal nest egg of $1 billion and $3 billion out of public funds.

Kondi says that she won’t settle for a ceasefire that allows Hamas to keep its rockets to defend itself with. Hamas makes the Qassam rockets themselves, since they can’t afford to buy weapons from anybody. The rockets are simple steel filled tubes with no guidance system. The fuel is a mixture of sugar and fertilizer, and the warhead contains fertilizer and scavenged TNT. Qassam rockets are worthless against the F-16 fighter-bombers we gave the Israelis.

FOX News put fear and loathing merchant John Bolton on the air to say the Israelis has a right to use those F-16s to “eliminate” Hamas. After that, Bolton said, Israel should use the F-16s to attack Iran for us.

Bush neocons aren’t the only U.S. politicos lifting their skirts for Israel. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally.” Dick Cheney must not have let anybody tell her that Israel attacked first either. On Meet the Press last Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prattled on about how generous the Israelis were when they gave the Palestinians control of the Gaza Strip in 2003. He didn’t mention that Israel was giving back land the UN parceled to the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 when it established Israel.

It’s too bad for the Palestinians they can’t afford to set up a lobbying group like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and to buy all of our politicians and our media like the Israelis have done.

Lonely at the Bottom

The Armistice Agreements that ended the 1948 Arab-Israeli War eliminated Palestine as a defined territory. The land not ceded to Israel was distributed to Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who essentially told their Palestinian Arab pals to go fish in a sand dune. In early December 2008, Egyptian president Mubarak blocked the Iranian Red Crescent from delivering food to Gaza to relieve Palestinians who had been reduced to eating grass. I reckon Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni hadn’t heard about the grass eating business when she said, “There is no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Or maybe she doesn’t think Palestinians eating grass constitutes a humanitarian crisis.

The Telegraph describes how the U.S. blocked the UN Security Council from passing a statement urging an immediate ceasefire on both sides on Saturday. Historian and journalist Gareth Porter exposes how the Bush administration has been plotting the current Gaza confrontation since early 2007.

I once had the audacity to hope that my country would become that shining city on a hill, a champion of the oppressed and abandoned. Human societies don’t get much more oppressed or abandoned than the Palestinians, but political regimes don’t come any more malignant than the Bush administration.

It would be nice to believe that change is just around the corner, but the ear-splitting silence from Barack Obama, on a holiday surfing safari as the Gaza debacle unfolded, has me suspecting that the Israelis now own U.S. foreign policy trigger, stock and barrel regardless of who the American public puts in power. I don’t buy Obama’s “one president at a time” excuse. Bush, Cheney and the neocons have gotten away with atrocity after atrocity after atrocity for eight merciless years because people who could have stopped them didn’t want to speak out of turn.

I’d also like to believe that Barack Obama is more concerned with doing the right thing than with what the John Boltons and Sean Hannitys and Bill Kristols of this world have to say about him.

But just now, I’m more inclined to believe in Scientology.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.