bazzfazz

Will Scotland leave the UK?

2012-01-18T20:07:00.000Z

There has been much discussion of this very question this past week, since suddenly it looks as if there will be a referendum on the issue of Scottish independence in Scotland in 2014. Actually, there’s a whole lot going on surrounding this referendum, including whether there might be a similar one elsewhere in the UK on whether the rest of the UK actually wants Scotland to leave—according to a recent poll in The Telegraph, a higher percentage of English respondents want Scotland to leave than do Scots. Alex Salmond, who heads up the Scottish Nationalist Party that currently runs the Scottish Parliament, had better be careful about getting what you wish for.All this started when Cameron called Salmond’s bluff by suggesting that the referendum be held sooner rather than later, and that perhaps it wasn’t entirely up to the Scottish Parliament on the timing of this in the first place—it actually required the approval of the British Parliament. This brought a furious reaction from Salmond, and the words have been flying around like wildfire. Things are calming down a bit now, but only because it’s clear that there’s lots of uncertainty about all of this.The background here is pretty straightforward—the SNP has been running on a platform of Scottish independence from Britain for years now, and surprisingly gained a majority of MPs in the Scottish Parliament in the last election—in spite of repeated polling in Scotland that a majority of the Scottish population does not favour independence from Britain. But it’s clearly a great vote-getter, appealing to some powerful instincts of Scottish nationalism, and it worked like a charm the past election, when dissatisfaction with Labour reached near-epidemic proportions (the Tories are barely a factor in Scottish politics) and Labour lost a number of seats in the Scottish Parliament as well as losing control of the British Parliament—which brought us the current coalition government. Too bad the reality check shows that if this does indeed occur, it’s not at all clear how Scotland will pay for it. Moreover, if indeed this does occur, it’s not at all clear how it would actually work in practice. (Just to be clear on nomenclature—Great Britain consists of England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom is actually “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” They’re not interchangeable.)I don’t have much familiarity with countries breaking up, and I have to say it’s not much fun watching America decide how quickly it wants to. I guess that Czechoslovakia thing worked out ok, but I’m not really up on the details. But as I remember, you had two different languages involved, which generally means something about identity (for better or worse). But here we’ve got two nations separated by a common language, as the saying goes, and much else, apparently.Of course, we’re talking about centuries of, well, fervor is probably the best word available. Unlike Ireland and Wales, Scotland wasn’t exactly conquered—it was more like an agreement when a Scottish king also became King of England. But ever since Scotland became part of Britain in 1707, Scottish nationalism has been a factor in local politics. And now it looks as if a separation might be achievable. But the mechanics may be daunting.There have always been a number of lingering questions about who controls what once the Labour government, under Tony Blair, passed devolution legislation in 1998, which went into effect in 1999. Like so much else that New Labour had a hand in, it was poorly thought out, and a number of significant issues were routinely ignored. That was Blair’s style, as is now clear. Not the least of these issues was what Scottish former Labour MP (and the smartest guy in the room, usually) Tam Dalyell referred to as the West Lothian question—the fact that MPs from Scotland after devolution could vote on matters affecting, say, education policy in England, but that English MPs would not be able to do so for education policy in Scotland—because that was now being determined by the new Parliament in Scotland. (Ditto Wales and Northern Ireland, although the Northern Ireland Parliament was suspended for a while there.)This is one of those issues that makes normally level-headed people become quite irrational. There have been various attempts to sort this over the past decade, but nothing that really passes the smell test in terms of seriousness—no one has a good idea here, other than, say, having a separate English Parliament as well. Just what we need. On the other hand, it looks as if the rhetoric, at least, has been stepped up the past two years. It’s mainly been Salmond, of course. He’s a canny politician, in many respects—his party did win the last Scottish election, after all. But at some point you have to get real.So what are the actual issues here? It’s not as if this will be easy, as a number of people have pointed out, and there are, in fact, some very big issues that need to be resolved. Or, at least, that the British government thinks they need resolving, although the SNP has been a bit vague on how they are to be resolved. Even assuming normal stuff like roads and schools are within the scope and ability of a new Scottish government, what about:1. Oil—most of Britain’s remaining oil and gas lie north and east of Scotland. How much Scotland would actually get is a bit of a mystery. This has been a depleting resource for a while now, since Britain, unlike Norway, has pretty much been drilling at maximum speed, and reserves are declining. Still, it’s undoubtedly better to be long oil and gas than not to be, and Scotland has a claim. But how much of one? That depends on where you draw that arbitrary line between England and Scotland. And as you might imagine, there are a number of possible lines to be drawn, and certainly nothing like a consensus.2. The Royal Bank of Scotland—which is still headquartered in Scotland, and would presumably be staying there. The British—not Scottish—government bailed it out, to the tune of £45 billion (and probably more, eventually). That’s quite a lot of money. So now it’s just going to be turned over to Scotland after the rest of the UK has bailed it out? Nobody thinks so, although Salmond is a bit vague on what would actually happen here. Others, on the remaining British side of the equation, have been less vague—a number of pundits want the “new Scotland” to reimburse the rest of Britain. Hah—we’ll see. Besides, RBS is still 85% owned by the British Treasury. But perhaps not for long.3. Let’s see, what currency should Scotland use? This has gotten contentious, and it’s becoming a major issue, in an area where, once again, the SNP appears to have not done its homework. Scotland currently has its own currency, but it’s good in the rest of Britain, and British pounds are good in Scotland. But Salmond seems to think he’ll be able to join the EC and start using the euro—and Chancellor George Osborne agrees with him, while suggesting that it won’t actually be that easy. Aside from the issue of timing, as former Chancellor Alistair Darling has pointed out, it’s not clear that this is the best idea that Salmond has come up with—Darling has said that Scotland keeping the pound would be ”ludicrous.” Even assuming there is a euro at that point. And then there’s the not trivial issue of what Scotland’s sovereign credit rating would be. Probably not the AAA that the UK currently has. Then what?4. The UK’s nuclear submarines and missles—its entire nuclear deterrent, in fact—currently reside off the coast of Scotland. Do they stay there? Probably not. Where, then, do they go—and who is going to pay for that? Probably Scotland, again. So how much will that cost? Good question—probably billions, at least.Actually, the issue here seems surprisingly muted compared with in the US, where we constantly hear excessive moaning about supporting deadbeats in other states (although, as we’ve commented before, the commentators usually seem surprisingly ignorant about who is supporting whom). Here, though it’s a bit different—what we’re dealing with is differently chartered sets of executive powers for two countries that really are really legally distinct countries (joined by a Treaty of Union) in a number of ways, that have some overlapping complications, not to say contradictions. For those who live in England, Dalyell’s question is a legitimate one—MPs from another country, with their own Parliament, currently have a say in real government functions and actions in England that is not reciprocated under the current arrangement.How this plays out is anyone’s guess at this point. You have to be impressed with Cameron’s footwork here, irrespective of your views of his politics—I think those who think Salmond is being very clever, and that Cameron has been a bit foolish, have it entirely backwards. Alex Massie is frequently a pretty bright guy, but we’re not seeing the same thing here. Cameron has backed Salmond into a corner that will be difficult to get out of, although by giving this until 2014 he is giving Salmond considerable wiggle room. Whether Salmond is smart enough to figure that out remains to be seen. As does whether it would make any difference whatsoever.

Josef Skvorecky, RIP

2012-01-08T08:34:00.002Z

I’ve always found it somewhat ironic, if that’s the word, that two of the best novels I’ve ever read about America—Dvorak in Love and The Bride of Texas—were written by a Czech expatriate author who lived in Toronto. In fact, they’re two of the best novels I’ve ever read, period. Skvorecky, who died this past week at 87, had what one might call an interesting life—he grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (experiences which formed a substantial focus for much of his fiction), got into constant trouble in Communist Czechoslovakia for his writings, and was banned repeatedly. He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1968, and he spent the rest of his life writing excellent novels and short stories, teaching literature, and publishing other Czech expatriates through his publishing house. Lots more details can be found in the NY Times obituary, or in the Telegraph obituary. A fuller literary appreciation will undoubtedly show up in the NY Review of Books soon.He is perhaps best known for The Engineer of Human Souls, which is a fine and visionary novel about the role of the writer in society, any society, but takes on a deep irony by contrasting the life of Danny Smiricky, who happens to be Czech exile teaching in Canada (as was Skvorecky), with life under both the Nazis and the Communists. This makes it sound like a simple political novel, which it is far from being—it’s a deeply felt, albeit meandering, novel about individualism that happens to take place in multiple locales, with more than its fair share of pathos and humor. Skvorecky used Danny throughout his literary career—the early collections of Danny Smiricky stories are wonderful too, especially the jazz stories. And it’s all good--The Bass Saxaphone stands out here. But the two that stand out in my mind are the two that concern America. Dvorak in Love is about just that—Dvorak’s journey to America in 1892 to 1895, which produced, among other works, his best-known work, Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”). Of course, what Dvorak did in America is pretty much what he did in Bohemia all his life—he wandered around and listed to music that people played and sang—in villages, in towns, wherever he could. The novel captures that wonderfully, as Dvorak adapts negro songs and spirituals to symphonic form. But it captures more—Dvorak was in love with America, what it was becoming, and what it represented to many of his countrymen--its energy, its freedom. It’s a wonderful novel, told from multiple perspectives, and not least because Skvorecky is not blind to America’s faults, particularly its racial history, but still, like Dvorak, is enamored of what America represented to Europe and much of the rest of the world—hope.This theme is explored in more detail in The Bride of Texas, a longer (and much more experimental) novel set in the American Civil War, which follows the exploits of a group of Czech immigrants who enlist in the Union Army. This actually happened—the Union ranks were loaded with immigrants, including Czech immigrants who served, as do the book’s characters, in the 26th Wisconsin battalion under Sherman. And while motives likely varied, there’s no question that at least some of it derived from Skvorecky’s area of concern—the feeling of gratitude to a country that offered hope. The novel itself is probably the most experimental of Skvorecky’s works, with its constant shifts of time and character—but it’s well worth the effort. It’s easy to forget this sometimes, when the current American political circus seems to offer nothing but ignorance, mendacity and viciousness about immigration (and, lord knows, so many other things), what America used to represent to the world--hope. And to some extent it still does, although the past decade certainly hasn’t helped. But we’re all (or mostly all) descended from immigrants from somewhere, and it’s good to be reminded of why that is. Skvorecky was a wonderful writer with the ability to create a broad canvas in a number of areas—and like his Czech soldiers, I’m grateful to him for having brought me so much pleasure, and I will miss him.

2011-12-21T19:25:00.000Z

OK, you blew it. You were supposed to load up with whatever this year's superduper toy was weeks ago, while it was still in stock. But you got distracted, as usually happens this time of year, and now you're stuck. And your marriage, and your children's permanent affections, are now at risk.Fortunately, Wired comes to the rescue. Specifically, good old GeekDad, who reviews toys and all sorts of other stuff for Wired. And he's got a list of the five best toys of all time. You might have a quibble here and there, but you can't deny he's on to something. Your only problem now is gussying them up as Christmas presents for kids who expect something either (a) glowing, (b) electronic, or (C) alive. But that's what wrapping paper is for, isn't it?

George Whitman, RIP

2011-12-15T00:07:00.000Z

George Whitman probably is an unfamiliar name to most Americans, but practically any American who has spent any at all time in Paris has at least wandered through the Shakespeare & Company bookshop, of which Whitman was the owner and proprietor. He was 98, and knew everyone. He had been a bit less mobile the past few years, but you could usually see him sitting around upstairs somewhere, puttering, or just sitting and talking. What an amazing set of memories, which are now no longer with us. It wasn't the original Shakespeare and Company bookshop owned by Sylvia Beach, but he opened his and named it in honor of Beach's--and when his own daughter came along, named her after Sylvia. It was, and still is, an amazing bookshop--wall to ceiling books, literally, mostly English language, about practically everything and anything, nestled in on the Left Bank opposite Notre Dame. Perfect--you couldn't possibly have improved on it. If they liked you, they would use one of those little embossing stamp things on the title page of whatever you bought, and I have one in my copy of, of course, George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris. It must be something to create an institution and then to live long enough to see it become one, as much a part of Paris today as the Seine it sits next to. A remarkable bookman and person, whose legacy appears set for a pretty sturdy survival. The next time you're in Paris, stop in and say a brief and silent prayer for books, the people who write and publish them, and the people who bring them to us, sometimes in the most improbable ways.

What the hell is "reconditioned" food?

2011-12-03T17:09:00.000Z

Here's a bit of a surprise--moldy applesauce going into baby food and school lunches. MSNBC fills us in:

A Washington state fruit processor that supplies the nation’s schools and a baby food maker is under scrutiny by federal health regulators for repackaging applesauce contaminated with several kinds of potentially dangerous, multi-colored molds, msnbc.com has learned.

Repackaging? What the hell is that?

Food and Drug Administration officials this week posted a warning letter to Snokist Growers of Yakima, Wash., saying the company cannot ensure the safety of moldy applesauce and fruit puree that has been reconditioned for human consumption.

Wait--I thought it was just repackaged. What is this?

“Your firm reprocesses moldy applesauce product … using a method that is not effective against all toxic metabolites,” read the FDA letter sent Oct. 20 to Jimmie L. Davis, Snokist’s president. “Several foodborne molds may be hazardous to human health.”

What? Processes moldy applesauce product? What's "applesauce product?" Is that like "cheese food?" Wait, I don't think I want to know. It doesn't matter, though--whenever you think it can't possibly get worse, it does:

Products recalled earlier this year by Snokist were blamed for illnesses of nine North Carolina children who became sick after eating applesauce at school.

The latest warning came after FDA officials said Snokist failed to adequately address problems identified during a June inspection in which regulators found large, laminated bags of fruit products that were supposed to be sealed and sterile, but instead were broken open and tainted with white, brown, blue, blue-green and black mold. Some of the compromised bags were bloated and one had “a strong fermented odor,” the report said.

Well, I'm sure these guys are out of business by now, right? How could they possibly stay in business? Especially since

The FDA’s letter identified at least eight instances last year in which Snokist had reprocessed the moldy applesauce into canned goods for human consumption. The inspection report said Snokist documents showed the company had reprocessed mold-contaminated applesauce at least 13 times between January 2008 and May 2011, repackaging food into 15-ounce cans, 106-ounce-cans, 300-gallon bags and 4.2-ounce, single-serve cups.

It's not clear whether the mold-tainted applesauce went to schools. However, the June inspection followed a voluntary recall of more than 3,300 cases of canned Snokist applesauce in May after North Carolina schoolchildren became mildly ill after eating the fruit product. The recall was blamed on faulty seals on cans. The children have since recovered.

I'm getting really confused here. These guys are still in business? And why are children in North Carolina getting sick from moldy "applesauce product" being canned in Washington? You just know what's coming next:

Snokist officials admit that they “rework” some moldy food for future use. But in an e-mail to msnbc.com, company officials said that the contaminated fruit represents only a fraction of the company’s products, that compromised product is typically separated and destroyed, and that any reprocessed food is heat-treated to kill toxins.

“If rework occurs, our thermal process is more than adequate to render the product commercially sterile,” Tina Moss, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.

See, no problem. I'm still not sure what to call this stuff, though. "Food" seems to be too generous. The company uses the term "rework." The FDA says "reconditioned," a term I normally think of as more appropriate for luxury cars and baseball mitts, but if the FDA, an agency of the US government, is using it, that's good enough for me.

Anyway, MSNBC goes on:

The company said it has begun testing for patulin, a common toxin produced by mold in rotting fruit.

However, the FDA said the company's tests are not adequate and that officials must prove they're testing for other dangerous microbes: “Most mycotoxins are stable compounds that are not destroyed by heat treatment,” the letter said.

Well, it sure as hell doesn't sound like much is adequate there. Here's the really, really good part, though:

FDA regulations to allow companies to "recondition" food, but the final product must be free of contamination. Firms aren't required to notify the agency they've reprocessed food unless they're required to under terms of an inspection or other action, such as an injunction. In addition, rules prohibit mixing contaminated product with sound product to get to acceptable levels of filth, said Pat El-Hinnawy, an FDA spokeswoman.

Those italics are mine. I'm just stunned to learn that these guys don't need to tell me, or the FDA, if they're using "reconditioned" food. So what's the point of food labelling if these guys don't have to tell us stuff like this?

Here's the rest, in one fell swoop, just to get this over with:

A 2009 consultant’s report showed that the types of molds in the Snokist fruit products included Alternaria, Fusarium and two types of Pennicillium, all of which can cause illness in people.

That report was commissioned by Snokist after a baby-food manufacturer returned dozens of bags of the company’s fruit product in 2009 because they were contaminated with “a large amount of mold,” according to the FDA inspection report.

In early 2010, the consultant recommended six steps that Snokist could take to fix the problems, but during the FDA’s June inspection, company officials said they’d implemented only two.

Snokist sold more than 3.3 million cases of processed fruit with sales of $53 million in 2010, according to the company’s annual report. That represents more than 50,000 tons of processed fruit.

In the past, Snokist has supplied applesauce to schools nationwide through federal nutrition programs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A spokesman said he couldn’t comment directly on whether Snokist had been removed from the program, but added that no firm under investigation by the FDA would be allowed to participate.

Snokist officials said they were working to address all of the concerns raised by the FDA and were awaiting a new inspection to confirm progress. FDA officials said the company has 15 days to respond to the warning letter.

So this goes for baby food, too. Jeez.

So let's sum up. Food producers can put "reconditioned" food into their products and they don't have to tell anyone--that means you and me--unless they've screwed up and made people sick. Wait, that's not quite right. They still don't have to tell you and me--but they do have to tell the FDA. Which apparently responds by sending letters. And even if they've screwed up--by making people sick, that's my definition of screwing up here-- they can still put this into baby food until they're told to stop? Although it looks as if they can't foist their reconditioned product onto unsuspecting schoolkids at some point--although we don't know if these guys are, or are not, currently providing reconditioned moldy "applesauce product" to children. Any bets?

Design fail, again, at the London Olympics

2011-11-23T16:43:00.004Z

Well, whoever it is who gave us this as our logo, and these guys as our mascots, is still around, because the new batch of official London 2012 Olympics posters was released a little while ago, and they're pretty dreadful. Uninspired is probably a better word, since they're among the most boring posters you will ever see. It clearly follows from the fact that whatever committee this was decided to go for name artists, rather than run some sort of competition. So we've got the gaggle of usual suspects. Here's probably the best of the bunch, from Adrian Hamilton:

And here's the whole lot.

Honestly, this is getting embarrassing. What sort of posters would they have gotten if they'd avoided hiring their buddies and actually opened it up to a competition? How about these? Or, even better, these? A sample of which is here:

Any of which would have been an improvement.

The Trouble with Occupy

2011-10-30T10:17:00.003Z

The Occupy movement seems as if it has the potential to do great things. While it professes no leadership, it has galvanized the left—and a growing part of the middle, possibly—in ways that no other issue has over the past decade—since the invasion of Iraq, actually. And galvanize it has—it’s a worldwide phenomenon now, here in London at St Paul’s Cathedral, and elsewhere. It has provided a focus for the anger—outright rage, in may cases—at the lack of accountability of the financial and political elite for the crisis of a couple of years ago, and the state of the economy now, at a time when it is god-awful difficult for many families in America and many other industrial economies to make ends meet, or just to stay in place. People are going backwards, and they know it. One can only admire the determination and focus of the people involved. One can only feel outrage at the indifference, so far, their protest has engendered in the corporate media and the policy elites. The tragedy in Oakland is symptomatic of a deep sickness in American culture, one that the financial and political elite seem perfectly comfortable perpetuating at the expense of both people and planet.

And yet, and yet.... I’m bothered by something, and I haven’t really seen anyone focus on what is actually being demanded here. Well, not demanded, actually, since people’s motives here are broad and wide. But there’s a broad insistence on economic justice, as if that could be satisfied by lower CEO pay, or sending some of the obvious crooks on Wall Street to jail. I suppose the latter might happen, but not nearly enough to matter, frankly. But there’s clearly more at issue here—it’s the lack of work, the lack of mobility, the fact that the American Dream no longer seems attainable.

But it’s a shibboleth, and illusion. The only person I’ve seen articulate the concerns I have is Gwyneth Jones, who writes (in a longer and much better thought out piece than I could come up with):

The trouble is, in real life as opposed to outer space, there is another value… and it's the worth of the living world, the only planet we have. This present crisis looks "bad" but the environment we live in can still be squeezed. Fossil fuels can still be extracted, at horrible cost but in mighty volumes of natural gas, even if the oil is running a little low. Forest and wilderness can still be cleared for agribusiness, in staggering enormous swathes. The oceans can be killed stone dead. And this is what will happen, and this is what must happen, if the middle classes and the masses are to be given enough of a "share of the wealth" to shut them up again.

I admire the Occupy movement very much, but I'm afraid their mass support is coming, has to come, not from those who want something new, but from the angry people who simply want the machine to work again. They want economic growth to go on, forever and ever, so that ideally (and this is what dresses the mass movement in idealism) everyone, every single one of the 7 billions and counting, can have the good life. But I don't want that, even if it were possible. I don't want to share the wealth, I want the wealthy to share my frugal sufficiency. I don't want my rights restored (the right to a new car, two weeks in the Maldives and a new gadget, every six months). I want those "rights" withdrawn from circulation. I want to trade them for a future I can look forward to without dread and grief.

The whole thing in America the past three decades has been an illusion, a house of cards, a trick with mirrors. It all comes down to credit. People got more and more credit, and thought they were rich. So the bigger house, and the extra SUV, the endless supply of gadgets. And everyone got to move to the Sunbelt even as the industrial economy was being hollowed out, and homebuilding became the most important industry in America.

And it all depends on energy being cheap. This has been America’s natural advantage for decades, perhaps even longer. Energy in America has always been cheaper than in Europe or Japan. It’s what let the country expand the suburbs, so that everyone could have the four bedroom monster with central air conditioning and SUV or two in the driveway. And a lifestyle where you have to drive everywhere—it’s not optional. In most parts of the US, even in most cities, you can’t not drive. Which is why every time the cost of energy goes up, the country has a conniption fit.

Well, the current period of adjustment, if nothing else, would have at least offered the prospect of weaning America from its energy addictions. It looked for a while there as if the prospect of cheap energy, and the artificial economy based on artificial credit that enables it, would disappear. But that might not be the case now. There is, in much of Europe and some of the rest of the world, a recognition that adaptation to and mitigation of global warming will mean that energy, yes, will become more expensive. The American policy elite, both Republican and Democratic, remain in deep denial. This is what I find deeply scary about shale gas—not so much that America might have cheap energy again, but the price it’s willing to pay to have it. In any choice there days between jobs and the planet, the planet usually loses. It didn’t take long to BP to get a new permit for deep drilling in the Gulf again, didn’t it? In this regard the Obama administration’s decision regarding the Keystone Pipeline will be telling. I’m not optimistic.

So where does this leave Occupy? Well, according to Michael Moore, Occupy is beyond party politics. Moore occasionally has useful things to say, but this is not helpful. If this isn't political, what's the point? I have no idea what Occupy should be about. Economic grievances are obvious, and curing them is a necessary part of whatever transition we’re about to undertake--if that's what is going to occur. But it’s not sufficient, and may even be counter-productive if, as Jones intuits, it simply becomes a return some familiar old mantra of jobs jobs jobs, which can take on an aura of Drill Baby, Drill if we’re not careful. But the goals here seem so inchoate that, really, this could go anywhere. Maybe a working democracy not owned by the usual suspects would be enough. It would be fantastic, in fact. But that next step—towards a voluntary simplicity and greater localism in our economic expectations—that remains to be seen.

Will fracking save the world?

2011-10-28T22:28:00.003+01:00

It depends on what you mean by "save."

Recently The Financial Times ran a story ("Shale gas boosts US manufacturing") discussing the fact that a number of companies, both American and non-American, were either re-opening chemical or fertilizer plants in the United States, or were building new plants. This trend has emerged as the result in the significant fall in the price of natural gas in the US as compared with other regions. As the FT noted,

Dow Chemical plans to open new US ethylene and propylene plants later this decade, and restart a Louisiana ethylene cracker closed in 2009. Royal Dutch Shell announced a chemical plant in the gas-rich Appalachian mountain region to make ethylene and petrochemicals. Sasol of South Africa last week unveiled a plan to convert gas into diesel fuel in Louisiana.

In the fertiliser industry, Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is investing $158m to restart a Louisiana anhydrous ammonia plant shut in 2003, when gas prices were climbing. Aluminium company Ormet is dusting off a nearby plant shuttered in 2006.

This is a turnaround from activity a decade ago, as the FT notes, when companies were closing plants and moving operations elsewhere. However, as one might expect, the story is somewhat more complicated, because the technology behind the drop in US natural gas prices—Hydraulic Fracturing, or “fracking”—comes with its own set of environmental and regulatory concerns. As the FT indicated,

The investments come as the US gas market faces regulatory challenges. Extracting gas from shale rocks involves injecting water, sand and chemicals at high pressures thousands of feet underground, raising concerns it will pollute drinking water.

Some states have imposed moratoria or restrictions on the technology, while the Environmental Protection Agency is studying potential impacts. A government advisory panel last month urged disclosure of what is in fracturing fluid.

Nor are these concerns restricted to the US. Fracking is a controversial drilling technology, so much so that France has banned its use, and the states of New York and New Jersey have banned its use either in watershed areas or completely (although the New Jersey ban has been rejected by the state’s governor, who prefers a one-year moratorium). These concerns arise as Europe discovers its very own tracts of shale gas, which, as is the case in the US, offers the potential for overcoming what appeared to be declining natural gas supplies and rising natural gas prices, as well as the ability to reduce dependence on imports, a significant concern for Europe in general. The most recent shale gas discovery, in fact, has been here in the UK.

Fracking represents a technology that thus far has allowed the US to reap the benefits of significantly lower natural gas costs over the past several years, although this benefit may be temporary as other countries push to develop the use of this technology in their own regions. However, it’s not clear that other parts of the world have the infrastructure or expertise to develop shale gas reserves as broadly as has been done in the US. As a result, the US faces the prospect of potentially benefiting from lower natural gas prices for some period of time. Moody’s , for example, has opined that this benefit may last 5-10 years in the case of the chemical industry.

In addition, as intimated above, there are some interesting, and potentially significant, environmental issues associated with fracking. Not least of these is the fact that fracking technology uses very large quantities of water. Given that many recently posited shale gas reserves seem to occur in areas of water scarcity, this raises some questions as to how usefully some of these resources can be developed. In addition, concerns have been raised about possible groundwater contamination, although it’s not clear whether these objections can’t be addressed through better drilling practices.

However, should the environmental issues be resolved in a cost-effective manner (which is not at this point a certainty), there are several significant implications that follow. First, the prospects of somewhat cheaper energy costs, and a longer life for current gas reserves than envisioned just a few years ago, appear justified. This is likely to have broad macroeconomic impacts.

Second, there are clear implications for a number of industries—chemicals and fertilizers in particular—that are significant industrial users of NG, and these implications may have differential impacts on US and European chemical and fertilizer producers. These implications may be significant enough to affect business strategies, and even credit profiles, to the potential benefit of North American producers versus their European (and possibly Asian as well) counterparts. The US industries affected have been major employers in their regions, to the prospects of a resurgence in hiring has obvious appeal for policymakers.

Third, NG is attractive to industry and governments relative to other fossil fuel sources for another reason—it generates significantly lower levels of Greenhouse Gasses (particularly CO2). Thus, NG has been proffered by a number of governments and non-governmental organizations as a “transition fuel” for meeting greenhouse gas reduction and various climate targets (the latter in the EU, but not yet in the US). More readily available and less expensive NG would make it easier for governments, as well as industries and utilities, to meet such targets. It is therefore not surprising that the US government, for example, is enthusiastic about the increased utilization of shale gas as a positive development in dealing with global warming. However, given some of the medium term uncertainties associated with shale gas development, the potential promise of NG as a “transition fuel” may remain speculative for the near term.

Natural gas (NG) provides an important source of energy, be it heating, a source of electricity, or a transportation fuel. It is also a fundamental feedstock for a number of major industries. This is particularly the case in many parts of the United States, where a substantial pipeline system now exists to provide natural gas as a fuel source to most parts of the country. This was helped by the large number of areas in the US that and substantial NG deposits, considerably more so than oil resources. Even with the creation of vast pipeline systems in the US (and more recently in Europe and Asia), NG remains predominantly a regional business. Gas is a bulky material, and to ship it requires either a pipeline, or a technology to convert it into another form—usually a liquid. As a result, over the past decade there has been substantial investment in NG processing and transmission facilities, either pipelines or facilities to convert NG into Liquefied Natural Gas.

NG is therefore one of the fundamental building blocks of the modern industrial economy. It is therefore of some concern that proven and probable reserves of NG have been in decline over the past two decades in parts of the world, such as the North Sea. However, improved technologies leading to more flexible drilling systems, including hydraulic fracturing, have altered the nature of this debate—if, indeed, it turns out that there is considerably more NG than previously supposed, as a result of this technology, then the often-made claim that shale gas is a “game-changer” seems justified.

Industrial production, currently about 27% of total US gas consumption, has been declining as a percentage of total NG consumption over the past few decades, for a number of reasons. First, overall industrial and manufacturing activity has declined in general over the past several decades as a percentage of US GDP. We have hollowed out our manufacturing base. Second, a number of US industrial enterprises have shifted production offshore, often to emerging markets to take advantage of lower labour and energy costs. Third, up until recently, higher NG costs put US costs (both fixed and variable) at a level comparable to those of Europe and Asia, since prices everywhere generally correlated with oil prices. As a result, industrial NG consumption in 2010 was substantially lower than in 1997, declining from 8.510.9 BCF to 6.599.9 BCF according to US Energy Information Administration data--the only category of end use that was lower over this period.

However, the US seems, for the moment, to have broken the relation between oil prices and NG prices, and it is plausible to speculate that industrial use of NG may begin to increase. Natural gas provides an important, indeed critical, feedstock to a number of important global industries. The most important of these are the Petrochemical, Fertilizer, Refining, Pulp & Paper, Metals and Mining industries. NG is also an important source of energy for the overall economic system, and its primary consumption is for heating (at all levels) and electricity generation, although its importance varies regionally. Energy production, in fact, has been a larger consumer of NG than Industrial sues since 2007, and this trend looks likely to continue. Moreover, in some quarters it is viewed as the fuel of choice as a “transition fuel” because of its lower CO2 generation characteristics than either oil or coal as countries, particularly in Europe, seek to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets.

In contrast to the US, the largest consumer of NG on a global basis. Europe consumes smaller amounts of NG, but is still in the aggregate the second largest consumer of NG. This is true even if Russia, the second largest country consumer of NG, is excluded. Only three European countries—the UK, German and Italy— are among the top ten consumers of NG in 2009. Only one European country—Norway—is among the top ten producers of NG (although the UK ranks number 15). Interestingly, the Netherlands, which has the largest gas field in Europe, is not among major NG exporters—the Dutch government maintains a rigorous production cap. And only Norway stands in the top twenty countries in terms of proven conventional reserves—and, in fact, Norway is the second largest NG exporter after the Russian Federation. Overall, OECD Europe consumed 19.2trillion cubic feet (tcf) of conventional NG in 2009, as compared with 22.7tcf in the US.

For most of the past century, NG prices tended to move in line with oil prices, since the two are often found together. NG was often treated as a by-product, albeit an occasionally useful one, of oil extraction. Over the past eighteen months, however, US NG prices have dropped well below those found in Europe or Asia, as shown in the following table:

Source: US Energy Information Administration

The EIA notes that “The relationship between North American and northwest European spot prices appears to have changed in the last 18 months. Before that time, they often followed similar paths; differences often reflected local conditions, such as storage, and tended to be temporary. However, in 2010 and 2011, the differences have grown and appear to be more lasting.”

The most common explanation put forward most recently is that this divergence reflects more aggressive drilling for and recovery of shale gas. In fact, shale gas has been being produced for decades in regions around the US (and elsewhere), but mostly in regions not economically reachable by pipelines. Until recently it has been a cumbersome process, and has generally been uncompetitive in terms of price with more readily available NG prices. Concerns that conventional production of NG was peaking, which arose from time to time, since NG is essentially a finite resource, have miraculously disappeared.

In the past, pricing of NG tended to be correlated with oil prices, which, of course, have been rising over the past decade. As a result, NG prices also rose, to the extent that energy costs involving NG tended to become non-competitive—or at least not a marginal factor in decisions on locating plant, unlike labour costs, which were often the significant decision in plant location decisions. And if NG derived from conventional sources was uncompetitive as an energy source, the additional costs associated with shale gas extraction made it even more uncompetitive at least until recently.

In fact, natural gas prices in the US over the past decade have been hugely volatile, rising from an average of $1.92 per thousand cubic feet during the 1990s to an average of $7.33 in 2005, and driven to over $12 after Hurricane Katrina knocked out several gas production facilities in 2005. Since the newer technologies allowed for profitable extraction of NG at $7 per tcf, a “shale gas rush” ensued, which has driven the price down even further.

At present, after several years of aggressive development of shale gas, prices are currently in the $3.50-$4 region, and in all likelihood look set to decline modestly over time as more supply comes on stream. While this puts margin pressure on utilities and Independent Power Providers, it makes feedstock and energy costs for the chemical industry (not to mention other industries) very attractive. On the other hand, NBP (National Balancing Point) prices in the UK, the proxy for European pricing, have remained tied to oil prices, which, while declining over the past several months, remain high relative to historical norms, and look set to remain that way.

The American Chemistry Council, the US chemical industry’s trade organization, has noted that the cheaper ethane derived from shale gas is currently giving US chemical manufacturers a cost advantage over non-US manufacturers. Moody's has suggested that this cost advantage may last for up to a decade, depending on whether this advantage is sustainable given environmental considerations, and how long it may take European and Chinese shale gas resources to be developed--if they are. As we'll see, there are particular issues in both regions that suggest development, if it occurs at all, will be a lengthy process.

So just what is shale gas? All natural gas is found in sedimentary rock formations, as a result of the condition under which it (and oil and coal) were created. Some formations, however, are more troublesome to recover petroleum products from, and shale is a particular problem, for a variety of reasons. Depth isn’t necessarily the problem, although shale deposits are often deep, as much as two miles below surface. The problem is that shale itself has a potentially problematic porosity and hardness that makes normal drilling processes unsuitable—it’s too thick and hard. Shale gas is an unconventional gas, like coal bed methane and tight gas, which means, essentially, very low permeability. As a result, over the past decades shale gas has not figured prominently in recoverable reserves estimated by energy companies and government agencies.

Recent changes in drilling technologies, however, have opened up the possibility of significant recoveries of gas from shale, in quantities that alter the reserve estimates of the US and a number of other countries, particularly in Europe, and in China. Shale is the most common sedimentary rock, and on a global basis contains a possible 5.760 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of NG reserves, according to a recent EIA report, World Shale Gas Resources: An Initial Assessment of 14 Regions Outside the United States. This is a significantly larger figure than previous worldwide estimates of proved NG reserves.

Significant shale gas opportunities are known to exist in the US, as shown in the map below:
Identified shale gas deposits in the United States

What has opened up potential shale gas production has been the significant and rapid development, particularly over the past decade, of a set of technologies in two areas: (1) horizontal drilling, and (2) hydraulic fracturing, the technique of exploding shale under pressure by “blasting” it with significant amounts of water, sand and chemicals. Once “fractured”, gas seeps out from the shale and can be collected. However, the combination of heavy use of water, and the possible effects of chemical contaminants on groundwater supplies, have raised issues about the relative utility and safety of fracking.

Recent shale gas developments have been successful enough such that shale gas is bearing the weight of substantial hopes in the US government and in the US NG industry, both of which expect shale gas to take up an increasing percentage of US NG production and consumption over the next several decades. The following graph, from the Energy Information Agency of the US department of Energy, gives a flavour of the hopes now resting on Shale Gas, in a graph that would have likely been inconceivable just four years ago
A growing dependence on shale gas in the US

Nearly all the improvement in the recent growth of estimated NG reserves in the US is accounted for by shale gas, in fact.

The effective result of these recent developments has been to make the US largely self-sufficient in NG in a surprisingly short period of time, as opposed to being a net importer of NG as was expected just a few years ago. These developments have also, as mentioned previously, caused NG prices in the US to disconnect from global oil prices to a potentially significant extent. Should this disconnect become permanent, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that companies in the US that rely on NG for feedstock or for significant energy consumption may garner a competitive advantage relative to competitors relying on NG derived from conventional sources, where pricing remains linked to oil prices.

And it turns out that shale gas deposits are found worldwide (as are, of course, oil and NG deposits), but it has only been with the development of the drilling technologies and methods described above that interest in developing these resources has recently emerged. As a result, we are already seeing some countries increase their reserve estimates. At present, 32 countries have estimable potentially recoverable reserves, according to the EIA study mentioned above. As shown in the following map, shale gas reserves occur worldwide:
Worldwide distribution of Shale Gas reserves

The US is actually the number two in terms of potential reserves, after China. Only three European countries—Poland, France and the UK—show up in the top ten. However, this is slightly misleading, since Europe as a whole does in fact have significant shale gas deposits, although not nearly to the extent of the US. The IEA has estimated that of the 6.622 trillion cubic feet of worldwide shale gas deposits, about 640 tcf are to be found in Europe, which would place “Europe” as number five in terms of potentially recoverable shale gas. Nonetheless, this offers enough of a prospect that development efforts are under way in a number of countries, especially Poland, as discussed further below.

Europe is already the world’s second largest NG market, but the supply differential between the US and Europe is significantly different—while the US generally is self-sufficient in gas, Europe is currently reliant on imports, largely from Russia and North Africa, and at current trends the import portion of Europe’s supply is expected to grow. Moreover, NG production in Europe continues to decline overall, particularly as North Sea gas fields continue to run down, reinforcing the prospects of increased imports going forward.

Europe and much of the rest of the world also gets its NG from more diverse sources than the US, which gets its NG directly from NG deposits in the ground. Europe, on the other hand, derives much of its NG from naphtha, a by-product of petroleum refining. In fact, prior to the discovery of significant gas fields in the North Sea in the 1970s (which continue to be discovered, although in smaller quantities), NG was not a major energy source within Europe, which tended to rely on coal and oil. Industrial users of ethylene, which is derived from gas, relied on gas derived initially from naphtha rather than straight natural gas, simply because there was more of the former than the latter.

However, over the past several decades this dynamic changed materially with several developments: the discovery of large NG fields in the North Sea, and the construction of various pipelines to get the gas to Europe; the expansion of export markets from NG sources such as North Africa; and the emergence of Russia as a major supplier of gas to Europe. Nonetheless, the North Sea gas fields are running down (the UK became a gas importer in 2005), and both North Africa and Russia as sources of NG carry some degree of geopolitical risk.

As a result of the above, there has been considerable interest in those areas where shale gas reserves have been estimated in Europe. Work is already under way in Poland, which has had mixed success to date, and has proved politically controversial. Austrian oil company OMV is currently drilling in an area of potential shale gas in Austria. Exploratory drilling is currently taking place in Denmark and is beginning in Sweden, beneath which runs the Alum Shale deposit. Significant shale gas deposits elsewhere in Europe have not yet been developed to any extent.

However, a number of European governments are actively reviewing the process, a necessary step given the potential environmental issues associated with shale gas. France, for example, has banned fracking, and has cancelled the exploratory drilling permits of companies who indicated they would rely on fracking technologies. However, France’s major energy company, Total, has objected that this will limit the potential for developing alternative energy supplies to supplement France’s well-known dependence on nuclear power. The UK government, following recent shale gas discoveries, has indicated it will not ban fracking, although it remains under pressure to do so. Rather, it appears as if there may be some confusion over who is directly responsible for whatever regulations may be required. There are signs that the UK government seemed to find the idea of shale gas development appealing earlier this year. However, this was before the earthquakes which forced the company developing some test wells to suspend operations (which have not yet been resumed, as of time of writing, although they may be shortly).

Unlike the US, Europe has been relatively late in developing shale gas resources. However, the fact that there are significant political benefits to reducing Europe’s dependence on gas imports has not gone unremarked among policy circles. There is currently a debate both at the country and at the EC level concerning how best to proceed with shale gas development in Europe, and we expect this debate will remain lively over the near term. However, we also expect that, pending resolution of some of the environmental concerns associated with shale gas, development will proceed in the near future. However, this is speculation on our part, admittedly, and we cannot really say how and indeed whether Europe will develop these deposits sufficiently to potentially close the widening gap between gas prices in the US and gas prices in Europe. If this gap does not close, it may disadvantage European production facilities with a high NG dependence.

It is not just Europe that is seeking to develop shale gas reserves. As the EIA study cited above suggest, Argentina has the world’s third largest shale gas reserves, followed by Mexico. We would expect development effort to accelerate in all areas where shale gas reserves are sufficiently large and potentially exploitable. However, even in areas where there appear to be large recoverable reserves of shale gas, there is often sufficient government concern about the potential risks to result in temporary slowdowns in development. Quebec, for example, instituted a year-long ban on shale gas development in March 2011 pending further study. Also in March 2011, India deferred shale gas auctions until 2012-2013 pending the development of suitable regulatory regimens.

Non-OECD countries will comprise the bulk of demand for oil and gas over the next several decades, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Medium Term Oil and Gas Markets 2011 report. While many of these countries—particularly some in Latin America like Brazil, and some in central Asia such as those surrounding the Caspian Sea—are likely to be energy self-sufficient, many are not. This latter category includes a number of significantly growing economic powers, such as India, Korea and China. China, in fact, is expected to account for about one-third of the total growth of incremental gas demand through 2016, through both pipeline gas and LNG.

We note that China has by far the largest potential shale gas reserves. China may have a particular interest in developing its own shale gas reserves. It is the world’s largest producer and consumer of energy. And it is moving from a net oil and gas exporter to a net oil and gas importer. Moreover, China is aggressively developing a number of industries, including a chemicals industry, which have a heavy reliance on NG as feedstock. China has recently embarked on a number of arrangements to ensure its oil and gas supplies, including many with former Soviet Union countries, including Russia, through various pipeline arrangements. However, the prospect of developing what may be the world’s largest shale gas reserves will undoubtedly be tempting to a government that has indicated its desire for energy independence, and whose most recent five-year plan has targeted a substantial increase in gas production in its primary energy mix by 2015—to 8.3% of total energy generated, from 3.8% in 2008 . China has taken a number of steps the past several years to encourage gas production of NG in general, and shale gas production in particular. In June 2010 the government lifted price controls on the price of gas at the wellhead in an effort to spur investment. More recently, China signed up to the US-sponsored Global Shale Gas Initiative, a forum for technology sharing among countries seeking to develop their unconventional reserves (and, one assumes, also to allow US-based oil and gas service companies to participate). As it turns out, the severe water intensity of the fracking process may raise some interesting resource allocation conflicts in China, a country where water resources are already under significant pressure from competing interests driven by agriculture and urbanization and its consequent energy demand.

There is a difference in identifying potentially recoverable reserves, however, and having the means to recover them. In contrast to the US, Europe in general has substantially fewer drillers, particularly drillers with shale gas expertise. In fact, Europe in general has far fewer gas rigs for conventional gas as well, and the oil and gas service industry is smaller than that in the US. In addition, Europe is more densely populated than the US, which in and of itself may raise concerns about extensive shale gas development. This suggests that development of European shale gas reserves may take longer than the recent learning curve in the US might suggest. For the time being, and barring significant curtailment of shale gas drilling in the US, it would appear as if the competitive NG cost advantage offered by rapid shale gas development in the US can be sustained for several years, at least.

All of the above has created a very tantalizing prospect for journalists, at least, who are now waxing eloquent about an industrial renaissance in the US, on the back of cheaper energy. This is certainly a plausible scenario should the conditions that allow cheaper NG than elsewhere in the world be sustained. There are some clear industrial beneficiaries if this is the case:

1. The chemical industry: since NG is a basic feedstock for the ethylene chain, on which so much of the industry depends, this offers the prospect of permanently cheaper feedstock costs (not to mention cheaper energy costs) going forward. Should the price differential between US NG and prices in Europe and Asia persist, this may create a competitive advantage for plants located in the US. While we would expect these to be plants largely owned by US companies, it’s worth noting that most major European chemical companies have substantial plant exposure in the US;
2. Fertilizer producers: NG is the principle feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer, which remains the major category of fertilizer products (Potassium-based fertilizer uses potash, which is mined). A number of fertilizer companies are expanding their plant capacity in the US and Canada at present;
3. US Energy and Power companies—should the cost advantage currently accruing to NG be sustained versus coal, the ongoing move by many utilities to NG from coal is likely to accelerate;
4. Oilfield Equipment and Service companies. These companies have already benefited considerably in the US, and shale gas expertise and equipment that looks set to be in increasing demand in Europe and China.

And above and beyond individual industrial sectors, there has already been a general shift away from coal towards natural gas for power generation, again particularly in the US, but also in countries with a high coal dependency such as Germany. In the US, this is not simply because of more attractive gar pricing for utilities—coal is a serious greenhouse gas generator relative to NG, as well as a generator of other substances (such as mercury) likely to subject to increased regulatory pressure over time. Gas turbine manufacturers are all seeing increased levels of inquiry demand in the US.

In general, these developments would seem to have a number of potential implications. For the US economy, and a number of US industries, these implications seem uniformly positive—cheaper energy and feedstock translate into a lower cost of business than European and/or Asian competitors, and, in the case of parts of the chemical industry, perhaps even Mideast producers as well. Moreover, the US looks set to become an exporter of LNG—several companies have received US government permission to export LNG from existing LNG terminals in the Gulf region. While it seems likely that there may be broader macroeconomic benefits as well, consideration of most of these potential benefits is beyond the scope of this report.

European competitors, on the other hand, may face higher feedstock and energy costs, which may place hem at a competitive disadvantage in some cases. This is particularly true in the chemical and fertilizer industries, where feedstock cost differentials and energy costs differentials, respectively, may be material in terms of profit margins.

This would explain why shale gas deposits in Europe have received recent attention. While such deposits are not as extensive as in the US and China, they are certainly present, and do afford European NG extractors the opportunity for bringing less expensive feedstock to the European chemical industry, and less expensive NG into the European energy mix. They also afford European governments and companies an opportunity to shift away from coal more rapidly, thus allowing the region greater opportunity to hit its self-imposed GHG reduction targets.

This all sounds great. What could possibly go wrong here? For all the potentially positive implications of shale gas development in North America (and elsewhere), there are also some concerns. Whether these concerns will become significant enough to curtail or even stall shale gas development completely remains unclear. However, they are at present significant enough for a number of municipalities and states in the US to have either imposed limited restrictions on fracking, or outright (but at present probably temporary) bans. On an international scale, similar issues have arisen at the sovereign level, such that France, (for example) has banned shale gas development, as mentioned previously. In the following discussion, we tend to concentrate on developments in the US, but this is largely because shale gas drilling has been occurring in the US for some period now, and there is a well-advanced regulatory infrastructure at both the state and federal levels which have been devoting considerable attention to some of these issues.
The main concerns to date concern the following:

1. Water use: Fracking uses significant amounts of water. Most oil and/or gas drilling involves pumping water into wells when the natural underground pressure becomes insufficient to move oil or gas up the well so that it can be recovered. However, shale oil and shale gas require significant amounts of water above and beyond normal the normal requirements of the industry. A “typical” well, for example, may involve 3-10 million gallons of water, and 1.5 million pounds of sand. Even by the standards of the water-hungry natural gas industry, these are prodigious amounts. In upstate New York, companies developing the Marcellus shale (the largest shale gas region in the US) have resorted to bringing in water by the truckload, in an area not noted for its water scarcity.

Were water in abundant supply everywhere, this would not necessarily be a problem. However, water is not in abundant supply everywhere. In fact, in many parts of the world water is in short supply, and there is already intense competition for water resources between agriculture, energy resources and urban development in areas such as parts of China. We would not expect this competition to get easier over time. Since the amount of water on the planet is finite, it’s not as if more can be discovered.

Parts of Texas, for example, have recently imposed water use restrictions on fracking drillers as a result of the severe drought the state has been experiencing. Texas is not the only area of the US with active shale gas drilling and limited water sup plies—much of the far west region, particularly the shale gas drilling areas of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, are areas of increasingly constrained water resources.

Water Scarcity--Physical

Source: International Water Management Institute

The above map simply shows area of physical and economic water scarcity. A comparison with the global map of potential shale gas resources presented earlier suggests that there are several areas of overlap—the western US, parts of northern and southern Africa, and western China in particular. However, a more revealing picture derives from looking at potential shale gas reserves against a map of Environmental Water Requirements—the withdrawal of water from groundwater or river sources for human use—suggests a more challenging picture:

Water Scarcity—Taking environmental water requirements into account

Source: International Water Management Institute

Taking existing human water consumption patterns into consideration suggests that there will be increased competition for water resources in some areas where there is little physical scarcity—the scarcity will come from competing economic interests. Given the level of water intensity involved in fracking, it is difficult to see how such competition for water resources will not increase over time, especially in regions such as the north-eastern US and Eastern Europe, and particularly China, where there may be considerable economic weight put on the development of shale gas resources.

2. Potential chemical contamination of water supplies: As described earlier, fracking involves blasting shale material with water, sand and chemicals. However, at present few companies have actually disclosed what chemicals are involved, a number of companies indicating that the chemical compositions are proprietary. While the chemical content of a drilling operation may represent only 0.5% of the total liquids involved, as industry sources have indicated, for a typical well involving 3 million gallons of water still translates into a meaningful amount of water. This has raised concerns concerning contamination of water supplies, including deep aquifers, from leakage. These concerns aren’t fanciful—spills are common occurrences in the drilling industry, and a number of potential contaminations of local water supplies have been reported to regulatory authorities. Not only are spills not uncommon, but accidents occur as well that can result in the release of contaminated liquids and water, and increased pressure for identification of the chemicals involved. In addition, at least one study has found evidence of methane contamination of water supplies in Pennsylvania from fracking, although the broader implications of this study, if replicated, aren’t completely clear yet.

The industry has responded with greater disclosure over the past two years, and some industry trade groups such as the Marcellus Shale Coalition continue to call for greater transparency (although not mandatory disclosure) on this issue. Some jurisdictions, including the State of New York, have issued outright bans on fracking operations in watershed areas. In other areas, including Wyoming, regulatory bodies have issued requirement to divulge what chemicals are used in the fracking process. By and large, the industry continues to resist these efforts. Federal Legislation, embodied in the Fair Power Act, would require disclosure of these chemicals, but this legislation is stalled in the current Congress. A number of states, including Wyoming and Pennsylvania, both centers of active fracking activity, have passed legislation requiring the disclosure of the chemicals used in the fracking process. However, these requirements often include exemptions for “proprietary” products, allowing drillers to block disclosure, as is the case in Wyoming. Moreover, they vary significantly from state to state.

A report from the Department of Energy earlier in 2011 called for substantially greater disclosure of chemicals used in fracking. The Environmental Protection Agency in the US is considering whether to assume a federal regulatory role in this regard, which the drilling industry is opposing. We expect this issue to remain contentious. The EPA has asked drilling companies to voluntarily disclose the identity of chemicals used in the fracking process, and some companies have responded affirmatively, but not all.

3. Fracking produces significant amounts of wastewater: Given the still-uncertain composition of the chemical mixes used in fracking, this in and of itself raises some concerns for public interest groups. Coupled with the significant amount of water used, concerns have been raised about what regulations will be required to ensure the safe disposal of wastewater. Typically, anywhere from 10%-40% of water injected in wells using fracking technology gets returned, and must be disposed of in some manner. One proposal has been to pump the water into the ground. However objections have been raised over concerns of possible groundwater contamination. Another tactic has been to simply dump the wastewater into local waterways. This process also has some significant drawbacks. However, the Environmental Protection Agency determined local wastewater facilities could not process fracking wastewater, and ordered the drilling companies to develop a more systematic plan for wastewater disposal. A number of proposals for recycling fracking wastewater have emerged, but these may have their own set of problems.

The more general issue is that for decades, as pointed out in a paper from the Environmental Working Group (Free Pass for Oil and Gas: Environmental Protections Rolled Back as Western Drilling Surges), the oil and gas industry has been able to garner a significant number of exemptions from a variety of federal environmental legislation, including

(a) the Safe Water and Drinking Act of 1974;
(b) the Resource Conservation and Recove5y Act of 1976, which requires cradle-to-grave management of materials used in drilling, including disposal of hazardous materials;
(c) The Emergency Planning and Community right to Know Act of 1986;
(d) The Clean Water Act (1987 amendments)
(e) The Clean Air Act.

The Environmental Protection agency in 2004 took the position that hydraulic fracturing was exempt from the requirements of these acts, which is the main federal legislation governing water quality and use in the US, including clean-up standards and requirements. However, as discussed in the next paragraph, the EPA is now considering applying several of these acts to hydraulic fracturing. And at the state level, we may see more proposals such as that recently put forward by the Governor of Pennsylvania, which would allow counties to impose fees for drilling using fracking technology to pay for environmental remediation efforts.

All of this remains in a state of flux at present, and we would expect a vigorous debate over the treatment and disposal of wastewater to be sustained for some time. At present, both the ACC and the American Natural Gas Alliance (the US Natural gas producer trade group) are actively opposing further federal regulation of fracking activities, preferring that such regulations remain at the state level.

4. Likely increased government regulation: Regulation, by its very nature, adds costs. It is in fact likely that given the concerns mentioned above that there will be increased regulation. What remains uncertain at present is whether any increased regulation will be at the federal or state level, the potential scope of these regulations, and therefore their potential costs. While there are pressures for an outright ban on fracking, such as is the case in France, we suspect such a ban is unlikely in the US, unless the evidence for groundwater contamination becomes unequivocal, which at present it is not. The US government may issue federal guidelines for fracking within the next month, and several states, including New York and New Jersey, are currently reviewing or developing guidelines to ensure groundwater safety. Given the relative recency of much current gas shale development, however, we would expect the regulatory environment to be a shifting one over the next several years. The Natural Gas industry trade group, along with related organizations such as the American Chemical Council, have indicated the preference for continuing with the present policy of leaving most drilling regulations to States.

We note that this is a situation that is likely to only exist in the US, where there can be a variety of regulations, and regulatory oversight agencies, at both the state and federal level. Most countries, however, have only a single set of regulations governing such issues as drilling and water use, and these are generally national regulations.

5. Uncertainty surrounding the long term estimates and productivity of shale gas wells: The EIA (and others) have noted that most shale gas wells are relatively new. Not only are they new, but their drilling lives may be considerably shorter than those of conventional gas drills. The more general concern here is that, just as is the case with other NG resources, not all shale gas is equal. Some deposits are easier to get to than others; some deposits are easier to drill than others. Not all areas of the Barnet shale in Texas, which currently has about 15,000 wells in various stages of drilling life, or the Marcellus shale in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, which has a number approaching that, are equally easy to recover shale gas from. The EIA, in fact, in its Annual Energy Outlook 2011, specifically cautions:

Estimates of technically recoverable shale gas are certain to change over time as new information is gained through drilling and production, and through development of shale gas recovery technology. Over the past decade, as more shale formations have been explored and used for commercial production, estimates of technically and economically recoverable shale gas resources have skyrocketed. However, the estimates embody many assumptions that might prove to be untrue in the long term.

More generally, it is also the case that estimates of reserves are often in early stages of refinement. The most dramatic example of this recently was the announcement by the U.S. Geological Survey that initial estimates of recoverable gas from the Marcellus shale area were overstated by as much as 80%. According to the USGS report, the Marcellus shale area contains about 84tcf of recoverable shale resources, as compared with previous estimates of 410tcf. While 84tcf is still a large number, this does point up the fact that in many cases the early estimates of recoverable shale resources may be significantly overstated or understated.

6. The utility of shale gas as a candidate for a “transition fuel” may be unsupported. In fact, using shale gas may run counter to meeting greenhouse gas reduction goals. A recent study has suggested, in fact, that shale gas may a very bad source for NG if the latter is to serve as a transition fuel with a lower carbon content than what it is replacing. This is because the amount of methane, itself a greenhouse gas, released during shale gas drilling may more than offset the benefits derived from using the natural gas recovered from fracking technologies, rendering the aggregate GHG contribution to one comparable to coal. According to the authors of the study,

Natural gas is composed largely of methane, and 3.6% to 7.9% of the methane from shale-gas production escapes to the atmosphere in venting and leaks over the life- time of a well. These methane emissions are at least 30% more than and perhaps more than twice as great as those from conventional gas. The higher emissions from shale gas occur at the time wells are "hydraulically fractured”as methane escapes from "flow-back return fluids”and during drill out following the fracturing. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential that is far greater than that of carbon dioxide, particularly over the time horizon of the first few decades following emission.

Thus, the notion that using shale gas may be used as a transition fuel to reduce GHG generation may be misplaced.

There are a number of competing interests here, as there usually are, and in this case the stakes are unusually high. On the one hand, there appear to be some significant concerns about water use and quality, and even availability, that may conflict with the drive to get at all that shale gas—and this may vary by region. We have already seen at least one instance of this conflict not going the drillers way in Texas, where the recent (and record in a number of respects) drought has forced the introduction of significant water use restrictions, including on shale drilling. We would expect to see more if evidence emerges that water supplies for agriculture and drinking water are being compromised.

It is worth noting that some, indeed many, of the above concerns may be amenable to technological solutions, although in many cases it’s early days yet. A company named GasFrac is experimenting with a liquefied petroleum gas gel as a substitute for water in the drilling stage, a development that would likely deal with a number of the above issues (depending on what’s in the gel material, of course). It seems likely that at least some of the incidents of groundwater contamination, and indeed the methane contamination study referred to above, derive from poor well construction, rather than fracking technology itself—this is an issue that can be addressed in a straightforward manner by enforcing stronger well casing standards.

On the other hand, the positive economic benefits of cheap energy are clear, especially in industries in the US and Europe that have been slowly decimated by foreign competition with access to cheaper labour and, indeed, cheaper energy in some cases. In addition, the prospect of reducing gas imports will remain increasingly appealing to European policy makers and governments. Moreover, it may very well be the case that cheap energy is becoming the marginal factor in decisions on plant placement globally, rather than cheap labour—we have recently seen examples of companies moving plant from China for countries where energy supplies are less expensive and, perhaps more importantly, more dependable. More to the point, however, is the fact that regions of the US and where that have seen their industrial core hollowed out over the past several decades now seem to be in a situation where the apparent cheap energy from shale gas would allow for a general level of economic improvement. As core industries such as energy and chemicals rebuild manufacturing capacity in core product areas in the US, ancillary growth will follow.

All of this bears close watching. If the drilling industry is able to satisfy what appear to be potentially important environmental issues at a relatively modest cost, than shale gas appears likely to live up to the often-repeated claim that it is a “game-changer.” However, the hurdles here may be high. There's also the issue of whether it's actually a wise idea to let the US continue on its current road of energy profligacy, considering what the costs have already been.

Postmodernism and Making things at the V&A; All that was vapid turned into money

2011-10-09T21:48:00.002+01:00

God, did Mrs W and I hate the 1980s. This was the most horrible decade of our lives. Not personally, actually--our kids were growing up, and that certainly kept us busy and delighted. I accidentally became an elected public official of the State of New Jersey, which was a hoot for a while until we moved to Massachusetts. I changed careers as I was approaching 40, leaving academics to go into finance, and it pretty much worked out personally. But the decade was just a complete loser. No, worse—it actually set us back as a country and a society. Milton Friedman, Ronald "evolution is just a theory" Reagan, the gutting of anti-trust enforcement, the endless fascination with the wealthy, the Tisch-Steinberg wedding, the rise of Donald Trump, Oscar de la Renta and his “Living well is the best revenge” motto, Nancy Reagan, the trashing of the unions, Madonna, the rollback of sensible environmental enforcement, Barbara Bush, the elimination of all the measures that would have probably made us energy self-sufficient by now, James Watt, Studio 54, the cocaine epidemic on Wall Street, “cocaine chic” brought to us by Calvin Klein advertising, the fact that there was barely any music to listen to…the list goes on.

And then there was the art.

Maybe we were over-exposed to the New York cultural scene, living in New Jersey at the time. It was hard to avoid. And this all comes rushing back by a visit to the Postmodernism show at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as good a catalog of the vapidity, hypocrisy and outright intellectual fraud of the art movement that dominated the 1980s in the US and much of Europe, if the show is any indication. Interestingly, we get little sense that there was much going on in Britain at the time. What we do get is largely the outright crap that was being peddled as art in the US, mainly New York, where money was suddenly everywhere. And where anyone, it seemed, could call themselves an artist, put together something completely banal, and sell it to the unsuspecting, or in some cases people who should have know better.

I tend to agree with Mrs W, as I often do, who thought that the inspiration for the show came about by someone at the V&A tripping over one too may boxes in the basement of stuff that people kept asking themselves, “Just what is all this stuff? And how did we get SO MUCH of it?” Because it’s all here—those happy looking but complexly non-functional tea sets, the poster of Philip Johnson’s ATT building (apparently an afterthought, or a late addition), lots of album jackets of that grisly art-rock put out by people like The Talking Heads (who were, of course, art students before forming what I’m constantly assured is a seminal rock band), lots of architectural models (I bet these take up LOTS of space in the basement or wherever they store this stuff). It’s a chronicle of what passed for the art and design establishment of the time essentially seeing what they could get away with.

You get the feeling that the V&A folks, who I have been critical in the past for the sloppy organization of many of heir shows, do get it this time. For one thing, they have a couple of rooms devoted to “Money,” pointing out that money was something of a problem, since there was a sense that much of the art and design of this period was somehow compromised by the sheer amount of money that many of these people were making. That’s putting it mildly, and is a bit of a distortion, actually. The whole point was money—it was the ethos of he decade, and lots of people started calling themselves “artists” because they figured out it was a quick and easy way to make money. Jeff Koons was a banker before he became an “artist,” and did pretty well on the basis of, well, nothing. This legacy persists, of course—that’s why we’ve still got Damien Hirst and Tract Emin being treated as major figures in the British art world of today—old habits die hard, apparently.

At least the V&A seem to know this. How else to explain the amazing and jaw-dropping test that accompanies the exhibit? Here’s an example:

Of all movements in art and design history, postmodernism is perhaps the most controversial. This era defies definition, but it is a perfect subject for an exhibition. Postmodernism was an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical. It was visually thrilling, a multifaceted style that ranged from the colourful to the ruinous, the ludicrous to the luxurious.

What does that even mean? It’s a collection of buzzwords strung together. No one could actually write that with a straight face, so we’re assuming that much of this is a very sly comment on the art and design criticism of the time—much of which we’re still saddled with. Or this?

Postmodernism, by contrast, was more like a broken mirror, a reflecting surface made of many fragments. Its key principles were complexity and contradiction.

Honestly, who talks like this? It’s an interesting show, because it amply demonstrates what a waste of time and space this all was.

So it’s a great relief to wander of to another gallery at the V&A to the Power of Making exhibit, which is about, well, making things. These two shows couldn’t be more unlike. The Power of Making is a collection of objects, really, simply presented to show the craftsmanship of the object, or the uses to which many craftsman are putting modern technology. And how they do it--adding, subtracting, transforming. Saddles, shoes, shotguns, whatever—these all involve processes, and many of these processes are now digitized. And the materials may only have existed for a couple of years--or perhaps are even being created as part of the process. The show itself was curated by the Crafts Council, which tends to know a thing or two about the process of crafting objects, useful or not—but mostly useful.

There’s some great stuff here—not just the objects that can only really be made by craftsmen, like saddles and shotguns. There’s also the stuff that stretches the imagination a bit—the knitted rug with needles the size of baseball bats, the mahogany bicycle, and he bicycle made entirely out of fibre, the sugar sculpture created by the chefs at the museum, the prosthetic suit for Stephen Hawking, the crocheted life-sized brown bear. And the printers—these were great. There’s a whole set of printers that you can download the instructions to online (which I assumed would be in the catalog, but are not, so I’ll have to go back and take scrupulous notes). It’s hard to say what my favorites were, but I’m pretty partial to the frog dissection composed of Legos, which has the advantage, as pointed out, of not smelling of formaldehyde, or the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic.

It’s a fascinating show, not only for the objects themselves, but also for the films—40 short films on making many of the objects in the exhibit, which you can find here. It’s 71 minutes, pretty long for people to sit in front of for that long—but many people seemed happy to sit there a quite a while.

It’s also fascinating for the reaction of the people in the show, especially to the films. Rather than the blasé distance of the folks wandering through the Postmodernism show, often looking puzzled or aghast, the people in this large room are totally caught up what they’re seeing—everything is getting scrutinized, teenagers stare at the films is rapt attention, dads hold up their kids to explain stuff to them (there’s lots of stuff for the kids, by the way). It’s a brilliant show because it does what a museum show is supposed to do—thoroughly engage and enlighten its audience.

Yes, yes, I do tend to drone on about the importance of making things and its cultural significance. These two shows demonstrate why. Actually, the Making show cheered me up quite a bit—on the basis of this, there’s quite a lot going on. I think as long as we don’t call it “art,” it will be ok.

Unsolicited museum review: Kauffer at the Estorick

2011-10-07T21:04:00.003+01:00

The wonderful little Estorick Collection, which was established to display modern Italian art, and normally does just that, has a wonderful show designed to present the poster art of Edward McKnight Kauffer. Kauffer revolutionized poster design in Britain after WWI, and was one of Britain's most important artists during the 1920s and 1930s, before his forced departure back to America following the entry of Britain into the European War in 1939. Kauffer was an American who went to Paris to study art (funded by a philanthropist named McKnight, whose name Kauffer adopted in acknowledgement), and, as an American, could find no work in Britain after the war began, and had to return to the US, which he bitterly regretted doing. This would have been before dual citizenship was possible, of course, and Kauffer had not undertaken UK citizenship.

Anyway, the art. Why should we care? And why now? Well, there has been something of a Kauffer revival going on over the past decade, and visiting the Estorick exhibit tells us why. Kauffer was a brilliant artist, and probably suffers from the fact that his ouvre--advertising posters and billboards--is, well, commercial art. Well, so it was. But it's still, you know, art. His friends, who included TS Eliot and most of the visual artists of the period, certainly thought so. Kauffer believed in the power of good, strong art, which is what he produced. And the show at the Estorick does an excellent job of conveying this.

His earliest posters, like the Oxhey woods one above, show him still under the influence of Latrec (his model), Cezanne, Derain, and the Japanese artists and print-makers whose work transformed European art in the late 19th century. The poster for Godstone, below, conveys this even more strongly:

This has Japonsime written all over it--the bold sky, the small details at the bottom (in this case, trains) where human activity occurs. in a similar vein is his poster for Surrey, below:

Again, it's the large Cezanney blocks of color that stand out, and the contrasting colours that grab out attention--and then the little details of human activity. These were both produced in the 1920s for either the London Underground or for some of the UK train companies, for whom Kauffer did sterling work. It was the Underground that gave him his start, in fact. Over his career in London, Kauffer produced something like 170 posters, and the majority were for the Underground or the train companies (of which there were many).

Kauffer also did a lot of work for Shell in the 1930s, and it's some of his strongest, showing some of the impact of some of his travels in Germany. Some of his images became much more industrial--both Germany and Italy had been through periods of Futurist art, which thought that industrial art was the way to go. Kauffer, who had earlier in his career allied himself with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, weren't convinced. In fact, Lewis (along with Pound and some others) founded Vorticism in direct response to the Futurusts and their mechanized visions of an artistic future. And although Kauffer drifted away from the Vorticists, a strong natural feeling for nature pervades most of his work. His most vorticist work is probably his legendary set of birds, initially used in an advertizing campaign by The Daily Herald:

And some of his 1930s posters for Shell show some of the same industrial cubism:

But much of his work was eclectic, and he would take images from anywhere, and still produce something recognizably Kaufferistic. His Stonehenge poster conveys this wonderfully, with its willowy lines, not a straight line anywhere--it's very reminiscent of what Grant Wood and Wanda Gag were also doing with prints and paintings at around the same time in the US:

When Kauffer returned to the US, his art changed somewhat--it got less dynamic, for any number of reasons, the main one being that his natural subject--the advertising poster--was a completely different animal in the US than it had been in Britain. He still found work, of course, but not anything that had anything like the impact his work in Britain had enjoyed in the 1920s and 1930s. He had an established career as an illustrator and book cover designer as well, and these paid the bills more often than not. But it's the posters that continue to startle and delight.

It's a great little show--just two large rooms of posters--and it manages to convey the strength and joy of Kauffer's art very well. And there are a series of lectures on Saturday afternoons--check the schedule. We'll just close with a little something for Eno's Fruit Salt, which, sadly, is not in the show:

And the Museum of Natural History, which is:

The exhibit runs through 18 December, and has a handsomely produced booklet with all the posters in the show. Enjoy!

Bert Jansch, RIP

2011-10-07T20:58:00.002+01:00

Bert Jansch, guitarist extraordinaire, died two days ago, the same day as Steve Jobs. While both changed my life in positive ways, I'd have to say that Jansch's influence was better. And I say that even as I sit here tappping away on my Macbook, charging up my ipod. Jobs gave me more interesting tools to live my life. Jansch gave it a bit more meaning than it would otherwise have had.

Jansch was in the forefront of the great British folk revival of the 1960s. This has been admirably described in Colin Harper's excellent biography of Jansch, Dazzling Stranger. This was the same time the Beatles were rewriting musical history--or writing new history--and Jansch was first among equals of a whole slew of great singer-songwriters, many of whom are still whinnying among us, some of whom, like Jansch, have departed. This was an incredibly interesting time, when everyone was not only rediscovering bits and pieces of the British musical heriage--of which there is a lot--but the place was full of Americans like Paul Simon stealing everything in sight. And the songwriting! Jansch, Sandy Denny, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron of The Incredible String Band, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake... Jansch hooked up with John Renbourn, another great, great guitarist of the time who is still going strong, and formed Pentangle, around the time Thompson and Simon Nicol were forming Fairport Convention. Meanwhile, the older folkies like Ewan MacColl were simultaneously fascinated and appalled at what was happening to their music. What a time. What great music! And Jansch has been a constant presence in the British folk consciousness ever since, touring regularly, teaching, being modest about his accomplishments, and singing with that husky voice, and playing with those incredible fingers. He was probably stolen from more than any other guitarist of the last fifty years. He made a whole raft of records, many of them uneven--his voice didn't always match his song selection. But this output over he decades has been consistently stimulating, and I often find Toy Balloon or Carnival or The January Man or When I Get Home popping into my head at the oddest times.

Jansch kept touring up to earlier this year. We saw him quite a few times, most recently three years ago when the original Pentangle regrouped. We went up to Oxford to see them, and it was worth the trip. They had a another reunion tour this year. There won't be more, I suspect, although if there's a memorial concert, I'm there.

The Guardian has a collection of tributes, the usual excellent obituary, and a nice appreciation from Peter Paphides.

But the best bet, if you haven't already done so, is to listen to the music. There are a couple of compilations, the best of which is called, appropriately enough, Dazzling Stranger. The guitar albums he did with Renbourn are still striking displays of technique. Or pick up Toy Balloon, a later album, or the fairly early Moonshine, or a couple of old Pentangle albums (Sweet Child especially), lean back with a glass of Laphroaig, neat, and enjoy. He will leave a mark on you.

Trashing Ultima Thule

2011-09-16T17:05:00.006+01:00

We noted back in 2009 an historic event. An oil tanker made its way from South Korea to Rotterdam—by way of traveling across the Northeast Passage, that region from the Bering Straight to the northern tip of Norway. This is major. For hundreds of years, nations have been searching for a Northwest Passage across North America, and this stimulated the imagination of generations of Englishmen and others as few other enterprises have done. And for hundreds of years, Russia has had two obsessions—the role of the north in the Russian character, and, as a far more practical matter, access to a year round warm weather port. I can’t speak to the first, but the second appears on its way to becoming reality.

The north, that vague unknowable land, that vague concept, that place of mystery, silence, purity, solitude and the Northern Lights. Oh, and the dumping ground for the world’s nuclear waste, air pollutants and chemical contaminants. That magnet myth, for exploration, for voyages of discovery back in the days when nations believed in voyages of discovery as expressions of national pride. Whatever it is, it is going to be trashed in pretty short order. The place is dying a slow death. Well, being murdered is more like it. And the death doesn’t even look that slow any more. “Death” is a loaded term, of course, and the Arctic literally isn’t going to die, just yet, anyway. But there is so much going on up there, and so much of it is bad, or potentially bad, that it’s only a matter of time. The Gulf of Mexico isn’t dead either, but it’s well on its way. Same with the Arctic. Say good-bye to the Polar Bear.

The culprit is global warming, of course. To ask whether any polar scientists doubt the validity of global warming is to already know the answer. And with warming comes the melting of the ice. Not all at once, of course, but at an accelerating pace, and it may not even be a smooth curve any more. No, the ice is going, there’s no question about that. After the great crash of summer ice in 2007, there has been, as Alun Anderson in particular lays out in After the Ice, increased attention to —if not outright panic about—what’s happening to the summer ice. And just to confirm everyone’s worse fears, it’s bad. The melt this summer looks set to set a new record low for ice cover, according to NOAA. So much so, in fact, that we now have events like this, which will undoubtedly become some sort of annual ironman event.

Books under discussion
Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death and Politics in the New Arctic, Virgin Books, 2009
Peter Davidson, The Idea of North, Reaktion Books, 2005
Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic. Bodley Head, 2010
Joanna Kavenna, The Ice Museum: in search of the lost land of Thule. Penguin, 2006.
Sara Wheeler, Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. Vintage, 2009
Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama, Melville House, 2010

So we now for example, face the prospect of Shell, the un-BP, undertaking an extremely high risk set of operations in the Arctic. Shell has received approval from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) to dig four exploratory wells in the Beaufort Sea. It’s a conditional permit, which means—what, exactly? If they mess up, they won’t get to do more? Barely a week later, Shell admitted it had a substantial North Sea leak, and they weren’t sure how long it had been going for, but it’s the largest spill into the North Sea in ten years. Shell admitted that the spill was “significant.” It was, actually—they were finally able to turn it off after ten days, but still, 218 tons of the stuff leaked out, with another 660 tones still in the pipeline that the company has to figure out what to do with. Much if it has been dispersed at this point, but, you know, so what? We can’t wait to see what comes of the recent tie-up between Rosneft, Russia’s largest (and 75% state-owned) oil company, and Exxon, another un-BP. Both have sterling records in terms of spills, as you might expect.

Well, these things happen. And they’re going to happen a lot more frequently. As all the authors lay out, the Arctic region is under extraordinary stresses from a number of pressure points. Warming is producing changes in any number of areas, the most important of which is coastlines. These were always a bit changeable, but these changes had a regularity that no longer seems to occur. Now the changes are abrupt, and severe, and the humans and animals who rely on access to the sea, which, ironically, may often be farther away than it was before. Which is why Polar Bears and Inuit now have to travel greater distances to find food—and why the survival of both is now threatened. This summer, to pick just one example, we’re seeing record numbers of walruses on beaches—because they can’t find ice floes close enough to the shoreline for breeding. Then there are the changes in water temperature.

Then there’s the chemical contamination of the Arctic. This is one of the most alarming themes running through the Emmerson, Anderson and Wheeler books. Not just animals, either—the resident humans (whatever one chooses to call them, there are so many names) as well. PCBs and all sorts of other interesting chemicals have been accumulating in arctic animals for decades, so much so that the Inuit that eat them are now chemical basket cases.

But even as all these changes are occurring, the seas—and the land beneath them—are now more accessible than they have been for centuries. And the mineral rush is under way, big time. There’s all sorts of stuff there that people want. Oil? Estimates vary, but it’s there, and may account for about 13% of all global undiscovered oil. Natural gas? Maybe the largest reserves in the world, perhaps as much as 30% of all undiscovered reserves. Well, the gas may be less exportable than the oil, but that’s hardly a comfort. In fact, this is all best guesses, but the truth is it’s not clear how much there is, but it’s probably a lot. Minerals? Well, funny you should ask. The Russian Arctic alone contains some of the world’s most substantial deposits of diamonds, nickel, copper, gold and uranium. Oh, and for good measure, coal as well.

So amidst this fantastic mineral and resource rush—which just looks more likely all the time given the increasingly easy access countries and companies will actually have—all of this has become quite tied up in legal negotiations, of course. These are taking place under the auspices of the United Nations, which is the venue for claims and counter-claims to be filed, and guidelines to be established, under the Law of the Sea treaty, signed by most countries back in 2004. Too bad the United States has never signed it. But the other Arctic countries—Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway, and even Iceland—are all busy buttressing various territorial claims to the ocean floor through the LOTS, and they’re making headway. Yet another instance of American Exceptionalism coming back to haunt us. The last three presidential administrations all spent time trying to get Congress to approve the treaty, but each ran into Republican intransigence over perceived “loss of sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, those two large countries with really long Arctic shorelines—Russia and Canada—are aggressively laying out their plans for Arctic, well, not domination, because they know that won’t be possible. But the best deal that they can get, and those deals will obviously be significant, simply because of the size of the two countries in question. We already had the spectacle, referred to here by Emmerson, Wheeler and Anderson, of Russia planting its flag on the floor of the Arctic Ocean directly below the North Pole back in 2007. Actually, this caused great alarm when it occurred, but in reality the North Pole is most likely going to end up in Denmark’s hands. It’s a complicated process, this business of establishing Arctic claims, and Emmerson, Wheeler and Anderson spend a fair amount of print laying it all out. It has to do with the sea shelf running out from the country’s shoreline. As expected, the claims are usually conflicting, and vigorous. In some cases, negotiations have been fruitful, as between Norway and Russia over several areas of disputed territory. In other cases, negotiations drag on.

But there’s clearly a lot of mixed feelings about the changes that are occurring. Greenland, for example, seems positively, well, if not giddy, then pretty excited. Oil drilling is already occurring there, and more is on the way. Environmentalists, of course, are suitably alarmed, for the usual good reasons, but Greenlanders in general appear to be looking forward to a variety of changes—warmth, for example. For one thing, it represents an opportunity for improving what is a pretty crappy standard of living. For another, it’s a possible step towards further independence from Denmark. Greenlanders, it has to be said, have a wide range of feeling about global warming, like much of the rest of the world. There’s no doubt about it there. Like everywhere else in the Arctic, the evidence over the past two decades has been overwhelming. Needless to say, it’s probably too late to save the Greenland ice sheets. What’s at issue is whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Greenland had warm periods before—Leif Ericsson originally colonized the place 1000 years ago, and colonists survived for several hundred years before the little ice age of the 1400s. But now, there’s a whole new world out there, but it’s complicated. As Sylvia Pfeifer and Christopher Thompson lay it out in The Financial Times,

About 750km north-west of Nuuk, out to sea, a Scottish company is drilling for oil. Greenland, the world’s largest island, with its tiny population of 56,000, is standing on the brink of an oil rush. The potential wealth that lies off its shores is turning the country – an empty wilderness three times the size of Texas – into a battleground. The global oil industry, striving to feed the world’s hunger for energy, is engaged in a struggle against environmental groups who believe that this delicate Arctic landscape should remain untouched.

A spill in such cold waters, they warn, would be calamitous, not least for fishing, currently Greenland’s main source of domestic income. But that fear must compete with the hope, shared by some of the biggest players in the energy industry, that the sea floor around Greenland holds one of the world’s largest remaining undiscovered oil finds.

In 2008, a study of the basins of the Arctic by the US Geological Survey estimated that three provinces off the coast of Greenland combined could yield up to 52 billion barrels of oil equivalent (which includes natural gas) – as much as has been drilled out of the North Sea in the past 40 years. This caught the attention of companies including ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, and it is why Scotland’s Cairn Energy is now prospecting there.

This pretty much summarizes the issues facing all the northern populations, in Russia, Canada and Norway as well as Greenland. As in Greenland, these are populations that are under stress, facing transitions they seem little prepared for. No thanks to the various governments, of course, whose track records with regards to the indigenous populations in the North has been, well, horrific. Actually, the US comes out looking pretty good here, in contrast with Canada and Russia. Both Wheeler and Emmerson spend considerable time on the rather sorry history of the Russian and Canadian governments and their treatment of their northern populations. Canada has a lot to answer for, but nothing like Russia. The more one learns about the inflicted tragedies of Stalin, the more one despairs. But not just Stalin—the horrors of the Soviet government for much of its existence can hardly be better conveyed than in their treatment of their northern populations, and it makes grisly reading.

Emmerson in particular spends considerable time on the geopolitics of the region. It’s now at the center of any number of competitions—for navigation rights, for mineral rights, and for political control of a region that is changing daily. And Emmerson is good as well on the impacts on the peoples of the region. We don’t know what will happen to the northern people. Actually, we probably do, and that’s the depressing part. They’ve adapted to one of the most brutal environments imaginable, and while humans seem endlessly adaptable, there is something about adapting to, and even thriving in, the harsh but cruel beauty of the North that compels our admiration. Emmerson, Wheeler and Kavenna especially spend much time with the Inuit and other tribal northerners. And they capture elegantly what it is about living in this part of the world that the rest of us find so, if not appealing, at least magnetic in a certain way. Wheeler has chosen the title of her book well. But whether they will continue to be able to adapt to the changes in the physical world as well as to changes in the political world remains to be seen.

Wheeler’s chapters here are particularly good. She spends lots of time here, and it shows. Wheeler admits she came to the Arctic late—she’s mainly known for her journeys to Antarctia (which came out in book form as Terra Incognita about ten years ago), and admits an initial skepticism—how could the Arctic possibly be as interesting as the Antarctic? Well, thankfully, she was surprised. It’s a fine book, one that covers pretty much everything referred to here—history, politics, science, animals, people, herself. If you’re only going to read one of these books, it should probably be this one—the informational content per page is probably a bit higher, simply because of the amount of ground she covers.

She covers it literally, too. Like all these others, Wheeler is a traveller, and has been taken by the same thing that captures so many other imaginations. And she probably travels more than the others, which is a delight, and allows her to bring us an even weirder set of stories than most, simply because as all the authors recognize, this is one weird area, and it attracts one weird set of people. But as Wheeler and the others point out, it has also attracted more than its share of calamities. Holly Morris, in her New York Times review of Wheeler’s book, makes the point:

Since the 1960s, cultural disintegration has clobbered the native peoples of the Arctic. The invaders, the pollutants, the brutal relocation tactics and the resources sought may vary, but the effects on the Inuit don’t. “Every nation devastates native cultures, even if it doesn’t actually kill everyone off. Russians did it with bureaucracy, Americans with money, Canadians (in the end) with kindness. Swedes and Finns did it with chain saws that chopped down forests. And everyone did it with booze and syphilis.” Today’s inhabited Arctic is awash in the legacies “of miscarried cultural assimilation and racial marginalization.”

Why all the carnage in the past 50 years? The answer is mostly this: The region “produces about a tenth of the world’s oil and a quarter of its gas.” Usually with Russia or the United States at the helm, the industry “delivers some fresh ecological catastrophe to the tundra as every month passes.” Few of them make headlines. As everyone’s “nuclear rubbish dump,” and a favorite testing site for nuclear warheads, parts of the Arctic Ocean, and sites around it, are the most radioactive on earth. The Russian Sami’s reindeer meat? Glowing.

Water flow, weather and long-range transport patterns carry toxic substances and pesticides from lower latitudes upward, making the Arctic the world’s sink. Animal fat, a mainstay of the native diet, has become riddled with contaminants, to wildly detrimental health effect.

All the authors here discuss aspects of the call of the north and its role in driving polar exploration. Yes, there were always commercial considerations, and considerations of nationalism (Nansen and Amundsen in particular—Norway was a young country then). But Davidson’s focus is more philosophical—what is it, exactly, that powers all this. Consider the title—The Idea of North—not The Idea of the North. This is intentional, and speaks to Davison’s intent—to describe, through literature as much as anything else, where this fascination comes from. It’s a powerful cultural meme, or has been, anyway, dating back to the ancient Greeks, as Davidson discusses. He’s a good guide. He is particularly good on the idea of north as a purification, an idea that has always been with us, it seems, as far back as the Greeks and the Romans. Ultima Thule shows up on medieval maps. Davison does some travelling, nothing like the other authors, but he’s writing a different kind of book, a travelogue of the mind.

Davidson, in fact, starts out his book with a discussion of the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s project on the North, also called, as it turns out, The Idea of North. This initially debuted as a one-hour radio program on the CBC in Canada’s Centennial year in 1967. It was primarily devoted to Solitude, a topic to which Gould, who had retired from performing at the time, was consumed by. It’s a very northern concept, one has to admit. One does not go to the tropics for solitude, and we would be bemused by anyone who said that they were going to Antigua for the solitude. But anyone heading north would get an understanding nod. Gould was not physically well, but died, as much as anything else, of the complications of hypochondria. He may have preferred hypothermia.

Davidson, on the other hand, shows signs of life on every page. He’s a genial traveler of the mind, and we get a rich survey of not only the literatures of the North (he’s particularly good on The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic), but an astonishingly wide range of literature about the north, ranging from the Greeks and Romans to the romantic Poets to moderns works such as Nabokov’s land of Zembla in Pale Fire. And I particularly liked his discussion of Eric Ravilious, an artist barely known outside of Britain, but who deserves to be. Davidson makes you want to go there, something that all these books do, but is unencumbered by actually regaling you with the fact that what he’s doing is travelling, usually uncomfortably. Davidson instead takes us on a great armchair journey.

Kavenna’s book, The Ice Museum, is closest to Davidson’s—it’s also an exploration of the hold that the concept of the North has had, not always for the better. Like the other authors here, she has traveled extensively, and like the others, The Ice museum is organized as a travelogue, moving from country to country. Kavenna has a particular target in mind, though—Thule. Where was it, exactly? Did Pytheas, wjho claimed to have discovered it in the 6th century BC, really do that? Who lived there? How did people know about it? And why has Thule had such a powerful hold on the European imagination, including the Thule Society founded by Aryans for Aryans, which Hitler used as a model for the type of society he wanted to build. Kavenna (and Wheeler a bit) also take us into territory that we see from time to time, where the concerns about purity get a bit more expansive than they need to. This is a personal book, as are Wheeler’s and Anderson’s, who not only exult in their own personal discovery of the North, but their varying responses to it while they’re traveling around. And her account of the US airbase in Greenland, named, of course, Thule, is alone worth the price of the book (Wheeler does a good job on this too).

Anderson’s book will likely be the most depressing read for those who still hold out hopes for the longer term survival of Polar Bears and other large mammals in the Arctic. The drivers of change are just too ingrained at this point, and we are likely at past the point of no return for Polar Bear survival. But Anderson points out that this is a mixed story--as there are costs to some, there are benefits to others. A number of marine mammal species, particularly the Killer Whale, keep moving more northwards every year. Anderson’s book is the strongest on the science of what’s going on up there. All of the authors, except for Davidson (who wasn’t writing that sort of book) devote varying degrees of attention to this, but Anderson devotes the most. And in that context, it’s the least encouraging for the future of the regions.

Meanwhile, the world goes on, and so does Steampunk. And for those who want to displace all of the above, because it’s just too damn depressing, there’s always escape into fiction, and if you want Arctic, Aurorarama is the perfect ticket. Set in some stampunky parallel future somewhere in the Arctic, in the city of New Venice (with canals and all), and with the obligatory pneumatic tubes and dirigibles, and the required amount of political intrigue and social unrest, Aurorama is just the ticket for a snowy winter evening. Start with that mysterious black airship hovering over the city, add some political riots, a revolutionary movement under threat from the top-hatted secret police, a range of fascinating characters that one could believe could only be found in the Arctic, leagues away from anywhere else—you couldn’t ask for more. Valtat does a very credible job of moving the flow and tensions of Victorian society to the Arctic plains, where the action really does take place out in the middle of nowhere half the time. And the final conflict, one feels, isn’t quite final, so it looks as if we may have a series here. Plus, this has one of the best book covers I’ve seen in a long time, one of the best ever, in fact. Imagine, a book as good as its cover. Satisfactory, as Wolfe would say.

For those who want a regular hits of Polar news, there are two excellent sources. The first is the daily Arctic Update put out by the US Arctic Research Commission, which provides some of the best coverage of Arctic news and events out there—probably the best. And it’s free, at least until President Perry or President Bachmann shuts the place down. The Arctic Council, established by various Nordic governments but with Russia, Canada and the US along for the ride, provides a raft of useful information, although a newsletter would be nice.

Steampunk at the Steam Museum

2011-08-29T12:16:00.021+01:00

Sounds like a dream ticket, actually. The Kew Bridge Steam Museum, one of London’s little treasures, has been having an exhibition of Steampunk art, which ended this weekend. After this, the bulk of it will be heading up to Lincoln for the big annual Steampunk festival there in September. Actually, much of it looked familiar, and indeed, quite a bit of it was also at the Steampunk exhibit up in Oxford last year we wrote about.

Much if it is gorgeous stuff, as we have highlighted, and much if it is quite funny, as anyone who has paid attention knows. Steampunk artists have to have a sense of humour in the first place, obviously—when you start out in tongue and cheek mode, there’s only one direction to go. But this is serious stuff, too—steampunk art, unless it’s dirigible posters or something, is more steampunk crafts—because this stuff, like, say, watches, is constructed, designed an assembled with great care in most cases. And the level of craftsmanship is brilliant. How about a steampunk sonic blunderbuss?

Or an air pump? (One of the pieces we saw in Oxford)

How about a Steampunk Dallek (for those Dr. Who fans out there?):

And, of course, the obligatory death ray:

And we couldn't possibly get by without our steampunk bomb disposal suit:

The museum itself is fantastic—an old (and quite large) pumping station for the Metropolitan Water Board, this was one of London’s largest water stations, pumping gazillions of gallons of water. And what pumps! These are all intrinsically simple, but the craft that went into manufacturing and maintaining them as working instrument was considerable. Honestly, whoever decided to array a bunch of Steampunk art around some of these pumps, which are stunningly beautiful combinations of form and function, is a genius. The line between steampunk and steampump has been obliterated here.

Here’s one:

Here’s another:

Or this, in operation at the time of the photo, which is three stories high:

Or this small but perfectly formed one:

These are all steam pumps that pumped water to London’s millions. But steam pumps powered the industrial revolution, starting with Thomas Newcomen’s engine, then engines by Watt and scores of others. And there was a time when every man in England was familiar with how these steam engines worked, because they drove everything—not just water pumping stations, but manufacturing, and mining (for which Newcomen invented his engine), and rail and sea transportation as well. This was a world powered by steam and coal, and it often was brutal, and certainly was loud. It’s tempting to get nostalgic, but let’s not get carried away.

But still, these are items of beauty in their own right. And they speak to a world where craftsmanship was essential. We’ve lost that, and I suspect that’s part of the allure of steampunk, which, like Goths, shows no signs of going away. Cherie Priest has commented that steampunk is what happens when Goths discover brown. And there were plenty of both steampunk fans and Goths at the museum. What gets made these days that requires craftsmanship? Certainly not machine tools, which get churned out on the back of computer-aided design. Large gas turbine engines these days are impressive as hell, but they’re large, and the scale is wrong. Or pretty much anything else, for that matter. When is the last time we picked up anything made in the past fifty years and marveled at its elegance, its beauty?

And that’s what steampunk gets us back to. Yes, it’s nostalgia, but nostalgia always has its roots in what we think we’ve lost. And in this case it’s pretty clear. It’s the loss of control of things, not just our built environment, but the things that make it go—what can anyone fix these days? Cars? Appliances? My CD player, all of five years old, has conked out. Is there a chance in hell of getting it repaired? No, of course, not. I’ll be told it’s cheaper to get a new one. And so the culture of modern obsolescence continues its degrading run. And our cultural degradation as individuals continues apace as well—our inability to actually do anything increases proportionally to our inability to actually connect to the material world.

No wonder men are pissed. We see it all around us, the testosterone-fueled rage that infects our American culture, ranging from hip-hop to redneck country, and American politics, where the Republican Party has succeeded brilliantly in capturing male rage as a sure-fire vote getter. For most of our history men did stuff. Often it was stuff that upon which family survival was at stake. And for most of the population, it was stuff that involved both knowledge and craft of some sort. Farming, for example. And for the past several hundred years, sustaining the mechanics of the industrial economy. But little by little this has been chipped away. Neal Stephenson had it right in the Baroque Cycle—for all our fascination with the digital, it’s the analog that still keeps much of the world going. And we’re steadily losing control of this.

Will the Murdochs survive? Nope.

2011-08-17T22:44:00.003+01:00

Lord knows what Rupert Murdoch and his son James were thinking a couple of weeks ago when they provided their bullshit testimony to Parliament over the phone hacking scandal at the now defunct News of the World. But if the documents released by Parliament yesterday are any indication of what information still has yet to emerge, either both were lying outright to Parliament, or neither one has a clue regarding what goes on the organizations they each run—News Corporation in the case or Rupert, and its subsidiary News International and its British satellite broadcasting subsidiary BSkyB in the case of James. In either event, the recent expressions of support by the BSkyB board for James are starting to look a bit premature, as does Rupert’s refusal to split his current Chairman/CEO roles at News Corp.

So what did we learn from the new documents released by the Parliamentary subcommittee overseeing the entire phone-hacking mess that we didn’t already know? Well, first of all, the reporter sent to prison for phone hacking, Clive Goodman, received a payoff for keeping his mouth shut. Goodman also indicted that phone-hacking was regularly discussed at editorial meetings under reference to phone-hacking was banned by Andrew Coulson, who became James Cameron’s communications chief for a while, much of which is being made here by the British press, but is actually the least interesting aspect of the whole affair. Cameron, remember, took on Coulson only after receiving personal assurances from Rupert Murdoch that Coulson had no involvement in phone hacking, none. So now Cameron knows exactly what Murdoch's personal assurances are worth. Moreover, News International executives were told four years ago that phone-hacking was rife. And just today, James admitted that News International did, indeed, pay hush money to another phone hacking victim, Gordon Taylor, in spite of previous testimony to Parliament to the contrary.

Then there are the lawyers. In the Murdochs’ testimony, they made much of the clean bill of health they had received from their lawyers, and then they said the lawyers had obviously screwed up. Well, the lawyers cited by both Rupert and James as having given the company a clean bill of health called time-out on that claim. Rather, they called the Murdochs’ testimony “inaccurate and misleading.” Lawyers are generally pretty precise in their wording of things, so one can assume that the lawyers here know exactly what they are saying. Both The Independent and The Guardian have extensive coverage of what was released, and its import, and The Guardian, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for following this when everyone else had dropped it, provides an elegant timeline of events. As Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism notes, there’s no reason to pay any attention whatsoever to the anemic US media coverage of this.

All of this leaves Labour salivating, although it shouldn’t, since it was under Labour that all these cozy relationships between News International and the Metropolitan Police were allowed to flourish. This is the other real scandal here--the compromising of the police, which News International appears only too happy to have pursued, and which some members of the Metropolitan Police appear only too happy to have gone along with. Which, of course, explains the complete fiasco of the earlier investigations into this by the police. It’s the age-old question—who will police the police? On the basis of their handling of this, it’s certainly unclear whether the police can police themselves. At some point, I suspect, there will be a massive housecleaning—there has to be. The recent riots have provided a welcome diversion, I imagine.

The more interesting question is how much trouble are the Murdochs in on the basis of this. Actually, quite a lot, I imagine. It now appears that, in spite of constant denials, News International has continued to withhold material information from those investigating the phone-hacking mess—at the very least, from Parliament, and has persistently provided misinformation. Consistently, it would appear. And, as we intimated in a previous post, all of this has implications for News Corporation’s US businesses, potentially quite negative ones. Those who thought Rupert did a good job in his testimony a couple of weeks ago might want to reconsider—it looks like both Murdochs have a bit more explaining to do. Frankly, it’s not clear to me how they can explain all this away. I would be very surprised if, in six months time, either one of them is still running anything.

Rick Perry for President?

2011-08-17T21:27:00.002+01:00

It looks as if Rick Perry is either the guaranteed Republican nominee already, or else this year’s Fred Thompson. Sadly, since he’s only been a declared candidate for a couple of days, it’s probably a bit too early to say. But Perry has the right chops—he’s already implied that Obama doesn’t love America, and that Ben Bernanke should be given some sort of Texas treatment if he tries to stimulate the economy, since that would be “treasonous.” He’s vindictive, dumb as a post, a rigid Creationasist, a global warming denier, and completely in bed with the oil industry. And, of course, thinks secession might be the solution, although to what, exactly, isn’t clear. Oh, I wish and hope. Anyway, what’s not to like? Oh, and he has never lost a political campaign, including when the Bush group supported Sissy Farenhold in her campaign against him for governor a couple of years ago. Really, what’s not to like here?

I’m certain this tells us something important about the state of political discourse in America right now that Perry seems to now be the leading contender for the nomination. But I’m not certain what that might be. The whole process of “ defining deviancy down,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous phrase, has been going on so long in American politics that’s we long ago lost the ability to differentiate between a real news “headline” from whatever is showing up in The Onion on any particular day. This seems particularly true in the political sphere, where it appears that anyone can say just about anything and not be called on it. Still, it seems safe to say that this year’s group of candidates for the Republican nomination of President of the United States of America marks a new low in, well, something. A race to the bottom that turns out not to have one. A number of them had no problem whatsoever with the US defaulting on its obligations. All of them think global warming is some sort of conspiracy (well, maybe not Romney or Huntsman, but they’ve assumed the position for the time being). I wish I could be at one of these “debates” (using the term loosely, of course) just so I could pose a question to Bachmann, Santorum, Cain, and maybe Perry too—“You all say that God told you to run. Why didn’t He just tell one of you?”

And leaving aside the question of whether America is ready for another Texas governor as President, it’s fairly clear already that the forthcoming campaign is bound to set now lows in mendacity, racist innuendo, and the usual Republican bag of tricks. This will provide tremendous fodder for the usual raft of lefty bloggers, including myself, and I suppose I won’t be able to resist, especially when it comes to the usual hooting about how whorish the US media remains. Boy, do I miss Media Whores Online and Billmon—they’d have a field day with this crew and the press coverage they’re getting. In a rational universe, they’d all be laughed off the stage.

Defending S&P's downgrade of the US's credit rating

2011-08-07T14:56:00.000+01:00

Lots of ink and many bits are currently being spilled analyzing S&P’s downgrade of the credit ratings of the United States to AA+ from AAA late Friday. Most of the talking heads in America continue to pretend to not to understand the dynamic of this action, and S&P, which hasn’t covered itself in glory over the past several years, admittedly, is taking a lot of flak for this—even Warren Buffett disagrees, and of course, Buffett is never wrong (except for those times when he is). Paul Krugman, with whom I normally agree, takes a number of pot shots, but I think misses the larger picture. Eschaton has an elegant little summary that a number of people, including Krugman, thinks summarizes what our reaction to be (and Eschaton, aka Duncan Black, is also an economist).

Most of the liberal commentary (and some of the commentary from the right as well) has basically taken the line that S&P has no standing, really, after its screw-ups the past several years, to opine on anything any more, particularly not the creditworthiness of a sovereign nation. S&P didn’t help its case by including a fundamental (and embarrassing) error of arithmetic in its initial press release, which the US Treasury jumped on (and which S&P duly corrected). But saying that S&P no longer has any standing to make these kinds of judgments misses the point of what rating agencies try to do, and generally do reasonably well, and why markets pay attention in the first place. If you back out the CDO debacle, S&P’s credibility is what it has always been—pretty good, as is also the case with Moody’ and Fitch. Those of us who operate in actual markets, as opposed to the academy or the blogosphere or the punditocracy, understand this. For the record, the National Journal has some of the best discussion of the repercussions of this move that I have seen.

And it’s important to note what S&P actually said, as opposed to assuming one knows what they said. (Here’s the entire S&P commentary.) It’s pretty clear that they think the situation with reference to the creditworthiness of the United States has changed, and they think it’s political. As I noted in my last post on this issue, agencies have to be very careful how they word justifications for rating actions. In particular, S&P noted two important points. The first is the following:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year’s wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently.

OK, it’s pretty clear what they’re getting here—the Republican-induced gridlock for the sake of political gamesmanship. Everyone I talk to in London, by the way, is equally horrified. What are these people thinking? Don’t they understand what they’re doing? My response to those questions was generally, sticking it to Obama, and no, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care. I can’t imagine that the rating agencies weren’t equally horrified. To reinforce the point, S&P later says this:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

This is about as straightforward as I’ve ever seen a rating agency get in a dicey political area. One gets the sense that most observers would prefer that S&P leave politics out of it. But that’s just not possible, especially after the horror show of he past six months.

Look, anyone who has take a course in basic finance understands the concept of the risk-free interest rate—it’s the basis for everything else that occurs in finance. For decades, the functional real world embodiment of the risk-free rate has been that attached to US treasuries, because that’s what Treasuries were supposed to be—risk-free. What S&P is saying is that because of the willingness of Republicans to hold the creditworthiness of the United States as a hostage to political arm wrestling, and their intransigence on raising revenues (particularly with reference to the expiration of the Bust tax cuts), it’s not clear that investing in the securities of the United States should continue to be regarded as “risk-free.” If Republicans were prepared to blow up the credit profile of the United States once, they might be again, and next time they might get away with it.

Triple A ratings are supposed to embody as close to risk-free as you can get. That’s just not true for the US any more, sadly. If you have legitimate cause for concern about the US government paying its bills, not just its Treasury obligations, then you've left "risk-free" territory behind. The S&P action is simply the most recent reminder that the Republican insanity of the past eleven years that has brought us a $4 trillion dollar war, the Bust tax cuts that will never, ever go away, apparently, and other collective manifestations of political madness do indeed have costs out in the real world. Politics and the world of finance are inextricably intertwined, no matter what they teach in finance courses, and it’s pointless to pretend otherwise.

In memoriam

2011-07-29T22:32:00.001+01:00

The Norwegian Church is an attractive 100-year old building in Rotherhithe, full of little maritime touches, south of the Thames. Back when London was a busy port, Rotherhithe was one of the main areas of port business. Whistler used to go there in the 1870s and 1880s to draw and paint. Today, it’s a pleasant enough lower middle class area, one of many in London, but it retains something of its maritime legacy. Including the Norwegian Church and Seamen’s Mission, right down the street from the Finnish Church. There are Norwegian Churches in all sorts of port cities, in fact. Liverpool has one. Cardiff. Edinburgh. Norwegians take their Christianity seriously. 80% of the country is a member of the Church of Norway.

So it was a fitting setting for today’s Memorial Service to the victims of a very evil man, Anders Behring Breivik, who last Friday blew up part of Oslo, just a week ago, leaving eight people dead and many maimed and injured. He then proceeded to spend 90 minutes stalking and murdering 68 teenagers at a retreat on Utøya island, all in the name of a some mythical armed struggle against multiculturalism. It was a mostly Norwegian crowd in the church, obviously, although I imagine there were some there, like me, simply to bear witness. And it was a fine service, with several ministers, the local MP, and an overwhelming feeling of dignity. There was talk of how much everyone admired the Prime Minister of Norway, whose response to the tragedy was to insist on more openness, not less. Openness and dignity--what alien concepts these days.

This is an act, a crime that passes understanding. Words just don’t capture what happened, or its repercussions, even in this little London church where everyone obviously knows each other. Norway is a small country—a population of 5 million, smaller than London by a third. I suspect six degrees of separation are three or four too many. Breivik, who is a poster boy for Aryan madness if there ever was one, was a member of the Church of Norway too. But something, somewhere, went very wrong. Needless to say, Pat Buchanan thinks he had some good ideas anyway. Pam Geller and Jennifer Rubin are outraged that anyone would think that their hateful words, or they themselves, bear any responsibility for the actions of another. They weren’t alone in ascribing a jihadist explanation to the bombing before anybody actually knew anything—in my office, we switched to CNN, and there they all were, yakking on about a likely Al Quaida plot, because of some political cartoon or something. Breivik was admiring of the Unibomber, and of Timothy McVeigh, of course. Glenn Beck tried to cut Breivik some slack by comparing his victim to the Hitler youth. That’s the level we’ve sunk to.

“Horror surrounds us like an oil spill. Not a day passes without more savagery or harm.” The late Terrence des Pres wrote these word decades ago in response to some other meaningless atrocity inflicted upon someone by someone else. We become inured to these events. Like we do to starvation in Africa, or yet another disastrous typhoon in Bangladesh. But these are natural events, acts of God, if you want to call them that. This is not the repeated, incessant refrain of the constant and willful destruction of human beings by others. We are overwhelmed with atrocities, we can't keep up. What keeps us going is hope, the hope provided by gatherings like that of today, where people of good will and faith and understanding come together to keep hope alive. It’s all we have, really.

Murdochgate redux

2011-07-18T22:31:00.002+01:00

There have been any number of further developments since our last post, and this shows signs of accelerating to the point of being out of Murdoch’s control entirely. Well, let’s face it—in the UK, it pretty much is. Rebekah Brooks resigned on Friday, and was arrested on Sunday. Murdoch’s long time deputy Les Hinton, who ran News International at the time of peak phone hacking, and more recently ran Dow Jones for Murdoch, also resigned. Brooks’s arrest means her testimony to Parliament tomorrow may be compromised—how convenient for someone, maybe the police?

Let’s not forget that in all the unseemly haste to somehow pin this all on PM David Cameron (of whom I am not a fan, by the way, but still), that all of this pretty much happened while Labour was in power, and Labour pretty much did nothing. And that the Metropolitan Police force has been deeply compromised, as evidence by the head of the MPC, Paul Stephenson, resigning yesterday. And the Assistant Commissioner, John Yates, resigning today. And there are more resignations in the Met Police to come, I imagine. There are reports this evening that both Stephenson and Yates, as well as several other members of the Metropolitan Police, are under investigation. Stephenson and Yates have been the subject of considerable discussion this past week as it has become clear that the original police investigation into News International phone hacking, which Stephenson supervised, was woefully inadequate, and the question is whether this derived from incompetence or something a bit more nefarious.

Murdoch, if he plans on saving his empire, has a couple of things he needs to do now. First, make damn well sure that the allegations of attempted hacking of the phones of 9/11 victims are not true. If they are true, he’s toast, as is News Corporation. Fox would likely lose a number, perhaps all, of its broadcast licenses in the event that these allegations turned out to be true, and these, along with Fox News, are really what drives the profits at News Corp. At present, the FBI is investigating, and the Justice Department has taken an interest, as have a number of Democratic elected officials, and at least one Republican—Peter King of Long Island, who has closely aligned himself with the 9/11 victim families, as well as the firefighters and police victims, often to the extent of being at odds with the Republican party Which is one reason why we’re starting to see a furious counterattack from the US right now, led by Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, both of whom are wondering what the big deal is. Murdoch understands the stakes here, one assumes; but you have to wonder, though, given his misreading of the mood in the UK.

It’s rapidly evolving—several weeks ago, of course, his empire was thriving. In the space of two weeks, his political power in the UK is gone, and it shows some signs of being threatened in the US. His top lieutenants in the UK and the US have resigned, and one, at least, has been arrested, somewhat to her surprise, apparently. There will probably be more arrests.

The other thing Murdoch needs to do is take a clear read of the business landscape now, given his misjudgments in the UK, and how they affect his dynastic ambitions. Murdoch has gone to great lengths to ensure that News Corp management remains in the family, and son James was being set up to take over, clearly. This may now be in doubt, given the potential exposure James now faces in the UK to questions of how much he knew. It’s not at all clear that the clear path to succession that existed up to a couple of weeks ago still exists. The main issue that James Murdoch faces is the issue of the earlier payments to several people whose phones were, yes, hacked—and the question of what he knew when these payments were made.

And of course, there were more developments the past two days, mainly the resignation of the Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Both claim to have done nothing wrong, and both claim to be leaving with their integrity intact. Well, integrity, perhaps, but there is widespread questioning of their competence in overseeing what is clear at this point is a deeply compromised police department. It’s this that has been the most distressing aspect of this whole controversy to many—people more or less expect politicians to be compromised by definition, and the press to some extent by nature. But the police are supposed to be above all this. Instead, what we have instead is the prospect that a criminal investigation was compromised by payments from the object of the investigation to the police over previous years.

Tomorrow should be interesting, in any event. Not only do Rupert and James Murdoch testify to Parliament over who knew what when, but also Rebekah Brooks, and Stephenson, and Yates, and various lawyers. One irony here is that when this parliamentary inquiry was set up last week, all these people had jobs—many of them today do not. Of course, no one is covering themselves with glory these days. Cameron continues to be hammered for his hiring of Coulson, in spite of significant warnings not to do so. Cameron, though, is something of a victim here—and I’m hardly a supporter. But I gather that he was in touch with Murdoch, and Murdoch gave assurances that Coulson was clean--as did Coulson. Whether Cameron should have trusted Murdoch is another issue. Whether anyone should ever have trusted Murdoch, given his track record, is something that there should be sufficient history on at this point.

There’s a bit of a frenzy in the press, of course—The Guardian, to its credit, sustained its own investigation into the phone hacking allegations when everyone else said there was no there there. And I mean everyone—News International and the Metropolitan Police in particular, but the other media as well. But a little historical perspective is always useful. These events span much of the past decade, and there’s no question that a number of Labour politicians probably had as little enthusiasm for a detailed investigation then as the coalition government does now. Tony Blair actually took a flight to Australia to meet with Murdoch; Gordon Brown sucked up too. Politicians have been corrupt forever. The corruption of the British political system by Rupert Murdoch was thorough, but it was not at gunpoint. Only the Liberal Democrats are clean here.

And the press itself appears to be confirming Murdoch’s most enduring legacy—turning everything into a tabloid scandal, as Mrs W has pointed out. For all the kudos The Guardian justifiably deserves for seeing this story through, their coverage of Cameron, as if this was all his fault, leaves a bit of a sour taste. As do the misleading tabloid-style headlines in The Independent (now owned by a Russian oligarch). The dumping on Cameron by Ed Miliband is to be expected—it’s politics. The dumping on Cameron by a media that also claims to be shocked, shocked by the behavior of Rupert Murdoch’s employees doesn’t wash very well.

Final note (for now)—every time I think this can’t get more bizarre, I am proven wrong. Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up.

Update: Then there's this. Good lord.

Kindles, books and libraries

2011-07-14T21:02:00.003+01:00

OK, so I got a Kindle. This is a major step, for someone who is as much of a book junkie as I am. Actually, more like a book magnet. And after decades of buying books, they add up. Especially since I’m a packrat, as Mrs W never tires of pointing out, and living in a flat with limited space, it leads to books three deep in the bookshelves, that sort of thing. Of course, there’s the occasional cull, but that just clears out space for a while that fills up again. Then there’s the feeling that while I’m not likely to read any Dan Brown ever again—once was enough—there’s still no reason to believe that a single tree should ever be sacrificed for a Dan Brown book, as Mrs W once commented. Elitist, I know, but there it is.

So I thought about this for a while, and a couple of years ago we borrowed one for a long weekend from the son-in-law, and Mrs W really liked it, but that was in the US, and for a while there the availability of titles in the UK was pretty sparse. But it’s catching up as various copyright and publishing issues get squared away. And it’s also the case, and this was a help in making the decision, that there’s some stuff being republished only in e-book format, particularly a lot of science fiction that isn’t betting republished in book format.

So how is it? Well, it takes a bit of getting used to. But it’s fit for purpose, as they say. The screen is fine, although I haven’t used it outside yet. It’s comfortable to hold in one hand, which is critical for me since I do most of my reading while on the Tube, which occasionally can be crowded. And one of the reasons I got it is so I can read big fat books, which I like to do, but you can’t really do that while standing in a crowded and swaying train. The little button that you use to do the Kindle equivalent of turning the page isn’t positioned as well as it might be—but maybe that’s intentional, so that you don’t use it be accident too often. On this point, I have to say it was a bit weird at first not having page numbers. What it does instead is give you a % of how much of the book that you’ve read. That’s weird at first, but you get used to that too. I haven’t tried anything will illustrations yet, but will have to eventually. I gather they’re getting better. But anything where you want the colour of the illustrations, like art books, I can’t see the sense of getting it on Kindle until the technology has gone through a couple more transformations that gets us to the book in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Or until I get an Ipad, whichever comes first.

It’s not a book, though. I’m getting used to it, but it’s still not a book. It doesn’t have that feel of a book in your hand, especially a soft paperback. You can’t riffle its pages to find your place. Or make that riffling noise. It doesn’t have that new book smell. It doesn’t have a cover that you can stare at idly, wondering what it has to do with what you‘re reading. You can’t really stick it in your back pocket—it’s too big. Not that there are many paperbacks these days you can do that with, but still. I’m a little be less cavalier with it than I might be with a book—it’s an expensive piece of electronica, after all.

But it’s a good way to read books anyway. And I’ve loaded it up. Well, put a couple of things on it is probably a more accurate statement. The actual reason I got it so that I could read the George R.R. Martin Game of Thrones series, and they’re all big and fat. I still have memories of trying to read the Dorothy Dunnett Niccola series on the Tube, and it sort of worked, but only sort of—mainly, if I got a seat. And I’ve read the first two, and then took a break. The Martins were fine, and I will get back to them—but they’re not Fevre Dream. I’m not a big fan of swash and buckle fantasy anyway, or anything past Lord Dunsany in the genre, but Martin is a fine writer, and I do want to get back to it. But to vary the pace, since I don’t want the Kindle to imprint on any one kind of book, I just finished Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, which, yes, is every bit as good as people say it is. Jeez, she’s only 25.

But the real fun is grazing the Kindle site on Amazon. Boy, it’s weird. It’s great for anything no longer under copyright. I’ve already loaded up the Kalevala, and some Anglo-Saxon poetry. And you can get the complete Shakespeare, free. In fact, you can get all sorts of free stuff. The Bible, of course, the RSV—but for a pound something, I can get the King James version with Gustave Dore illustrations. HP Lovecraft. Poe. Henry James. Greek Plays. George Eliot. Melville, both Moby Dick and Bartleby. All free. There’s this fantastic range of great literature that’s there, just download it and you can carry it around forever, or until you’ve read it and decided you’re not going to read again. I've always thought of the internet as the world's largest library, but this takes it a step further-you now have unlimited borrowing privileges for most of he world's great literature if you got one of these babies. If you think of the internet as one large external hard drive, this is one of the portals you want access to.

It’s the modern stuff that’s all over the place. I imagine every word Dan Brown ever wrote is there. But the other stuff—the less well read these days is how I would put it. And it’s completely inconsistent. This may be because all of this is still unfolding, and in ten years the Kindle landscape will look completely different than it does now. But right now, you can’t find any Lawrence Durrell on Kindle in the UK. Or Joyce Cary. If you want some Henry Miller, you can find some of the more notorious fiction, but none of the excellent non-fiction and essays. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, but that’s it—none of the excellent fiction. Several books by George Steiner, but not a single one by William H. Gass. One book by Howard Norman—and it’s a German translation. I can find some Wendell Berry—more than I expected, in fact, something I’m sure he would find deeply ironic—but I find more books about Berry than by him. And some of Gary Nabhan’s recent stuff on food—but none of his earlier stuff about the desert. Astonishingly, though, I can get Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers as an ebook. So The Death of Virgil shouldn’t be too far behind, I imagine.

As far as genre fiction goes, if I look up some of my favorite writers, again it’s all over the place. Lots of Jeff Vandermeer, and Gwyneth Jones, a fair selection of Ian Macdonald’s more recent stuff, but not the earlier stuff, and lots of Ursula Le Guin. But practically no Ken Macleaod, and only one novel by Nancy Kress. That’s in the UK, though—if I look up Nancy Kress on the US Amazon, there are many more ebook novels there. So some of this scarcity here might just be that things haven’t moved over here yet, because of publisher complications, or whatever. Although I also notice that if I look up Howard Norman in the US, there’s that German translation I mentioned earlier—and one other novel.

Of course, if you’re going to read it again, why would you get it on Kindle? This is a question for those of us who keep buying books. Which I will continue to do. But here we get to another thing about the Kindle, or ebooks in general—the fact that there’s stuff that’s being reissued in ebook format that isn’t being reissued as books. This is already happening in the SF world. I loaded up two books by Ian Hocking that have been reissued as ebooks, and the reason I did it is that it‘s unlikely that they’re going to get reissued in book form any time soon, if ever. If I look up Jeff Vandermeer’s stuff on Kindle, there’s a whole boatload of it, including some things I’m pretty sure are not available in book format. And there’s also the fact that what goes into ebook format isn’t constrained by length, in either direction. So I can find some Nancy Kress novellas, and even short stories, available for pennies. Or pence. This is great. It turns out there’s all this shorter stuff—novellas, mini-collections of stories—that Kindle is ideal for. They’re too short to publish as books, but as bits floating through the ether, it works out just fine.

So as far as I can tell, the book industry is handling the Kindle a whole lot better than the music industry handled the internet (which is not hard, given how insanely stupid the music industry has been). For one thing, they know that there are all sorts of books that they’ll keep publishing that are just not suitable for Kindles. Anything with lots of illustrations, like art books, or anything like the marvelous books that Barbara Hodgson puts out, where the assembled illustrations are an integral part of the book. Not that these are big sellers, but there’s a steady demand, which may be enough. There are a number of implications for book publishing here, as well as libraries. But I don’t think the Kindle is necessarily a threat to either—or any bigger threat than the internet has already proved to be.

Certainly the industry has had to get used to the concept of electronic reading, but it’s had the internet to help it along for the past two decades. The number of books being sold in the UK and the US has held pretty steady over the past decade, in fact. Between 2000 and 2010, according to the UK Booksellers Association, published book sales rose from about £2.51 billion to £3.1 billion. This includes a really big export number, and if you back that out, it’s still a positive trend: from £1.658 billion in 2000 to £1.86bn in 2010. This is a bit misleading, though—if you look at consumer spending on books in the UK, it looks flat for the past decade—although again that’s a bit misleading, since the figure rose from £2.183 billion in 2003 to £2.469 billion in 2007, and has been dropping since then (data from The Publishers Association). Here’s the odd thing, though—the number of books published continues to go up--in fact, I haven't seen the data for 2010, but 2009 was a record year for the number of titles published. And, apparenlty, volumes too. There are some complicating factors here, though—Harry Potter sales, for one thing. Plus the fact that the data cited here doesn’t capture sales from small publishers—in fact, only about 70% of UK book sales are accounted for in the above figures, apparently. All in all, it doesn't sound as if book publishing is in much danger at the moment.

But still, the landscape is starting to look different. What has changed? Well, for one thing, the role of the bookseller. Book stores, in spite of my best efforts, are going out of business at an accelerating pace, sadly. This presumably is not unrelated to the fact that digital book sales are the most rapidly growing part of the market, and now account for 6% of total sales in the UK. This certainly looks set to rise, according to the Publishers Association. Another contributing factor as well, surely, is the rise in audiobook sales for the iPhone in both the UK and the US. But this percentage also looks low, especially in light of the fact that ebook sales at Amazon have passed paperback sales, at least here in the UK.There are apparently more book apps than game apps for iphones.

So this is still evolving, and rapidly, and, as is often the case, in some unexpected directions. Hovering over all of this is Google Books, which has been the subject of discussion for several years now since they started their project of trying to digitize every book in existence. Robert Darnton has followed all of this over at The New York Review of Books for some time, and a collection of his essays on this subject came out in 2009 year with the snappy title The Case for Books--available as an ebook, of course. Darnton’s argument is simple—there is a digital revolution going on, but books will always be with us. But books and libraries may never be the same, and in the case of libraries, maybe they shouldn't be. We’ll consider this further in the next post.

The Empire strikes back

2011-07-11T22:26:00.003+01:00

This just keeps getting better and better. Alexander Cockburn is right—this is just like Watergate. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news. The iconic hate figure, a man who pretty much single handedly created a global media empire against very significant odds, which in any other context might be seen as plucky and admirable in some way, but who wrecked that accomplishment through political blowback once some transparency revealed the depths to which members of his organization would go. (There’s that whole Fox News thing too, for good measure.) The scuttling of politicians for cover, or at least better defensive positions. And a few heroes popping up, occasionally from unexpected quarters.

So what’s happened since our last update? Well, what hasn’t happened? Except for Rebekah Brooks’s resignation, which Rupert has said is not gonna happen. We’ll see—some folks are giving it until Wednesday. In other expected and unexpected developments, Andrew Coulson, former News of the World editor and former press advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, has been arrested, question, and released. More arrests are apparently forthcoming. One would hope so, given the other stuff that’s come out. Like the fact that News International apparently has been sitting on a bunch of emails since 2007 that pretty unequivocally show the company’s involvement in more extensive phone hacking and police payoffs. Cameron himself took responsibility for hiring Coulson against the advice of a number of people, reiterating his give-everyone-a-second chance spiel, authorized the creation of two new investigations, and is still in some hot water. Deputy PM Nick Clegg, presumably on his own, called for Murdoch to withdraw News International’s bid for BSkyB. Ed Miliband, whose stint as leader of the Labour Party thus far has been mostly characterized by flailing around, suddenly looks sharp and determined—like a leader, perhaps, although he still sounds a bit like a doofus. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who just last week was all set to sign off on Murdoch’s dream of buying up the 61% of BSkyB that he doesn’t already own, has reconsidered and sent the bid off to the UK Competition Commission, which looks set to extend this whole process. Oh, and the News of the World published its final edition yesterday.

This last point is what this whole affair has been about, from Murdoch’s point of view. He was willing to close a profitable newspaper, one of the two in his stable—the other being The Sun. Both The Times and The Sunday Times continue to lose money, but have been supported by the profits from the redtops (as the tabloids are referred to). He was willng to do this because the profitability of broadcast media is in the billions, of newspapers in the millions—when there are even profits to be had. So saving that deal was paramount. But it doesn’t look as if he’s going to pull it off. Miliband is set to introduce a resolution in Parliament on Wednesday that will force a deferment of any News International/BskyB deal until all investigations are complete—and this could take a while, perhaps even years. According to The Daily Mail, News International executives were threatening Miliband just a couple of days ago, but it looks as if Miliband has decided the game is too far gone. And it looks as if he’s even going to get some LibDem and Tory support. Murdoch didn’t help his position, presumably, by insisting that his top priority was saving Rebekah Brooks’s job. If I were a News Corporation shareholder, watching the share price drop regularly, I think I’d be getting a little concerned about what Murdoch’s actual priorities are. It’s not a good time to be an owner of BSkyB shares either.

Nor will Murdoch be helped by the more recent revelations. As I said, it’s drip, drip, drip at this point. So yesterday we had the news, as mentioned above, that News International has been sitting on damaging emails since 2007. 2007, by the way, was the year the Les Hinton, Murdoch’s right hand man for 52 years, testified to Parliament that the phone-hacking was the work of one rogue reporter, he was positive of that—and that’s the line that NI and News Corp resolutely took up to last week. So we’re already seeing stories that he’s being set up to take the fall, along with Coulson. Coulson apparently is not a happy camper these days, nor should he be, since it looks as if he’s in a bit of trouble as well. Then there were the gems from today—first, that News International apparently paid someone in the royal security detail for information on Royal Family movements. Cool. But even that paled with this afternoon’s allegation that The Sunday Times and The Sun (not NOTW, for a change) apparently did some furious digging on the personal details of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his family—including his children’s medical records. Now, Brown is not the most popular political figure in the UK, obviously—he lost pretty handily last year. But medical records of his kids? That will generate the same revulsion that phone-hacking a murdered girl’s cellphone generated—and that’s what started Murdoch on the slippery downward slope he’s currently on, remember. It was the Sun that broke the story that one of the Browns’ children had cystic fibrosis—a fat known only to the Browns and their doctor at the time. We now know how they got that story, then. Gee, who was editor of The Sun at the time? Rekekah Brooks. Oh, and let’s not forget the allegations raised in the Daily Mirror today that 9/11 victims in the US had their phones hacked as well And the shareholders’ lawsuit alleging lousy governance. See? Tomorrow, we’ll read about how News International was behind Princess Diana’s death as well. Well, maybe not. But every time I think we can’t go lower, we do.

If Murdoch wants to save his BSkyB deal, and even his UK businesses in general, he needs to be doing a whole lot of apologizing and digging for what actually happened. He does not appear to be taking that route—there are still press reports of News International executives threatening various political figures even as recently as this weekend, and Murdoch and Brooks putting up their beamy smiles across the media landscape today is probably not helpful to his cause either. Which suggests a very deep disconnect with the mood of the country, and Parliament, right about now. Murdoch is not stupid. But is he too old? Is he losing it? It’s hard to say. I gather, though, that there’s a legal reason for shutting down NOTW—and it has to do with limiting potential litigation in the US.

Here’s what Murdoch’s lawyers are probably worried about. Up until today, the government’s line was that there was little it could do to stop the NI/BSkyB transaction. That’s because up until now, the only issue that might have gotten in the way was the issue of media plurality, and whether Murdoch had too much dominance in the UK media landscape. Since the original proposal was approved by the EU Competition Commission, it was believed by the government that it could not then refer the deal to the UK Competition Commission. And the big mystery was why OFCOM, the media regulator, was not attempting to block the transaction on the grounds that Murdoch and his crew were obviously up to some pretty scandalous stuff—they would not pass the “fit and proper" test laid out in the Broadcasting Act of 1990.

Well, there’s a reason for that. And it’s this, if I have this right—the only way OFCOM could have attempted to block the transaction once it was passed on by the Competition Commission was if there was a likelihood of bringing charges against a director or executive of the company, or if a director or executive of a company was convicted of a crime—News International, in this case. That’s the test—but the law and precedent are murky here, as you might expect. And up until this week, that looked very unlikely.

But as a result of the revelations of last week—including James Murdoch’s admission that he paid off settlements to hacking victims years ago to keep other hacking details from coming to light—based on incomplete information, and all those pesky emails that keep turning up—it appears that OFCOM may have reconsidered its position. Which is why it wrote to Hunt a couple of days ago taking an interest in the case—and why Hunt today referred this all to the UK Competition Commission, to buy more time. Because if it turns out that any News International executive broke the law, that may pretty much doom the NI/BSkyB transaction. And not only that—if NI isn’t “fit” to own 100% of BSkyB, they would obviously not be fit to own the 39% that they currently own. Wait, there’s more. This has ramifications in the US as well.

So I’m looking forward to whatever comes out tomorrow. The next big milestone is Miliband’s threat to introduce legislation that would delay any NI/BSkyB transaction until after all investigations is probably going to come on Wednesday. That probably seems like a long way away to some of the people involved in all this.

Trouble in Murdochland redux

2011-07-08T10:37:00.004+01:00

A couple of months ago we noted that things were not going all that well in Murdochland, what with investigations heating up over allegations that phone hacking--that delightful pastime of hacking into someone’s voicemail so you can read and/or hear their messages—was far more pervasive than anyone had guessed. Or, certainly, than Murdoch and his News Corporation team were prepared to admit. Since then, it’s gotten worse, with lots of lawsuits, and allegations, and to-ing and fro-ing all over the place. But it wasn’t until this past week that the whole situation finally exploded, and explode big time it did.

Because it’s one thing to hack the voicemail of movie stars and politicians—the public turns out to be supremely indifferent to that. It’s quite something else to hack into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl and delete messages, leading her parents to think she was still alive. Or the families of other murdered schoolgirls. Or the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the victims of the July 7 bombings. Not only is this beyond the bounds of decency by several orders of magnitude, the public actually recognizes this. And they’re steamed. Oh, did I mention the admission that News of the World, which was probably responsible for all of the above (perhaps directly, perhaps only indirectly), also gave lots of cash to policemen? Which is against the law, by the way. After you’ve been denying that any of this stuff happened in the first place, and spent the past four years insisting that these problems were the work of one rogue employee.

Murdoch is not loved in the UK, even though he owns four of the largest newspapers, and controls the second largest broadcaster. But he is feared. He has made a number of enemies over the years, but seems to have build up a certain amount of political immunity over the years as well, since the endorsement of The Sun is still actively courted by leaders of the major political parties—including David Cameron, the current Prime Minister, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the two previous Labour Prime Ministers. Blair’s sucking up to Murdoch was legendary. Cameron, who unlike Blair appears capable of embarrassment, has at least had the decency to be less obnoxious about it, although he has also played the game with a vengeance. But it has paid off—whomever The Sun endorses, wins.

So now Murdoch has a real mess on his hands. He has steadfastly refused to abandon Rebekah Brooks, who edited the News Of the World for a time before she went on to edit The Sun, and before her current stint as head of News International here in the UK. Likewise Murdoch’s son, James, who this afternoon put out one of the most deliriously loopy letters of apology in living memory, which has managed to infuriate even more people, as if that were remotely possible. Meanwhile, advertisers were canceling right and left, and News Corporation shares have hit the skids. So what has News International done in response? Why, yesterday they decided to shut down News of the World—this Sunday’s edition will allegedly be the last one. This stunning announcement—which will cause several hundred people to lose their jobs at the UK’s (heretofore) largest selling newspaper—is absolutely baffling, since it actually solves nothing. Labour MP Chris Bryant, who has emerged as one of the genuine good guys in this whole affair, argues that this is a cynical move designed solely to protect Brooks, and he’s probably right. Not for the first time one wonders what hold Brooks has over Murdoch.

It’s hard to know where this goes next. Allegedly Andy Coulson, another former News of the World editor who was, for a time, James Cameron’s media advisor before resigning this past spring as the phone hacking scandal was taking off for real, is allegedly about to be arrested. And more arrests are almost certain to follow. Then there’s the scandal at Scotland Yard, where it’s now clear there were perhaps quite a number of police on the News International payroll, so to speak. So not only is this a huge embarrassment for them, because they blew the first investigation of this so badly a couple of years ago. It also turns out that there were, and perhaps still are, obviously a bunch of cops who have been illegally taking money from a news organization.

Then there’s Cameron, who up to this past week has been able to float a bit above the fray—but no more. His hiring of Coulson as his media advisor was criticized at the time, and that criticism was ignored. But it now looks to have been prescient. Cameron is taking an increasing amount of heat here, not just for the Coulson decision, but also for his closeness to Brooks, whose family the Camerons joined for Christmas dinner. Cameron is a smart guy, and generally has proven to be politically adept—but this will linger. In part because the government still has yet to approve the takeover of BSkyB, which Rupert Murdoch desperately wants to accomplish—and the longer this goes on, the more difficulty the government will have in approving this, given everything that has come out the past couple of weeks. Yesterday Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary whose decision this will ultimately be, announced the decision was being put off until September, given the volume of mail and emails he was getting. And Parliament certainly looks set to step into the fray as well. The power Murdoch once had appears to be gone.

What does this tell us about Murdoch? I know people always say that it’s dangerous to underestimate him, and that may still be true. On the other hand, this has been festering for several years now, and has been outright problematic if not dangerous for months, and was still allowed to fester until it finally exploded. What were his people thinking? He was here in the Spring, remember, to straighten this all out. But, as I think about it, he actually didn’t have much to say then. And what he’s said recently has sounded suspiciously like what other News Corp and NI people have been saying. So is he just flailing around, or what? Well, I figure one of three things happened last spring. First, he may have learned then how bad this all was, and decided to wait it out, hoping that the BSkyB transaction would get through, and then deal with whatever the fallout was afterwards. It was a calculated business decision, and it didn’t work, but Murdoch is above all else a businessman, and he knows the potential payoffs and costs of calculated risks.

Second, he was outright lied to. But this means that not only Brooks lied to him, but probably his son as well. The first I would believe, the second seems less likely. But stranger things have happened. And it explains why Murdoch, who normally solves problems before they become crises, has been so casual about all this. Third, he’s just dottering around at this point, and didn’t really grasp the significance of any of this. Which would be one of the risks of letting an 80 year-old run a large corporation. But which would also explain quite a lot. This last possibility is one that will probably be concerning News Corporation shareholders the most. If the company founder and largest stockholder is losing it, what do you do? Not that I have a whole lot of sympathy for News Corp shareholders. They’re the ones who continue to allow Roger Ailes to foist Fox News on America.

I do have to say that as a committed news junkie, this is great stuff. And I’m not alone. This has become gripping, the way Watergate was, as Alexander Cockburn reminds us. So much so that it’s easy to forget the pain and suffering that News of the World practices have inflicted on people who already were dealing with a lot of pain and suffering to begin with. There’s a certain irony here that Murdoch would understand if he had any distance from this—he’s been pushing to get approval for the BSkyB takeover because he’s been concerned that its share price would keep rising to prohibitive levels, making any acquisition by News International more expensive. Too bad he didn’t consider what might happen to NI and News Corp share prices if he let this get out of hand.

Anyway, more details regularly, I’m sure. Oh, and by the way, remember when we wondered whether Murdoch had an Internet strategy? Apparently the answer is no.

Mobile phones have been such a transformative technology you would think there would be more stamps with mobile phones on them You would be wrong—this not very attractive stamp from Denmark seems to be it.

Aliens and the Imagination

2011-06-29T00:31:00.002+01:00

What is an alien? Someone not of my own species? Of my own country (cue political flatulence)? Of my own neighborhood? How about of my own planet? How have governments used UFOs? All of these were subject to a lively (but short) series of talks this evening at the British Library, where tonight’s talks focused on Aliens and the Imagination.- We had a pretty good line-up—fantastic, in fact: Gwyneth Jones, one of my all time favorite SF writers; David Clarke, who among other things is the UFO consultant to the National Archives here; bioligist and methematician (and science and SF writers) Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart; film director Gareth Edwards, who brought us Monsters; and writer Mark Pilkington, who also helps run the Strange Attractor blog. As usual, I thought the problem was too many people and not enough time—but these are all really interesting people, and I could have sat there all evening. Too bad there was no time at the end for the speakers to ask each other questions, or for questions from the audience.

There were several strands. The first--from Clarke and Pilkington--concerned aliens, UFOs and the myths that grow up around them, and how governments try to control the memes for various reasons of their own. The most obvious example is the portrayal of aliens and UFOs in American films of the 1950s when anti-communist hysteria was running high. UFOs didn't start figuring in the popular consciousness until the Cold War, when sightings started, and then abductions. Clarke had a clever chart showing the number of abduction claims over time, and they spike during years when major alien films are released--Close Encounters, ET, Independence Day. Pilkington's work, especially in his book Mirage Men, relates to the use of the UFO story by governments, which they did in spades. Clarke, who has had access to the Ministry of Defence files on UFOs (which now reside at the National Archives), provided an entertaining history of aliens in popular culture from the cold war up to now--there's a lot there. What he didn't mention in much detail, probably because of time, is the continued overwhelming popularity aliens have had, and continued to have, in the visual media--films and tv shows in particular. Take o look at the top movies of all time (to date, anyway)--there's a whole lot of fantasy and SF in there, and quite a few about aliens, friendly or otherwise.

Cohen and Stewart stole the evening, however, with a double act they clearly enjoy giving on the evolution of life in the universe. We're thinking about it all wrong, they said--humans are the anomaly, and we shouldn't be using ourselves as a standard for anything biological. Their thought experiment is if you rerun life on earth, would you get humans? No, pretty emphatically-in fact, you're unlikely even to get vertebrates. If you look at life on earth, you find certain aspects of life recurring over and over again, independently--flight, for example, or fur, or sexual reproduction. Other things, like bipedalism, arise only once. So what you'd be looking for if you were looking for life elsewhere is those universal aspects of life. And humans aren't likely to be one of them--so we should give up thinking that intelligent life out there would look anything like humans, and start thinking about what we can infer about what life might really look like. Intelligence (or exelligence, in their term, referring to intelligence that that extends itself artificially--and so far, we're the only example of that) is likely to exist somewhere else too, given the many examples that we find on earth. In fact, they happily concede that earth is full of animals that manifest intelligence--just not exelligence. But that may exist elsewhere, and there's no reason that it needs to derive from a life form anything like humans.

Edwards, who was the draw of the evening given the relatively younger age of the audience, had a great time telling us all how he made Monsters. And he had lots of filmclips showing how he put it all together. It was a small operation, apparently, from what I can remember of the reviews when it came out--Edwards pretty much did all the CGI himself, and boy, does it look neat. Everyone loved this movie, and now I think I understand why. The aliens, who look like a cross between an octopus and a crab, look great. I have to see this movie. For those of you who have seen it, those waving tentacles at the gas station? Think of a rope in a weightless environment--that's what he used. Edwards said he started out wanting to make a movie in which the aliens really did look like nothing else that had been on the screen--and he failed. At one point, he even wanted to release the film without showing what the aliens looked like, but then he realized that that was a really stupid idea. Gotta see this film.

Jones was late, sadly, because a lightning strike stalled her train from Brighton, but she did get there eventually, and did a reading from a human/alien sex scene from her great book White Queen. Much of Jones's work concerns not just how humans deal with alien contact, but how the aliens do as well. Her trilogy on aliens arriving on earth--White Queen, North Wind, and Phoenix Cafe--deal with the Aleutians (as they are called for reason too complicated to explain here) and their impact, as do many books on alien visitation. Jones does something very few writers succeed at, though, and that's making the aliens characters of comparable depth and importance throughout the series. It's an amazing set of books.

Aliens have been a recurring theme in the science fiction of the post-war decades, and like other memes, often represent the political and cultural world that surrounds their literary or celluloid creation. We see ourselves in them--how can we not? But sometimes--as in Jones' work, or what Edwards has come up with on film--they move beyond that, into the realm of the near mystical. That's not right, of course, because their being alien to us means nothing, really--like us, they derive from the particular construct of the worlds they evolved in in the first place. Otherworldly is a better term. And they show us ourselves in a new light, as they're meant to from a literary standpoint. Let's hope that when we run into them for real, we're a bit more mature as a species than we seem to be at the moment. As Clarke mentioned, in popular culture aliens are here to either enslave us or to save us--but life is always more complicated, and if we ever really do meet aliens, they will be too.

Palin agonistes

2011-06-10T21:51:00.004+01:00

I have this rule--it's not really mine, it's from some columnist and I just can't for the life of me remember who it is, but I owe him or her a huge debt of gratitude--to resolutely not read any stories that have the words "Sarah" and "Palin" in the headline. It's proved to be a remarkably good rule. It saves me a lot of time, and generally keeps me in a better mood. It turns out to be very adaptable too. It works just as well with the words "Cheryl Cole," or "Donald Trump," or "Newt Gingrich."

But when I saw a story with the words "Sarah Palin" and "Margaret Thatcher" in the same headline, I had to break the rule. How could I not? Sarah wanted to drop in say hello to Margaret when she visits London next month. Why she's visiting London remains a mystery to me, and that's just fine. But then it turned out that it just wasn't going to happen.

According to the Wintour and Watt political blog,

This is what Palin told Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times:

I am going to Sudan in July and hope to stop in England on the way. I am just hoping Mrs Thatcher is well enough to see me as I so admire her.

It appears that the former prime minister has no intention of meeting the darling of the Tea Party movement. Andy McSmith reported in the Independent this morning that Palin is likely to be "thwarted" on the grounds that Thatcher, 86, rarely makes public appearances.

It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher's frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:

Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.

Cue the predictable freak-out on the right, led by, of course, "Rush Limbaugh," who claimed he drove Thatcher around in a golf cart once, or something.

What none of these dimwits seems to be aware of is that Thatcher has dementia, has had it for years, and it's getting progressively worse. She's 86, after all, and, even though I detested her politics, I agree she deserves a little dignity. Palin is the opposite of dignity. Alex Massie sums up the situation nicely.

Palin apparently has no desire to meet with David Cameron, which tells you something right there, and which probably comes as a relief to Cameron. Nadine Dorries, predictably, is a Palin fan. Maybe they can hook up.

Utopias and other imaginary worlds

2011-06-07T00:35:00.002+01:00

What makes a good Utopia? Are there minimum critical success factors that would allow the vagaries of human nature to be overcome? Does it mean a four day work week and personal jetpacks? A permanent rustic rural retreat, with all necessary services being provided by elves? A socialist workers’ paradise—ie, where no one expects to actually have to work? Is one even possible without robots to do all the gruntwork? Is there even a good definition of Utopia? Does it need to accord with John Rawls’ definition of a just society? Do we know what we’re talking about here anyway?

This is all prompted by the highly entertaining and interesting discussion this evening at the British Library, part of their discussion series that goes along with their Science Fiction exhibition. Tonight we had the redoubtable Iain M. Banks (and not, thankfully, Iain Banks, who writes different sorts of books entirely); Gregory Claeys, who has written extensively about the notion of utopias and whose Searching for Utopia has just been published; and Francis Spufford, general racounteur and author of three terrific and totally unrelated books: I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, The Child That Books Built, and Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin. And, most recently, Red Plenty, about utopianism in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, which seems relevant to the topic at hand. Banks is best known for his series of novels set in the future in the Culture, a vast society of shared cultures, races, beings that spans much of the known universe. And the thing about the Culture is that it’s an empire that pretends it’s not an empire. It’s sort of a voluntary empire, and which you’re part of the Culture because you want to be. Not everyone is in the Culture. So what separates the two? (One of my favorite Banks novels is his first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, whose protagonist resists the Culture, and is regarded as heroic by the Culture for doing so. The other thing about the Culture is that it's equally shared between animate beings and machines. And since everything manual is done by machines, often very smart machines (like the great ships, some of whom are some of the best characters in modern fiction), it is kind of a utopia.

So, the obvious question—is the Culture Banks’ vision of the closest we’ll ever get to Utopia? Well, no, actually to Claeys, who actually teaches the history of political thought at Royal Holloway, and has been looking at Utopias for years. Notice the capital U, to distinguish it from lower case utopias, which Spufford suggested should be regarded as a direction, not a destination. But to what? Well, Claeys suggested, after a thorough review of what Utopia was not (a literary tradition, a branch of theology, a state of mind, or a synonym for social improvement), he proffered that it's a postulation about how to improve the social order. That "social" is important--utopias are always communal affairs. That question came up in the Q&A later on, in fact, when someone offered the notion of an individual utopia--this was flatly rejected by all three panelists. Moreover, it's not just communal, but also egalitarian.

Claeys's second fundamental criterion was that Utopias be plausible. He made anumber of interesting points about this, including that when Thomas More wrote Utopia influenced by not only the European monastic tradition, but also by the fact that a number of reports about life in the New World was already affecting the European view of the world. More wrote Utopia not as an imaginary world, but as a world premised on what he thought was plausible about how the world worked. These concepts were not only imagined, they were discovered, according to Claeys.

There's a third point, which came out following a question from Spufford, or a comment, really, in response to Claeys's introduction--that Utopias are also transformative. They're supposed to be improving--that's the point. There's a moral aspect to Utopias. (This may leave out the Culture, then.) Utopias represent what we have lost, before the corruption that took over, before the Fall, and it's what we have to figure out how to get back to. I don't know, I know Claeys said that Utopias aren't theological, but he sounded awfully theological himself when he said this. Not that I don't agree--I do.

So how does does Science Fiction fit into all of this, since we are really talking about two different genres here? Well, according to Claeys, everything changed at the end of the 19th century with Verne and Wells and the notion of a scientific understanding of how the world worked, a time when a scientific understanding came to underpin notions of progress, and notions of how to organize society. Plus, at this point you also had Evolution as a factor in this scientific approach as well, and suddenly you're extending history by not just centuries, but millions of years. This changes things.

Banks then went off on a bit of a discourse on how he came to write the Culture novels. He wanted something a little more American than what British SF writers were putting out at the time he was growing up was "dreary," and he wanted something with a little more, well, pizazz (my words, not his). More to the point, he wanted something where the folks who ran everything were the good guys. A more interesting comment, which will make more sense to those familiar with the novels than not, was his puzzlement that in all these novels of the future, everything had moved on--except for economics. But what he was rally interested in was reclaiming the moral high ground of space opera for the left. What Banks created, according to John Clute, was a "post-scarcity society," where people still disagreed, but but there was less to disagree about. Oh, and everyone could genetically modify themselves to boot. Spufford noted wryly that any cuulture that required its inhabitants to genetically modify themselves to remove bad instincts sounded pretty anti-Utopian, in fact.

Everyone was great, except Spufford spoke into his chest a bit too much. Claeys is this academic guy who looks and sounds like an academic guy, Banks sounds like a Scottish science fiction writer who also writes pretty dark "literary fiction" and a pretty good book on Scotch Whiskey too. He was also quite funny. Spufford was a genial and inquiring host who moved things along nicely (except could never make his mind up on who to call on for questions). But in retrospect, it was Claeys whow defined and carried the evening. Banks was great fun, and the discussion of how the Culture novels came to be was interesting--but, actually, not as interesting in some respects as actually thinking what goes into a proper Utopia.

Some of the questions were pretty good, and led to some further lively discussion. Communalism kept coming up, including in contrast to Ayn Rand, whom all thee dismissed as pointless in this context. Claeys gave a pretty impassioned defense of why we need some sort of notion of Utopia now, given the fact that we seem headed for a pretty wretched dystopia if climate change continues its inexorable trajectory. We need a utopia as an alternative to this future if we have any hope of avoiding it. Claeys (whom I keep referring to simply because he had more interesting things to say than either Spufford or Banks) also pointed out that a little perspective is always needed--for someone living at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in Europe, how we're living now would pass for Utopia.

There were a couple of questions about the fact that utopias don't seem to work. Claeys disagreed, sort of, pointing out that people generally have lived more communally than we do now. There was some exception taken to this by some in the audience, but he's probably right. We are a communal species, we have evolved that way, and we're likely to stay that way--at least until we start genetically modifying ourselves.

One final good question--where are the utopias now? Claeys thought the European Social Democracy model was as good as we're likely to get. Denmark, for example. Spufford said that wasn't the most exciting prospect he's heard of. Banks then noted that it might be the best that we can get. You know, that's not bad. A good compromise between Khruschev and Rand, as Claeys said. I've got to read this guy's book.

The next plague

2011-06-03T21:45:00.002+01:00

It’s not like a major theme, usually, but writers of near future science fiction usually have one or two major disease outbreaks as one of the plot devices, even if it isn’t a major factor in the story. It’s always fun to speculate on the future, and it’s a good bet that there will be something along the lines of the Kansas City Flu, or the Helsinki Virus, both of which have figured in someone’s novel. Or it could have been the Kansas City Virus and the Helsinki flu. It’s fun to make up catastrophic disease names, and it’s so easy—pick a location, any location, really, and put it in front of the words “flu” or “virus”, and suddenly you’ve got a plausible near-future event. Hey, look, the Seattle flu wiped out one third of humanity. Who knew? But it wasn’t nearly as deadly as the Capetown virus, which took out the other two-thirds.

All good speculative fun, in its own weird way. The problem is that life often has a tendency to imitate art. So now we have this new form of e. coli bacteria (technically, Escherichia coli O104:H4 (STEC O104:H4)) that has killed a number of people in Germany and elsewhere (17 dead, and over 1,600 ill so far, and counting). And, contrary to earlier reports, it appears that the bacteria did not come from cucumbers in Spain. In fact, no one seems to know where it does come from. The German health minister has said that the origin may never be traced. The one thing that seems clear is that it’s related to consuming fresh vegetables, but whether it’s from where and how they’re grown, harvested, stored or distributed is still anyone’s guess. But it keeps killing people, and even in the survivors causes extensive kidney damage--470 people with kidney failure at this point, and who knows where this levels off. And it’s contagious, apparently. And it has now reached the US. This looks like the worst e. coli outbreak ever, in terms of the severity of the reactions, and no one knows where it came from, or how it got to where it is now. Or what happens next, apparently. Science writer Christine Gorman, who writes about this stuff over at Scientific American’s blog, is worried. No, make that scared.

(And just today, here in Britain, and presumably purely by coincidence, a new strain of the MRSA superbug has been found in milk on farms around the country. Great.)

The response thus far has not really been a surprise, although there’s always some other levels of interest to this sort of thing—Russia has banned raw imports of vegetables from the European Union, following on an earlier ban of vegetables just from Germany and Spain. Spain, ruffled by the initial accusations from Germany about the quality of Spanish cucumbers, is now seeking compensation from Germany for lost sales of €200 million a week. In the US, where a couple of cases have been reported, the CDC is in “monitoring” mode.

All of this has a number of implications. If you’re a Public Health person, you have to be wondering how you respond to outbreaks of disease that have never appeared before? It may be that the World Health Organization over-reacted a couple of years ago when it looks as if a new strain of swine flu might take off—it looked pretty deadly at the time. As it turned out, it wasn’t, but governments around the world spent hundreds of millions on flu vaccines anyway (including one with possible dodgy side-effects), enriching as number of pharmaceutical companies further. But it’s not clear to me, anyway, just as a concerned citizen who is not involved in the decision-making on any of this, that the line between justified and unjustified caution isn't pretty darn blurry. This isn’t clear-cut by any means, as opposed to the hysterical nonsense over the concerns about a possible (but never, ever scientifically validated) link between autism and the MMR vaccine.

Then there’s the general issue of the sprawling and increasingly-difficult-to-monitor food production and distribution network we’re saddled with, a network that, on the positive side, manages to deliver generally safe (and often even healthy) food to an extraordinary number of people on a daily bases. Offsetting this is the increasing difficulty governments and regulatory authorities have in monitoring this network, even in places where governments and regulators actually want to do a good job in this regard (like Europe, as opposed to the US, which seems to have largely given up). And incidents like this one are on the increase. While the overall number of outbreaks appears to be lower than in the 1990s, they still appear with depressing regularity. And—wildly speculating here—there seems to be no question but that these are associated with practices at factory farms. These now dominate US agriculture, and are increasingly common in Europe. Anyone who has read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, to take a popular example among many books on the food industry these days, knows the grisly history of regulatory capture of regulators and Congress by the processed meat industry in the US. And since it now appears more likely than not that the current strain comes from cows, that’s where investigators will be looking. Does this mean that factory farms in Europe are the likely culprits here? It’s too soon to tell, clearly—how does factory farm anything relating to cattle somehow get intertwined with vegetable distribution?

So do we look forward to a future where the increased industrialization of agriculture inevitably is accompanied by increasingly virulent disease outbreaks? This seems plausible, and worrying. Up to now, at least, there’s little evidence that these outbreaks won’t keep occurring. What has worked reasonably well up to now (although not perfectly, obviously) has been the regulations under which food safety inspectors operate under. In the US, of course, these have been under pressure for years, and were rolled back significantly under the previous administration—and Obama’s attempts to strengthen them have run into bitter Republican opposition. In Europe, there has been reasonable success in harmonizing the regulations governing all of this, although the issue remains complicated by national borders and domestic agricultural issues.

Once again, there’s that vague sense of helplessness that arises in the face of the corporatization of everything. But there’s reason for optimism—here in the UK, at least, I’m in a position to actually know where my meat and vegetables come from, which is next to impossible to do in the US. And this is still the case in much of Europe, and in those parts of the globe where industrial agriculture has not yet taken root. As Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson and the folks over at Front Porch Republic keep reminding us, we need more localism than we have now, and we need to figure out how to get it back in those areas where it’s been lost. In Britain, at least, that’s still possible in a number of domains, including food, and this remains true in many parts of Europe as well. What this most recent outbreak shows as that the international intertwining of the food system is far enough advanced to provide instant global infection in the right circumstances pretty much anywhere—Germany has some of the most effective food inspection regimes out there.

It’s not the Kansas City flu yet. But unless we figure out a way to get a sensible combination of localism and globalization than we have now, the odds are not moving in our favor. There are reasonable justifications for both processes to continue, but the trend at present remains more global than local, and we need to reverse that somehow. The harder part for most people, in the US anyway, particularly in urban areas, will be to reconnect to the local. Unless we can do that, the risks of a real Kansas City flu outbreak along the lines of an even more sever e. coli outbreak will continue to hang over us. Maybe it’s just assumed that this is a price we’re willing to pay for the relative efficiencies (and environmental consequences) of the modern industrial agricultural system that generates an increasing proportion of our food. But I don’t remember being asked.

Who owns the story of the future?

2011-05-25T01:12:00.001+01:00

Back to the British Library this evening for another interesting panel discussion as part of their Science Fiction series, this one on “Who owns the story of the future?” Given the extent to which we’ve seen the media get compromised by corporate ownership over the past two decades, at least in the US, this turns out to be a really good question—where do the narratives come from that we tell ourselves to make sense of the world as it is today, let alone of the future. And one that people seem to be interested in, given that it was literally a full house. Part of that may have been the fact that two of the speakers were William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, who have clearly thought about these issues in some detail. Plus, they’re old hands at this sort of thing. The other panel members all looked just as interesting, all being writers on what the future may or may not hold.

First, Jon Turney, the moderator, has edited The Rough Guide to the Future. Mark Stevenson has written An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. And economist Diane Coyle has just published something that is sure to go on my reading list—The Economics of Enough (reviewed here by Fred Pierce). I haven’t read any of these, I have to say, so this was a bit of an adventure—going to talks with people you’ve never heard of can be a dicey proposition. On the face of it, Coyle appears to be genuinely frightened of what the future might hold, whereas Stevenson, I imagined, might be pretty chipper about things, a representative of the Matt Ridley view of the world.

So we started out the evening with a number of possible narratives—since that’s what we’re dealing with here, the control of the narratives that will emerge as the future unfolds. My view is we’re already overwhelmed with narratives right now, which is one of the reason there is so much bad information out there. It’s easy to blame the internet, but it’s also the case that Peter Medawar’s caution years ago of the dangers of educating people beyond their abilities for rational thought (somehow the US Congress springs perhaps too easily to mind here) needs to be kept in mind as well.

But there was very little of that sort of discussion early on. In fact, the entire first half of the evening was spent talking a lot abut “progress.” Not that it wasn’t interesting, but it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. Matters were not helped by there being five people up there on the stage, one of them (Turney) trying to make sure that everyone had a chance to say something edifying. Four panelists is just one too many. Nor by the fact that Gibson, who was clearly jet-lagged (and admitted it apologetically early on), which meant he was even spacier than usual—which is already pretty spacey. This didn’t prevent him from making some substantial offerings, but still, he didn’t seem to be on top form. Then there was Stevenson, who is indeed of the Matt Ridley school of things have never been better, and we should stop being cynical, because we can fix whatever it is, or something. And who likes to talk.

It started out well, with Turney getting everyone to talk about writing about the future. Coyle had an interesting point about economics being more speculative than science fiction. Doctorow set one of the themes for the evening by taking about his next novel, which will be sort of an anti-Cormac, where people in a disaster scenario actually help each other out. He hates that meme where disaster brings out the worst in everyone, On that, Doctorow and Stevenson had one of their few agreements of the evening. Coyle also made an interesting point about Steampunk—it represents a nostalgia for the Victorian era as a time of optimism about the ability of technology to handle the future. Gibson, as is his wont these days, pointed out that Science Fiction writers actually haven’t been very good at predicting the future.

The rambling “progress” discussion was probably well-intentioned when Turney began it, but it went nowhere, sadly—or rather, too many places, some of which were interesting, but many were not. Coyle noted that an interesting aspect of the present is the amount of pessimism around, even though in many respects a number of things have never been better. Her example, which it’s hard to argue with, is that ten years ago no one in Kenya had a mobile phone, and now nearly everyone has one, and it’s difficult to actually predict what the implications of that might be. Fair enough, and Stevenson chirped right in, with further comments on the dangers of cynicism. Doctorow was having none of it. Doctorow, getting back to the Victorians, commented about the difference being that Victorians being able to deal with materials where the could bury their mistakes—we can’t do that now. This morphed into a barely semi-interesting discussion about whether we’re drowning in information or not, with the term “immortal ephemera” sounding good and surfacing a number of times. But “progress” kept coming up. Doctorow’s point was that it’s a loaded term, with a fair amount of baggage—the fact that people live longer in many countries may or may not be progress. The term that seemed better to Doctorow was “accumulation.” Stuff improves, yes, but as Doctorow pointed out, progress hits local maxima pretty quickly—we were able to improve the amount of calories per acre of soil, for example, but then hit a wall that we haven’t been able to move past for several decades. “Progress” is a very important SF meme, but what SF is particularly good at is exposing some of the delusions behind the myth of progress.

Coyle commented that in terms of the future, markets are the best—in fact, the only—mechanism we have for betting on the future, and it’s pretty short term betting, 25 years max. Gibson’s last several books have been about the present, in part because he said he’s finding the future, well, too hard to predict. The present has such complexity that it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of long term betting on the future that was common in, say, the 1950s and 1960s, the earlier ‘golden age” of SF writing. Heinlein’s History of the Future couldn‘t be done today—nor, as Doctorow pointed out, could Asimov’s Foundation series. All these writers from that period—whom Gibson and Doctorow referred to as “the uncles”—had a sense that history was orderly, or at least that future history would be. No one has that sense now—technology moves too fast, and is too unpredictable. Developers of technology never really know what the impact of any particular technology is going to be when it’s introduced—it takes time. The automobile, as someone in the audience pointed out, transformed the lives of millions and the landscapes of the planet—and also has the potential to lead to mass species extinction, as Gibson pointed out, and has created the database nation, as Doctorow commented. Gibson had the best one-liner of the evening—“Who knew?” should be the motto of the human species.

All well and good, and much of it interesting, but a bit off topic—not much so far about owning the story of the future. So when Question Time came around, I asked about the competing narratives that we’re all dealing with now, and this actually worked—they started talking about this, which was good. Doctorow thought there were two at the moment—the “authenticity” narrative, in which we’re all gong to bond through the internet to make the world a better place as we all empower ourselves, and the “Astroturf” narrative, where we actually just withdraw into out own personal Las Vegas or something. I couldn’t tell you why he called them that. But there was some good discussion around this whole meme of narratives—this is when Gibson noted that there is no future with a Capital F any more. This then led to some further questions and comments form the audience that there didn’t seem to be any big themes any more. There was some discussion around this point, and Doctorow and Gibson seemed to suggest that this wasn’t really true—it’s just that, again, stuff just moves too fast for the bid idea concept to remain stable.

So a fair amount of good discussion after all, even though much of it was all over the place. Well, that’s what’s good about these things—sometimes they just open up into something completely unexpected, and you end up in a completely different place from where you started, and you’re not sure how you got there, but it sure was interesting. It wasn’t quite that this evening, however, but might have been with one fewer person on the stage. When you keep trying to make sure that everyone gets and equal chance, that tends to limit the flow of conversations. And these are people whose conversations I want to hear—that’s why I came in the first place. So one fewer would have helped, I think, and that could easily have been Stevenson, who likes to hear himself talk, with no loss in the quality of discourse. I actually would have liked to have heard more from Turney, who seems like a bright guy with interesting things to say, but clearly felt bound by the moderator’s role of not actively participating. Still, time well spent.

“How to build your own industrial civilization”

2011-05-24T21:55:00.002+01:00

So, what sort of machines do you need to create an industrial civilization—kind of like the one we have now, but more sensibly sourced. I remember taking a sociology course years ago where we started out with a similar question, although we conceived the question more broadly—what does civilization as we know it rely on? The answer then (decades ago, before the impact of The Whole Earth Catalog had been felt) was something along the lines of “technology.” But this is a much better question. We rely on machines for all sorts of stuff, s till. Yes, yes, we tell ourselves we’re in a post-industrial economy and all that. Right. These guys have thought about this question, and you know what? You need 50 machines—“The Global Village Construction Set.” A Meccano or Erector Set for grown-ups, with some further but important constraints: “Open Source - Low-Cost - Modular - User-Serviceable - DIY - Closed-Loop Manufacturing - High Performance - Heirloom Design - Flexible Fabrication.” No Tech Magazine has the scoop. Here’s who they are. And here’s their blog. Now get to work.

ht—Climateer Investing

Out of this World

2011-05-21T00:20:00.005+01:00

The good folks over at the British Library, bless their hearts, are having a substantial exhibit that starts today on science fiction—Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it. This looks great, and it has barely opened. As part of the show, there will be, as is usually the case with any British Library show, a series of events, ranging from talks by interested parties and scholars, to films, to musical events —including George Clinton.

The talks look excellent, and if this evening’s was any indication of how these will go, I expect to have a really good time attending some of them and providing updates. This evening’s session, with the same title as the exhibit but the subtitle “Why Science fiction speaks to us all,” had a stellar line-up: Erik Davis, China Miéville, Adam Roberts, and Tricia Sullivan, all moderated by Sam Leith, the former literary editor of The Telegraph. Davis has written some very interesting books on culture and technology (including Techgnosis, which is also the name of his blog). Miéville has written some of the best SF/urban fantasy of the past decade, and his most recent but one novel, Kraken, was a cracker. Sullivan was nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award this year (which Lauren Beukes won for Zoo City, but Sullivan would have been a worthy winner too, with Lightborn). Sullivan (a previous winner of the Clarke award, like Miéville) is an American who lives in London (like me, but that’s as far as the analogy goes). Roberts has, among other things, written the Palgrave The History of Science Fiction. So this had potential.

As always, the problem is how do you steer four pretty bright and interesting thinkers in 90 minutes? Leith did a pretty good job, mainly just be letting everyone hold forth, although he could have reined Roberts in a bit, since Roberts clearly likes to talk when he has an audience. Fortunately, he’s generally got stuff to say. These people have all done this sort of thing before, obviously, and know the drill. It was a wide-ranging discussion. Roberts kicked it off by positing that the Science fiction world changed forever in 1977, with Star Wars. What had been a genre domain of a literature of ideas thereafter became a primarily visual medium that has become the dominant cultural meme of our time. This is not to say that everyone who sees Avatar is going to pick up an SF book for a good read. But Roberts is right—SF has become a visual medium, on film, television, computer games, and the internet. And it’s phenomenally popular. And SF literature is still a genre.

Miéville didn’t think this was necessarily a bad thing, and there was a lively discussion on this that ran throughout the whole 90 minutes. But his concerns were elsewhere—on the sub-generic proliferation of the genres of SF, and its interaction with mainstream fiction, which at the moment is high, but it waxes and wanes. Miéville has clearly given the current status of SF in the scheme of modern literature considerable thought—he is an unusually bright guy, concerned that these themes get a broader platform. In fact, the fact that the British Library is having this exhibit and discussion series is a clear sign that the broader discussion is going on, at least for now.

Davis comes at this from a different view, and my only disappointment of the evening is that we didn’t hear more from him. I really liked Techgnosis when I read it, but that was a while ago, and I should re-visit it. Much of this discussion ended up on the writing of stories, and Davis doesn’t write stories, although he did a really good job of presenting the fan’s view of the impact of SF, especially on how we think about technology. Davis has a long-running concern with how people respond to technology, and how they develop various mythic structures to explain various parts of the world, including how technology runs it. Davis points out that we live in the time of the expert, with people in general feeling increasingly disconnected with the control of the world, and that SF provides a space for people to be able to reclaim concepts that have in many ways been taken over by the professional expert class. Davis is also concerned with the tropes that we use to do this by. He recounted the model of people returning again and again to see the same crappy 1950s SF movies, finding deeper meanings with each viewing. This is how we adapt to this great visual world we’ve created and are in danger of being overwhelmed by—ascribing meaning where and when we can, and developing new archetypes for this increased complexity, abstracting simplicity where perhaps none exists.

There was lots of sensible but interesting discussion, including, inevitably, lots of discussion of Philip K. Dick, whom Davis is preparing a book about, apparently, having been granted access to Dick’s journals. As Davis noted, Dick is now the best-paid dead screenwriter in Hollywood. And lots about Star Wars, which everyone agreed had a dumb, in fact, nearly simple-minded story. As Roberts reminded us, it’s actually also a story that takes place in the past. But what’s futuristic about it are the visuals, and this changed everything. Miéville pointed out that thinking of SF being about the future is a bit misleading—rather, “alternativity” is probably a more appropriate concept to describe why people write SF, and why people read it.

But the real message here was the power of CGI, the impact it has had on the film industry, and how all this has transformed how we see the world. The games discussion, which I was expecting early on, didn’t actually surface until near the end of the session, which was too bad. But even games fit into the trope of the visual displacing the literary. What sort of narrative do games have? Technology, and the ideas underlying it, is no longer the domain of the conceptual, or the scientific thinking behind it—it’s the visuals now, such that, as Davis put it, “the machines become the poetry.” And even as Sullivan noted that even with all the focus on visuals, people still care about the story, you had to wonder. Those of us who are readers do, of course—but do gamers? Probably, at some level. Constructing narratives is a fundamental part of human experience, after all. And where SF is valuable to readers and writers alike is the opportunity to break the narrative in interesting ways, as Dick did. Sullivan asked “what kind of new stories can we be telling?” It’s a good question, not just for SF writers—for any kind of writer. But it’s also the case that the old stories seem to be the ones we love best—that’s why they keep coming back. The best-selling publishing phenomenon of the past decade? Harry Potter. And look how upset many people got when Rowling messed with story structure in the final volume.

There was lots of other stuff too—the appeal (or not) of Transformers (Sullivan has kids just the right age), the internet (and the role of SF fandom in structuring some of the early basic rules of how the internet would be used), the internet’s impact on the publishing industry (Sullivan and Miéville—it’s way too soon to tell). Why do so many readers continue to think of SF as an adolescent genre? (Sullivan—our culture is at a point of adolescence right now—not an answer, obviously, but a more general observation I happen to agree with.)

Future talks look equally good. At the moment, I’m only signed up for some, not all of them, simply because of time constraints. But next Tuesday is a panel on “Who owns the Story of the Future?”, with a solid line-up—William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, and future specialists Diana Coyle, Mark Stevenson and Jon Turney. Looking ahead, we’ve got session on Utopias with Iain M. Banks (among others), Aliens with Gwyneth Jones (among others), and a roundtable with old masters Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, John Clute and Norman Spinrad. Good times ahead, and we’ll have some comments on all.

Which reminds me—the nominations for Hugo best novel have been out for a while, and I’ve been remiss with comments, a situation soon to be rectified.

Why Obama went after Osama, really

2011-05-02T22:06:00.000+01:00

Like most people, I'm mostly glad that Osama is dead. He directly caused the deaths of thousands of people, and indirectly led to the deaths, displacement and exile of millions more. Would Sparky have launched the grand $3 trillion and yet-to-be-paid-for invasion of Iraq if Osama hadn't leveled the Towers? No, of course not. So Osama had a lot to answer for, and while I would have preferred to see a trial, this will do. What I'm having some trouble with are the responses from the right, the ones that question Obama's timing of this exercise. Many of these have been neatly summarized over at Alicublog, where Edroso has his usual fun with the lunacy that emanates daily from the cognitively impaired (check out his Voice column too). Drudge seemed to think it was to do something bad to Donald Trump, that sort of thing.

What is being overlooked here is the obvious, as usual. Much has been made here of the failure of the Royal Wedding planners to invite Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to the wedding of the century, or the millenium, or something. Many commentators seem greatly troubled by this. If that's true, imagine how Obama must feel. This is hugely embarrassing. So, clearly Obama went after Osama at the point that he did in order to distract attention from his grevious failure to receive an invitation to the Royal Wedding, and remove all that Royal Wedding coverage off the front pages of the world's newspapers. And he's been remarkably successful. Simple, really.

A Royal Wedding

2011-04-29T11:38:00.001+01:00

So, like Two Billion other people around the world, we’re still watching this on television. Imagine. Two billion people. That’s like, what, nearly one third of the world’s population? We have some Republican—i.e., anti-Royal—friends who are probably wondering what the appeal of this is. This is an outdated institution in this day and age, right? Apparently not. Anything that can attract two billion people to stay glued to their televisions is worth comment, and, like the institution or not, commands some degree of respect, if only for the spectacle.

It’s a commonwealth thing, to some extent. The commonwealth, after all, includes about one-third of the global population, and it seems to be well represented, not only at the wedding itself, but in the crowds outside. There are visitors (as well as locals) lining the Mall and the other routes the wedding couple will take, separately or together, and they’re from some of the obvious places—Canada in particular, but lots of other places.

And it’s the spectacle, too. This is a big deal. William is, after all, the heir to the throne, once-removed, and Kate is going to be Queen at some point, so the Royal pomp that goes with any such occasion is out in full force. This is a Royal event, not a state one, and certainly not a political one, although it’s taken on its share of political controversy (largely manufactured, but still). So we’ve had the hoo-hah over the fact that Margaret Thatcher and John Major were invited, but Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were not. And we just had Simon Schama being interviewed, in his usual blowhard mode, saying that this was a mistake. Well, no, and who cares? This will pass. (Side note to Tony Blair—the next time you write an autobiography, it’s probably a good idea to not include what you thought Prince William’s thoughts were. Another good point about Will—apparently he can’t stand Tony Blair either.) Thatcher, who, like Major, was invited as a member of The Order of the Garter, declined for reasons of health (advancing Alzheimer’s). Major is there, though, as are members of the current government. And the usual gaggle of royals, with much breathless commentary on hats, and fascinators, and dresses, and the endless guessing on the wedding dress.

Yes, the dress, which no one has yet seen, and we don’t even know who the designer is yet, and this seems to occupy an endless amount of discussion time among presenters. Who knew this was as important as it apparently is?

William in his uniform just pulled out of Clarence House, accompanied by his Best Man, Harry. They look pretty snappy in their military uniforms. William, it should be mentioned, is still serving with the Air Rescue unit of the Royal Air Force, with another couple of years to go, and the happy couple are returning to Anglesey, in North Wales, for the duration of his service.

It’s difficult to look at either Will or Harry and not see Diana in them. And, of course, Diana is the great presence hanging over this entire affair. The contrast between this wedding and that of Charles and Diana couldn’t be greater. Partly it’s just the distance in time—thirty years or so, and all the aspects of society that have changed in that period. The past is a foreign country, as they say. But in this wedding, and how it’s been managed by the Royal family, and in the persons of Will and Harry, one can actually see how powerfully Diana actually changed the monarchy in Britain. And what a good mother she actually was, keeping the kids away from the press as much as possible so that they wouldn’t be forced to endure what she had endured. And she turned out two pretty good kids, who respect the tradition they were born into, but also treat it as it deserves—as a responsibility, but one to be approached in a spirit of service, not duty. But we also have William marrying someone with no connection to royalty whatsoever—a commoner, as we’re constantly told. And not only that—Will and Kate have been living together the past several years up there in Wales, something unthinkable back in the day of Charles and Diana.

So what will they do? Well, as the Royal family has before them, especially Elizabeth (who is now 85!), and Charles, and particularly Anne, service to the nation. The Queen is the Head of State, which Charles will become with Elizabeth’s passing, and which Will will become at some point. And whatever one’s views on the monarchy, one can’t deny that these people take it seriously. I’m reminded of the great essay by Paul Fussell reviewing The Boy Scout Handbook decades ago, in which he remarks that Scouting is one of the last vestiges of the notion of service to others that still manages to have society’s approval. I suspect people feel that way about the Royal family as well. Yes, it’s an outdated institution, but it knows its role, and takes it seriously.

Kate just got into her car, in her gown, followed by her Dad, who is being a good sport, patiently folding the train on his lap.

And now they’ve arrived at Westminster Abbey, out of the car, and it’s a very pretty dress, I have to say. Nice train, too. Lots of lace.

And the flower girls are adorable.

Still, you have to wonder why we care. Well, partly the spectacle, tinged with a bit of envy. Who wouldn’t want to live like British royalty? Minor royalty, probably—out of the public eye. And, let’s face, it, no one does royalty like the British. There are kings and queens and princes and princesses all over Europe, but this is the one we seem to care about. I still remember being at a The Who concert in 1970 at Wolf Trap. I was stationed at Ft. Meade at the time, and we used to head out there for concerts frequently. 1970 was definitely not a good year in America—it was the second year of Nixon’s increasingly divisive presidency, we had had Kent State, and it looked like the country was falling apart. In fact, it was. And Pete Townshend, in the middle of the show, turned to the audience and said, “Don’t you wish you had a Queen?” And the crowd roared.

The British have, and seem mostly comfortable with, what America denies it has—a history. And one of the joys of living here is discovering that history, and the fact that the present is inextricably tied up with the past, and the past is actually thousands of years long. A lesson the British by and large take to heart, but which Americans still have to learn. Perhaps part of the worldwide fascination with this event, with all its pomp and circumstance, actually reflects a desire to stay connected with the past that the institutions of America don’t easily lend themselves to. Fussell was right about this when he commented, in another essay, that American has been spared the embarrassment of titles, thus avoiding the prospect of Sir Casper Weinberger, or Lord Richard Cheney. But that doesn’t mean that the need to such a historical connection is easily filled. Will and Kate are wildly popular in America, as was Diana before them.

And they are now married. That was quick. For a second there it looked as if the ring wasn’t going to go on Kate’s finger, but it did. So that’s that. Just lots of singing and talking now—actually, for another 45 minutes or so.

So off to the Mall to see what we can see!

Trouble in Murdochland

2011-04-11T00:44:00.001+01:00

Rupert Murdoch probably thought that, at 80, he could ride off into the sunset and leave News Corporation in good hands—those of his trusty assistant, Robert Thompson, and his son James, who is being moved to the US from the UK to become the firm’s number three. Murdoch has built one of the most remarkable media empires around through a combination of brashness and acumen rarely encountered in the past couple of decades. (Unfortunately, he’s also created Fox News, a true force for evil and that bane of American politics, but that’s another discussion.) But things are not going so smoothly here in the UK, and it may have ramifications for how the organization develops going forward, and indeed whether it will survive in its current form. Because the long-simmering scandal over phone-tapping by reporters for one of the Murdoch stable of newspapers here, News of the World, now looks set to explode, and it’s not clear the damage can be contained.

The background is this. Back in 2006, police were asked to investigate mobile phone hacking of some members of the Royal Family. There was an investigation, which culminated in the royal reporter for NOTW, Clive Goodman, being carted off to prison, along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. NOTW has since, up until very recently, maintained the posture that this was the effort of a lone rogue reporter, did not have the sanction of anyone in the organization, and should be treated as such. And the police have, up until recently, taken a similar line, indicating that everyone who was targeted by NOTW had been alerted, and really, this was all making a mountain out of a molehill.

But the story kept getting more complicated. The Guardian kept investigating, and eventually determined that it was more like several thousand people whose voicemails had been hacked, and that there were likely more NOTW staff involved as well. And it turns out that a number of people indeed were targeted—certainly in the hundreds. We don’t actually know how many yet. And many of them were Labour politicians, and many of them were just celebrities. Why they were targeted seems pretty obvious—if you can hack someone’s voicemail messages, especially in a culture where people are leaving messages all the time, you can pick up something good for a story—or even better, for leverage for a story in the future. So Parliament hauled some people in, and they testified, and denied everything. Or, if they were John Yates, who headed the police inquiry, they said everything had been done that could be done. Or, if they were Rebekah Brooks, former editor of NOTW and The Sun before becoming head of Chief Executive of News International in the UK, and who is very close to Rupert Murdoch, they just ignored the Parliamentary invitation in the first place. Given how events are unfolding, she may not be able to ignore another one.

More recently, this past week police arrested two more people, one an editor at NOTW. There’s also in an interest in a second private investigator, recently acquitted of murder (don’t ask—apparently unconnected, but at this point who knows?) The police have decided—after being thoroughly embarrassed by the half-ass job they did in the first place, and by the fact that it turned out they had received hundreds of inquiries from people who thought their phones had been hacked—to re-open the investigation a bit more aggressively than the last run-through. Police also raided NOTW’s offices, although it’s not yet clear what they may or may not have found.

Then there were all the other, added, dimensions to the story, which meant it not only had legs, it had implications. For one thing, the editor of NOTW at the time, Andrew Coulson, who resigned following the initial scandal, was hired by incoming Prime Minister David Cameron as his principal media advisor. He has since resigned that position too, although for reasons of not embarrassing the government, allegedly, and this may be true. This is a tricky one, because it isn’t clear at this point whether Coulson actually did know what was going on. Moreover, it appears that Labour at the time wasn’t enthusiastic about pushing this either, although it was revealed recently that Gordon Brown wanted an investigation prior to the election, but was over-ruled by the Cabinet Secretary over concerns that it would appear “political.” For another, David Cameron himself is friends with Rebekah Brooks, former editor of both NOTW and The Sun, and currently head of News International’s operations in the UK. Then, just to add a wrinkle of confusion to the whole tapestry, there’s the real possibility that the police may have underplayed, if not bugled outright, the original investigation. There’s enough high dudgeon going around to fill a book, and there will certainly be one at some point.

Then there’s News Corporation’s attempt to buy up the stock of phenomenally successful satellite broadcaster BSkyB so it could fully consolidate its very strong financial results, and not have to wait until BSkyB’s share price became prohibitively high. This decision by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has proved extremely controversial, and it may be more difficult to justify going forward, although Hunt has said he will give a final decision when Parliament returns on 26 April. Because of the weirdness of the laws governing media combinations, it’s not clear whether any of this potentially criminal activity can be a rationale for blocking the transaction. Get this (also from the above-linked article in The Guardian):

But advisers to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, say he is prevented by law from taking the scandal into account when he considers whether it is appropriate for News Corporation to be allowed to buy all of BSkyB. The £8bn merger, which the minister has already said he is minded to approve, is being examined on its impact on "media plurality". However, Hunt's lawyers say that phone hacking cannot be considered in an inquiry as regards plurality. They say it could only form part of a "suitability of persons" test into whether Murdoch and the bosses of News Corporation were appropriate individuals to own BSkyB. That test was designed to prevent pornographers, for example, becoming media owners - but it cannot now be invoked in the case of the Murdoch merger. The Enterprise Act that covers the UK's merger rules only allows one referral on one set of grounds, which means £8bn deal could only ever have been referred for political approval on either media plurality or suitability of persons grounds, but not both.

Confused? So is everyone here. Mayor Boris Johnson, who probably wouldn’t mind if Cameron’s star was a bit tarnished from all of this, has called for a newspaper Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which seems to degrade the notion a bit, but I think I know what he has in mind. Because it’s clear that one of the reasons the police didn’t pursue this as aggressively as they might have earlier on was because of the cozy relationship that was built up between the police and the Murdoch newspapers.

Recently there have been some further developments. Since there’s a whole celebrity circus surrounding this, as some many celebrities were apparently targets (or victims, if you will), some have had the bright idea of doing a little digging on their own. So we have the delectable spectacle of Hugh Grant, of all people, doing a nice turn as a reporter and actually learning something interesting, something that could prove problematic for Rebekah Brooks if it’s true. Possibly David Cameron, too. Of course this has once again become front page news every day, and it’s great sport for media freaks. Scary, too, though. How many of us want reporters—or anyone?—rooting around in the voicemails on our mobile phones?

So this past Friday News International attempted a bit of closure, fessing up that there was indeed cause for concern, since, yes, there was more than one reporter involved in this “unprofessional” practice, and offering compensation to a number of the victims of the phone hackery. Eight, apparently. This can probably be interpreted as a recognition by News International that they have not been able to contain the problem, even though Rupert Murdoch himself said last year that there was nothing there. So Rupert himself is looking a bit dodgy here, although I will say in his defence—probably the only time in my life I will defend Murdoch—that he may very well have been misled. The question now is by whom. It it’s Brooks, whom NOTW and News International have thus far been fairly successful at protecting, then she’s out, friendship with Cameron or no friendship. But it’s still unfolding, so she may be safe.

Where does this leave everything? A bit unsettled, which is certainly not where Rupert Murdoch, who probably thought whether he had an Internet strategy was his biggest problem, wants things. Or James Murdoch, for that matter. The House of Lords, which needs to approve the sale of the remaining shares of BSkyB to NewsCorp, has at least two members—including Lord Prescott, former Labour Deputy Prime Minister, and Lord Oakshott, who was the person who blew the whistle on Tony Blair’s Cash for Honors scandal, and therefore should not be messed with—willing to say at this point that perhaps there should be no rush for approval pending the results of determining who actually knew what when. Then there are the calls in the House of Commons for a complete vetting of the somewhat sorry police investigation back then, and where things stand now. It already appears that some of what the chief investigator told Commons in his previous testimony may not be completely accurate. And what happens with the current News International offer to settle with some, but not others, of the potential litigants will bear watching.

At the moment, there’s no indication that any of them are prepared to end their litigation and take the offer, which News International would dearly love to see happen, since it would apparently establish a limit for damages for future claimants. James Murdoch, in an interview after the announcement, said of the offer that “It shows what we were able to do is really put this problem into a box.” Well, maybe not quite yet. Murdoch, who was off running BSkyB when all of this was taking place at NOTW, may well be the only figure in the clear of any involvement in this. But that’s probably of little comfort at the moment. And Rupert’s thoughts of easing off into the sunset, if he had any? Probably on hold for now. This story still has legs, as they say in the news business.

most this amazing day

2011-04-06T23:44:00.002+01:00

It was a stunning day in London today. I’m sure it was snowing somewhere, probably in the US, but here it was gorgeous the entire day. It was the first day that really felt like spring—the sun shining all day, blue skies without a single cloud, temperatures in the 20s, the girls in their summer dresses, almost, like they just knew, which anyone watching the weather last night would have, eating supper at 7:45 and it still being light out, and a crescent moon just hanging over the rooftops at dusk. All magical. All this gives me a good mood, even more than that. I love autumn, it’s my favorite season, but today was the kind of day that you know just starts off the new part of the year. For the past several weeks we’ve had the flowering trees—the magnolias especially—coming out, and over the past few days we’ve seen this outright explosion of green, with leaves on most of the trees in a race to come out and green the world. And suddenly all the vistas are different--from the windows, from the busses, just looking down the street, everything looks different. It’s lighter later every day, too, noticeably. That’s how we know it’s spring. The world is new again, and life is good.

It hasn’t been that bad a winter, really. The worst of it here was in December—after that it was cold, but not bitterly so, but mostly gray. So we spent most of the winter ignoring the world, spending as much time indoors as we could, just because the outside was so uninspiring. Winter seemed to drag on, but without much interest, and you could feel how, not depressed, just listless, everyone felt. It was palpable. Every spring is a release, of course, but today felt like more than just that—today was the day that you could tell everyone was savoring, because they all knew that this was that day. Living in London, like living in any large city, tends to remove you from the impact of the seasons as they roll merrily along. There is a disconnect with the natural world that needs to be bridged, usually be leaving the city. But today nature came to you, in full glory.

One of my favorite books is The Medieval Calendar Year, by Bridget Ann Henisch. It reminds me that whatever the hardship of the lives of Britons of the, say, 14th century (including the plague, and wars, and kings, and whatever else you can think of), there was a time when living with the seasons, being mindful of both their bounty and their costs, was the natural order of things. Actually, for much of Britain (and most other places), this was the case well into the 20th century. Now it’s still true for some of us, but a decreasing number here as we all live more suburban or urban lives, and I live in a place where, on a good night, I can count maybe a couple of dozen stars. So it’s good to have nature give me a good whack in the head. If I were religious, I would sing suitable praises. Instead, I’ll go re-read cummings’ I thank you god for most this amazing day, and just savor the memory, and hope another comes soon.

The end of an era, man

2011-03-20T17:34:00.002Z

Good old Owsley Stanley, purveyor of the best LSD ever, I’m assured, and designer of, among other things, the good old Grateful Dead’s Steal Your Face logo, as well as much of their sound system and sound, has died. Not from an overdose, as one might expect—Stanley was pretty pristine regarding what he ingested, as the NY Times obituary attests. Rather, from an automobile accident in Australia, where he had lived much of his later life. Stanley achieved legendary status in the 1960s, that best of decades, through his skills in chemical manufacture, but as he always said, he only started manufacturing LSD because he wanted to be sure of what was in it. He only ate meat, too. He is probably best remembered by some as the supplier of acid to Ken Kesey’s trips festivals described hilariously in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which recounted Kesey’s adventures among the psychedelics, not to mention the Hell's Angels, much like an anthropological study written entirely from the right hemisphere.

Stanley managed to find himself, as some would say, at the right place in the right time for his particular skillset. He managed to start making acid for the absolutely right people—rock bands—at absolutely the right time. After 1963, when the original patent expired, anyone could churn this stuff out, and at times it seemed that anyone did. This was back when lots of people thought taking acid was a cool thing to do, and for many people, it probably was. For some, not so much, but that’s true for any sort of pharmacological substance that has a tendency to alter perceptions of reality, alcohol most certainly included.

Stanley’s career during the 1960s and 1970s was one that seems almost dreamlike now—maker of acid and principal sound guy for the Dead. Which meant, presumably, he spent his time on tour with the Dead, and selling acid all over the place. He did, of course, go to prison for the selling acid part of this equation. People seemed pretty pleased with the product at the time, though. Then, of course, that nasty old US government stepped in and banned its possession in 1968. What seems little remembered now is that for decades, LSD had an important role in psychiatric treatment—it was originally synthesized at the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz Laboratories in 1938, and for decades was used by shrinks for treatment of a variety of disorders. It was the drug of choice for therapy, apparently. Cary Grant stunned everyone by revealing he had taken LSD more than 60 times for treatment. Grant thought it was great. He wasn’t alone.

And this was a time when altered states seemed like a groovy idea, and the LSD experience proved to be widespread, and great copy for a media that had little sense of what was going on, other than there was something out there called the counter-culture, which no one really had a clue about. And before it got co-opted by the media and the advertising industry, it did seem like a genuine attempt to develop some alternative modes of living. There was a thriving back to the land movement for a time there. And a thriving lively investigation of “Where do we want to go and how do we want to get there?” types of questions. It’s the same spirit that gave is the transformative The Whole Earth Catalog. Surprisingly, much of this persisted well into the 1970s, particularly in the environmental movement, although without the psychedelics, of course, and the 1960s didn’t really die until the election of Ronald Reagan killed it off in 1980.

LSD died well before that, of course. The threat provided by that age old tension between control and ecstacy resulted in a predictable reaction—attempting to shut down the potential sources of ecstacy. We’ve been through this before throughout the whole of human history, since priests came along, and we’ll go through it again. This tension probably is a characteristic of human culture—as Terence McKenna has argued (in, for example, Food of the Gods), there’s ample evidence that humanity has spent much of its history in various altered states. Our survival mechanisms must indeed be pretty powerful. And what scared people in the 1960s is the same thing that always scares people about any substance that alters perceptions—loss of control. So there was the predictable response from conservative America (and Britain, to a lesser extent) to ban the substance, as if that was supposed to do any good. All it ended up doing, as Stanley feared, was degrade the quality of the merchandise, as they say, and lots of bad trips resulted.

Stanley continued to thrive, because in addition to chemicals, he knew about sound and electronics from his stint in the Air force, and he somehow ended up as not only one of the Dead’s early financial backers, and principal substance purveyor, but also their sound guy, along with Bob Thomas. Stanley’s nickname was Bear, and there’s a Dead album titled Bear’s Choice, which are some of his favorite Dead cuts. A live album, too. The Dead, it should be said, revolutionized live music recording and performance as much as the Beatles did in the studio, and much of that was Stanley. It should also be noted that the Dead weren’t nearly as fastidious as Stanley in their ingestion of various pharmacological substances—Pig-Pen, Brent Mydland, and, of course, Jerry Garcia all managed to OD on something or other. But not Stanley’s acid. (Being a keyboardist for the Dead at times seemed to resemble being Spinal Tap’s drummer, but maybe that’s just with hindsight.)

It was quite a time, and Stanley was in the middle of it, right there in San Francisco. It gave us great music, a new journalism, The Whole Earth Catalog, Jerry Brown, hippie dresses, much better food for a time there, and a level of social concern that has not been duplicated since. That it went sour eventually was not the fault of those whose ideals, or for that matter simple playfulness, drove the period. Culture changes, and the period is now regarded with some degree of amusement, if not outright scorn, depending on your point of view. It’s scary to see how much of the Republican agenda, driven by windbags like Gingrich and Limbaugh, still embodies the culture wars of the 1960s. But they weren’t really wars at all. More like skirmishes. But it’s funny from where I sit now to discover that hippie is now a derogatory term for people who attended Grateful Dead concerts in the 1990s.

There was the real work of the civil rights movement, which was the significant achievement of the 1960s. The rest was driven by, well, what, exactly? Much of the attractiveness of what was termed the counter-culture was that it didn’t really take itself seriously. A sense of playfulness on a societal level, I suppose. Of course, that war and the draft overhung everything, so there were a sizeable number of people who, given the absurdity of that event, weren’t prepared to be serious about much of anything else. Who wouldn’t want to listen to the Dead with a bunch of your friends, all wearing funny clothes, while pondering how cool it was that men were walking around on the moon or orbiting the planet, and wondering if you were going to be drafted the following week? But that time has passed, as these things tend to do. And digging out that old headband won’t bring it back, fun as it was.

It is March

2011-03-15T21:37:00.002Z

Since it's still March, here's this nifty little poem by W.S. Merwin:

It Is March by W. S. Merwin

It is March and black dust falls out of the books
...Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices

When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write

The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses

At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet begun

Welcome to the neighborhood, Saif

2011-03-13T12:35:00.003Z

Dear Saif—

Hey, it turns out that we’re neighbors. Isn’t that great? Not really neighbors, exactly, like living down the street or something, but we do live in the same part of London. We’re in more of a low rent part of town, but still, it’s nice to know that we have the same taste in real estate. Which must be some comfort for you these days, considering the fact that many of your countrymen don’t appreciate your leadership qualities, or those of your father, for that matter. It’s hard to find a decent place to live in London these days, I have to admit, and to have all these other problems too—it makes me feel better knowing that you have this peaceful retreat to come to if, for whatever reason, you may feel the need to leave Libya. Although I have to say there are some issues for you to deal with here in London as well. First there’s the fact that the London School of Economics is now investigating whether you actually wrote your own dissertation. And then there’s that pesky little issue of the large donation to the LSE from your foundation. Of course, things at home look a bit complicated as well, and probably not helped by the support of the Arab League yesterday for a no-fly zone. And boy, what’s with France recognizing the rebels as the government of Libya? What’s that all about? You’ve got a lot on your plate there, Saif! Sometimes it seems like the whole world is against you, doesn’t it?

So Mrs W and I hopped in the car this morning and drove over to your house, just to be neighborly, and to let you know that not everyone in the world is on your case these days. Well, I guess I have to admit I tend to agree with the rebels, who would like to see you and your dad and the rest of your omnivorously greedy family leave, and quickly. But it wouldn’t actually be the neighborly thing to do to let that get in the way of a friendly cup of coffee, would it? So we thought we’d stop by for a neighborly chat. And guess what? You weren’t there! But you know who were? Squatters! Can you imagine? They appear to be sympathizers with the rebels, and they’ve got various flags and posters hanging on the place. Doesn’t exactly improve the tone of the neighborhood, I have to say, and I hope the residents committee will take this up at the next meeting. Are you on the committee? It’s a good way to meet your neighbors, by the way—I heartily recommend it!

Now, I also have to say that Mrs W and I are generally sympathetic to the squatters, not just in your place, but elsewhere in London. London is chock full of big houses owned by people who don’t live there. I’m sure you know the reason for this, since you still (for the moment, anyway) have that doctorate from the London School of Economics. It’s something that we learned when we first moved here in 1998. You may remember what the world was like back then—it was yet another period in recent history when the world looked like it was about to go down the economic tubes. And you know what was happening? Well, all these rich people from various places around the world—Russia, Korea, the Mideast, even some of your own family, I bet—were busy plowing cash into London real estate. Because any time there’s significant economic uncertainty in various interesting places of the world—North Africa, for example—cash somehow magically finds its way into London real estate.

Of course, owning a house in some tony part of London doesn’t mean that you actually have to live there. And many of the owners of these houses—does this include you, I wonder—don’t. They just use London real estate as an easy place to park cash during the duration of whatever crisis is going on. Now, the rest of us who actually want to live here have to contend with folks like you helping to drive up real estate prices to such an extent that it’s virtually impossible for most people to be able to buy anything here. But people like you keep taking that cash—I won’t speculate about where you got it, because that wouldn’t be neighborly—and buying properties here that you have no intention of living in. And it makes much of London unaffordable for most of the rest of us. I’m sure you know all this already, though, so there’s no need to bring it up over a friendly cup of coffee.

So you have to give the squatters credit. They find a house that’s owned by some absentee oligarch or potentate or corrupt family member—maybe even your very large family, Saif—and move into it. Now, London has some interesting laws on squatting, which for all I know go back to medieval times, as many of the laws here do, and it turns out that it’s actually pretty difficult to get squatters out once they’ve set up shop. And I have to say this group of squatters sounds like an interesting bunch—they want to take a lot of your money and give it back to the Libyan people. It was early when we showed, up, though, and we didn’t want to wake them. I did notice that they left their bicycles just lying around in the driveway, though—I imagine that will come up at the next residents committee meeting too. You really have to get involved with that group, Saif, if you end up living here permanently.

Anyway, sorry we missed you. I know you’re busy these days, but Mrs W and I would just love to get together with you and the missus the next time you’re in town. Just drop us a tweet!

Best regards,

Wufnik

Two and a half cheers for World Book Night

2011-03-07T23:03:00.005Z

So Saturday was World Book Night. It was actually an all day thing for most of us, and really started Friday night at Trafalgar Square. This was a big deal—giving a million books away free. What a great concept. I stumbled across this a couple of months ago, I can’t even remember where—probably on one of the SF writer blogs that I hit regularly. So I went and signed up to give away books, free, to anyone I felt like—friends, neighbors, complete strangers. There was a list of 25 books, selected by some sort of panel, and I picked one of my favorites—Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I love the idea of this. Yes, it’s probably at root some marketing thing from the publishing industry, but, at the same time, I don’t care. Just the idea of giving one of your favorite books to someone you know or don’t know, and not knowing what the reaction will be. But I hope, of course, that it’s that same that mine was when I first read it two decades ago—the incredible lushness of the language, the story that sweeps you away, and not a hint of magic realism in sight. It’s one of Garcia Marquez’s masterpieces, right up there with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I picked up my 48 copies on Thursday night.

So Friday night I met Mrs W at the National Gallery, and off we went, wristbands in hand, into the Square, where there was a stage set up for the readings. And it was great. Really cold, but great. Alan Bennett, Edna O’Brien, Philip Pullman, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, John Le Carre, and a raft of others, all hosted by Graham Norton in unusually subdued form. And then Saturday, with 48 books to give away. Actually, I already had a bunch lined up—the good old Orlando Chamber Choir (getting ready for our next concert in two weeks) was having an all-day rehearsal. So on the way down to the rehearsal I stopped off at my local bread place and got a croissant, and started asking around among the people eating their croissants and drinking their coffee if they wanted a free book.

Well, practically everyone there took one, so that was six or seven right there. The Polish guy behind the counter asked me to sign it, but I showed him the signature in the back. Right next to my number, the one I put in every book so it can be tracked, since the whole idea is to pass the book on once you’re read it. So let’s say everyone of my 48 recipients passes it on, and then it gets read again and passed on, and so on. How to change the world in six easy steps. Then on to the tube, where I bumped into someone I knew who didn‘t need a copy, but the woman sitting on the bench overheard and was curious, so she got one too. Then about 25 at the rehearsal. And another eight or so at the pub during lunch. And a couple outside the church where we were rehearsing.

So I ended up back at home with another half dozen or so left, so some went to friends in the building, and one to some friends at lunch on Sunday, and I’m holding one for someone who couldn’t make rehearsal. And I’m down to my last copy to give away. I’m thinking, well, it’s been two decades since I read it, I’ll read it again, and then pass it on. I’ve got a copy (first edition) somewhere, but Lord knows where it is, so this will do. And I like the idea of passing on a copy that I’ve read.

I imagine readers everywhere in London and around Britain and Ireland are doing the same thing. Cataloging who the books have gone to, and since everyone picked their own book, and it’s presumably a favorite, they’re all hoping that all those books will have the same impact as when you or I or they first read it. Because books do that sometimes. I can’t remember who said it, but someone has suggested that of all of humanity’s inventions, fiction tops the list—because that’s the thing that really lets us see inside other people. I can’t imagine that the people on the receiving end of the million books that are being passed out really need that lesson—but every new book just transforms us all a bit more, and hopefully for the better.

But I have to agree with Stephen Hunt on the book selection. This is a pretty mainstream selection. It could have used a little oomph. Not that there’s anything wrong with any the 25 books chosen—some are classics, and all are worth reading. But they’re all sort of mainstream, modern fiction, and the established poet. Philip Pullman got on there because they needed a Young Adult selection, for heaven sake. There‘s a distinct lack of any strong genre fiction--science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, even whatever genre those Stephanie Meyer books fall into. Hunt goes a little overboard, as Steampunkers tend to do, but he does have a point. LeCarre, but no Tolkein or CS Lewis. Garcia Marquez, but not the magical realism. Sarah Waters, but no Susannah Clarke or Michael Moorcock. No JG Ballard, or Iain Sinclair, or Ian MacDonald, for that matter. Seamus Heaney, but no Flann O’Brien. Nothing outside of the mainstream Guardian readership. And while what’s there is fine, much of indeed great, we could use a little boundary stretching here. This is a comfortable list.

So two and half cheers—great concept, great involvement, a great thing to do, and I enjoyed every minute of it. But if we do it again, let’s expand our horizons a bit. Still, a great event.

Note to self: the next time you’re offering a free book to strangers on the street, don’t be standing in front of a church.

SciFi day at Imperial College

2011-02-21T20:53:00.006Z

So on Saturday I wandered over to Imperial College, because the student science fiction association was putting on its annual fest, Picocon, complete with invited writers. And I really wanted to hear Paul Mcauley, of whom I am a fan. I don't know how many Americans have hung out at Imperial, but it's the functional equivalent of hanging out at MIT or Cal Tech. Now imagine the kids there who read lots of science fiction, and you've got the idea. The day went well, except for, well, the other writers, of whom there were two. Each gave a little talk for an hour, and Mcauley's was the most interesting--writing a novel backwards. He described how he came to write his two most recent novels--The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun (both highly recommended). What he did was start out looking at all those great pictures of Saturn's moons that were being sent back from the Cassini Solstice Mission. So Mcauley started wondering how could people live on these moons? Some have water--or ice on top of water. How about live volcanos? Saturn turns out to have lord knows how many moons--at least 30. They keep finding more all the time. Anyway, Mcauley worked out how people actually could live there--and then had to come up with the plot that got them there in the first place. If you think tax dodge, as he said, you've more or less got it. Well, not really. Still, out of this Mcauley conjures up wonders--it's great space opera.

The other writers speaking didn't quite cut it. Kari Sperring was pretty neat, I think, teaching early Welsh and Irish history in real life (under her real name), and her talk was ok, and I suppose I might read some of her stuff sometime, which is fantasy sent in 18th century France. But she sort of blew it in the panel discussion. Juliet McKenna, on the other hand, made me not want to read her stuff at all, but she sure talked a lot during the discussion. And what was the discussion? Pretty much "Steampunk--threat or menace." None of it was helped by the cheerful admission by most of the writers (except Mcauley)--Sperring and McKenna, and two other women fantasy writers, I think, whose names were vaguely familiar--that none of them really knew what it was, hadn't read much steampunk at all, but were all sure it glorified the Victorian era and was a fashion statement at the same time. Mcauley looked vaguely bored and/or embarrassed, but didn't really have much to offer other than some good stories that may or may not have been related to the topic. All of this rolled merrily over the student organizers, who were cheerful and good-natured throughout, and clearly know how to organize a potentially interesting day, if they had more potentially knowledgable people to discuss the topic at hand, I left before it ended, since it was degenerating into sheer verbiage. So good luck with next year.

I did learn something very cool, though, which is that London has put together a proposal for the World Science Fiction convention in 2014. How neat is that? So I'm going to sign up to help out. You can too. Website here.

Remembering Edward Said

2011-02-21T20:51:00.000Z

The recent popular democratic movements in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa would have delighted the late Edward Said, although he would also be properly appalled by the most recent events in Bahrain and Libya. Long a critic of Western paternalism towards the Mideast, he would have been charmed by the fact that the Egyptian people basically overthrew a dictatorship without outside help, and largely non-violently to boot. Of course it’s not over yet, the army is still in charge, and who knows how this will play out. But it’s a vindication of one of the major preoccupations of Said’s intellectual and cultural career—the relationship between Western imperialism and its cultural legacy of hostility to non-Western cultures. That he was able combine this career as a political and cultural activist, particularly on behalf of Palestinian statehood, along with a distinguished teaching career at Columbia (one of his students was Barack Obama), and along with a distinguished career as a music critic, and the creation of one of the most remarkable symphony orchestras in history, is a testament to a remarkable intellect and a remarkable man. Said’s death from leukemia eight years ago (after a 14-year battle) has deprived us of one of the most interesting minds of recent memory. Said was interested in so many things, and has so many impacts on so many fields, that a simple homage can‘t do him justice.

I first came across Said, as many did, through his seminal work Orientalism sometime in the 1980s. First published in 1978, Orientalism laid out Said’s thesis, which continues to prove controversial, that the West continues to portray non-Western cultures—in this case Arabian and other middle-eastern vultures—through the prism of Western imperialism with a Eurocentric frame of reference. Said went further, actually—he argued that the false assumptions underlying American and European views toward the Mideast were used as an ongoing justification for neo-imperialist occupations. As Said phrased it, Middle Easterners were viewed as being either oil suppliers or terrorists. This thesis has been provoking endless arguments over Said’s scholarship since Orientalism first appeared.

But as Said argued convincingly and compellingly through his life, it’s still the case. One of his more remarkable books is Covering Islam, in which he looks at how the middle-east is portrayed in the Western media. It’s a good thing he’s not around to see how many of the popular movements of the past two months have been discussed on CNN and in The New York Times. The former seems to bring every story down to whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood will benefit. The latter seems solely concerned with whether any of this will affect Israel. In both cases, we’re seeing Said’s thesis constantly and disappointingly affirmed.

As described in Out of Place, his autobiography (and one of the most interesting autobiographies I’ve ever read), Said is a product of multiple cultures. Coming from a family of Palestinian Christian heritage who ended up in New York City teaching comparative literature at Columbia, Said is well-equipped to deal with the tensions of carrying multiple cultures and their contradictions. Said describes his early childhood in Palestine, and then we’re off to Egypt, where his family, successful businessmen, moved among other families displaced by the formation of Israel. Said’s tales of growing up in the two cultures of Jerusalem and Cairo is a deeply moving one, as any tale of disrupted childhood invariably is. But it also explains how and why he came to literature, a lifelong passion and career, and political activism, and music.

Said was active in the cause for Palestinian statehood for decades, and took a lot of grief for it in America, where he would receive death threats periodically, and Israel, of course. A firm believer in the two- state solution, he was equally appalled at Israeli intransigence and Arafat’s grandstanding. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council for a number of years before breaking with Arafat, but maintained a lifelong commitment to the Palestinian cause.

For a tribute to Said, see here; for an alternative view, and a particularly negative view of Said’s scholarship, see here; for a response, see here; for a more balanced view of Said’s scholarship, see here; and for a larger set of reactions to Said’s influence across a number of domains, see here. I’m not a trained historian, especially of a region of the world where the main languages are ones I don’t understand, but it does seem that there are some valid criticisms to be made of some of Said’s scholarship—but as Terry Eagleton points out in his commentary, Said got the general overall story correct. It’s difficult to disentangle the criticism of Said from the larger political context in which the Palestinian statehood issue regularly takes place, especially in the US. For example, a documentary narrated by Said about Palestine for the BBC called In Search of Palestine was broadcast in the UK in 1998. The BBC has been unable to get it onto US television. This is not unexpected, of course, and there’s little reason to expect any change in the near future, sadly.

Said was also a prodigious musician, as an amateur pianist, and also as a critic. He was the music critic for The Nation for a number of years, and his reviews for that period are collected in Music at the Limits, which reveals the breadth of his interests. A bit too much opera for my taste, but his observations on pianists are astonishing, especially his observations on the deteriorating genius of Glenn Gould. How could someone with such a rare musical intelligence be so accomplished at everything else as well?

But for all these intellectual influence, perhaps his finest achievement was the result of this friendship with Daniel Barenboim, one of the world’s greatest pianists and most distinguished conductors. The two had become friendly during the 1990s, almost by accident. Both had backgrounds as peace activists in the Middle East. Barenboim has had his own share of controversies in Israel, of which he is a citizen, a fact that did not prevent him from becoming embroiled in a huge political controversy when he attempted to perform Wagner. In 1999 Said and Barenboim acted on an inspired idea—that music really could be used a tool for peace. Together they founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, named after writings by Goethe, who himself had a fascination with middle eastern cultures. The idea was elegantly simple—create a youth orchestra of musicians from Israel and all its neighbors. And they did, and its impact has been profound. The orchestra, originally founded in Weimar (Goethe’s home) but now based in Seville, has been enthralling and enchanting audiences for years.

We are fortunate enough to be at one of the first London performances back in 2004, a concert that was actually a memorial concert to Said himself conducted by Barenboim. It was one of those special lump-in-the-throat moments. We were lucky to get tickets, in fact, and it was classical music groupie’s heaven. I can’t tell you whom we were sitting next to, but there were dozens of conductors and singers and whatnot in the audience—it was pretty edifying to be sitting among all that talent. But what was on the stage was extraordinary, both visually and musically. Visually, because it was an amazing cross-section of middle eastern nations, many in somewhat traditional garb and headgear, many in concert performance gowns and dinner jackets, all playing Western music. And musically, it was a remarkable performance. I still have the program. Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Bareboim conducting from the piano, has never sounded so spirited, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, played by Israeli, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian musicians, none over the age of 26, was sublime.

If Said left no other legacy than this, it alone should ensure our gratitude. As Daniel Barenboim commented on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, its purpose was not so much to promote peace as to fight ignorance. Which seems to be a good summing up of Edward Said’s life’s work.

How to Save the World

2011-02-15T22:46:00.002Z

A couple of years ago we were on holiday out in Devon and Cornwall for a week or so, and on the way back stopped off in Totnes. Totnes is a small town—well, not that small. It has a population of 7,000 or so, a good size for a town. That’s an important point, size, as we’ll see. But it’s a lovely spot, with a fine long High Street that hasn’t been completely taken over by chains, a fine bookstore (always a defining criterion), and, well, just a nice feel to the place, lots of tea shops, and several interesting looking pubs, another good sign. I’ve got an informal barometer for the well-being of a place that depends on some complicated calculus that I couldn’t possibly explain involving bakeries, bookstores, libraries, concert venues, tea shops, pubs, being near the water, and walking. It’s an old hippie town too, which makes it even better. Undoubtedly there’s a vinyl store somewhere too. It turns out my instincts were sound in this case. Because Totnes is one of the leaders of the Transition Towns movement here in the UK, and idea that seems to be spreading like wildfire around the world. In fact, they more or less invented the concept.

Well, more specifically, a fellow named Rob Hopkins invented it, tried it out in Ireland with mixed success, and moved to Totnes several years ago to try it again. Hopkins had this notion that the only really effective response to two apocalyptic trends—global warming and peak oil—would be at the local level. But this would only work in certain kinds of communities. It has to be a community where you can involve people at the local level. It’s really that old “Think globally, act locally” concept updated for he 21st century, when oil is $100 a barrel, solar cells and panels are cheap and getting cheaper, and people are actually willing to try now concepts if they work—planting nut trees around the town to provide free nuts to anyone who wants them.

The Guardian had an article not too long ago that lays out what Totnes has done, and is doing now, and is planning on doing in the future. Hopkins arrived in 2005, and started talking with people. It helped that he had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to see happen, an idea—or set of ideas—that he had developed while living as a teacher in Ireland. Lucy Siegle lays it out for us:

The Transition movement works on the basis that if we wait for government to act on issues such as climate change we'll be waiting until hell freezes over; and if we only act as individuals, that's too little. So it's working together as communities where the real change will happen. In offices on that steep high street, squeezed between the pet shop and a travel agency, Transition Town Totnes was formed, swiftly followed by the Transition Network, to support the growth of the movement outside Totnes.

There are now more than 350 Transition movements, 200 of them in the UK. Last month the first Australian region, Sunshine Coast, became an official Transition Town. Hundreds more communities are mulling over the idea of embracing Transition (they are known as mullers). While there has been some debate among greens as to whether Transitioners are right to put so much emphasis on peak oil, and whether climate change should really be the main driver for change, it is clear that the strategy laid out in the latest Energy Descent Action Plan is one that will protect communities in the event of both oil shocks and climate change (and possibly economic shocks, too). It certainly beats stockpiling tinned food and buying a firearm.

As I leaf through the neat action plan, it brings order to apocalyptic scenarios and creates a vision of how Transition Town Totnes could be in 2030. Some strategies are niche, but some strategies are the stuff of market-town revolution. George Heath ran a flourishing market garden in the 1920s; his son inherited the business, opening a shop on the high street to sell the local, fresh produce. Today David Heath, his grandson, shows me the site of the market garden and large urban greenhouse in the centre of town. Since 1981 it's functioned as one of the town's main car parks. The Transition plan is to convert it back to a market garden by 2030. How close is the town to realising its alternative narrative?

Of course, there’s always someone who is unhappy:

"We did have a German visitor who was very disappointed," says Brangwyn, "because there were still cars in the town and there were no goats on the roof." Totnes hosts an increasing number of Transition pilgrims who want to see what's going on, and, says Brangwyn, "People have different expectations. We're not going to make big visual changes overnight. Transition is ground up, it's about people doing the work for themselves. So the culture has to change first.'

The Transition Town movement is something to behold. It seems to have galvanized action in a way that other green activist movements have not, mainly because it brings everyone in on the action and the planning. And it’s really taken off. They’re all over Britain, and spreading like crazy. Ed Miliband has got the Labour party looking at it as well. Well, Labour needs something, so it might as well go with something sensible instead of their usual claptrap.

You’re not gong to be doing it alone, and that’s the point. It will help, of course, if you live in a place that lends itself to this sort of thing. Here in Britain, there are lots—villages and small towns are pretty much to be found everywhere—it’s one of the things I love about the place. There are always some local farms nearby and these are places where you can usually walk to where you need to go. The scale is right for this. In the US, it’s a bit different of course, but somehow university and college towns come to mind here—there’s a ready stock of people who will want to lend themselves to his sort of thing. The US might be harder in general, though, simply because it’s so big, and it’s moved the production of food so far from where most people live. But you start where you can.

It’s starting to spread, too. There are Transition Town networks all over the place now—the US, New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and there’s even some interest in Japan. The wonders of the internet. I’ve never been to Australia, but I think it’s big, so it might have some of he same issues that places in the US will face. We’ll see.

And there’s even an attempt to develop a Transition Town in the Borough of Brixton right here in London, which I find intriguing. One in Tooting, too. London is a huge city, so doing something like this on a city-wide basis is probably impractical, at least at first. But the whole point of Transition Towns is that they’re small—and what is a city, a proper city, but an aggregation of neighborhoods.

I like this. I’m going to see if anyone is doing this in Camden. This has a lot of promise, I think. And if I ever get tired of London, Totnes looks like a pretty good place to end up.

The future of libraries, part 2

2011-02-09T23:30:00.002Z

The town of Hull, Massachusetts, is a comfortable blue-collar town on the tip of a little cape off of Boston’s south shore. At one time a fashionable resort, more recently it has been dealing with a declining tax base and an increased demand for services. Still, it’s a pleasant enough place, especially in the summer, when it attracts boatloads of tourists for summer rentals and a nice beach community. And it has a charming library, in an old Victorian building reeking with character, with an interesting book collection (some of which celebrates the town’s maritime history) and a fantastic children’s program. It’s pretty much what you want any locally municipal library to be, in fact.

Just like many other towns and cities in America, however, Hull library services have been the targets of cutbacks by the municipal government this past year. In fact, the cutbacks in this particular case were brutal—the annual library budget was cut from $240,000 in FY2009 to just $100,000 in 2010. This represented a 58% budget cut, while other municipal services saw budget cuts in single digits. And not only was this cut more aggressive than other Hull services, it was the largest library budget cut in the state of Massachusetts—only five other communities had cuts that were greater than 10%. As a result, the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners took a rather singular step—it decertified Hull’s public library.

This means that the library is no longer eligible for state monies or grants. It also means that Hull residents no longer enjoy borrowing privileges at neighboring community libraries, including nearby Hingham, which Hull residents used nearly as much as they did their own library. And while residents protested the municipality’s decision, the voters of Hull failed to override the municipality’s budget, which left the budget intact, with its draconian cuts. Bake sales and Harry Potter readings won’t be sufficient any more. Hull now has the distinction of being the only Massachusetts town or city without a certified public library.

So why would the folks who prepared and submitted the FY2010 budget be willing to go after their own library so aggressively—more aggressively than any other community in the state? Well, it’s a pretty blue collar community, with a fair number of retirees—not that this means anything in and of itself. So this is descriptive, not explanatory. It may be that it’s not a very well-run town, and the folks who prepared the budget just don’t really know what they’re doing. It may be that own leaders have it in for the town librarian—who doesn’t actually appear to be all that effective if he can’t prevent these kinds of cuts. But this is all speculation. And it’s not as if the town leaders lacked support for their proposals; voters had the opportunity to override the proposed budget—and chose not to.

In some respects, Hull is lucky in that it still does have a library. Libraries are closing at a record pace in the United States, and there’s no sign that the trend is slowing. In fact, given the trouble that municipalities find themselves in as a result of falling tax revenues, it’s likely that the cuts will accelerate. The Charlotte, North Carolina library system announced $2 million in cuts last May, following $4 million announced in 2009. New York City nearly implemented $37 million in cuts, but backed off at the last minute. Philadelphia wasn’t so lucky—the entire Free Library system actually closed, but was able to re-open following some emergency state funding. In Boston, the city’s plan to close some libraries entirely were ultimately canceled following threats by state lawmakers to cut off state funding if the closures proceeded (although, to be fair, the state didn’t offer to cough up extra state funding—in fact, it was the state cutting funding in the first place that precipitated the threatened closings).

There have been some exceptions to this trend, of course, but that’s what they are—exceptions. And it’s not likely that the recent elections are going to be encouraging to of free library services around the country. Unlike here in the UK, where there is a public law that requires local councils to provide library services (although what counts as minimal service is a but hard to say), there is no such federal law in the US, certainly, and it’s hard to find any such similar laws in the US at the local level. So we know what’s coming. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for decision-makers at the state and local level these days. Cities are literally broke, and, like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, are actively considering filing for bankruptcy protection (yes, cities and town can do that under Chapter 9 of the US Bankruptcy Code). And governors are facing some painful choices. Some of these folks are just plain batshit crazy, like that goofball up in Maine, but many are dedicated public servants who want to do the right thing, and are being squeezed. Still, you can see how library services are easy targets.

Not that the law in the UK is providing much protection these days, and the outlook for libraries is now considerably worse than when I last posted on this topic. The new Coalition government has instituted a wide ranging series of budget cuts, which are resulting in considerably less cash flowing from Westminster to localities. And localities are responding as you might expect--slashing library budgets right and left. At present, there are something like 375 libraries threatened with closure around Britain, although the number could well be higher. It’s hard to keep track. Oxfordshire seems prepared to close down 20 out of 43 libraries. Gloucestershire seems set to close 11 libraries, as part of a 43% cut to the library services budget. This pattern is being replicated all over Britain.

It’s fair to say that the proposed cuts of library services, and the outright closure of libraries, seems pretty draconian to many of us. Yes, there’s a budget crunch, but it’s no worse than what’s happening to states and municipalities around the US—some states are nearly bankruptcy, and many municipalities already are in everything but name. But here in the UK there’s an emerging movement to stop this in its tracks—not that there aren’t some libraries that should be closed, but the choices here should not be as draconian, or as binary, as authorities would have us believe. The estimable Camden New Journal reports that the London Borough of Camden, where I live, is to cut 20% of its library budget, and has recently proposed that users make a choice among the following:

Users will be asked whether they would prefer Swiss Cottage Library to shut down completely, five smaller libraries to close or a 40 per cent opening hour reduction across the board.

Well, this sounds pretty dire, and I would happily choose none of the above. But a number of questions arise when I ponder this—first of all, who made these the only choices? I know the Borough is under pressure to cut stuff, because going on in the article I read this:

The suggestions are part of a consultation package, unveiled exclusively to the New Journal ahead of the launch today, aimed at finding where regulars think £2million worth of cuts should be made.

Labour councillors insist they have been forced into making cuts by government demands to cut between £80m to £100m of its overall budget.

The consultation package states that a further £500,000 could be saved if they reduced the new book budget by 40 per cent, and that a further £100,000 could be found by raising the levels of fines for overdue books.

Other suggestions include using volunteers instead of staff, handing over the management of the centres to Friends groups, and freezing spending on computers and furniture.

OK, none of this sounds optimal, but it appears that at least there’s been a little bit of thought involved here. But then I go on and discover that in 1998, the year we moved here, the Borough was attempting to close libraries as well:

Camden Public Libraries Users Group chairman Alan Templeton said: “Unfortunately, the good library service of the early Camden years has been continuously eroded. The history of Camden has been punctuated by the closure and attempted closure of libraries. In 1998, Camden attempted to close three small libraries as the first phase of a larger closure programme. As a direct result of the 1998 battle, there has been enduring mistrust of Camden Council’s intentions with respect to its libraries. That battle was bitter and questionable tactics were used by the council. The wounds received, on both sides, have not really healed and the council has decided that it is time to put matters right – get the closures out of the way, once and for all.”

And it turns out that Camden is not really helping its argument out when we discover that they’re spending £25,000 to hire consultants to monitor the results of the poll. Say what? We can’t find some volunteers to do this?

It gets better, of course. Because it turns out that Camden isn’t only threatening to close libraries (including the library closest to where Labour Leader Ed Miliband lives.) It’s building one, too, at considerable cost and controversy. And then you remember why local councils take quite a lot of abuse—it’s not clear that they always know what they’re doing. Yes, it’s a thankless job, but still, a bit less duplicity would improve everyone’s mood here.

Well, it’s good to see that there is quite a lot of concern over this issue, although in the near term it’s not clear that much can be done to stop the bulk of these cuts. But people are angry, and taking action. People who like libraries are ornery, smart, and wily, and we know how to the stuff done, like mobilizing a community. But it’s going to be tough, given the fiscal realities. It’s enough to make me think about moving to Vienna, that well-known city of the future.

Simon Jenkins isn’t necessarily convinced. He’s sympathetic, of course, but points out the same thing I mentioned the last time I posted on this—libraries are losing patrons:

The trouble is that a dwindling number of people exist in the gap between those who are not remotely interested in books and those who can find literary stimulus without the intercession of the state. In the galaxy of possible cuts to local services, the closure of perhaps a fifth of London's neighbourhood libraries may be sad but does it really constitute what Philip Pullman calls, in the argot of his trade, "the darkening of things"?

For older readers, libraries are like cod-liver oil, Hovis and branch-line steam trains. They evoke nostalgia for lost youth, even if few can state when they last borrowed a book from one. I hesitate to suggest that applies to most of the celebrities who gathered for last Saturday's "shh-in" for Save Our Libraries Day. The truth is that library visits have fallen some 20 per cent over the decade and book borrowing by a third.

Libraries aren’t the only thing facing reduced budgets, of course, and it’s not as if Councils around England have it in for libraries in particular, although some may—there’s enough anti-intellectualism to go around these days, both in the UK and the US, although thankfully there’s a lot less of it here. But these are not happy times for library lovers anywhere in the US or the UK. I suspect the carnage will be greater in the US, simply because the US already has a venerable history of book censorship, like the UK—but the UK pretty much gave that up after the Lady Chatterly decision, whereas the forces of censorship are alive and well throughout the US. So that make me think US libraries are a lot more vulnerable. I’d be happy to be proved wrong here, of course, but I’m not optimistic.

Well, what about privatizing the libraries? Would that help? Actually, I’m not sure, and have to say that at present I’m pretty agnostic. We belong to a private library, The London Library, and it’s great. Not cheap, but great nonetheless. But it’s not a profit-making enterprise, nor should it be. And that’s the rub. It’s not clear to me that library services should be a private function. Like many other domains, there’s probably a healthy debate to be had here, but to the extent that we’re having it at all, it’s not exactly under optimal circumstances. But it looks as if there’s a test case being run even as I write, but it’s too soon to tell whether this will work out. But I have to say that I was surprised to learn that a private company is the fifth-largest library system in the US. Ironically, the community described in the Times story above saw no actual funding threat to the libraries—they just wanted to try it out. But, as the article makes clear, passions are already running high. I’m trying to keep an open mind here, but I admit I have to work at it—it just sounds like a bad idea. But why? It’s presumably occurring under a contract with the municipality that probably prevents the company from doing bad stuff, like eliminating certain kinds of services, but I have to say I don’t know. Librarians certainly think it’s a horrible idea, and they may be right.

Jenkins points out something that I wasn’t aware of, though:

I can just recall when the local library was privately supplied by Boots the chemist, run at the back of the pharmacy and charging tuppence a week per book. They lasted until 1966, when they were finally run out of business by ratepayer libraries. There were gloriously musty rooms lined with books at the back of the chemists, where adults would gather and chat over the latest best-seller for hours, while I was allowed my weekly Arthur Ransome.

Wow, so that’s what passed for libraries back then. Well, not exactly. There have been public libraries for decades, including Carnegie libraries, all over England. I imagine there was an expansion of library services over the decades, and now we’re facing the retrenchment. But Jenkins goes on with what I think may be an interesting suggestion:

Besides, the free supply of a product or service by the state clearly drives independents out of business, none more obviously than public libraries have done to private libraries, bookshops and now music stores. I am not clear how that helps the cultural life of the nation, but the state monopoly on book lending is clearly failing to sustain demand. Unlike bookshops, libraries are shut much of the time.

Libraries should be a gift to the Big Society movement, which in this case should be the small society. Books are classic recyclable products, as the vitality of second-hand bookselling shows. They are things people lend, exchange, buy, sell and dump on others. Two-thirds of books are bought as gifts, fuelling a natural market in their re-use. Many booksellers survive on people giving them stock for free.

It cannot be beyond our wits to marry bookselling and book borrowing. If a lending library could once have been part of a chemist or W H Smith, why not now? Perhaps it could go into partnership with a local coffee bar, as in one I visited in California. If a community wants to keep its library and is ready to use volunteers to keep it going, let it. Leave it free to levy a parish-style local tax to do so, as for parks and gardens. It is wrong that the unions should have a stranglehold on library employment, which merely increases the chance of their having to close.

Well, I think he’s dead wrong on that last sentence, but the rest of it is actually sort of an interesting idea. There’s a lot of fear about using volunteers. But if a community decides that it’s the library or the ambulance service, which it may be on some cases, that’s a no-brainer. I’m game. Besides, volunteers in libraries are a long,standing tradition. And the bookstore/library, or library/coffee shop, or library/pool hall idea should at least be considered. We can still have professional librarians, and the make great bookstore owners too. Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, where I have spent many happy hours, was started by children’s librarians, if I remember correctly.

It’s not as if libraries aren’t already struggling with increasing uncertainty as to their public function. Jenkins is right—at least in Britain, library use is down, as is bookstore use. And this leads to the even bigger question facing libraries as they are fighting to stave off mass closures during a time of public budget distress—what are libraries for these days? The role of the library still fills some of the functions that it used to—it’s a gathering place, a community center, a place to do your homework, or meet other young mothers, or whatever. But these social roles, while undeniably important in many communities, aren’t really what libraries are for—it’s a public function that libraries sort of evolved into over the past several decades. And while it‘s an undeniably valuable public function, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what libraries should be doing, nice as it is to have them doing it.

Libraries are, at heart, repositories of information. For the past 500 years, that has meant books. But that’s changing now. The future of libraries, assuming someone will be paying for them, is inextricably entwined with the future of books. And that’s an even more interesting question, which I’ll be rambling on about in the next post. Meanwhile, get over to the library, buy some coffee for the nice (and underpaid) librarian, and take out a couple of books. They need the traffic, and you’ll feel better the whole rest of the day.

Food prices, Tunisia and what's next

2011-01-17T21:35:00.002Z

Just last week we were reading various reports about sharply rising food prices and demonstrations that were turning into riots in a number of countries. And then we had a revolution in Tunisia, toppling a dictator (western supported, of course) who had been in power for decades. And now we’re reading about concerns about a domino effect of the potential collapse of a variety of mideast dictatorships or kingdoms. And, true to form, we’re already seeing some governments furiously lowering food prices in an attempt to forestall more rioting—in fact, Algeria has already done so.

Let’s be clear about this—this should not have come as a surprise. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the demonstrations and rioting in Tunisia were actually successful in driving out a hated government—although what will replace it remains a bit unclear. What prompted the riots in the first place was a dramatic rise in food prices. We discussed the global food situation and its precarious balance two months ago, and cautioned that this was likely to get worse. And sure enough, it has. Commodity prices, especially grain prices, keep rising in the face of constant downward revisions to estimates of what the global grain and other commodity harvests will be this year, and many commodity prices remain at or near historic high prices. Then there are those floods in Queensland, and a pretty alarming year for extreme weather events, probably related to a pretty strong La Niña which will continue to affect crop production in 2011. Over at Reuters, Peter Apps has done a good summary of some of the potential trouble spots that are likely to be affected by a catastrophic increase in the price of basic staples. And you know what? There are a LOT of them. Egypt. Syria. Saudi Arabia. Morocco. The list is long.

It is not surprising that most of these countries are political dictatorships—or at least hardly functioning democracies. One could call Egypt a democracy, I suppose, in the same way that Russia and China are democracies—everyone gets to vote. But in many cases, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these countries are the opposite of democracies because of US (and Europe and Russia, it should be noted) pressure to keep the lid on Islamist revolt. But this is going to be harder to do if the governments in question can‘t keep food prices low enough for the majority of these countries’ populations. Which, let’s face it, are usually poor, in fact direly so. These are countries where economic opportunities are limited, unemployment (especially among young males) is high and getting higher, and where food prices suddenly aren’t low. They’re going up. Because that’s what food prices around the world are doing again.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) recently ( January 5th, in fact) warned that we are likely to see a repeat of the food riots that shook governments in 2008. That was pretty prescient of them, but at least someone is paying attention. Well, it’s not just Mozambique or India any more—it’s counties in the most geopolitically unstable part of the world. Let’s hope we don’t start seeing similar riots in Pakistan. But Pakistan has a lot of poor people too.

Lester Brown has been nattering on about this for years now, hoping that someone would start taking notice. He has recently pointed out that we’ve been in a food bubble, and it’s bursting. As far as I can tell, political institutions aren’t particularly well prepared for this. Certainly the Tunisian government wasn’t. We all knew there was a day of reckoning coming, except for the significant portion of the political class that remains in denial, or just assumed that we had lots of time. Well, we may not have all that much time. Brown has a number of suggestions about how to forestall a global environmental and food crisis, but what about the political crises that we’re about to be hit with if food prices keep escalating? We keep telling ourselves that technology somehow will save the day. But, you know, at some point there just might not be enough food to go around. Then what?

Chilcot redux

2011-01-16T20:28:00.003Z

The UK’s Inquiry into the Iraq war and the UK’s role in it kicks off again this week. Technically known as The Iraq Inquiry but more conventionally known as the Chilcot inquiry (since it is being chaired by Sir John Chilcot), this series of hearings has produced occasionally riveting theatre. In some respects this has been turning out better than expected, because we have learned quite a few things we didn’t know before, especially on that pesky little matter of Tony Blair’s duplicity.

Anyway, the hearings start up again this week with a couple of military and Cabinet Office guys, and then on Friday we get the return of Tony Blair. As usual, people signed up for tickets, which is what occurred last time, but I’m going to be home watching it on BBC. There’s quite a lot that the Committee could be asking Blair about, in fact. Keep in mind that the only reason he’s here is that he was specifically asked to return to address a number of inconsistencies between his testimony and that of some others, specifically regarding the legal advice he received from his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, and its changing nature over time. As The Guardian notes,

The inquiry is believed to be concerned about the revelation in documents it released in June. They show that the day before he privately assured Bush he would back US-led military action, Blair was warned by Lord Goldsmith, then attorney general, that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal.
A note from Goldsmith to Blair, marked secret and dated 30 January 2003, stated: "I thought you might wish to know where I stand on the question of whether a further decision of the [UN] security council is legally required in order to authorise the use of force against Iraq." Goldsmith warned Blair: "My view remains that a further [UN] decision is required."
The document contains a handwritten note, by David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, which warned: "Clear advice from attorney on need for further resolution." An apparently frustrated Blair scrawled in the margin: "I just don't understand this."
The following day Blair flew to Washington to see Bush. Manning noted that Bush told Blair that military action would be taken with or without a second security council resolution, and bombing would start mid-March 2003. The minute records Blair's reaction: "The prime minister said he was solidly with the president."

Well, this sounds pretty damning, but Blair, as we all know, is a pretty smooth and chatty testifier. It will be fun to see how he tries to wrangle out of this one, but undoubtedly he will come up with some sort of weaselly line of defense that will satisfy no one but himself—but that will be enough for him. Especially after last year’s testimony in which Blair indicated he would do it again.

We’ll post again on Friday following Blair’s testimony. I suppose in some ways this will be the acid test for the committee members, who so far have been occasionally brilliant, and occasionally stupefyingly thick, throughout. Blair has a lot to answer for—will the committee have the guts to ask the right questions? We’ll see. The committee’s exact task, recall, is to determine what lessons should be learned. What to do about lying ex-Prime Ministers should be one of them.

A Dangerous Game of Chicken

2011-01-07T21:51:00.003Z

Sometime during the next few months something very interesting might happen. Because during this period, the US Congress will be asked to raise the debt ceiling so that the US Treasury can continue to meet its obligations. The debt ceiling is a legal limit set by Congress on how much money the Treasury can borrow. In the past, it was raised from time to time. Over the past ten years, however, federal debts ballooned following the Bush administration's 2001 tax cuts and the massive deficit spending that resulted (including for several undeclared wars). As a result, the debt ceiling has been raised ten times in the past ten years. And now Congress will be asked to do it again.

But we have a new Congress, with a House of representatives now in the control of the Republicans, many of whom seem to among the most intellectually challenged and ideological bunch you care to come across. As a result, the administration is starting its full court press early. Earlier this week, Obama’s chief economic advisor Austin Goolsbee was out there hitting the airwaves, talking about how crucial it was to get the debt ceiling raised. And yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner sent a letter to Congress--in the person of the new Speaker, John Boehner, actually-- reiterating the same points, pointing out that a failure to raise the debt limit would result in “catastrophic damage to the economy, potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009”.

Of course, some Republicans seem resigned to raising the debt ceiling, like it or not. But even here, there is an air of unreality pervading the discussion. For example, there’s this:

A Treasury official urged lawmakers preparing for a new budget not to mix up the debt limit issue with calls for greater restraint in government spending.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed confidence that Congress will raise the debt limit if only because not doing so would be so damaging.

Well, does anyone remember what happened on the first TARP vote? A similar assumption was made then, only to have the measure voted down in the House of Representatives, and it was a pretty bi-partisan showing too—much more so than this vote will be.

Of course, the incessant calls for further government cuts will continue, and will likely even intensify. And it may not be all Republicans, certainly, and there may even be some blue dog Democrats who might join in trying to block the increase. So we get this from that dim bulb, new Speaker John Boehner:

“The American people will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington,” Boehner said.

Now, government “spending binges” generally aren’t job killing—in fact, they’re usually the reverse-- but Boehner has to say something like this, if only to avoid the question of "if tax cuts are so good at stimulating job growth, how come they haven’t done diddly squat over the past decade?" And of course, when Boehner was asked yesterday what programs he would be trying to cut to meet the Republicans’ fantasy target of $100 billion in cuts this year, he couldn’t actually name of any. And true to form, everything the new Republican majority accomplished yesterday (or not, as it turns out) will actually raise the deficits, not reduce them. So we all know this is bullshit. Note that Obama’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, yesterday proposed $78 billion of spending cuts from the bloated DOD budget, and Republicans are already howling. And the bloated Department of Homeland Security, which doesn’t even make us safer, still had a budget in the range of $55 billion in 2010—larger than the entire defense budget of the United Kingdom (which this year will be about £31.4 billion, or $51.4 billion in real money). But note that Gates’s proposals would get Republicans pretty far along in their bid to cut federal spending, so we’re already seeing some of the battle lines for a bit of a civil war among Republicans here. And as Spencer Ackerman notes above, Gates isn’t actually cutting the defense budget exactly—he’s eliminating some programs and spending the money elsewhere. So how much spending is actually being cut remains a bit of a mystery (although If I really tried, I could probably find out. I imagine someone will throw a number out before too long, though).

In fact, these battle lines will intensify, although perhaps not along the same lines. Because what we’ve got right now, I think, is a clear schism within the Republicans, between those who, like Reps. Ryan and Boehner, reluctantly agree that the debt ceiling should be raised, although perhaps only if accompanied by significant spending cuts, and those that don’t think it should be no matter what, damn the consequences. Bruce Bartlett has some choice words to describe this second group, or actually just one: insane.

Bartlett makes a number of good points, and you should read the whole interview, because he goes a bit further than most do in describing some of the consequences of even letting this get close. Bartlett is hardly a flaming liberal, of course, having worked in the Reagan administration, but like David Frum, he’s been drummed out of the party because he started attacking Republican economic irresponsibility in the middle of the decade. Here’s a selection, which should scare the hell out of you:

So what happens if we get to early March, U.S. borrowing hits the limit, and House Republicans refuse to raise it? What would be the immediate consequence?

Well, first of all, the Treasury has certain ways that they can get around the limit for a little while. They have some legal authority to move things around. For example, a large part of federal employee retirement funds are covered by special securities issued by the Treasury and the Treasury is permitted to not make regular contributions to the fund on a temporary basis, as long as it makes up the difference later on. And there are other tricks of this sort. There are even some economists who believe that the Treasury has an unlimited bag of tricks to do this. Personally, I don’t think so.

I think there really is a hard limit, but when we would hit that limit I don’t know. But assuming we do, what would then happen is that the Treasury would lack the cash flow to be able to pay its bills. Every single day the Treasury has bills to pay, Social Security benefits, interest on the national debt … But if the debt ceiling is not raised, the only cash it would have to pay those bills would come from the tax revenues that come in on a day-to-day basis — from the payroll tax or from income tax withholding. But that would not be enough to pay the bills that are due that day, so somebody at the Treasury is going to have to decide — as individuals do when their pay doesn’t cover their credit cards and other debts — who gets paid this month and who doesn’t. And, of course, there is a problem with this, because not everybody can be put be off. By law, Social Security benefits have to go out on the first of the month. But the Treasury literally would not have the cash in its account to cover those benefits, or to pay interest on the debt — at which point you have a default. Any time the precise terms of a bond are not adhered to — if you don’t receive exactly the amount of money you were promised, on exactly the day it was promised — you have a default, and that is what would happen under this circumstance.

But we’ve never let that happen before.

It’s never happened before. And I think many people in financial markets, and perhaps even in Washington, just assume away the possibility. They cannot conceive of the insanity of allowing the debt to default. But what I keep trying to explain to people is that these Tea Party people really are that crazy. And I’m just tying to get people to believe me.

But isn’t there a limit to how irresponsibly politicians can act? When the House Republicans rejected the first TARP authorization vote, the reaction in financial markets swiftly changed their minds. Wouldn’t the same thing be likely to happen this time around?

Perhaps. But do we really want to pay that price? Do we really want to introduce an element of doubt into the financial markets, that a security that is primarily bought because there is assumed to be risk zero risk of default is no longer safe? There is no other security on earth that has that reputation, not even German government bonds. The U.S. Treasury is the gold standard and we have benefited enormously from this fact. Every time there is some disruption in the world financial markets, people flee to quality by buying Treasuries. As a result, we have benefited by not having to pay for the consequences of our own profligacy. Foreign central banks hold trillions of dollars of Treasuries as the backing for their own securities. The minute we introduce an element of doubt into their own minds about whether these debts will be paid, suddenly other alternative investments may start to look better to them, and we will lose market share, which will greatly increase the costs of borrowing over the long term. It’s the most monumental insanity that I can even imagine.

I really don’t think it makes a lot of sense to shoot ourselves in the foot, just to make an idiotic point about the debt being too large. If people really believe that, they should vote to increase taxes and cut spending, and thereby reduce the Treasury’s need to borrow.

Just who is Bartlett worried about here? Well, guys like this guy, who think this is a form of taxation without representation. Then there are these guys, for whom it’s pure ideology. Is there a critical mass of these guys? Who knows? But here’s Bartlett’s concern, and I think he’s absolutely correct:

I have no doubt that there are enough rational people in the Republican Party together with enough Democrats to have the votes to increase the debt limit. The problem is that as we’ve seen in this last election, the Tea Party people have shown us that they don’t give a crap. Look, for example, at the defeat of Sen. Robert Bennett in Utah. He was one of the most conservative members of the Senate, and he was defeated primarily because he merely co-sponsored a bill with the Democrat Ron Wyden that put out an alternative approach to healthcare reform. This was deemed to be beyond the pale. He was defeated in the Republican primary, and I think this is the concern that every Republican has — of having someone run against them in the primary who says, This senator or congressman s.o.b. voted to increase the debt limit. They voted to give Obama more money to destroy our country with.

I don’t think there are very many Republicans that are going to take the risk of allowing that to happen.

So there’s a rock and hard place thing going on here. Even those Republicans who understand completely the need to do this may feel put off by the crazies out there who are ready to take them on in the next primary. Heck, even Richard Lugar, who at times seems to be the only Republican Senator left with any dignity, has been signaled that he’s going to face Tea Party opposition in his next primary. So what are those congressman who know for sure that someone to the right of them can’t wait to take them on going to do? Because those guys on the right don’t get it. Partly from ideology, and partly from a world view that derives form American exceptionalism, in which America is always privileged, and nothing really bad ever happens.

And this, I think, is crucial—the consequences just aren’t understood. I have recently finished a whole slew of books on the crisis of two years ago, and some were very good, some were less so. But all had a glaring hole in them. Which was no one really went into in detail what the consequence of letting the financial system go under would have looked like. Since this is my world, I have a pretty strong notion of what I think would have happened, and it resembles the same vision most of the people I know in this business had—the thoughtful people anyway. And to say it would have produced another great depression does get it right. But of course no one really remembers what the last one was like. No one has a clue what 25% or 30% (or more) unemployment would look like, with mass defaults on every sort of debt imaginable, with complete uncertainty on interest rates and the values of currencies, and the complete collapse of asset values in America and much of the rest of the world (much, much more than what we've seen). Whatever you think your house is worth, divide it by three or four or more. That’s the sort of economic carnage we’re talking about.

Think of the desolation of the abandoned industrial cities of America’s heartland, or someplace like Compton, and just spread it around. But most people in America aren’t familiar with that sort of desolation, and they prefer to believe it’s not that bad, anyway. My own view is that it would have been horrible, and would have taken decades to repair. There would have been some salutary side benefits, of course—a whole lot more localism, for example, and a lot of the barter economy. But the economy we’ve grown comfortable with over the past several decades, where all our wants can be instantly satisfied, usually on credit—that would be gone. And we were talking about the global banking system going under, a prospect that was not implausible. Which is why Henry Paulson did what he did. What we all understood was how incredibly, and dangerously, interlinked the global banking system had become--something apparently beyond the ken of your average American Congressman, probably because it hadn't occurred to anyone to actually explain it to him or her.

Would this be similar? Well, probably, but not as bad elsewhere. It would affect mainly the US, because suddenly the dollar’s value as a reserve currency would be in question, and there’s no real alternative—but the Chinese sure would benefit, as would the other BRIC countries, Brazil, India and Russia. Interest rates would shoot up, and again we’d see massive increases in unemployment, and massive collapses of asset values. But the rest of the world would trundle along, so the global damage won’t be as severe. But the damage to the US would be significant, and long-lasting, and you know what? The US would really be broke then. Because it wouldn’t be able to borrow the way it does now. That, too, would have some benefits—we would no longer be able to be the world’s policeman (although whether this would really be a good thing is open to debate, obviously). It’s hard to sustain 737 military bases globally when you’re flat broke. Well, broke is an overstatement, probably. But the US would not have anything like the financial wherewithal it currently has. Because right now, because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and US treasuries are the de facto AAA standard, the US gets to borrow internationally cheap. And if that goes, then everything—and I mean everything—goes off the rails in the US. The prospect of, like Africa, selling off farmland to the Chinese does not sound so far-fetched in this world.

The Wall Street Journal, by the way, will let you take a poll on whether the debt ceiling should be increased—right here. As of the time of writing, about 87% of the respondents favor not raising the debt ceiling, which tells you something, I suspect, about people who take polls offered by the Wall Street Journal. Note that one of the options is “only with billions in spending cuts.” Since the incoming Republican majority in the House doesn’t seem to have a clue what to cut, it’s not clear what this means, although in the comments we get the usual “eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy” stuff. Needless to say, since it’s the WSJ, the option of raising taxes for one of the most undertaxed major industrial countries in the OECD does not arise.

Zogby has a poll as well, which shows that 64% of those polled oppose raising the debt ceiling. As is probably the case with the WSJ polling results, there may be some selection bias among those taking the poll. Once again, diving into an analysis of why people believed what they believed shows that people don’t get it. The likely worst case scenario just doesn’t scan for most people, because most people just can’t conceive that a default is that big a deal.

Let’s hope we don’t find out. This is not an experiment we really want to conduct.

Blowing in the Wind

2010-12-30T10:07:00.004Z

There are times when I think Obama is the smartest politician I have seen in my lifetime, and there are times when I’m scratching my head, wondering what the hell? Most of the latter occurrences arise in the context of Obama’s Justice Department, which, as far as I can tell, has yet to prosecute a single Bush administration official for malfeasance, although I may have missed it if it did happen. Then there’s Afghanistan, which looks like an unholy mess. Then there’s financial reform—or, more specifically, the lack of it, which I trace directly to Obama’s very foolhardy appointments of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, under the aegis of that old charlatan, Robert Rubin. If Obama loses his re-election effort, it will be because he listened to people like Rubin and Summers and Geithner, instead of ignoring them completely, which would have been the smarter thing to do given their roles in creating the mess to begin with.

Then there’s the environmental and climate stuff, where I had high hopes. And I'm very glad we've got some EPA enforcement again. But then there's the biofuels boondoggle, suggesting that Obama is just another farm state senator. Well, that’s sort of ordinary and predictable stuff, the kind of stuff that any senator (or ex-Senator who becomes President) does—look at the otherwise generally admirable Chuck Schumer and his entanglements with the financial industry. But what do I make of this—the Obama administration has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization against China’s renewable energy subsidies.

Now, filing a complaint against another country’s subsidy practices is a complicated endeavor in the best of circumstances, and in this case it seems a bit murky, frankly. There are many more clear-cut examples of subsidies that distort the market sufficiently to cause economic harm, on both producers and consumers. The US just won a WTO case against China over tires, for example. Now, some of the cases are stupid, and some are so politically loaded (Boeing versus Airbus) that you have to wonder why anyone even bothers. China and the US are involved in constant talks all the time about opening up China’s markets to various products and services, and these discussions are generally long and complicated--with intellectual property protection a critical issue more often than not. China, you will not be surprised to learn, is a bit casual about intellectual property rights, just as the US has become obsessive about it (check out what’s happened to copyright over the past couple of decades). But that’s why you have trade talks in the first place, and that’s why the World Trade Organization was created—to reduce the kinds of frictions that arise between countries. Too bad the WTO seems to have gone the way of the IMF and The World Bank.

Anyway, as is usually the case with a rapidly developing economy, China would like to protect a number of domestic industries in order to develop them. And one of the ways countries routinely do this is by subsidizing them until they can be competitive internationally, or at least domestically against foreign competition. There are any number of ways of doing this, actually—high tariffs on imported goods is a favorite one, and one used by both the US and Germany aggressively in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The US didn’t get free trade fever until after the Second World War, don’t forget. But it has certainly dominated the agenda since then. Or you could do it the way Korea and Japan have done it, not by tariffs, but by excessive regulations on imports. And these tactics work.

But it's not as if we're dealing with, oh, DVD players here. We're dealing with essential technologies for reducing the rate of increase in carbon generation over the next several decades (to say nothing of actually trying to reduce carbon generation—there doesn’t seem to be much hope for that). But of course the kinds of trade treaties the US and the rest of the world is involved in don’t make that distinction. And here you have to wonder, yet again, about the mismatch between the at-this-point highly questionable economic models that govern how these organizations function, on the one hand, and the way the world really works, on the other. We’ve just spent two years recovering from such a mismatch, but the same models still govern.

So China, which generates a huge amount of carbon, and which is on track to generate more, has spent lots of money to develop renewable energy industries. One might suppose that this is a good thing. In fact, one might wonder why everyone isn’t doing this. The problem comes, apparently, from the fact that China may be exporting these technologies. Well, so what? Really, this is one of those times when you have to wonder how screwed up the international financial system is. Rather than criticize China for its clean energy subsidies, which will result in lower CO2 generation, both domestically and abroad (since there will certainly be exports,) why not match those subsidies? And if China objects, let them take the US to the WTO. That seems unlikely, however. Why would China object? They’ve already got the moral high ground against the US on carbon generation. China’s energy efficiency and renewable targets (which, by the way, China seems to actually be pursuing aggressively) would put the US to shame if the US cared enough. And the world would be a better place, certainly. Look at the rural poor in Africa who now have some electricity courtesy of Chinese small-scale solar energy generators—not the World Bank, it should be pointed out. Of course, there was a time when the US led in this technology, by miles, under Jimmy Carter, but we decided instead to consume more oil and give up on all this renewable stuff when Reagan came in and scrapped all the programs. As in so much else, it’s easy to blame Reagan here, and there’s a large element of truth to this. But we’ve had decades to try to restore a sane trajectory, and have failed manifestly to do so. What a bunch of putzes.

So why can’t the system come up with a better solution than having the US and China go after each other in the premier global trade organization? Well, partly the usual—subsidies are bad etc etc etc. We’re about to get a House of Representatives dominated by people who believe this. Of course, subsidies aren’t necessarily bad at all—ask any country that develops an automobile industry how it does it. (Even Malaysia has one.) Or ask Korea and now China how they developed their shipbuilding industries. Ask any country—including the US, and of course most of the rest of the world (except for poor Africa which can’t quite get it together)--that supports its farmers so that it can ensure some minimal necessary food production. Ask the US oil industry, which gets all sorts of hidden subsidies from the federal government—and will undoubtedly get more under the new regime.

Then there’s the Korea problem. Korean conglomerates have aggressively been trying to enter the renewable energy business, mostly through investments in Solar cell companies. In addition, Korea provides lots of subsidies to the solar and wind industry, subsidies that European countries are currently cutting back on, as is (or will be) the US, which is why there is virtually no US solar industry. So will the US go after Korea as well? And as the authors of the Grist piece point out, there are lots of subsidies elsewhere for the renewables industry, including Spain and the UK—most of Europe, in fact. Will the US file a WTO complaint against the UK? Somehow, I suspect not.

This represents a failure of the imagination on a very large scale. Not just by Obama, who seems curiously constrained and inside the box in dealing with global warming, but by everyone involved in a intellectually bankrupt system that doesn’t distinguish between kinds of economic goods. DVDs and tires are a lot more equivalent to each other than either is with wind turbines--and we (and governments) should be able to make that differentiation. Wind turbines at this point should be regarded as an essential survival tool—as should be every form of renewable energy. But we’re not there yet, and by the time we get there, it will likely be too late.

It’s perhaps even more absurd. The New York Times covered the same story, giving it the predictable anti-China spin that is becoming all too common in the Times these days. The story generated a raft of comments worth perusing, including commentator number 4, who points out that

There is another side to this story, of course - namely, that both the Obama and Bush Administrations have focused on subsidizing the following:

1) Coal-to-gasoline plants (billions from the DOE, often cloaked as "CO2 capture projects")

2) Tar sand imports (billions in Congressional loan guarantees for new gas pipelines to feed the tar sand production system)

3) Liquefied natural gas imports (more billions to Exxon and Chevron for their Indonesian and Papua New Guinea LNG projects)

4) A new round of ridiculously expensive taxpayer-subsidized nuclear reactors ($8 billion in loan guarantees for Southern - Georgia nuclear plants).

There are many similar examples of the Obama-Bush focus on fossil fuels and nuclear - but solar and wind have received almost nothing in comparison.

Clearly, this could be challenged by China as unfair government support for fossil fuel & nuclear (which, despite the earnest claims of Energy Secretary Chu, are hardly "clean" and definitely not renewable) - but China is obviously more concerned with reducing its dependence on fossil fuel imports by moving state support away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.

This is all true, although I have to admit I’m a lot more ambivalent about nuclear these days than I used to be. If carbon is the enemy, and it is, I’m not sure how we get to where we want to be (stabilizing CO2 generation at 350 ppm, or whatever –it’s currently 388.59, and rising) without nuclear. And there’s certainly an interesting discussion to be had on whether natural gas (and LNG) are acceptable “transition” fuels. But these are separate discussions, I think. The point here is that the US has yet to make any significant moves to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels, while China is doing just that, and very aggressively too. Which does make you wonder what the WTO claim is really all about.

The US, after all, continues to subsidize highly inefficient corn-based ethanol, while imposing a substantial tariff on imports of more efficient sugar-based ethanol from Brazil—and Brazil, by the way, removed its own import tariff on ethanol earlier this year (although only through 2011). Oh, and Brazil looks set to initiate a claim against the US in the—you guessed it—WTO on this issue. The US ethanol subsidy and import tariff were set to expire at the end of 2010—but they just got extended in the tax bill that just got passed. If you were looking for an example of a subsidy policy that was both bad economics and bad climate policy, US ethanol subsidies would be near the top of the list. And Ontario is raising its domestic content requirements in certain renewable areas as well. So is there a trade war with Canada shaping up? I would guess not—we need their oil, after all.

Now, I'm fully mindful of what Obama is going to be up against in the next Congress. Here is one example of another fathead who thinks he knows stuff, but who obviously knows nothing, and, who is going to find himself in a position of considerable power. Then there's this guy. Oh, this one too. So I'm not sure what Obama can actually do here--the window of opportunity may be gone on this, tragically. The prospect of getting some sort of even weak climate bill through the next Congress appears remote. But that doesn't mean the administration has to approach this all with the caution it has demonstrated up to now. Time for a little boldness, I think. And pursuing courses of action that will only serve to delay the adoption of reasonable energy goals and standards doesn’t really seem like the right strategy. What all of this sadly demonstrates is that the American government under the Obama administration, somewhat surprisingly, has yet to move beyond rhetoric in the global warming debate—but certainly gives the impression of being upset that China may be.

Look out, here comes the Civil War. Again.

2010-12-28T23:07:00.003Z

Get ready for five years of misery, self-absorption, class warfare, occasional (perhaps even frequent) denials of racism, interminable militaristic posturing, and so much more. The US is about to start commemorating, if that’s the word, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. Well, maybe not everyone in the US—just the South, which will wallow endlessly in its victimhood for being on the receiving end of the Northern Occupation--or at least for the next five years. And the media, of course, which already has shown over the past two years hat it just can’t get enough of ignorance, bigotry and outright fantasy about the past. Why, it’s as if the 20th century never happened.

This is going to be bad, horrible, even. We’re in for five years of paeans to alleged Southern valor, interminable babble about “State’s Rights,” debates about the flying of the Confederate Flag, odes by Southern politicians to the sanctity of our Christian heritage (from the part of the country that leads the US in violent crimes and executions) and our god-given right to own other human beings—no, wait. That last part won’t be talked about much. In fact, it will be denied vociferously. In fact, we’ll see, as we have for what seems like forever, interminable arguments about how the Civil War wasn’t about slavery at all. Nope. But we know better. The South may have won the memory wars, but facts are facts.

The British media has noticed some of this. Rupert Cornwall, writing for The Independent, gets it right—the US is still divided by the Civil War. Cornwell comments on a party in South Carolina, the state that started it all, where everyone stands around celebrating the first moves towards secession. David Usborne, also of The Independent, actually went—and conveys its surreal atmosphere nicely:

Inside the hall, 200-odd guests, all white and some in period costume, gathered to see a re-enactment of the signing of the secession document. When it was over, they instinctively joined the cast in singing the anthem of the South, "Dixie", before repairing to an adjoining hall for dinner and dancing.

And if you’re wondering WTF, you‘re not alone. But, you know, the South is different. Well, for lots of reasons, but mainly because it was the South that declared war on the United States. And lost. And have never gotten over it.

Ed Pilkington of The Guardian was there as well. He shares an interesting but highly predictable and representative profile:

Mark Simpson, commander of the South Carolina branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which sponsored the ball, said the line that the war was fought over slavery was spin, used by detractors of the south to discredit them. "Slavery was an issue, yes, but only because it was the economic lifeblood of the south."

He reacted with indignation to claims that the secession ball celebrated slavery. "Are we celebrating slavery? Absolutely not. We are celebrating that we are proud South Carolinians. Americans, yes, but also southerners." He was not a secessionist but believed there were many parallels between the complaints of the south in the lead-up to the civil war and today's angry mood among the American electorate. In the 1860s, the gripe of South Carolinians was that their taxes were all being spent in the north. "There's a lot that goes on today that is not in our benefit. Where do all our taxes go?" Simpson said.

Well, Mr Simpson, if you knew anything at all, you moron, you would know that they come right back to South Carolina, that’s where—South Carolina being a “taker state”, which received $1.35 back from the federal government for every $1 in federal income tax paid (in 2005, anyway). We’ve noted this before—it’s the states of the old Confederacy that do particularly well at the federal trough. This is a part of the country where white people do a lot of complaining about welfare—but not about welfare queen states.

Note Mr. Simpson’s other point—the Civil War was not about slavery, of no, even though slavery was the “economic lifeblood of the south.” We’ve covered this ground a surprising number of times this past year—Southern politicians conveniently forgetting the issue of Slavery in their references to, and even celebrations of, the Civil War. As Mr. Simpson observed, that slavery talk was “spin” to discredit the South. Note the assumption that the South needs any further discrediting.

So here we have all the problems of modern American politics neatly encapsulated, particularly the astonishing levels of ignorance that now permeates the national debate—and which will doubtless dominate the yelling about the Civil War over the next five years. Slavery didn’t cause the Civil War. We don’t know where our taxes go. The Civil War was caused by Northern aggression. I’m ignorant as hell, but people just use that fact to discredit me. Hey, I’m the victim here, and I’m going to be the victim for the next five years too, because I'm really good at it.

Cornwell, Pilkington and Usborne have it right—this is the war that has never ended. Of course, they’re British, and can point this out without any embarrassment. But few in the US will talk openly about this, although it’s become more of a topic for discussion over the past two years as the hysteria in parts of the country about having a black president has deranged an even higher number of the civic polity than is normally the case. Credit to McClatchy, as usual, for raising many of the same points as The Independent and The Guardian, although the Times weighs in too, in its usual infuriatingly balanced way. It’s become all the more important to claim the god-given right to fly the Confederate flag—especially over State houses. We have noted in the past year or so the increasing insistence among Southern politicians of their god-given right to secede, if they want to, although they really don’t, sort of, or something. The incessant bleating about States’ rights will just accelerate. We’ve been treated to the spectacle of Tea Party marchers carrying signs of the President of the United States with clear racial denigrations--what next? Whatever we can imagine, if history teaches us anything, it's that what we'll get will be worse than what we expect.

So expect to see a whole lot of Confederate flags. And extensive and intellectually challenged rationalizations regarding whether it should be flown or not (see here, including—in fact, especially—the comments, for a fairly representative discussion). And expect the secession thing to keep coming back, like the Terminator. It just won’t stay dead. The whole thing is going to be insufferable.

One of my fonder memories of Basic Training (at good old Fort Jackson, in South Carolina) was some Drill Sergeant staring at me, a New York boy, and saying “God, I hate Yankees.” I don’t imagine the past four decades have changed his mind much. The past is a foreign country, yes it is. Even better—as Faulkner, who lived in the south and should know, said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” How right he was. We’ll be seeing that quote a lot the next five years too. And every time we see it, we can remind ourselves how the part of the country that still has citizens that considers the US government to be an occupying power has come to dominate American political discourse and, indeed, its political institutions. Good luck to us all.

The above stamp was issued in 1961 to commemorate the beginning of the Civil War, which started 100 years earlier when cadets in the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter. That's right. The South started it. Who knew? So why do they insist on calling it The War of Northern Aggression?