Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 174-84 | Added on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 04:53 PM The automobile was invented, then the airplane, and then the World Wide Web—perhaps the quintessential product of a globalized world. All of these technologies have carried the promise of a boundless world. They would free us from geography, allowing us to move out of crowded cities and into lives of our own bucolic choosing. Forget the past, when cities and civilizations were confined to fertile soil, natural ports, or raw materials. In today's high-tech world, we are free to live wherever we want. Place, according to this increasingly popular view, is irrelevant. It's a compelling notion, but it's wrong. Today's key economic factors—talent, innovation, and creativity—are not distributed evenly across the global economy. They concentrate in specific locations. It's obvious how major new innovations in communications and transportation allow economic activity to spread out all over the world. What's less obvious is the incredible power of what I call the clustering force. In today's creative economy, the real source of economic growth comes from the clustering and concentration of talented and productive people. New ideas are generated and our productivity increases when we locate close to one another in cities and regions. The clustering force makes each of us more productive, which in turns makes the places we inhabit much more productive, generating great increases in output and wealth. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Note Loc. 184 | Added on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 04:53 PM clustering forces - Porter ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 185-87 | Added on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 04:54 PM In the United States, more than 90 percent of all economic output is produced in metropolitan regions, while just the largest five metro regions account for 23 percent of it. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 278-81 | Added on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 09:38 PM The first and more obvious one is the geographic spread of routine economic functions such as simple manufacturing or service work (for example, making or answering telephone calls). The second, less obvious side to globalization is the tendency for higher-level economic activities such as innovation, design, finance, and media to cluster in a relatively small number of locations. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 282-85 | Added on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 09:38 PM they miss the reality of this clustering (the centrifugal force). Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor and expert on competitive strategy, dubs this the "location paradox": "Location still matters," he told Business Week in August 2006. "The more things are mobile, the more decisive location becomes." And "this point," he added, "has tripped up a lot of really smart people."5 ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 443-46 | Added on Thursday, February 26, 2009, 08:59 AM This is a noxious brew—far more harrowing than the flat world Freidman describes and a good deal more treacherous than the old rich-poor divide. Contrary to Samuel Huntington's famous thesis, which pits so-called modern Judeo-Christian values against "backward" Muslim ones, what we face is not a clash of civilizations but a deepening economic divide among the world's spikes and valleys. Most of the world's conflicts—even those seemingly unrelated to economics—stem from the underlying forces of a spiky world. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 518-22 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 01:11 AM Cities have always been the natural economic units of the world. But over the past several decades, what we once thought of as cities, with central cores surrounded by rural villages and later by suburbs, have grown into mega-regions composed of two or more city-regions, such as the Boston–New York–Washington corridor. Mega-regions are more than just a bigger version of a city. In the way that a city is composed of separate neighborhoods, and like a metropolitan region is made up of a central city and its suburbs, a mega-region is a new, natural economic unit that results from city-regions growing upward, becoming denser, and growing outward and into one another. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 555-57 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 01:18 AM The comparative advantage Ricardo identified still matters today, but national borders no longer define economies. Instead, the mega-region has emerged as the new natural economic unit. It is not an artifact of artificial political boundaries, like the nation-state or its provinces, but the product of concentrations of centers of innovation, production, and consumer markets. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 581-83 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 01:20 AM The more that two mega-regions—regardless of their physical distance or historical relationship—have in common financially, the more likely they are to develop similar social mores, cultural tastes, and even political leanings. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 701-3 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:06 PM Much of Japan may be well on its way to becoming the world's first integrated super-mega-region—a single, gargantuan, and geographically overlapping economic entity of more than 100 million people producing $4.5 trillion in LRP. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 707-9 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:06 PM Greater Singapore is a classic city-state, whose population of 6 million generates LRP of $100 billion. It has "willingly and explicitly given up the trappings of nation states," Ohmae writes, "in return for the relatively unfettered ability to tap into. . .the global economy." ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 760 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:09 PM "What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for, if not to be around other people?" ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 782-83 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:10 PM A little later the great economist Alfred Marshall developed his basic theory of why firms and industries agglomerate or cluster: to capture the economic benefits of colocation. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 787-92 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:11 PM Up until the mid-twentieth century, prevailing theory held that more labor and capital equaled bigger economies. In other words, the more giant factories or machine tools applied, the more money would be made. That changed after the Great Depression and World War II, when a growing number of economists, business leaders, and policymakers became captivated with Joseph Schumpeter's theory that it is innovation and entrepreneurship—not simply economies of scale and specialization—that power economic growth and give rise to what he called the great gales of "creative destruction" that destroyed established systems and replaced them with new firms and industries.4 ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 817-18 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:13 PM "I will be following very closely the lead of Jane Jacobs, whose remarkable book, The Economy of Cities, seems to me mainly and convincingly concerned (although she does not use this terminology) with the external effects of human capital." ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 827-30 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:14 PM As Chapters 6 and 7 will show, as talented and highly educated people cluster together in certain regions, the location of work becomes more concentrated and specialized as well. According to the theory, when people cluster together in cities, they will produce more and thus the cost of living in those places will inexorably rise, generating those "Chicago rents" Lucas mentions. Eventually, communities and people will sort themselves into an economic pecking order. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 835-37 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:15 PM Development is differentiation—new differentiation of what already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a differentiation of a previous thing. Just about everything—from a new shoe sole to changes in legal codes—all of those things are differentiations. Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a different thing.8 ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 848-51 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:15 PM Cities don't just get bigger in size; they become multifaceted and differentiated. And in doing so, they—and not firms—are the well-spring of new innovations that generate new work and new branches of industry. The city, Jacobs argued, is a complex, self-organizing ecology whose form cannot be predetermined or controlled from the outside. Its diversity is the true source of innovation and economic growth.9 ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 867-73 | Added on Friday, February 27, 2009, 02:17 PM This might all have been expected. But what the researchers had not expected to see was that the correlation between population growth and characteristics with little analogue to biology—such as innovation, patent activity, number of supercreative people, wages, and GDP—was greater than one. In other words, a doubling of population resulted in more than two times the creative and economic output. Unlike biological organisms, all of which slow down as they grow larger, cities become wealthier and more creative the bigger they get. They called this phenomenon "superlinear" scaling: "By almost any measure, the larger a city's population, the greater the innovation and wealth per person." This increased speed is itself a product of the clustering force, a key component of the productivity improvements generated by the concentration of talented people. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 890-92 | Added on Saturday, February 28, 2009, 11:27 AM Economic growth in our model takes place through a basic law of "preferential attachment," in which skilled and productive people attract the presence of other skilled and productive people. As they team up to form firms, these creative organizational units begin to develop new ideas and products. And as those units grow, they attract other hard-working and productive agents. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 899-901 | Added on Saturday, February 28, 2009, 11:27 AM Rather than simply growing upward, these city-regions expand outward until they are forced to combine with other city-regions. Through this process of nucleation, these city-regions merge together as a mega-region. The largest mega-regions have the longest staying power. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 903-4 | Added on Saturday, February 28, 2009, 11:28 AM Creative people and their firms cluster tightly to form the top of a hierarchy of city-regions that strikingly reflects George Zipf's famous power law. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 931-34 | Added on Saturday, February 28, 2009, 11:30 AM Mega-regions will become more congested and pricier, causing greater social and economic segregation. Major new advances in transportation and environmental technology will surely be required. For the leading mega-regions, retaining rates of innovation will be their primary challenge. Without it, as West and his colleagues caution, they "will stop growing and may even contract, leading to either stagnation or ultimate collapse." ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 951-54 | Added on Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:14 PM I have come to think of this additional geographic dimension of socioeconomic class in terms of two groups that I refer to simply as the mobile and the rooted. The mobile possess the means, resources, and inclination to seek out and move to locations where they can leverage their talents. They are not necessarily born mobile, nor are they inevitably rich. What the mobile understand is that the pursuit of economic opportunity often requires them to move. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1010-13 | Added on Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:18 PM The leading reason people in the United States move is for housing. According to the census, over half (51.6 percent) of all people who move do so for that reason. They are renters wanting to own, young couples wanting to upgrade, and retirees looking to downsize. Another quarter (26.3 percent) of people say that they move for family-related reasons—getting married, getting divorced, having children, combining families, because of the death of a spouse, and that sort of thing. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Bookmark Loc. 1032 | Added on Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:19 PM ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1125-28 | Added on Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:33 PM One of the many upshots of these two competing movements, according to leading demographers and political sociologists, is a new "sorting" of population by values, culture, and politics. This tension is perhaps best captured by David Brooks's two iconic American characters, the cappuccino-drinking urban "bourgeois-bohemian" ("bobo" for short) and suburbia's "patio man."5 ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1181-90 | Added on Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:38 PM The consequence is this: the means migration is dividing the world into two kinds of regions with very different economic prospects. A small number of means metros attract the lion's share of the mobile and the skilled, who see their incomes and real estate values climb, while the great majority witness the exact opposite. Some of today's means metros could eventually fall back as housing prices and living costs rise. But there are powerful reasons to believe that the economic disparity between some city-regions and others will continue to grow, and perhaps even accelerate, thanks to the snowball effect of talent attraction. "This spatial sorting," says Wharton economist Joseph Gyourko, "will affect the nature of America as much as the rural-urban migration of the late nineteenth century did."8 He asks us to imagine a future society in which people interact only with others who share the same educational, financial, and psychological backgrounds. "We already have fairly intense segregation by income within metropolitan areas," he writes. "But how different will things be if almost every community within the metro region is roughly as rich and skilled as mine?" ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1227-30 | Added on Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:40 PM Meanwhile, the United States and other advanced nations are generating new kinds of jobs. The workforce is splitting into two distinct labor groups, which UCLA economist Edward Leamer has dubbed the "geeks" and the "grunts." The geeks enjoy higher-paying, higher-skill work in the creative sector; the grunts are laborers in the service sector, who have fewer skills and receive less pay. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1230-34 | Added on Sunday, March 01, 2009, 11:40 PM We've effectively become the "postindustrial society" that the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell predicted in the 1970s, hinging our prosperity on the growth of a knowledge class, reliant on science to bring forth innovation and social change, and more dependent on services than goods. Some 59 million Americans, more than 45 percent of the U.S. workforce, are employed as retail salespeople, physical therapists, dental hygienists, home health aides, food service workers, haircutters, manicurists, landscapers, and the like. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1320-24 | Added on Monday, March 02, 2009, 10:55 AM But according to my team's analysis, high concentrations of these sectors ultimately do not bode well for cities' economies. Although they may employ many people and provide great services, education and health-care add relatively little to regional income.7 That is even truer when we look at education and health-care jobs as a share of a region's creative economy. As the share of education and health-care jobs rises, regional earnings fall. The more creative class members take jobs in education and health-care, the lower their region's wages tend to be. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1346-51 | Added on Monday, March 02, 2009, 10:56 AM economist Alfred Marshall's concept of "agglomeration."10 Some firms take advantage of economies of scale by integrating their activities and growing larger. But companies can also benefit by the agglomeration economies that come from locating close to one another. More recently, social scientists have dubbed this the power of the "industrial district." Whatever it is called, companies like Armani, Prada, and Gucci benefited from high levels of productivity and innovation, but even more so from being part of a tight cluster of suppliers, users, and customers. The economic power and efficiency of these clusters was more than enough to offset mounting pressures to relocate abroad. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1360-62 | Added on Monday, March 02, 2009, 10:57 AM "Now that globalization continues to power forward," he said in a 2006 online interview with Business Week, "what has happened is that clusters must become more specialized in individual locations. The global economy is speeding up the process by which clusters get more focused." ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Note Loc. 1362 | Added on Monday, March 02, 2009, 10:57 AM Porter ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1399-1401 | Added on Monday, March 02, 2009, 10:59 AM We estimated employment "location quotients" (or LQ)—a statistical ratio that compares a region's share of a particular activity with that of the nation—for all major occupations and all major regions across the United States. An LQ of 1.25 is considered reasonably high by most experts, indicating a regional cluster of work. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1407-8 | Added on Monday, March 02, 2009, 05:44 PM Washington, D.C., is home to 78 percent of all political scientists, as well as a huge share of economists, mathematicians, and astronomers. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1431-41 | Added on Monday, March 02, 2009, 05:46 PM Networks are the human connections that make it possible for people and firms to share this vital information, described in detail by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his best-selling book Bowling Alone. Putnam's ideas on the decline of tightly formed networks (the sort represented by 1950s bowling leagues) and the rise of a less caring society, more isolated individuals, and the decline of civic life have become incredibly popular.18 These networks are formed by two kinds of social capital: bonding and bridging. Bonding represents the close ties that exist within extended families or ethnic communities and is the phenomenon whose decline Putnam lamented. Bridging reflects looser ties that extend across and connect different groups. For clustering, this second type is what matters. It "puts people in the flow of the many different thoughts and actions that reside in any one world," writes Andrew Hargadon, director of Technology Management programs at the University of California, Davis.19 At its heart, bridging, he continues, "changes the way people look at not just those different ideas they find in other worlds, it also changes the way they look at thoughts and actions that dominate their own. Bridging activities provide the conditions for creativity, for the Eureka moment when new possibilities suddenly become apparent." ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1654-62 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 01:42 AM Our initial findings were on target. We found that the presence of these populations had a direct relation to housing values as well as other locational variables (such as income and human capital), making these places more attractive to other populations and demographics. In other words, the presence of these groups was not only related to higher housing values, but higher incomes as well. Why would this be? Our theory is that bohemian and gay populations capitalize on two distinct factors of high-value housing. The first is an aesthetic-amenity premium. Artists and bohemians not only produce amenities but are attracted to places that have them. As selective buyers with eyes for amenity, authenticity, and aesthetics, they tend to concentrate in places in which those things abound. The second is a tolerance or open culture premium. Regions with large bohemian and gay populations possess low cultural barriers to entry, allowing them to attract talent and human capital across racial, ethnic, and other lines. Artistic and gay populations also cluster in communities that value open-mindedness and self-expression. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1675-76 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 01:43 AM According to our findings, the key determinants of housing prices are income, human capital, and concentrations of bohemian or gay populations, rather than local wages or local occupations. Income, unlike wages, follows the person who owns it. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1701-3 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 01:45 AM He cites a study by British economist Andrew Oswald which found that home ownership can essentially trap people, especially those who are not well off.15 Across both the United States and Europe, Oswald found, high levels of home ownership are correlated with high levels of unemployment, and more so than with other factors such as unionization or welfare benefits. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Bookmark Loc. 1731 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 01:46 AM ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1731-33 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 01:47 AM But as Aristotle observed, human beings seek happiness above all else. A growing interest in the psychology of happiness—or, as psychologist Martin Seligman put it in a 2005 Time magazine cover story, the "enabling conditions that make human beings flourish"—has brought an abundance of new research and coverage to the subject.1 ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1758-62 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 01:48 AM Happiness is surely associated with income—but only up to a point. People in wealthier countries are generally happier than those in the poorest ones. But after a certain threshold of income is crossed, the effect of money and material goods on happiness levels out. Higher levels of income or economic growth do not necessarily translate into higher levels of happiness. Proof of this is in the United States, where GNP has risen substantially since the 1940s and 1950s while the national level of happiness has remained virtually ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1802-4 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 01:50 AM Our findings show the overwhelming importance of place to our happiness. Place forms the third leg in the triangle of our well-being, alongside our personal relationships and our work. When asked to rate happiness in relation to things like work, finances, personal life, and place on a 1-to-5 scale, place scored 3.63, behind personal life (4.08) and work (3.98) but ahead of finances (3.46). ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1895-99 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 11:54 AM Generally speaking, people derive happiness from being themselves, from cultivating their individuality. Sociologists and psychologists have long pointed out that self-expression is a major source of happiness. A place is a means to that end. It gives us an environment we can adopt and make our own. An undeniable advantage of today's mobile society is that we are not forever tied to the identity of our birthplace—the handed-down norms and customs of our families, religions, and hometowns. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1942-50 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 11:57 AM The survey covered dozens and dozens of specific community attributes, which we then clustered into five major categories. The first is physical and economic security—perceptions of crime and safety, the overall direction of the economy, and availability of jobs. The second is basic services—schools, health-care, affordable housing, roads, and public transportation. The third category is leadership—the quality and efficacy of elected and unelected (business and civic) leadership and the opportunity for public and local engagement. The fourth is openness—the level of tolerance for and acceptance of diverse demographic groups including families with children, ethnic and racial minorities, senior citizens, immigrants, and gays and lesbians. The fifth cluster is aesthetics—physical beauty, amenities, and cultural offerings. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1984-89 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 04:24 PM So did Maslow have it all wrong? Not entirely, argues Postrel. When his theory is portrayed as a simple pyramid, it can lead to a false conclusion: "That aesthetics is a luxury people only care about when they're wealthy." Postrel points out that there is no pyramid of needs in which moving up requires that one first completely satisfy the needs under it. "The next increment of what we consume changes depending on what we already have. . .The marginal value of some characteristic, such as nutrition or shelter, is high initially—we don't want to starve or freeze to death in a snow storm—but that value drops off faster than the marginal value of other characteristics, including aesthetics." ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2295-2306 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 04:43 PM Psychologists say that there are five basic dimensions to personality. This five-factor model, or what psychologists sometimes describe as the "Big Five" dimensions of personality, is straightforward.3 The first type is openness to experience. Open types have a tendency to enjoy new experiences, especially intellectual experiences, the arts, fantasies, and anything that exposes them to new ideas. People high in openness tend to be curious, artistic, and creative. The second type is conscientiousness. Conscientious types work hard and have a great deal of self-discipline. They are responsible, detail-oriented, and strive for achievement. Psychologists find that people high in conscientiousness tend to be better than average workers on almost any job, completing tasks competently and efficiently. The third type is extroversion. Extroverts are outgoing, talkative, gregarious, assertive, enthusiastic, and seek excitement. They enjoy meeting new people and tend to maintain a fairly stable, positive mood under most circumstances. The fourth type is agreeableness. Agreeable types are warm, friendly, compassionate, and concerned for the welfare of others. They generally trust other people and expect other people to trust them. The fifth type is neuroticism. Neurotic types are emotionally unstable, more likely to experience anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, and ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2333-35 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 04:47 PM If you want to find places of energy, particularly high-level creative energy, Csikszentmihalyi chimed in, look for concentrations of people who exhibit high levels of curiosity—a point I will return to later in this chapter. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2394-96 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 04:51 PM To get at this, Stolarick undertook factor analysis—a powerful statistical matching technique—on the hundreds of thousands of data points in the personality survey to identify the main clusters of regional personality types across the United States. His analysis found that all U.S. metropolitan regions break down into three main categories. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2465-68 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:05 PM Sooner or later, Rentfrow and Gosling argue, these places (and their inhabitants) will also assume certain personality traits. They refer to these as "social founder effects." That is, people come to acquire personality traits that reflect their practices, lifestyles, and beliefs. Places that tolerate or encourage openness to experience will ultimately attract people who seek environments in which they can feel free to express themselves in whatever way they choose. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2490-94 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:07 PM The effects of personality on mobility hit me one day as I was addressing the top marketing team at Dewar's. They had read Rise of the Creative Class and wanted to break the image that all scotch-drinkers are sixty years old, affluent, white, and male. They had found that young creative types, whom they dubbed "urban independents," clustered in places like New York's East Village, D.C.'s Adams Morgan and U Street Corridor, Chicago's Wicker Park, and Los Angeles's West Hollywood, had developed a taste for scotch whiskey. Dewar's began reaching out to their budding clientele, keeping track of their predilections and preferences. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2518-24 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:09 PM For years I've tried to make out why technology-based growth took off around MIT and Stanford, but not around Carnegie Mellon, where I taught for nearly twenty years. It's surely not the warm sunny weather. It seemed, after all, that there really was something to the old joke. "How do you make the next Silicon Valley?" "Take one part great university, add two parts sunshine and three parts venture capital: shake vigorously." What if Silicon Valley succeeds not just because it is a magnet for highly skilled people but because it attracts those who are also highly motivated, highly ambitious, highly curious, and highly open? The same is true of the people who migrate and succeed in finance in New York or London; the actors and filmmakers who make it in LA; and the musicians who thrive in Nashville. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2556-58 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:11 PM Openness to experience is the only personality type that plays a consistent role in regional economic development. It is highly correlated with jobs in computing, science, arts, design, and entertainment; with overall human capital levels, high-tech industry, income, and housing values. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2564-69 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:12 PM However, Peterson found a negative relationship between creative cities and strengths that connect people to one another—such as modesty, gratitude, spirituality, teamwork, kindness, and fairness. It may very well be that creative cities have higher concentrations of people whose basic personality makeup is doing their own thing. This jibes with my research team's findings which show that regional creativity and innovation are related to diversity and openness, but not to social capital of the sort Robert Putnam has written about. Putnam's most recent research has also found that diversity hinders social capital.12 This is all very troubling news for our sense of community and social cohesion. The very strengths that make places diverse and creative seem to damage our social capital and community commitment. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Bookmark Loc. 2606 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:27 PM ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2630-40 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:30 PM first segment is recent college graduates. Its members are younger, ages twenty to twenty-nine, just getting out on their own, generally single, and looking for places to start their careers, make friends, have fun, and perhaps find that special someone. The second segment is young professionals. They are older, ages thirty to forty-four, established in their careers, have more resources to spend on housing, and tend to be more settled. They include singles, people who are living together, and married couples, but a precondition is that they not have children. The next phase of life occurs not when people get married but when they have children. The third segment is families with children. Although one can define family in many ways, the available data limited our definition to officially "married" couples, one of whom is sixty-four or younger, with children in the household. Most people think of retirement as the major turning point of this life stage, but at least when it comes to making decisions about location, an equally significant event is when the kids leave home. My team and I divided this demographic into two distinct groups. The fourth segment is empty-nesters between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four. The fifth segment is retirees, those over the age of sixty-five. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2757-62 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 05:42 PM An intriguing study entitled "Sex and the City" by Columbia University economist Lena Edlund found that young women outnumber young men in most urban areas throughout the industrialized world. Since cities offer better labor markets for highly skilled workers, urban job markets should attract more men than women, or at least equal numbers of both genders. Edlund found, however, that while men out-earn women at all ages, young women in the twenty-five to forty-four age range live in more affluent cities. Her answer lies in what she calls the "asymmetries in the marriage market." Men, she writes, "pay women for marriage"—that is, for the relatively higher costs women incur in having and raising children.5 ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2841-44 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 06:37 PM So where do people turn for support during the increasingly long period between leaving their parents' house and getting married? The answer, according to Ethan Watters, is a new surrogate family, the urban tribe.11 Watters defines it as an "intricate community of young people who live and work together in various combinations, form regular rituals, and provide the same kind of support as an extended family." ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Bookmark Loc. 2860 | Added on Wednesday, March 04, 2009, 06:39 PM ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2963-68 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 02:12 PM Giant Sorting Sound What we are witnessing, for better or for worse, is the growing stratification of communities, countries, and the world at large, which Bill Bishop dubs the "big sort."16 Various ages, economic affiliations, cultures, and political affiliations once lived in proximity to one another. Now, more and more, we are segregating across virtually every economic and social dimension. It's not just rampant gentrification and the "blanding" of our cities that worry me, it's that the big sort is wreaking havoc on our social fabric, dividing and segregating societies across class lines. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 3277-81 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 06:42 PM It's hard to fault people for what Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker termed "assortative mating"—the tendency to pair off with someone like ourselves.20 And in a world in which highly talented and highly paid people concentrate in the same handful of places, it should come as little surprise that they are marrying each other. Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence. ========== Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 3291-94 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 06:43 PM As I noted, marriage has declined across all income groups, but among those who do get married, highly educated couples with high incomes fare far better than those couples with lower incomes. "As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm," the Washington Post reported in March 2007, "social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent."22 ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 209-10 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 10:55 PM The comments made by senior Marines to investigators clearly irked Bargewell. In their view, he wrote, “Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 299-302 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 11:01 PM He was as “Army” as an officer can be, his father having been a general who was the highest-ranking American casualty of the Vietnam War. The one thing Casey lacked was combat experience. Over the previous two decades, the Army had fought in Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, but he had not been involved in any of these. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 434-46 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 11:09 PM Eliot Cohen, a professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins University, had suggested Crane to Petraeus as a smart military expert who understood the subject and could lead a team. The perpetually bow-tied Cohen is an unusual figure in Washington, influential in several circles, with an extraordinary range of contacts inside the government, from the White House to the Congress to the military and intelligence establishments, a network created mainly because those institutions send many of the best young people to him to study strategy. He makes that study both intense and concrete, suggesting thousands of pages in readings, from Sun Tzu to Winston Churchill, but also leading his students on walks of battlefields, from Gettysburg to Italy to the Middle East, to mull campaign strategies. Cohen also was comfortable talking to journalists covering national security and foreign policy, especially if they were willing to follow up on his patient efforts to educate them. If being a Harvard-trained Jewish academic didn’t make him an outsider in military eyes, his resolute dislike of spectator sports would have—despite being from the Boston area, he followed neither baseball nor football. This actually may have aided his strategic analyses, as the sports metaphors that tend to pass for strategic discourse in the American military—“we’re five yards from the end zone,” or “it’s the fourth quarter and we’re down fifty”—sailed by him. He also was the author of Supreme Command, an influential study of how civilian leaders have intervened in wartime to oversee strategy and steer their wars toward success. Before the invasion of Iraq, the White House made it known that President Bush had studied the book. But for all that, Cohen didn’t know that David Petraeus and Conrad Crane had been friends for decades, since they sat next to each other in a West Point military history class. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 457-60 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 11:10 PM “General Petraeus doesn’t seem to fit the mold, because he is extremely bright, and intellectual,” said Mansoor, who, like Petraeus, holds a doctorate—in his case, in military history from Ohio State University, home of a top department in the United States for that subject. “But he is a PT [physical training, or exercise] stud, and tactically and technically competent, and that matters to Army [promotion] boards.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 482-90 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 11:12 PM The invasion of Afghanistan 18 months earlier had been a “light force” war, featuring Special Forces and, a bit later, the 10th Mountain Division and some Marine units. Iraq was to be the heavy Army’s turn. The early top commanders in Iraq—Tommy R. Franks and Ricardo Sanchez—were products of that mechanized force. Petraeus, by contrast, was a light infantryman, having spent much of his field time with the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and the helicopter-borne soldiers of the 101st Airborne. The term “light” is a bit of misnomer, because these troops carry everything they can on their backs, from ammunition to medicine, often staggering under the loads. But “light” means that such units rely very little on tanks, artillery, and other heavy weaponry. “That’s significant,” noted Tom Donnelly, a longtime student of the Army and its cultures. “For one thing, it makes you less obsessed with technology. The airborne community always knew that there was more to worry about than tank warfare in Europe’s central front,” the main focus of most of the late twentieth-century Army. While the tankers stayed in Germany, he said, “the light infantry did the Caribbean, Panama, peacekeeping in the Sinai.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 497-500 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 11:13 PM But even more significant than Petraeus’s military background is his determination. It is the cornerstone of his personality and a characteristic that seems to strike everyone he meets. One of his favorite words is “relentless.” Donnelly first encountered Petraeus in the late 1980s, when Petraeus was a young major. “He was almost identical to the guy you find today—very bright, very ambitious,” Donnelly recalled. “Always ready to go for a run. Every day was a good day for him.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 508-11 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 11:14 PM Trying to explain his unease about Petraeus, an officer who has known him for years said, “I really respect his intelligence. He is very disciplined. But I’m not comfortable with his competitiveness.” He said he found it difficult to get Petraeus to engage in a normal conversation. “It is all a race. Everything is a race. It’s a narcissistic, exploitative way of dealing with people.” This approach also has a long-term cost, he said: “Dave tends not to build teams, or think about what happens afterwards. It’s the Dave Petraeus Show.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 525-26 | Added on Thursday, March 05, 2009, 11:15 PM “I worked with him,” said David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency theorist who Petraeus would bring to Iraq as his adviser. “But I am not sure I know him.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 605-8 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 01:03 AM The manual also would borrow liberally from the work being done that summer by Australian army Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a quirky infantryman with a Ph.D. in the anthropology of Islamic extremism, a wicked wit, and experience fighting in Timor. Kilcullen came to Petraeus’s attention when he wrote an essay breezily titled “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency”—that is, going one better than Lawrence of Arabia’s famous “Twenty-Seven Articles” on how to fight in the Middle East in 1917. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 684-88 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 01:08 AM In the 9 primarily Shiite provinces, the leading Shiite party, the United Iraqi Alliance, won 70 of 81 seats. The Kurds swept the 35 seats in their region, and Sunni parties won 15 of 17 seats in al Anbar and Salahuddin provinces. The election results in Baghdad, Nineveh, Diyala, and Kirkuk also resembled the sectarian makeup of each province. This may have helped light the fuse of the small civil war that exploded in Baghdad months after. As Petraeus himself would put it much later, “The elections hardened sectarian positions as Iraqis voted largely based on ethnic and sectarian group identity.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 759-65 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 01:21 AM The court-martial took an illuminating turn: The accused cited the aggressive tone set by their brigade commander, Col. Michael Steele, whose ham-fisted approach long had raised eyebrows in the Army. Retired Army Col. James Hallums, one of his predecessors in commanding the same unit, and himself a veteran of much combat, commented, “The supermacho image that Steele projected permeated his unit, and in my opinion, led directly to atrocities.” When the brigade deployed, Steele, whose role in the fighting in Somalia in 1993 was captured in the book and film Black Hawk Down, had given a speech that was captured on videotape by documentarians following the unit. “Anytime you fight, you always kill the other sonofabitch,” he had told his soldiers. “Do not let him live today so he will fight you tomorrow. Kill him today.” When you go to Iraq, he added, “You’re the predator.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 927-33 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 09:03 AM The conversation flowed freely, and the president enjoyed the brisk dialogue, said Feaver, the NSC aide who helped conceive and arrange the meeting. But it didn’t work as he had intended, which was to confront the president and his key advisers with the worried critiques of loyalists. Bush was riding on good news. Not only had a new government been seated, but just a few days earlier, Zarqawi had been found and killed. And as Bush was listening, he knew something his four visitors didn’t—that he would be slipping away from Camp David just minutes later to make a secret trip to Baghdad, his first since Thanksgiving 2003. (“He was almost a little bouncy,” Kagan said. “I now recognize that he was very excited about the trip he was about to pull.”) So rather than lead to a much-needed review of strategy, the three events effectively combined to reenergize the president’s commitment to the existing one, Feaver said. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 972-77 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 09:05 AM The core of the Iraqi state was rotten. The Iraqi army was heavily Shiite, and even worse, the National Police were thoroughly infiltrated by Shiite militias. These forces didn’t have to carry out the cleansing themselves. All they had to do was go into a Sunni neighborhood and demand in the name of pacification that all heavy weapons be relinquished. After that was accomplished, they could tip off the Shiite militias, who might arrive that night or the next morning, ready to take on the newly defenseless population. As one foreign diplomat in Baghdad summarized the legitimate complaint of Sunnis, “You come and denude us of weapons, and the next day the militias visit.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1068-71 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 02:00 PM The failure to hold meant that the U.S. military was simply repeating the pattern of 2003-5 that Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency analyst, had labeled “kiss of death” operations, in which American forces moved into an area, found cooperative locals, and then, after some improvement of security, pulled out of the area. “Then,” Kilcullen grimly concluded, “insurgents kill those who cooperated with us.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1359-60 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 04:34 PM Also, Iraqi soldiers living on American rations began to show more energy. “You’d be surprised at how much work you can get out of an Iraqi if he has had enough calories to eat,” he said. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1401-7 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 04:37 PM The prevailing American theory for years had been that improvements in security would lead to progress in politics. This was the opposite—political change leading to improvements in security. That decision also took the United States into the dangerous and complex new territory of supporting an armed group that was opposed to the government in Baghdad that the United States also supported. As Carter Malkasian, the counterinsurgency adviser to the Marine Corps in al Anbar, put it, “For all intents and purposes, the government was permitting Sittar and his movement to have their own militia.” But, as Petraeus and Odierno would do the following year, MacFarland had decided it was time to take some risks, especially given that the alternative appeared to be failure. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1407-11 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 04:37 PM The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, in the midst of a small civil war in Baghdad between Shiites and Sunnis, wasn’t happy with what it was hearing out of Ramadi about the Americans cutting local cease-fire deals with Sunni sheikhs. Here again, MacFarland found that American experience on the ground in Iraq helped. His deputy commander, Lt. Col. James Lechner, had spent time as an adviser to the Iraqi military and “knew how to work the system to get guys paid.” Among other things, MacFarland noted, “That built up my wasta with the sheikhs.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1524-30 | Added on Friday, March 06, 2009, 04:44 PM The turning point in the war was the American midterm elections of November 2006, which transferred control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. Without that “thumping,” as President Bush termed it, the administration might never have contemplated the major revisions in strategy and leadership that it would make in the following two months. Until the election, Bush seemed satisfied with blather. After it, he began to speak about the war seriously. The sweeping changes that followed ultimately would reverse the steady downward course of the war—and perversely for Democrats, thus likely extend the conflict for many more years. “I think that without the ’06 elections, there might not have been a change” in U.S. strategy, said Tom Donnelly, one of the original Iraq hawks who in the wake of the November elections would help plan the escalation that would become known as “the surge.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1550-55 | Added on Saturday, March 07, 2009, 01:32 PM Webb had been molded by his experience as a young Marine officer in the Vietnam War. Back then, his Appalachian tenacity and populist distrust of centralized power made him a fierce critic of anti-war activists. He ended Fields of Fire with a scene in which a Vietnam vet challenges a crowd of Harvard protestors: “How many of you are going to get hurt in Vietnam? I didn’t see any of you in Vietnam.” Yet those same deep-running character traits had made Webb an opponent of the Iraq war, where he thinks elites once again are recklessly sending someone else’s children to die while their own stay home and tend their careers. For decades Webb had nursed a cold contempt for such people who took from their country more than they gave. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1584-89 | Added on Saturday, March 07, 2009, 01:35 PM After his last day in office, Rumsfeld took his family to Buck’s Fishing & Camping, which, despite its rustic name, is an upscale Washington restaurant. Underscoring the loathing Rumsfeld had generated in many Americans, the chef-owner there, Carole Greenwood, told her coowner, James Alefantis, to kick him out. “I’m not serving a war criminal in my restaurant,” she declared. Alefantis pointed out that her business was to serve people and that Rumsfeld was with his family. Greenwood eventually relented but only on the condition that someone else cook Rumsfeld’s meal. To Alefantis’s chagrin, he heard that Rumsfeld soon was telling people that Buck’s was his favorite restaurant in the area. Greenwood likely would go ballistic if Rumsfeld returned with his buddy Dick Cheney. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1817-25 | Added on Saturday, March 07, 2009, 04:11 PM So, he told Rumsfeld, the U.S. Army needed to stop conducting mindless Humvee patrols out of big bases and instead start living among the people and patrolling small areas on foot. Set up traffic-control points, conduct a census, and issue identity cards—all classic measures to channel and track the movements of a population. His most controversial recommendation was that Rumsfeld order everyone to stop talking about drawing down troop levels in Iraq. Get some new generals in there, hold them accountable, and match your policies to your resources. To live among the people, and dry up the sea in which the insurgents swam, you are going to need more troops. And focus them on Baghdad. What Keane was saying was hardly novel. He had captured the core lesson of David Galula, the great French theorist of counterinsurgency, who argued in his influential Counterinsurgency: Theory and Practice that to defeat an insurgency, military units must live among the population. Indeed, Keane recommended that book to Rumsfeld. The defense secretary was “uncomfortable” during the meeting and opposed increasing the troop levels without offering a reasoning, Keane said as he read aloud from his extensive notes of the meeting. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 1864-66 | Added on Saturday, March 07, 2009, 04:14 PM Even so, Keane wasn’t entirely approving of Odierno. He had some issues with how he had led the 4th Infantry Division in 2003-4, during his first tour in Iraq. Nevertheless, Keane thought Odierno was a tough, intelligent officer who, unlike some of his peers, was willing to take risks for what he thought was right. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 2050-54 | Added on Saturday, March 07, 2009, 04:32 PM “David Petraeus,” said Cohen. His thinking, he recalled was that “all armies get it wrong at the beginning, as [the great British military historian] Michael Howard says—the question is who adapts fastest.” Cohen believed that Petraeus was the general who while serving in Iraq had best shown the ability to adapt. Keane and McCaffrey seconded the idea. (McCaffrey believes he was first to mention the name, but others disagree.) All the invitees were in accord that Petraeus was the only serious candidate for the job. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 2128-31 | Added on Saturday, March 07, 2009, 04:37 PM This outcome was a victory for Keane, but it raised troubling questions about the ability of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his peers at the Pentagon to carry out their mission of figuring out how to fight and win. “Why did the American military establishment so fail to come up with a war-winning strategy that it was up to a retired general and a civilian think tank, AEI, to do their job?” asked retired Army Col. Bob Killebrew. “This is a stunning indictment of the American military’s top leadership.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 2184-95 | Added on Saturday, March 07, 2009, 04:40 PM Fast said in a statement to investigators that Odierno’s attitude was “We wouldn’t have detained them if we wanted them released.” She asked retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a veteran intelligence officer specializing in interrogation, to review the way intelligence was gathered from detainees. Herrington concluded that some U.S. commanders, in seeking to shut down the insurgency in their areas of operations, were using tactics that effectively made them recruiting sergeants for it. Herrington was especially bothered by the actions of Odierno’s division. “Principally due to sweep operations by some line units—the 4th ID was consistently singled out as the major offender—the number of detainees” was rising steadily, he wrote in his report to Fast. He emphasized that point five pages later: “Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some—the 4th ID is the negative example—are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib.” “Odierno, he hammered everyone,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Kellogg Jr., who was serving with the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad. “The 4th ID was bad,” said an Army intelligence officer who worked with them. “These guys are looking for a fight,” he remembered thinking. “I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians, our jaws dropped.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3257-60 | Added on Sunday, March 08, 2009, 11:16 PM There was good reason for this quiet ratcheting down. As Steven Metz, an astute strategic analyst, put it, encouraging democracy was at odds with the larger goal of stability: “Our current strategy is based on the delusion that we can have stable, or modulated democratization,” he said. “Few things are more destabilizing and prone to chaos than democratization. I think we can have either democratization or stabilization. The issue is whether we can tolerate several decades of often-violent instability while democratization takes ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3326-29 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2009, 01:39 PM Its soldiers conducted a thorough census that mapped the 3,500 households in its area of operations, photographing all male inhabitants and collecting their grievances. Dubbed “Operation Close Encounters,” it was done slowly and carefully, with some interviews lasting an hour. Keirsey ordered that the soldier doing the talking should sit down, take off his helmet and sunglasses, accept any drink offered, and speak respectfully. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3429-36 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2009, 05:54 PM As thousands of cement barriers were erected—the one separating Adhamiyah from a Shiite area was twelve feet high and three miles long—they were roundly criticized as an imitation of Israeli tactics. That was the most incendiary charge possible in the Middle East. Steve Niva, a Middle East specialist at the Evergreen State College in Washington, charged that they were “dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications.” What they actually were doing was dividing Iraqis from people trying to kill them and choking off the normal movements of death squads. In Adhamiyah, civilian deaths declined by about two-thirds after the wall was erected in April 2007, Kilcullen said. One sign of the value of the walls was that al Qaeda in Iraq vigorously resisted them, noted Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, commander of a battalion in northwest Baghdad. “We were engaged in a running battle with AQI as they tried to establish holes in the barriers while we tried to keep them intact,” he said. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3439-44 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2009, 05:54 PM As the fighters and death squads shifted to new locations, they were forced to communicate, and signals interception enabled the U.S. military to find them, or to eavesdrop on their reports and planning sessions. Trying to escape the new constraints, some insurgents moved out of the cities and into the desert. This in turn made it easier for the Marines to locate them and then order up air strikes. “Population control measures and the subsequent movement of the insurgency into more remote areas has a secondary positive effect on our operations,” the Marine report continued. “More and more often we found ourselves engaging the enemy on terrain that maximizes kinetic effects.” Also, in the emptiness of the desert, “collateral damage”—that is, killing bystanders—became far easier to avoid. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3503-9 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2009, 05:58 PM The fight was growing more complex. One day in May, Kilcullen noted that, in Baghdad’s Hurriyah neighborhood, there were four factions of Jaysh al-Mahdi, Sadr’s extremist Shiite militia, fighting each other—Noble JAM, Golden JAM, “criminal JAM,” and “ordinary JAM.” U.S. officials sent a message to “JAM Central” in Najaf. “We want these guys out of there.” In response, he said, the JAM headquarters in Najaf sent a hit team to Baghdad to sort out the problem. “Because we treated them as the authority, they cleaned it up.” There also was murky unconfirmed talk that a deal was reached under which the U.S. military would aid Golden JAM in attacking other parts of the militia deemed to have gone rogue. Petraeus stated flatly that no such agreement existed and suggested that it grew out of rumors collected from Iraqis by U.S. intelligence or deals made by local American commanders. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3544-49 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2009, 10:38 PM “This is a period in which it gets harder before it gets easier,” Petraeus said one day in May as he sipped iced tea in his office, a giant map of the city of Baghdad behind him. He was expecting a long, hard summer of violence, followed by a trek to Capitol Hill to tell Congress how much progress he was making. He was pushing all the American chips on the table, going “all-in,” he said, with the surge. Whatever happened, he was going to ride this thing through to the end. “There’s no combat forces left, at least, I’m aware of,” he said. That is, the United States military simply didn’t have replacement troops available for those he was fielding. “You can’t ask for a brigade that isn’t there.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3720-28 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2009, 10:47 PM Political support for the surge, never strong, appeared to be collapsing. Senator Reid, who in April had pronounced the war lost, now attacked Petraeus personally, charging, somewhat oddly, that the general “isn’t in touch with what’s going on in Baghdad”—as if he could discern better from Washington, D.C. Senior Republicans weren’t far behind him in heading for the exits. Senator Richard Lugar, the centrist Indiana Republican, took to the floor of the Senate on June 25 to call for an end to the surge. “I believe that the costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved by doing so,” said Lugar, one of the most respected voices in Congress on foreign policy. “Persisting with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our interests over the long term.” A week later he would be joined by Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who called for following the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations and getting U.S. combat forces out of Iraq by early 2008. Senator George Voinovich of Ohio also was backing away from the president. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3746-52 | Added on Monday, March 09, 2009, 10:48 PM Five soldiers were killed in the incident, but the image that haunted Weber was the first thing he saw, the dead soldier in the blasted turret, “iPod still in his ear.” He still wonders, “Did his leadership know he was distracted by music; not being able to hear the battlefield?” Indeed, there were growing signs of such demoralization and indiscipline. In the hard-hit 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, which had lost five soldiers in one bombing in June, life got even worse in July. The first sergeant of its Alpha Company, while on patrol, said, “I can’t take it anymore,” put a weapon under his chin, and shot himself in front of his men. A few days later, members of a platoon in the battalion’s Charlie Company refused to go out on a mission, saying they were afraid of becoming abusive with Iraqis. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3808-17 | Added on Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 11:04 AM In addition, in a highly classified operation, new information about al Qaeda and insurgent leaders began to get distributed much more quickly to tactical units. The officer responsible for the change was a military intelligence specialist, Lt. Col. Jen Koch Easterly, who reorganized the collection and analysis of intercepted telephone and computer communications in order to coordinate it better with other intelligence operations and with what units were doing on the ground. She also focused more on going after the networks that were assembling, delivering, and detonating roadside bombs, which has been the single greatest killer of U.S. troops during the war. According to one senior officer, her military intelligence unit’s successes became the undisclosed key to the success of the surge. Her work still remains largely unknown because so much of what was done remains highly classified. But as one operations report by the 1st Cavalry Division put it, “synchronization of ISR/HUMINT/SIGINT [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance /human intelligence/signals intelligence] has significantly reduced IED cells and threat.” Asked about that, Maj. Patrick Michaelis said, “It was a major factor. . . . Cryptological support from Colonel Easterly was critical.” She declined to be interviewed, citing classification ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3920-23 | Added on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 09:21 PM First, he deemphasized the transition to Iraqi control. “It’s the indirect approach,” Dubik said. “It’s right out of Aristotle: If you want a happy life, don’t aim for happiness, aim for virtue.” In other words, create an effective Iraqi force, and the transition will follow naturally, without being forced. In Maoist terms, Iraqi forces would not be given power, they would take it. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3974-76 | Added on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 09:24 PM “The biggest difference is, we have doctrine now,” he said, “Everyone’s doing it now, protecting the population.” That was also a much more concrete mission than “stop the insurgency,” an order that only raised a series of additional definitional questions, such as what the insurgency was and what tactics were appropriate in countering it. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 3990-98 | Added on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 09:25 PM The fifth—and by far the most controversial—reason for the decline in violence was the turning of parts of the Sunni insurgency. This may have been the biggest gamble Petraeus took as the commander of the war in Iraq. He was going behind the back of the Baghdad government to put its enemies on the American payroll. Strikingly, he didn’t seem to think he needed to get clearance from the American government, either. When asked about how he had gotten the president to agree to the program, he indicated that he hadn’t asked Bush about it. “I don’t think it was something that we needed to ask permission for. We had the authority to conduct what are called security contracts, and that was how we saw these.” But, he added, “to be truthful we didn’t see it growing to 103,000”—its peak in 2008, and a huge addition to the firepower the U.S. military could bring to bear in and around Baghdad. At its height, the monthly payroll was $30 million, which sounds like a lot but amounts to a few hours of what the war costs the American taxpayer twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4008-13 | Added on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 09:26 PM It was effectively a second marriage for both sides, which had become estranged from their original partners. The Americans weren’t quite divorced from their allies in the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, which wasn’t interested in a program of centrally driven reconciliation, but there was a new distance between the two. The Sunnis had split from al Qaeda in Iraq, rejecting its program of violent religious extremism. “The possibility of forming a de facto alliance with the tribes emerged only once the Sunnis had themselves become disenchanted with AQI, and once the United States had also grown equally disillusioned with the prospects of achieving a ‘top down’ process of reconciliation through the auspices of the al-Maliki government,” commented Australian political scientist Andrew Phillips. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4036-45 | Added on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 09:28 PM Nor were the front-line troops being asked to work with their former enemies told much about the changeover. Cpl. David Goldich, a smart young Marine in al Anbar Province, recalled simply seeing local guys showing up with weapons and setting up a rudimentary checkpoint on a main road. To a Marine eye, they didn’t look impressive—“unshaven men wearing civilian clothes carrying rusty AK-47s milling about,” he wrote. But he soon concluded that “they are worth their weight in gold. . . . an amazing force multiplier that denied the enemy freedom of movement in a manner we could not.” They spoke the language, they knew the area, and they knew who wasn’t from it. Higher-ups wouldn’t approve giving supplies to the new guards, so Goldich’s unit decided to help them out and scrounged weapons and food for the men and bullet-proof glass and concertina wire for their checkpoints. “What we gave them we stole from base, and probably would have been punished if caught,” he recalled. (Goldich, who graduated from the University of Virginia before enlisting, also showed a far greater understanding of counterinsurgency than the Marine chain of command had after the Haditha incident. He took more risks, such as sometimes approaching Iraqis without carrying a weapon, because he thought it would help his unit achieve its mission. “My job is to defeat the enemy, not protect myself,” he reasoned.) ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4067-71 | Added on Thursday, March 12, 2009, 11:12 AM There also was some suspicion that that was precisely the American plan—that is, create a balancing force of Sunnis to deter the Shiites from wholesale suppression of the Sunnis once the Americans were out of the way. Petraeus flatly denied that the new groups were a helpful counterweight to the Baghdad government, but planners below him were perhaps more candid. “As their growth grows, the national government will be in jeopardy,” said Lt. Col. Jeff McDougall, one of Odierno’s senior planners. “So it’s a forcing mechanism,” he said, posing a useful “or else” to the Shiite political leaders in Baghdad. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4074-77 | Added on Thursday, March 12, 2009, 11:13 AM Not all American military officials were comfortable with the approach, worrying that the short-term security gain obtained would create long-term political problems. “What we’re doing is creating a secessionist state out west,” said a senior U.S. military intelligence official. “The Anbar tribes will be capable of keeping order, and also of keeping a Shiite-dominated army out of Anbar.” In other words, argued retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, the Americans were avoiding military defeat by embracing political failure. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4152-55 | Added on Thursday, March 12, 2009, 11:17 AM He also told them that al Qaeda in Iraq had three major sources of funding: crime, the Kurds, and the Iranians. Cook would use this information adroitly, asking local Sunni insurgents why they thought al Qaeda was their friend, if it was on the payroll of the dreaded Persian power. The insurgents, who had affiliated with al Qaeda as the surge began to hit them, also were growing tired, Cook recalled. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4432-35 | Added on Saturday, March 14, 2009, 12:21 PM The danger of making policy on the fly and not vetting it through scrutiny and debate is that it may win short-term advances without recognizing long-term costs. As Long, the counterinsurgency expert at the RAND Corporation put it, “The tribal strategy is a means to achieve one strategic end, fighting al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but it is antithetical to another, the creation of a stable, unified, and democratic Iraq.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4620-24 | Added on Saturday, March 14, 2009, 12:32 PM For the first time in the war, younger officers could feel that they were being led by men who had some sense of what life was like for soldiers out in the streets, palm groves, and deserts of Iraq. “These are people who have moved forward through a very, very tough crucible,” said Abizaid, who had known them for years. They were far less inclined than their predecessors to tolerate peacetime protocol or bureaucratic chickenshit. And that was what they thought they were getting from Fallon in the spring and summer of 2007. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4756-61 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 12:22 AM But even some of the violence helped American aims. In August a day of Shiite-on-Shiite violence in the holy city of Karbala killed 49 people. Moqtada al-Sadr apparently was embarrassed by the incident, which had pitted his Mahdi Army against fighters from the the Badr Corps, the other major Shiite militia. He announced that he was putting a “freeze” on his militia’s operations for six months, a period he later expanded. Sadr was taking a gamble of his own, that he could survive as a political power without having a fielded force to protect his turf and generate revenue from various forms of racketeering, extortion, and property seizures. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 4812-16 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 12:25 AM Petraeus laid the groundwork for that approach in the letter he issued to the troops as he left Iraq. While the initiative had been retaken, he expressed disappointment about the political state of Iraq. “Many of us had hoped this summer would be a time of tangible political progress at the national level,” he wrote. “One of the justifications for the surge, after all, was that it would help create the space for Iraqi leaders to tackle the tough questions and agree on key pieces of ‘national reconciliation’ legislation. It has not worked out as we had hoped.” It would be hard to charge that he was being rosy about Iraq. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5041-49 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 07:26 PM The bloodshed that did occur now seemed to resonate less, especially because there was a new air of desperate improvisation in al Qaeda’s attacks. “None of ’em add up to anything particular,” Brig. Gen. Anderson, Odierno’s chief of staff, said of that winter’s car bombings. Baghdad had moved from the seventh circle of Hell, which Dante reserved for the violent, to the fifth, the destination of those overcome with anger and sullenness, or as the poet put it in Canto VII, “those who swallow mud.” It was a notable improvement, and it was in the right direction—but it was still a version of Hell. Al Qaeda’s usual methods of bomb delivery—cars or young men—were deterred by a proliferation of checkpoints, so it began using bicycles, women, and preteen boys to bomb Iraqis. Eventually it would perversely turn to mentally handicapped or disabled girls. In a sign of how much checkpoints run by the turned militias were impeding its operations, al Qaeda fighters also began launching sophisticated ambushes against them, in one instance wearing Iraqi police uniforms so they could get near. U.S. military operations continued, with large offensives in Diyala and Nineveh Provinces, but they had a desultory feeling of mopping up. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5068-70 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 07:29 PM “The surge is doing what it was designed to do,” President Bush asserted in the spring of 2008. But it hadn’t done what he had hoped it would—that is, lead to political reconciliation. As Defense Secretary Gates had phrased it, “The purpose of the surge was to create enough space that the process of reconciliation could go forward in Iraq.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5199-5200 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 07:42 PM Petraeus took it a step further a month later, calling him “al-Sayyid Moqtada al-Sadr,” using the honorific for descendants of the prophet Muhammad. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5208-11 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 07:43 PM The last nongovernmental armed group in Iraq that was being reevaluated that winter was the genuine American militia, the 20,000 to 30,000 private security contractors who, loosely controlled and operating under a hazy legal regime, guarded American diplomats and other contractors. One of the side effects of the new U.S. strategy, founded on protecting the people, was to cast a harsh new light on the security contractors, and especially their willingness to open fire on civilian vehicles. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5256-60 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 07:47 PM Matters came to a head on a Tuesday afternoon in September 2007, when employees of Blackwater who were guarding a convoy just outside the Green Zone shot and killed at least 17 Iraqis. The Blackwater men said they were responding to an ambush, and the company would back them up, saying they acted in self-defense. But several Iraqi eyewitnesses disputed that, and parallel investigations by the U.S. military and the Iraqi government would conclude that no one fired except the contractors. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5372-79 | Added on Sunday, March 15, 2009, 08:16 PM A major personnel move led by Petraeus a few months earlier also began to leak out about this time. In November he had left Iraq to come back to the Pentagon to run a promotion board to select the Army’s new brigadier generals. It was unprecedented for a commander to leave the war zone to do that, but it showed how influential he had become. Among the 40 new generals his board tapped were H. R. McMaster, Sean MacFarland, and Steve Townsend, who had commanded a highly mobile Stryker brigade that Odierno had employed as a quick reaction force in 2007. The board also was notably heavy in veterans of Special Operations, including Kenneth Tovo, who had lead a task force in Iraq; Austin Miller, a former commander of the secretive Delta Force; and Kevin Magnum, a former commander of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. One of the signs of an effective military is rewarding battlefield success, and Petraeus’s board, which was widely watched inside the military, did just that. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5498-5501 | Added on Monday, March 16, 2009, 05:03 PM “Basra was a colossal failure in execution, but the decision to attack was a key step forward for the government of Iraq,” concluded Brig. Gen. Dan Allyn, Gen. Austin’s chief of staff at the American military headquarters for day-to-day operations in Iraq. “They chose to take on Shia militias for the first time. That was a courageous decision not properly prepared for.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5505-7 | Added on Monday, March 16, 2009, 05:04 PM In military terms, the outcome was ambiguous. “It was totally unclear who won or lost on the ground,” said Lemons, the Marine sergeant. But in political terms, Basra was a clear victory for Maliki and his army, he and others said. “Every Iraqi I have spoken to since then about how the prime minister did claims Maliki proved he is a strong leader willing to crack JAM.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5530-33 | Added on Monday, March 16, 2009, 05:06 PM Hammond, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, described the battle of Basra as a transformative event for Iraqi troops. “Until then, they were a checkpoint-based security force, and that was kind of hit and miss,” he said. “It’s kind of like they found a whole new level of confidence. Even the checkpoints are different than they were a month ago—higher level of professionalism, greater pride, greater sense of purpose. I think they’ve tasted success, and they like it.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5561-63 | Added on Monday, March 16, 2009, 05:08 PM In June 2008, Austin, the new corps commander, noted that, “For the first time, the government has positive control of the three strategic nodes—Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad.” It was indeed an accomplishment, even if it came during the sixth year of the war. At Umm Qasr, Iraq’s only port, just south of Basra, the amount of cargo arriving daily tripled from the spring to the summer. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5615-22 | Added on Monday, March 16, 2009, 05:11 PM McCain’s grand vision was not only at odds with the more restrained goals in Petraeus’s campaign plan—simply of “sustainable security”—but verged on fantasy. It resembled President Bush’s 2003 rhetoric, but flew in the face of five additional years of painful evidence about the imprudence of that grandiose approach. It was unlikely that Iraq would wind up a strong or genuinely democratic nation, with not only elections but also rule of law and respect for the rights of its minorities. There was even less chance that Iraq would be an ally against Iran, given that the Shiite politicians that the United States had helped to power had taken refuge in Iran during Saddam’s time, and had maintained close ties even during the U.S. occupation. Rather, the best case scenario was that in the long run, Iraq would calm down, be mildly authoritarian, and probably become an ally of Iran, but, with luck, not one that threatened the rest of the Arab world. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5655-60 | Added on Monday, March 16, 2009, 05:13 PM The evocation of Lebanonization raised the haunting possibility of the American war in the Middle East continuing for decades. A generation of Arab fighters had taken on the United States presence in Iraq, and some had survived to go back home, reported the Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid. “Iraq is a badge of honor for every Arab and Muslim to fight the American vampire,” he was told by Abu Haritha, the nom de guerre of a man who was wounded while fighting in Fallujah and then returned home to his home in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city. Crocker’s warning was effectively dismissed by the members of Congress quizzing him and Petraeus, despite the ambassador’s persistence and his familiarity with both Lebanon and Iraq. It was as if no one even wanted to hear it. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5693-99 | Added on Monday, March 16, 2009, 05:16 PM The Muslim holy month of Ramadan would start this year in September, and in every year of the war it had brought a spike in violence. Second, the better security was in Baghdad, the more refugees would return home from Jordan and Syria, where many of them were running out of money. Their homecomings promised to provoke sectarian fighting and test Iraqi forces as Sunnis returned to neighborhoods that had been cleansed by Shiite militias that had taken possession of Sunni houses. Provincial elections almost certainly would increase violence. The planners also knew, finally, that the American election would be closely watched in Iraq, and that there might be violence intended to influence American voters. That election could go a long way toward determining the future U.S. mission in Iraq: Under Obama it would be to reduce the presence, while under McCain it would be to prevail and help confront Iran. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5742-45 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 05:36 PM The surge was the right step to take, or more precisely, the least wrong move in a misconceived war. Petraeus’s final letter to his troops, dated September 15, 2008, stated that “your great work, sacrifice, courage and skill have helped reverse a downward spiral toward civil war and wrest the initiative from the enemies of the new Iraq.” That assessment captured what the surge and associated moves did, but not what they didn’t do. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5760-68 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 05:38 PM Marine Col. Tom Greenwood, who had been a member of the critical “council of colonels” that in the fall of 2006 had pushed the Pentagon toward recognizing some hard truths about Iraq, said the surge essentially had papered over the problems of Iraq without solving them. “I still think that the Maliki government is riddled with sectarianism and is dysfunctional,” he said in mid-2008, and “that we have de facto partition between the Kurds, Shia and Sunni, that Iraq is little more than an Iranian proxy, that we have destabilized the region worse than Saddam Hussein ever did, that the downward trend in U.S. casualties will be short-lived.” What’s more, some of the country’s political tensions were worsening, most notably between Arabs and Kurds over oil and the status of Kirkuk. “As Nouri al-Maliki has become more capable and more confident, he’s actually become less inclined to reach out to those he most needs to reconcile with,” said Colin Kahl of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish region, charged the Baghdad government with forgetting its commitments and acting like “a totalitarian regime.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5775-78 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 05:39 PM Judging by the frustrated mood of officials in Baghdad, it wouldn’t be surprising in an Arab-Kurd showdown to see an American “tilt” in favor of the Arabs. “The Kurds have gotten away with everything for the last five years, taking more than they should,” Emma Sky, Odierno’s political adviser, said that same month. “I think the Kurds overplayed their hand, and we helped them do it.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5789-94 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 05:40 PM The surge, while making short-term security gains, also may have carried hidden long-term costs that will only become fully apparent when Obama is president. “The surge may have bought transitory successes . . . but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism,” argued Steven Simon, a Council of Foreign Relations expert on the Middle East. If continued, he predicted, the U.S. support for tribes, local militias, and other centrifugal forces will undermine central authority and lead to a divided, dysfunctional sate “that suffers from the same instability and violence as Yemen and Pakistan.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5807-12 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 05:41 PM It was an oddly contentious encounter, in part because the two men are essentially similar—more cerebral and reserved than their peers, but also lean, focused, ambitious, and extraordinarily successful in their chosen fields. One is a paratrooper who went to graduate school at Princeton, the other a community activist who went to law school at Harvard. Most important, their vision of what America can and should do in Iraq is fundamentally fairly close, with both inclined toward what Petraeus has called a “minimalist” position, a polite way of rejecting the grandiose Bush vision and instead acknowledging that Iraq isn’t going to be a stable, quiet, peace-loving democracy anytime soon. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5839-43 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 05:43 PM Gen. Austin, the number two commander in Iraq, said that his impression was that Obama “really took to heart some of the things we told him.” Obama left people in Iraq with the sense he would be flexible and consider conditions on the ground and would be able to adjust his 16-month timetable if he saw the need. In sum, Obama, Bush, Maliki, and Petraeus all seemed to be saying more or less the same thing: We all want the U.S. military out of Iraq eventually, but want to do it in a way that doesn’t push the country over a cliff. The long war view appeared to have won. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 5845-51 | Added on Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 05:44 PM It has happened to hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Leaving Iraq is a moment of ambivalence. One is pleased to be going home and anticipating a reunion with one’s family, but is also conflicted by the nagging sense of leaving in the middle of the fight, with much unfinished business. There is a sense of lightness, of a weight being lifted, followed by a recognition of how much a mental and physical strain it has been to fight in Iraq. When Petraeus got on the airplane to leave Iraq in mid-September 2008, he experienced all these mixed emotions. He and others felt “a quiet pride,” he said, “that we helped Iraq step back from the brink of civil war and to essentially go . . . from the brink to the mend.” But in his case, the sense of relief didn’t last long. “I think there might have been a lifting of the weight for five minutes and then someone started talking about Centcom.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 6135-39 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 01:14 AM John McCreary, a veteran analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, predicted in September 2008 that the arrangement imposed by the U.S. government on Iraqi factions would unravel, likely with a Shiite attack on the U.S. presence. The Americans have imposed power sharing on Iraq’s factions, he said, and that should worry us for several reasons. First, it produces what looks like peace but isn’t. Second, in such situations eventually one of the factions seeks to break out of the arrangement. “Thus,” McCreary wrote, “power sharing is always a prelude to violence,” usually after the force imposing it withdraws. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 6139-44 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 01:15 AM That analysis points toward an outcome akin to the battered state of Lebanon. In fact, many of those closest to the situation in Iraq expect a full-blown civil war in the coming years. One colonel who served in Iraq saw that renewed bloodshed as inevitable. “I don’t think the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,” he said. “I suspect Sadr is recruiting and amassing weapons and resources for that day we pull down our troop levels to the point where he can make a grab for the seat of power in Baghdad. I’m sure his boys are infiltrating all levels of the Iraqi army and police, and he is smart enough to wait until he realizes we are drawn down to a point where we can’t effectively stop him without a massive rebuild of troops, . . . a point where the American public will not stomach another ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 6161-65 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 01:17 AM The less the Iraqi generals need American support, the more they might be inclined to take control of the government, so one reason to keep a substantial number of troops there, said Biddle, was to deter them from launching a coup. One nightmare scenario, he noted, leads eventually to a Shiite general who takes over explicitly as a Shiite out to suppress the Sunnis—and who has at his disposal a military and an economy more effective and efficient than Saddam Hussein’s ever were. “Imagine an Iraq-Iran axis with their oil wealth, a modern equipped army, in cahoots with each other,” he said. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 6169-72 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 01:17 AM One of the least understood of those “shady guys” was also one of the most prominent—Moqtada al-Sadr. The U.S. government consistently has underestimated him, first in going into Iraq and then in 2004, when he violently confronted the American superpower. He not only survived those encounters, but also emerged more powerful and was brought into the American-created Iraqi government. If he can stay alive, more power is likely to flow to him, as his two main rivals for Shiite allegiance, Hakim and Ayatollah Sistani, are both old and ill. ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 6178-84 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 01:18 AM Indeed, given that Sadr is more of an Iraqi nationalist than many of the people the U.S. government has supported in Iraq, it isn’t clear why the U.S. government holds that diminishing him will restrain Iranian influence in Iraq. “That’s the million-dollar question,” said Capt. Jeanne Hull, a military intelligence veteran who during 2008 was on her third tour in Iraq, all of them working for Petraeus. She also was almost certainly the only soldier serving in Iraq who was simultaneously doing research for a doctoral dissertation for Princeton University. She had been assigned to work on Sadrist issues on this most recent tour. “I don’t think we’ve looked at it deeply enough to know if backing the GOI [government of Iraq] is the same as backing Iranian interests.” ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 6189-95 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 01:19 AM Americans still don’t fathom how the Iraq war is likely to end, Emma Sky said after addressing the CIA conference on Iraq early in 2008. “I expect Iraq is going to ask us to leave,” she said. That is, Iraqi leaders no longer would see any utility in keeping U.S. forces on hand, which would permit Iraq’s deep-seated xenophobia to roar back in full strength. Once they felt they had amassed sufficient power to survive without American protection, they would kick them out. That expulsion would probably only come when and if the government of Iraq felt secure, both internally and with its neighbors. But it also could develop if the Baghdad government came sufficiently under the sway of Tehran to become a subsidiary of Iranian power—-a situation that would promise long-term instability, both internally and regionally. The role of Iran remains problematic. At this ========== The Gamble (THOMAS E. RICKS) - Highlight Loc. 6287-90 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 09:42 AM No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends, it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015—which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict. “The story of the new Iraq is going to be a very, very long time in unfolding,” Ambassador Crocker said one day in 2008. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 219-24 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 05:32 PM So conditions were ripe for a swing of the dietary pendulum when, in the summer of 2002, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the new research entitled “What if Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat?” Within months, supermarket shelves were restocked and restaurant menus rewritten to reflect the new nutritional wisdom. The blamelessness of steak restored, two of the most wholesome and uncontroversial foods known to man—bread and pasta—acquired a moral stain that promptly bankrupted dozens of bakeries and noodle firms and ruined an untold number of perfectly good meals. So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 304-10 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 11:39 PM One of the themes of this book is that the industrial revolution of the food chain, dating to the close of World War II, has actually changed the fundamental rules of this game. Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead. (Of course, even that energy originally came from the sun, but unlike sunlight it is finite and irreplaceable.) The result of this innovation has been a vast increase in the amount of food energy available to our species; this has been a boon to humanity (allowing us to multiply our numbers), but not an unalloyed one. We’ve discovered that an abundance of food does not render the omnivore’s dilemma obsolete. To the contrary, abundance seems only to deepen it, giving us all sorts of new problems and things to worry about. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 337-44 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 11:42 PM Yet as different as these three journeys (and four meals) turned out to be, a few themes kept cropping up. One is that there exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry, at least as it is presently organized. Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature’s ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system—a patch of soil, a human body—and the health of one is connected—literally—to the health of the other. Many of the problems of health and nutrition we face today trace back to things that happen on the farm, and behind those things stand specific government policies few of us know anything about. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 459-62 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 11:54 PM After water, carbon is the most common element in our bodies—indeed, in all living things on earth. We earthlings are, as they say, a carbon life form. (As one scientist put it, carbon supplies life’s quantity, since it is the main structural element in living matter, while much scarcer nitrogen supplies its quality—but more on that later.) Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 506-15 | Added on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 11:58 PM Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us. To some extent this holds true for all of the plants and animals that take part in the grand coevolutionary bargain with humans we call agriculture. Though we insist on speaking of the “invention” of agriculture as if it were our idea, like double-entry bookkeeping or the light-bulb, in fact it makes just as much sense to regard agriculture as a brilliant (if unconscious) evolutionary strategy on the part of the plants and animals involved to get us to advance their interests. By evolving certain traits we happen to regard as desirable, these species got themselves noticed by the one mammal in a position not only to spread their genes around the world, but to remake vast swaths of that world in the image of the plants’ preferred habitat. No other group of species gained more from its association with humans than the edible grasses, and no grass has reaped more from agriculture than Zea mays, today the world’s most important cereal crop. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 549-53 | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2009, 03:59 PM “Corn was the means that permitted successive waves of pioneers to settle new territories,” writes Arturo Warman, a Mexican historian. “Once the settlers had fully grasped the secrets and potential of corn, they no longer needed the Native Americans.” Squanto had handed the white man precisely the tool he needed to dispossess the Indian. Without the “fruitfulness” of Indian corn, the nineteenth-century English writer William Cobbett declared, the colonists would never have been able to build “a powerful nation.” Maize, he wrote, was “the greatest blessing God ever gave to man.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 560-63 | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2009, 04:00 PM Had maize failed to find favor among the conquerors, it would have risked extinction, because without humans to plant it every spring, corn would have disappeared from the earth in a matter of a few years. The novel cob-and-husk arrangement that makes corn such a convenient grain for us renders the plant utterly dependent for its survival on an animal in possession of the opposable thumb needed to remove the husk, separate the seeds, and plant them. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 605-10 | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2009, 06:26 PM Native Americans had discovered that by taking the pollen from the tassel of one corn plant and dusting it on the silks of another, they could create new plants that combined the traits of both parents. American Indians were the world’s first plant breeders, developing literally thousands of distinct cultivars for every conceivable environment and use. Looked at another way, corn was the first plant to involve humans so intimately in its sex life. For a species whose survival depends on how well it can gratify the ever shifting desires of its only sponsor, this has proved to be an excellent evolutionary strategy. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 638-42 | Added on Thursday, March 19, 2009, 06:28 PM Farmers now had to buy new seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce themselves, they now depended on a corporation. The corporation, assured for the first time of a return on its investment in breeding, showered corn with attention—R&D, promotion, advertising—and the plant responded, multiplying its fruitfulness year after year. With the advent of the F-1 hybrid, a technology with the power to remake nature in the image of capitalism, Zea mays entered the industrial age and, in time, it brought the whole American food chain with it. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 683-86 | Added on Friday, March 20, 2009, 08:34 AM The 129 people who depend on George Naylor for their sustenance are all strangers, living at the far end of a food chain so long, intricate, and obscure that neither producer nor consumer has any reason to know the first thing about the other. Ask one of those eaters where their steak or soda comes from and she’ll tell you “the supermarket.” Ask George Naylor whom he’s growing all that corn for and he’ll tell you “the military-industrial complex.” Both are partly right. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 713-17 | Added on Friday, March 20, 2009, 02:09 PM Even without the addition of transgenes for traits like insect resistance, the standard F-1 hybrids Naylor plants are technological marvels, capable of coaxing 180 bushels of corn from an acre of Iowa soil. One bushel holds 56 pounds of kernels, so that’s slightly more than ten thousand pounds of food per acre; the field George and I planted that day would produce 1.8 million pounds of corn. Not bad for a day’s work sitting down, I thought to myself that afternoon, though of course there’d be several more days of work between now and the harvest in October. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 790-93 | Added on Friday, March 20, 2009, 02:47 PM The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 818-21 | Added on Friday, March 20, 2009, 02:50 PM By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China’s opening to the West: After Nixon’s 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would probably have starved. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 999-1004 | Added on Saturday, March 21, 2009, 01:33 AM “The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different than a firm’s: When prices fall, the firm can lay off people, idle factories, and make fewer widgets. Eventually the market finds a new balance between supply and demand. But the demand for food isn’t elastic; people don’t eat more just because food is cheap. And laying off farmers doesn’t help to reduce supply. You can fire me, but you can’t fire my land, because some other farmer who needs more cash flow or thinks he’s more efficient than I am will come in and farm it. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1005-6 | Added on Saturday, March 21, 2009, 01:34 AM Corn is the most efficient way to produce energy, soybeans the most efficient way to produce protein.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1131-33 | Added on Saturday, March 21, 2009, 12:05 PM Making matters still more difficult, the golden river of American commodity corn, wide though it is, passes through a tiny number of corporate hands. Though the companies won’t say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1218-20 | Added on Saturday, March 21, 2009, 07:44 PM Although a mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a funnel that starts out as wide as the Great Plains. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1294-1302 | Added on Saturday, March 21, 2009, 07:51 PM IT WAS ONLY NATURAL that I start my tour at the feed mill, the feedlot’s thundering hub, where three meals a day for thirty-seven thousand animals are designed and mixed by computer. A million pounds of feed pass through the mill each day. Every hour of every day a tractor trailer pulls up to the loading dock to deliver another fifty tons of corn. The driver opens a valve in the belly of the truck and a golden stream of grain—one thin rivulet of the great corn river coursing out of the Middle West—begins to flow, dropping down a chute into the bowels of the mill. Around to the other side of the building, tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplements. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen beside pallets stacked with fifty-pound sacks of antibiotics—Rumensin and Tylosin. Along with alfalfa hay and silage (for roughage), all these ingredients will be automatically blended and then piped into the parade of dump trucks that three times a day fan out from here to keep Poky’s eight and a half miles of trough filled. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1307-10 | Added on Saturday, March 21, 2009, 09:04 PM Before being put on this highly concentrated diet, new arrivals to the feedyard are treated to a few days of fresh long-stemmed hay. (They don’t eat on the long ride and can lose up to one hundred pounds, so their rumens need to be carefully restarted.) Over the next several weeks they’ll gradually step up to a daily ration of thirty-two pounds of feed, three-quarters of which is corn—nearly a half bushel a day. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1707-12 | Added on Sunday, March 22, 2009, 03:25 PM As the historian W. J. Rorabaugh tells the story in The Alcoholic Republic, we drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, before work and after and very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break called “the elevenses.” (Just to pronounce it makes you sound tipsy.) Except for a brief respite Sunday morning in church, Americans simply did not gather—whether for a barn raising or quilting bee, corn husking or political rally—without passing the whiskey jug. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1783-86 | Added on Sunday, March 22, 2009, 03:33 PM But the soda makers don’t deserve credit for the invention of supersizing. That distinction belongs to a man named David Wallerstein. Until his death in 1993, Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald’s, but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas, where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn—the high-markup items that theaters depend on for their profitability. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 1965-68 | Added on Sunday, March 22, 2009, 03:52 PM In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn’s koala. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 2095-99 | Added on Sunday, March 22, 2009, 04:09 PM Or should I say partly overlooked, for surely our abiding affection for the stuff—reflected in our scrupulously tended lawns and playing fields, as well as in the persistence of so many forms of grassy pastoral, in everything from poetry to supermarket labels—expresses an unconscious recognition of our one-time dependence. Our inclination toward grass, which has the force of a tropism, is frequently cited as a prime example of “biophilia,” E. O. Wilson’s coinage for what he claims is our inherited genetic attraction for the plants and animals and landscapes with which we coevolved. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 2175-78 | Added on Monday, March 23, 2009, 03:58 PM “You know what the best kind of organic certification would be? Make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer’s bookshelf. Because what you’re feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what’s sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 2357-61 | Added on Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 11:09 AM Which was why much more was at stake than a method of farming. Acting on the ecological premise that everything’s connected to everything else, the early organic movement sought to establish not just an alternative mode of production (the chemical-free farms), but an alternative system of distribution (the anticapitalist food co-ops), and even an alternative mode of consumption (the “countercuisine”). These were the three struts on which organic’s revolutionary program stood; since ecology taught “you can never do only one thing,” what you ate was inseparable from how it was grown and how it reached your table. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 2675-77 | Added on Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 11:54 PM Unlike Cascadian, however, Earthbound is still very much in the farming business, though most of its production land is an hour northeast of Carmel, in the Salinas Valley. Opening onto the Pacific near Monterey, the fertile, sea breeze–conditioned valley offers ideal conditions for growing lettuces nine months of the year. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 2827-33 | Added on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 12:06 AM After I stepped back outside into the fresh air, grateful to escape the humidity and ammonia, I waited by the chicken door to see if any of the birds would exercise that option and stroll down the little ramp to their grassy yard, which had been mowed recently. And waited. I finally had to conclude that Rosie the organic free-range chicken doesn’t really grok the whole free-range conceit. The space that has been provided to her for that purpose is, I realized, not unlike the typical American front lawn it resembles—it’s a kind of ritual space, intended not so much for the use of the local residents as a symbolic offering to the larger community. Seldom if ever stepped upon, the chicken-house lawn is scrupulously maintained nevertheless, to honor an ideal nobody wants to admit has by now become something of a joke, an empty pastoral conceit. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3003-8 | Added on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 01:31 AM So is an industrial organic food chain finally a contradiction in terms? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is. Of course it is possible to live with contradictions, at least for a time, and sometimes it is necessary or worthwhile. But we ought at least face up to the cost of our compromises. The inspiration for organic was to find a way to feed ourselves more in keeping with the logic of nature, to build a food system that looked more like an ecosystem that would draw its fertility and energy from the sun. To feed ourselves otherwise was “unsustainable,” a word that’s been so abused we’re apt to forget what it very specifically means: Sooner or later it must collapse. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3033-36 | Added on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 01:34 AM Joel calls his pastures the “salad bar,” and to his cows they contain at least as many different things to eat. As well as a few things not to eat. Though we might fail to notice the handful of Carolina nightshades or thistles lurking in this pasture, when the cows are done grazing it tomorrow, those plants will still be standing, like forlorn florets of cauliflower languishing on a picky child’s plate. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3075-79 | Added on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 01:44 AM The simplest way to capture the sun’s energy in a form food animals can use is by growing grass: “These blades are our photovoltaic panels,” Joel says. And the most efficient—if not the simplest—way to grow vast quantities of solar panels is by management-intensive grazing, a method that as its name implies relies more heavily on the farmer’s brain than on capital—or on energy-intensive inputs. All you need, in fact, is some portable electric fencing, a willingness to move your livestock onto fresh pasture every day, and the kind of intimate knowledge of grass that Joel tried to impart to me that early spring afternoon, down on our bellies in his pasture. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3108-12 | Added on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 01:46 AM The unit in which a grass farmer performs and records all these calculations, deciding exactly when and where to move the herd, is a “cow day,” which is simply the average amount of forage a cow will eat in one day; for his rotations to work, the farmer needs to know just how many cow days each paddock will yield. Though it turns out that, as a unit of measurement a cow day is a good deal more rubbery than, say, the speed of light, since the number of cow days any given paddock can supply rises and falls in response to all the aforementioned variables. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3142-46 | Added on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 01:49 AM Native grasses evolved to thrive under precisely such grazing patterns; indeed, they depend on them for their reproductive success. Not only do ruminants spread and fertilize seed with their manure, but their hoofprints create shady little pockets of exposed soil where water collects—ideal conditions for germinating a grass seed. And in brittle lands during the driest summer months, when microbial life in the soil all but stops, the rumen of the animals takes over the soil’s nutrient-cycling role, breaking down dry plant matter into basic nutrients and organic matter, which the animals then spread in their urine and manure. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3272-74 | Added on Thursday, March 26, 2009, 02:05 AM So there are a great many reasons American cattle came off the grass and into the feedlot, and yet all of them finally come down to the same one: Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. They prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability, and economies of scale. Everything about corn meshes smoothly with the gears of this great machine; grass doesn’t. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3477-80 | Added on Monday, March 30, 2009, 10:54 AM Yet Joel Salatin’s farm makes the case for a very different sort of efficiency—the one found in natural systems, with their coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops. For example, in nature there is no such thing as a waste problem, since one creature’s waste becomes another creature’s lunch. What could be more efficient than turning cow pies into eggs? Or running a half-dozen different production systems—cows, broilers, layers, pigs, turkeys—over the same piece of ground every year? ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3491-94 | Added on Monday, March 30, 2009, 10:55 AM Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. In effect, Joel is farming in time as well as in space—in four dimensions rather than three. He calls this intricate layering “stacking” and points out that “it is exactly the model God used in building nature.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3499-3504 | Added on Monday, March 30, 2009, 10:56 AM Joel calls each of his stacked farm enterprises a “holon,” a word I’d never encountered before. He told me he picked it up from Allan Nation; when I asked Nation about it, he pointed me to Arthur Koestler, who coined the term in The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler felt English lacked a word to express the complex relationship of parts and wholes in a biological or social system. A holon (from the Greek holos, or whole, and the suffix on, as in proton, suggesting a particle) is an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part. A body organ like the liver is a holon; so is an Eggmobile. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3586-88 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 01:37 AM “Part of the problem is, you’ve got a lot of D students left on the farm today,” Joel said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. “The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3589-92 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 01:38 AM Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the farm and put them to work in Dilbert’s cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems.” This isn’t just the farmer’s problem, either. “It’s a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3597-3604 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 01:39 AM I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. “In nature health is the default,” he pointed out. “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.” At Polyface no one ever told me not to touch the animals, or asked me to put on a biohazard suit before going into the brooder house. The reason I had to wear one at Petaluma Poultry is because that system—a monoculture of chickens raised in close confinement—is inherently precarious, and the organic rules’ prohibition on antibiotics puts it at a serious disadvantage. Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn’t easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3703-5 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 01:45 AM When I saw the chicken was none the worse for it, I switched it to my right hand (I’m a lefty), and went for a second and a third, until I had five chicken legs and a giant white pom-pom of feathers in my right hand. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3735-39 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 01:47 AM It was a little early in the day for a full-blown prairie populist stem-winder, but clearly I was going to get one anyway. “The USDA is being used by the global corporate complex to impede the clean-food movement. They aim to close down all but the biggest meat processors, and to do it in the name of biosecurity. Every government study to date has shown that the reasons we’re having an epidemic of food-borne illness in this country is centralized production, centralized processing, and long-distance transportation of food. You would think therefore that they’d want to decentralize the food system, especially after 9/11. But no! They’d much rather just irradiate everything instead.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3814-24 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 01:54 AM While we were cleaning up, scrubbing the blood off the tables and hosing down the floor, customers began arriving to pick up their chickens. This was when I began to appreciate what a morally powerful idea an open-air abattoir is. Polyface’s customers know to come after noon on a chicken day, but there’s nothing to prevent them from showing up earlier and watching their dinner being killed—indeed, customers are welcome to watch, and occasionally one does. More than any USDA rule or regulation, this transparency is their best assurance that the meat they’re buying has been humanely and cleanly processed. “You can’t regulate integrity,” Joel is fond of saying; the only genuine accountability comes from a producer’s relationship with his or her customers, and their freedom “to come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around. If after seeing how we do things they want to buy food from us, that should be none of the government’s business.” Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology. It is a compelling idea. Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface’s—if not open to the air then at least made of glass. So much of what happens behind those walls—the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth—would simply have to stop. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3832-35 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 02:08 AM For him, regulation is the single biggest impediment to building a viable local food chain, and what’s at stake is our liberty, nothing less. “We do not allow the government to dictate what religion you can observe, so why should we allow them to dictate what kind of food you can buy?” He believes “freedom of food”—the freedom to buy a pork chop from the farmer who raised the hog—should be a constitutional right. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3889-92 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 02:11 AM In Joel’s view, that reformation begins with people going to the trouble and expense of buying directly from farmers they know—“relationship marketing,” as he calls it. He believes the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do. “Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 3958-62 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 02:15 AM Not that a bar code needs to be so obscure or reductive. Supermarkets in Denmark have experimented with adding a second bar code to packages of meat that when scanned at a kiosk in the store brings up on a monitor images of the farm where the meat was raised, as well as detailed information on the particular animal’s genetics, feed, medications, slaughter date, etc. Most of the meat in our supermarkets simply couldn’t withstand that degree of transparency; if the bar code on the typical package of pork chops summoned images of the CAFO it came from, and information on the pig’s diet and drug regimen, who could bring themselves to buy it? ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4023-26 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 02:34 AM “The beauty of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find their tribes, and then for the tribes to find their way to us”—all without the expense of marketing or a storefront. Eatwild.com, a site that promotes the benefits of pastured meat and dairy, is another route by which consumers find their way to Polyface. “It’s never been easier for people to opt out.” ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4031-37 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 02:34 AM Late in our conversation, Joel asked Bev and me if we’d seen a recent column by Allan Nation in Stockman Grass Farmer about “artisanal economics.” Drawing on the theories of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, Nation had distinguished between industrial and artisanal enterprises to demonstrate why attempts to blend the two modes seldom succeed. Industrial farmers are in the business of selling commodities, he explained, a business where the only viable competitive strategy is to be the least-cost producer. The classic way any industrial producer lowers the costs of his product is by substituting capital—new technologies and fossil-fuel energy—for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploiting the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow ever bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4038-45 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 02:35 AM Nation contrasted this industrial model with its polar opposite, what he calls “artisanal production,” where the competitive strategy is based on selling something special rather than being the least-cost producer of a commodity. Stressing that “productivity and profits are two entirely different concepts,” Nation suggests that even a small producer can be profitable so long as he’s selling an exceptional product and keeping his expenses down. Yet this artisanal model works only so long as it doesn’t attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect. It must not try to replace skilled labor with capital; it must not grow for the sake of growth; it should not strive for uniformity in its products but rather make a virtue of variation and seasonality; it shouldn’t invest capital to reach national markets but rather should focus on local markets, relying on reputation and word of mouth rather than on advertising; and lastly, it should rely as much as possible on free solar energy rather than costly fossil fuels. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4167-73 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 12:46 PM So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual’s control—what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we’re going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another. This might not sound like a big deal, but it could be the beginnings of one. Already the desire on the part of consumers to put something different into their bodies has created an $11 billion market in organic food. That marketplace was built by consumers and farmers working informally together outside the system, with exactly no help from the government. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4221-28 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 12:50 PM “We don’t have to beat them,” Joel patiently explained. “I’m not even sure we should try. We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse—we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. “And make no mistake: It’s happening. The mainstream is splitting into smaller and smaller groups of like-minded people. It’s a little like Luther nailing his ninety-five theses up at Wittenberg. Back then it was the printing press that allowed the Protestants to break off and form their own communities; now it’s the Internet, splintering us into tribes that want to go their own way.” Of course! Joel saw himself as more of a Luther than a Lenin; the goal wasn’t to blow up the Church, but simply to step around it. Protestantism also comes in many denominations, as I suspect will the future of food. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4274-79 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 06:02 PM But the brining (like the carving of the birds into pieces) promised to do something else, too, something for me as much as the meat: It would put a little distance between the meal and Wednesday’s kill, certain aromas of which were still lodged in my nostrils. One of the reasons we cook meat (besides making it tastier and easier to digest) is to civilize, or sublimate, what is at bottom a fairly brutal transaction between animals. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture. For these particular chickens, which I had personally helped to kill and eviscerate, the brining would make a start on that transformation even before the cooking fire was lit. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4339-42 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 06:07 PM As our diet—and the diet of the animals we eat—shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4346-48 | Added on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 06:07 PM Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat—long associated with cardiovascular disease—may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal’s diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.) ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4692-96 | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 01:26 AM Cooking is often cited (along with tool making and a handful of other protohuman tricks) as evidence that the human omnivore entered a new kind of ecological niche in nature, one that some anthropologists have labeled “the cognitive niche.” The term seems calculated to smudge the line between biology and culture, which is precisely the point. To these anthropologists the various tools humans have developed to overcome the defenses of other species—not only food-processing techniques but a whole gamut of hunting and gathering tools and talents—represent biocultural adaptations, so-called because they constitute evolutionary developments rather than cultural inventions that somehow stand apart from natural selection. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4778-82 | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 01:32 AM What is striking is just how little it takes to set off one of these applecart-toppling nutritional swings in America; a scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can alter this nation’s diet overnight. One article in the New York Times Magazine in 2002 almost single-handedly set off the recent spasm of carbophobia in America. But the basic pattern was fixed decades earlier, and suggests just how vulnerable the lack of stable culinary traditions leaves us to the omnivore’s anxiety, and the companies and quacks who would prey on it. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 4828-33 | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 01:35 AM Several years ago, in a book called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, sociologist Daniel Bell called attention to the tendency of capitalism, in its single-minded pursuit of profit, to erode the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization. The family dinner, and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest such casualty of capitalism. These rules and rituals stood in the way of the food industry’s need to sell a well-fed population more food through ingenious new ways of processing, packaging, and marketing it. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 5074-77 | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 10:38 AM A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism—the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 5189-94 | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 10:47 AM Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations. It’s very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature? Is the individual the crucial moral entity in nature as we’ve decided it should be in human society? We simply may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights seem to suit us and serve our purposes today. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 5309-13 | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 10:58 AM Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look. No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers willing to raise and kill their animals transparently. ========== Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) - Highlight Loc. 6514-17 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 01:48 AM There comes a moment in the course of a dinner party when, with any luck, you realize everything’s going to be okay. The food and the company having sailed past the shoals of awkwardness or disaster, and the host can allow himself at last to slip into the warm currents of the evening and actually begin to enjoy himself. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 67-68 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 01:53 AM The sooner we understand the Iranian paradox—who they are, what they want, how they want to both humble us and work with us—the sooner we’ll understand how to come to terms with the new Iranian superpower. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 82-86 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 02:02 AM I knew Iran well enough now to know what its chief of staff was getting at. Iran has convinced itself it is America’s equal, a statist military power capable of thwarting American power in the Gulf. Iran believes that the new form of warfare it developed in Lebanon can fight a conventional army to a standstill. Iran also believes it is now a global power, inasmuch as its advanced Silkworm missiles positioned along the Persian Gulf can shut off Gulf oil exports in a matter of minutes. The chief of staff’s message was clear: The game has changed. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 98-100 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 02:03 AM Scratch away the veneer of Islam, and what you find in an Iranian is old-fashioned nationalism—a deep, abiding defiance of colonialism. Keep scratching and what you find at the bottom of Iran’s soul is a newfound taste for empire. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 100 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 02:03 AM empire. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 100 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 02:03 AM for empire. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 98-100 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 02:03 AM Scratch away the veneer of Islam, and what you find in an Iranian is old-fashioned nationalism—a deep, abiding defiance of colonialism. Keep scratching and what you find at the bottom of Iran’s soul is a newfound taste for empire. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 108-11 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 02:04 AM Iran’s star is rising. And now with a friendly Shia government in Baghdad, it will rise a lot faster. On the other hand, the old Sunni order—the foundation of American interests in the Middle East—is edging toward collapse. How long can Pakistan and Saudi Arabia hold on? For the first time in the history of Islam, Shia domination of Mecca is not unthinkable. Nor is an Iranian empire in the Middle East. Was Khomeini right after all, that Iran would ultimately defeat America, the Great Satan? ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 118-20 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 02:05 AM What it comes down to is this: Iran is the most powerful and stable country in the Middle East—a country the United States must either fight in a new thirty-year war or come to terms with. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 138-41 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 03:47 PM Americans see Iran’s president and mullahs as relics from a dark age, when in reality they’re a driving force behind Iran’s modernization. Since the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s true, there’s been a conservative retrenchment, with hard-liners winning the presidency and a majority in parliament. A U-turn like this was all but inevitable with hostile armies on two of Iran’s borders. But once the wars are over, Iran will no doubt return to modernizing. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 199-202 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 03:53 PM A misconception Americans have about Iran is that Iranians hate us and our culture. But that’s not true. They simply hate what they consider our occupation of large swaths of the Middle East. I saw this most clearly when making a documentary about suicide bombers in southern Lebanon a couple of years ago. Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy whose name means “party of God” in Arabic, had invited us to film at its martyrs’ school in Nabatiyah, to see how their next generation was turning out—Allah’s little soldiers. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 232-35 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 03:55 PM Martyrdom in fact is a canon of Shia Islam, almost as important as the Koran, the mosque, and daily prayer. Hezbollah, like Iran, has turned martyrdom into a state religion. Iran’s Martyrs’ Foundation, a quasi-governmental institution founded to care for the families of Iranian soldiers who died during the Iran-Iraq War, funds the Nabatiyah school. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 271-75 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 03:57 PM “Look here,” he said. “Tehran is a Turkic city. Not Persian. How many Americans understand this?” Indeed, it comes as a surprise to many Americans that of Iran’s 69 million people, just 51 percent are ethnic Persian. The largest minority is of Turkish origin—or Azeris, as they’re called in Iran. The rest of the population is a mix of Kurds, Arabs, Baluch, and others. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 289-94 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 03:59 PM The problem is exacerbated, as Amin said, by exiles—usually homesick Iranians who remember an Iran of their dreams. They make themselves indispensable in Washington, in its think tanks, and with Beltway contractors peddling expertise on Iran. But almost invariably the exiles’ only service is to promote their own personal interests, which usually come down to changing the regime in Tehran. This is the same malign influence we saw in the fifties when the China lobby convinced us to back Chiang Kai-shek, or today with the Cuban lobby blocking reconciliation with Castro’s Cuba. Iraq, though, is the real parable for exiles suckering Washington into a debacle. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 321-24 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:00 PM This is a book about Iran, and Iraq at this point may seem like an unnecessary diversion. But in fact, the one certainty about the Iraq War is that the United States will see Iran’s imperial ambitions played out more clearly there than in Tehran. If it’s in Iran’s interests to have chaos in Iraq, then chaos there will be. If Iran intends to draw the United States into a quagmire, a quagmire is what we’ll get. Our war with Iran will be fought in Iraq, through proxies, on the periphery of Iran’s empire. How could we have missed this so badly? ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 365-74 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:03 PM The Iraqi Shia would reject occupation just as surely as the Lebanese had rejected it in 1982. And Iran also knew Lebanon would be the strategic blueprint for its war of liberation: Iran would dominate Iraq not by invading it outright, but rather through proxies, spreading religious conviction, and employing the new form of guerrilla warfare it had learned in Lebanon. Granted, Iraq is not Lebanon. In some ways, the country of Iraq was permanently shattered by the Mongol invasion in 1258. The Ottoman Empire reconstituted Iraq into three provinces, but only under the force of arms. And Saddam held the country together only with extreme brutality. Iraq’s soft center, like that of Lebanon in the eighties, is what gives Iran the confidence the Lebanon model is transferable. Even the most nationalist and fractious Iraqi Shia can be manipulated, bribed, and cowed. So, inasmuch as the future in the Middle East can ever be predicted, with time and money Iran stands a good chance of dominating Iraq, annexing it all but in name. It will almost certainly try to do so after the United States leaves. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 381-84 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:04 PM The Iranians know exactly what they have to do in Iraq. They wrote the template in Lebanon, where they learned how to manage chaos, to create order where there was none before. And they know there’s nothing the United States can do to stop them from doing the same in Iraq. The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, called it Iran’s “Lebanization” of Iraq. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 411-15 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:06 PM Losing Iraq—ceding it to Iran—marked the first time in history Mesopotamia was ceded to a hostile power without a real fight. It’s the first time the Shia have ruled an Arab country since the Fatimids in Egypt in the twelfth century. It’s also the first time in modern history that an Arab country has been wiped off the map. How could something like this, a God-sent opportunity for Iran, not provoke serious change in the Middle East? The fact that the United States was the agent of this change, in a voluntary war, is tantamount to Rome’s willingly ceding the Mediterranean to Carthage, or Britain’s ceding the English Channel to Nazi Germany. The stakes in Iraq are just as high. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 419-22 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:07 PM The American backers of the war claimed that with massive investment Iraq’s production could be taken to 6 million barrels a day. If they’re right, and if Iran proceeds with its de facto annexation of Iraq and its oil, the combination of Iran’s current production of 4.21 million barrels a day with Iraq’s 6 million would put Iran within range of becoming the world’s largest producer, ahead of Saudi Arabia. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 438-40 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:08 PM As soon as things in Iraq started to go badly in 2004, and Iran’s role became clear, the Saudi interior minister started flying to Tehran almost weekly, assuring the Iranians they would never join in an attack against Iran. At the same time, Saudi Arabia is buying all the arms it can, hoping against hope that they will serve as a deterrent against Iran. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Bookmark Loc. 441 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:08 PM ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 462-64 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:11 PM Destroying Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder this country has made in its history. Unless we change course, there’s every reason to believe the Iraq War will end up changing the United States more than it will ever change Iraq. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 499-503 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:15 PM Iran senses that with Iraq failing, it’s on an equal footing with the United States in the Gulf. Along with that, there’s a growing confidence in Tehran today that the United States will finally have to come around to recognizing Iran’s true stature in the world as the only important player in the Middle East—a superpower, even. Iran is confident that America will have to accept the inevitable, that we’ve been wasting our time with the Gulf Arabs, and that we have to come to terms with Iran. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 503-5 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:15 PM Between March 20 and April 9, 2003, allied forces obliterated the state of Iraq, a nation that will never be put back together in any form resembling the old Iraq. What the war planners didn’t understand was that Iraq was an army rather than a country. In destroying the Iraqi army, the allies destroyed Iraq. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 553-57 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:19 PM When the Iran-Iraq War started, the Revolutionary Guards were integrated into the military and sent to the front, where they learned to fight in a conventional war. During the war, the Guards benefited from the Darwin effect: the smart ones went home, leaving behind on the battlefield the ones who had only zealotry going for them. Today, almost entirely integrated into Iran’s regular armed forces, with their own air force and navy, the Revolutionary Guards are Iran’s special forces. They number about 125,000. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 617-20 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:22 PM Ashura commemorates the murder of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad. In A.D. 680, Husayn was on his way to Najaf in answer to an appeal from his followers there to overthrow the ruling Umayyid Caliphate. But no one moved to join Husayn, and when he reached Karbala an Umayyid force intercepted him and his small band. Husayn was beheaded, and his family killed. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 662-67 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:25 PM I knew nothing about the man sitting in front of me. “Karbalai” means “the man from Karbala.” It could have been an assumed name, for all I knew. He could even have been Iranian. Some estimates put Karbala’s residents at 75 percent Iranian or Iranian descent. I noticed that Karbalai never mentioned Baghdad; only Najaf, Karbala, Qum—the Shia shrine cities, a cosmopolitan link older and more enduring than Iraq itself. This wasn’t a surprise. A moderate Shia cleric like Karbalai gives temporal political capitals as wide a berth as possible, preferring to tend to the flock instead. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 686-91 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:30 PM Ayatollah Ali Sistani is very roughly the pope of Shia Islam. This is by virtue of the fact that Sistani has the most followers among Shia Islam’s largest subsect, “Twelver Shia,” so called because of its tenet that the prophet was followed by twelve divinely chosen successors. About 80 percent of Shia follow Sistani’s spiritual guidance. Generally viewed as apolitical, a moderate, and a rival to the Iranian clerics—a “quietist” cleric—he was the man the United States and Britain had pinned their hopes on to line up Iraq’s Shia behind the occupation and shepherd them into building a modern, secular, democratic Iraqi state. Our ayatollah on our white horse. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 693-701 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:31 PM But Sistani’s turban always sat uneasily on his head. He represented a threat to Iran’s political mullahs, who considered him too moderate, too independent, and too passive. Sistani also disagreed with Tehran about whether clerics should get their hands dirty in day-to-day politics. In contrast to Sistani, Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, both held that a Shia cleric must govern in a truly righteous Islamic republic—one accountable for both the temporal and spiritual affairs of its citizens. Moreover, Sistani’s popularity and scholarship—in comparison with Sistani, Khamenei is a virtual illiterate in Islamic jurisprudence—was seen as a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority. Sistani’s quietist doctrine also implicitly called into question the legitimacy of the regime in Tehran. According to Sistani’s interpretation of Shia Islam, the mullahs could be voted out, if that was the wish of Iranians, and replaced with a secular government. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 705-8 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:32 PM Tehran’s passing over Sistani came close to causing a civil war among Shia. Lebanon’s highest-ranking ayatollah supported Sistani’s candidacy. But he was forced to keep quiet after the Iranians circulated a rumor that they intended to assassinate him. It was a credible threat—in 1985 the Lebanese ayatollah had been the target of a massive car bombing. Moreover, the Lebanese ayatollah’s body-guards were under the control of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 715-18 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:33 PM Having had almost no contact with average Iraqis, Sistani comes across as cloistered, aloof, and elitist—in other words, little better than an exile. He may be more credible than Ahmed Chalabi, but the Iraqis can’t help but look at Sistani as a foreigner. Sistani isn’t as powerful as the raw number of his followers suggests. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 748-51 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:35 PM The truth is that, as in Lebanon, the Kalashnikov, not the Koran, rules in Iraq. Both Sistani and Majid represented an old Shia aristocracy that never stood a chance in postinvasion Iraq. The country they thought they knew had died under Saddam’s brutal regime, the eight-year war with Iran, and thirteen years of a crushing international embargo. It didn’t help that the Shia clergy had been in a steep decline under the assault of twentieth-century secularism. But it was the invasion that ripped away the last illusions. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 752-57 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:35 PM Washington and London had been encouraged when Sistani supported Iraq’s constitutional referendum and parliamentary elections. (Then again, Iran and Iran’s proxies did the same. With the Shia a majority in Iraq, this wasn’t a surprise.) But democracy wasn’t what was at stake in Iraq; armed force was. Without a militia, Sistani couldn’t control the street. He was unable to stop intra-Shia violence or Shia assassination squads, or influence the Shia government in Baghdad. Several of his assistants were assassinated. And so today—little different from Saddam’s era—Sistani rarely leaves his house in Najaf. He is no more capable of controlling Iraq than Karbalai was Karbala. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 769-71 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:36 PM With Sistani unmasked, Iraq’s independent, moderate clergy was shown to be irrelevant. The British, during the Iraqi mandate in the 1920s, used to talk about a Shia cleric’s authority “to loose and bind.” Now that’s an artifact of history, as quaint as afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Baghdad British residency. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 791-94 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:42 PM Iran will continue to eviscerate Iraq’s independent Shia clergy. It will buy off Sistani’s followers, appropriate his tithes, and undermine the seminary in Najaf. If it needs to, it will assassinate Sistani or any other cleric who challenges Tehran. Iraqis already believe that Iranian intelligence has bought houses around Sistani’s for that eventuality. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 808-10 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 04:43 PM By bleeding the United States, Iran knows it can keep it from acting against Iran’s allies Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas. More crucially, a United States bogged down in Iraq will not attack Iran. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 819-22 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 06:44 PM Iran believes that the Iraq debacle will force the United States to finally come around to an inevitable truth: that Iran has an undeniable place in Iraq, the Gulf, and the rest of the Middle East. Open-ended containment of Iran, with an American fleet and army perpetually in the Gulf, is too expensive for the United States to continue indefinitely. And so, for the first time in its undeclared thirty-year war with Iran, the United States will be forced to deal with Iran on an equal basis. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 876-79 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 06:47 PM No one knows how or when, but along the way Iran’s Revolutionary Guards discovered two truths about Lebanon. First, there was a deep vein of nationalism to be tapped. The Lebanese didn’t want to be occupied—by Israelis, Syrians, Americans, or anyone else. Even supposedly pro-Syrian groups didn’t want Syrian troops quartered in their country. It was a sensitivity Iran would learn to guard against as well as exploit. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 895-96 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 06:49 PM “Lebanon,” he said, pointedly using the Arabic pronunciation Lubnan, “is Iran’s greatest foreign policy success. We will repeat it across Dar al-Islam (the Islamic world) until all of Islam is liberated.” ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 920-23 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 06:51 PM Or we could figure out how to settle with Iran. If we examine Iran’s Lebanon war and the army that Iran rode to victory on, we will understand Iran’s coming campaigns, how Iran learned the lessons from a failed revolution and transformed itself into a Middle East hegemon. That knowledge will allow us to define our choices. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 940-43 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 06:52 PM The Reagan administration was elated, at least for the first few months after the Israeli invasion, convinced that Lebanon, now free of the Palestinian terrorists, would go back to being the Switzerland of the Middle East—a Western outpost, a beacon of change. Lebanon would be the first domino in transforming the Middle East into a moderate, democratic, prosperous, pro-American part of the world. Just as the neocons in 2003 would count on Iraq doing the same. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1016-18 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 06:58 PM The Iranians were following a long tradition: Persians through history have believed that any serious work is done in the dark. Whenever Iran deviated from this practice, it got into trouble, including in Lebanon. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1028-31 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:00 PM It was clear what Sheikh Hossein was proposing: a war with the United States and Israel; driving the West out of Lebanon—the Americans, British, French, and Italian troops that were coming to replace the Israelis in Beirut. The Western diplomatic missions and even the press would have to go too, to purge Lebanon of all Western influences. Iran would put an end to colonialism in Lebanon forever. Were Mughniyah and his followers ready, Sheikh Hossein asked. He already knew Mughniyah’s answer because he already knew a lot about him. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1048-52 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:01 PM In almost every other way the Iranians don’t behave like us. They are some of the most secretive people in the world. They don’t keep bureaucratic records. They don’t rationalize their decisions on paper. They don’t leak. They don’t splash mistakes or scandals on the front pages of their newspapers. They don’t hold parliamentary hearings, or allow anyone to write frank memoirs. The Islamic Jihad Organization would soon become the most mysterious, elusive terrorist organization in the world thanks to Iran’s ability to hide its hand. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1064-70 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:03 PM And the mirage wasn’t just in Lebanon. Iran, too, is a mirage of sorts. President Ahmadinejad is supposedly the executive power in Iran. He’s the man Iran puts on CNN, who speaks at the UN and Columbia University, who writes a weekly blog. But little real power resides with Ahmadinejad. Instead, it lies with Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s security apparatus, the Revolutionary Guards, the army, and other influential ayatollahs. “Ahmadinejad is just a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard and the hardcore commanders in the Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistani intelligence who has spent years dealing with Iran, told me. “Khamenei is primus inter pares—maybe even the final word, depending on the issue.” ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1121-22 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:09 PM Khomeini intended to fire Arab anger as he had that of the Iranians. His message was simple: If Iran could beat the United States—David slay Goliath—then the Arabs could beat Israel. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1155-61 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:11 PM “The 1979 Islamic Revolution caused an earthquake that shook the Islamic consciousness,” the imam said, pulling at his beard. “It was a new dawn.” Khomeini’s message alone accomplished that? I asked. No. “The martyrdom of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Iraq,” the imam told me, “is the symbol of the oppression of Shia.” Evoking Sadr’s name wasn’t what surprised me. It was the fact that it came out of the mouth of a Hezbollah cleric—an Iranian loyalist who should have been regurgitating Khomeini’s doctrine. Once again, Iran and its proxies were proving to be far more pragmatic than anyone expected. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1164-67 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:12 PM Saddam had crossed a line, and Sadr would be avenged. The imam wanted me to know that Sadr wasn’t just another ayatollah. Ever since the disappearance of the legendary Twelfth Imam in the ninth century—the imam who, many Muslims believe, will return to save the world in the end times—the Shia believed there was no point in revolt, in fighting for justice in the here and now. Justice would return only when the Twelfth Imam reappeared. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1171-72 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:12 PM When you fly into Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, the thing you can’t see but should know is that everything, from the concession stands to the jet fuel supplies, is owned by the Revolutionary Guards. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1175-81 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:13 PM On Iran’s face, it’s impossible to tell whether religious authorities or the military is in charge. Ask the question on any street in any of the world’s major capitals, and you’ll hear that Iran is a theocracy, run by religious ideologues. But that view is dated, by twenty-five years. While theology forms a basis for many of Iran’s beliefs and policies, the men who hold the power derive it from the military and security services, even if they are themselves clerics. Even before Khomeini’s death, Iran stopped being a country run by mullahs and Islamic militias and turned into one run by the “power ministries,” as they’re called in military dictatorships. Almost within months after Khomeini returned to Tehran in February 1979, he had to quietly concede that he couldn’t make Iran a theocracy overnight. It could take decades. Or maybe even centuries. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1185-89 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:25 PM Khomeini openly acknowledged failure when in 1989 he removed Ayatollah Montazeri as his successor. Montazeri was the most learned mujtahid after Khomeini, so when Khomeini passed him over, he abolished velayat-e faqih in all but name. Khomeini instead named as his successor Ayatollah Khamenei, a man who was not really even qualified to be a mujtahid. But Khamenei had the following and political skills to control the Revolutionary Guards and the secret police. So Khomeini, as it turned out, was as pragmatic as Sheikh Hossein. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1197-99 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:25 PM Americans generally are blind to complexities like these, finding it easier to simply reduce Iran to a theocracy. This is a mistake that has led the United States to appeal for democracy and Western values in order to bring down the Iranian regime—to reveal the mullahs as false prophets. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1214-15 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:26 PM Taqqiyah is one reason that American and Israeli intelligence were never able to effectively penetrate Hezbollah. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1228-31 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:27 PM Americans should definitely be scared about Iran and the Middle East, but not for the reasons the Bush administration has put forth. Iran’s foot soldiers are no longer terrorists. They’re a formidable army, which makes Iran something much more dangerous. And the creation of that army can be told through the story of one man, Imad Mughniyah: a terrorist turned guerrilla fighter. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1240-41 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:28 PM Iran is not a totalitarian state run by “Islamofascists” who believe they’re in some quixotic war with the West and Western civilization. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1249-50 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:29 PM Americans have missed Iran’s critical transition, its metamorphosis from a Shia rebellion and a terrorist state to a classic military power. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1346-52 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:35 PM Finally, fifteen days after it began, the drama of KU-422 came to an end when the eight hijackers were granted safe passage back to Lebanon in exchange for abandoning the plane and freeing the remaining hostages. In the end, Mughniyah’s hijacking accomplished absolutely nothing, except perhaps to display the level of discipline and skill he and the Iranians had achieved during the Lebanon conflict. Though it was perfectly executed, it still didn’t work—one reason it would be one of the last hijackings Iran would back. The times had changed, as had Iran’s objectives. It was time for Iran to grow up, get serious in Lebanon, concentrate on capturing ground from the Israelis, and act like the mature power it had become. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1396-1401 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:38 PM Yet Basra and its surrounding area are not really part of Iraq anymore. Quietly, without firing a single shot, the Iranians have effectively annexed the entire south, fully one-third of Iraq. In Basra today, the preferred currency is the Iranian rial. The Iraqi police, the military, and at least one of its intelligence services answer not to Baghdad, but to the Iranian-backed political parties, SCIRI, Da’wa, and other Shia groups under Tehran’s control. But it’s not just the police; the same Iranian proxies run the universities, the hospitals, and the social welfare organizations. They exert more control over daily life in Basra than the central government does—and clearly more than Britain or the United States. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1471-75 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:43 PM The Iranians know the official estimates of the Iraq War’s cost will soon surpass one trillion dollars, and that America will eventually run through its money and political will. But the Iranians would like to keep the United States engaged in Iraq as long as possible, as it serves their long-term interests, giving them more time to consolidate control over the Shia south. In the long term, Iran intends to wear down the United States to the point that it will not want to confront Iran anywhere in the Middle East. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1475-77 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:44 PM But there’s another option for the United States, one that is neither clean nor risk-free: simply getting up and leaving, dropping the Iraqi mess in Iran’s lap. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1477-82 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:44 PM All of a sudden, it would be Iran deciding whether it wanted to be directly responsible for keeping a lid on the anarchy, and whether it wanted to send in its own troops and start killing Iraqis. A direct Iranian role in Iraq would involve Iranians killing Sunni and even Shia, turning the conflict into a civil war. Everything Iran achieved in Lebanon, turning the Shia and the Sunni against Israel and the United States, would be lost. The Iranians would suddenly be the occupiers, and as such would absorb the full political impact of running a foreign country. They’d no longer be able to hide behind their proxies. It is unlikely Iran would do well as pure colonial power, burdened by the inevitable blame that comes with occupation. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1500-1504 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 07:50 PM Iran knows how to use its strengths. Iranians are Muslims, and like the majority of Iraqis, they are Shia. The two countries’ histories are intertwined and their bloodlines mixed, as are their economies, which both depend on oil. In other words, Iran is only half-foreign. Iran will always have more pieces to play with than the Americans do. To Iraqis, Tehran matters. Washington doesn’t. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1652-56 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 09:01 PM The Iranians understand perfectly that the only reason we care about that miserable body of water called the Persian Gulf is that 55 percent of the world’s reserves lie beneath its shores and 17 million barrels of crude oil pass daily through the Strait of Hormuz. Given Iranian military dominance in the Gulf, Iran would be delighted to use oil for political dominance as well. So it definitely was no accident that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chose Hormuz to put down a marker, ruin Bush’s visit to the Gulf, and remind everyone that worse would come if they weren’t careful. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1671-74 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 09:02 PM Iran’s naval “swarming tactics” follow a trend of using relatively unsophisticated weapons to cause heavy damage. The 9/11 hijackers used ordinary box cutters and civilian airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and attack the Pentagon. The USS Cole was attacked by a small launch. In each case, less was more: simple weaponry was used to inflict massive damage of the sort usually caused by bombers or heavy artillery. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1694 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 09:03 PM To this day, the United States doesn’t know who Hezbollah’s senior field commanders are. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1721-22 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 09:04 PM In the early eighties, we taught the Afghan mujahideen to pack their small iron stoves with explosives, with the stove lids acting as projectiles to penetrate light Soviet armor. The Iranians advanced the technology, shaping and milling the projectiles for a vastly more lethal effect. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1736-39 | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2009, 09:05 PM Iran’s transformation to an elite asymmetric war machine certainly got Israel’s attention. As the Winograd Commission Report, the official Israeli investigation into the 34-day war of 2006, put it, “A semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technological advantages.” ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1743-45 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 02:24 PM The Gulf Arabs closely watched the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006. They saw how Israel was unable to protect its cities, how forty-three Israeli civilians were killed, forcing Israel to retreat from Lebanon without achieving any of its stated objectives. What could Iran do to the Arabs, whose military isn’t even a shadow of Israel’s? ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1746-48 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 02:24 PM What’s particularly odd about Iran’s advancement in conventional military tactics is that the West has largely ignored it, choosing instead to focus almost obsessively on whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons. It’s more evidence that we are miscalculating the nature of the Iranian threat. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1760-61 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 02:25 PM First, Iran wanted to counter Pakistan’s bomb—the “Sunni” bomb, as it was called—and they also believed Saddam Hussein was building one. Second, Iran wanted to be taken seriously as a major power, in the same way it wanted to control Hormuz and the world’s oil. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1767-69 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 02:25 PM Iran may not yet have nukes, but it has three things that are vastly more important: highly developed asymmetrical fighting skills and weapons; a growing army of hungry, disaffected, street-smart fighters; and an invincible anticolonial message. With that, Iran has set the stage for its push toward empire—a push they’ve already begun. The next target: Turkey. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1800-1802 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 02:27 PM But on a more tactical level, the Iranians see in the Kurds an instrument to undermine their neighbors: if Turkey or Iraq opposes Tehran on some issue vital to Iran, Tehran will fund and arm Kurdish guerrillas in those countries to hit back. It’s another side of proxy warfare. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1830-33 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 02:30 PM When I asked, I was told there were no Iranian troops actually in Kurdistan. Rather, Iran had created a surrogate army, Kurdish Hezbollah, a name borrowed from the more famous Hezbollah in Lebanon. (This is Iran’s version of branding.) Iran’s intent was to have control over the area without invading it, I was told. The Revolutionary Guards funded and trained Kurdish Hezbollah, and worked side by side with the man who headed it, Adham Barzani, a Sunni Muslim. He was a man worth talking to. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1841-43 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 02:31 PM I had a sense now of just how cut off northern Iraq was from the rest of the country, and how easily and quickly Saddam must have lost it. He would have had a hard time supplying his troops there, let alone retaking those mountains. I was starting to see how it was possible for Iran to quietly annex this piece of Iraq. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1926-31 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 06:52 PM In November 1979, a radical Saudi messianic sect seized Islam’s holiest site, the Mecca Mosque, shaking the Muslim world to its core. In the long, bloody siege that followed, the attackers were killed or executed before the Saudis could properly interrogate them. But it’s generally accepted that Khomeini’s revolution in February 1979 and the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, were the catalyst for the Mecca attack. The attackers were inspired by Iran’s revolution, and at the same time they were convinced that because of the weakness of Al Saud, Sunni Islam itself was under threat from the Shia—a prelude to end times. And they believed that true Muslims—Sunnis—had to have undisputed control of Mecca when the apocalypse arrived. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 1946-48 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 06:53 PM The Middle East is a world of shifting definitions. But the word takfiri generally refers to a Sunni Muslim who looks at the world in black-and-white: there are true believers and then there are nonbelievers, with no shades in between. A takfiri’s mission is to re-create the Caliphate according to a literal interpretation of the Koran. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2098-2102 | Added on Friday, April 03, 2009, 07:08 PM Ever since Azerbaijan gained independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Iranians have been meddling there. Azerbaijan is a predominantly Shia country, and as it did in Lebanon and Kurdistan, Iran recruited proxies to spread its influence. It created an Azeri Hezbollah. Iran has yet to attract a wide following there, or anything matching the armed groups it has in other parts of the world—it had to go slowly because of Russian complaints—but the Iranians are confident that, given the need, a handful of proxies could disable Azerbaijan’s Turkey-and-Georgia pipeline with a couple of pounds of explosives. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2130-33 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:23 AM It looks as if Iran will prevail. In late 2007, the Iraqi oil minister, a Shia close to Tehran, nullified fifteen oil deals signed by the Iraqi Kurdish regional government, underscoring that the Kurds would not be allowed to independently make their own oil deals. “There is an understanding between Tehran, Ankara, Damascus, and Baghdad,” he said—a statement that was remarkable not only because it didn’t mention the United States or Britain but also because it did name the four countries with large Kurdish populations that oppose an independent Kurdistan. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2149-52 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:24 AM Iran’s army is combat-hardened, thanks to the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War; Saudi Arabia’s has never fought a war. The Saudis’ last engagement was during the 1990–91 Gulf War, when the Saudi soldiers threw down their rifles and ran. If it hadn’t been for the U.S. Marines, there would have been nothing standing between the Iraqi army and the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Even today, the only thing that stands between Iran and Riyadh is the United States. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2184-87 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:27 AM In the case of an American retreat from Iraq or even the Gulf, Iran could simply bully the Gulf Arabs into accepting Iranian suzerainty. A few military confrontations on Gulf waters, either accidental or intentional, and the Arabs wouldn’t have a choice. Iranian president Ahmadinejad already hinted at Iran’s plans in December 2003, when he offered the Arabs a “joint security pact”—the Iranian equivalent of NATO, over which Iran would clearly dominate. Already, Arab Gulf emissaries these days travel to Tehran more often than they do to London or Washington. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2194-97 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:28 AM Oil reserve estimates are based on data provided by oil-producing countries and oil companies. They’re not independently audited, and the numbers are impossible to corroborate. The higher reserves an OPEC member claims, the higher the OPEC quota it’s allotted, and the more oil it’s allowed to “lift,” or pump out. And of course, the more barrels of oil a company “books,” the higher its stock prices—and the higher the bonuses for its executives. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2251-55 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:32 AM With 75 percent of its population under twenty-five, Iran clearly needs a change in course. America’s neocons would like us to believe that Iran is in a prerevolutionary state, the Iranians ready to rise and depose the clerics and hard-liners and install a more pragmatic regime. This may or may not be true. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that the government that would succeed the mullahs would either wean itself off oil or reconsider Iran’s ambition of dominating the Persian Gulf and its oil. Iran knows it is running out of oil and must do something—and quickly. It has no intention of letting itself become the Bangladesh of the Gulf. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2263-88 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:39 AM There is no one in the Middle East who’s not enraged that the United States defers to Israel, a country with no oil and of little strategic importance. Arabs and Iranians alike feel slighted by America—humiliated and bent on revenge. I heard this same grievance from Ayatollah Khomeini’s former aide, Amin, the one who now owns a bookstore in Paris. Amin gave me a quick primer on why he thought America has historically allied with the wrong players in the Middle East. “The United States in the Middle East has always stood on four very wobbly legs,” Amin told me. “Pakistan, the Shah of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.” Each of the four, Amin is convinced, has failed the United States or will do so. He offered a quick tour d’horizon to make his point. “Pakistan is not a country, it’s an army,” he said—not unlike Saddam’s Iraq. Amin reduced Pakistan to five provinces ripped out of the British Raj, its borders drawn for British convenience rather than that of the Pakistanis. “The country cannot hold together,” he said. My conversation with Amin took place three months before Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, but there were already signs Pakistan was coming off its hinges. President Musharraf was unable to control the tribal areas along the border of Afghanistan, let alone capture bin Laden for the Americans. “As the Pakistani army goes, so goes Pakistan,” Amin told me. “In twenty-four hours a coup could change American fortunes in that country. Wasn’t it clear enough in Pakistan’s failed hunt for Osama bin Laden? It couldn’t or wouldn’t help.” It was hard to argue against the point that Pakistan has been a waste of money. In 2007, the United States gave $52.6 million to Pakistan’s Frontier Corps—a tribal force meant to keep peace along the wild and historically ungovernable Afghan-Pakistan border—to do something about al Qaeda and the Taliban’s taking refuge there. Another $97 million was to be spent in 2008. But the money got us nothing, neither bin Laden nor the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. And it certainly didn’t buy stability. “As for Saudi Arabia,” Amin went on, “it’s an archaic political structure—Bedouin tribes incapable of coping with the twenty-first century. Do you think it’s an accident that there were fifteen Saudis on those planes on September 11? And lest you forget, they were the most Americanized Saudis, the crème de la crème of Saudi Arabia.” I had made up my mind long ago that Saudi Arabia was yet another virtual country. Its borders are artificial, and it’s ruled by fragile tribal coalitions that will crack under pressure. Yet all along the United States has treated Saudi Arabia not only as a friend but as if it were a force capable of defending our interests in the Gulf. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2318-20 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:41 AM Iran sees the Arabs, and particularly the Palestinians, as very much subordinate to their core national interests. They’re not about to go to war with Israel over the Palestinians, especially at the risk of a nuclear confrontation. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2320-25 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:41 AM I knew the Iranians had told us over and over through diplomatic back channels that they’re not particularly concerned about the fate of the Palestinians or the existence of Israel. Iran will accept whatever settlement the Palestinians accept, they assured us, whether it includes returning Jerusalem or not. I heard the same thing as recently as March 2008, when a politburo member from Lebanon’s Hezbollah told me that Hezbollah would be “no more Palestinian than the Palestinians.” In other words, if the Palestinians agreed to settle with Israel, so would Hezbollah. Only a serious engagement with both Iran and Hezbollah can test this claim. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2333-34 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:42 AM The consensus in the Persian Gulf is that the first Arab sheikhdom to fall will be Bahrain, with a tap by Iran. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2342-48 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:43 AM “The Iranians like to give us a taste of what they’re capable of,” he told me. “Little reminders now and then.” Bahrain was part of Iran for centuries—until 1782, when the Al Khalifa family, a band of pearl divers and pirates, seized the island from Iran’s declining Qajar Dynasty. In order to hold on to it, the Al Khalifa quickly signed a series of treaties with Britain, turning the island into a British protectorate by the nineteenth century. When Britain left the Persian Gulf and gave Bahrain its independence in 1971, Bahrain immediately offered naval basing rights to the United States—with the express purpose of dissuading the Shah from seizing it, as he had the three islands he seized from the UAE. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2389-94 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:52 AM For fifty years, the Communists were the face of the world’s liberation movements, the champion of the poor, dispossessed, and oppressed. In Iranian eyes, that torch has passed to Iran. Iran’s revolution in the Middle East has less to do with religion than with politics and economics. Iran has exploited Shia discontent, but it also has promised to redress global economic inequality, Third World political impotence, colonialism, and injustice. Iran has taken over from the Communists in the war of conviction, and with the bond of belief, salvation, and the hereafter, it’s the greatest threat to the Middle East since the Ottomans. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2394-99 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 02:52 AM The reason President Ahmadinejad solicits the support of Venezuela’s populist president Hugo Chavez, and even the descendants of Che Guevara, is to tap the legacy of world revolution—the have-nots against the haves. It certainly helps that Tehran looks like a socialist country. Walk around Tehran and you’ll notice there are no palaces—none of the grand, sprawling compounds like those Saddam Hussein or the Saudis built for themselves. Although Iran’s mullahs possess great fortunes, they’re not on display. Iran successfully portrays itself as a populist country, one committed to helping the downtrodden. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2433-36 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 11:03 AM Iran overcame sectarian and ethnic differences by offering the Palestinians a real plan for fighting Israel, and providing cash and arms to any faction ready to do so. The Iranians are trying to convince the Palestinians to abandon pointless suicide attacks against civilians for a more traditional military struggle. Palestinian suicide bombings have dropped off steeply, replaced by rocket attacks. It’s possible that this is because of Iran, which has been urging the Palestinians to adopt more conventional military tactics. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2474-75 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 11:06 AM I had one of the little epiphanies you get visiting the Middle East: There was a craving here for order, the kind of order Hezbollah had imposed in Lebanon. The kind I’d seen at the Hezbollah martyrs’ school in Nabatiyah. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2593-97 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 11:14 AM Nasrallah, on the other hand, sensed the shift of winds in Tehran. Though he was at the center of Hezbollah’s notorious terrorist campaign of the 1980s, he easily made the shift away from terrorism along with Tehran. Conclusive evidence of the transformation would come during the 2006 war in Lebanon, when the Nasrallah-led Hezbollah didn’t so much as touch a hair on the head of any American in Lebanon—a restraint Mughniyah, on his own, would have been unable to show. Nasrallah was now a victorious de facto head of state, taking and holding ground and commanding a military to match. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 2598-2601 | Added on Saturday, April 04, 2009, 11:15 AM Since his assassination in February 2008, Imad Mughniyah has become an iconic legend among many Shia. But it’s Hassan Nasrallah who is seen as the man who’ll liberate the Middle East—the modern-day incarnation of Saladin, the twelfth-century Kurd who drove out the Crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem. The Palestinians are convinced it will be Nasrallah who frees them, liberates Jerusalem, and drives out the modern-day Crusaders, the United States and Israel. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3286-87 | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2009, 01:43 PM At the risk of gross oversimplification, the Sunnis lack discipline because they lack a pope, an institution like Shia Islam’s grand ayatollahs. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3363-64 | Added on Sunday, April 05, 2009, 01:48 PM The notion of martyrdom is so deeply ingrained in the Middle East that even secular groups have embraced it, young men who don’t believe in the keys to heaven or the promise of seventy-two virgins. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3452-55 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 01:55 AM “There is nothing that makes a person rebel more than oppression, right?” she said. “So oppression gives birth to mutiny. Now when you see Israel invading and killing people, while you are not fighting back as is happening in Palestine—well, you are not fighting and dying. To fight and die is better than just dying.” ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3663-68 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:05 AM After the 7/7 bombings, Britons were shocked at how closed and hostile the British Pakistani community was, unwilling to grieve or condemn the stupidity of the act. There were exceptions, but it was clear that while the Pakistani community condemned the means, they shared the 7/7 bombers’ deep grievance, East versus West. The 7/7 bombings were a signal of the steep descent into pure hatred these Sunnis feel for the West. Even as Iran-backed Hamas was trading rockets with Israel, they were still ready to talk. The most radical members of Hamas were not slamming the door in the face of journalists—there was still something to talk about, something to negotiate. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3741-46 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:09 AM “Islam in the Iranian world is like a woman’s plain chador worn over party finery,” he writes, “a cloak that covers, disguises, or incorporates much traditional Iranian, pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian belief.” Iran is a country that is at once “cynical, cultured, sophisticated, wise, and deeply religious.” Iranians see Americans not only as a people without a history, but also as a people who have no sense of history. An Iranian will tell you about points of history few of us think about—how the major Iron Age nomads spoke early Iranian, and about the Kimmerians, the Scythians, the Sarmatians, and the Alans. How Central Asia’s major cities once were all Iranian-speaking. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3760-64 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:10 AM Alexander the Great, known in Central Asia by the name Iskandar, was for Iranians the first in many waves of colonialist occupiers in the Middle East. Alexander was a barbarian as far as the Iranians are concerned. He burned the Avesta, the Zoroastrian holy book, and undertook a Hellenistic civilizing mission that attempted to destroy indigenous Iranian culture. The Zoroastrians curse him to this day; as the scholar A. V. Williams Jackson put it, in Zoroastrian eyes Alexander the Great was “the predestined tyrant of evil fate.” ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3867-70 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:14 AM Finally, in extraordinary frankness for a society that lives behind walls, Rafsanjani said Iran’s clerical and secular leadership intended to regain “Iran’s past greatness.” He spoke of the “imperial outlook” that prevailed among Iran’s religious leaders, an impulse to promote militant Islam. They wanted to turn Iran into a “citadel of Islam” to help oppressed Muslims worldwide. They wanted to control Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holy cities. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3902-5 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:16 AM So what do the Iranians want? Based on their actions and what they’ve told Western officials, they seem to have six core interests: Internal security. Iran is 89 percent Shia and 9 percent Sunni. The Sunnis are a small minority, but Iran still looks at them, as well as the Kurds in Iran, as its Achilles’ heel. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3913-15 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:17 AM Iraq. Iran is there to stay. Nothing short of a regime collapse in Tehran will change that. Empire aside, Iran does have a vital interest in putting an end to the chaos in Iraq. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3916-17 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:17 AM Energy. Iran wants a better price for its oil, modern technology to more efficiently lift it, and alternative energy sources for the day it runs out of oil. This would include nuclear power plants. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3921-23 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:17 AM An Iranian empire. Short of drastic action, Iran won’t cede its dominion in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, the Gulf, and Gaza. Iran will insist on dominion in the Gulf after the United States leaves. It will hold itself out as the protectors of the Shia as well as the Palestinians. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3926-29 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:17 AM Control of Mecca. Iran wants control of Mecca. For 1300 years, the Shia have been second-class Muslims. With Iran’s newfound military predominance, there’s no longer any reason to accept the status quo. It’s unclear what precisely Iran’s mullahs will demand, but it will probably be co-administering both Mecca and Medina along with Saudi Arabia. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3929-32 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:18 AM Recognition/equality. At the bottom of it all, the Iranians want to be treated fairly. Iran wants to be recognized for what it is: a stable country that has lived within the same borders for thousands of years, the most powerful country in the Gulf, OPEC’s second-largest producer, a regional economic power, and a major influence in Islam. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3951-53 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:19 AM Shia Islam—or really, Islam in general—is therefore a progressive political movement, an ongoing struggle between justice and injustice. It is tied to action, which is why Shariati disregarded “quietist” Shia clerics like Ayatollah Sistani. To Shariati’s mind, a cleric who stays out of politics has abandoned the quest for divine justice. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3978-79 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:20 AM Contain Iran. This would mean indefinitely staying in Iraq. Iraq can be held together only by sheer armed force. The same is true of Afghanistan. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3986-88 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:20 AM The United States could go to war with Iran, but the outcome is uncertain. As President Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, said in a 2008 New York Times interview, taking on Iran is not an option. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3987-88 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:20 AM option. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3986-88 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:21 AM The United States could go to war with Iran, but the outcome is uncertain. As President Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, said in a 2008 New York Times interview, taking on Iran is not an option. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3986-87 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:21 AM The United States could go to war with Iran, but the outcome is uncertain. As President Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, said in a 2008 New York Times interview, taking on Iran is not an ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3992-93 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:21 AM Finally, the United States could undertake a long open-ended bombing campaign, the same thing we used to contain Saddam from 1991 to 2003. But that won’t work either, according to Gates. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 3997-98 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:21 AM Provoke a Sunni-Shia civil war. The Mad Max option is to provoke Muslims to kill one another rather than us. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4006-7 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:22 AM Settle with Iran. Alternatively, America could take its medicine and sit down at the negotiating table with Iran, treat it like the power it has become, and see what it has to offer. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Bookmark Loc. 4007 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:22 AM ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4017-19 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:22 AM Why not allow the Iranians to take direct control of the parts of Iraq they already control through proxies? This would be more efficient, and there would be less violence. Let the Iranians take direct responsibility for the cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Basra, which would force Iran to be more cautious and less the spoiler. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4032-34 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:23 AM Effective sanctioning of Iran is a dream. Iran’s regime is still standing after thirty years of sanctions—still able to buy anything it wants from China and Russia. Some of America’s closest allies, such as Turkey and Japan, trade with Iran as if there were no sanctions at all. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4048-50 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:24 AM In the interest of realpolitik, we should explore the possibility of cooperating with Iran in policing the Gulf. After all, Iran already allows 17 million barrels of oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz daily, unimpeded and untaxed. In contrast, given the means, a Sunni takfiri such as bin Laden would have tried to choke off that oil flow long ago, whatever the consequences. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4058-59 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:24 AM Also, with Russia and Iran being the number-one and number-two producers of natural gas, they could easily form a monopoly that would decide whether Europe goes to bed cold or warm. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4064-68 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:25 AM Not surprisingly, one of the Saudis’ worst fears is that an Iranian-American pairing is inevitable. “Every time I go to Riyadh,” a State Department officer told me, “the Saudis ask, What happens to us when you come to your senses and reconcile with Iran?” But to put it bluntly: Do we really care what happens to Saudi Arabia if Iran is able to guarantee Saudi oil fields? ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4100-4101 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:26 AM 1. Guarantee Iranian internal security. The United States would immediately stop calling for regime change in Iran. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4107-9 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:26 AM 2. Joint patrols in the Persian Gulf. The worst fear of the U.S. military and State Department is that there will be an accidental confrontation between our ships and Iranian ships. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4112-16 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:26 AM 3. Ease the embargo on Iran. Western oil companies would be allowed to invest in Iranian fields—providing an immediate benefit to Iran’s economy as well as a global benefit, by making Iran’s oil fields more efficient. Iran would be allowed to import spare parts for its passenger airplanes. In return, Iran would put a moratorium on arms shipments to Hezbollah. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4116-17 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:27 AM 4. Grant Iran a defined security role in Iraq and Afghanistan. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4126-28 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:27 AM 5. UN Resolution 242. In return for negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian settlement based on UN Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to withdraw to its pre-June 5, 1967 boundaries, Iran should be expected to help impose an immediate cease-fire on Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4137 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:27 AM 6. Incorporate Hezbollah’s militia into the Lebanese army. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4140-41 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:27 AM 7. Mecca. We cannot and should not try to stand in the way of Iran’s quest to dominate Islam. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4147 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:28 AM 8. Put Middle East nuclear arms under international supervision, including Israel’s. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4149-50 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:28 AM 9. Establish an international body to audit oil supplies and set the price for oil. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4176 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:29 AM We’ve come this far, so why not speculate on redrawing the Middle East’s borders? ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Highlight Loc. 4196-97 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 02:30 AM The Middle East we grew up with has already vanished, in all but name. Anticipating the consequences rather than futilely trying to stop them is the easiest—and ultimately surest—path forward. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 117-19 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 11:10 AM Most of the conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century were about Germany’s status in Europe. While the times and places of wars couldn’t be forecast, the probability that there would be a war could be and was forecast by many Europeans. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 122-24 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 11:10 AM Certainly the rise of the United States and Russia was predicted in the nineteenth century. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche forecast the preeminence of these two countries. So, standing at the beginning of the twentieth century, it would have been possible to forecast its general outlines, with discipline and some luck. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 150-52 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 11:12 AM The history of the twenty-first century, therefore, particularly the first half, will revolve around two opposing struggles. One will be secondary powers forming coalitions to try to contain and control the United States. The second will be the United States acting preemptively to prevent an effective coalition from forming. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 157-61 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 11:13 AM The United States doesn’t need to win wars. It needs to simply disrupt things so the other side can’t build up sufficient strength to challenge it. On one level, the twenty-first century will see a series of confrontations involving lesser powers trying to build coalitions to control American behavior and the United States’ mounting military operations to disrupt them. The twenty-first century will see even more war than the twentieth century, but the wars will be much less catastrophic, because of both technological changes and the nature of the geopolitical challenge. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 181-82 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 11:14 AM Far from being a challenger, China is a country the United States will be trying to bolster and hold together as a counterweight to the Russians. Current Chinese economic dynamism does not translate into long-term success. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 198-201 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 11:15 AM Japan, Turkey, and Poland will each be facing a United States even more confident than it was after the second fall of the Soviet Union. That will be an explosive situation. As we will see during the course of this book, the relationships among these four countries will greatly affect the twenty-first century, leading, ultimately, to the next global war. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 210-12 | Added on Monday, April 06, 2009, 11:17 AM But underlying all of this will be the single most important fact of the twenty-first century: the end of the population explosion. By 2050, advanced industrial countries will be losing population at a dramatic rate. By 2100, even the most underdeveloped countries will have reached birthrates that will stabilize their populations. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 208-9 | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 08:19 PM Marketing used to be about advertising, and advertising is expensive. Today, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and delivering products and services with stories that spread. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 218-20 | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 08:19 PM Here’s what’s changed: some people admire the new and the stylish far more than they respect the proven state of affairs. And more often than not, these fad-focused early adopters are the people who buy and the people who talk. As a result, new ways of doing things, new jobs, new opportunities, and new faces become ever more important. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 292-93 | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 08:24 PM Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 347-49 | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 08:26 PM So I started a newsletter. The newsletter highlighted the work of every person who worked on one of my products. It highlighted their breakthroughs and talked about the new ground we were breaking (music! in a game!). I made photocopies and distributed the newsletter to the interoffice mailbox of every person in the company—by then about a hundred people. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 395-98 | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 08:30 PM Too many organizations care about numbers, not fans. They care about hits or turnstile clicks or media mentions. What they’re missing is the depth of commitment and interconnection that true fans deliver. Instead of always being on the hunt for one more set of eyeballs, true leaders have figured out that the real win is in turning a casual fan into a true one. Fans, true fans, are hard to find and precious. Just a few can change everything. What they demand, though, is generosity and bravery. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 455-58 | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 08:34 PM On a recent trip I took to India, this mind-set was made crystal clear. Ask almost anyone there what the perfect job would be, and the answer is: working as a government bureaucrat. Not only do you have air-conditioning, but you aren’t even asked to take initiative. The job is steady, the pay is good, and there are no surprises. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 499-503 | Added on Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 08:37 PM It’s the story of success, of drive, of doing something that matters. It’s an intellectual story about what the world (or your industry or your project) needs and how your insight can help make a difference. I believe you can talk over the fear, laying out a game plan that makes the fear obsolete. It’s not about some clever tactic or a better way to write a memo to your boss. It’s about making it clear to yourself (and to others) that the world is now demanding that we change. And fast. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 529-32 | Added on Friday, April 10, 2009, 09:58 AM Fear of failure is actually overrated as an excuse. Why? Because if you work for someone, then, more often than not, the actual cost of the failure is absorbed by the organization, not by you. If your product launch fails, they’re not going to fire you. The company will make a bit less money and will move on. What people are afraid of isn’t failure. It’s blame. Criticism. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 532-34 | Added on Friday, April 10, 2009, 09:58 AM We choose not to be remarkable because we’re worried about criticism. We hesitate to create innovative movies, launch new human resource initiatives, design a menu that makes diners take notice, or give an audacious sermon because we’re worried, deep down, that someone will hate it and call us on it. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 846-49 | Added on Sunday, April 12, 2009, 09:50 AM Welcome to the age of leverage. Bottom-up is a really bad way to think about it because there is no bottom. In an era of grassroots change, the top of the pyramid is too far away from where the action is to make much of a difference. It takes too long and it lacks impact. The top isn’t the top anymore because the streets are where the action is. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 1082-85 | Added on Sunday, April 12, 2009, 10:05 AM We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheeplike. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 1116-19 | Added on Sunday, April 12, 2009, 10:08 AM It’s four a.m. and I can’t sleep. So I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Jamaica, checking my e-mail. A couple walks by, obviously on their way to bed, having pushed the idea of vacation a little too hard. The woman looks over to me and, in a harsh whisper a little quieter than a yell, says to her friend, “Isn’t that sad? That guy comes here on vacation and he’s stuck checking his e-mail. He can’t even enjoy his two weeks off.” ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 1415-19 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 01:27 AM There’s a myth that all you need to do is outline your vision and prove it’s right—then, quite suddenly, people will line up and support you. In fact, the opposite is true. Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths—whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 1472-74 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 01:31 AM Over and over again, the Sternins have discovered a simple process: find leaders (the heretics who are doing things differently and making change), and then amplify their work, give them a platform, and help them find followers—and things get better. They always get better. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 1485-86 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 08:33 AM Flynn Berry wrote that you should never use the word “opportunity.” It’s not an opportunity, it’s an obligation. ========== Tribes (SETH GODIN) - Highlight Loc. 1513-17 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 08:36 AM Belief People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Note Loc. 388 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 02:11 PM and coal/energy? ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 405-8 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 02:13 PM Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire—there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on. The European nations exhausted themselves in endless wars with each other while they invaded, subjugated, and eventually ruled much of the world. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 447-50 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 02:18 PM Geopolitics has two basic competing views of geography and power. One view, held by an Englishman, Halford John Mackinder, argues that control of Eurasia means the control of the world. As he put it: “Who rules East Europe [Russian Europe] commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island [Eurasia]. Who rules the World-Island commands the world.” ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 451-53 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 02:18 PM Another view is held by an American, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, considered the greatest American geopolitical thinker. In his book The Influence of Sea Power on History, Mahan makes the counterargument to Mackinder, arguing that control of the sea equals command of the world. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 475-81 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 02:22 PM It is interesting to note that throughout the Cold War, the United States was on the defensive psychologically. Korea, McCarthyism, Cuba, Vietnam, Sputnik, left-wing terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, and harsh criticism of Reagan by European allies all created a constant sense of gloom and uncertainty in America. Atmospherics gave the United States the continual sense that its advantage in the Cold War was slipping away. Yet underneath the hood, in the objective reality of power relations, the Russians never had a chance. This disjuncture between the American psyche and geopolitical reality is important to remember for two reasons. First, it reveals the immaturity of American power. Second, it reveals a tremendous strength. Because the United States was insecure, it generated a level of effort and energy that was overwhelming. There was nothing casual or confident in the way the Americans—from political leaders to engineers to military and intelligence officers—waged the Cold War. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 500-501 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 02:24 PM North America alone can house a transcontinental nation capable of projecting power simultaneously into the Atlantic and the Pacific. Therefore North America is the center of gravity of the international system. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 519-27 | Added on Monday, April 13, 2009, 02:27 PM Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn’t live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for. Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and that their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism undermines self-certainty. Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 546-48 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 02:35 AM People talk about “the long war,” and the idea that the United States and Muslims will be fighting for a century. As is usually the case, what appears permanent is only a passing phase. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 640-44 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 04:48 AM This era is actually less a coherent movement than a regional spasm, the result of a force field being removed. Ethnic and religious divisions in the Islamic world mean that even if the United States is expelled from the region, no stable political base will emerge. The Islamic world has been divided and unstable for over a thousand years, and hardly looks to become more united anytime soon. At the same time, even an American defeat in the region would not undermine basic American global power. Like the Vietnam War, it would be merely a transitory event. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 668-70 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 04:52 AM Grand strategy is not always about war. It is about all of the processes that constitute national power. But in the case of the United States, perhaps more than for other countries, grand strategy is about war, and the interaction between war and economic life. The United States is, historically, a warlike country. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 675-76 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 04:53 AM War is central to the American experience, and its frequency is constantly increasing. It is built into American culture and deeply rooted in American geopolitics. Its purpose must be clearly understood. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 677-81 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 04:54 AM Norway’s grand strategy might be more about economics than warfare, but U.S. strategic goals, and U.S. grand strategy, originate in fear. The same is true of many nations. Rome did not set out to conquer the world. It set out to defend itself, and in the course of that effort it became an empire. The United States would have been quite content at first not to have been attacked and defeated by the British, as it was in the War of 1812. Each fear, however, once alleviated, creates new vulnerabilities and new fears. Nations are driven by fear of losing what they have. Consider the following in terms of this fear. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 752-54 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:04 AM The United States wanted to prevent stability in areas where another power might emerge. Its goal was not to stabilize, but to destabilize. And that explains how the United States responded to the Islamic earthquake—it wanted to prevent a large, powerful Islamic state from emerging. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 756-61 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:04 AM However, the principle of using minimum force, when absolutely necessary, to maintain the Eurasian balance of power is—and will remain—the driving force of U.S. foreign policy throughout the twenty-first century. There will be numerous Kosovos and Iraqs in unanticipated places at unexpected times. U.S. actions will appear irrational, and would be if the primary goal is to stabilize the Balkans or the Middle East. But since the primary goal will more likely be simply to block or destabilize Serbia or al Qaeda, the interventions will be quite rational. They will never appear to really yield anything nearing a “solution,” and will always be done with insufficient force to be decisive. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 781-86 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:12 AM We saw this in Vietnam and we see it in Iraq as well. These conflicts are merely isolated episodes in U.S. history, of little lasting importance—except to Vietnamese and Iraqis. The United States is a young and barbaric country. It becomes emotional quickly and lacks a sense of historical perspective. This actually adds to American power by giving the country the emotional resources to overcome adversity. The United States always overreacts. What seems colossally catastrophic at one moment motivates Americans to solve problems decisively. An emerging power overreacts. A mature power finds balance. A declining power loses the ability to recover its balance. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 802-4 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:13 AM The United States wins as long as al Qaeda loses. An Islamic world in chaos, incapable of uniting, means the United States has achieved its strategic goal. One thing the United States has indisputably done since 2001 is to create chaos in the Islamic world, generating animosity toward America—and perhaps terrorists who will attack it in the future. But the regional earthquake is not coalescing into a regional superpower. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 866-70 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:19 AM But the growth rate has not accelerated. It has actually slowed down dramatically. According to the United Nations, between 2000 and 2050 the population will continue to grow, but only by about 50 percent, halving the growth rate of the previous fifty years. In the second half of the century, it becomes more interesting. Again, the population will continue to grow, but only by 10 percent statistically, according to other forecasters. This is like slamming on the brakes. In fact, some forecasts (not by the UN) have indicated that the total human population will decline by 2100. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1036-39 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:37 AM American pragmatism was an attack on European metaphysics on the grounds of impracticality. American culture was obsessed with the practical and contemptuous of the metaphysical. The computer and computer language are the perfect manifestations of the pragmatic notion of reason. Every line of code must have a practical consequence. Functionality is the only standard. That a line of code could be appreciated not for its use but for its intrinsic beauty is inconceivable. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1046-49 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:38 AM If we look for the essence of American culture, it is not only in pragmatism as a philosophy but also in the computer as the embodiment of pragmatism. Nothing exemplifies American culture more than the computer, and nothing has transformed the world faster and more thoroughly than its advent. The computer, far more than the car or Coca-Cola, represents the unique manifestation of the American concept of reason and reality. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1049-52 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:38 AM Computing culture is also, by definition, barbaric. The essence of barbarism is the reduction of culture to a simple, driving force that will tolerate no diversion or competition. The way the computer is designed, the manner in which it is programmed, and the way it has evolved represent a powerful, reductionist force. It constitutes not reason contemplating its complexity, but reason reducing itself to its simplest expression and justifying itself through practical achievement. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1187-92 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 05:53 AM From the Baltics south to the Romanian border there is a region where borders have historically been uncertain and conflict frequent. In the north, there is a long, narrow plain, stretching from the Pyrenees to St. Petersburg. This is where Europe’s greatest wars were fought. This is the path that Napoleon and Hitler took to invade Russia. There are few natural barriers. Therefore, the Russians must push their border west as far as possible to create a buffer. After World War II, they drove into the center of Germany on this plain. Today, they have retreated to the east. They have to return, and move as far west as possible. That means the Baltic states and Poland are, as before, problems Russia has to solve. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1515-19 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 06:43 AM The problem for China is political. China is held together by money, not ideology. When there is an economic downturn and the money stops rolling in, not only will the banking system spasm, but the entire fabric of Chinese society will shudder. Loyalty in China is either bought or coerced. Without available money, only coercion remains. Business slowdowns can generally lead to instability because they lead to business failure and unemployment. In a country where poverty is endemic and unemployment widespread, the added pressure of an economic downturn will result in political instability. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1576-82 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 06:49 AM By approximately 2020, Japan will have Chinese allies in the fight to bring in Japanese investment on terms favorable to Japan. Coastal regions will be competing to attract Japanese investment and resisting Beijing’s pressure and its nationalist ideology. Interior China might not benefit from Japan’s presence, but businesses and governments along the coast would. The Japanese, with large amounts of money, will have recruited allies in the coastal cities who do not want to pay the price that will be needed to satisfy the demands of the interior. An alliance between one or more coastal regions and Japan will emerge, confronting the power of Beijing. The amount of money that Japan will bring to bear will rapidly divide the central party itself and weaken the central government’s ability to assert its control on the coastal cities. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1710-15 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 07:13 AM This is the reason the Russians are so unwilling to compromise on Chechnya. The southern part of Chechnya is deep in the northern Caucasus. If that were lost, the entire Russian position would unravel. Given a choice, the Russians would prefer to be anchored farther south, in Georgia. Armenia is an ally of Russia. If Georgia were Russian, its entire position would be much more stable. Controlling Chechnya is indispensable. Reabsorbing Georgia is desirable. Holding Azerbaijan does not provide a strategic advantage—but the Russians would not mind having it as a buffer with the Iranians. Russia’s position here is not intolerable, but Georgia, not incidentally closely allied with the United States, is a tempting target, as was seen in the August 2008 conflict. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1768-70 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 07:19 AM Ukraine and Belarus are everything to the Russians. If they were to fall into an enemy’s hands—for example, join NATO—Russia would be in mortal danger. Moscow is only a bit over two hundred miles from the Russian border with Belarus, Ukraine less than two hundred miles from Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1857-58 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 07:35 AM Around 2015 a new bloc of nations, primarily the old Soviet satellites coupled with the Baltic states, will emerge. Far more energetic than the Western Europeans, with far more to lose, and backed by the United States, this bloc will develop a surprising dynamism. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1859-62 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 07:35 AM The Russians will respond to this subtle American power grab by trying to increase pressure on the United States elsewhere in the world. In the Middle East, for example, where the interminable confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians will continue, the Russians will increase military aid to the Arabs. In general, wherever anti-American regimes exist, Russian military aid will be forthcoming. A low-grade global confrontation will be under way by 2015 and will intensify by 2020. Neither side will risk war, but both sides will be maneuvering. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1867-69 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 07:36 AM Given the confrontation, the European dependence on hydrocarbons, much of it derived from Russia, will become a strategic issue. The American strategy will be to de-emphasize the focus on hydrocarbon energy sources. This will kick into high gear the American interest in developing alternative sources of energy. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1918-20 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 07:45 AM The crisis will come to a head, if history is any guide, in the presidential election of either 2028 or 2032. I say that because there is an odd—and not entirely explicable—pattern built into American history. Every fifty years, roughly, the United States has been confronted with a defining economic and social crisis. The problem emerges in the decade before the crisis becomes apparent. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 1926-31 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:13 AM In its history so far, the United States has had four such complete cycles and is currently about halfway through its fifth. The cycles usually begin with a defining presidency and end in a failed one. So the Washington cycle ends with John Quincy Adams, Jackson ends with Ulysses S. Grant, Hayes with Herbert Hoover, and FDR with Jimmy Carter. Underneath the politics, the crises are defined by the struggle between a declining dominant class linked to an established economic model and the emergence of a new class and a new economic model. Each faction represents a radically different way of viewing the world and a different definition of what it means to be a good citizen, and reflects the changing ways of making a living. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2032-39 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:31 AM A little over a decade away from the likely commencement of the first crisis of the twenty-first century, we should already be able to glimpse its beginnings. There are three storms on the horizon. The first is demographic. In the late 2010s, the major wave of baby boomers will be entering their seventies, cashing in equities and selling homes to live off the income. The second storm is energy. Recent surges in the cost of oil may only be a cyclical upturn following twenty-five years of low energy prices. These surges could also be the first harbingers, though, of the end of the hydrocarbon economy. Finally, productivity growth from the last generation of innovations is peaking. Great entrepreneurial companies of the 1980s and 1990s like Microsoft and Dell have become major corporations, with declining profit margins reflecting declining productivity growth. In general, the innovations of the last quarter century are already factored into the price of equity. Maintaining the thunderous pace of the past twenty years will be difficult. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2095-96 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:36 AM Unemployment is the only thing that won’t echo the 1970s. Whoever can work will have a job—at high wages—but those wages will be badly squeezed by taxes or inflation. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2115-18 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:38 AM In the 2020s this concept will shift again, and by the election of either 2028 or 2032 a sea change in American political thinking will have taken place. Some will argue that there are plenty of workers available, but that they don’t have the incentive to work because taxes are too high. The failing president will try to solve the problem with tax cuts to motivate nonexistent workers to join the workforce by stimulating investment. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2143-45 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:41 AM The other will be those who can develop technologies that increase productivity in order to address the labor shortage over the longer term. Therefore, professionals in the physical sciences, engineering, and health care, along with manual laborers of various sorts, will be the primary kinds of workers that are recruited. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2180-85 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:44 AM Three nations will be in particularly opportune positions for taking advantage of this. First, Japan will be in a position to exploit opportunities in the Russian maritime region and in eastern China. Second, Turkey will be in a position to press northward into the Caucasus and potentially beyond. Finally, an alliance of Eastern European countries, led by Poland, and including the Baltic states, Hungary, and Romania, together will regard this as an opportunity not only to return to older borders but also to protect themselves against any future Russian state. A powerful secondary benefit for these countries is this: by increasing their strength, they will be further protecting themselves against their traditional Western enemy, Germany. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2297-2301 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:56 AM There is a deeper issue. By 2020, Turkey will have emerged as one of the top ten economies in the world. Already ranked seventeenth in 2007, and growing steadily, Turkey is not only an economically viable country but a strategically crucial one. In fact, Turkey enjoys one of the strongest geographic locations of any Eurasian country. Turkey has easy access to the Arab world, Iran, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and above all the Mediterranean. The Turkish economy grows in part because Turkey is a center of regional trade as well as a productive economic power in its own right. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2417-20 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 12:04 PM U.S. interest in Europe may wane in the immediate wake of Russia’s collapse, seemingly opening the door to increased Franco-German power. But this will be transitory. As the U.S. crisis with Japan and Turkey emerges and intensifies, the U.S. interest in Europe, as we shall see, will reemerge. The United States will have a very real interest in Eastern Europe once the Turks start to make their move in the 2020s. And that will likely be enough to block the reemergence of German and French power. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2478-83 | Added on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 12:09 PM American policy will be complex, as always, and influenced by different factors. The idea of a strong China threatening the Russian rear will become an obsession in the U.S. intelligence and military communities in the 2010s and 2020s. In the 2030s this fear will become an idée fixe in the State Department, where old policies never change or die. The United States will therefore continue its commitment to a secure and stable China. But this will become a major irritant in U.S.–Japanese relations by 2040. Obviously, Japanese behavior in China will be incompatible with the American idea of a stable China. By 2040 the relationship between Washington and Beijing will grow closer, irritating the Japanese no end. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2620-27 | Added on Thursday, April 16, 2009, 12:15 AM The United States faced crises on multiple fronts a century before when, in the 1940s, Germany and Japan simultaneously challenged American interests. In that case as well, the United States followed a strategy of strengthening regional allies, aiding Britain and Russia against Germany, and China against Japan. Now, a century later, it will again be prepared to play a long game. It will have no desire to occupy or destroy either Turkey or Japan, much less Germany. The United States is playing a defensive game, blocking emerging power. It is not engaged in an offensive strategy, however it might appear. American strategy will be to wear down any threats over an extended period of time, causing potential opponents to bog down in conflicts they cannot bring to a close and cannot easily abandon. In this strategy the United States will always invoke the principles of self-determination and democratic values, painting Japan and Turkey as aggressors undermining national sovereignty while violating human rights. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2677-80 | Added on Thursday, April 16, 2009, 04:45 PM Using lessons learned during space construction projects in the 2030s, I believe the United States’ future plans will call for the creation of a system of three Battle Stars. The main Battle Star will be located in geosynchronous orbit over the equator near the coast of Peru. A second will be placed over Papua New Guinea, and a third over Uganda. The three will be arrayed at almost exact intervals, trisecting the earth. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2814-19 | Added on Friday, April 17, 2009, 05:43 PM The brute nature of nuclear weapons generated a technological revolution in warfare. Nuclear weapons were the reductio ad absurdum of global and total war. In order to fight nuclear wars, nations—the United States and the Soviet Union—had to be able to see globally. The only way to do that efficiently was to fly over enemy territory, and the safest and most effective way to do that was in space. While manned space projects were the public side of space programs, the primary motive—and funding—was driven by the need to know precisely where the other side had located its nuclear missiles. Spy satellites evolved into real-time systems that could pinpoint enemy launchers within meters, allowing them to be targeted precisely. And that created the need for weapons that could hit those targets. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2824-35 | Added on Friday, April 17, 2009, 05:44 PM This change in scale will be of tremendous advantage to the United States, which has always been at a demographic disadvantage in fighting wars. The primary battlefields in the twentieth century were Europe and Asia. These were heavily populated areas. The United States was thousands of miles away. Its smaller population was needed not only to fight but to build sup-plies and transport them great distances, siphoning off manpower and limiting the size of the force available for direct combat. The American way of war has thus always focused on multiplying the effectiveness of each soldier on the battlefield. Historically it did this by using both technology and masses of weapons. After World War II, however, the emphasis was increasingly on technological multipliers rather than mass. The United States had no choice in the matter. If it was going to be a global power, it would need to maximize the effectiveness of each soldier by wedding him to advanced weaponry. It has created a culture of war in which smaller forces can defeat larger ones. As the use of technology increases, the size of the force needed decreases until ultimately what is required is a remarkably small number of extremely well-trained and sophisticated warriors. It is important to see how the weapons culture created by the United States parallels its demographic shift. With an aging and contracting population, the maintenance of mass forces becomes difficult, if not impossible. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2883-88 | Added on Friday, April 17, 2009, 06:30 PM Satellites must be protected, whether by deflecting the attack or destroying the attacker. By the middle of the twenty-first century this idea will have evolved in the mode of other weapons systems in history, and the result will be the satellite battle group. Like a carrier battle group, where the carrier is protected by other vessels, the reconnaissance satellite will be protected by auxiliary satellites with various capabilities and responsibilities, from blocking laser beams to attacking other satellites. The problem of defending space-based systems will escalate rapidly, as each side increases the threat and thereby increases defense measures. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 2995-99 | Added on Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:23 PM In the mid-twenty-first century, the Japanese will face the same problem in a different context. They will need to destroy the Battle Stars. They must attack from an unexpected direction with unexpected means. The unexpected direction would be from the rear, the equivalent of the northwest Pacific. That would mean the moon. They would have to use unexpected means—weapons constructed in secret on the moon, since shipping weapons there for later use could be detected. The equivalent of Pearl Harbor in the twenty-first century would have to involve the principles of surprise in direction and means. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Note Loc. 3254 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 09:58 AM what about terminators? ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 3254-60 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 09:58 AM The key weapon will be the armored infantryman—a single soldier, encased in a powered suit that is able to lift substantial amounts of weight and protects the soldier from harm. The suit will also allow him to move rapidly. Think of him as a one-man tank, only more lethal. He will be supported by many armored systems, carrying supplies and power packs. The power pack will be critical. The systems will all be electrically powered and driven by advanced electrical storage units—batteries with a lot of power and life in them. But however advanced, they need to be recharged. That means that access to electrical grids will be the single most important thing in warfare—along with the electrical power plants pushing electricity through the grids. Electricity will be to war in the twenty-first century as petroleum was to war in the twentieth century. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 3322-28 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 10:02 AM Providing enough power for the infantrymen’s armored suits and robots will also be a problem. These suits will be electrically driven and will need to be recharged or have their massive batteries swapped out every day or so. Tremendous advances will have been made in the storage of electrical power, but in the end the batteries will still run out. A key resource, therefore, will be the electrical power grid tied to electrical generation plants. Destroy the power generation plants, and the attackers will have to ship in massive, charged batteries from wherever there is power and then distribute them around the battlefield. The farther the troops advance, the longer the supply line will become. If the defenders are prepared to shut down their own power grid and, when necessary, destroy their power plants—a scorched-earth strategy—the attack would be slowed by lack of power. Everything will depend on the tactical delivery of electricity. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 3391-95 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 10:08 AM The United States won’t want to destroy Japan. Rather, it will want to maintain a balance of power between Japan, Korea, and China. Similarly, it will want not to destroy Turkey or create chaos in the Islamic world, but only to maintain a balance of power between the Polish bloc and Turkey. The Poles and the Polish bloc will scream for Turkish blood, as will the Chinese and Koreans for that of the Japanese. But the United States will pull a Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. In the name of all that is humane, it will make certain that Eurasia remains chaotic. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 3515-20 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 03:20 PM As with the automobile superhighways, the information superhighway might have come about on its own, but it did not. The basic cost of creating it was a military undertaking designed to solve a problem the military was experiencing. To push this analogy a bit, the energy superhighway will have its origins in the same kinds of necessities. It will be built for the military, and therefore its economics will make it more competitive than other energy sources. Since the military will absorb the basic capital cost and will deploy the systems, the commercial cost of this energy will be enormously lower than it might be otherwise. Cheap energy in the civilian sector will be critical, particularly as robots become more and more prevalent in the economy. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 3538-42 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 03:22 PM Obviously, the receivers would have to be installed in isolated areas on earth, since the localized microwave radiation would be intense, but the risks would be far less than that from nuclear reactors or from the environmental effects of hydrocarbons. One thing that space has available is space. What would be unbearably intrusive on earth (say, covering an area the size of New Mexico with solar panels) is swallowed up by the limitlessness of space. Plus there are no clouds, and collectors can be positioned to receive continual sunlight. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 3552-62 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 03:23 PM We will see here a fundamental paradigm shift in geopolitical realities. Since the start of the industrial revolution, industry has guzzled energy, which was accidentally and haphazardly distributed around the world. The Arabian Peninsula, which otherwise had little importance, became crucially important because of its oil fields. With the shift to space-based systems, industry will produce energy instead of simply consuming it. Space travel will be the result of industrialization, and an industrialized nation will produce energy at the same time as it fuels its industry. Space will become more important than Saudi Arabia ever was, and the United States will control it. A new wave of American-generated culture will sweep the world. Remember that we define culture not simply as art, but in the broader sense of how people live their lives. The computer was the most effective introduction to American culture, far more profound than movies or TV. The robot will represent the computer’s logical and dramatic conclusion. In a world that needs economic growth but no longer has a surging population, robots will become the driver of productivity, and with space-based solar systems there will be ample electricity to power them. Robots, still primitive but developing rapidly, are going to sweep the world, and will be particularly embraced by the population-constrained advanced industrial world, and by countries that will be closing in on the first tier and nearing or passing population peaks. ========== The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (George Friedman) - Highlight Loc. 3750-59 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 03:58 PM When we drill deeper into the HDI, we see something else interesting about Mexico. Mexico as a whole has an index of 0.70, which puts it in the same class as the United States or Europe. But there are enormous regional inequalities within Mexico. The darker areas on the map below have rankings equal to some European countries, while the lightest areas are the equivalent of poorer, North African countries. Levels of Economic and Social Development This tremendous inequality is exactly what you would expect to see in a country in the process of rapid development. Consider the descriptions of Europe written by Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo. They captured the essence of nineteenth-century Europe—tremendous growth amid intensifying inequality. In Mexico, one can find that contrast in Mexico City or Guadalajara. But one can also see it regionally, contrasting the relative wealth of Mexico’s north with the poverty of the south. Inequality does not mean lack of development. Instead, it is the inevitable by-product of development. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 72-73 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 04:42 PM nnovation, exploration, freedom, and renewal-these ideals have sustained the vitality of American culture and business _since the pilgrims sailed west and the founding fathers launched an ambitious new kind of democracy. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 106-9 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 04:56 PM Given the number of innovative products and services that we see around us, it's easy to believe that our Ecosystem is stable and secure. But in fact, we are rapidly losing our advantage. Innovation is not just a sound bite, and a focus on the short term is not enough. Both our companies and the country have dangerous blind spots in the areas of medium-term and long-term innovation. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 156-60 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 05:14 PM It is creating that soup where lots of people are coming up with ideas, and having a system that translates them into something effective;' says Danny Hillis, a former Disney Imag- ineer and cofounder of Applied Minds, an R&D consulting firm that calls itself the "little Big Idea company." The soup starts with some common ingredients, a set of human attitudes and beliefs that are so critical that I call them the five core values of innovation: questioning, risk taking, openness, patience, and trust. If pushed to an extreme, any one of these values can actually stifle ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 349-50 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 06:08 PM The innovation process can result in life-changing breakthroughs or incremental improvements to existing ideas or products. There is a third type of significant innovation that comes from applying existing technologies in new ways. I call this orthogonal innovation. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 376-79 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 06:11 PM Magic happens when small groups of the most talented people have a sense of purpose and shared values, are provided with sufficient resources, and are empowered to come up with something great. Even for complex projects that ultimately may require significant resources to implement, the initial teams should be kept small, cutting down on communication overhead and ensuring that the group can change direction quickly if necessary. In Silicon Valley, the optimal size of these ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 417-19 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 09:38 PM The Innovation Ecosystem is made up of communities of people with different types of expertise and skill sets. Scientists, administrators, business leaders, engineers, writers, educators, health-care professionals, and other individuals all play a role. Each community must receive the nutrients it deserves through leadership, funding, and public attention. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 429-31 | Added on Sunday, April 19, 2009, 09:43 PM In view of its crucial role in the Ecosystem, research should be judged not by the number of patents obtained, but by the amount of new knowledge brought into the world by scientists, and by former students providing the foundation for innovation in other communities. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 62-65 | Added on Thursday, April 30, 2009, 02:02 PM Whuffie is the residual outcome—the currency—of your reputation. You lose or gain it based on positive or negative actions, your contributions to the community, and what people think of you. The measurement of your whuffie is weighted according to your interactions with communities and individuals. So, for example, in my own neighborhood, where I have built a strong reputation for being helpful, my whuffie is higher than when I travel to another neighborhood where nobody knows me. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 1041-43 | Added on Friday, May 08, 2009, 01:28 PM Openness and transparency is a great first step, often beyond what your competitors are doing, but it is equally important to take the results of that openness—the feedback and the market research—and integrate it into the product itself. This is more difficult than opening yourself in the first place because there will be a great number of conversations to respond to. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 1959-61 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 01:34 PM Leisa Reichelt, who coined the term “ambient intimacy,” describes it as being “about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 2100-2105 | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 06:59 PM In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whuffie is gained and lost through a person's negative or positive actions. For example, acting rude to someone will lose you whuffie points with that person and anyone else who observes your behavior, while creating a beautiful work of art or composing a symphony will gain you whuffie points with those who enjoy the work. The business equivalent of creating a symphony is creating a notable product or service—something that moves people. When you are notable, you thereby sustain and build the community you serve by offering amazing customer experiences and people will connect to you through those experiences. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 2405-10 | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 03:55 PM The personal experience from the website carries all the way through the personal act of exchanging cards through the way they are distributed. Occasionally, I'll take a handful of different designs, spread them out in a fan, and let the recipient pick his or her favorite, like a trading card. I've not only personalized my experience, but I connect to others through letting them personalize their own by having their choice of card. Moo founder Richard Moross says this is a common way of presenting the Moo cards, a really great way for spreading the word of mouth about them. Most people instantly decide to get a set themselves. Richard considers Moo part of the ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 2971-75 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 01:58 PM Once you figure out the type of culture you want to create, you can start to define how to measure your success within that goal. The beauty of online communications is that all sorts of metrics are available. Deciding which ones apply to the measurement of your goal is the trick. For instance, if your goal is to create a culture of generosity, measuring the number of new sign-ups doesn't necessarily mean much. But measuring the number of sign-ups referred by members can mean that people are enjoying themselves enough on the service to invite their friends. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 3039-50 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 02:06 PM One of the best ways to open up opportunities for yourself is to create more bridging capital. According to Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, social capital comes in two forms: bonding and bridging capital. Bonding capital is what we do with good friends and family: We build deep relationships of trust and care. We can count on those we have bonding capital with for our survival. Bonding capital is essential to our individual survival and is what emotionally fulfills us. Bridging capital, on the other hand, is the type of social capital that helps us grow and builds our careers and businesses. Bridging capital is what you are building when you go outside of your heterogeneous environment (close friends, workplace, etc.) and meet new people. Bridging is what you do when you go to conferences and meet people you don't usually hang out with. It's what you do when you spend time getting to know people across your industry and others online and off. According to Putnum, bridging connections “are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion” and provide a “sociological WD-40” that can “generate broader identities and reciprocity”6 Therefore, to really open up doors of opportunity and give your whuffie a real power boost, you should be making connections across different industries. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 3448-53 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 02:25 PM Jane's ideas are definitely breakthrough and she's even brought them to the work world through her involvement with the Institute for the Future's Future of Work program, but one company, Akoha, launched in 2008 by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts in Montreal, Quebec, takes it a step further. Akoha, derived from the word “koha,” which means reciprocal gift giving in Maori, is highly appropriate to how Austin Hill, Alex Eberts, and their team are creating meaningful play through an online game where people win whuffie points through acts of kindness and service to others. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 3663-65 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 02:31 PM Integration and fulfillment of needs is where community members begin not only feeling that they can influence others, but can also see their own whuffie rise because of that influence. So how can you make the whuffie more obvious? Create a VIP or Heroes program. ========== The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (Tara Hunt) - Highlight Loc. 3690-3704 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 02:33 PM First, you need to figure out what you are doing and for whom. This will be your overall strategic pivot point. Sit down with your cofounders, employees, stakeholders, or just yourself, and ask the following questions: Who is our core customer/who are we building this for? List as many as you like but pick one to focus on. Only one. Remember Google focuses on the impatient searcher, not the browser and not the advertiser. Why would they care? Figure out what truly differentiates you from your competition. Are you offering an amazing customer experience? Be brutally honest with yourself. We are creating a culture of ________________. Fill in that blank with one type of customer community you'd like to have. This is a very important section as having a strong, positive culture will go a long way to community growth. How do we achieve that culture? Go wild and come up with all sorts of great ideas. Once you have a list of at least twenty ideas, prioritize them and set them in a reasonable timeline. By reasonable I mean that you can work on product development while implementing these ideas. What is our higher purpose? Take a look at chapter 9 and see how you are going to build whuffie by being part of the gift economy. Set your qualitative and quantitative measurements of success. Be realistic here, too. You can shoot for the stars, but tie the measurements back to the kind of culture you want to create. STEP 2 ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 587-88 | Added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 02:36 PM The G.I. Bill, signed by President Roosevelt in 1944, included financial support for veterans who wished to continue their education or technical training. Forty-nine percent of those admitted to college in 1947 were veterans. By 1956, nearly eight million World War II vets had taken advantage of G.I. Bill funding to advance their educations ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 670-73 | Added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 04:10 PM Proposals did not have to go through a long peer review process. Researchers spent their time working, rather than grinding out lengthy funding requests. "We could write our proposals on half a page, because they were really just goals;" says Alan Kay. "We needed to invent a scalable network-what else can you say? We used to say that ARPA is vision rather than goals, and people rather than projects" ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 708-10 | Added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 04:13 PM Congress passed the Small Business Investment Act in 1958, and innovative financial professionals and ex-entrepreneurs teamed up to launch the first venture capital (VC) partnerships. Arthur Rock left banking to focus on VC in 1961. Eugene Kleiner, one of the scientists who left Shockley, cofounded Kleiner Perkins in 1972. Thirty new venture firms were created between 1968 and 1975. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 734-40 | Added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 05:17 PM The Vietnam War diverted money from basic research and resulted in increasing resistance to the military among university scientists. The Internet research that Vint Cerf was leading at Stanford continued to get full support from the government, because it was easy to explain to DARPA how a communication system capable of surviving a nuclear war could serve the needs of the military. But Cerf also had to make the people who were doing the research comfortable with their sponsors. "I found myself trying to figure out what kind of civilian problems could be solved using our research;" he says. He specifically avoided the use of military terms when describing problems to researchers, while ensuring that their work was relevant to military needs. Government budgets were tightening overall, and DARPA contracts were becoming more directed. As the information technology and biotech industries showed promise, funding was directed toward these areas, at the expense of continuing to fuel basic research in the physical and environmental sciences. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 767-71 | Added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 05:20 PM Changes in university licensing policies had unintended consequences for innovation. In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, giving universities ownership of intellectual property resulting from federally funded research. The universities now had the responsibility, as stewards of their discoveries, to see that those discoveries benefited society. Technology transfer offices were created to move ideas from campus labs out to the commercial world, where increasing numbers of entrepreneurs were waiting to capitalize on them. But there was a difference between the intent and the outcome of Bayh-Dole. As these licensing offices grew in size and power, at some universities they became viewed as a new source of revenue, which encouraged researchers to emphasize short-term applied research that could be licensed more quickly. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 771-74 | Added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 05:20 PM "It has made me very nervous to think that universities themselves are becoming motivated by capitalizing on their research properties, as opposed to allowing the research to be motivated by the desire to know and to share;" says Internet pioneer Vint Cerf. The pace of research accelerates remarkably when there is adequate sharing going on, which is what publication is all about. The Human Genome Database is just one example of how progress can move forward more quickly when sharing of data is required. ========== Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (Judy Estrin) - Highlight Loc. 797-99 | Added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 05:22 PM There were many hidden costs of the focus on short-term efficiency. Organizations lost their tolerance for anything that couldn't be managed through the metrics dashboard on the executive's desktop PC. Innovation can be a messy and inefficient process; it's not one that can be managed through simple metrics. ========== The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower (Robert Baer) - Bookmark Loc. 73 | Added on Sunday, June 07, 2009, 04:08 PM ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 375-81 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2009, 12:54 PM In addition to the problem of lousy information, perhaps some voters are going to vote for or against the incumbent regardless of performance because of their ethnic identity. Identity is the basis of most voting in the bottom billion. Their societies are usually divided into competing ethnic identities, and as a result ethnicity is by far the easiest basis on which to organize political loyalty. The problem with it is that because the loyalty isn’t issues-based, it isn’t performance-based either. Votes are simply frozen in blocs of rival identities. A consequence of having great blocs of votes frozen into support or opposition is that the vote that an incumbent politician attracts is not very sensitive to performance: few votes hinge on whether he has done a good or a bad job. So not only do people lack the information on which to judge performance, but relatively few are going to base their votes on this judgment. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 574-76 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2009, 01:09 PM Evidently, local incumbency is what matters for controlling the vote count. But the surprise was that voter intimidation was high when bribery and miscounting were low. It turned out that, at least in the Nigerian election, violence was predominantly a strategy of the politically weak, perhaps somewhat analogous to terrorism. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 580-84 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2009, 03:36 PM other words, democratic elections cannot possibly, in themselves, be a solution to the problem of violence, or to the larger problem of decent government. In themselves they are a recipe for driving political leadership into the gutter. It is not even a matter of maybe. Electoral competition creates a Darwinian struggle for political survival in which the winner is the one who adopts the most cost-effective means of attracting votes. In the absence of restraints the most cost-effective means are simply not going to be good governance: that option is surely way down the list. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 585-91 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2009, 03:37 PM An example from the Nigerian gubernatorial elections stared me in the face. This had been the campaign for reelection by the incumbent minister for the federal capital territory of Abuja, Nasir el-Rufai. Contrary to most of his colleagues, he had governed well. His ability was recognized by ordinary Nigerians: in 2006 he had won the prestigious Silverbird Man-of-the-Year Award. Indeed, by any standards he was competent. He had managed to get into Harvard Business School, no mean feat for a young Nigerian, and had duly come to the top in his year. Also exceptionally, he had decided not to exploit the potential multiple advantages of incumbency and conducted an honest campaign. He lost: in fact he didn’t even manage to win the nomination of his own party in the primary that preceded the gubernatorial election. Given the potency of the dishonest options, the honest and decent have so much stacked against them that that is all too often their fate. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 606-9 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2009, 03:39 PM Further, we needed a measure of policies and governance that was available on a consistent basis for as many countries as possible, for as long a period as possible. There are only two possibilities, one put together by the World Bank, called the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, and the other put together by a commercial company, the International Country Risk Guide. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 629-30 | Added on Monday, June 08, 2009, 03:42 PM What the results were telling us was that the chances of reform were at their peak when the society was as far away from an election—in either direction—as possible. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 653-57 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 06:59 AM So the implication is that to date the process of democratization in the bottom billion has remained within the range over which better is worse: the increased democracy has quite probably retarded the reform of economic policies and governance. It has gone far enough to lose whatever might be the advantages of autocracy, while not yet having gone far enough to gain the benefits of democracy, and the typical society of the bottom billion remains well short of the point at which democratization would lead to improvement. It has proved much easier to introduce elections than checks and balances. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 659-61 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 06:59 AM Taken together, the results on elections and democratization are consistent: if democracy means little more than elections, it is damaging to the reform process. I do not like these results. It would be a much happier story if at every step along the way to fully fledged democracy the consequences got better and better. But unfortunately this does not seem to be the world as it is. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 697-701 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 07:03 AM To an extent donor conditionality might have forced reform. But the statistical evidence if anything suggests that it has delayed reform rather than accelerated it. Governments do not like being made to do something against their will and they are remarkably ingenious at finding ways of not doing it. Donors are also amazingly bad at enforcing their agreements with governments. So my own judgment is that donor conditionality on economic policies is not the explanation for policy improvement. I would put my money on learning from failure. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 717-19 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 07:05 AM Obviously influenced by his Northern Irish experience, he emphasized the satisfaction that people get from using their vote as a way of expressing their identity: voting is satisfying in the same way that wearing a football scarf is satisfying. And so voter turnout is likely to be particularly high where identity politics rules. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 730-31 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 07:06 AM Perhaps, in encouraging elections, we have landed these societies in an unviable halfway house that has neither the capacity of autocracies to act decisively nor the accountability of a genuine democracy. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 743-45 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 07:07 AM A society can function perfectly well if its citizens hold multiple identities, but problems arise when those subnational identities arouse loyalties that override loyalty to the nation as a whole. As the Luo vote suggests, in the societies of the bottom billion, ethnic identity usually trumps national identity. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 758-61 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 07:09 AM The solution to moral hazard is not indignantly to protest that the insurer should not doubt your good faith, it is to make your behavior observable. Only if the insurer can see that you are trying your best does the insurance become feasible. For a private insurance company such observation would be prohibitively expensive, but for a community it is feasible. Nosiness, gossip, friendly intimacy, all the ingredients that are natural to a community also happen to be just what is needed for insurance. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 763-71 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:21 AM If anyone can join or leave the insurance group at any time, then it will be in perpetual deficit: people will declare themselves to be members of the community when they fall on hard times and declare themselves fancy-free when things are going well. This is known in economics as the problem of adverse selection: unless insurance companies take care, instead of getting a random selection of clients from the population, they get people who know that they are bad risks. That is why insurance companies use some device for restoring a random selection, such as offering much better terms for all the employees of a firm than they offer to individuals who turn up at the door. This is where ethnicity comes in: you do not choose your ethnic group. If you are not a member of the ethnic group, you cannot choose to become a member when times are hard. If you are a member, you cannot choose to exit the group when things go well. That is the economic basis for strong ethnic loyalties: it enables income insurance to work in the high-risk, low-income conditions under which it is supremely valuable. Over time, loyalty to the group becomes reinforced by all the normal power of morality: it is morally good to meet your obligations. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 821-26 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:26 AM Not only does identity trump policies, but to the extent that policies do enter, instead of a race to capture the vote of Ms. Moderate the All-Powerful Median Voter, there is a race to the extremes. Colin Jennings introduced me to this tendency via the expressive voting idea. His work analyzes how electoral competition is likely to work out in ethnically divided societies. Voting for the extremist parties offers the strongest identity fix. It also selects the most ardently sectarian leaders, so that when it comes to the stage of reaching compromise in a grand coalition, the starting point for the negotiations is as far toward the position of your own ethnic group as possible. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 870-74 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:30 AM I constructed estimates, country by country, of the public and private capital stock and then investigated whether the productivity of these two types of capital was affected by the degree of ethnic diversity of the society. Each of these steps is precarious, but what came out was that ethnic diversity reduced the productivity of public capital, while increasing the productivity of private capital. While this may be spurious, it is at least consistent both with the micro-level evidence and with other macro-level results. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 887-91 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:31 AM Unfortunately for the societies of the bottom billion, it is. The beneficial effects of diversity only set in at higher levels of income: diversity is good news for America, and while Europe’s rising diversity may well weaken its welfare state, it will be compensated by a more vibrant private economy. But it is bad news for Kenya and the other societies of the bottom billion. At low levels of income, diversity is a substantial net economic disadvantage, and it shows up in slower growth: a highly diverse low-income society on average grows a full 2 percentage points less rapidly that a completely homogenous one. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 950-54 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:38 AM Where selectariats routinely ditch incompetent dictators, the autocracy performs well. This result is important, but it raises a further question: what determines whether the selectariat is willing to ditch a failing dictator? They come up with a simple answer. The selectariat will only dump the dictator if it is confident of retaining power, replacing him with one of their own. Here, I think, lies the explanation for why autocracy goes wrong in societies stratified by strong ethnic identities: ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 964-65 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:39 AM Diversity may make democratic politics deteriorate, but it is likely to make dictatorship lethal. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 971-75 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:40 AM This has indeed always been how national identity comes about: it is a political construction. But here I want to stick with the rare instances of the construction of a sense of nation in the new post-colonial countries. What can leaders do? Both Sukarno and Nyerere focused on language: indeed, language is so fundamental to ethnic identification that it is the main way in which social scientists have measured it. Sukarno created a national language, Bahasa Indonesia, so simple that I have heard Australian schoolchildren chatting away confidently in it. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 975-76 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:40 AM Nyerere made Kiswahili universal across Tanzania. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 982-87 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 09:49 AM Nyerere also constructed physical symbols of national unity, most notably building a new national capital, Dodoma, in the center of the country, an act much derided by the donors. Partly due to lack of funding, Dodoma has not succeeded, but it clearly demonstrated his larger purpose of moving beyond the inherited localized identities. Above all, Nyerere developed and hammered home the rhetoric of national unity: people were Tanzanians, and that was something to be proud of. Ethnic identities were not forcibly suppressed; they were simply downplayed. Even when Tanzania introduced multiparty politics it was circumscribed: no party was allowed to campaign on an ethnic platform. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1201-2 | Added on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 10:44 AM Expenditure on peacekeeping strongly and significantly reduces the risk that a post-conflict situation will revert to civil war. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1234-37 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 11:29 AM Is there an alternative? I could think of two other possibilities. The first is what is known as over-the-horizon guarantees. It is what the British government is doing in Sierra Leone. For the past few years there have been only eighty British troops stationed in the country, but the government has been given a ten-year undertaking that if there is trouble, the troops will be flown in overnight. Perhaps this has helped stabilize the society. Sierra Leone is, at least in terms of reversion to violence, a major success. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1286-93 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 11:34 AM Economic recovery is to my mind the only genuine exit strategy for peacekeeping. I think we need to dismiss the illusion that elections are the milestone and face the long haul of building the economy. It may well not be necessary to keep many peacekeeping troops on the ground throughout the decade: an initial military presence may well be able to evolve successfully into an over-the-horizon guarantee. But any such guarantee must be credible: the French guarantee was made credible by its military bases, and the British guarantee was credible because during the conflict they indeed flew in overnight to check the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces that were set on occupying the capital, Freetown. The British forces held off the RUF on the outskirts of the capital at little place called Waterloo. But they only arrived just in the nick of time: as Lord Wellington said of the former, somewhat grander battle, it was “a damned close thing.” ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1327-28 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 11:43 AM By 2004 it had reached the astounding figure of 36 percent: more than a third of Africa’s own wealth is outside the region. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1332-36 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 11:45 AM So how does this relate to inflation? Victor discovered that capital flight in post-conflict situations was particularly sensitive to inflation, much more than in normal peacetime conditions. We are not sure why: perhaps high inflation is seen as a sign of future instability, indicating that the government is itself discounting the future heavily. But the implication is that aid during the post-conflict period is particularly effective. By enabling the government to reduce inflation, aid is geared up by reduced capital flight, and indeed possibly by capital repatriation. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1364-68 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:13 AM More than forty years ago Nobel laureate Ken Arrow had the key insight into the process of skill accumulation in a society. He called it “learning by doing”: productivity rises in an activity with practice. Conceptually, there is a counterpart to learning by doing: “forgetting by not doing.” In the prosperous economic context of Arrow’s work, this logical possibility was not even sufficiently important to warrant a footnote. But for the economics of civil war it matters. Civil war is development in reverse, and Arrow’s model is running backward. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1371-75 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:16 AM During civil war the sector that collapses most severely is construction: the society is hell-bent on destruction and so nobody is investing in buildings and infrastructure. The construction sector uses a lot of unskilled labor, which has the potential for job creation among the unemployed youth that constitute a post-conflict powder keg. But even the construction sector needs skills: you cannot build a wall with only unskilled labor. And so the fact that the basic skills needed for construction have atrophied during the war becomes an impediment to rapid economic recovery. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1399-1403 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:19 AM More generally, each percentage point reduction in the risk of a civil war is worth around $200 million. Recall that peacekeeping at the level of $100 million per year sustained over the post-conflict decade reduces the risk of civil war by 21 percentage points. So the value of the benefit is around $4.2 billion. Since the peacekeepers are there for a decade, their total cost is $1 billion. We are at last ready for the punch-line number: the ratio of benefits to costs is better than four to one. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1425-26 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:21 AM The core role of politicians is to mobilize the collective action that supplies public goods with benefits far in excess of their costs. Peacekeeping is such a public good. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1508-15 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:29 AM Expressed more professionally, if a country had once had to fight an external war, maybe it would be more fearful that it would have to do so again. Perhaps the country had a particularly dangerous neighbor, maybe it had a particularly aggressive leadership, or perhaps it saw itself as an international policeman, riding to the rescue of distressed regimes. We decided to try it, focusing on the history of warfare since the end of the Second World War. Sure enough, once a country had been engaged in an international war, its military spending was permanently higher by around 1.8 percentage points. We tried to see whether this faded with time. Presumably at some point it does, but we could not find any such tendency: as far as we could see, wars fought years ago were still leaving their legacy in the form of higher spending. If this is right, a disturbing implication is that much of the costs of an international war accrue after it is over: the society continues to be burdened with higher military spending. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1519-21 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:30 AM So what happened once the Cold War ended: did it show up in global levels of military spending? It most certainly did: with the end of the Cold War global military spending fell by an astonishing 35 percent. The collapse of the Soviet Union delivered a huge global peace dividend. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1534-38 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:32 AM We haven’t quite done with proxies for external threats. In fact, there is one more that is utterly obvious. If you were free to chose which neighbor you faced, would you be more frightened of China or Bhutan? Never mind the politics, or the share of military spending in income, China is intrinsically more of a threat because it is so much bigger. More populous countries systematically spend a smaller share of income on the military. This is an instance of a proposition that is going to loom large throughout this book: security is subject to economies of scale. Big may not be beautiful, but it is safe: small is dangerous, and expensive. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1549-53 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:38 AM A big army is not just a source of defense, it is an interest group. The nearest we got to the military-industrial complex was to investigate whether the military was concerned to look after itself. Quite commonly, professions tend to lobby in their own interests. Plato had the brilliant idea that the ideal government would be composed of philosopher kings: government by professors. Unfortunately, Plato’s splendid idea has not been implemented with sufficient frequency for it to be amenable to statistical testing, but I hazard that a government of professors would spend significantly more on universities. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1571-77 | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2009, 10:41 AM In economic language things that are vital priorities are necessities: you buy them even if it means sacrificing the purchase of things that are less necessary. So military spending must be a necessity. It is one of those propositions that we know must be true, but nevertheless it is best to look: known truths, like theorems, sometimes turn out to be wrong. Indeed, it is wrong. Military spending came out as a clear luxury: it increases much more than proportionately with income. In one sense this is good news: the poorest countries tend to spend a lower proportion of their income on the military. But the unfortunate aspect is that with global growth military spending is going to loom larger and larger. While politicians tell us how necessary it is, they behave as though it were a government luxury good. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1722-23 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:23 PM Future civil wars will take the form of a government pitted against a private extralegal military grouping. They will variously be called rebels, terrorists, freedom fighters, or gangsters, but their essential characteristic will be the same. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1745-47 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:28 PM Scholars have been hyperactive in quantifying phenomena that were not previously measured, and at filling in the gaps in previous estimates, so that our data for the past are now much nearer to being complete. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1795-97 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:33 PM It is also evident why natural resources might increase proneness to violence. They provide a ready source of finance for rebel groups, they provide a honey pot to fight over, and they enable the government to function without taxing the incomes of citizens, which gradually detaches it from what citizens want. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1820-24 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:48 PM So there is a ready demand for evidence that colonialism is responsible for the subsequent violence. Unfortunately, Anke and I cannot find evidence that supports this contention. Neither the length of time that has elapsed since independence, nor the particular former colonial power, seems to matter. I do not want to push this too far: it is quite evident that Portuguese decolonization was disastrous. Angola, Mozambique, East Timor all went straight into civil war. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1829-30 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:49 PM As Niall Ferguson has pithily expressed it, what people expected would be the Third World War turned out to be third-world wars. But even the effect of the Cold War is controversial. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Note Loc. 1843 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:53 PM J.Ho doesn't agree with that. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Note Loc. 1846 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:54 PM same conclusions from Desai's class on clientelism ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1870-74 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:57 PM But there was no equivalent measure for mountains. There were crude proxies such as the highest point in the country, but these seemed to miss the point as to what rebel groups would actually find useful: they did not want to perch on the top of Everest; they wanted rugged terrain where government forces would not be able to find them. We tracked down the world’s leading geographer on mountainous terrain and commissioned him to build a quantitative measure of the proportion of a country’s terrain that could reasonably be judged mountainous. This measure has since become widely used, and in our new work we indeed find it to matter: mountains are dangerous. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1882-89 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:01 PM With that caveat I propose the feasibility hypothesis. The feasibility hypothesis is that the key to understanding civil war is to focus on how rebellion happens rather than on what motivates it. Why focus on the rebels? Does that reveal a pro-government bias? The focus on the rebels is simply because it is the act of rebellion that defines the outbreak of civil war. All governments with the exception of Costa Rica and Iceland have armies, so these cannot be the defining feature. Sometimes a government army attacks its own defenseless citizens, but, disgusting as this is, it is a pogrom, not a civil war. The defining feature of the outbreak of civil war is that the usual monopoly of force held by the government army is challenged: a private organization within the society builds its own army. No government can tolerate the existence of a private army on its soil, and so even if it is the government that fires the first shot, it is the creation of the rebel army that defines the war. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1915-20 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:04 PM So what is the feasibility hypothesis? It is that in explaining whether a rebellion occurs, motivating factors are of little importance compared to the circumstances that determine whether it is feasible. The tough version of the hypothesis, which I am reluctant to adopt but which I suspect is close to the truth, is that where a rebellion is feasible it will occur: the rebel niche will be occupied by some social entrepreneur, although the motivation might be anything across a wide range. Civil war is predominantly studied in political science departments and so naturally enough they interpret the motivation as political: sometimes it surely is, although even political motivations might stray quite some distance from social justice. Even rebellions that look entirely justified can sometimes be called into doubt. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 1960 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:08 PM these economic costs alone are the equivalent to losing around two years of income, or some $20 billion. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2012-14 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:13 PM Far from offering the prospects of book tours, losing power looks decidedly scary. So evident is the fear of losing office that a public-spirited African businessman, Mo Ibrahim, has now introduced a $5 million prize for African presidents who voluntarily step down. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2078-79 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:20 PM Does democracy makes coups less likely? Controlling for other influences, unfortunately it does not: coups are at least as likely to break out in democracies as in autocracies. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2117-18 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:24 PM What, apart from repression and economic development, can a president do to guard against a coup? One strategy that is widely touted in the literature is to divide the military into many different units so that each one can function as a check on the others. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2202-4 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:40 PM Surgical strikes do sometimes happen, but more commonly coup leaders are not surgeons wielding a scalpel, but rank amateurs hacking away at the body politic. To date, coups have been unguided missiles that have usually hit the wrong target. Rather than be eliminated, perhaps they need a guidance system. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2209-15 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 04:43 PM To make sense of the meltdown we need to start with the prior success: what was the Ivorian miracle? Success had not been based on democracy, but on the vision of an autocrat, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. As you will see, his strategy was risky, but it nearly came off. Along the way, the president transferred the capital to his home village, Yamoussoukro, built an astonishing basilica modeled on St. Peter’s, and induced the pope to come and open it. Since the basilica was financed partly by the diversion of aid, it was viewed with something between horror and derision by the donors. But societies throughout history have used monumental buildings to construct a shared identity. The anthropologist Colin Renfrew suggests that Stonehenge was such an edifice, and as I will argue, the creation of a sense of shared identity is very much what leaders should be doing in these societies. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2388-90 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:23 PM Legally, states can be built by the stroke of an international pen: they need only recognition. This is how the states of the bottom billion came into existence. They have not been forged into nations, and so they face an acute lack of public goods. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2405-11 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:25 PM Onto this scene of specialization now add economies of scale in violence, this being a fancy way of saying that size matters. It is this that makes violence distinctive. Other economic activities had to wait until the industrial revolution before scale became important. A thousand-person farm was no more productive per person than a one-person farm; a thousand-person firm of cobblers was no more productive per person than a solo cobbler. But a thousand-person army could kill, one by one, a thousand solo fighters: large groups of professionals tend to defeat small groups of professionals. Not always and everywhere: small armies can win if they have better technology and better management; there is even room for differential heroism. The race is not always for the swift, but that is where to put your money. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2412-18 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:26 PM But safety is not the only consideration: life can only be sustained with income. People specialized in violence forgo the chance to produce. Where is your income to come from? The answer, as any mafioso knows, is that having established a monopoly of violence, you now have the power to extort from other inhabitants of the territory. Why do the inhabitants not run away? Perhaps your army can enforce penalties for attempting to escape: you are able to turn the inhabitants into serfs. Perhaps the inhabitants have nowhere to run because the neighboring territories are dominated by similar armies, so flight would merely get them out of your frying pan into some other army’s fire. Perhaps the protection from other predators that is a consequence of your local monopoly of violence is worth the payments. You, the army, are inadvertently supplying a public good: you have become a state. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2428-32 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:28 PM As the effective state facilitates economic growth, even the politically weak become better off, and this, together with an emerging sense of common identity, gradually makes them more powerful. Recall that autocracies become more prone to political violence as income rises. More specifically, they become increasingly beset by riots, demonstrations, and political strikes. The sense of common identity further eases the collective action of protest. Better provision of public goods is gradually prised out of the elite by this pressure. To make these improvements credibly permanent, elites also concede limited extensions of the franchise: the society inches toward modern democracy. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2462-68 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:31 PM The critical invention of the Dutch was political accountability. People were only prepared to tolerate high taxation if the government of the state became accountable to citizens. Not all citizens, of course, but the rich citizens who were paying the taxation. Further, with an accountable state the government was able to borrow: people were prepared to lend once they saw that the government was being forced to conduct its finances in such a way that it would always be able to pay them back. The Hapsburgs found that gold and silver were not quite enough, and so they too decided to borrow. But nobody had forced them into accountability. And so the battle for the Netherlands turned into a battle of interest rates. The power of compound interest to gradually gut the finances of a profligate borrower ensured that final victory would go to the state with the better credit rating. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2491-94 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:35 PM Often the process is very rapid: technology can permit states to expand explosively. The development of the stirrup in the geographic context of the steppes suddenly enabled the Mongols to build the largest land empire ever known. Similar expansions occurred during the nineteenth century. When the pace of expansion gets sufficiently far ahead of the process of building a common identity, the resulting superstates face overwhelming problems in trying to establish a common identity. Instead of becoming nations, by default they become empires. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2499-2502 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:36 PM The age of empires came to an abrupt end for a variety of reasons, but probably the most powerful was the rise of America to primacy and its resolute antipathy to them. The seeds were sown by President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War. Wilson committed himself to the principle of self-de-termination of peoples, a concept entirely revolutionary to the then-established principles of international relations. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2509-13 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:38 PM With rare exceptions, the new states did not emerge as the solutions to struggles to provide security. It is usually said that the boundaries of the new states were arbitrary. This is not entirely fair to the colonial authorities that faced the task of turning a vast multitude of ethnic communities into manageable countries. The fundamental problem was that neither of the two processes that had happened in the formation of modern states had taken place: there had been neither the emergence of territories viable in terms of security, nor the retrospective creation of an imagined community among the inhabitants of these security-defined spaces. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2515-17 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:39 PM Thus, although the instant states that came into being with the dissolution of the colonial empires were ancient societies with a multiplicity of strong ethnic loyalties, usually they lacked national loyalty: people’s primary allegiance was to their ethnic group. As I have argued, this severely impeded the provision of public goods. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2518-20 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:39 PM Much the surest way of overcoming this problem would be to follow the earlier model of nation building: gradually erode ethnic identities and replace them with a national identity. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2522-26 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 06:40 PM The evidence from recent surveys of attitudes across nine African countries by Afrobarometer is not encouraging. It found that if people are educated they are more likely to identify themselves through their ethnicity. The same is the case if they have a wage job as opposed to the traditional occupation of farmer. The same is the case if they have experienced political mobilization. So development, with the attendant education, jobs, and electoral competition, is increasing the salience of ethnic diversity rather than erasing it. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2537-39 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 11:41 PM And so, despite the arms races in Lilliput, the governments of the bottom billion have not engaged in international wars to anything like the same extent as did the European states of the nineteenth century. The resulting reduced need to tax has been reinforced by aid: in the typical country of the bottom billion the government gets around a third of its expenditure met by aid. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2656-61 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2009, 01:14 AM Accountability and security are vital: without them a country cannot develop. The societies of the bottom billion have not, individually, been able to supply either accountability or security. The path of building supply from within the society is hard. While its heroes who are engaged in this struggle deserve our support, we should be far more forthcoming with international supply. I will argue that a minimal degree of international intervention could spring the trap. Once the trap is sprung, domestic supply could and should replace it: international assistance in the supply of accountability and security need only be a phase. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2690-92 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2009, 01:17 AM Regional cooperation is the least invasive challenge to national sovereignty, and so if it is feasible, it is at this level that international supply of accountability and security should be undertaken. Is it feasible? ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 2782-85 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2009, 02:13 PM Our somewhat eccentric research is still in progress, but it looks as though Africa’s multitude of ethnic groups could have been bundled up into around seven large states with little increase in ethnic diversity. A seven-state structure for Africa would, on our analysis, have been considerably safer than the present structure. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 3243-45 | Added on Monday, June 15, 2009, 10:23 AM In this book I have spared you the fancy terminology of economics, but since you have reached the end you can take delight in one technical term: in economic language the quality of political leadership is endogenous. As a result, in these societies visionary leadership is now rare. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 3245-49 | Added on Monday, June 15, 2009, 10:23 AM There is thus a powerful case for security and accountability to be regarded as basic social needs that, as a default option, should be provided internationally. After the intervention in Iraq, many people might reasonably feel that the unintended consequences of security interventions are such that intervention in any form is too risky. Yet international military intervention has had many successes. The lesson is not that it is intrinsically risky, but that the circumstances that warrant it should be limited and clearly delineated. ========== Wars, Guns, and Votes (Paul Collier) - Highlight Loc. 3272-74 | Added on Monday, June 15, 2009, 10:25 AM You get the picture: faced with a security danger America got serious; no viable strategy was neglected. It worked: the threat from the Soviet Union is over, but even with this massive response it took more than forty years of sustained effort. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 509-20 | Added on Monday, June 15, 2009, 01:51 PM Scott Bedbury, Starbucks’ vice president of marketing, openly recognized that “consumers don’t truly believe there’s a huge difference between products,” which is why brands must “establish emotional ties” with their customers through “the Starbucks Experience.”16 The people who line up for Starbucks, writes CEO Howard Shultz, aren’t just there for the coffee. “It’s the romance of the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community people get in Starbucks stores.”17 Interestingly, before moving to Starbucks, Bedbury was head of marketing at Nike, where he oversaw the launch of the “Just Do It!” slogan, among other watershed branding moments. In the following passage, he explains the common techniques used to infuse the two very different brands with meaning: Nike, for example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with sports and fitness. With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people’s lives, and that’s our opportunity for emotional leverage…. A great brand raises the bar — it adds a greater sense ofpurpose to the experience, whether it’s the challenge to do your best in sports and fitness or the affirmation that the cup of coffee you’re drinking really matters.18 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 529-31 | Added on Monday, June 15, 2009, 01:51 PM the products that will flourish in the future will be the ones presented not as “commodities” but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 832-34 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 12:13 PM More and more magazines are turning their offices into market-research firms and their readers into focus groups in an effort to provide the most cherished “value-added” they can offer their clients: highly detailed demographic information about their readership, amassed through extensive surveys and questionnaires. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 884-89 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 12:16 PM Though there have been dozens of imitators since, the original genius of MTV, as every marketer will tell you, is that viewers didn’t watch individual shows, they simply watched MTV. “As far as we were concerned, MTV was the star,” says Tom Freston, network founder.12 And so advertisers didn’t want to just advertise on MTV, they wanted to co-brand with the station in ways that are still unimaginable on most other networks: giveaways, contests, movies, concerts, awards ceremonies, clothing, countdowns, listings, credit cards and more. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 968-73 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 04:34 PM Clearly fed up, in 1996 Molson held its first Blind Date Concert. The concept, which has since been exported to the U.S. by sister company Miller Beer, is simple: hold a contest in which winners get to attend an exclusive concert staged by Molson and Miller in a small club — much smaller than the venues where one would otherwise see these megastars. And here’s the clincher: keep the name of the band secret until it steps on stage. Anticipation mounts about the concert (helped along by national ad campaigns building up said anticipation), but the name on everyone’s lips isn’t David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Soundgarden, INXS or any of the other bands that have played the Dates, it’s Molson and Miller. No one, after all, knows who is going to play, but they know who is putting on the show. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 976-81 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 04:35 PM The rock stars, turned into high-priced hired guns at Molson’s bar mitzvah party, continued to find sad little ways to rebel. Almost every musician who played a Blind Date acted out: Courtney Love told a reporter, “God bless Molson…. I douche with it.”16 The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Lydon screamed “Thank you for the money” from the stage, and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell told the crowd, “Yeah, we’re here because of some fucking beer company…Labatt’s.” But the tantrums were all incidental to the main event, in which Molson and Miller were the real rock stars and it didn’t really matter how those petulant rent-a-bands behaved. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 1253-57 | Added on Thursday, June 18, 2009, 03:15 PM Still, the myth of Woodstock as a sovereign youth-culture state was part of a vast project of generational self-definition — a concept that would have been wholly foreign to those in attendance at Woodstock ’94, for whom generational identity had largely been a prepackaged good and for whom the search for self had always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not they believed it or defined themselves against it. This is a side effect of brand expansion that is far more difficult to track and quantify than the branding of culture and city spaces. This loss of space happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical space but of mental space. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 1910-13 | Added on Saturday, June 20, 2009, 10:53 AM There is, however, another, more ingrained cultural factor that has helped the brands get inside the schools, and it has to do with the effectiveness of branding itself. Many parents and educators could not see anything to be gained by resistance; kids today are so bombarded by brand names that it seemed as if protecting educational spaces from commercialization was less important than the immediate benefits of finding new funding sources. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 2155-57 | Added on Saturday, June 20, 2009, 02:49 PM This candy-coated multiculturalism has stepped in as a kinder, gentler packaging for the homogenizing effect of what Indian physicist Vandana Shiva calls “the monoculture” — it is, in effect, mono-multiculturalism. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 2179-83 | Added on Saturday, June 20, 2009, 02:51 PM firm that conducted a consumer study on Chinese teens, found that while Mom, Dad and both grandparents may do without electricity, their only son (thanks to the country’s one-child policy) frequently enjoys what is widely known as “little emperor syndrome,” or what she calls the “4-2-1” phenomenon: four elders and two parents scrimp and save so the one child can be an MTV clone. “When you have the parents and four grandparents spending on one child, it’s a no-brainer to know that this is the right market,” says one venture capitalist in China.19 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 2188-89 | Added on Saturday, June 20, 2009, 02:51 PM Diversity. Whatever. — Slogan for a 1998–99 ad campaign for Eaton’s department store, Canada ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 2230-40 | Added on Sunday, June 21, 2009, 12:57 PM What I question is the battles we North American culture warriors never quite got around to. Poverty wasn’t an issue that came up much back then; sure, every once in a while in our crusades against the trio of ’isms, somebody would bring up “classism,” and, being out-P.C.-ed, we would dutifully add “classism” to the hit list in question. But our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures. “Discrimination against poverty” (our understanding of injustice was generally construed as discrimination against something) couldn’t be solved by changing perceptions or language or even, strictly speaking, individual behavior. The basic demands of identity politics assumed an atmosphere of plenty. In the seventies and eighties, that plenty had existed and women and non-whites were able to battle over how the collective pie would be divided: would white men learn to share, or would they keep hogging it? In the representational politics of the New Economy nineties, however, women as well as men, and whites as well as people of color, were now fighting their battles over a single, shrinking piece of pie — and consistently failing to ask what was happening to the rest of it. For us, as students, to address the problems at the roots of “classism” we would have had to face up to core issues of wealth distribution — and, unlike sexism, racism or homophobia, that was not what we used to call “an awareness problem.” ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 2241-49 | Added on Sunday, June 21, 2009, 12:58 PM So class fell off the agenda, along with all serious economic — let alone corporate — analysis. Certainly there were those in the ID ranks with revolutionary goals. Like the sixties counterculture radicals who thought they were shaking the foundations of Western civilization by dropping acid, there were a handful of professors and students of identity politics who believed that “great blows are being struck against capitalism in the realms of theory,” as critic Gayatri Spivak put it.27 And Dinesh D’Souza and his ilk couldn’t resist calling the P.C.ers “neo-Marxists” — but in fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street. “The real guilt of P.C….,” wrote SUNY professor of literature Tim Brennan in 1991, “is not its supposed intolerance or rigidity, but that it is not political enough — that it is impersonating political struggle.”28 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 2464-70 | Added on Sunday, June 21, 2009, 05:35 PM Yet no matter how urbane the original concept may have been, the business of chains has a logic and a momentum of its own, having very little to do with what it sells. It breaks down each of a brand’s elements — no matter how progressive and homespun — into a kit of easy-to-assemble bits and parts. Just as the chains snap together like Lego, each chain outlet is made up of hundreds of its own snappable parts. Within the logic of chains, it matters little whether those snappable parts are a McDonald’s deep frier and a Hamburglar mannequin or the “four elemental icons” that form the building blocks for each Starbucks store design: “Earth to grow. Fire to roast. Water to brew. Air for aroma.” A clone is a clone, whether it is molded in the shape of an arch or a peace symbol, and its purpose is still replication. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 3231-39 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 07:43 PM The conflation of shopping and entertainment found at the superstores and theme-park malls has created a vast gray area of pseudo-public private space. Politicians, police, social workers and even religious leaders all recognize that malls have become the modern town square. But unlike the old town squares, which were and still are sites for community discussion, protests and political rallies, the only type of speech that is welcome here is marketing and other consumer patter. Peaceful protestors are routinely thrown out by mall security guards for interfering with shopping, and even picket lines are illegal inside these enclosures. The town-square concept has recently been picked up by the superstores, many of which now claim that they too are providing public space. “Essentially, we want people to use the store as a meeting place. A place where people can get their fix of pop culture and hang out for a while. It’s not just a place to shop, it’s a place to be,” said Christos Garkinos, vice president of marketing for the Virgin Entertainment Group, on the occasion of the opening of Vancouver’s 40,000-square-foot Virgin Megastore.27 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 3370-73 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 07:52 PM In all likelihood, resentment at invasive advertising, the corporate takeover of public space, and monopolistic business practices would have festered as little more than run-of-the-mill cynicism had many of the same companies gobbling up both space and choice not decided simultaneously to bankroll their innovative branding forays by slashing jobs. It is this essential economic, human concern that has been a major force in contributing to the rise in anticorporate activism: No Good Jobs. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 3513-16 | Added on Thursday, July 02, 2009, 05:07 PM Despite the conceptual brilliance of the “brands, not products” strategy, production has a pesky way of never quite being transcended entirely: somebody has to get down and dirty and make the products the global brands will hang their meaning on. And that’s where the free-trade zones come in. In Indonesia, China, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere, export processing zones (as these areas are also called) are emerging as leading producers of garments, toys, shoes, electronics, machinery, even cars. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4208-18 | Added on Friday, July 03, 2009, 01:50 PM Starbucks has been the most innovative in the modern art of supple scheduling. The company has created a software program called Star Labor that allows head office maximum control over the schedules of its clerks down to the minute. With Star Labor, gone is anything as blunt and imprecise as a day or evening shift. The software measures exactly when each latte is sold and by whom, then tailor-makes shifts — often only a few hours long — to maximize coffee-selling efficiency. As Laurie Bonang explains, “They give you an arbitrary skill number from one to nine and they plug in when you’re available, how long you’ve been there, when customers come in and when we need more staff, and the computer spits out your schedule based on that.”22 While Starbucks’ breakthrough in “just-in-time” frothing looks great on a spreadsheet, for Steve Emery it meant hauling himself out of bed to start work at 5 a.m., only to leave at 9:30 a.m. after the morning rush had peaked and, according to Star Labor, he was no longer working at maximum efficiency. Wal-Mart has introduced a similar centralized scheduling system, effectively reducing employee hours by pinning them precisely to in-store traffic. “It’s done just like we order merchandise,” says Wal-Mart CEO David Glass.23 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4244-51 | Added on Friday, July 03, 2009, 01:52 PM Writing about his former job, which involved hiring unpaid interns to send faxes and run errands for Men’s Journal magazine, Jim Frederick notes that many of his applicants had already worked for nothing at Interview, CBS News, MTV, The Village Voice and so on. “‘Very impressive,’ I would say. By my quick calculations they had contributed, conservatively, five or six thousand dollars’ worth of uncompensated work to various media conglomerates.”27 Of course, the media conglomerates — the broadcasters, magazines and book publishers — insist that they are generously offering young people precious experience in a hard employment market — a foot in the door on the old-fashioned “apprenticeship” model. Besides, they say, sounding suspiciously like McDonald’s managers the world over, the interns are just kids — they don’t really need the money. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4381-90 | Added on Friday, July 03, 2009, 06:31 PM Some of them are even what Tom Peters likes to call a “Brand Called You.” Tom Peters’s latest management-guru idea is that just as companies must reach branding nirvana by learning to let go of manufacturing and employment, so must individual workers empower themselves by abandoning the idea of being employees. According to this logic, if we are to be successful in the new economy, all of us must self-incorporate into our very own brand — a Brand Called You. Success in the job market will only come when we retrofit ourselves as consultants and service providers, identify our own Brand You equities and lease ourselves out to targeted projects that will in turn increase our individual portfolio of “braggables.” “I call the approach Me Inc.,” Peters writes. “You’re Chairperson/CEO/Entrepreneur-in-Chief of your own professional service firm.”56 Faith Popcorn, the management guru who came to prominence with her 1991 best-seller, The Popcorn Report, goes so far as to recommend that we change our names to better “click” with our carefully designed and marketed brand image. She did — her name used to be Faith Plotkin. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4452-56 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2009, 01:31 PM Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Kay points out that the exorbitant salaries American companies have taken to paying their CEOs is a “crucial factor making the U.S. economy the most competitive in the world” because without juicy bonuses company heads would have “no economic incentive to face up to difficult management decisions, such as layoffs.” In other words, as satirist Wayne Grytting retorted, we are “supporting those executive bonuses so we can get…fired.”68 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4601-8 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2009, 01:37 PM Today, it’s hard to find a contented company town, where citizens do not feel they have in some way been betrayed by the local corporate sector. And rather than dividing communities into factions, corporations are increasingly serving as the common thread by which labor, environmental and human-rights violations can be stitched together into a single political ideology. After a while it becomes apparent that the unsustainable search for profits that, for example, leads to the clear-cutting of old-growth forests is the same philosophy that devastates logging towns by moving the mills to Indonesia. John Jordan, a British anarchist environmentalist, puts it this way: “Transnationals are affecting democracy, work, communities, culture and the biosphere. Inadvertently, they have helped us see the whole problem as one system, to connect every issue to every other issue, to not look at one problem in isolation.” ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4664-68 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2009, 01:40 PM Temp CEOs are a major assault on the capitalist folklore of the mail-room boy who works his way up to becoming president of the company. Today’s executives, since they just seem to trade the top spot with one another, appear to be born into their self-enclosed stratospheres like kings. In such a context, there is less room for the dream of making it up from the mail room — especially since the mail room has probably been outsourced to Pitney Bowes and staffed with permatemps. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4688-97 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2009, 01:41 PM But for some — particularly younger workers — there is a silver lining. Because young people tend not to see the place where they work as an extension of their souls, they have, in some cases, found freedom in knowing they will never suffer the kind of heart-wrenching betrayals their parents did. For almost everyone who has entered the job market in the past decade, unemployment is a known quantity, as is self-generated and erratic work. In addition, losing one’s job is much less frightening when getting it seemed an accident in the first place. Such familiarity with unemployment creates its own kind of worker divestment — divestment of the very notion of total dependency on stable work. We may begin to wonder whether we should even want the same job for our whole lives, and, more important, why we should depend on the twists and turns of large institutions for our sense of self. This slow divestment by corporate culture has implications that reach far beyond the psychology of the individual: a population of skilled workers who don’t see themselves as corporate lifers could lead to a renaissance in creativity and a revitalization of civic life, two very hopeful prospects. One thing is certain: it is already leading to a new kind of anticorporate politics. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 4926-29 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2009, 01:54 PM As Susan Douglas notes in Where the Girls Are, “Of all the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, none was more explicitly anti-consumerist than the women’s movement. Feminists had attacked the ad campaigns for products like Pristeen and Silva Thins, and by rejecting makeup, fashion and the need for spotless floors, repudiated the very need to buy certain products at all.”14 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5012-17 | Added on Saturday, July 04, 2009, 01:57 PM Listening to the Marketer Within In a New Yorker article entitled “The Big Sellout,” author John Seabrook discusses the phenomenon of “the marketer within.” He argues persuasively that an emerging generation of artists will not concern themselves with old ethical dilemmas like “selling out” since they are a walking sales pitch for themselves already, intuitively understanding how to produce prepackaged art, to be their own brand. “The artists of the next generation will make their art with an internal marketing barometer already in place. The auteur as marketer, the artist in a suit of his own: the ultimate in vertical integration.” ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5505-11 | Added on Sunday, July 05, 2009, 02:58 PM The privatization of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion of neighborhood and community that defines the metropolis. Road schemes, business “parks,” shopping developments — all add up to the disintegration of community and the flattening of a locality. Everywhere becomes the same as everywhere else. Community becomes commodity — a shopping village, sedated and under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form. A TV soap “street” or “square” mimicking the area that concrete and capitalism are destroying. The real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through not to be in. It exists only as an aid to somewhere else — through a shop window, billboard or petrol tank. — London ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5520-21 | Added on Sunday, July 05, 2009, 02:58 PM The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have names and addresses. — Utah Phillips ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5702-7 | Added on Sunday, July 05, 2009, 09:52 PM Instead, many of the people who inhabit their branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected. But this connection is a volatile one: it is not the old-style loyalty between lifelong employee and corporate boss; rather, this is a connection more akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but shallow enough to turn on a dime. This volatility is the unintended consequence of brand managers striving for unprecedented intimacy with the consumer while forging a more casual role with the workforce. In reaching brand-not-products nirvana, these companies have lost two things that may prove more precious in the long run: consumer detachment from their global activities and citizen investment in their economic success. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5762-67 | Added on Sunday, July 05, 2009, 09:54 PM Arvind Ganesan, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, is blunt about what his organization refers to as “a shift in the terms of the debate over corporate responsibility for human rights.”16 Rather than improved human rights flowing from increased trade, “governments ignore human rights in favor of perceived trade advantages.”17 Ganesan points out that the severing of the connection between investment and human-rights improvements is today clearest in Nigeria, where the long-awaited transition to democracy has been coupled with a renewed wave of military brutality against Niger Delta communities protesting against the oil companies. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5772 | Added on Sunday, July 05, 2009, 09:55 PM A democratic country, in other words, was becoming less democratic as a result of corporate intervention. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5809-13 | Added on Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 04:01 PM The political backdrop to this phenomenon is well known. Many citizens’ movements have tried to reverse conservative economic trends over the last decade by electing liberal, labor or democratic-socialist governments, only to find that economic policy remains unchanged or caters even more directly to the whims of global corporations. Centuries of democratic reforms that had won greater transparency in government suddenly appeared ineffective in the new climate of multinational power. What good was an open and accountable Parliament or Congress if opaque corporations were setting so much of the global political agenda in the back rooms? ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5834-37 | Added on Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 04:03 PM In explaining why he has chosen to focus his activism on the Nike corporation, Washington-based labor activist Jeff Ballinger says bluntly, “Because we have more influence on a brand name than we do with our own governments.”21 Besides, adds John Vidal, “Activists always target the people who have the power…so if the power moves from government to industry to transnational corporations, so the swivel will move onto these people.”22 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 5897-5906 | Added on Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 04:06 PM For a moment, I feel as if I am back in grade school with Romi the logo vigilante checking for impostors. Instead, it’s 1997 and the person examining my collar is Lora Jo Foo, president of Sweatshop Watch. She is running a seminar called “Ending Sweatshops at Home and Abroad” as part of a conference on globalization. Every time Foo runs a seminar on sweatshops, she pulls out a pair of scissors and asks everyone to cut the labels off their clothing. She then unfurls a map of the world made of white cloth. Our liberated brand names are sewn onto the map, which, over the course of many such gatherings in several countries, has become a crazy patchwork quilt of Liz Claiborne, Banana Republic, Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Jones New York, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren logos. Most of the dense little rectangular patches are concentrated in Asia and Latin America. Foo then traces a company’s global travel routes: she begins with when its products were still being produced in North America (only a few labels remain on that part of the map); then moves to Japan and South Korea; then to Indonesia and the Philippines; then to China and Vietnam. According to Foo, clothing logos make a great teaching aid; they take faraway, complex issues and plant them as close to home as the clothes on our backs. ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 6109-12 | Added on Thursday, July 09, 2009, 12:21 PM She is, as Andrew Ross writes, “a perfect foil for revelations about child labor.” Confronted with Diaz’s words, Gifford had two options: throw away her entire multimillion-dollar TV-Mom persona, or become the fairy godmother of the maquiladoras. The choice was simple enough. “It took Gifford only two weeks to ascend to the saintly rank of labor crusader,” Ross recounts.17 ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 6552-56 | Added on Thursday, July 09, 2009, 03:44 PM In Saro-Wiwa, civil liberties came together with antiracism; anticapitalism with environmentalism; ecology with labor rights. The bright yellow bulbous logo of Shell — Saro-Wiwa’s Goliath of an opponent — became a common enemy for all concerned citizens, to the extent that their governments around the world were required to put the matter on the international agenda. PEN protested against Shell, as did the campaign department at the Body Shop, the activist shareholders who placed the Ogoni plight on the agenda of three consecutive Shell annual meetings and thousands upon thousands of others. In June 1998, Owens Wiwa, Ken’s brother, wrote this of the company’s situation: ========== No Logo (Naomi Klein) - Highlight Loc. 7455-62 | Added on Thursday, July 09, 2009, 04:21 PM The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights already recognizes the right to freedom of association. If respecting that right became a condition of trade and investment, it would transform the free-trade zones overnight. If workers in the zones had the freedom to bargain for their rights without living in fear of either a government crackdown or immediate factory flight, the need for private codes and independent monitors would virtually disappear. In countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, governments would enforce these standards, and their own laws, or fear the economic repercussions. But then, this type of rigid regulation is exactly what the corporate sector has so aggressively fought since free trade was introduced — by yanking the teeth out of the UN’s declarations and treaties, and by steadfastly opposing all proposals to link trade deals to enforceable labor and environmental codes. In fact, it is precisely this kind of regulation that multinationals are now trying so frantically to circumvent by drafting their own voluntary codes. ========== new-liberal-arts-2009 (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 278-80 | Added on Friday, July 10, 2009, 12:26 PM In a world where people break into tribes based on their identification with a brand or product, marketing bleeds into politics, law, and national security. Skilled marketers will be anthropologists and social network theorists, tracking how people group and label themselves. They’ll be masters of cultural forensics, able to dissect the origins and impact of any product or campaign. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 232-36 | Added on Thursday, July 16, 2009, 02:24 PM Thus was born one of the most powerful marketing tools of the twentieth century: giving away one thing to create demand for another. What Woodward understood was that “free” is a word with an extraordinary ability to reset consumer psychology, create new markets, break old ones, and make almost any product more attractive. He also figured out that “free” didn’t mean profitless. It just meant that the route from product to revenue was indirect, something that would become enshrined in the retail playbook as the concept of a “loss leader.” ========== new-liberal-arts-2009 (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 321-22 | Added on Thursday, July 16, 2009, 02:25 PM “do you know what astonished me most in the world? the inability of force to create anything .” —Napoleon bonaparte Negotiation is the art of reconciling differences without resorting to political, economic, or physical force. ========== new-liberal-arts-2009 (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 335-37 | Added on Thursday, July 16, 2009, 02:25 PM » FaCiLitatioN involves teasing out the best strands of a person’s thought and mirroring them back clearly, while steering interactions away from personal attacks or ego displays. In a way, facilitation is negotiation without an overt conflict at its center; it aims to smooth and improve the process of working as a group. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 553-55 | Added on Sunday, July 26, 2009, 10:45 PM In China, Sivers notes, “some doctors are paid monthly when their patients are healthy. If you are sick, it’s their fault, so you don’t have to pay that month. It’s their goal to get you healthy and keep you healthy so they can get paid.” ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 555-59 | Added on Sunday, July 26, 2009, 10:45 PM In Denmark, a gym offers a membership program where you pay nothing as long as you show up at least once a week. But miss a week and you have to pay full price for the month. The psychology is brilliant. When you go every week, you feel great about yourself and the gym. But eventually you’ll get busy and miss a week. You’ll pay, but you’ll blame yourself alone. Unlike the usual situation where you pay for a gym you’re not going to, your instinct is not to cancel your membership; instead it’s to redouble your commitment. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 656-60 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 09:33 AM Spelling this out in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin, in a way, anticipated some of the social forces that dominate the “link economy” of the Internet today (people linking to one another in their posts, bringing traffic and reputation to the recipient). In giving something away, he argued, the trade-off is not money, but satisfaction. This satisfaction was rooted in community, mutual aid, and support. The self-reinforcing qualities of that aid would, in turn, prompt others to give equally to you. “Primitive societies” worked that way, he argued, so such gift economies were closer to the natural state of human affairs than market capitalism. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 763-70 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 09:40 AM Corn economies are naturally abundant economies, at least as far as food goes. Historians often look at the great civilizations of the ancient world through the lens of three grains: rice, wheat, and corn. Rice is protein-rich but extremely hard to grow. Wheat is easy to grow but protein-poor. Only corn is both easy to grow and plump with protein. What historians have observed is that the protein/labor ratio of these grains influenced the course of the civilizations based on them. The higher that ratio, the more “social surplus” the people eating that grain had, since they could feed themselves with less work. The effect of this was not always positive. Rice and wheat societies tended to be agrarian, inwardly focused cultures, presumably because the process of raising the crops took so much of their energy. But corn cultures—the Mayans, the Aztecs—had spare time and energy, which they often used to attack their neighbors. By this analysis, corn’s abundance made the Aztecs warlike. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 814-21 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 09:43 AM Humans are wired to understand scarcity better than abundance. Just as we’ve evolved to overreact to threats and danger, one of our survival tactics is to focus on the risk that supplies are going to run out. Abundance, from an evolutionary perspective, resolves itself, while scarcity needs to be fought over. The result is that despite Simon’s victory, the world seemed to assume that Ehrlich, on some level, was still right. As Regis noted, “Simon complained that, for some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they’d been medically vaccinated against the force of fact.” Ehrlich’s gloomy predictions continued (and continue) to have influence. Meanwhile Simon’s own observations seem to be of interest only to commodities traders. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 860-62 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:02 AM Where abundance drives the costs of something to the floor, value shifts to adjacent levels, something management writer Clayton Christensen calls the “Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits.” ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 891-95 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:03 AM Abundance thinking is not only discovering what will become cheaper, but also looking for what will become more valuable as a result of that shift, and moving to that. It’s the engine of growth, something we’ve been riding since even before David Ricardo defined the “comparative advantage” of one country over another in the eighteenth century. Yesterday’s abundance consisted of products from another country with more plentiful resources or cheaper labor. Today’s also consists of products from the land of silicon and glass threads. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 964-70 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:07 AM THE PENNY GAP With magazines it can clearly be effective to charge a minimal price, instead of nothing. But in most cases, just a penny—a seemingly inconsequential price—can stop the vast majority of consumers in their tracks. A single penny doesn’t really mean anything to us economically. So why does it have so much impact? The answer is that it makes us think about the choice. That alone is a disincentive to continue. It’s as if our brains were wired to raise a flag every time we’re confronted with a price. This is the “is it worth it?” flag. If you charge a price, any price, we are forced to ask ourselves if we really want to open our wallets. But if the price is zero, that flag never goes up and the decision just got easier. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 970-73 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:07 AM The proper name for that flag is what George Washington University economist Nick Szabo has dubbed “mental transaction costs.” These are, simply, the toll of thinking. We’re all a bit lazy and we’d rather not think about things if we don’t have to. So we tend to choose things that require the least thinking. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1025-27 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:12 AM The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture—it’s getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1032-35 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:13 AM But in the 1970s, a new branch of economics emerged that looked at the psychology driving economic behavior. Called “behavioral economics,” today the field ranges from game theory to experimental economics. Ultimately, what it tries to explain is why we make the economic choices we do, even when they aren’t necessarily the most rational ones. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1036-38 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:13 AM “Zero is not just another price, it turns out,” he writes. “Zero is an emotional hot button—a source of irrational excitement.” It’s easy to say, but difficult to measure, which is why Ariely set out to do just that. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1102-6 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:17 AM The authors of the Penny Closer blog tell the story of a friend who volunteers for a charity that provides people who are down on their luck with transportation—free bus tickets, to be exact. Unfortunately, these tickets, which cost the charity $30 each, are frequently lost. So the charity instituted a new rule—all tickets would cost $1 to help offset the costs of replacement. Suddenly, people lost fewer tickets. Just the act of paying $1 changed how people viewed the ticket. Since they had invested in it, clients seemed to be more careful not to lose it. Even though it was inherently worth something before they had to spend $1 on it, the ticket was somehow worth even more now. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1158-61 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:22 AM This is why free works so well in conjunction with Paid. It can accommodate the varying psychologies of a range of consumers, from those who have more time than money to those who have more money than time. It can work for those who are confident in their skills and want to do it themselves, and for those who aren’t and want someone to do it for them. free plus Paid can span the full psychology of consumerism. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1222-25 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:25 AM All buildings would be electrically heated, never mind the thermal conversion rate. We’d all be driving electric cars. (free electricity would be incentive enough to develop the efficient battery technology to store it.) Massive desalination plants would turn seawater into all the freshwater anyone could want, allowing us to irrigate vast inland swaths and turn deserts into fertile acres. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1230-32 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:25 AM Unlikely? For electricity, perhaps (although who knows what solar energy may someday bring?). But today there are three other technologies that touch nearly as much of our economy as electricity does: computer processing power, digital storage, and bandwidth. And all three really are getting too cheap to meter. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1332-38 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:43 AM As George Gilder, the author of Microcosm, puts it: When matter plays so small a part in production, there is less material resistance to increased volume. Semiconductors represent the overthrow of matter in the economy. In other words, ideas can propagate virtually without limit and without cost. This, of course, is not new. Indeed, it was Thomas Jefferson, father of the patent system (and a lot more), who put it better than anyone: He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1408-11 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:46 AM What Kay realized was that a technologist’s job is not to figure out what technology is good for. Instead it is to make technology so cheap, easy to use, and ubiquitous that anybody can use it, so that it propagates around the world and into every possible niche. We, the users, will figure out what to do with it, because each of us is different: different needs, different ideas, different knowledge, and different ways of interacting with the world. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1438-40 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:47 AM Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free. Not too cheap to meter, as Strauss foretold, but too cheap to matter. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1564 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 11:25 AM Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1601-2 | Added on Thursday, July 30, 2009, 11:26 AM But information is what British anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as “a difference that makes a difference.” ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 1609-12 | Added on Friday, July 31, 2009, 10:04 AM The physical world analogy, he said, is a pub. It provides a place for community and conversation, but it doesn’t charge for that. It just charges for the beer that lubricates it. “You find that something else to charge for, whether it’s the steins of beer or the dial tone, or some other equivalent, like adjacent advertising. You always wind up charging for something different than the information.” ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Note Loc. 1894 | Added on Sunday, August 02, 2009, 11:13 PM what the fuck is this? ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2019-22 | Added on Sunday, August 02, 2009, 11:19 PM All this sounds very clever, but it’s not quite as deliberate as it seems. Although Google does have in-house economists and business strategists, mostly what it has is engineers who are paid to think about what their technology enables and what people might want. Only later does some MBA (a second-class citizen in this geek culture) consider how exactly what the engineers have come up with might be a complement to ad sales. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2047-49 | Added on Sunday, August 02, 2009, 11:20 PM Free brings more liquidity to any marketplace, and more liquidity means that the market tends to work better. That’s the real reason why Craigslist has taken over so much of the classifieds business—free attracted people, but the marketplace efficiencies that came with free ultimately kept them. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Bookmark Loc. 2049 | Added on Sunday, August 02, 2009, 11:20 PM ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2096-98 | Added on Sunday, August 02, 2009, 11:23 PM This is what free does: It turns billion-dollar industries into million-dollar industries. But typically the wealth doesn’t vaporize, as it appears. Instead, it’s redistributed in ways that are hard to measure. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Note Loc. 2098 | Added on Sunday, August 02, 2009, 11:23 PM so we need social metrics to track intangible social value ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2116-19 | Added on Sunday, August 02, 2009, 11:25 PM In traditional markets, if there are three competitors, the number one company will get 60 percent share, number two will get 30 percent, and number three will get 5 percent. But in markets dominated by network effects, it can be closer to 95 percent, 5 percent, and 0 percent. Network effects tend to concentrate power—the “rich get richer” effect. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2127-31 | Added on Tuesday, August 04, 2009, 05:58 PM Just consider the plight of the newspapers. The success of the free Craigslist has caused the big city dailies to shrink, taking many professional journalists out of circulation. But low cost and user-generated “hyperlocal” alternatives have not risen equally to fill the gap. Maybe someday they will, but they haven’t yet. That means that there is less local news for Google to index. There may be more local information, but it can no longer use the fact that it came from a professional news organization as an indicator of quality. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2125-27 | Added on Tuesday, August 04, 2009, 05:59 PM Why should Google care about whether other companies can use free to economic advantage? Because it needs those other companies to create information that it can then index, organize, and otherwise package to create its own business. If digital free de-monetizes industries before new business models can re-monetize them, then everyone loses. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2164-69 | Added on Tuesday, August 04, 2009, 06:01 PM Radio Broadcast magazine announced a contest for the best answer to the question “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” As Susan Smulyan recounts in Selling Radio, eight hundred people entered, with ideas that ranged from volunteer listener contributions (hi, NPR!) to government licensing and, cleverly, charges for program listings. The winning entry sought a tax on vacuum tubes as an “index of broadcast consumption.” (That is, in fact, the model that was adopted in the United Kingdom, where listeners and viewers pay a yearly tax on their radios and TVs and get the ad-free BBC in return.) ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2293-2301 | Added on Tuesday, August 04, 2009, 06:07 PM At this point, the skeptical reader should be on full alert. Surely there are limits to the advertising dollars out there. Advertising can’t support everything. This is true, and indeed some advertising can be worth even less online than offline. The reason comes back to scarcity and abundance. As Scott Karp, the founder of Publish2, a news service and analysis firm, puts it, “Advertising in traditional media, whether newspapers, magazines, or TV, is all about selling a scarce resource—space. The problem is that on the Web there’s a nearly infinite amount of space. So when traditional media companies try to sell space online the same way they sell space offline, they find they only have a fraction of the pricing power.” A glossy print magazine can charge an advertiser more than $100 per thousand print readers, but would be lucky to get more than $20 per thousand online readers. There’s simply more competition online—advertisers have more choices and the price falls to whatever the market will bear. But that’s for “display advertising,” banners and images that are meant to promote a brand, not necessarily to lead to an immediate sale. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2310-18 | Added on Tuesday, August 04, 2009, 06:08 PM THE TRIUMPH OF THE MEDIA MODEL This is why the ad-driven model has spread so far beyond media online. It is simply where the money is. Fred Wilson, the New York venture capitalist, thinks that “most Web apps will be monetized with some kind of media model. Don’t think banner ads when I say that. Think of all the various ways that an audience that is paying attention to your service can be paid for by companies and people who want some of that attention.” You can look at the Web as the extension of the media business model to an unlimited range of other industries. Google is not a media company by any traditional definition of the word, but it makes its billions from the media business model. So, too, for Facebook, MySpace, and Digg. All of them are software companies at the core. Some organize other people’s content, others provide a place for people to create their own content. But they don’t create or distribute content the way a traditional media company does. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2377-81 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 09:55 AM Like many online multiplayer games, Maple Story is free to play; you can happily move through the levels, interact with other players, and otherwise have fun without spending a penny. But if you’d like to do it faster, you may want to buy a “teleportation stone,” which will allow you to jump from place to place rather than trudging through the landscape. For that you’ll need “mesos” (credits) that you can either earn or get from this card (or, if you’re an adult and have a credit card, buy online). ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2382-87 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 09:56 AM You can buy a “guardian angel” who will bring you back to life immediately, without having to trudge back from a respawn point. With your Nexon points you can buy new outfits, hairstyles, and faces. Importantly, you can’t buy a superweapon, because that would be unfair—the company doesn’t want people to be able to buy their way to power, creating a two-tiered society. Instead, money is used to save time, look cooler, or otherwise do more with less effort. The opportunities to pay are “nonpunitive,” says former Nexon North America boss Alex Garden. You don’t have to pay, but you may want to. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2396-2400 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 09:57 AM When you’re selling disks, you risk the Hollywood “second weekend” effect: When the movie’s not as good as the trailer made it look, people feel ripped off and word spreads. But in games that are free to play and only charge for items once people understand why they might want them, the risk of disappointment is lower and the odds of returning customers is higher. Simply put: You’re charging the people who want to pay, because they understand the value of what they’re getting. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2591-93 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 11:48 AM As publisher Tim O’Reilly puts it, “the enemy of the author is not piracy, but obscurity.” free is the lowest-cost way to reach the largest number of people, and if the sample does its job, some will buy the “superior” version. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2661-65 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 11:50 AM But figuring out exactly how many billions of dollars Facebook is worth has been a tricky matter. It’s probably some multiple of the users it has and the number of connections between them, which is what “friending” someone creates. That act is an exchange of reputational currency, and if that currency is worth something, it must be worth something to the person giving it. But how much? And what does that imply for Facebook’s valuation? ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2675-79 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 11:51 AM The value of attention and reputation is clearly something, or companies wouldn’t spend so much on advertising to influence them. We set prices on attention every day: the cost to reach a thousand radio listeners for thirty seconds, the charge for forcing a million Super Bowl viewers to interrupt their game. And every time a movie star’s agent negotiates a film deal, a reputation is being valued. But there’s a lot more attention and reputation in the world than that measured in media and celebrity. The problem is we don’t have any idea of how much more. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2752-55 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 05:26 PM One trillion hours over the fifteen years we’ve been building the Web is the equivalent of 32 million people working full-time over that period. Let’s say 40 percent of that was done for free—the Facebook and MySpace pages, the blogs, the countless discussion group posts and comments. That’s 13 million people—almost the working population of Canada. What would their salaries be worth, if they were paid? At a bargain rate of $20,000, that would be more than $260 billion a year. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2834-41 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 05:31 PM It’s too soon to say monopolies are no longer to be feared online. Those same network effects that gave Microsoft its stranglehold on the desktop work just as well on the Web, as Google has all too ably demonstrated. But what’s interesting about online quasi-monopolies is that they rarely bring monopoly rents with them. For all Google’s dominance, it doesn’t charge $300 for its word processors and spreadsheets—it gives them away (Google Docs). Even for things it does charge for, mostly advertising space, the price is set by auction, not by Google. So, too, for all the number ones in the big online product categories, from Facebook to eBay. For all their power, they have precious little pricing power. Facebook can only charge rock-bottom ad rates of less than a dollar per thousand views, and every time eBay tries to raise its listing fees its sellers threaten to leave, which, given the abundance of alternatives online, is no empty threat. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2916-20 | Added on Friday, August 07, 2009, 05:36 PM Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. What Simon was observing was a manifestation of one of the oldest rules in economics: “Every abundance creates a new scarcity.” We tend to value most what we don’t already have in plentitude. For example, an abundance of free coffee at work awakens a need for much better coffee, for which we are willing to pay a lot. And so, too, for any premium good that arises from a sea of inexpensive commodity products, from artisanal food to designer water. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2930-33 | Added on Sunday, August 09, 2009, 06:48 PM Normally in the consumer marketplace, our scarcity of money helps us navigate the abundance of products available to us—we only buy what we can afford (credit card balances notwithstanding). This is also how capitalism “keeps score” of consumer demand, by what consumers are willing to pay for. But what happens online, where more and more products are encoded into software and thus can be offered for free? No longer is money the most important signal in the marketplace. Instead, two nonmonetary factors rise in its place. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2934-37 | Added on Sunday, August 09, 2009, 06:49 PM These two are what are often called the “attention economy” and the “reputation economy.” Of course there is nothing new about marketplaces of attention and reputation. Every TV show has to compete in the first and every brand has to compete in the second. A celebrity builds reputation and converts it into attention. But what’s unique about the online experience is how measurable the two are, and how they are becoming more like a real economy every day. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2944-47 | Added on Sunday, August 09, 2009, 06:50 PM If the attention I pay to others is valued in proportion to the amount of attention earned by me, then an accounting system is set in motion which quotes something like the social share prices of individual attention. It is in this secondary market that social ambition thrives. It is this stock exchange of attentive capital that gives precise meaning to the expression “vanity fair.” ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 2950-52 | Added on Sunday, August 09, 2009, 06:50 PM But what if we could treat attention and reputation as quantitatively as we do money? What if we could formalize them into proper markets so we could explain and predict them with many of the same equations that economists use in traditional monetary economics? To do so, we’d need attention and reputation to exhibit the same characteristics of other traditional currencies: to be measurable, finite, and convertible. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3008-15 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 08:05 AM In each of these games, the companies behind them take their role of central banker seriously. If the Warhammer developers don’t keep a cap on the gold supply, its value will fall and the resale market will collapse. Game designers often bring in academic economists to help design their in-game economies, to avoid all the ills of real-world economies, from insufficient liquidity to fraud. But in the end, all these games pivot around the ultimate scarcity: time. Time really is money, and at the core of these game economies there is a trade-off between them. Younger players may have more time than money, and they can accumulate attention currencies with their clicks. Older players may have more money than time, and they can buy shortcuts. Game designers try to get the balance of those two right, so players can compete and advance either way. And as designers do so, they are creating some of the most quantified nonmonetary economies the world has ever seen. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3036-44 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 08:06 AM There is nothing new about this—people have always been creating and contributing for free. We didn’t call what they did “work” because it wasn’t paid, but every time you give someone free advice or volunteer for something, you’re doing something that in a different context could be somebody’s job. Now the professionals and amateurs are suddenly in the same marketplace of attention, and these parallel worlds are now in competition. And there are a lot more amateurs than professionals. What motivates the amateur creatives, if not money? Many people assume that the gift economy is driven mostly by generosity, but as Hyde observed in Pacific Islanders, it’s usually not quite so altruistic. Adam Smith got it right: Enlightened self-interest is the most powerful force in humanity. People do things for free mostly for their own reasons: for fun, because they have something to say, because they want people to pay attention to them, because they want their own views to gain currency, and countless other very personal reasons. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3044-50 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 08:07 AM In 2007, Andy Oram, an editor at O’Reilly Media, looked out at the amazing variety of user-generated documentation—instruction manuals for software, hardware, and games, that go beyond what the original creators provided—and wondered what motivated people to do it. He ran a survey for a year and then tabulated the results. The top reason was “community”—people felt part of a community and wanted to contribute to its vitality. The second was “personal growth,” which harkens back to Maslow’s highest level, self-actualization. Third came “mutual support,” which suggests that many such contributors are what sociologists call “mavens”—people with knowledge who enjoy sharing it. (Interestingly, reputation figured relatively low among the motivations in Oram’s survey.) ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3076-81 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 08:08 AM The opportunity to contribute in a way that is both creative and appreciated is exactly the sort of fulfillment that Maslow privileged above all other aspirations, and what many jobs so seldom provide. No wonder the Web exploded, driven by volunteer labor—it made people happy to be creative, to contribute, to have an impact, and to be recognized as expert in something. The potential for such a nonmonetary production economy has been in our society for centuries, waiting for the social systems and tools to emerge to fully realize it. The Web provided those tools, and suddenly a market of free exchange arose. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3303-5 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 07:00 PM One twenty-three-year-old female respondent said, “Right now I can’t afford to buy a lot of real Prada or Coach, so I buy the fake items. I hope that in the future I will be able to afford the real thing, but right now I want to look the part.” ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3325-29 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 07:02 PM So they need some other reason to get consumers to lose their infatuation with this year’s model. The solution: widespread copying that turns an exclusive design into a mass-market commodity. The designer mystique is destroyed by cheap ubiquity, and discriminating consumers have to go in search of something exclusive and new. This is what Raustiala and Sprigman call “induced obsolescence.” Copying allows fashion to move quickly from early adopters to the masses, forcing the early adopters to adopt something new. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3355-58 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 07:04 PM Ninety percent of the bands have no record contract and no label. They don’t need one. Letting others get their music for free creates a bigger industry than charging ever could. This is something that Brazil understands better than most: Its culture minister until 2008, the pop star Gilberto Gil, has released his music under a free Creative Commons license (including in a CD we distributed for free with Wired). ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3362-66 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2009, 07:05 PM So Brazil’s health minister went to the key patent holders, the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck and the Swiss firm Roche, and asked for a volume discount. When the companies said no, the minister raised the stakes. Under Brazilian law, he informed them, he had the power in cases of national emergency to license local labs to produce patented drugs, royalty-free, and he would use it if necessary. The companies caved, and prices fell by more than 50 percent. Today, Brazil has one of the largest generic drug industries in the world. Not free, but royalty-free, an approach to intellectual property rights that the industry shares with the tecnobrega DJs. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3412-18 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 11:58 AM The world wars put a damper on most sci-fi utopianism, but the dawn of the Space Age brought it back, and this time without as much of a dark edge. As with the stories above, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 The City and the Stars starts with a hermetically sealed techno-city, where machines supply everything that’s needed and nobody ever really dies. The citizens fill their days with philosophical discussions, making art and taking part in virtual reality adventures. After a few thousand years, they return to the Hall of Creation to have their consciousness digitized again. Clarke portrays this as idyllic but a bit short of meaning; his central character decides to venture out into the surrounding desert to see if there is more and eventually finds a world much like our own, where the normal cycle of birth and death provide purpose. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3422-30 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 11:59 AM Of course plot requires tension, so all is not well in these utopias of abundance. In Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, some undescribed technology controlled by the Bitchun Society had “all but obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold.” The result, however, is that people become bored and apathetic. One character explains: “Junkies don’t miss sobriety, because they don’t remember how sharp everything was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can’t remember what it was like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough, that we might get sick or get hit by a bus.” What becomes scarce in Doctorow’s world is reputation, or “whuffie.” It serves as a digital currency, something that can be given to people in exchange for good deeds, and diminished by bad behavior. Head-up displays reveal everyone’s whuffie, which serves as a measure of status. When all physical needs are met, the most important commodity becomes social capital. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3453-57 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 12:01 PM Neither society found itself floundering or stagnating for lack of purpose. The Athenians became artists and philosophers, trying to seek purpose in the abstract, while the Spartans focused their lives on military strength and might. Rather than depriving life of purpose, material abundance created a scarcity of meaning. Athenians moved further up Maslow’s pyramid, exploring science and creativity. And the Spartans’ lust for battle? I suppose Maslow would call that a form of self-actualization, too. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3583-87 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 12:07 PM In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very hard to charge when your competition is free. —Hank Williams, writing in Silicon Alley Observer ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3721-28 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 12:12 PM No, it’s just the opposite. free doesn’t encourage piracy. Piracy encourages free. Piracy happens when the marketplace realizes that the marginal cost of reproduction and distribution of a product is significantly lower than the price asked. In other words, the only thing propping up the price is the law protecting intellectual property. If you break the law, the price can fall, sometimes all the way to zero. That’s true for everything from fake Louis Vuitton luggage (where the price is low, but not zero) to MP3s (which are traded without charge). So piracy is like the force of gravity. If you’re holding something off the ground, sooner or later gravity is going to win and it will fall. For digital products it’s the same thing—copyright protection schemes, coded into either law or software, are simply holding up a price against the force of gravity. Sooner or later, it will fall, either because the owner drops it or because the pirates knock it to the ground. ========== Free (Chris Anderson) - Highlight Loc. 3750-52 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 12:13 PM They insist on free not just in price but also in the absence of restrictions: They resist registration barriers, copyright control schemes, and content that they can’t own. The question is not “What does it cost?” but “Why should I pay?” This is not arrogance or entitlement—it is experience. They have come of age in a world of free. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 71-74 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 12:22 PM The first tough, cranky, pragmatic, independent Generation Xers are gonna start hitting 40 in the next couple of years, and rearing up behind them are the Millennials, the first batch of which are the high-school class of 2000. These kids are, as a group, pleasant, cheerful, helpful, ambitious, and community-oriented. —MaryAnn Johanson, film critic, flickfilosopher. com ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 313-20 | Added on Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:16 AM And yes, Millennials are numerous. Swelled by a resurgent fertility rate and by the large families of a record immigration surge, they are indeed a giant of a generation, 76 million strong at the end of 2000. Millennialsalready outnumber Boomers. By 2002 (which, for now, we assume to be their final birth year), they'll outnumber Xers as well. Add in subsequent immigration, and Millennials are well on their way to becoming America's first 100-million-person generation. Yet despite this rising trend, the current number of Millennial teens is still recovering from the Generation-X “birth dearth.” As a share of the U.S. population, kids have merely held steady during the 1990s. An absolute head count shows that America had more youth spenders aged 15 to 24 in the early 1980s (over 40 million) than there will be again until the year 2004. Yet back in those days of Gen-X youths, hardly any politicians and not nearly as many marketers paid much attention to their age brackets. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 327-32 | Added on Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:17 AM Demographically, this is America's most racially and ethnically diverse, and least-Caucasian, generation. In 1999, nonwhites and Latinos accounted for nearly 36 percent of the 18-or-under population, a share half-again higher than for the Boomer age brackets, and nearly three times higher than for today's seniors. One Millennial in five has at least one immigrant parent, and one in ten has at least one noncitizen parent. Potentially the largest second-generation immigrant group in U.S. history, Millennials embody the irreversible browning of American civilization. Thanks to the internet, satellite news, porous national borders, and the end of the Cold War, they are also becoming the world's first generation to grow up thinking of itself as global. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 349-55 | Added on Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:18 AM Which kids are most likely to be wearing school uniforms? Nonwhites. Whose schools are moving fastest to impose uniform curricula, back-to-basics drilling, and achievement standards? Nonwhites. Whose neighborhoods are producing the swiftest decline in street murder, child poverty, teen pregnancy, and school violence? Nonwhites. Which kids are more likely to live with a two-parent family today than they were a decade ago? Nonwhites—in particular, African-American city children, who are now the focus of a community renaissance extending through Harlem and Watts to Oakland and Chicago's South Side. Black America has long been an outsized cultural contributor to generational currents, from civil rights (Silent Generation) to black power (Boomers) to hip-hop (Gen Xers). That contribution is continuing, albeit in new forms, with today's uniformed urban schoolchildren. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 610-11 | Added on Saturday, August 22, 2009, 10:00 AM Left unmentioned is another more interesting number: 73 percent of the kids report that they had refused to cheat even though they saw others cheating. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 1094-97 | Added on Monday, August 31, 2009, 05:35 PM So, too, have they never known pro athletes who didn't regularly shop their skill and celebrity to the highest bidder, or a sexual landscape that wasn't dotted with lawyers and deadly diseases, or a school curriculum that wasn't an ideological battleground, or a film era that wasn't vulgar and hyperviolent, or parents for whom military service was a widely shared experience, or political leaders who weren't the butt of endless jokes about corporate bribery, selling national secrets, attack ads, on-the-job sex, and spin control. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 1155-60 | Added on Monday, August 31, 2009, 05:38 PM The G.I.s’ most important link to the Millennials is in the void they leave behind. With the departure of what Robert Putnam calls “America's long civic generation,” no other adult peer group possesses anything close to their upbeat, high-achieving, team-playing, and civic-minded reputation. Sensing this role unfilled, today's adults have stressed the teaching of these (G.I.) values to Millennial children—who themselves are gravitating toward the G.I. archetype as the only available script for correcting or complementing the Boomer persona. You don't rebel against Boomers by being iiber-Xers. You rebel by being G.I. redux, a youthful update of the generation against which the Boomers themselves rebelled, so famously, in the 1960s and 70s. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 1173-80 | Added on Monday, August 31, 2009, 05:39 PM The Silent Generation, now straddling retirement, provides the real bulk of the Millennials’ grandparents. This is the generation that was born just too late to be heroes during World War II and just too early to be youthful free spirits during the Consciousness Revolution. As heavily protected children, the Silent grew up watching older people make great sacrifices on their behalf. Reaching maturity in an era of “lonely crowd” conformism, they avoided risking their spotless reputations (hence their names) while making early and unconditional commitments to family and career. Much later, in a “midlife crisis” rebellion against these youthful promises, the Silent triggered the divorce boom and invented the hands-off child-raising style of the ‘70s that Gen-X kids recall as their own. No-fault divorce, schools without walls, gradeless report cards, new realism in child media, and more open attitudes about sex, drugs, and lifestyle diversity—all this prevailed while the Silent were assuming the helm of America's institutional life. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 1362-71 | Added on Tuesday, September 01, 2009, 05:31 PM Back around 1940, with a world war stirring, Americans were counting on young adults to be strong, loyal, even heroic. When General George Marshall declared the nation's troops to be “the best damn kids in the world,” he was implicitly setting a high standard for those who came next. Through the immediate postwar years, the presumed path of youth was toward the doing of big deeds—joining all-powerful armies or history-bending class struggles. The late ‘40s invasion of returning G.I.s onto college campuses perpetuated the image of youth as world conquerors. No one foresaw Fortune magazine's chiding of the first mostly nonveteran college class (of ‘49) as passive, compliant, “taking no chances.” Two decades later, around 1960, most experts assumed that the onrushing bulge of children known as the “baby boom” would grow up even more pliable and conformist than that era's gray-flanneled young adults, just then starting to chafe under the name “Silent.” College presidents were predicting a new crop of serious technocrats—and the youth culture was still crammed with ditzy doo-wop, folksy hootenanny, and Pat Boone's sanitized rock'n'roll. The big-name social scientists—from Margaret Mead to Erik Erikson—saw no hint of the youth revolution about to explode. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 1404-14 | Added on Tuesday, September 01, 2009, 05:34 PM Yes. These three basic principles apply to any rising generation in non-traditional societies (like America) that allow young people some freedom to redirect society according to their own inclinations. Each generation: » solves a problem facing the prior youth generation, whose style has become dysfunctional in the new era; » corrects for the behavioral excess it perceives in the current midlife generation; and » fills the social role being vacated by the departing elder generation. Let's look at how these rules can be applied to today's three older generations. The Silent rebelled by solving a problem facing G.I.s by the McCarthy era—the reflexive habit G.I.s had developed (since 1932) of mobilizing endlessly to direct their society toward the right collective future. Rather than be punished by another grand whipsaw of history, the Silent learned to take the new order for granted, keep their heads down, fit in, and develop expertise “within the system.” ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 1522-27 | Added on Tuesday, September 01, 2009, 05:38 PM Millennials will also correct for what today's teens perceive are the excesses of middle-aged Boomers—the narcissism, impatience, icono-clasm, and constant focus on talk (usually argument) over action. Millennials can do this, over time, by turning toward community, patience, trust, and a new focus on action over talk. That's the path by which today's kids can rebel against aging ex-rebels. Instead of growing up to be “Generation Y” or “Echo Boomers,” Millennials will grow up to be de-X'd anti-Boomers. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 1589-93 | Added on Tuesday, September 01, 2009, 05:40 PM Will the Millennial uniform trend stop there? Don't count on it. Around the time leading-edge Millennials graduate from college—especially if this coincides with economic (or other) trouble—no one should be surprised to hear serious proposals for a national service corps. Americans of all ages will be so familiar with seeing this generation regularized, to positive effect, that compulsory uniformed service could feel fitting and right even to aging Boomers who once spent long years dodging the draft. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 2277-96 | Added on Tuesday, September 08, 2009, 06:54 PM Here's what Millennials see, in the adult world: They see lifestyle fragmentation. They cannot recall an era of two political parties, three TV networks, and four major sports leagues—an era in which the “average” person's beliefs or lifestyle might usefully be described. For them, politicians are squabblers; media audiences are segmented into an infinitude of special-interest magazines, cable stations, and web sites; and pro sports are less about teams than stars. As for opinions and fashions, the only ones worth noticing belong to self-authenticating “niche groups,” each focusing zealously on a sex, race, religion, ideology, occupation, or hobby—and occasionally (as with the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, or the Michigan Militia) breaking out in maniacal midlife fury. They see geographic fragmentation. In the middle ‘80s, what Joel Gar-reau calls “Edge Cities” began springing up around new work and shopping areas. By the late ‘90s, these exurbs became their own source of unzoned sprawl and strip-mall ugliness. Fights often brewed between younger parents who wanted sidewalks (often Gen Xers who worried about the safety of their small kids) and older parents who preferred the unkempt gravel look (often Boomers whose kids were grown up or had cars). They see racial and ethnic fragmentation. In 1984, Jesse Jackson launched the Rainbow Coalition, declaring America to be “a quilt of many patches, many pieces, many colors, various textures.” Today, after endless national debates over ethnic pride, hate crimes, nullification juries, affirmative action, and balanced textbooks, multiculturalism has entirely displaced assimilation as a national goal. Millennials are noticing less mixing in the schools, because that's exactly what's happening: The decades-long trend toward integration in public schools has begun to reverse. The Harvard Civil Rights Project now reports that the share of black students attending majority-white public schools reached its all-time apogee (of 44 percent) in 1988, the same year the first Millennials entered first grade. By 1996, it had fallen back to 35 percent, where it had been in the early 1970s. The decline has occurred in virtually every region—and for Latinos as well as African Americans. Some of it is due to self-selecting geographic mobility. But with cities across the country phasing out their desegregation plans— most recently, Buffalo, Nashville, Mobile, Minneapolis, and Seattle— much of it is due to declining enthusiasm for school integration. With the passing of the G.I. Generation, the idea of bringing the country together racially has lost much of its appeal. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 2309-23 | Added on Tuesday, September 08, 2009, 06:55 PM Most important, Millennials see income fragmentation. When the first of them were born, only a few of their parents had yet noticed this trend. In 1984, with Mario Cuomo's “Two Societies” speech and Charles Murray's book Losing Ground, the public at large first became acquainted with the growing gap between rich and poor. By century's end, after rising sharply in the (Reagan) mid-'80s and again in the (Clinton) mid-'90s, the gap had grown dramatically. While the share of children living in absolute poverty has declined, the gap between those living in struggling families and those living in prospering families has widened. Since 1982, the average real income of the lower two-fifths of all families climbed by only 8 percent (to $20,000 in 1997), but the average for the top one-fifth climbed by 38 percent (to $134,000) and for the top one-twentieth by 70 percent (to $235,000). For all families with children, the income ratio between the poorest and richest has nearly doubled over the last twenty years. So where Boomers discovered the “yuppie” on the edge of midlife, and Gen Xers stepped into the 90210 world coming of age, Millennials have opened their eyes as children to see this trend already in place. In their education, the growing share of Millennials in private or “home” schools no longer know what a randomly chosen fellow citizen looks like. Those going to public school can often see up close what Jonathan Kozol calls the “savage inequalities” between rich and poor school districts—sometimes due to heavily organized parental spending designed to end-run judicially imposed state equalization formulas. In Chicago, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition persuaded two classrooms to trade places for a day. The inner-city kids, from a school that annually spends $5,000 per student, visited a plush suburban school that had three new gymnasiums, two Olympic-size pools, and elegantly appointed chemistry and computer labs, thereby learning what $15,000 per student can buy. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 2382-85 | Added on Tuesday, September 08, 2009, 06:57 PM When you apply all these economic forces together, you can see that the “tale of two Millennial cities” is largely a contrast between two sets of kids: those with two-income Boomer parents—with highly educated soccer moms, bursting stock portfolios, and gift-giving grandparents— and those with one-income Gen-X parents, many of them never-married black moms or recent Latino immigrants. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 292-97 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 01:37 PM In 1990, Pat matriculated at Almaden’s Leland High School, one of the top public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, both academically and athletically. Before entering Leland he had resolved to become the catcher on the varsity baseball team, but the head coach, Paul Ugenti, informed Pat that he wasn’t ready to play varsity baseball and would have to settle for a position on the freshman-sophomore team. Irked and perhaps insulted by Ugenti’s failure to recognize his potential, Pat resolved to quit baseball and focus on football instead, even though he’d taken up the latter sport barely a year earlier and had badly fractured his right tibia in his initial season when a much larger teammate fell on his leg during practice. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Note Loc. 297 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 01:37 PM similar story for me, bad coach ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 372-75 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 01:41 PM According to Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the purpose of arming the Afghans was to stimulate enough turmoil in Afghanistan “to induce a Soviet military intervention.” Brzezinski, the most fervent cold warrior in the Carter administration, boasted in a 1998 interview that the intent of providing arms to the mujahideen was specifically to draw “the Soviets into the Afghan trap” and ensnare them in a debilitating Vietnam-like debacle. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 389-91 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 02:26 PM The Soviet cause wasn’t helped by a policy designated as “Limited Contingent”: Moscow decided to cap the number of Fortieth Army troops in Afghanistan at 115,000, despite the fact that before the invasion Soviet generals had warned that as many as 650,000 soldiers would be needed to secure the country.* ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 415-17 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 02:28 PM One wonders if the new Soviet leader perhaps pondered the famous tenet voiced sixteen years earlier by Henry Kissinger in reference to the American experience in Vietnam: “We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 548-54 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 02:36 PM Commander Ghani* has just provided a vivid summation of the Pashtun principles of nang (honor), ghairat (pride), and badal (revenge), which—along with a fourth concept, melmastia (hospitality)—account for the most important tenets in an unwritten, overarching code of behavior known as Pashtunwali that has shaped culture and identity in this part of Central Asia for centuries. There are an estimated fifteen million Pashtuns living in Afghanistan’s southern and eastern provinces; they constitute that nation’s largest ethnic group. Another twenty-six million Pashtuns live just across the border in western Pakistan, and to a great degree Pashtunwali dictates how these forty-one million people conduct their lives. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 586-89 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 02:38 PM Despite Pat’s quickness to resort to his fists, he was in many ways the antithesis of a bully. As a matter of principle, he fought only with kids who were bigger than he was, and on several occasions he intervened to rescue nerdy classmates who were being hassled by older, larger tormentors. But when Pat fought, he fought to win and never capitulated, which earned him the reputation at Leland and beyond as a guy not to be trifled with. In the pack he ran with, there was no question in anyone’s mind that he was the alpha male. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 800-804 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 02:53 PM “We sat outside on the deck upstairs,” Marie remembers. “It was the beginning of October, and it was a little cold out. Pat hadn’t dated much, and I could tell he was nervous. Besides his mom, he hadn’t really spent much time around girls. And Dannie told me that raising all boys, she downplayed her feminine side a lot and did things outside with them, teaching them to play sports, that kind of thing. His idea of what girls were all about was not typical. But it wasn’t a big problem. All three Tillman brothers always had a lot of respect for their mom. From her they learned how to treat women.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1027-29 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:03 PM Omar’s group freed the boy and public appeals started coming in for the Taliban to help out in other local disputes. Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1206-11 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:14 PM being locked up for thirty days was a turning point in Pat’s life. The transformation would turn out to be a long, drawn-out process rather than an overnight personality makeover, but it was nevertheless profound, and it began to reveal itself before he was even out of jail: he started to approach his intellectual development with the same kind of discipline he’d long applied to his athletic development. Throughout high school Pat had received Bs and Cs with the occasional A on his report cards. He didn’t read much. When he went to juvenile hall, however, his mother started bringing him books to pass the time, and it initiated a genuine passion for reading that persisted for the rest of his life. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1257-64 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:17 PM The juxtaposition of Pat’s vulnerability with his fearlessness and self-assurance is not an easy thing to wrap one’s mind around, but it was an absolutely central aspect of his personality. Armchair psychoanalysts might be inclined to explain his toughness as a macho pose—a protective shell he donned to disguise his insecurities. Marie strongly disagrees: “It wasn’t some stereotypical tough-guy act. He really had these two opposite aspects to his personality. It was a dichotomy: he was this very tough person, but he also had this softhearted side, and he didn’t mind showing it. And he was that way as long as I knew him. It goes back to this incredible sense he had of who he was—his self-confidence. He didn’t feel the need to hide much, or pretend to be something that he wasn’t. He wasn’t insecure about the sensitive side, or worried that he wasn’t tough. He considered both qualities important, and didn’t see them as irreconcilable in any way.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1532-35 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:32 PM the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response. But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point. Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1657-63 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:46 PM In the military, when soldiers venture beyond the security of their forward operating bases, which are enclosed by massive blast walls topped with concertina wire, they refer to it as “going outside the wire.” The term could just as easily serve as a slogan for how Pat lived much of his life. “I think you’ve got to get out of your comfort zone,” he once explained to a journalist. “If you’re kind of comfortable all the time—it’s like if you’re skiing and you’re not falling, you’re not trying. I kind of want to push myself. A lot.” He believed that to experience personal growth, he had to be willing to take calculated risks. In so doing, he trusted that his strength and athleticism, augmented by good judgment, would keep him from harm. He possessed that trust since before he was even old enough to articulate it. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1758-60 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:50 PM After seeing a baffling item called a McFu Burger on the menu, he wrote, “I had to have it.” It turned out to be “just your standard quarter-pounder-type burger, minus the cheese, plus oriental sauce with lettuce and crazy carrot pieces and what have you. It was delicious. My hat is off to the McFu.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1785-95 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:52 PM The next journal entry begins: It wasn’t my fault! Blame Alex. … Blame Paris. … Oh Lord!! I got fucking hammered last night. Beyond hammered … Because we were in Paris, the ladies wanted a nice dinner. Little did they know what they were in for. … The restaurant was small and quaint. Jazz played in the background and the help was real cool. A cheese dish and mushroom concoction made up our appetizers … the mushroom deal was unbelievable. Unfortunately, with the appetizers came the vino. For dinner I had lamb, which kicked ass. All of our food was excellent with great sauces. … Our conversation was humming, and as the wine was poured it got louder and louder. For dessert the ladies had crème brûlée and Alex a brownie. I opted for more wine. Now things start to get hazy. Alex and I are getting obnoxious as we get drunk. Like usual, I am swearing up a storm and as Marie tells it, the people around us are not pleased. We are not kicked out, but were politely cut off and went on our way. They were really cool and didn’t get pissed but were happy to see us leave. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1843-47 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 03:54 PM Although imbibing was certainly one of Tillman’s great pleasures, his favorite beverage wasn’t alcoholic. It was coffee, which ran through his life like the Ganges runs through India, lending commonality to disparate experiences and far-flung points of the compass. And although Pat delighted in the rituals associated with coffee—grinding the beans, mashing down the plunger on a French press, perusing the menu at espresso stands—the coffee itself was really just a lubricant, a catalyst, a means to a particular end, which was stimulating conversation. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 1957-59 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 04:00 PM As cited in The 9/11 Commission Report, a covert CIA source stated that bin Laden had “complained frequently that the United States had not yet attacked. According to the source, bin Ladin wanted the United States to attack, and if it did not he would launch something bigger.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2085-92 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 04:44 PM ‘Look, Frank, the Cardinals drafted me in the seventh round. They believed in me. I love the coaches here. I can’t bring myself to take the offer from the Rams.’ I said, ‘Patty, are you nuts? Are you fuckin’ crazy? The Rams want to pay you $9.6 million! If you stay with the Cardinals, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you’re gonna be playing for $512,000.’ Pat says, ‘I’ve made my decision, Frank. I’m going to stay with the Cardinals.’ “In twenty-seven years,” Bauer continues, “I’ve never had a player turn down that big of a package in the National Football League. I’ve had players take twenty grand less per year to stay at clubs they really wanted to play for, but turning down nine and a half million? That’s unheard of. You just don’t see loyalty like that in sports today. Pat Tillman was special. He was a man of principle. He was a once-in-a-lifetime kid.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2105-10 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 04:45 PM “He always had a book with him,” says Murphy. “Between innings, or anytime there was a lull, he’d have it open and he’d be reading something.” Because he loved engaging in informed debate, Pat made an effort to study history, economic theory, and world events from a variety of perspectives. Toward that end he read the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Quran, and the works of writers ranging from Adolf Hitler to Henry David Thoreau. Although Tillman held strong opinions on many subjects, he was bracingly open-minded and quick to admit he was wrong when confronted with facts and a persuasive argument. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2112-15 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 04:45 PM He was an ardent advocate for the rights of homosexuals, for instance, and once demanded of Lyle Setencich, an ASU football coach for whom he had great respect, “Could you coach gays?” When Setencich answered not only yes he could, but that he already had, Tillman’s esteem for the coach grew even higher. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2177-78 | Added on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 04:49 PM Twenty minutes later Pat was still staring at the screen, transfixed, when the north tower plummeted to the ground before his eyes. “I left to go in to work,” says Marie, “but he sat there watching all morning, and it had a big impact on him.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2393-96 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:10 PM War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. —CHRIS HEDGES, “A CULTURE OF ATROCITY” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2426-33 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:13 PM Exactly five years after the September 11 attacks, staring out a window at throngs of New Yorkers scurrying through lower Manhattan, Marie muses, “I never explicitly asked him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Because I understood Pat well enough to already know. … If it was the right thing for people to go off and fight a war, he believed he should be part of it. “He saw his life in a much bigger way than simply, ‘I am a professional football player, and if I walk away from this, my life is over.’ Football was part of who he was, but it wasn’t the be-all/end-all. He was looking in other directions even prior to 9/11. I always knew he would stop playing football before they had to kick him off the field. It was just a matter of time. … I mean, Pat could have played for years, retired, then golfed for the rest of his life. But I knew he was never going to do that.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2434-60 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:14 PM After carefully weighing all the factors, Pat sat down at his computer and typed a document titled “Decision,” dated April 8, 2002: Many decisions are made in our lifetime, most relatively insignificant while others life altering. Tonight’s topic … the latter. It must be said that my mind, for the most part, is made up. More to the point, I know what decision I must make. It seems that more often than not we know the right decision long before it’s actually made. Somewhere inside, we hear a voice, and intuitively know the answer to any problem or situation we encounter. Our voice leads us in the direction of the person we wish to become, but it is up to us whether or not to follow. More times than not we are pointed in a predictable, straightforward, and seemingly positive direction. However, occasionally we are directed down a different path entirely. Not necessarily a bad path, but a more difficult one. In my case, a path that many will disagree with, and more significantly, one that may cause a great deal of inconvenience to those I love. My life at this point is relatively easy. It is my belief that I could continue to play football for the next seven or eight years and create a very comfortable lifestyle for not only Marie and myself, but be afforded the luxury of helping out family and friends should a need ever arise. The coaches and players I work with treat me well and the environment has become familiar and pleasing. My job is challenging, enjoyable, and strokes my vanity enough to fool me into thinking it’s important. This all aside from the fact that I only work six months a year, the rest of the time is mine. For more reasons than I care to list, my job is remarkable. On a personal note, Marie and I are getting married a month from today. We have friends and family we care a great deal about and the time and means to see them regularly. In the last couple of months we’ve been skiing in Tahoe, ice climbing in Utah, perusing through Santa Fe, visiting in California, and will be sipping Mai Tais in Bora Bora in a little over a month. We are both able to pursue any interests that strike our fancy and down the road, any vocation or calling. We even have two cats that make our house feel like a home. In short, we have a great life with nothing to look forward to but more of the same. However, it is not enough. For much of my life I’ve tried to follow a path I believed important. Sports embodied many of the qualities I deem meaningful: courage, toughness, strength, etc., while at the same time, the attention I received reinforced its seeming importance. In the pursuit of athletics I have picked up a college degree, learned invaluable lessons, met incredible people, and made my journey much more valuable than any destination. However, these last few years, and especially after recent events, I’ve come to appreciate just how shallow and insignificant my role is. I’m no longer satisfied with the path I’ve been following … it’s no longer important. I’m not sure where this new direction will take my life though I am positive it will include its share of sacrifice and difficulty, most of which falling squarely on Marie’s shoulders. Despite this, however, I am equally positive that this new direction will, in the end, make our lives fuller, richer, and more meaningful. My voice is calling me in a different direction. It is up to me whether or not to listen. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2805-14 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:33 PM Referring to his barracks as “this house of gnats,” Pat vented, Often I am so disgusted with the people I’m surrounded with that my heart fills with hate. I’ve been exposed to an element of people that can be worse than any I’ve encountered, including in Juvenile Hall. They’re resentful, ungrateful, lazy, weak, and unvirtuous, as often as not. They bicker, complain, lie, tell tall tales, mope, and grumble incessantly. … Perhaps I keep this out of my journal because I’m disappointed in myself. When Nub and I embarked on this journey I just kind of assumed these kids would fall in line. … Many times I struggle to maintain my cool through their chaos. Kevin and I are forced to yell and swear as opposed to recommend and suggest. … Perhaps I’m not as good a leader as I think. Ultimately I believe in a general goodwill, and I’ve not become bitter, however I’ve not maintained as high a road as I’d hoped. I suppose when you wrestle with pigs, you’re going to get dirty. … I continue to learn. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 2961-65 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:42 PM It may be very soon that Nub & I will be called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for. … Were our case for war even somewhat justifiable, no doubt many of our traditional allies … would be praising our initiative. … However, every leader in the world, with a few exceptions, is crying foul, as is the voice of much of the people. This … leads me to believe that we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim. Of course Nub & I have … willingly allowed ourselves to be pawns in this game and will do our job whether we agree with it or not. All we ask is that it is duly noted that we harbor no illusions of virtue. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3169-78 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:53 PM The spurious particulars did not come from Private Lynch. The bogus story was based on information fed to gullible reporters by anonymous military sources. The government official who arranged for reporters to interview these sources—the guy who deserves top billing for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch, in other words—was a White House apparatchik named Jim Wilkinson. Although his official job description was director of strategic communications for General Tommy Franks (the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan), actually Wilkinson served as the Bush administration’s top “perception manager” for the Iraq War. As Ben Smith noted in an article published in the New York Observer in October 2003, Wilkinson has gone from politics to war and back since he worked for George W. Bush in Florida during the 2000 election, and his journey is a mark of the administration’s utilitarian approach to marketing war, politics and the presidency. … He’s also got as pure a Republican pedigree as you can wish, and an edge honed in the bitter partisan wars between Bill Clinton and the Republican House leadership. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3178-85 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:53 PM Mr. Wilkinson grew up in East Texas and attended high school in Tenaha, population 1,046, then gave up plans to become an undertaker to go to work for Republican Congressman Dick Armey in 1992. Mr. Armey soon became House majority leader; his communications director, Mr. Wilkinson’s mentor, was Ed Gillespie, now chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mr. Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have “invented the Internet.” Then the Texan popped up in Miami to defend Republican protesters shutting down a recount. … For his troubles, Mr. Wilkinson was made deputy director of communications for planning in the Bush White House, and was among the aides who set up the Sept. 14, 2001, visit to Ground Zero that redefined George W. Bush’s presidency. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3205-8 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:55 PM It was Wilkinson’s job to divert attention from this alarming setback lest it undermine the homeland’s overwhelming support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Several days later, after even more bad news further threatened to erode public support for the war, Wilkinson learned that Jessica Lynch was lying in a hospital bed, guarded haphazardly if at all, just a few miles from an American military outpost. Right away, he knew exactly how to make the most of the opportunity. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3210-15 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 03:56 PM In the predawn hours of March 23, 2003, as Jessica Lynch’s convoy rolled across the Euphrates River and entered An Nasiriyah, Pat Tillman was asleep on his cot in Ar’ar, Saudi Arabia, having stayed up late the previous evening reading The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem about the Greek hero Odysseus and his ten-year effort to make his way home to his wife, Penelope, after the Trojan War. Pat had no knowledge of the tragedy beginning to unfold in Nasiriyah, nor could he have imagined that its aftershocks would one day be a source of unceasing torment to the people he loved. As the sun crested the horizon that morning in ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3331-37 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 04:01 PM According to the executive officer of the Iraqi Twenty-third Brigade, who was later captured and interrogated by the Marines, the Iraqi forces adopted an entirely different frame of mind when the Americans in Jessica Lynch’s convoy “didn’t fight when they got engaged,” and instead fled the city. All the Iraqi soldiers were “emboldened,” the executive officer explained: “It emboldened even the tribal leaders to fight the Americans, because if this is the best you’ve got, then why not be on the winning side.” When the Marines showed up on the same streets where the 507th Maintenance Company had just been routed, the Iraqis assumed that the Marines would also turn tail and run if confronted with a show of force, so they fought with great determination. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3528-29 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 05:17 PM Video shot from the cockpits of the A-10 Warthogs recorded every second of the attack, but the videotapes went missing soon after the incident. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3530-36 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 05:17 PM The pilots known as Gyrate 73 and Gyrate 74 each held the rank of major in the Twenty-third Air Expeditionary Wing, Pennsylvania Air National Guard. Both men had watched the tapes with intelligence officers after returning to their base. Gyrate 73 then turned his tape over to the officer who debriefed him, and the tape vanished, never to be seen again. After watching his tape, Gyrate 74 explained, “I asked Intel, ‘Can I keep this and turn it in later? I’d like to look at this tape later on.’ ” He was allowed to take it, whereupon he “mistakenly” inserted the tape into the cockpit video camera and recorded over it, erasing it. The two most crucial pieces of evidence were thereby destroyed. Nobody ever made any real effort to determine what actually happened to the tapes, and no one was disciplined in any way for the loss of this key evidence. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3546-51 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 05:18 PM The brazenness of the board’s dishonesty was breathtaking. But mendacity of this sort, it turns out, is common in such inquiries. When the military convenes a friendly-fire investigation board, the organization responsible for the incident is called upon to investigate itself, so there are powerful incentives, both institutional and personal, to assign minimal blame. Although the investigating body typically goes elaborately through the motions of unearthing the facts, seldom is the truth pursued with the zeal demonstrated by, say, the National Transportation Safety Board when it investigates commercial aviation disasters. Military investigations of friendly-fire incidents have a well-documented history of obscuring the truth more often than revealing it. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3559-66 | Added on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 05:19 PM In October 2001, the Department of Defense established the clandestine Office of Strategic Influence specifically to dupe international news organizations into running false stories that would build support for war. When the New York Times revealed the existence of this program in February 2002, public clamor forced Donald Rumsfeld to officially kill it. But in November of that year he admitted during a press briefing, without apology, that he had killed it in name only: And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And “Oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said, “Fine. If you want to savage this thing, fine: I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done.” And I have. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3633-39 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 11:05 AM By that time preparations to rescue Lynch were already under way. Approximately a thousand troops had been mobilized, including a contingent from Task Force 20, the most elite Special Operations commandos in the world, and infantrymen from the Second Ranger Battalion. As Pat and Kevin Tillman got ready for the mission, its massive scale—unlike anything they’d seen since arriving in the Persian Gulf—puzzled them. “We leave tomorrow,” Pat wrote in his journal on March 30. “This mission will be a P.O.W. rescue, a woman named Jessica Lynch. As awful as I feel for the fear she must face, and admire the courage I’m sure she is showing, I do believe this to be a big Public Relations stunt. Do not mistake me, I wish everyone in trouble to be rescued, but sending this many folks in for a [single low-ranking soldier] screams of media blitz. In any case, I’m glad to be able to do my part and I hope we bring her home safe.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3664-71 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 11:07 AM Eventually Wilkinson’s rendering of Lynch’s ordeal was exposed as propaganda, but by then it had already accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: covering up the truth in order to maintain support for the president’s policies. To this day, very few Americans have any inkling that seventeen U.S. Marines were killed by U.S. Air Force jets on the fourth day of the Iraq War. The Jessica Lynch hoax worked so well, in fact, that the White House would recycle the same tactic thirteen months later, almost move for move, when it was confronted with another series of potentially disastrous revelations. Just as before, a fictitious story about a valiant American soldier would be fed to the media in order to divert attention from a rash of disquieting news. On this occasion, however, the soldier cast as the hero of the fable would be a professional football player whose sense of duty had inspired him to enlist in the Rangers after 9/11. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3737-42 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 11:11 AM If anything, Pat was probably even less pleased than Kevin to find himself participating in the invasion of Iraq. Although both brothers were opposed to the war, Kevin was single and not yet on a career path when they enlisted, while Pat had walked away from both a devoted wife and an uncommonly satisfying job in order to help defeat those responsible for 9/11. He ached constantly for Marie. A homebody at heart who was half the world away from the home she had made for him, he felt the distance between them acutely. It’s apparent from his journal that Pat was extremely unhappy to be serving in Iraq, and that throughout his tour of duty there he relied on Kevin for emotional support in a way that he never had before. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 3832-35 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 11:16 AM Bin Laden regarded the invasion of Iraq as a tremendous gift from President Bush—a “rare and essentially valuable” opportunity to spread jihad, as the exiled sheik put it. Not only had the United States eliminated Saddam Hussein, whom bin Laden reviled as “a thief and an apostate,” but the American occupation was fueling Muslim rage even more than the invasion of Afghanistan had, inspiring throngs of Arab men to join the ranks of al-Qaeda. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 4072-76 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 01:26 PM The majority of the Rangers in Tillman’s platoon hadn’t joined the Special Operations Forces in order to go camping in exotic lands; they’d enlisted to be part of a rarefied warrior culture. Engaging in mortal combat was not an aspect of their service they sought to avoid. To the contrary, they’d aspired to it since they were small boys. They were itching to confront the enemy firsthand and prove themselves under fire. Approximately half the platoon had never been in a firefight. Most of the untried Rangers yearned to experience the atavistic rush of having to kill or be killed—a desire more common among the male population than is usually acknowledged in polite company. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 4203-13 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 01:33 PM During an investigation of Tillman’s death seven months later, Brigadier General Gary Jones asked Alpha Company first sergeant Thomas Fuller, “I mean, what necessitated in this mission right here that they had to get down there so quickly?” “I don’t think there was anything,” Fuller testified under oath. “I think that a lot of times at higher [headquarters]—maybe even, you know, higher than battalion [headquarters]—they may make a timeline, and then we just feel like we have to stick to that timeline. There’s no—there’s no ‘intel’ driving it. There’s no—you know, there’s no events driving it. It’s just a timeline, and we feel like we have to stick with it; and that’s what drives that kind of stuff.” In other words, the sense of urgency attached to the mission came from little more than a bureaucratic fixation on meeting arbitrary deadlines so missions could be checked off a list and tallied as “accomplished.” This emphasis on quantification has always been a hallmark of the military, but it was carried to new heights of fatuity during Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was obsessed with achieving positive “metrics” that could be wielded to demonstrate progress in the Global War on Terror, or the illusion thereof. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 4434-37 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 10:56 PM “Weeks only fired one round during the entire firefight,” says Boatright. “He stayed real calm. Beforehand, when we were back in the rear, he was more on edge, more hyper. But it was eerie how calm he got once the shooting started. After that I always called him ‘My God of War.’ He’d been there before. He stayed cool and took control because he knew that’s what he had to do.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 4642-47 | Added on Thursday, September 17, 2009, 11:07 PM Some Rangers in the platoon regarded Alders as a chest thumper who talked big but often had to ask others to help carry his load. Pat, however, had always gone out of his way to be nice to him. “Alders was pathetic,” says one of his platoon mates. “He was a child. Pat was just about the only guy in the platoon who treated him with respect.” The previous September, when they were at Fort Benning preparing to attend Ranger School, Pat and Kevin were granted a four-day pass. Alders happened to be at Benning then as well. When Pat and Kevin were invited to spend their leave at the home of some good friends of their mother’s who lived in Buckhead, just outside of Atlanta, Pat encouraged Alders to tag along. He gratefully joined them, and was treated like kin. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 4885-87 | Added on Friday, September 18, 2009, 06:40 PM On the night of April 23, Sergeant James Valdez testified, a captain named Wade Bovard “came to me with an orange plastic bag containing Tillman’s clothes. He then related that he wanted me to burn what was in the bag for security purposes. Additionally, Captain Bovard related he wanted me alone to burn what was in the bag to prevent security violations, leaks, and rumors.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 4962-68 | Added on Friday, September 18, 2009, 06:44 PM The administration had tried to make Tillman an inspirational emblem for the Global War on Terror when he was alive, but he had rebuffed them by refusing to do any media interviews. If there had been a way to prevent the White House from exploiting him after his death, Tillman would have done that, too, as he made clear to Jade Lane in Iraq. “When we were in Baghdad, our cots were next to each other,” Lane remembers. “Pat and I used to talk at night a lot before we’d rack out. I don’t know how the conversation got brought up, but one night he said he was afraid that if something were to happen to him, Bush’s people would, like, make a big deal out of his death and parade him through the streets. And those were his exact words: ‘I don’t want them to parade me through the streets.’ It just burned into my brain, him saying that.” ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 5507-21 | Added on Saturday, September 19, 2009, 06:29 PM After Pat’s death, Ward decided not to reenlist when his Ranger contract was up. Although being a noncommissioned officer in the Special Operations Forces, he says, “is something I’m naturally good at,” the aftermath of the Tillman fratricide left him terminally disillusioned with the Army leadership. “From the moment you first join the Ranger Battalion,” Ward explains, it’s ingrained in you that you will always do the right thing. They’re not like, “Please do the right thing.” It’s “We will fucking crush you if you don’t do the right thing.” You will adhere to every standard. You will always tell the truth. If you fuck up once, you’re out on your ass. Then you see something like what they’re doing to Pat—what officers in the Ranger Regiment are doing—and you stop being so naive. The only two times where I personally was in a position to see where the Army had the choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing, both times they chose to do the wrong thing. One of those times was what they did to Pat. It made me realize that the Army does what suits the Army. That’s why I won’t put that uniform back on. I’m done. If I had been killed that day, and it had not suited the Army to disclose to my wife the manner in which I died, nobody would ever know what really happened because I’m not famous. I’m not Pat. It wouldn’t have been a news story. For the rest of her life, my wife would think I was killed by whatever bullshit story they decided to make up. They’d write up a couple of medals like they did for him, and that would be it. I think my wife would deserve to know the truth about how her husband died. And I think Pat’s wife deserves the same. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 5731-59 | Added on Saturday, September 19, 2009, 06:40 PM In his 1992 best seller, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama predicted that the inexorable spread of capitalist democracy “would mean the end of wars and bloody revolutions. Agreeing on ends, men would have no large causes for which to fight. They would satisfy their needs through economic activity, but they would no longer have to risk their lives in battle.” Fukuyama acknowledged that this rosy future would come with a slight downside, however: the emasculation of humankind. World peace would spawn “the creature who reportedly emerges at the end of history, the last man.” “The last man” was a derisive term coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in his overstuffed masterwork, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Nietzsche’s estimation, according to Fukuyama, modern liberal democracies produced men composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. … It is not an accident that people in democratic societies are preoccupied with material gain and live in an economic world devoted to the satisfaction of the myriad small needs of the body. … The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of pointless battles in which men fought over whether they should be Christian or Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, German or French. The loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices. Men with modern educations were content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism. Mocking these contemptible “last men,” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra famously declares, “Thus you stick out your chests—but alas, they are hollow!” Which prompted Fukuyama to label such milquetoasts “men without chests.” Given the current state of turmoil in South Asia, Africa, and the Caucasus, the onset of international peace prophesied by Fukuyama does not seem imminent. But his forecast about the ascendancy of the American wimp remains disturbingly accurate, according to the historian Lee Harris. In a polemic titled The Suicide of Reason, Harris argues, The problem is not that Fukuyama is dead wrong; the problem is that he is half right. Unfortunately for us, the wrong half. In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless. … We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs. To rid your society of high-testosterone alpha males may bring peace and quiet; but if you have an enemy that is building up an army of alpha boys to hate you fanatically and who have vowed to destroy you, you will be committing suicide. … The end of testosterone in the West alone will not culminate in the end of history, but it may well culminate in the end of the West. ========== Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Jon Krakauer) - Highlight Loc. 5781-87 | Added on Saturday, September 19, 2009, 06:42 PM In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduced the concept of the Übermensch: an exemplary, transcendent figure who is the polar opposite of “the last man” or “men without chests.” The Übermensch is virtuous, loyal, ambitious and outspoken, disdainful of religious dogma and suspicious of received wisdom, intensely engaged in the hurly-burly of the real world. Above all he is passionate—a connoisseur of both “the highest joys” and “the deepest sorrows.” He believes in the moral imperative to defend (with his life, if necessary) ideals such as truth, beauty, honor, and justice. He is self-assured. He is a risk taker. He regards suffering as salutary, and scorns the path of least resistance. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 216-18 | Added on Saturday, September 19, 2009, 06:55 PM In 2001 the World Bank produced an influential study, Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, arguing that promoting gender equality is crucial to combat global poverty. UNICEF issued a major report arguing that gender equality yields a “double dividend” by elevating not only women but also their children and communities. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 3961-62 | Added on Sunday, September 20, 2009, 03:34 PM » School, up by 8:20 hours per week. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 4496-97 | Added on Monday, September 21, 2009, 11:22 AM Some are proposing that students be made to wear identity cards bearing bar-coded Social Security numbers. Others are calling for a national registry of school disciplinary incidents, listing the names, dates, and charges down to the smallest kindergarten sandbox incidents. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 5034-39 | Added on Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 09:38 AM To the contrary, as the true children of postmodern America, Millen-nials often feel that whatever respect they do have for those old causes they have to acquire on their own. They are growing up in a world that feels post- truth, post- sacrifice, posi-heroic, posf-anything truly ennobling. Much of what they learn about civic matters gets filtered through the lens of cynicism, irony, satire, and parody—that is, through the ‘90s-era pop culture. The great causes are over, their agendas in place, their foibles grist for Jay Leno, the Capitol Steps, and Politically Incorrect. So much is tongue in cheek that not much seems at stake anymore. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 525-28 | Added on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 12:07 AM The reality is that past efforts to assist girls have sometimes backfired. In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin wanted to help Bangladeshi girls laboring in sweatshops, so he introduced legislation that would have banned imports made by workers under the age of fourteen. Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thousands of these young girls, and many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 570-76 | Added on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 12:09 AM To address these financial pressures, American Assistance for Cambodia started a program called Girls Be Ambitious, which in effect bribes families to keep girls in school. If a girl has perfect attendance in school for one month, her family gets $10. A similar approach has been used very effectively and cheaply to increase education for girls in Mexico and other countries. Kun Sokkea’s family is now getting the stipend. For donors who can’t afford to fund an entire school, it’s a way to fight trafficking at a cost of $120 per year per girl. The approach helps because it is typically girls like Kun Sokkea who end up trafficked. Their families are desperate for money, the girls are poorly educated, and a trafficker promises them a great job selling fruit in a distant city. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 675-79 | Added on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 12:15 AM Partly that’s because governance is often poor, so the regulation is ineffective, and partly it’s that the legal brothels tend to attract a parallel illegal business in young girls and forced prostitution. In contrast, there’s empirical evidence that crackdowns can succeed, when combined with social services such as job retraining and drug rehabilitation, and that’s the approach we’ve come to favor. In countries with widespread trafficking, we favor a law enforcement strategy that pushes for fundamental change in police attitudes and regular police inspections to check for underage girls or anyone being held against their will. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 771-76 | Added on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 12:20 AM The Netherlands and Sweden highlight the differences between the big-stick approach and the legalize-and-regulate model. In 2000, the Netherlands formally legalized prostitution (which had always been tolerated) in the belief that it would then be easier to provide health and labor checks to prostitutes, and to keep minors and trafficking victims from taking up the trade. In 1999, Sweden took the opposite approach, criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, but not the sale of them by prostitutes; a man caught paying for sex is fined (in theory, he can be imprisoned for up to six months), while the prostitute is not punished. This reflected the view that the prostitute is more a victim than a criminal. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1146-54 | Added on Thursday, September 24, 2009, 09:33 AM “Empowerment” is a cliché in the aid community, but it is truly what is needed. The first step toward greater justice is to transform that culture of female docility and subservience, so that women themselves become more assertive and demanding. As we said earlier, that is, of course, easy for outsiders like us to say: We’re not the ones who run horrible risks for speaking up. But when a woman does stand up, it’s imperative that outsiders champion her; we also must nurture institutions to protect such people. Sometimes we may even need to provide asylum for those whose lives are in danger. More broadly, the single most important way to encourage women and girls to stand up for their rights is education, and we can do far more to promote universal education in poor countries. Ultimately, women like those in Kasturba Nagar need to join the human rights revolution themselves. They constitute part of the answer to the problem: There will be less trafficking and less rape if more women stop turning the other cheek and begin slapping back. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1164-72 | Added on Thursday, September 24, 2009, 09:34 AM Zach is part of an exploding movement of “social entrepreneurs” who offer new approaches to supporting women in the developing world. Aid workers function in the context of an aid bureaucracy, while social entrepreneurs create their own context by starting a new organization, company, or movement to address a social problem in a creative way. Social entrepreneurs tend not to have the traditional liberal suspicion of capitalism, and many charge for services and use a business model to achieve sustainability. “Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or to teach how to fish,” says Bill Drayton, a former management consultant and government official who popularized the idea of social entrepreneurship. “They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.” Drayton is the founder of Ashoka, an organization that supports and trains social entrepreneurs around the world. They are called Ashoka Fellows, and there are now more than two thousand of them—many involved in women’s rights campaigns. Drayton’s brief history of the rise of social entrepreneurs goes like this: ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1283-86 | Added on Monday, September 28, 2009, 05:33 AM Ehlers merged those images and came up with a product she called Rapex. It resembles a tube, with barbs inside. The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed. When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers responded tersely: “A medieval device for a medieval deed.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1292-95 | Added on Monday, September 28, 2009, 05:33 AM Rape is so stigmatizing that many women do not report it, and thus researchers have difficulty tabulating accurate figures. Yet some evidence suggests that it is very widespread: 21 percent of Ghanaian women reported in one survey that their sexual initiation was by rape; 17 percent of Nigerian women said that they had endured rape or attempted rape by the age of nineteen; and 21 percent of South African women reported that they had been raped by the age of fifteen. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1360-63 | Added on Monday, September 28, 2009, 05:36 AM Finally, the judge sentenced Aberew to ten years in prison. But a month later, for reasons that are unclear, the judge released him. Woineshet fled to Addis Ababa, where she moved into her father’s shack and resumed her studies. “I decided to leave and go someplace where no one would recognize me,” she said. Then she added slowly and firmly: “I will never marry anyone. I don’t want to deal with any man.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1382-86 | Added on Monday, September 28, 2009, 05:37 AM “Empowering women begins with education,” she said. She sees the cadre of educated women growing. Some twelve thousand women a year now volunteer with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association, giving it political as well as legal weight. Equality Now works closely with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association, and that is a useful model: We in the West can best help by playing supporting roles to local people. And the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association may soon have another volunteer. Woineshet is now in high school, getting good grades and planning to go to university and study law. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1403-11 | Added on Monday, September 28, 2009, 05:39 AM In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it’s not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters’ genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war. Typically, women fighters would lure a victim to the rape site, and then restrain her as she was raped by male fighters. “We would help capture her and hold her down,” one woman ex-combatant explained. The author of the study, Dara Kay Cohen, cites evidence from Haiti, Iraq, and Rwanda to suggest that female participation in Sierra Leone’s sexual violence was not an anomaly. She argues that ubiquitous gang rape in civil wars isn’t about sexual gratification, but rather is a way for military units—including their female members—to bond, by engaging in sometimes brutally misogynistic violence. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1673-77 | Added on Monday, September 28, 2009, 06:33 PM Even in places like Pakistan, where there is no genocide or all-out war, honor rapes arise from an obsession with virginity and from the authorities’ indifference to injustices suffered by the poor and uneducated. Shershah Syed, a prominent gynecologist in Karachi, says that he frequently treats young girls from the slums after rapes. And then, unless the girl kills herself, the family has to move away; otherwise, the perpetrators—who are usually rich and well connected—will terrorize the family and eliminate them as witnesses. And the police are worse than indifferent. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1896-1902 | Added on Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 05:50 AM “I love this work,” she said in exasperation the first time we met. “I’m not here because I’m a saint or doing anything noble. I enjoy my life tremendously…. I’m here because I feel God wants me to be here. I feel I’m doing some good and helping these women. It’s very satisfying work.” Catherine and her late husband, Reg Hamlin, moved from their native Australia to Ethiopia in 1959 to work as ob-gyns. In Australia, they had never seen a single case of fistula; in Ethiopia, they encountered fistulas constantly. “These are the women most to be pitied in the world,” Catherine says firmly. “They’re alone in the world, ashamed of their injuries. For lepers, or AIDS victims, there are organizations that help. But nobody knows about these women or helps them.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 1935-36 | Added on Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 02:32 PM For the 2009 fiscal year, President George W. Bush actually proposed an 18 percent cut in USAID spending for maternal and child care to just $370 million, or about $1.20 per American per year. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2198-2200 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 05:47 AM Humans are the only mammals that need assistance in birth, and some evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary biologists have argued that as a result perhaps the first “profession” to emerge in prehistoric days was that of the midwife. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2244-46 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 05:50 AM “Maternal deaths in developing countries are often the ultimate tragic outcome of the cumulative denial of women’s human rights,” noted the journal Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology. “Women are not dying because of untreatable diseases. They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2252-57 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 05:50 AM In most societies, mythological or theological explanations were devised to explain why women should suffer in childbirth, and they forestalled efforts to make the process safer. When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were “supposed” to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband’s testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2348-51 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 05:56 AM A senior World Bank official told a maternal health conference in London in 2007, with typical enthusiasm: “Investing in better health for women and their children is just smart economics.” Now, that’s certainly true of educating girls, but the sad reality is that investments in maternal health are unlikely to be as cost-effective as other kinds of health work. Saving women’s lives is imperative, but it is not cheap. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2361-63 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 05:57 AM So let’s not overstate the case. Maternal mortality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women. The best argument to stop it, however, isn’t economic but ethical. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2582-86 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 02:39 PM There’s some evidence that decisions about childbearing reflect deep-seated tensions between men and women about strategies to pass on their genes. Polling tends to confirm what evolutionary biologists have sometimes suggested, that at a genetic level men often act like Johnny Appleseed, betting that the best way to achieve a future crop is to plant as many seeds as possible, without doing much to nurture them afterward. Given biological differences, women prefer to have fewer children but to invest heavily in each of them. One way to curb fertility, therefore, may be to give women more say-so in the family. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2613-22 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 02:41 PM The Bush administration focused its AIDS prevention campaign on abstinence-only programs. There is some evidence that abstinence education can be helpful, when paired with a discussion of condoms, contraception, and reproductive health. But the Bush program went beyond underwriting abstinence education; it insisted on “abstinence only” for young people, meaning no discussion of condoms in schools (although the Bush AIDS program did distribute condoms readily to high-risk groups, such as prostitutes and truck drivers in Africa). Indeed, one third of AIDS prevention spending was funneled by law to abstinence-only education. One American-sponsored abstinence-only approach consists of handing out heart-shaped lollipops inscribed with the message: DON’T BE A SUCKER! SAVE SEX FOR MARRIAGE. Then the session leader invites girls to suck on the lollipops and explains: Your body is a wrapped lollipop. When you have sex with a man, he unwraps your lollipop and sucks on it. It may feel great at the time, but, unfortunately, when he’s done with you, all you have left for your next partner is a poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Bookmark Loc. 2622 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 02:42 PM ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2640 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 02:43 PM In ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2640-44 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 02:43 PM In any case, for women the lethal risk factor is often not promiscuity but marriage. Routinely in Africa and Asia, women stay safe until they marry, and then they contract AIDS from their husbands. In Cambodia, a twenty-seven-year-old former prostitute told us of her struggles with AIDS, and we assumed that she had caught the virus in the brothel. “Oh, no,” she said. “I got AIDS later, from my husband. In the brothel, I always used condoms. But when I was married, I didn’t use a condom. A woman with a husband is in much more danger than a girl in a brothel.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2688-94 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 02:45 PM One strategy was to train elementary school teachers in AIDS education; that cost only $2 per student but had no impact on reducing pregnancies. A second approach was to encourage student debates and essays on condoms and AIDS; that cost only $1 per student but was not shown to reduce pregnancies. A third approach was to provide students with free uniforms to encourage them to stay in school longer; that cost about $12 per student and did reduce pregnancies. Using their comparisons with the control areas, the researchers calculated that the cost was $750 per pregnancy averted. The fourth and by far the most cost-effective approach was also the simplest: warning of the perils of sugar daddies. Schoolchildren were shown a brief video of the dangers of teenage girls going out with older men, and then were informed that older men have much higher HIV infection rates than boys. Few students had been aware of that crucial fact. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2713-18 | Added on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, 02:46 PM Moreover, the Catholic Church as a whole has always been much more sympathetic to condoms than the Vatican has been. Local priests and nuns often ignore Rome and quietly do what they can to save parishioners. In Sonsonate, in the poor southwestern part of El Salvador, the Catholic hospital advises women about IUDs and the Pill, and urges them to use condoms to protect themselves from AIDS. “The bishop is in San Salvador and never comes here,” explained Dr. Martha Alica De Regalada. “So we never get in trouble.” Nor was she worried that she would get into trouble for being quoted speaking so frankly. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2892-98 | Added on Thursday, October 01, 2009, 05:44 AM Aisha was the only one of Muhammad’s wives who was a virgin when he married her, and she grew to be a strong-willed woman with whom he spent a great deal of time. Aisha knew firsthand the perils of a society that treated a woman as a fragile chalice of honor, for she herself was once accused of adultery. While traveling across the desert in a caravan, she lost a necklace and went to look for it—and then was left behind by the caravan. A man named Safwan found Aisha and rescued her, but since they had been together without a chaperone, they were accused of having an affair. Muhammad sided with her—that’s when he had the revelation about needing four witnesses to attest to adultery before punishment could be applied—and ordered that the accusers be flogged with forty lashes. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2909-13 | Added on Thursday, October 01, 2009, 05:45 AM Another dispute about the Koran concerns the idyllic black-eyed virgins who supposedly will attend to men in the Islamic afterlife. These are the houri, and some Islamic theologians have been quite specific in describing them. A ninth-century scholar, Al-Tirmidhi, recounted that houri are gorgeous young women with white skin, who never menstruate, urinate, or defecate. He added that they have “large breasts” that are “not inclined to dangle.” Suicide bombers have often written about their expectations of being rewarded by the houri, and Muhammad Atta reassured his fellow hijackers on the eve of 9/11: “The houri are calling you.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 2994-99 | Added on Thursday, October 01, 2009, 05:51 AM A society that has more men than women—particularly young men, is often associated with crime or violence. The historian David Court-wright has argued that one reason America is relatively violent, compared to Europe, is the legacy of a male surplus. Until World War II, the United States was disproportionately male, and the frontier was overwhelmingly so. The result, he suggests, was a tradition of aggressiveness, short tempers, and violence that still echoes in America’s relatively high homicide rates. The same analysis, while controversial, may also help explain why male-dominated Muslim societies have similar threads emphasizing self-reliance, honor, courage, and a quick resort to violence. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3001-3 | Added on Thursday, October 01, 2009, 02:19 PM “For each percentage-point increase of youth in the adult population,” says Norwegian researcher Henrik Urdal, “the risk of conflict increases by more than 4 percent.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3227-30 | Added on Thursday, October 01, 2009, 02:30 PM Alternatively, a capsule of iodized oil can be given every two years to all women who may become pregnant—at a cost of only fifty cents per capsule. Research by Erica Field of Harvard focused on Tanzania, where these capsules were given to women in some areas beginning in 1986. Professor Field found that daughters of those women given capsules managed to stay in school markedly longer and performed better. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3337-41 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 05:40 AM At the end of primary school, she took the nationwide sixth-grade graduation examinations and had the best score not only in her school, but in the entire district—in fact, one of the highest marks in the nation. Yet she could not afford to go to secondary school. She was inconsolable. Angeline was destined to be another farmer or village peddler, another squandered African asset. Local people have a saying for it: Those who harvest the most pumpkins are the ones who lack the pots to cook them. In other words, the brightest children are often born into families that lack the means to educate them. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3474-78 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 05:48 AM Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of twenty-five, who guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make their payments and discuss a social issue. Topics include family planning, schooling for girls, or hudood laws used to punish rape victims. The meetings are held in the women’s homes, in rotation, and they create a “women’s space” where they freely discuss their concerns. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3515-21 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 05:51 AM Roshaneh and Sadaffe spent their first few years tweaking the business model. Because delinquent loans were a problem, they began tracking loan payments daily rather than weekly. A loan officer began doing basic checking on a client’s creditworthiness: Does she buy from the local grocery store on credit? Does she pay utility bills? But mostly the model depended on lending to a group of twenty-five women who would all be responsible if any one of them defaulted. That meant that those women did their own screening, for fear of admitting a weak link. Finally, Kashf had a system in which virtually 100 percent of loans were repaid in full—if not by the borrower, then by other members of the group. Kashf then began expanding rapidly, more than doubling each year since 2000. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3557-63 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 02:37 PM One reason microloans are almost always made to women, rather than to men, is that females tend to suffer the most from poverty. Mortality data show that in famines and droughts, it is mostly girls who die, not boys. A remarkable study by an American development economist, Edward Miguel, found that in Tanzania, extreme rainfall patterns—either droughts or flooding—are accompanied by a doubling in the numbers of unproductive old women killed for witchcraft, compared to normal years (other murders do not increase, only those of “witches”). The weather causes crop failures, leading to worsening poverty—and that’s when relatives kill elderly “witches” whom they otherwise would have to feed. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3594-96 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 02:38 PM Professor Duflo found that when the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have good crops, the households spend more money on food, particularly beef. Several other studies also suggest that women are more likely than men to invest scarce cash in education and small businesses. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3601-2 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 02:39 PM That suggests that if one purpose of cash transfers is to improve the health of children, it’s better to direct the transfers to women than to men. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3657-60 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 02:41 PM This does suggest that women politicians, at least in India, face a hurdle: Even if they do better than men at providing services, they initially are judged more harshly. Follow-up research did find that after a village had once had a female leader, this bias against women chiefs disappeared. Women leaders were then judged by gender-neutral standards. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3805-9 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 03:16 PM One response is China. A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female. Foot-binding, child marriage, concubinage, and female infanticide were embedded in traditional Chinese culture. Rural Chinese girls in the early twentieth century sometimes didn’t even get real names, just the equivalent of “No. 2 sister” or “No. 4 sister.” Or, perhaps even less dignified, girls might be named Laidi or Yindi or Zhaodi, all variations of “Bring a younger brother.” Girls were rarely educated, often sold, and vast numbers ended up in the brothels of Shanghai. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3818-21 | Added on Friday, October 02, 2009, 03:17 PM Communism after the 1949 revolution was brutal in China, leading to tens of millions of deaths by famine or repression, but its single most positive legacy was the emancipation of women. After taking power, Mao brought women into the workforce and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and he used his political capital to abolish child marriage, prostitution, and concubinage. It was Mao who proclaimed: “Women hold up half the sky.” ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3852-62 | Added on Sunday, October 04, 2009, 10:17 PM China is an important model because it was precisely its emancipation of girls that preceded and enabled its economic takeoff. The same is true of other rapidly growing Asian economies. As Homi Kharas, an economist who has worked on these issues for the World Bank and the Brookings Institution, advised us: Engineering an economic takeoff is really about using a nation’s resources most efficiently. Many East Asian economies enjoyed a sustained boom by moving young peasant women from farms to factories, after giving them a basic education for free. In Malaysia, Thailand, and China, export-oriented industries like garments and semi-conductors predominantly employed young women who had previously been working in less productive family farms or doing household work. The economies got multiple benefits from this transition. By improving the labor productivity of the young women, growth was raised. By employing them in export industries, the countries got foreign exchange which could be used to buy needed capital equipment. The young women saved much of their money or sent it back to relatives in the village, raising national saving rates. Because they had good jobs and income-earning opportunities, they also delayed marriage and childbearing, lowering fertility and population growth rates. So a major factor in East Asia’s economic success was the contribution of its young peasant female workforce. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 3893-97 | Added on Monday, October 05, 2009, 09:07 AM In some respects, in everything but size, Rwanda is now the China of Africa. In the aftermath of the genocide, 70 percent of Rwanda’s population was female, and so the country was obliged to utilize women. But it was more than necessity. Men had discredited themselves during the genocide. Women were just minor players in the slaughter, so that only 2.3 percent of those jailed for the killings were female. As a result, there was a broad sense afterward that females were more responsible and less inclined to savagery. The country was thus mentally prepared to give women a larger role. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 6258-63 | Added on Tuesday, October 06, 2009, 10:21 AM In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks limns an unforgettable portrait of midlife Boomers as America's ascendant “bohemian bourgeoisie”—creatively obsessive about the meaning of everything (down to the subtext of their ads for gourmet latte) yet indifferent or uncooperative on the big questions facing society's public life. As such, Boomers have created the perfect foil for a new anti-Bobo generation. Millennials are primed to give higher priority to the outer world than the inner, to push America toward a blander culture yet also toward a more aggressive and ambitious definition of the nation's collective agenda. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7558-62 | Added on Tuesday, October 06, 2009, 10:27 AM “Fair play” on pay and benefits will be at issue, and new labor problems will arise, especially among male workers. The American workplace will become less nomadic and X-ish, and—following the next recession—more cooperative, standard, and loyal. Entry-level youths will be attracted to solid companies with career ladders and standardized pay and benefits (including, for men, continuing education programs). They will be less attracted to consulting, contracting, temping, freelancing, or new business startups. Older employees will admire their skills, confidence, and team spirit, but will question their creativity and toughness. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7566-68 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:22 AM Young-adult Millennials will start constructing a new definition of “middle class.” As their cliquishness ages with them, a clearer generational center of gravity will emerge than ever existed for Gen X, within which social prestige (and pecking order) will become important. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7577-78 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:23 AM Young adults will be drawn most to products that combine their focus on family formation and community approval with breakthrough technologies. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7595-97 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:24 AM They will embrace and help develop groupware, community networks, cooperative games, and web devices that credential, simplify, segment, and screen the infosphere. A new breed of internet activists will marshal global peers on political, economic, military, and environmental issues of common concern. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7639-43 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:25 AM Millennials will begin the decade at the peak of their breakout, and will end it with their generation being a tired subject (much like Gen X became by the mid-'90s). Their breakout will seem utterly uncreative in the cultural sense, but enormously powerful politically. Millennial youths will go for tangible results, not gestures or feelings. They will coalesce and mobilize around any challenge that admits to a measurable, quantitative solution. Their hugely powerful political influence will start being embedded in national institutions, with which they will be bonding and identifying—much as Boomers bonded and identified with the culture during the 1970s. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7736-38 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:27 AM Millennials will lay costly new infrastructures, build big things, and develop other grand plans to make life still better. New public devices that provide collective security against risks—economic, social, global—will be a major goal for midlife Millennials. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7739-58 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:27 AM Issues involving children and schools will remain high on the agenda, but with the focus shifting to how strong public institutions can make up for weak parental convictions, rather than the other way around. Millennial voters will approve gleaming new schools and community facilities, embodying new materials and technologies. Millennial politicians will chafe at any resistance they encounter from what remains of the Gen-X political leadership, and will look forward to the time when they are fully in charge. The Oh-Thirties will mark the apex of Millennial influence on community and cultural life. The family-oriented, peer-approved gender-role divisions that felt fresh to Millennials in the Oh-Teens, back when the largest number of them were getting married, will now feel routinized, on autopilot, seeding as-yet unexpressed misgivings in younger people. To the snickers of youth, Millennials may work hard to disavow, conceal, or even electronically delete whatever they perceive was excessively vulgar or violent in the cultural artifacts of their youth. And as Boomers pass on, the fulsome encomia offered to honored Aquarians by their middle-aged Millennial children may prompt guffaws from some sixtyish Gen Xers. This is a revolution in waiting. This generation will redefine society in the twenty-first century just as baby boomers shaped social, political and economic changes in the last half of the twentieth century. —Gerald Celente, Trends Research Institute [Today's teens] give me the greatest hope for newspapers because they have the attributes of a 60-year-old, and 60-year-olds are our greatest newspaper readers. —Mark Smith, Northwestern University Since we are leading the world into a new millennium, society is giving us a chance and a good rep. I think we will prove them right and take the world politically, economically, and socially to new levels. —Sarah Boone, 17 THE OH-FORTIES ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7827-30 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:29 AM On top of this chronology, let's lay one of history's great rites of passage, within America's borders or even around the world. Suppose there is a major war or economic disaster. Picture how such a crisis might lend dimensionality, motivation, adrenaline, and drama to all aforementioned trends, giving them shape and texture, motivation and character, adding guideposts and touchstones not just for Millennials, but for all generations alive at the time. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7840-46 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:30 AM Here is where history reveals a very important lesson for Millennials. Go back through time, and once every long human life—roughly every eighty to one hundred years—you can find another American generation that started life much as today's teens and children have. Each of these ancestral generations encountered a crisis, an enormous bend-point in history, while coming of age as adults. The timing hasn't been exact, but has varied by less than a decade. Were these mere coincidences? Historical accidents? No. These crises arose because the persona of the rising generation, and the personae of the generations that preceded them, provoked the society to respond in a more determined fashion to the sparks of history. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7881-85 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:31 AM Dating back at least as far as the seventeenth century, you can find a hero generation once every long human lifetime: the Glorious, Republican, Progressive, and G.I. Generations. With one exception, these occur once every four generations. All but one can be classified as following the hero archetype from birth through old age. The Progressives, stunted by the trauma of Civil War before they could fully come of age, had a hero-type childhood but never acquired the same young-adult mantle, midlife hubris, or late-in-life honor. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 7886-7901 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:32 AM » A hero generation arrives just after an era of societywide upheaval in values and culture that many historians call a “spiritual awakening” and passes through childhood during a time of decaying civic habits, ebbing institutional trust, and resurgent individualism. RUSSELL: I'll promise you one thing. I'll never take any unnecessary measures. I won't try to be a hero. claire: Too late. You already are a hero. —Promised Land » A hero generation directly follows a youth generation widely deemed to be disappointing, reacts against the older “postwar” generation that fomented the spiritual awakening as young adults—and fills a void left by the passing of an elder generation known for civic purpose and teamwork. » A hero generation, early in life, becomes the target of passionate adult efforts to encircle and protect the childhood world, to promote child achievement, and to attach a new sense of destiny to youth—to which it responds by meeting and beating adult expectations. Marbles skipped a generation. —Beri Fox, a marble maker whose child customers say their grandparents, not their parents, taught them to shoot marbles Let's see how these four generations fit this pattern. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 8291-95 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 12:36 AM Chang has a point. Starting in the middle Oh-Ohs, and extending into the 2020s, Millennials could find themselves at the vortex of history. By then, they may well have matured into the same kind of results-oriented young adults those four ancestral generations produced on the eve of the gravest tests of this nation's history. They will be empowered by their specialness, familiar with uniforms, used to meeting and beating high standards, respectful of adults, responsive to command—in short, Millennial will be exactly what older leaders may seize upon as a powerful tool in time of crisis. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 8420-25 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 07:56 AM Add in the spiritual awakenings (such as the Consciousness Revolution) that occur about halfway in between, and you'll notice their alignment with other patterns that have been examined by historians and social scientists. These include the cycles of political change and realignment noticed by Arthur Schlesinger, Ir., Walter Dean Burnham, and Samuel Huntington; cycles of foreign policy and global power, by Frank Klingberg and George Modelski; cycles of religious revitalization, by Robert Wurthnow and William McLaughlin; cycles of substance abuse, by David Musto; and cycles of commercial flux, by legions of economic theorists from Nikolai Kondratieff to Harry Dent. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 8425-30 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 07:57 AM Neither accident nor coincidence, this cycle of American history derives from the intersections of the seasons of life with the seasons of time. Put simply, this is a generational cycle. Its movement is driven by the same forces that cause each new batch of rising youths to correct for the excesses of midlife parents and leaders and to fill the role vacated by recently departed elders. The concept is as old as Exodus, the “tempers” of ancient Greece, the Celtic wreath, and the circularity of Navajo sand paintings. The antecedents are as profound as they are many and varied. A triumphal modern nation like the United States, feeling like it has conquered the business cycle and stands unrivaled in the world, may deem itself exempt from these larger rhythms—but does so at its peril. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 8442-51 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 07:57 AM Here's what this cycle teaches, and what it foretells: Roughly once every twenty years or so, around the time all living generations start entering new phases of life, the social mood changes direction. In the last century, this occurred in the mid-1900s, the late ‘20s, the mid ‘40s, the mid ‘60s, and most recently in the mid ‘80s (when the oldest Silents reached retirement age, the oldest Boomers reached midlife, the oldest Gen Xers came of age as adults, and the first Millennials were being born). If this rhythm continues, sometime around the middle Oh-Ohs— maybe a few years before or after, but in any case when first-wave Millennials are somewhere in their twenties—a spark of history will ignite a public response quite unlike what it would have touched off in most earlier decades, such as the 1990s. History always produces sparks. But some sparks flare and then vanish, while others touch off firestorms out of proportion to the sparks themselves. (Recall how the sinking of the Lusitania produced such a mild response, and the attack on Pearl Harbor such a decisive one.) These next sparks could prompt enough of a reaction, and such a powerful mood shift, that America would embark on an era of crisis that could last into the 2020s. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 8577-84 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 08:00 AM Millennials would still rebel against the perceived adult “mistakes” of their youth, but their list of mistakes would grow—and the tone of their rebellion would darken. They might rebel against today's pop culture not just by cleansing it, but by demanding a repressive censorship. They might rebel against today's spreading gap between rich and poor not just by urging new public policies, but by enlisting themselves in an ugly class warfare. They might rebel against today's unfocused multilateralism not just by asking for more focus on action and results, but by prodding an aggressive militarism. They might rebel against today's civic ennui not just by voting and politicking, but by boosting populist demagogues. And, perhaps more frighteningly, they might rebel against today's high-tech individualism not just by enabling high-tech teamwork, but by constructing a new high-tech authoritarianism many of today's older people now consider impossible. ========== Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Neil Howe and William Strauss) - Highlight Loc. 8594-96 | Added on Thursday, October 08, 2009, 08:01 AM If the Millennials’ heroic trial is twisted by adversity, if their postcrisis hubris turns pathological, if their muscularity turns brutal, this is the kind of generation that could produce an Orwellian era, much like the “Big Brother” people feared back in the postwar years of conformism, bland culture, and midlife G.I.s. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 180-81 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 09:00 AM I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to resize the window—he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard display. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 227-31 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 09:03 AM On campus, they called him Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, because of his cowboy vibe and because of his lifestyle, and he somehow grew to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met. I’d pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie—all the savings from the symphonies and the first three theses—drinking myself stupid at the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I’d expended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 25-28 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 12:08 PM Instead, we may have to use different reflections of the underlying theory in different situations. It might be like our being unable to represent the surface of the earth on a single map and having to use different maps in different regions. This would be a revolution in our view of the unification of the laws of science but it would not change the most important point: that the universe is governed by a set of rational laws that we can discover and understand. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 121-25 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 02:27 PM Another argument was put forward by St. Augustine in his book The City of God. He pointed out that civilization is progressing and we remember who performed this deed or developed that technique. Thus man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long. St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 BC for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC, which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.) ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 152-55 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 02:30 PM One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job! ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 189-91 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 02:33 PM Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories – the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 326-29 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 04:07 PM Using this procedure, observers who are moving relative to each other will assign different times and positions to the same event. No particular observer’s measurements are any more correct than any other observer’s, but all the measurements are related. Any observer can work out precisely what time and position any other observer will assign to an event, provided he knows the other observer’s relative velocity. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 331-32 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 04:08 PM (The reason for that particular number is that it corresponds to the historical definition of the meter – in terms of two marks on a particular platinum bar kept in Paris.) ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 345-50 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 04:11 PM An event is something that happens at a particular point in space and at a particular time. So one can specify it by four numbers or coordinates. Again, the choice of coordinates is arbitrary; one can use any three well-defined spatial coordinates and any measure of time. In relativity, there is no real distinction between the space and time coordinates, just as there is no real difference between any two space coordinates. One could choose a new set of coordinates in which, say, the first space coordinate was a combination of the old first and second space coordinates. For instance, instead of measuring the position of a point on the earth in miles north of Piccadilly and miles west of Piccadilly, one could use miles northeast of Piccadilly, and miles north-west of Piccadilly. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Bookmark Loc. 370 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 04:14 PM ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 379-83 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 04:15 PM We would know about it only after eight minutes, the time it takes light to reach us from the sun. Only then would events on earth lie in the future light cone of the event at which the sun went out. Similarly, we do not know what is happening at the moment farther away in the universe: the light that we see from distant galaxies left them millions of years ago, and in the case of the most distant object that we have seen, the light left some eight thousand million years ago. Thus, when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Bookmark Loc. 445 | Added on Saturday, October 10, 2009, 04:23 PM ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 471-73 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2009, 10:22 AM We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 494-98 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2009, 10:24 AM Correspondingly, if the source is moving away from us, the wavelength of the waves we receive will be longer. In the case of light, therefore, means that stars moving away from us will have their spectra shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (red-shifted) and those moving toward us will have their spectra blue-shifted. This relationship between wavelength and speed, which is called the Doppler effect, is an everyday experience. Listen to a car passing on the road: as the car is approaching, its engine sounds at a higher pitch (corresponding to a shorter wavelength and higher frequency of sound waves), and when it passes and goes away, it sounds at a lower ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 500-502 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2009, 10:25 AM ln the years following his proof of the existence of other galaxies, Rubble spent his time cataloging their distances and observing their spectra. At that time most people expected the galaxies to be moving around quite randomly, and so expected to find as many blue-shifted spectra as red-shifted ones. It was quite a surprise, therefore, to find that most galaxies appeared red-shifted: nearly all were moving away from us! ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 504-5 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2009, 10:25 AM Or, in other words, the farther a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away! And that meant that the universe could not be static, ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 545-51 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2009, 03:52 PM They were working on a suggestion, made by George Gamow (once a student of Alexander Friedmann), that the early universe should have been very hot and dense, glowing white hot. Dicke and Peebles argued that we should still be able to see the glow of the early universe, because light from very distant parts of it would only just be reaching us now. However, the expansion of the universe meant that this light should be so greatly red-shifted that it would appear to us now as microwave radiation. Dicke and Peebles were preparing to look for this radiation when Penzias and Wilson heard about their work and realized that they had already found it. For this, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 (which seems a bit hard on Dicke and Peebles, not to mention Gamow!). ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 612-14 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2009, 03:57 PM Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.) ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 706-8 | Added on Sunday, October 11, 2009, 04:53 PM So the velocity of the particle will be disturbed by a larger amount. In other words, the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa. Heisenberg showed that the uncertainty in the position of the particle times the uncertainty in its velocity times the mass of the particle can never be smaller than a certain quantity, which is known as Planck’s constant. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 719-26 | Added on Monday, October 12, 2009, 05:36 AM In general, quantum mechanics does not predict a single definite result for an observation. Instead, it predicts a number of different possible outcomes and tells us how likely each of these is. That is to say, if one made the same measurement on a large number of similar systems, each of which started off in the same way, one would find that the result of the measurement would be A in a certain number of cases, B in a different number, and so on. One could predict the approximate number of times that the result would be A or B, but one could not predict the specific result of an individual measurement. Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science. Einstein objected to this very strongly, despite the important role he had played in the development of these ideas. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to quantum theory. Nevertheless, Einstein never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement “God does not play dice.” ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 830-33 | Added on Monday, October 12, 2009, 02:36 PM A proton or neutron is made up of three quarks, one of each color. A proton contains two up quarks and one down quark; a neutron contains two down and one up. We can create particles made up of the other quarks (strange, charmed, bottom, and top), but these all have a much greater mass and decay very rapidly into protons and neutrons. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1115-21 | Added on Monday, October 12, 2009, 04:09 PM As 11:00 approached his companions watching from the spaceship would find the intervals between successive signals from the astronaut getting longer and longer, but this effect would be very small before 10:59:59. They would have to wait only very slightly more than a second between the astronaut’s 10:59:58 signal and the one that he sent when his watch read 10:59:59, but they would have to wait forever for the 11:00 signal. The light waves emitted from the surface of the star between 10:59:59 and 11:00, by the astronaut’s watch, would be spread out over an infinite period of time, as seen from the spaceship. The time interval between the arrival of successive waves at the spaceship would get longer and longer, so the light from the star would appear redder and redder and fainter and fainter. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1201-4 | Added on Monday, October 12, 2009, 07:07 PM Black holes are one of only a fairly small number of cases in the history of science in which a theory was developed in great detail as a mathematical model before there was any evidence from observations that it was correct. Indeed, this used to be the main argument of opponents of black holes: how could one believe in objects for which the only evidence was calculations based on the dubious theory of general relativity? ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1234-40 | Added on Monday, October 12, 2009, 07:11 PM There are other models to explain Cygnus X-1 that do not include a black hole, but they are all rather far-fetched. A black hole seems to be the only really natural explanation of the observations. Despite this, I had a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This was a form f insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. In fact, although the situation with Cygnus X-1 has not changed much since we made the bet in 1975, there is now so much other observational evidence in favor of black holes that I have conceded the bet. I paid the specified penalty, which was a one-year subscription to Penthouse, to the outrage of Kip’s liberated wife. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1435-39 | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 02:27 PM The existence of radiation from black holes seems to imply that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, its mass will increase, but eventually the energy equivalent of that extra mass will be returned to the universe in the form of radiation. Thus, in a sense, the astronaut will be “recycled.” It would be a poor sort of immortality, however, because any personal concept of time for the astronaut would almost certainly come to an end as he was torn apart inside the black hole! ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1457-65 | Added on Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 02:29 PM Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference – the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death! ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1593-97 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 05:39 AM According to this theory, there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own initial configuration and, perhaps, with its own set of laws of science. In most of these universes the conditions would not be right for the development of complicated organisms; only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question, “Why is the universe the way we see it?” The answer is then simple: if it had been different, we would not be here! laws of science or as support for the strong anthropic principle. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1630-35 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 05:43 AM In an attempt to find a model of the universe in which many different initial configurations could have evolved to something like the present universe, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alan Guth, suggested that the early universe might have gone through a period of very rapid expansion. This expansion is said to be “inflationary,” meaning that the universe at one time expanded at an increasing rate rather than the decreasing rate that it does today. According to Guth, the radius of the universe increased by a million million million million million (1 with thirty zeros after it) times in only a tiny fraction of a second. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1661-64 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 05:46 AM The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1745-49 | Added on Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 02:34 PM One can picture real and imaginary numbers in the following way: The real numbers can be represented by a line going from left to right, with zero in the middle, negative numbers like – 1, – 2, etc. on the left, and positive numbers, 1, 2, etc. on the right. Then imaginary numbers are represented by a line going up and down the page, with i, 2i, etc. above the middle, and – i, – 2i, etc. below. Thus imaginary numbers are in a sense numbers at right angles to ordinary real numbers. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1816-21 | Added on Thursday, October 15, 2009, 05:51 AM When one goes back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still appear to be singularities. The poor astronaut who falls into a black hole will still come to a sticky end; only if he lived in imaginary time would he encounter no singularities. This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1873-78 | Added on Thursday, October 15, 2009, 02:42 PM The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time. There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1897-1900 | Added on Thursday, October 15, 2009, 02:44 PM However, any human beings who were observing the cups would be living in a universe in which disorder decreased with time. I shall argue that such beings would have a psychological arrow of time that was backward. That is, they would remember events in the future, and not remember events in their past. When the cup was broken, they would remember it being on the table, but when it was on the table, they would not remember it being on the floor. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1979-80 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 05:52 AM It is not that the expansion of the universe causes disorder to increase. Rather, it is that the no boundary condition causes disorder to increase and the conditions to be suitable for intelligent life only in the expanding phase. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1982-88 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 05:52 AM They are the thermodynamic arrow, the direction of time in which disorder increases; the psychological arrow, the direction of time in which we remember the past and not the future; and the cosmological arrow, the direction of time in which the universe expands rather than contracts. I have shown that the psychological arrow is essentially the same as the thermodynamic arrow, so that the two would always point in the same direction. The no boundary proposal for the universe predicts the existence of a well-defined thermodynamic arrow of time because the universe must start off in a smooth and ordered state. And the reason we observe this thermodynamic arrow to agree with the cosmological arrow is that intelligent beings can exist only in the expanding phase. The contracting phase will be unsuitable because it has no strong thermodynamic arrow of time. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2020-24 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 02:27 PM The Godel solution and the cosmic string space-time start out so distorted that travel into the past was always possible. God might have created such a warped universe but we have no reason to believe he did. Observations of the microwave background and of the abundances of the light elements indicate that the early universe did not have the kind of curvature required to allow time travel. The same conclusion follows on theoretical grounds if the no boundary proposal is correct. So the question is: if the universe starts out without the kind of curvature required for time travel, can we subsequently warp local regions of space-time sufficiently to allow it? ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2024-29 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 02:27 PM A closely related problem that is also of concern to writers of science fiction is rapid interstellar or intergalactic travel. According to relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. If we therefore sent a spaceship to our nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, which is about four light-years away, it would take at least eight years before we could expect the travelers to return and tell us what they had found. If the expedition were to the center of our galaxy, it would be at least a hundred thousand years before it came back. The theory of relativity does allow one consolation. This is the so-called twins paradox mentioned in Chapter 2. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2052-54 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 02:30 PM That might seem to rule out both rapid space travel and travel back in time. However, there is a possible way out. It might be that one could warp space-time so that there was a shortcut between A and B One way of doing this would be to create a wormhole between A and B. As its name suggests, a wormhole is a thin tube of space-time which can connect two nearly flat regions far apart. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2095-98 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 02:35 PM A possible way to explain the absence of visitors from the future would be to say that the past is fixed because we have observed it and seen that it does not have the kind of warping needed to allow travel back from the future. On the other hand, the future is unknown and open, so it might well have the curvature required. This would mean that any time travel would be confined to the future. There would be no chance of Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise turning up at the present time. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2232-38 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 05:52 PM String theories also lead to infinities, but it is thought they will all cancel out in versions like the heterotic string (though this is not yet known for certain). String theories, however, have a bigger problem: they seem to be consistent only if space-time has either ten or twenty-six dimensions, instead of the usual four! Of course, extra space-time dimensions are a commonplace of science fiction indeed, they provide an ideal way of overcoming the normal restriction of general relativity that one cannot travel faster than light or back in time (see Chapter 10). The idea is to take a shortcut through the extra dimensions. One can picture this in the following way. Imagine that the space we live in has only two dimensions and is curved like the surface of an anchor ring or torus Figure 11:7. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2237-38 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 05:52 PM the surface of an anchor ring or torus Figure 11:7. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2232-38 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 05:52 PM String theories also lead to infinities, but it is thought they will all cancel out in versions like the heterotic string (though this is not yet known for certain). String theories, however, have a bigger problem: they seem to be consistent only if space-time has either ten or twenty-six dimensions, instead of the usual four! Of course, extra space-time dimensions are a commonplace of science fiction indeed, they provide an ideal way of overcoming the normal restriction of general relativity that one cannot travel faster than light or back in time (see Chapter 10). The idea is to take a shortcut through the extra dimensions. One can picture this in the following way. Imagine that the space we live in has only two dimensions and is curved like the surface of an anchor ring or torus Figure 11:7. ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2288-92 | Added on Friday, October 16, 2009, 05:57 PM Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God’s freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It’s a bit like the old paradox: can God make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it? But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, he knew what he intended when he set it up! ========== stephenHawking-ABriefHistoryOfTime (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2371-76 | Added on Saturday, October 17, 2009, 12:59 PM When we combine quantum mechanics with general relativity, there seems to be a new possibility that did not arise before: that space and time together might form a finite, four-dimensional space without singularities or boundaries, like the surface of the earth but with more dimensions. It seems that this idea could explain many of the observed features of the universe, such as its large-scale uniformity and also the smaller-scale departures from homogeneity, like galaxies, stars, and even human beings. It could even account for the arrow of time that we observe. But if the universe is completely self-contained, with no singularities or boundaries, and completely described by a unified theory, that has profound implications for the role of God as Creator. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 238-42 | Added on Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 12:38 PM This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success. And then he’d lead me down a subtle, carefully baited trail that led to my allowing that while, yes, we might someday encounter alien species with wild and fabulous ways, that right now, there was a slightly depressing homogeneity to the world. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 273-74 | Added on Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 12:41 PM “Oh, no, not at all,” she sarcased at me. She sat up and pulled out her crack pipe and lit up. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 297-99 | Added on Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 12:43 PM I knew she was pinging his Whuffie and I caught her look of surprised disapproval. Us oldsters who predate Whuffie know that it’s important; but to the kids, it’s the world. Someone without any is automatically suspect. I watched her recover quickly, smile, and surreptitiously wipe her hand on her jeans. “Coffee?” she said. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 581-85 | Added on Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 09:19 PM /> It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high—higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf—Tim, I had to remember to call him Tim—would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 875-84 | Added on Thursday, October 22, 2009, 01:30 PM “But that guy in the suit of armor, he could improvise. You’d get a slightly different show every time. It’s like the castmembers who spiel on the Jungleboat Cruise. They’ve each got their own patter, their own jokes, and even though the animatronics aren’t so hot, it makes the show worth seeing.” “You’re going to fill the Mansion with castmembers in armor?” Dan asked, shaking his head. I waved away his objections, causing the runabout to swerve, terrifying a pack of guests who were taking a ride on rented bikes around the property. “No,” I said, flapping a hand apologetically at the white-faced guests. “Not at all. But what if all of the animatronics had human operators—telecontrollers, working with waldoes? We’ll let them interact with the guests, talk with them, scare them . . . We’ll get rid of the existing animatronics, replace ’em with full-mobility robots, then cast the parts over the Net. Think of the Whuffie! You could put, say, a thousand operators online at once, ten shifts per day, each of them caught up in our Mansion . . . We’ll give out awards for outstanding performances, the shifts’ll be based on popular vote. In effect, we’ll be adding another ten thousand guests to the Mansion’s throughput every day, only these guests will be honorary castmembers.” ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 898-901 | Added on Thursday, October 22, 2009, 01:32 PM She’d been thinking just the way I had—souvenirs that stressed the human scale of the Mansion. There were miniature animatronics of the Hitchhiking Ghosts in a black-light box, their skeletal robotics visible through their layers of plastic clothing; action figures that communicated by IR, so that placing one in proximity with another would unlock its Mansion-inspired behaviors—the raven cawed, Mme. Leota’s head incanted, the singing busts sang. She’d worked up some formal attire based on the castmember costume, cut in this year’s stylish lines. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 944-47 | Added on Thursday, October 22, 2009, 04:05 PM “I know,” I said. But it was, almost—she was a real opinion-leader in the Liberty Square ad-hoc, someone who knew the systems back and forth, someone who made good, reasonable decisions and kept her head in a crisis. Not a hothead. Not prone to taking radical switchbacks. This plan would burn up that reputation and the Whuffie that accompanied it, in short order, but by the time that happened, she’d have plenty of Whuffie with the new, thousands-strong ad-hoc. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Note Loc. 947 | Added on Thursday, October 22, 2009, 04:05 PM creative destruction ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 973-81 | Added on Thursday, October 22, 2009, 04:08 PM The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I’d done an informal study and come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit’s foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich. No, for my money, I’ll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who’s given that much consideration to their gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits and pieces they’ll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for fastestpossible processing. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 981-86 | Added on Thursday, October 22, 2009, 04:08 PM This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs who pack everything because they lack the organizational smarts to figure out what they should pack—they’re just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders. I spied a queue that was made up of a group of Road Worriers, a queue that was slightly longer than the others, but I joined it and ticced nervously as I watched my progress relative to the other spots I could’ve chosen. I was borne out, a positive omen for a wait-free World, and I was sauntering down Main Street, USA long before my ferrymates. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 68-73 | Added on Friday, October 23, 2009, 09:35 PM One of Douglass’s signature speeches was called “Self-Made Men,” which he delivered over fifty times. He revised it as he evolved, much as he wrote three autobiographies. The heart of the speech described how men and women could better their condition through hard work and education. Lincoln too believed in these templates as the primary means to self-improvement. But the ultimate goal of such transformation was to improve society rather than to get rich. In remaking the self, you reformed society.6The very existence of slavery, whether the ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 77-79 | Added on Friday, October 23, 2009, 09:35 PM Ultimately, Douglass and Lincoln understood that self-making was antithetical to racism. This was because the idea of “whiteness” (white skin) as a sign of superiority and justification for oppressing blacks depended on believing that the self was fixed and unchanging. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 137-39 | Added on Friday, October 23, 2009, 09:43 PM A goatee, neatly trimmed and coal black, added gravity to his countenance. Altogether, he looked “majestic in his wrath,” as one observer noted (see figure 1).9 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 271-76 | Added on Saturday, October 24, 2009, 06:12 AM His Thanksgiving proclamation had become something of a charade, however, for on the very day he issued it (July 15), working-class men in New York City unleashed their rage against the government’s conscription act by rioting and killing blacks. Consisting mostly of Irish Democrats, the mob complained that they were being drafted “to fight for the niggers” who would come north and take their jobs; and as draft officers began drawing names, they went on a four-day rampage, killing or maiming virtually every black they could get their hands on. Some they lynched from lampposts, one was “roasted alive in Madison Square,” and they burned the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. Over one hundred people (disproportionately black) were killed before Union troops, fresh from Gettysburg, brought order to the city.43 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 348-53 | Added on Saturday, October 24, 2009, 06:29 AM Lincoln immediately went on the defensive. Knowing that Douglass had frequently criticized him, he sought to clarify his position. Although Lincoln did not bring up black colonization, or Douglass’s critique of it, he referred to a speech Douglass had given in Boston in early 1862, widely published, in which Douglass had said that the “most disheartening feature” of the war was not the military disasters but “the tardy, hesitating, and vacillating policy of the President,” especially Lincoln’s policies on freeing and arming blacks.60 Lincoln admitted that he had sometimes been slow to act, but he denied vacillating: “when I have once taken a position, I have never retreated from it.”61 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 872-79 | Added on Saturday, October 24, 2009, 03:17 PM But there were also rumors that Thomas had been castrated, possibly from fighting, or made sterile. Whether or not these rumors are true is almost beside the point. What’s important is that a culture of violence, in which a man might lose his testicles in a brawl, could fuel such apocryphal tales.115When men weren’t maiming each other they often killed themselves with drink. At Pigeon Creek and Sangamon, locally distilled whiskey flowed more readily than water. Indeed, during Abraham’s formative years, America was an “alcoholic republic.” The average man drank about eight shots a day of whiskey or rye (or their equivalent from a jug), usually in the space of a few hours; and over one-quarter of the adult male population sucked down twelve shots or more. Competition was part of the culture, the goal being to drink more and stay soberer than your opponent.116 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1014-19 | Added on Saturday, October 24, 2009, 06:47 PM Lincoln’s fight and subsequent friendship with Jack Armstrong taught him something that would remain a central aspect of his career: “if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend,” as he said a few years after the fight.145 Conciliate with your enemy, up to a point, and then put your foot down and fight. While Lincoln was willing to sacrifice principles for friendship, the young Frederick Bailey had learned a quite different lesson from his fight with Covey: never befriend an enemy unless he first converts to your side, for friendship depends upon common cause and shared principles. They would later apply these lessons in the testing years of the Civil War. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1027-45 | Added on Saturday, October 24, 2009, 06:49 PM In one literary bout, a master recaptures his slave, who has twice attempted to run away. Before punishing him, he demands to know why the slave tried to run away. He has feelings for him, has treated him kindly and humanely, and wants an apology. But his slave says only, “I submit to my fate. I am a slave.” This stoic response sparks a debate over the morality of slavery:147Master: It is in the order of Providence that one man should become subservient to another. It ever has been so, and ever will be.Slave: The robber who puts a pistol to your breast . . . makes just the same plea. Providence gives him a power over your life and property; it gave my enemies a power over my liberty. But it has also given me legs to escape with.Master: But it was my intention not only to make your life tolerably comfortable at present, but to provide for you in old age.Slave: Is a life like mine . . . worth thinking about for old age? No: the sooner it ends, the sooner I shall obtain that relief for which my soul pants.At every turn the slave defends himself brilliantly, exposing the violence and inhumanity of slavery. In winning the debate, he wins his freedom.The young Frederick Bailey and Abraham Lincoln both discovered this “dialogue” at the same time, between 1830 and 1831. It appeared in The Columbian Orator, a popular reader and elocution manual for young boys compiled by the Massachusetts educator Caleb Bingham. The Orator was one of the most popular books in the new nation. From 1797 to 1860 it went through some twenty-three editions and in many American homes it was one of a handful of essential books, along with the Bible, a spelling book, and a farmer’s almanac. In subject matter it was a radical book, for it used stories, speeches, and poems to teach boys that all men are created equal and entitled to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and happiness. It was considered so radical, in fact, that in the 1850s, during the height of the slavery crisis, the most prominent Southern newspaper included it on a blacklist of abolitionist books, effectively banning it from Southern schools and homes.148 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1122-27 | Added on Sunday, October 25, 2009, 04:03 PM Jake’s fears, though exaggerated, were not without foundation. New Yorkers got rich on Southern slavery and cotton. The city “was virtually an annex of the South, the New York merchants having extensive and very profitable business relations with the merchants south of the Mason and Dixon line,” wrote one South Carolinian who resettled in New York.5 Some of the city’s most respectable whites hoped for the expansion of slavery and the “extermination” of free blacks and abolitionists in order to improve commerce and their profits.6 As a result, the growing numbers of fugitives in the city had to be on constant watch for their masters or slave-catchers. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1156-62 | Added on Sunday, October 25, 2009, 07:10 PM Yet Frederick totally ignored Anna’s role in helping him escape, both at the time and in his memories of the event. Recognizing it would have cut against his image of the self-made man and representative African American that even now, in his first days of freedom, he was already beginning to cultivate. In one of the first letters he wrote after reaching New York, he told a friend that he “felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.”17 It is a familiar image: the lone warrior, the American isolatto, fighting the savage enemy and emerging triumphant. He was participating in a tradition of self-made men that went from Ben Franklin and Natty Bumppo through Lincoln on up to Malcolm X—a tradition that dismissed the role of wives and women in shaping the man’s success. What made Frederick’s situation unique was that he established the tradition of the self-made African American.18 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1199-1203 | Added on Sunday, October 25, 2009, 07:12 PM Frederick discarded the surname Johnson after a New Bedford neighbor, Nathan Johnson, told him that there were already too many Johnsons in town and suggested “Douglas” instead. Nathan had been reading Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake and was so impressed with the bravery of the protagonist, Douglas, that he recommended it to Frederick. Frederick agreed to the new name, even though he hadn’t read Scott and didn’t know how it was spelled. But he was familiar with Douglass Street in Baltimore, and so added an extra “s” to his (and Anna’s) name.27 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1348-52 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2009, 01:42 PM It also needed someone who could speak about slavery firsthand. Southerners flooded the market with pamphlets, books, and images that depicted slaves as happy and content and masters as benevolent and fatherly. They accused abolitionists of never having seen slavery. Only Southerners could speak authoritatively about the institution, they argued, adding that Northern wage workers were far more oppressed than slaves. Indeed, white Southerners called themselves blacks’ best friends; one pamphlet asserted that “of all the states,” Maryland was “the first in friendliness toward the African.”66 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1384-87 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2009, 10:14 PM December 1841, just three months after he started his new career, one journalist effusively described his performance: “This is an extraordinary man. He was cut out for a hero. . . . He has the ‘heart to conceive, the head to contrive, and the hand to execute.’ . . . As a speaker he has few equals.” Douglass would use the same language a decade later to describe a fictional black hero whom he modeled on himself.73 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1481-85 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2009, 10:20 PM But with fame his freedom was now in great jeopardy. Thomas and Hugh Auld, or any would-be kidnapper, could easily track his whereabouts in the antislavery newspapers. Indeed numerous slave-owners in Baltimore and on the Eastern Shore, including Thomas and Hugh, read the Narrative, despite laws prohibiting its circulation in Maryland and elsewhere in the South. The Aulds were outraged by Douglass’s portraits of them. Thomas publicly called Douglass a liar, and Hugh sought revenge, vowing to “spare no pains or expense in order to regain possession of him” and “place him in the cotton fields of the South.”93 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1505-9 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2009, 10:21 PM Douglass did not turn a blind eye to Britain’s social problems, however, especially its rampant poverty. He realized that while social stratification in America stemmed primarily from racial distinctions, in Britain it came from class; and he forged alliances with Chartists, who advocated equal rights for the poor and laboring classes. He also acknowledged that the absence of racism stemmed in large part from the fact that so few blacks lived there. But at least in England, “there is Freedom, there is Liberty.”99 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1509-13 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2009, 10:21 PM The British Isles highlighted for Douglass the problems in America. He came to believe that the greatest obstacle to abolitionism was neither the wealth generated by slavery, nor the Constitution and laws defending it, but the horrible prejudice against blacks: whites “reconciled themselves” to black slavery and oppression “as things inevitable if not desirable.”100 Racism enabled slaveowners to feel good about themselves; it purged any guilt that came from treating humans as oxen and sex objects. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1513-20 | Added on Monday, October 26, 2009, 10:22 PM What finally convinced Douglass to return to the United States was his sense of duty to his fellow blacks and his desire to end the scourge of racism. “I have no love for America,” he announced. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.” But in loving England he did not hate America: “I love humanity all over the globe.” What he hated were American laws, churches, newspapers, and legislatures that defended slavery. While he was abroad America had annexed Texas as a slave state and had made war with Mexico in order to acquire more slave territory. Douglass wanted to destroy these bulwarks of oppression, wanted to rip the Constitution into “a thousand fragments” and rebuild the government from the ground up in order to fulfill the principles of freedom and equality in the Declaration.101 He wanted, in short, to import into America some of the humanity he had witnessed in England. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1556-59 | Added on Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 10:23 AM Such criticism did not affect Douglass, though. He had already learned that as he continued to remake himself, he left friends and allies behind. Friends today too often became strangers tomorrow, especially abolitionists who were loath to compromise. While he constantly changed, they remained much the same or evolved in divergent paths. In a protean sea, love and friendship rarely survived. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1829-37 | Added on Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 01:46 PM In some cases, friends made their sexual passions explicit. A decade before Lincoln and Speed met, Thomas Jefferson Withers, a twenty-two-year-old South Carolina law student, told his friend James Henry Hammond how much he liked sleeping with him: “I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole—the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling?” Withers playfully blurred the line between eros and ardor: “Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow—by such hostile—furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him—when he is least prepared for defence against the crushing force of a Battering Ram.”183 Significantly, their friendship threatened neither their sense of manly honor nor their social standing.184 Indeed, Withers would later become a South Carolina appellate court judge and Hammond would achieve fame as a United States senator and governor of South Carolina. And both men would marry, raise families, and join the Confederacy. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 1980-87 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 08:47 AM But in other ways Mary Todd was totally different—in fact, she acted like a man.224 She was as ambitious for fame and as passionate about politics as Lincoln. Having been brought up in an ardently Whig family, she was a “violent little Whig,” loved Henry Clay, who was a family friend and neighbor, and hated Democrats. At age fourteen she had reportedly ridden her horse to Ashland, Clay’s estate, to tell him that she expected him to be the next president, adding that she too wanted to “live in the White House.” That desire didn’t die, for after moving to Springfield in 1839, she “declared her intention of marrying a future President of the United States.” Vivacious and outgoing if a bit high-strung, she was very smart, loved poetry, and had a wit to match her future husband’s.225 She was, in other words, a perfect political and intellectual match for Lincoln. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2014-17 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 08:49 AM While duels had largely died out in the more refined culture of the Northeast, they remained popular in the South and West, even though many states, including Illinois, outlawed them. Lincoln had violated the code of honor that protected a man’s private character, and he knew that he would be dishonored if he declined Shields’s challenge.236 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2078-84 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 08:53 AM As for Byron, Lincoln did not read him as much as he did Burns, nor did he identify with Byron’s genteel radicalism. In fact in his political views, friendships, and failed engagements, Lincoln recognized that the real always fell far short of the ideal. This was not a calamity. It was the way of the world. His insecurities about marriage had taught him that the “idealizing impulse” was itself the problem. As he told Speed, “The peculiar misfortune of both you and me” is “to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.”251 Such pragmatism enabled him to tolerate slavery while hating it, or marry someone with whom he lacked the kind of intimacy already achieved. And it helped him reconcile his dreams of fame with his anonymous status. For while Douglass was internationally renowned, Lincoln was still a small-town lawyer and politician, utterly unknown outside of Illinois. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2099-2100 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 08:54 AM American statesmen wanted to rejoice with France “in her republicanism,” but found it impossible to do so “without seeming to rejoice over abolitionism.”1 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2107-12 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 08:54 AM Douglass also exposed no-name congressmen like Lincoln. In January 1849 he published a tally of the votes in the House of Representatives on a resolution to prohibit the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Most Northern congressmen were shocked by the trade’s visibility in the capital of a free country. One of the nation’s largest slave markets stood just a few blocks from the Capitol, and congressmen passed the huge bleak warehouse on their way to work. They also had to confront the regular “train of slaves passing through” Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House.3 Northern House members rallied around the resolution, voting for it and enabling it to pass. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2155-58 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 05:31 PM In almost any other city, Douglass probably would have gone bankrupt. But Rochester, a manufacturing city of fifty thousand, was also a hub of radical reform. And with a direct route to Canada, it was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad. It was, in other words, a city in need of a good abolitionist editor and conductor. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2191-98 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 05:34 PM Douglass fell in love with Rochester. It was one of the most abolitionist and feminist cities in the country, and it lacked the smugness of Boston’s ruling elite. It was in the heart of the “Burned-Over District,” a region in upstate New York along the Erie Canal that had been swept by the spiritual fires of revivalists, transforming it into a center of radical reform. Rochester was home to the Fox sisters, who in 1848 discovered the new religion of Spiritualism, which enabled people to communicate with the dead. And the city was only about sixty miles from Seneca Falls, the site of the world’s first women’s rights convention, also in 1848. Although there is no evidence that Douglass practiced Spiritualism, he attended, along with 30 other men and 110 women, the Seneca Falls convention. During a debate on a resolution for female suffrage, he gave an eloquent speech and saved the motion from defeat.27 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2269-77 | Added on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 05:39 PM The worst rumors came from Boston abolitionists who considered Douglass a heretic. One former colleague called Julia “a Jezebel whose capacity for making mischief between friends would be difficult to match.”44 Garrison himself fueled the rumor mill by saying that since moving to Rochester, Douglass “has lost much of moral power. . . . He has had one of the worst advisors in his printing office, whose influence over him has not only caused much unhappiness in his own household, but perniciously biased his own judgment.”45 Douglass denied that Julia’s presence had created unhappiness in his family. But according to another account, Amy Post said that Anna felt threatened by Julia and demanded that she live with another family: “I don’t care anything about her being in the office—but I won’t have her in my house,” Anna reportedly told Frederick. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a friend of both Douglass and Garrison, tried to silence the rumors, “but her words were wasted on the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society.”46 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2383-93 | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2009, 08:47 AM The Fugitive Slave Act was the most outrageous part of the Compromise of 1850. Replacing the previous law of 1793, it denied suspects the right to a jury trial or even a hearing before a judge, and it excluded their testimony. It appointed special commissioners, who were authorized to send the suspect immediately into slavery “without stay or appeal.” And commissioners received a bonus for condemning suspects to bondage ($10 instead of $5). Any and all citizens in a community could be called on to hunt down alleged fugitives, subject to a $1,000 fine if they refused. Anyone caught aiding a fugitive faced a fine and prison term.82 The law transformed public opinion in the North. It made free soil “hunting ground for southern kidnappers” and convinced countless Northerners that they could no longer wash their hands of slavery.83 It inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose impact was so profound that it prompted President Lincoln to call Stowe “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war” when he met her at the White House.84 And the law sparked a mass exodus of Northern blacks to Canada.85 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2406-9 | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2009, 08:48 AM If slavery was a kind of living death, as Douglass had sometimes suggested, he now demanded Old Testament retribution. The “lines of eternal justice” needed to be brightened with the blood of tyrants. This was God’s law, he argued; and when human laws destroyed human rights, God’s government needed to be erected in its place. He referred to Gerrit Smith’s constitutional doctrine and said he was “proud to be one of [Smith’s] disciples.”91 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2413-23 | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2009, 08:50 AM Douglass downplayed his militancy when speaking to women, however. A month before his Pittsburgh talk, Rochester’s Female Anti-Slavery Society had invited him to deliver the 1852 Fourth of July address at the city’s lavish Corinthian Hall. The celebration occurred on Monday, July 5, perhaps to highlight the nation’s unfulfilled ideals.93 His speech that day is probably his best known, and rhetorically it is masterful, employing a “double reversal.” He opens by comforting his mostly white listeners, making them feel proud and hopeful about “your nation.” The pronoun “your” foreshadows the sudden shift in tone that comes midway through: “pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” And then for the next hour he berates them, dramatizing the national sins of slavery and racism. The second reversal comes near the end: “I leave off where I began, with hope,” he says, anticipating Barack Obama.94 The speech is a jeremiad, a song of lament seeking to restore the ideals of the nation’s founders. But unlike his other great speeches of the era, there is no talk of retribution or of killing kidnappers.* ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2668-71 | Added on Thursday, October 29, 2009, 05:40 PM Douglass never criticized Brown for almost getting him killed. In fact he said he loved Brown and he frequently called him “THE man of this nineteenth century.”163 To be sure, he distanced himself from the Harpers Ferry raid and denied complicity in it. But this was partly because he had to: after all, in “a government recognizing the validity of the Dred Scott decision,” Douglass had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” as he noted.164 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2737-56 | Added on Friday, October 30, 2009, 08:54 AM When the Lincolns arrived in Washington in December 1847, the nation’s capital seemed huge and incomplete. With some forty thousand people, including two thousand slaves and eight thousand free blacks, it was the largest city either of them had ever seen.183 Many Americans referred to Washington as “the City of Magnificent Distances,” but Charles Dickens, who had visited a few years earlier, termed it “the City of Magnificent Intentions” because it was only half developed. There were no streetlamps anywhere. Empty roads went nowhere waiting for buildings to give them life. And everywhere were public buildings that needed “a public to be complete.”184 Pennsylvania Avenue, the main thoroughfare, had been partly paved with cobblestones. The rest of it was a mudhole after a heavy rain.185 Pigs roamed the streets and “garbage, dead animals, and human waste littered every neighborhood.” The sewage from the Capitol spilled onto the Mall from gullies and became a “fetid marsh.”186 Not even the classically elegant Capitol was finished. Its dome, yet to be gilded, looked like a large phrenological chart of the head, with steel wires crisscrossing around it as if to draw attention to the mental and moral faculties of the nation’s character. (The most prominent parts of the dome seemed to correspond with those areas in phrenology responsible for acquisitiveness and combativeness.) The Capitol faced east, but as the city had grown west, it had “the appearance of turning its back on” the people and the city.187 Dickens called Washington “the headquarters of tobacco- tinctured saliva,” and he did not exaggerate. Chewing was allowed in all public places, and the marble columns of the Capitol and the carpeting in the House and Senate were stained with it. Spittoons were everywhere, but chewers often ignored them or missed their mark. “Even steady old chewers of great experience are not always good marksmen,” Dickens noted after meeting some of them. Many esteemed members of the House and Senate, their cheeks swelled with plug, would shoot an airball, missing the spittoon entirely. One New York representative hated serving in Congress because of so many colleagues who “squirted their tobacco juice upon the carpet” and drank on the job. In fact he likened Congress to a “dramshop” or pub, especially during night sessions.188 Neither Abraham nor Mary drank or chewed (many women did both); but they were used to these habits from Springfield. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 2934-40 | Added on Friday, October 30, 2009, 05:36 PM hired a replacement and promised to give the girl a 75–cent-per-week bonus on top of whatever Mary paid. And he warned her “not to fuss with Mrs. Lincoln.”234 Lincoln thus learned how to use subterfuge to keep the peace at home. When a neighborhood boy asked him to give money to the fire department fund drive, he responded, “I’ll go home to supper and ask Mrs. Lincoln what she has to say. After supper she will be in good humor, and I will ask her if we shall give fifty dollars. She will say, ‘Abe, when will you learn some sense? Twenty dollars is enough.’ Come around in the morning and get your money.”235 The boy got his twenty dollars. With Mary, he knew how to negotiate and still get what he wanted. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3048-59 | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2009, 10:30 AM Stephen Douglas derailed this vision of progress. He signed a devil’s pact with Southerners and in his Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited slavery from spreading north of the 36°30' parallel in the Louisiana Territory.265 Suddenly the nation’s destiny was no longer on a trajectory of upward moral progress. It had peaked and was now regressing. The United States was in decline. Abruptly Lincoln felt that the only way he could tell the national story was as a rise and fall, which hopefully would mobilize the masses and restore the nation to its former glory.266 A lot of Northerners agreed with Lincoln in believing that Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act marked a new era of descent. The Republican Party emerged in its immediate wake, uniting diverse groups of Northerners under the explicit goal of prohibiting the spread of slavery. They concurred when Lincoln said there was “a vast difference” between tolerating slavery and extending it over a territory “already free and uncontaminated with the institution.”267 They yelled “that’s right” when Lincoln said, “Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of” Judge Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act “are utter antagonisms; and the former is rapidly displaced by the latter.”268 They cheered when he talked about how much he hated slavery and how evil it was. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3073-82 | Added on Saturday, October 31, 2009, 03:03 PM Lincoln’s timing was perfect, for Northerners were furious with Douglas for opening their territories to slavery. When the judge returned to Illinois in the fall of 1854 to campaign for Shields and other Democrats, he quickly realized how bitter the resentment was: “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy,” he said.273 In his first campaign speech in Chicago, he was shouted down with boos, hisses, and screams as soon as he walked onstage. A few people threw rocks and rotten eggs, and each time he opened his mouth to speak “the tumult was renewed.”274 He lost his temper and began shaking his fist at the crowd, “which only intensified the din.”275 Then he tried staring the crowd into silence like a parent fed up with his three-year-old child, but the crowd kept yelling. For two hours he endured the insults, waiting for the people to lose their voices or get tired so that he could educate them about the virtues of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But the crowd wouldn’t relent and so he finally stomped offstage and retired to the luxurious Tremont House hotel, where one imagines him comforting himself with a bottle or two of claret. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3403-8 | Added on Sunday, November 01, 2009, 03:46 PM Douglass and Lincoln read Aesop when young and committed many of his fables to memory. In the revolutionary 1850s especially, Aesop helped them articulate central aspects of American society. Both Douglass and Lincoln drew from the fable of the lion and the bulls, where the lion separates the bulls through deceit in order to eat them. The moral was clear: “a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.” Douglass borrowed from another fable to define Democrats (and some Republicans) as wolves in sheep’s clothing. Perhaps his favorite was the story about the bees rebelling against their master.375 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3428-33 | Added on Monday, November 02, 2009, 08:45 AM Strong greatly respected Lincoln; he called him “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla in respect of outside polish, but a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger. . . . His evident integrity and simplicity of purpose would compensate for worse grammar than his.”378 The story resembles Aesop in contrasting talk and action, or “being put to the test.”379 Lincoln’s folksy style was part of what endeared Douglass to him when they met. He was used to that kind of grammar and humor. The sound of Lincoln’s voice, especially when telling a story, suggested to him that for all their differences, their backgrounds had more than a little in common. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3462-74 | Added on Monday, November 02, 2009, 08:48 AM While tens of thousands of his fellow black men and women left America’s shores in search of better homes, he had resisted this impulse. In fact just one month earlier, in response to a letter from a subscriber, who had asked him if he ever expected to emigrate to Haiti, Douglass responded with a firm “No; I do not expect to emigrate to Haiti under any circumstances now existing or apprehended.”7What caused him to change his mind? What induced him to suddenly abandon his faith in America?The answer was the new president, Abraham Lincoln.Douglass was never so demoralized as when he read Lincoln’s Inaugural Address. It “is little better than our worst fears,” he complained. Instead of firmly rebuking the South, Lincoln “courted their favor.”8 He vowed to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act, suppress slave insurrections, and never interfere with slavery in the slave states. Lincoln essentially told slaveholders that he was “an excellent slave hound.”9Worse still, the Inaugural was a “double-tongued” address. Lincoln had been elected on a platform to confine slavery “where it is, ‘where the public mind shall rest in the belief of its ultimate extinction,’ ” as Douglass quoted him.10 Lincoln affirmed his promise to contain slavery but in the next breath gave away the greater goal of ultimate extinction. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3585-91 | Added on Monday, November 02, 2009, 07:04 PM This torture occurred because the federal government enforced a fugitive slave law for the benefit of people who had just committed treason against them. It was tantamount to Southerners’ returning to John Brown deserters from his army. It was absurd, in other words, and never would have happened to white men. When Lydia Maria Child, a petite and elderly abolitionist, read about the incident at Fort Pickens in Douglass’s newspaper, she felt like trampling on the national flag: “God knows I want to love and honor the flag of my country; but how can I, when it is used for such purposes?” Douglass felt the same way. Until the Union decided to “strike down slavery,” it didn’t “deserve the support of a single sable arm.”46 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3661-65 | Added on Monday, November 02, 2009, 07:08 PM The nation’s four million slaves, plus another half million free blacks, were equivalent to a quarter of the North’s population and represented a potent source of power. Indeed, there were half as many blacks in the country as rebel whites!66 Utilizing them would thus satisfy the demand for troops, prevent the need for conscription, and more than offset the attrition of white soldiers who refused to fight for black freedom. As a military strategist Douglass favored demography over geography. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3665-69 | Added on Monday, November 02, 2009, 07:09 PM Douglass also challenged Lincoln’s assumption that the border (slave) states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware would secede if the slaves were freed. The border-state dilemma hinged around a simple question: did slaveholding Unionists value their country over slavery? Douglass thought they did, which meant that the border states would not secede. And if he was wrong, if border-state men loved slavery more than their country, then let them go! Good riddance! They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.67 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 3675-79 | Added on Tuesday, November 03, 2009, 09:39 AM The important point about the border states was not the official status of the state but Unionists’ ability to control transportation routes, manufacturing facilities, and armories amid the guerrilla warfare. If the Union army could not control these resources, they would have trouble defending Washington, D.C., and they would lose crucial manufacturing plants and the strategic Ohio River to the rebels. But as long as Lincoln ordered his generals to imprison anyone advocating secession, then border-state guerrilla warfare was a manageable problem.71 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4391-95 | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2009, 10:55 AM Outside, blacks and whites gathered together in crowds along Pennsylvania Avenue and listened as preachers read them the Proclamation. “Men squealed, women fainted, dogs barked, white and colored people shook hands, songs were sung,” the black minister Henry Turner said. “It was indeed a time of times and a half time. Nothing like it will ever be seen again in this life.” For countless people that day, national ideals and scriptural prophecies were being fulfilled. The line between present and future, heaven and earth, seemed suddenly to vanish.243 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4403-9 | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2009, 10:56 AM It is a rich and wonderful irony that a conservative Republican would preside over the most radical transformation of the nation’s history. Frederick Douglass was not the only one who understood this. No less an authority on radicalism than Karl Marx emphasized the revolutionary nature of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Writing from Vienna, he called it “the most important document of American history since the founding of the Union, a document that breaks away from the old American Constitution. . . . Never yet has the New World scored a greater victory than in this instance, [when] ordinary people of goodwill can carry out tasks which the Old World would have to have a hero to accomplish.”246 It is a strange convergence of Marx and Lincoln. But an even stranger one, in the form of an interracial friendship, was soon to come. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4434-44 | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2009, 10:58 AM Even Lincoln’s sense of humor turned morbid that August. According to one anecdote, he went for a walk in Lafayette Park and stopped at the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson astride his upreared horse. A thin, hungry-looking man approached and, not recognizing the president, begged for money. Lincoln asked him why he didn’t join the army. “They won’t let me in,” the man said. “I’d be glad enough to die for my country, sir, if they would give me a chance.”Lincoln said he could help. He took out a piece of paper and wrote, “The bearer is anxious to go to the front and die for his country. Can’t you give him a chance?” Then he sealed it in an envelope and told the man to take it to the local recruiting office. The man disappeared and Lincoln never heard from him again.6The story, though apocryphal, captures the state of the Union in early August 1864. Volunteers had dried up despite Lincoln’s call for another 500,000 men. The martial spirit had vanished from popular songs and was replaced by the elegiac: “We are tired of war on the old camp ground, / Many are dead and gone.” The Treasury Department had spent all its gold, causing greenbacks to fall to forty cents on the dollar. And everywhere people were clamoring for peace.7 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4753-57 | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2009, 10:28 PM After the ceremony Douglass went to the reception at the White House. As he was about to enter, two policemen rudely yanked him away and told him that no persons of color were allowed to enter. Douglass said there must be some mistake, for no such order could have come from the president. The police refused to yield, until Douglass sent word to Lincoln that he was being detained at the door.Douglass found the president in the elegant East Room, standing “like a mountain pine in his grand simplicity and homely beauty.”91 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Bookmark Loc. 4757 | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2009, 10:28 PM ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4813-18 | Added on Thursday, November 05, 2009, 10:31 PM Major Rathbone tried to seize Booth, but the assailant slashed him with his dagger and then jumped to the stage. Booth’s spur caught on the flag bunting decorating the box, and he landed on one leg, breaking his ankle. Waving his bloody dagger, he shouted “Sic simper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!” the Virginia state motto), and escaped through the rear of the theater. Then, above the din, everyone heard Mary’s wail: “They have shot the President! They have shot the President! Oh, my God, and have I given my husband to die?”107It was Good Friday. ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4845-50 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 10:58 AM After quoting from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Douglass searched for meaning in the tragedy of his death. “Though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives.” The president’s death had suddenly united blacks and whites in the North and “made us kin.” His martyrdom was a symbol of racial reconciliation and forgiveness, of lasting peace with malice toward none and charity for all. Indeed, Douglass likened Lincoln to America’s Christ: “it may be that the blood of our beloved martyred President will be the salvation of our country.” People would be united, made kin, by their loyalty to their nation rather than their complexion.115 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4852-57 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 10:59 AM Most whites treated Lincoln’s death much differently, however. His martyrdom would redeem the nation and facilitate the process of reunion among Northern and Southern whites. He quickly came to symbolize an American Christ who forgave rebels their sins and allowed them to reenter the Union. “Jesus Christ died for the world, Abraham Lincoln died for his country,” said one clergyman on the Sunday after Lincoln’s death, and his sentiment became a common refrain. Consequently, John Wilkes Booth became America’s Judas. Some called this second Judas “worse than his namesake” because he committed the murder, whereas the first Judas was only a betrayer who collected gold and let others “do the deed of death.”116 ========== Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (John Stauffer) - Highlight Loc. 4925-30 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:03 AM Like most other black and white abolitionists, Douglass saw the end of the war as the endpoint of an era and of his life’s work.12 It also marked the end of his continual self-making. After the war “a strange and, perhaps, perverse feeling came over me,” he confessed. The great joy he felt in helping end slavery “was slightly tinged with the feeling of sadness. I felt that I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life; my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again.” His life’s work was now “among the things of memory.”13 ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 4118-21 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:33 AM Molly evaluated literacy programs by going to 240 literacy centers—and found them mostly failures. “What I found were classes where there were supposed to be fifty students, but nobody would be there,” she said. “Or everybody would be falling asleep.” Likewise, she saw Westerners thundering against genital cutting and trying to pass laws against it, without actually going out in the countryside to understand why mothers cut their daughters. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 4127-30 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:33 AM “I want to be cut,” Zoé told her mother. “I promise I won’t cry.” All of Zoé’s friends were being cut, and she didn’t want to be left out. Molly wasn’t that indulgent a mom, and the girl changed her mind when she was told what the procedure entailed. The incident convinced Molly that the key to ending cutting would be changing village attitudes as a whole. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 4155-59 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:34 AM The entire marrying group must make the decision to drop cutting collectively. So Tostan began helping groups identify the other villages that commonly supply their marriage partners and then organizing intervillage discussions of cutting. Tostan also helps women organize joint declarations that they have abandoned the practice, and this approach has worked stunningly well. Between 2002 and 2007, more than 2,600 villages announced that they had ceased cutting. “It’s accelerating,” Molly said, adding that Tostan’s goal is to end all cutting in Senegal by 2012. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 4291-95 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:38 AM Two scholars, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, calculate that for sixty years Britain sacrificed an annual average of 1.8 percentage points of its GNP because of its moral commitment to ending slavery. That is an astonishing total, cumulatively amounting to more than an entire year’s GNP for Great Britain (for the United States today, it would be the equivalent of sacrificing more than $14 trillion), a significant and sustained sacrifice in the British standard of living. It was a heroic example of a nation placing its values above its interests. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 4359-63 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:40 AM Nearly everyone who works in poor countries recognizes that women are the third world’s greatest underutilized resource. “The first thing we learned is that men are often untrainable,” said Bunker Roy, who runs Barefoot College, an India-based aid organization that operates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. “So now we work only with women. We pick a woman from Afghanistan, from Mauritania, from Bolivia, from Timbuktu, and in six months we train her to be a barefoot engineer” working on water supplies or other issues. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 4363-66 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:40 AM Almost invariably around the globe, countries and companies that have deployed women according to their talents have prospered. “Encouraging more women into the labor force has been the single biggest driver of Euro-zone’s labor market success, much more so than ‘conventional’ labor market reforms,” Goldman Sachs wrote in a research report in 2007. ========== Half the Sky (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn) - Highlight Loc. 4375-84 | Added on Friday, November 06, 2009, 11:40 AM Psychologists have long noted that intelligence as measured by IQ tests has risen sharply over the years, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect, after a New Zealand intelligence researcher named James Flynn. The average American IQ, for example, rose by eighteen points from 1947 to 2002. Over thirty years, the IQ of Dutch conscripts rose twenty-one points and those of Spanish schoolchildren by ten points. One scholar estimated that if American children of 1932 had taken an IQ test in 1997, then half of them would have been classified as at least borderline mentally retarded. The cause of the Flynn Effect isn’t fully understood, but it affects primarily those with lower scores, who may not have received adequate nutrition, education, or stimulation. Iodine deficiency is a factor in some countries. As people become better nourished and better educated, they perform better on intelligence tests. Thus it’s no surprise that a particularly large Flynn Effect has been detected in developing countries such as Brazil and Kenya. The IQ of rural Kenyan children rose eleven points in just fourteen years, a pace greater than any Flynn Effect reported in the West. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 39-40 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2009, 05:26 AM Marx and his followers were the first to use the word capitalism, which they invented as an antonym for socialism. But it took Schumpeter to tell us what the word really meant.2 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 50-52 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2009, 05:28 AM SCHUMPETER FIRST USED the phrase creative destruction in 1942, to describe how innovative capitalist products and methods continually displace old ones. He gave abundant examples. The factory wiped out the blacksmith shop, the car superseded the horse and buggy, and the corporation overthrew the proprietorship. "Creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism," he wrote. "Stabilized capitalism is a contradiction in terms."' ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 61-62 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2009, 05:30 AM Musing on his own reinventions, Cary Grant once said, "I pretended to be someone that I wanted to be, and I finally became that person. Or he became me." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 101-5 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2009, 05:36 AM He went on to say that a third element is "so essential to the functioning of the capitalist system" that it must be added to the other two.' This third element is the creation of credit. The core ethos of capitalism looks constantly ahead and relies on credit in launching new ventures. From the Latin root credo-"I believe"-credit represents a wager on a better future. The entrepreneurs and consumers who make these bets often care little about the past and have scant patience with the present. They undertake innovative projects and make expensive purchases (houses, for example) that require far greater resources than those lying at hand. In the absence of credit, both consumers and entrepreneurs would suffer endless frustrations. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 130-33 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2009, 05:40 AM Instead, it is an uncommonly difficult system to construct and sustain. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is still essential, but it is no longer sufficient, any more than are the eighteenth-century waterwheels Smith so admired. Modern capitalism must be actively nurtured and controlled, with sophistication and resolve. Without constant promotion by entrepreneurs and careful monitoring by regulators (a necessity much underestimated by many advocates of the free market, including Schumpeter himself), it cannot achieve or maintain its full potential. Like the actual engines that loom so large in creative destruction-steam, electric, diesel, gasoline, jet-the capitalist engine can slow down, sputter, overheat, explode, or die. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 238-40 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2009, 02:34 PM Wherever he found himself, Schumpeter never felt that he quite belonged. Many years later, his brilliant Harvard student Paul Samuelson saw "an insecurity in his nature, perhaps typical of a precocious only child." With the disappearance of the ordered Viennese society of his youth, "he became completely qualified to play the important sociological role of the alienated stranger. "'6 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 371-75 | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2009, 01:45 PM Because the maturing Schumpeter sensed that creative destruction in the economic sphere could be violently disruptive, he began to place a high premium on political order. He became convinced that the supplanting of one set of entrepreneurial elites by another could bring social turmoil that might stall the capitalist engine. Thus, economic growth demanded a steady hand of government, and Schumpeter saw that capitalist progress required enforceable rules of law and private property. In his judgment, the best kind of oversight was embodied in a nonpartisan civil service and a symbolic leader whose legitimacy the masses were unlikely to question. The empire had all these advantages, but it still struggled with continuing nationalist movements within its borders and with resistance to economic modernization. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 378-80 | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2009, 01:46 PM Mark Twain recorded many of these barbs during his 1897 visit: "You belong in a gin mill." "You Judas!" "Brothel-knight!" "East-German offal-tub!" "Infamous louse-brat!" "Street arab!" "Contemptible cub!" "Pimp!" "Blatherskite!" "You Jew, you!" "Drunken clown!" "Brothel-daddy!" "Which is the hardest, a Pole's skull or a German's?" "Polish dog!" (this last epithet addressed to the nobleman whom the emperor had appointed head of Parliament) .21 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 386-87 | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2009, 01:47 PM Like other great talkers-Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth, H. L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker in the twentieth-he found the line between prudence and sarcasm hard to draw. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 443-47 | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2009, 10:31 PM During Schumpeter's university years, the work of Karl Marx and his socialist apostles hovered in the background almost everywhere, even though it prevailed almost nowhere. More than any other economist before Schumpeter himself, Marx had emphasized the dynamics of capitalism-its ever-changing nature whose only music was uproar. That was Marx's greatest contribution, and it had a potent influence on Schumpeter. But Marx went on to draw groundless conclusions about what he called the "inevitable" results of capitalism. His predictions about "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "withering away of the state" never came to pass. Even so, Marxism exerted a check on more orthodox theories. It posed a body of doctrine against which to measure rival approaches. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 505-9 | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2009, 10:38 PM The Austrian School as a whole later became known for its spirited opposition to socialism and other forms of government interference in economic affairs. Schumpeter always regarded himself as a conservative, but he never opposed public interventions to the extreme degree of Mises, Hayek, and other members of the Austrian School. Instead, he soaked up insights from all leading approaches: the Classical School, the German Historical School, the Austrian School, and the analysis of capitalism by Marx. And in the end, it was not the classical economists who developed the most thorough and accurate analysis of capitalism. Nor was it Karl Marx, nor members of the German Historical School, nor Carl Menger, nor the British neoclassicists. The key figure was Schumpeter himsel£20 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 511-15 | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2009, 10:38 PM He rooted his own theories in the overriding fact that capitalism is more than just an economic system. As he wrote in 1914, "The reality of which we think when using this term [capitalism] has of course been the subject of very different interpretations: not only scientific, political, and ethical, but different interpretations even within the realm of science, flowing from sociology, social psychology, analysis of culture, and history." Schumpeter managed to synthesize broad lessons from all these disciplines into a coherent, full-fledged theory of capitalism. But that task took him many years to complete; and in the meantime he continued his ambitious but impossible struggle to achieve "exact economics," primarily through the use of mathematics.2' ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 765-68 | Added on Sunday, December 06, 2009, 03:14 PM This key insight, even though it resonates with the experience of nearly all businesspeople, has seldom been embraced by academic economists. The reason for its rejection is that, unlike the idea of equilibrium, the phenomenon of entrepreneurship is almost impossible to "model" through the use of equations yielding mathematical proof. Thus, even though academic economists have moved beyond the steady state, they have paid little attention to the entrepreneur, even to this day.6 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 773-76 | Added on Sunday, December 06, 2009, 03:15 PM Moving into psychological speculations-and beyond the disciplinary boundaries of almost all prior work in economics-Schumpeter next turns to the motivation of entrepreneurs. Here again he shows the kind of insight that, however imaginative, is not amenable to mathematical measurement: "The typical entrepreneur is more self-centered than other types, because he relies less than they do on tradition and connection and because his characteristic task-theoretically as well as historically-consists precisely in breaking up old, and creating new, tradition."9 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 778-83 | Added on Sunday, December 06, 2009, 03:16 PM Schumpeter's entrepreneur is not driven solely by a wish to grow rich or by any other "motivation of the hedonist kind." Instead, he or she feels "the dream and the will to found a private kingdom"-usually a family business dynasty. "Then there is the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself ... Finally, there is the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one's energy and ingenuity . . . Our type seeks out difficulties, changes in order to change, delights in ventures." The Schumpeterian entrepreneur has some characteristics in common with Max Weber's "charismatic" leader but falls short of the "superman" portrayed by Friedrich Nietzsche.10 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 799-803 | Added on Monday, December 07, 2009, 01:57 AM Schumpeter suggests that firms often must take steps to build demand for their products. "The spontaneity of [human] wants is small." Thus, it is "the producer who as a rule initiates economic change, and consumers are educated by him if necessary; they are, as it were, taught to want new things, or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using. Therefore, while it is permissible and even necessary to consider consumers' wants as an independent and indeed the fundamental force in a theory of the circular flow, we must take a different attitude as soon as we analyze change."15 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 807-13 | Added on Monday, December 07, 2009, 01:58 AM He specifies five types of innovation that define the entrepreneurial act. To quote his list directly: (1) The introduction of a new good-that is one with which consumers are not yet familiar-or of a new quality of a good. (z) The introduction of a new method of production, that is one not yet tested by experience in the branch of manufacture concerned. (3) The opening of a new market, that is a market into which the particular branch of manufacture of the country in question has not previously entered, whether or not this market has existed before. (4) The conquest of a new source of supply of raw materials or half-manufactured goods, again irrespective of whether this source already exists or whether it has first to be created. (S) The carrying out of the new organization of any industry, like the creation of a monopoly position (for example through trustification) or the breaking up of a monopoly position." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 819-21 | Added on Monday, December 07, 2009, 02:00 AM The Oxford English Dictionary defines capital as "accumulated wealth reproductively employed." That is a wonderful definition. But capitalism is something else again, because it relies so heavily on credit-wealth that has not yet been accumulated. Credit must be created out of nothing but future expectations, which is a basic reason why capitalism, of all economic systems, is so distinctly oriented toward the future. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1085-89 | Added on Monday, December 07, 2009, 01:07 PM But assuming that this did not happen, the state would become an entity whose functions reached far beyond military action. In this new setting, "Taxes were no longer raised merely for the purposes for which the prince had asked them" but also for nonmilitary functions such as free public education. Under wise management, the state could even reduce tax rates in such a way that tax revenues increased-entrepreneurial profit being "the premium which capitalism attaches to innovation." Ever the Anglophile, Schumpeter cited William E. Gladstone and the younger William Pitt as exemplars in shaping good tax policies." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1262-64 | Added on Monday, December 07, 2009, 04:42 PM Because Austria's return to economic health required a more favorable balance of trade, Schumpeter found the trend toward world protectionism especially disturbing. Speaking to the Austrian League of Nations Club in 1922, he said that the League must fight high tariffs not only for economic reasons but to minimize the chance of another war. "In a capitalistic world, free trade is the cement which holds together the idea of peace."20 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1602 | Added on Wednesday, December 09, 2009, 03:07 PM A conviction that spiritual life suffered grievous damage if people became immersed in materialism. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1618-22 | Added on Wednesday, December 09, 2009, 03:09 PM Even today, the human impulse that lies behind this tendency has extraordinary power. Most people, consciously or not, regard their jobs as a type of personal property. In much of the contemporary world, even the capitalist world, it remains very difficult to fire employees. Owners or managers who undertake to lay people off do so at the risk of their own safety, or even their lives. (If this sounds like an exaggeration, ask someone from India, Mexico, or some other country where layoffs are difficult or impossible.) In a global context, the American tradition of freedom to fire people, which in law is called "employment at will," represents the exception, not the rule. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1628-29 | Added on Wednesday, December 09, 2009, 03:10 PM A primitive financial system that lacked paper money, stocks, bonds, or any other credit mechanism. This was a particularly telling reason for the late arrival of capitalism, and a key to why Schumpeter laid such heavy emphasis on the creation of credit. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1648-50 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 05:38 AM As early as 1911 Schumpeter had flatly asserted in The Theory of Economic Development that individual entrepreneurship held the key to economic growth in any country. And he recognized that the freer a system became-the more rights a government guaranteed to individuals-then the greater the opportunity for unfettered entrepreneurship and therefore the higher the potential for economic growth. In this sense he was an early messenger of the connection between capitalism and personal freedom. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1714-19 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 05:44 AM One of the hallmarks of first-rate economic theorists is their ability to present a stripped-down model of reality without losing its essence-and by this measure Keynes was Schumpeter's superior. As Einstein once put it, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." And with a different take on the same issue, T. S. Eliot observed that "Anyone can carve a goose if there are no bones." When Schumpeter took up a subject such as money, he insisted on working with the whole goose, bones and all. He knew so much about so many things that he sometimes lost sight of the "simple as possible" part of Einstein's dictum. Schumpeter wanted to create an "exact" economics for money and other complex subjects. But often there were just too many variables, and he was unwilling to give them up-no matter how hard he had to work to include them.13 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1722-24 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 05:45 AM Schumpeter once wrote to a former student of his, "My model [of entrepreneurship] may seem fuzzy and difficult to handle mathematically but it is real and you can see it. The Keynesian determinants (so-called) are a paper screen interposed between the student and ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1769-71 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 02:37 PM The united proletarian conscience of class is only a utopian idea, with little connection to reality." Skilled and unskilled workers think in very different ways, and skilled workers in particular have a real stake in the new social and economic order. It is the untrained laborer who is more likely to become politically radical and whose future attitude is least predictable.24 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1784-88 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 02:39 PM Most strikingly, he argues that class status at any given moment is the result of prior events, and is therefore likely to be out of date. Thus, much of the existing social order at any particular time "can be explained only by the survival of elements that are actually alien to its own trends." The original unit of classes was the family, and the most common path into a higher class-for individuals or families-was "a single-minded marriage policy pursued over centuries." The industrial revolution made this kind of marriage policy more difficult but by no means put an end to it.27 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1799-1802 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 02:41 PM This is very hard to do, Schumpeter concedes. Most successful people, especially once they become wealthy, do not want to continue obsessing over economic growth. They come to abhor the relentless demands of continuous innovation. They want to enjoy themselves and live a better-rounded life. For these reasons, great enterprises typically outgrow the abilities of founding families to sustain a position at the top of their industries. "Mere husbanding of already existing resources, no matter how painstaking, is always characteristic of a declining position."31 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1822-26 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 02:44 PM None of this, Schumpeter adds, can be explained in the usual economists' terms of equilibrium. Instead, innovation requires continuous disequilibrium-led by entrepreneurs obsessed with what they are doing. Innovation itself is primarily "a feat not of intellect, but of will ... a special case of the social phenomenon of leadership." The barriers to innovation consist of "the resistances and uncertainties incident to doing what has not been done before." These difficulties are often immense, and to surmount them "is the function characteristic of the entrepreneur."39 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1918-23 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 06:15 PM To this day, the achievements of capitalist business owe much to the adoption of such standards as horsepower for engines, sizes for cuts of lumber, thicknesses for sheets of steel, and safety regulations for electrical equipment. The United States adopted two-by-fours in the construction industry, the label UL (Underwriters' Laboratories) in electrical appliances, and SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) for grades of motor oil, to name just a few. In the absence of standards, many routine operations that everyone takes for granted-shifting gears in a car, tuning radios to AM and FM stations, operating a computer-would be almost impossible. Standards can be used to exclude new companies from an industry, but on the whole they have benefited producers and consumers across the board. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1953-57 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 07:52 PM On the touchy issue of personal income taxes, Schumpeter argues that they are justified but have been set too high. In his view, income taxes are effective only if they stay low enough to be accepted by society as a whole. During hard times, if a tax takes away a quarter or a fifth of someone's income, then it becomes destructive-inhibiting investment, diminishing consumption, and encouraging tax evasion. This is exactly what had happened in Germany during the i zos. By today's standards, of course, these tax rates appear low, but at the time they were extremely high. When Schumpeter moved from Germany to the United States, his own income tax rate dropped from 25 percent to about 4 percent, even though his new salary was much higher.20 He also warns against the excessive use ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 1976-79 | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2009, 07:54 PM In 1924 the director of the Reich Economic Council, a leading business group, said, "We do not need to follow the `like it or lump it' policy of the Americans in the area of social policy, which is simply `work or you die.' In America there is no social welfare policy at all. We certainly don't want that." On the other hand, "We need foreign credit, and the outside world asks: what are you going to do with the credit? We cannot afford things they cannot afford."26 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2222-27 | Added on Sunday, December 13, 2009, 11:06 AM Schumpeter lectured to great acclaim all over Japan. His appearances attracted blanket coverage by the Japanese media (Radiobombardement, as he called it), on a scale that is hard to imagine for any academic today. Japan itself fascinated him. "Here is a culture," he wrote Gustav and Toni Stolper, "that thinks of itself not only as an equal to ours, but superior, and is ready to adapt any technical devices, but nothing else." In particular, the Japanese aesthetic sense appealed to Schumpeter, and he told the Stolpers that he was sorry to have had so little time for sightseeing. Actually, he visited shrines in Tokyo, Hakone, Nara, Kobe, Nikko, and the ancient city of Kyoto, where he was taken with the serene architecture of Japanese temples-many of which, like his favorite European cathedrals, were hundreds of years old.16 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2755-60 | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 05:20 PM Elizabeth Schumpeter shared her husband's doubts about the wisdom of certain policies. Both Schumpeters accepted that the Nazis could be defeated only with help from the Soviet Union, yet they both regarded the Soviets as a more formidable long-term threat to world stability than either the Germans or Japanese. Elizabeth, as one of very few Americans not of Asian descent who had a deep knowledge of Japan's economy, foresaw with great clarity what would happen in the event of a war in the Pacific. During the late 193os and right up to the moment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, she warned of Japan's growing industrial strength. She coauthored a book on Japan, and in numerous articles she predicted that a Pacific war was likely to be long, ruthless, and ultimately advantageous to the Soviet Union. But most Americans still regarded Japan as weak and remote, and her forecasts were dismissed-until December 7, 1941. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2779-86 | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 05:23 PM I wish to state right now that if, starting my work in economics afresh, I were told that I could study only one of the three but could have my choice, it would be economic history that I should choose. And this on three grounds. First, the subject matter of economics is essentially a unique process in historic time. Nobody can hope to understand the economic phenomena of any, including the present, epoch who has not an adequate command of his- toricalfacts and an adequate amount of historical sense or of what may be described as historical experience. Second, the historical report cannot be purely economic but must inevitably reflect also "institutional" facts that are not purely economic: therefore it affords the best method for understanding how economic and non-economic facts are related to one another and how the various social sciences should be related to one another. Third, it is, I believe, the fact that most of the fundamental errors currently committed in economic analysis are due to lack of historical experience more often than to any other shortcoming of the economist's equip- ment.3 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2810-17 | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 05:26 PM This is true enough. But Schumpeter's approach to cycles veers perilously close to historical determinism. In his pursuit of a more exact economics, he attempts the hopeless task of fitting historical patterns of business booms and busts into predictable wave periods of standard lengths. "Barring very few cases in which difficulties arise," he writes, "it is possible to count off, historically as well as statistically, six Juglars [8-io year cycles] to a Kondratieff [5o-6o years] and three Kitchins [40 months] to a Juglar-not as an average but in every individual case."5 Clement Juglar, Joseph Kitchin, and Nikolai Kondratieff were prominent business cycle theorists. References to their work appear hundreds of times in Schumpeter's text and make it extremely difficult to read. Here is a representative sentence: "Both crises [the downturns of 1826 and 1836] occurred when, taking the Juglar and the Kondratieff phase together, we should be prepared to find major dips in prices and values: a Juglar recession on a Kondratieff depression forms the background of the one, and a Juglar depression on a Kondratieff revival, the background of the other." Paul Samuelson later commented that the book's arguments "began to smack of Pythagorean moonshine."6 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2829-31 | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 05:27 PM (Ida Tarbell's History ofthe Standard Oil Company, 1904), individual businessmen (Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, 1934), and entire industries (Upton Sinclair's The jungle, 19o6, on meatpacking; Louis D. Brandeis's Other People's Money, 1914, on banking). Books and articles on business, both pro and con, had some merit, especially literary merit, since they were narratives complete with plots and memorable characters. But most portraits were painted in stark hues of good versus evil and, at least in the United States, were largely bereft of theory.10 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2834-36 | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 05:28 PM The core of Business Cycles is its copious detail about the flowering of business systems in Britain, Germany, and especially the United States. Schumpeter focuses on companies in five industries that led economic development: cotton textiles, railroads, steel, automobiles, and electric power. He also emphasizes three institutional innovations crucial to the rise of capitalism: the factory, the corporation, and the modern financial system. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2844-47 | Added on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 05:30 PM Schumpeter next turns his attention to the main protagonist of the system, the entrepreneur (or "New Man") and to the entrepreneur's necessary companion, "Profit." He concedes that in some situations it is hard to identify the entrepreneur. In the real world of business, "nobody ever is an entrepreneur all the time, and nobody can ever be only an entrepreneur." Particularly in large firms, the entrepreneur often not only innovates but also carries out day-to-day management.14 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2856-60 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 08:46 AM Thus, a new firm's intrusion into an existing industry always entails "warring with an `old' sphere," which tries to prohibit, discredit, or otherwise restrict the advantage afforded to the new firm by its innovation. But whatever may happen in a particular case, every entrepreneur's high profit is temporary, because competitors will copy the innovation, causing market prices to fall. This sequence of cutting prices, which Schumpeter calls "competing down," is observable in all industries except those protected by government monopoly. Competing down may take several years and is often hard for contemporaries to see. But one way or another, competing down always happens, and it is why Schumpeter seldom worried about price-fixing by monopolies, other than those sponsored or propped up by governments (as many firms had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire)." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2883-84 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 08:48 AM Schumpeter places heavy emphasis on the role of marketing in mass consumption and in economic growth itself. "It was not enough to produce satisfactory soap," he writes, "it was also necessary to induce people to wash-a social function of advertisement that is often inadequately appreciated."" ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2898-2900 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 08:49 AM In describing the industrial revolution-and in probing the nature of change, which is the heart of his thesis-Schumpeter draws sharp distinctions between inventors and entrepreneurs, and between inventions and innovations: "The making of the invention and the carrying out of the corresponding innovation are, economically and sociologically, two entirely different things." Often the two interact, but they are never the same, and innovations are usually more important than inventions.30 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2939-42 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 08:53 AM Meanwhile, the multitude of construction programs undertaken by railroads stimulated a host of other industries. "Everything else," Schumpeter writes, "turned on the roads and was either created or conditioned by them." Railroads vastly increased the use of coal, iron, steel, machinery, and petroleum-based lubricants and fuel. Across the continent, railroads created new communities of all sizes, from small junctions to vast new industrial centers. Chicago was a child of the railroads, as were Omaha, Fort Worth, Denver, and thousands of smaller towns. Even established manufacturing cities such as Pittsburgh once more mushroomed.43 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2944-48 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 05:59 PM At that point, railroading became part of the general business "organism," as Schumpeter calls it, with "mutual dependence" all around. This was typical of capitalist evolution. "The more an innovation becomes established, the more it loses the character of an innovation and the more it begins to follow impulses, instead of giving them." Railroad mergers and refinancings occurred "by way of spectacular struggles between controlling groups." The shakeout appeared to the general public in the form of "freight wars, cutthroat competition, discrimination, and the evils of unregulated enterprise." But the real story was one of "consolidation, efficient administration, and sound finance, thus ushering in the last step of America's railroadization."44 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2974-75 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 06:02 PM The separation of ownership from control created opportunities for talented managers to climb the corporate ladder and lead great enterprises. At the same time, the secondary market for corporate shares, run by stock exchanges, allowed holders of stocks and bonds to convert their investments into cash at a time of their own choosing.52 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 2980-83 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 06:03 PM From 1897 through 1904, 4,227 American companies merged into 257 large entities. Many of their names, along with those of companies expanding internally, are still familiar today: Goodyear, Pepsico, General Dynamics, Kellogg, Gillette, Monsanto, 3M, Texaco. This movement would not have occurred without the completed railroad network, which created the first truly national markets. Through mergers, acquisitions, and internal growth, entrepreneurs sought to stabilize prices and reduce what contemporaries called "cutthroat competition ."14 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3030-34 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 06:08 PM Schumpeter pointed out that "one essential peculiarity of the working of the capitalist system is that it imposes sequences and rules of timing." Nearly every company that could benefit from electric power now had to innovate, whether it wished to or not. Schumpeter emphasized this point repeatedly, and for many industries. Electricity provided the heat necessary to refine copper and aluminum ores. Electric motors spun and wove textiles, pumped water from mines, milled lumber with high-speed saws, and shaped metal with power drills and stamping machines. "For success in capitalist society," Schumpeter argues, "it is not sufficient to be right in abstracto; one must be right at given dates." Much of the success enjoyed by individual entrepreneurs came down to their talent for seizing the opportunities of the moment.68 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Bookmark Loc. 3040 | Added on Thursday, December 17, 2009, 06:10 PM "Capitalist evolution spells disturbance," Schumpeter emphasizes again and again. "Capitalism ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3040-43 | Added on Friday, December 18, 2009, 09:53 AM "Capitalist evolution spells disturbance," Schumpeter emphasizes again and again. "Capitalism is essentially a process of (endogenous) [sic] economic change." In the absence of change, "capitalist society cannot exist." If the capitalist engine stalls, the economic system will disintegrate. And the key that starts the engine and keeps it running is innovation: "Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions-of `progress'-is the only one in which capitalism can survive." Hence there must be constant change, generated from within. "In this sense," Schumpeter concludes, "stabilized capitalism is a contradiction in terms."7' ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3115-17 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 06:13 PM None of this was accidental. During the years when Keynes was writing The General Theory, he tried out his ideas again and again within his elite circle of young economists at Cambridge University. He incorporated their many insights, particularly those of Richard Kahn, who practically invented the idea of the multiplier effect, so crucial to Keynes's argument. Meanwhile, Keynes discarded some of his own wrong-headed arguments and excess verbiage. Schumpeter, working almost alone, never ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3199-3201 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 06:20 PM Like many other Germans, Mia and some members of her family (not all) initially welcomed Hitler's ascent to power. They hoped that their country might somehow throw off the yoke of Versailles and recover its dignity and prosperity. The world's quick condemnation not only of Hitler but also of the German people angered Mia and increased her prejudice against Jews. In one letter to Schumpeter she described a social occasion that "could have converted you to anti-Semitism forever. "12 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3450-52 | Added on Sunday, December 20, 2009, 07:43 PM The solution was not in hiring still more faculty, nor in any "democratization of appointments." In a revealing comment, Schumpeter wrote that "happiness and contentment in academic life can only come from intellectual achievement, and stressing this (if necessary by instituting formal proof of scientific performance as a condition to promotion) and reducing the number of appointments to the number of the people that are up to the standard seem to me the only way out of present difficulties."6 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3587-94 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 06:55 AM Today, Roosevelt is widely regarded as the greatest American president of the twentieth century. He entered office in 1933, when the United States faced economic catastrophe. His New Deal program, enacted during the first five years of his administration, dealt almost entirely with domestic affairs arising from the Great Depression.' Wealthy Americans turned bitterly against the New Deal because of Roosevelt's innovative economic measures. They included a complex series of securities laws, which were absolutely essential in bringing Wall Street and the capital markets under effective public regulation; the Wealth Tax Act of 1935, which increased income taxes on corporations and high individual earners; and a significant inheritance tax, the first in the nation's history. While the rich fumed against "that man" in the White House, the canny Roosevelt found a way to exploit their hostility. In his brilliant and successful campaign for reelection in 1936, he denounced them as "economic royalists." And in an election-eve speech at Madison Square Garden in New York, he told his frenzied audience that the rich "are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred." (Roosevelt was capable of demagoguery, although he seldom used it. The Madison Square Garden speech upset even Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady.) ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3599-3601 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 06:56 AM The New Deal did not solve any of the nation's leading problems: the economy, the structural unfairness to working people, the racism, or the severe poverty in particular regions of the country. But it ameliorated all of these problems. Both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, though born into wealth and social prominence, seemed to a majority of Americans to be humane friends who cared about them personally. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3648-54 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 03:38 PM The American banking system, because of its extreme decentralization, was "by far the weakest in the world." Most countries counted their banks by the scores or the hundreds and encouraged multiple branches. By contrast, America's historic suspicion of centralized power had prevented financial concentration; and interstate banking and branch banking were still illegal in most states. At the time of the 1929 crash, there were about thirty thousand independent American banks, the great majority of them small and bereft of sufficient reserves.21 About seven thousand of these banks failed during the short period from 1931 to 1933, bringing financial ruin to millions of citizens. The result for public opinion, said Schumpeter, was a mass indictment of the whole economic system: "Capitalism stood condemned to a point where it was hardly possible to present to any audience in 1933 a dispassionate view of events ... anything that did not end in a condemnation of the system was out of court when the New Deal came. I am not criticizing this frame of mind of the American people and many other people; I am only drawing your attention to it."22 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3664-67 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 03:39 PM Taking aim at the policy of economic sanctions against aggressive countries, Schumpeter said, "Never was there a more unfortunate idea." For one thing, sanctions compelled nations to pursue autarchy (economic self-sufficiency). In so doing, they reduced international trade, which in itself was a powerful force for peace and continuous diplomatic engagement. Severe sanctions against the Japanese, for example, had led them to develop their own supplies of raw materials and to seek new sources through further aggression. "This almost childish belief that so many people hold ... that by means of managing raw materials you can force foreign nations to their knees, has been a boon to autarchists, militarists, and dictators all over the world."25 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3682-84 | Added on Tuesday, December 22, 2009, 03:41 PM career" over the long term. This could be fatal to the nation's democracy. "The American who sees these possibilities and expects to avoid them in case the country embarks on a prolonged war is an optimist. The American who sees them but says from moral considerations that nevertheless he is going to enter upon the course he thinks is right is a saint. The American who does not see these dangers is a fool."29 Despite his pessimistic tone, Schumpeter ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3925-28 | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2009, 05:40 PM year, from September to June, he taught his classes on economic theory, business cycles, and the history of economic thought. He usually held one class session per day, six days a week. (Saturdays were not yet holidays at American universities.) Even though he often taught the same courses in successive years, he never gave the same lecture twice, either then or at any other time during his career. This kind of fresh attention to teaching is rare in academic life. Many professors speak from old dog-eared drafts year after year, with minimal changes.7 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 3984-86 | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2009, 05:46 PM Marx had "no adequate theory of enterprise." He failed to "distinguish the entrepreneur from the capitalist." He had no tenable conception of big business. His system did not deal effectively with business cycles. And, like the classical economists, he usually thought in terms of what came to be called "perfect competition."7 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4030-33 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 12:03 PM But because it neglects the dynamics of creative destruction, Schumpeter finds perfect competition wholly unsuitable for understanding a modern capitalist economy. When, for example, a new product or process is introduced, all buyers and sellers cannot possibly have complete information about potential markets. As a matter of fact," Schumpeter writes, "perfect competition is and always has been temporarily suspended whenever anything new is being introduced." And the continual emergence of new products and new ways of doing things is "the fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4051-56 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 12:04 PM The reader of these passages should make no mistake about the radical nature of what Schumpeter is asserting. He is indicting his own economics profession for what amounts to a capital crime: failing to acknowledge that continuous innovation is "endogenous to" (inherent in) capitalism. If this one conceptual alteration were adopted in orthodox economics, then a whole series of methodological shifts would ensue. To the extent that economists become more focused on change, they would pay more attention to the record of change. They would have to pursue a much more thorough investigation of economic and business history, as Schumpeter himself had done in Business Cycles. And against that historical background, they would recognize that large-scale units of control were not merely to be tolerated as necessary evils. Instead, they would see big businesses as part and parcel of "the most powerful engine of [economic] progress and in particular of the long-run expansion of total output" that the world had ever witnessed.24 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4090-93 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 12:06 PM In modern capitalism, the substitution of a share of stock for tangible assets "takes the life out of the idea of property." And if this trend goes on long enough, "there will be nobody left" to defend bourgeois values with vigor and determination. Also, large businesses do not command the same degree of loyalty from their workers as proprietorships and partnerships. Employees take economic progress for granted, but they have little emotional attachment to the success of their companies, or of the capitalist system as a whole. As replaceable cogs in a large wheel of enterprise, they feel personally insecure.34 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4108-12 | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2009, 12:08 PM No serious threat to capitalism had appeared earlier in the United States, Schumpeter explains, because "the scheme of values that arose from the national task of developing the economic possibilities of [the U.S.] drew nearly all the brains into business and impressed the businessman's attitudes upon the soul of the nation." The lackluster quality of American presidents in the late nineteenth century corroborates his point. Between 1865 and 19oi, forgettable men such as Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur occupied the White House, while the entrepreneurial leadership of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and many others left its mark on American history. But by the 1940s the era of "drawing all the brains into business" had long since passed.39 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4243-48 | Added on Sunday, December 27, 2009, 02:00 AM "Modern democracy rose along with capitalism, and in causal connection with it."" Therefore, when socialists argue that bourgeois democracy is fraudulent, they are being "absurd." This was true even during crises such as the Great Depression, when authoritarian regimes actually did a better job of combatting unemployment and restoring prosperity. But that record was a mere historical detail. Even under the handicap of economic stress, bourgeois democracy was remarkable in "how wide and equal the opportunities it offered ... how large the personal freedom it granted to those who passed its tests ... and how well it functioned, when faced by demands that were outside of and hostile to the bourgeois interests." As a matter of logic, bourgeois democracy is preferable to socialism, because "it is easier for a class whose interests are best served by being left alone to practice democratic self-restraint than it is for classes that naturally try to live on the state. "71 ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 493-508 | Added on Sunday, December 27, 2009, 12:03 PM This began to change, however, with the rise to power of the Turkish sultan Nûr al-Dîn, who unified the various peoples of Syria. The tide turned entirely in favor of the Muslim resistance under his successor, Yûsuf Salâh al-Dîn, or simply 'Saladin,' as he is known in the West. Saladin united all the Muslim peoples from Syria to Egypt and mobilized their collective resistance. His armies recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. "Militarily, politically, and in every other way, Saladin was the most successful leader of the period. His successes were so surprising and total that historians sometimes invoke luck and good fortune to explain them. However, as I have studied Saladin, I am convinced he succeeded in war for a much deeper reason; a reason that won't seem at first to be related to war at all." "What?" Pettis asked. "What reason?" "To understand it," Yusuf answered, "we need to get a better feel for the man. Let me tell you a story. On one occasion, an army scout came to Saladin with a sobbing woman from the enemy camp. She had requested, hysterically, that the scout take her to Saladin. She threw herself before Saladin, and said, 'Yesterday some Muslim thieves entered my tent and stole my little girl. I cried all through the night, believing I would never see her again. But our commanders told me that you, the king of the Muslims, are merciful.' She begged for his help. "Saladin was moved to tears. He immediately sent one of his men to the slave market to look for the girl. They located her within the hour and returned her to her mother, whom they then escorted back to the enemy camp." Yusuf paused for a moment. "If you were to research Saladin, you would discover that this story is characteristic. He was renowned for his kindness toward allies and enemies alike." "I'm not sure those who died at the end of his army's swords thought him kind," Elizabeth interjected. "But I agree that in comparison to others of the period, he did shine a little brighter." ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 564-66 | Added on Sunday, December 27, 2009, 12:06 PM "The secret of Saladin's success in war," Yusuf answered, "was that his heart was at peace." This was too much for Lou. "'Heart at peace' you say, Yusuf?" he asked with an edge to his voice. "That's your secret— that Saladin's heart was at peace?" ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 571-74 | Added on Sunday, December 27, 2009, 12:06 PM "Yes, Lou," Yusuf answered unflinchingly. "And not just in war. It is the secret to success in business and family life as well. The state of your heart toward your children—whether at peace or at war—is by far the most important factor in this intervention we are now undertaking. It is also what will most determine your ability to successfully maneuver your company through the challenges created by your recent defections." ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 776-78 | Added on Monday, December 28, 2009, 01:32 PM Lou felt blindsided. He was about to pounce when Avi interrupted. "Hearts at war, that's what we're talking about," he said. "Gwyn, Lou, Carol, Miguel, Ria, the rest of us—do you feel what I mean? How are we seeing each other—right now? As allies? As enemies? These are warring feelings." ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 975-87 | Added on Monday, December 28, 2009, 10:31 PM "I think I must have forgotten to set the brake," he blurted. "It's in the river, Dad. The car is in the river! I'm so sorry," he said, bursting into sobs. "I'm so sorry!" What happened next seared itself so deeply into Lou's memory he was sure that should he ever get Alzheimer's or some similar disease, this would be the last memory to leave him. He remembered trembling while waiting for his father to respond. His father didn't turn to him but still sat holding the newspaper wide before him. He then slowly reached his left hand to the top corner of the right-hand page and turned it to continue reading. And then he said it, the sentence Lou would never forget. He said, "Well, I guess you'll have to take the truck then." As Lou remembered this, he sat stunned anew. There had been no retribution, no lecture, no visible anger. Just, "Well, I guess you'll have to take the truck then." Lou realized in this moment that his father's heart was at peace toward Lou, a peace so powerful that it couldn't be interrupted even by a provocation so great as the sudden loss of a hard-earned car. Perhaps in his wisdom he knew Lou was now the last person who would ever put another car into the river. Perhaps in that instant he divined that a lecture would serve no purpose, and to start one would only hurt an already hurting son. An already hurting son. Lou reeled at the thought. He had one of those too but had rarely spared the lecture. What have I become? he wondered silently. Why do I turn so quickly to war? ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1203-14 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 01:02 AM "Descartes acquired those words, and the ability to think with them, from others. Which is to say, he did not conjure them from a separate, individualized I. "Consider what this means for Descartes' theory," he continued. "There is a kind of brute fact that just is—the fact of being in the world with others. Descartes was able to postulate that the separate self was what was most fundamental only because he acquired language in a world with others." "Ah," Elizabeth interjected, "so being in the world with others, and not the idea of a separate self, is what is fundamental. Is that what you are suggesting?" "Exactly," Avi agreed. "Descartes' foundational assumption is disproved by the conditions that made it possible for him to state it in the first place. So Heidegger, among others," he continued, "with his attack on individualism, shifted the focus of the philosophical world away from the separate self and onto the idea of being with others. "A contemporary of Heidegger named Martin Buber, whom I mentioned this morning, agreed with Heidegger that way of being in the world is what is most fundamental to human experience. He observed that there are basically two ways of being in the world: we can be in the world seeing others as people or we can be in the world seeing others as objects. He called the first way of being the I-Thou way and the second the I-It way, and he argued that we are always, in every moment, being either I-Thou or I-It—seeing others as people or seeing others as objects. ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1410-13 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 01:10 AM "So notice," Yusuf continued, "when I betray myself, others' faults become immediately inflated in my heart and mind. I begin to 'horribilize' others. That is, I begin to make them out to be worse than they really are. And I do this because the worse they are, the more justified I feel. A needy man on the street suddenly represents a threat to my very peace and freedom. A person to help becomes an object to blame." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4365-68 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 01:24 AM Eastern Europe but also what he called "Ethical Imperialism" by the British and Americans. In the theaters of war where they were victorious, he expected them to impose "a world order of this kind in which the interests and ambitions of other nations would count only as far as understood and approved by England and the United States." He also foresaw that the maintenance of this order would require "permanent readiness to use military force"-which would be something new in American history but which actually occurred after World War II.12 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4507-10 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 01:32 AM War profiteering by private firms was held to a minimum by the threat of severe penalties for violations. Because the evils of the Nazi regime were so abhorrent, because the country had been attacked by Japan, and because the message of patriotism was so effectively put forth by the Office of War Information (which did not hesitate to use racism to demonize Japan), the American people were united as never before or since.40 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4854-58 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 01:55 AM Here, in his typically pioneering way, Schumpeter almost perfectly anticipated what later became known as the mixed economy. That kind of system-private enterprise leavened by the public sector's assumption of responsibility for prosperity-became the norm in advanced industrialized countries during the years after World War II. It remains so to this day. But despite Schumpeter's comment in 1943, neither he nor most other analysts believed that the mixed economy would have long-term staying power. They tended to assume that all systems would gravitate toward either traditional capitalism or pure socialism. Somewhat like Marx's division of society into only two warring classes, Schumpeter (and many others) found it hard to imagine that there could be a long-term compromise between the two systems. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4907-13 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 10:30 AM He began by saying that arguments in favor of socialism all seemed to rest on economic criteria such as capitalism's exploitation of workers; but that the facts belied these arguments. As he had pointed out many times, real wages for workers in capitalist countries had been rising for decades, interrupted only by depressions. They had held steady as a percentage of national income except in down cycles, and their percentage had increased in Western democracies with progressive income tax systems. It was natural enough that socialist thinking had thrived during the Great Depression. But it no longer made sense "when we can look forward to prodigious industrial development." Arguments based on the class struggle were particularly inappropriate because modern businessmen do not usually own their own capital-as both Adam Smith and Karl Marx had believed, in "a profound error." Instead, the businessman's role "is comparable to the role of a military commander; the businessman is essentially a worker who is the leader of other workers." He has as much conflict with his own banker as with his workers.' ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4918-21 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 10:31 AM The doctrine of Quadragesimo Anno is what political theorists call "corporatism." Under this kind of system, voluntary associations in agriculture, industry, mining, construction, and labor organize to govern themselves and promote harmony within and among different groups-all in the broader interest of society. Historically, corporatism had been advocated most notably by Catholic theorists in the nineteenth century as an alternative to both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. Corporatism is much more consistent with capitalism than with socialism. But it imposes some limits on competition in order to soften the impact of creative destruction on human values, especially those of the family. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4955-59 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 11:03 AM He speculated that during the postwar years American affluence and example could ramify throughout the world. At a sufficiently high level of national income, a country could afford to be hospitable to business and at the same time pay for social welfare programs. If that country's economy were as large as America's, it could even lead the entire capitalist world back to full prosperity, like a powerful locomotive pulling a long train. To be sure, he saw several potential problems: high taxation in the United States, which had continued as a necessary means of paying for the war; the powerful inflationary forces that plague all countries after major wars; and what he regarded as the bureaucratic immaturity of America's federal 16 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 4990-95 | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 11:08 AM many of his writings suggest, one of his fondest wishes was to reach a minimal threshold of economic prosperity and get material issues settled once and for all. When that end-of-economic-history goal had been reached, then people could focus on the finer things of life and conduct themselves on a higher cultural plane. Schumpeter had no such illusions. He believed, as is evident from hundreds of comments he made throughout his life, that capitalism is a continuous evolutionary process without an end-point. Neither entrepreneurs nor consumers will ever be satisfied with their material lot. They will forever want more. Aspiration and desire are hard-wired into human beings, and the reasons for their striving are not based on what Schumpeter often called "hedonistic" motives alone. ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5049-53 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 12:36 AM Yet, by the early twenty-first century, all major democratic countries had enjoyed success with mixed economies for at least four decades, and some for as many as seven. In these countries, the total tax burden at all levels of government combined-local, state, and national-had ranged from about 25 percent to about 6o percent. The different percentages depended on the particular array of social services (retirement, health care, housing, child care) paid from public funds. Sweden and Holland typically had the highest rates, while Japan, Switzerland, and the United States recorded the lowest. This broad hybrid, then, appears to be the long-run outcome of what Schumpeter saw as the struggle in democratic countries between capitalism and socialism. Schumpeter's thinking during the 1940s ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5084-87 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 12:39 AM More than any other project he ever started, this one depended for its success on the selflessness and support of Elizabeth, in both sickness and health. For an entire decade, the Schumpeters were to spend most of their days together holed up in Taconic or secluded at Harvard Business School's Kress Library. Elizabeth very much wanted to work with her husband: "Since we cannot have a child, let's have this book together," he quotes her in his diary. "Why can't we have a child-many children?"-that is, many books.' ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5122-24 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 12:41 AM But in a sense, Schumpeter had been working on this book "all his life," as Elizabeth put it. "Even his reading for pleasure and recreation-he loved to read biographies, preferably those in many volumes-contributed to that fascinating knowledge of men, events, and backgrounds which is apparent throughout the History." The research became an avocation in addition to a scholarly task.' ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5243-46 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 09:25 AM Throughout his History, Schumpeter is at pains not only to lampoon bad work but also to credit good work, regardless of its source. The test is analytical validity, not motive. "The most stubborn class interest may induce true and valuable analysis, the most disinterested motive may lead to nothing but error and triviality." Motives make no difference, and it is dangerous even to raise the question. "The only mind accessible to us is our own. In talking about motives of individuals we may be revealing nothing but our own propensities."" ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5258-61 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 09:26 AM Keynes's vision was based on his conception that British capitalism was growing old and feeble. And whether right or wrong, this vision of a bleak economic future preceded Keynes's development of his own formal system of economic analysis.43 Schumpeter says that all analysis begins with a distinct intuition that is almost inherently ideological. "It embodies the picture of things as we see them," and usually our way of seeing them "can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them." This is a dangerous situation for researchers, because it tends to limit the generality of their conclusions.44 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5291-94 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 09:29 AM Today, in the twenty-first century, many economists add entrepreneurship to the three factors of production as traditionally conceived: land, labor, and capital. That addition owes a very great deal to Schumpeter's own work. But large numbers of analysts still downplay the idea. Entrepreneurship is very difficult to measure, and virtually impossible to express mathematically. It therefore does not easily fit into formal models. As Schumpeter noted, entrepreneurial gains do not tend "toward equalization" because they "are not permanent returns at all." Instead, they emerge whenever an individual entrepreneur innovates in some important way-and then disappear as the innovation spreads. Meanwhile, they have contributed to general economic growth .14 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5376-78 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 09:32 AM Schumpeter's primary objection to Keynes's theories, Smithies continued, was that "in his opinion, Keynes, next to Marx, cultivated the intellectual soil in which anti-capitalist attitudes flourished." Keynes's worst flaw, in Schumpeter's view, was that "he made it intellectually respectable for other non-socialists to go further in an anti-capitalist direction than he had any inclination to go himself." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5381 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 09:32 AM Short-run inequity is the price that must be paid by the masses for the rising living standards that capitalism can achieve."70 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5574-77 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 02:50 PM Ironically, Schumpeter concluded, the persistence of ideological vision is not a bad thing but a good thing-because no new departure in any science would be possible without the vision that motivates scholars to do their work. "Through it we acquire new material for our scientific endeavors and something to formulate, to defend, to attack. Our stock of facts and tools grows and rejuvenates itself in the process. And so-though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all without them."35 At these closing words, the audience ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5674-76 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 03:49 PM Even before captive audiences of students, Smithies added, Schumpeter avoided any mention of his own writings. Also, "one of the many ironies in his life is that his ardent support of mathematics in economics drove his students away from the fields of intellectual endeavor that made his own work so significant, and produced many results that he considered sterile." 16 ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5682-85 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 03:50 PM Schumpeter's writings provided an ideal corrective to Keynes's fatal omission of innovation's important role in capitalist evolution. Conversely, Schumpeter's own shortcomings lay exactly in the areas that Keynes's theories illuminated-where consumption and investment could be considered as aggregates; where analysts could think in macroeconomic terms about the total output of national economies. This was especially ironic because Schumpeter himself had been one of the precursors of modern macroeconomic analysis, as Alvin Hansen wrote in another essay published in Schumpeter, Social Scientist. Hansen was both Schumpeter's friend and Keynes's chief American proponent." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5725-29 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 03:53 PM Schumpeter's signature legacy is his insight that innovation in the form of creative destruction is the driving force not only of capitalism but of material progress in general. Almost all businesses, no matter how strong they seem to be at a given moment, ultimately fail-and almost always because they failed to innovate. Competitors are relentlessly striving to overtake the leader, no matter how big the lead. Responsible businesspeople know that they ignore this lesson at their peril. Every day they feel themselves, as Schumpeter put it in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, "in a situation that is sure to change presently." They are "standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet." ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5788-92 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 03:58 PM What is it, for example, that drives innovation? Is it just the prospect of making money? Or, as Schumpeter had argued early in his career, is it something more than "motivation of the hedonist kind"? Schumpeter believed that the innovator-entrepreneur also had a "will to conquer ... Our type [a revealing choice of words that seems to include himself] seeks out difficulties, changes in order to change, delights in ventures." Several hundred case studies of innovation completed in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first confirmed Schumpeter's thesis. Just as forces besides money had motivated Carnegie, Thyssen, and Ford, the same was true of later entrepreneurs such as Akio Morita, Estee Lauder, Andy Grove, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Oprah Winfrey.'° ========== Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Thomas K. McCraw) - Highlight Loc. 5802-4 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 03:58 PM The profundity of Schumpeter's insight becomes evident when misguided leaders attempt to reverse this sequence. At the beginning of China's Cultural Revolution of the i96os, for example, Mao Zedong's guiding slogan was, "Destroy first, and construction will look after itself." This was the precise opposite of Schumpeterian creative destruction, and the result was catastrophic: the deaths of at least a million people, the uprooting of even more, and a long list of other calamities, including the devastation of the nation's ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2474-77 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 04:11 PM RECOVERING INNER CLARITY AND PEACE (FOUR PARTS) Getting out of the box Look for the signs of the box (blame, justification, horribilization, common box styles, etc.). Find an out-of-the-box place (out-of-the-box relationships, memories, activities, places, etc.). Ponder the situation anew (i.e., from this out-of-the-box perspective). ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2556-63 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 05:29 PM "So whatever brought you to the States?" Pettis asked. "Assassinations," Yusuf answered. "Assassinations?" Pettis recoiled. "Yes—of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Malcolm X in 1965. Their deaths made big headlines in the Arab world. The United States was not yet a vociferous ally of Israel, and I and my fellow Arabs looked to America with some bit of hope. I identified myself with the struggle of black Americans. Malcolm X, as a fellow believer in the Koran, intrigued me, and I knew a little about Martin Luther King. I was interested in the revolution that seemed to be taking place in America. With my own revolution in shambles, I began looking to the West. Less than a month after the war, I was making plans to go to the United States. I wanted to go to Harvard or Yale to get a degree." ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2696-2702 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 05:38 PM "Oh," she added after a moment, looking around at the rest of the group. "My father's favorite word was action." "'Action'?" Lou repeated. "Yes." "Why?" "I'm not entirely sure," she said. "But I bet Yusuf is." "I think I know why, yes," he responded. "I think it was your father's way of reminding himself that although he could get out of the box by finding an out-of-the-box place and pondering the situation anew, in order to stay out and away from the box, he had to execute a strategy. That is, he had to do something." "Do what?" Lou asked. "Something only he would know," Yusuf answered. ========== The Anatomy of Peace (The Arbinger Institute) - Highlight Loc. 3006-11 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 05:48 PM "From within the box, passions, beliefs, and personal needs seem to divide us. When we get out of the box, however, we learn that this has been a lie. Our passions, beliefs, and needs do not divide but unite: it is by virtue of our own passions, beliefs, and needs that we can see and understand others'. If we have beliefs we cherish, then we know how important others' beliefs must be to them. And if we have needs, then our own experience equips us to notice the needs of others. To scale Mount Moriah is to ascend a mountain of hope. At least it is if one climbs in a way that lifts his soul to an out-of-the-box summit—a place from where he sees not only buildings and homes but people as well. ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 37-44 | Added on Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 05:51 PM In all cases, money drives the engine of a university. Salaries at this place are not guaranteed by anybody. Even the tenured faculty get only a portion of their support from the state, so that the pressure to bring in funds from wherever is huge. That's how you have to live: on patient care, clinical research, basic research, what have you. And I would say that under those circumstances, money talks. So the degree to which it compromises the integrity of the institution or the individual-that's a tough call. I would like to believe that very little of it contaminates us, but I think there are plenty of people who say it's very difficult to resist being kind to the person who is paying your rent. I'm not aware of any major issues right now, either involving patient care or basic research, or in terms of abusing the postdocs and the graduate students. The watchdog activities, certainly the IRBs [institutional review boards] are quite good, and the regulations are getting tougher and tougher. I'm wondering if, in fact, it's not quite excessive. I think it inhibits research by a number of people. I'm an example. I just can't do it. Daniel Bikle, professor of medicine, University of California, San Francisco; former chairman, UCSF Conflict of Interest Task Force' ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 102-5 | Added on Thursday, January 21, 2010, 11:37 AM in late 2001, toppling Saddam, and then uprooting Baathism in Iraq, the United States removed local rivals that had contained Iranian power to its east and west. Since the Shah’s time and more so after the Islamic Revolution, Saddam’s military had been the main barrier to Iran’s expansionist aims. Today there is no indigenous military force in the Persian Gulf region capable of containing Iran. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 137-40 | Added on Thursday, January 21, 2010, 11:41 AM Economics has more to do with determining the pecking order in the Middle East than the region’s miasmic tumult of feuds, wars, and saber rattlings would lead one to believe. The Middle East is not just a zone of clashing extremist ideas and zealous terrorist armies. It is also a place of struggling and thriving economies, where new classes and business elites are elbowing their way higher in the power structures of many countries, changing religious, social, and political life on the way. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 174-76 | Added on Thursday, January 21, 2010, 11:43 AM embryonic stem cell research to help cure a range of ailments from heart disease to multiple sclerosis.8 The initiative has surged ahead taking advantage of the fact that a fetus is not considered a human in Islamic law before the end of the first trimester of a pregnancy. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 242-43 | Added on Friday, January 22, 2010, 07:43 AM They were the words of the Prophet, he was told: “A merchant is the beloved of God” (al-kasib habiballah). ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 298-302 | Added on Friday, January 22, 2010, 07:47 AM This upwardly mobile class consumes Islam as much as practicing it, demanding the same sorts of life-enhancing goods and services as middle classes everywhere. Their preference that those goods have an Islamic flavor makes Islam big business. A booming economic sector around the region is catering to this exploding demand, and these rising Islamic consumers comprise as much as a sixth of humanity, spread across a vast expanse from Morocco to Malaysia, with notable toeholds from Detroit to Düsseldorf and São Paulo to Singapore. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 371-72 | Added on Friday, January 22, 2010, 07:52 AM Caribou Coffee, America’s largest specialty coffee chain after Starbucks, is owned by a shariah-compliant private-equity firm based in Bahrain.27 ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 419-23 | Added on Friday, January 22, 2010, 04:30 PM All of this is not to say that Islamic finance will in any way become dominant in the global economy, not by a very long shot. Limitations will rein in the growth of this business. Islam’s ban on speculation, for example, means that transactions must be based on tangible assets, which makes it easy to do business in commodities and real estate, but much trickier to innovate financial products. Islamic finance could run out of assets to sustain its growth, and even short of that it may overemphasize investment in certain assets, such as real estate or retail, thereby increasing the risk of losses. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 466-70 | Added on Saturday, January 23, 2010, 06:17 PM The mayor of the booming town of Kayseri in central Turkey, where many of the so-called Islamically conscious “Anatolian Tigers” come from, thinks so. “I had read Weber,” he says, referring to the German sociologist who first credited Calvinist ethic for the rise of capitalism. The idea of “how Calvinists work hard, save money and then reinvest it into business” seems, he continued, “very similar to what was happening in Kayseri.”43 ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 528-33 | Added on Saturday, January 23, 2010, 06:23 PM This Rhode Island–sized emirate, one of the seven nestled on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula that form the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is a land of superlatives. Dubai boasts not only the world’s tallest building but also its two biggest shopping malls, its largest airport, largest arched bridge, largest man-made archipelago, largest man-made harbor, and largest theme park, which is twice the size of Disney World. Until the global recession of 2008 slowed its stride, 80 percent of the world’s water-dredging equipment was in use in Dubai, as were a fifth of the tallest cranes on earth. This emirate seeks to set world standards for luxury and consumerism, to be first in everything, especially the kinds of things the West appreciates. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 565-68 | Added on Saturday, January 23, 2010, 06:25 PM In fact, the growth was achieved even as the emirate’s oil production shrank. Dubai pumps just a quarter of what it did in 1992. The share of GDP that the oil industry accounts for is down to barely 5 percent today from 43 percent in 1992. Services, including tourism, finance, real estate, education, media, and transportation, now account for more than 80 percent of GDP.8 ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 655-61 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 09:33 PM Connecting the many economies of the region to one another and then to the larger world economy, and providing them with critical financial and logistical services in the process, presents Dubai with the opportunity to generate wealth from trade at an unprecedented scale in the region. The author Robert Kaplan argues that the Indian Ocean will be at the heart of world trade in the twenty-first century. Half of the world containers on tankers and “70 percent of the total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean from the Middle East to the Pacific,” and those numbers are only expected to grow further in the coming decades.16 Dubai has tied its future to that trade. Dubai’s ports can particularly facilitate greater trade in the region through the reexport ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 683-86 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 09:35 PM As important as Dubai’s role as an economic crossroads is the manner in which its economic flourishing has been achieved, by a pro-capitalist, public-private partnership. The idea of the state taking the facilitation of capitalism to be its mandate is a novelty in the Middle East, and what truly makes Dubai modern is not its consumerism or its construction boom, but its embrace of the idea of the capitalism-friendly state—the good dirigisme of Singapore. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 817-24 | Added on Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 09:41 PM There are no hard estimates of how many Iranians are in Dubai, but you do not need to look far to conclude that there are many. A good portion—maybe as many as half—of Dubai’s native population are of Iranian origin.24 Rumor has it even the ruling al-Maktoum family has its origins in Iran’s province of Baluchistan. When I travel to Dubai, it is not uncommon to hear government officials break into Persian in private. I have encountered ministry officials and equity-fund managers, all seemingly Arab, who wait till we are alone and then tell me, in Persian, of their Iranian roots. Estimates put the number of Iranian-passport holders in Dubai at 450,000; many more come and go as tourists and businessmen.25 There are 11,500 Iranian students in UAE universities—the majority at the new American University of Dubai—and some 9,000 Iranian companies are registered at the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The number ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 1158-62 | Added on Thursday, January 28, 2010, 06:28 AM The Supreme Leader and his inner circle felt the need to fuel Ahmadinejad’s populism and reignite anti-Americanism most of all due to internal pressures from long-simmering capitalist energies that the Islamic regime has alternately tried to control and contain since the 1979 revolution. Much of the story in Iran, especially for the past decade, has been that of the clerical elite’s effort to hold back the growing power of the same middle class that is rising in pockets all around the region. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 1213-18 | Added on Thursday, January 28, 2010, 06:31 AM One of the most distinctive, and limiting, features of Iranian capitalism is those “foundations” that my friend mentioned. Known in Persian as bonyads, they are vast conglomerates with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of assets, which were set up after the revolution by putting together the many nationalized industries and to serve the Islamic Republic’s supporters, war veterans, and the poor.18 In time they grew in size and economic influence. They report only to the Supreme Leader, and are free from other government oversight. Neither truly public or properly private, their hybrid character and control by the Supreme Leader allows them great advantage in forming ventures to bid for government contracts, and then using those ventures to corner markets and create monopolies. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 1474-77 | Added on Friday, January 29, 2010, 06:36 AM Yes, [sanctions] can stop a guy in the Spice Market from getting a letter of credit, [but] that’s not fomenting opposition. The guys who are hurting are in the business community. Yes, they hate Ahmadinejad, but they hated him from the beginning. The basic flaw is [the idea] that people who are unhappy with the government can do anything. If the goal is to stop Iran from developing a nuclear capability, nothing that has happened here will achieve that objective.36 ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 2048-54 | Added on Friday, January 29, 2010, 08:24 PM began with little theocratic impetus? The revolution was in part an epic battle of Islam against secularism, and also a mass rebellion against dictatorship, but it did not turn on these things. The revolution happened in Iran, and has not happened since anywhere else, because Iran was unique among secular, modernizing states in a single crucial respect: Only in Iran did the Kemalist regime so totally and irretrievably lose the loyalty of its secular middle class. In large numbers, these educated professionals—lawyers, doctors, professors, government workers—shunned the Kemalist regime that had called them into being, and in their dissent, they became more enamored of socialism and communism than of Western-style capitalist democracy, though some among them did promote the latter. This helps to explain why the secular middle class so readily submitted to Khomeini’s Leninist-style leadership. The ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 2705-7 | Added on Friday, January 29, 2010, 09:52 PM He was offended by American culture, particularly upset by racial prejudice that he encountered due to his dark complexion and the brazen outspokenness of American women. Some of what he felt was the awkwardness any foreign student may feel, but Qutb formed hardened views of American society as racist, morally corrupt, and licentious. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 2719-24 | Added on Friday, January 29, 2010, 09:53 PM Islamic jurist Ibn Taimiyah for inspiration in arguing forcefully for separating the righteous from the less vigilant, equating the latter with the age of jahiliyah (pagan ignorance) before the Prophet proclaimed his message. The most zealous fundamentalists follow this line of thinking, and are self-described Salafis—which means literally those who follow the example of the righteous forefathers, the first generation of Muslims who lived at the time of the Prophet. Qutb also drew on Ibn Taimiyah to justify violence in the cause. Ibn Taimiyah had little tolerance for apostates and had advocated a violent form of jihad—by which he meant putting heretics and even questionable Muslims to the sword. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3036-45 | Added on Sunday, January 31, 2010, 09:53 PM After Kemalism came fundamentalism; now fundamentalism too is losing ground. What will be the next big idea in the Muslim world? What will the rising middle class hitch its wagon to? With the allure of the state—both secular and Islamic—having lost all of its luster, the Muslim world is embracing something altogether different: pluralism. The region is already well engaged in what journalist Robin Wright describes as a “quiet and profound revolution,”1 led by bloggers, rappers, fashion designers, televangelists, human rights activists, and self-styled Islamic gurus and thinkers of all stripes. There are secularists in their mix, but this is by and large an Islamic resurgence, which celebrates piety while rejecting violence and extremism. There is no one flavor of Islam dominating; both conservatives and reformists are taking part, with some interested in politics while others are content to leave politics alone and focus on matters of personal faith and practice. Just as the separation of church and state in the United States supported the flourishing of many different Christian denominations, the loosening of the grip of top-down state control and sponsorship of Islam is making room for many Islams. Such is the nature of pluralism. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3145-49 | Added on Monday, February 01, 2010, 06:56 PM A key point is that Khalid, Qaradawi, Gulen, and al-Shugairi are not mosque men; they have become men of the people, media men. They reach their audiences through the communications technologies that have become popular with the rising middle class that comprises the bulk of their following. And they are only the tip of the iceberg of a growing number of such media-savvy new voices of Islam in the region who use satellite TV, newspapers, the Internet, and large gatherings at convention halls to build their popularity. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3183-89 | Added on Monday, February 01, 2010, 06:59 PM Those advocating a Protestant future for Islam dwell little on the facts that early-modern Christian reformers were hardly liberal or tolerant—and that the Reformation unleashed a century and a half of bloody and even cataclysmic warfare. The Reformation in all its manifestations across Europe enforced narrow puritanical views with great violence. “Knox and his lieutenants,” writes the historian Arthur Herman, “imposed the new rules of the Calvinist Sabbath on Scottish society: no working (people could be arrested for plucking a chicken on Sunday), no dancing, and no playing of the pipes. Gambling, card-playing, and the theater were banned.”7 The Reformation’s contribution to the rise of capitalism and democracy happened long after the icons of the Reformation, men like Luther, Calvin, and Knox had left the scene, and then only as an unintended consequence. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3212-15 | Added on Tuesday, February 02, 2010, 05:37 AM The arguments of these reformers have proven much more compelling, however, for Western audiences than with the folks back home. Islamic reformist intellectuals spill more ink in English, French, Dutch, or German than in Arabic, Malay, or Urdu. The fundamental reason for this is probably that their works fail to speak directly to the wants and needs of the majority of Muslim people, especially to the interests of the rising middle class. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3281-85 | Added on Tuesday, February 02, 2010, 05:42 AM The typical old-school madrasah, with a curriculum heavy on Koranic recitation and rote learning, is simply not well suited to serving the demand of Islam’s rising middle class, which is intent on its children being successful in the world of increasing globalization. But quite understandably, many parents feel more confident about their children stepping out in that competitive globalized world if there is reassurance that ties to tradition will be retained. The new modern and Islamic style of education serves both of these deeply felt needs. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3311-19 | Added on Tuesday, February 02, 2010, 05:45 AM Terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey argue that the link between madrasahs and terrorism is weak.20 The anthropologist Robert Hefner estimates that of some 46,000 pesantrans (as madrasahs are called in Indonesia), no more than forty or so qualify as extremist.21 Perhaps a larger problem is that in many countries, the so-called secular schools teach a great deal of religion, often interpreted in illiberal ways, and sometimes push hair-raising intolerance. State textbooks in Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia all stand as cases in point. In Algeria, the battle against Islamic extremism now centers on changing school curricula that have long been under the control of conservative religious leaders.22 Sometimes, as in Jordan, the problem is that state authorities have tossed fundamentalists the education ministry as a sop. Better to give them that than have them clamoring for the foreign-affairs or finance portfolios, the thinking seems to have run. It is a worrisome reminder of the lack of seriousness with which these governments consider education. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3361-67 | Added on Tuesday, February 02, 2010, 03:24 PM Higher education in the Muslim world is seeing similar trends. Three decades ago, the governments of Pakistan and Malaysia established the International Islamic Universities of Islamabad and Kuala Lumpur. The idea behind these ventures was to “Islamize knowledge.” The best way to explain this ambition is to say that it reflects the fundamentalist goal of Islamizing modernity. The idea has now caught on even in Iran. Mofid University in the great seminary city of Qom, in Iran, trains students with at least two years of seminary education in a modern curriculum heavy on the humanities and social sciences. Tehran’s Imam Sadeq University, the alma mater of many of the Islamic Republic’s mandarins, combines religion and modern education by teaching both side-by-side. Even traditional seminaries in Qom have taken to teaching modern subjects, whether as electives or required courses seen as necessary for the training of future leaders of the state. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3416-18 | Added on Tuesday, February 02, 2010, 03:28 PM Fashion shows and magazines cater to the style-conscious hejab wearers. Arab or Turkish girls are not Westernized through and through, nor are they purely Islamic. Instead, they are something in between, what the author Allegra Stratton calls “muhajababes,” literally, babes in hejab.27 ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3735-40 | Added on Wednesday, February 03, 2010, 01:36 PM Pakistan has always had a rocky relationship with Afghanistan.9 Afghans have never recognized their border with Pakistan—the famous Durand Line, which, in an effort to shore up its rule in northern India, Britain drew up in the late nineteenth century. The demarcation had no basis in history; it was imposed in order to separate what was still the territory of India then from the territory ruled by troublesome Pashtun tribes to the north, and many Afghan Pashtuns hold that the true border is the Indus River, some 120 miles southeast of the Durand Line. The Pakistani military has long feared a Pashtun nationalist uprising that would claim the territory, an especially troubling prospect in light of the large Pashtun population within Pakistan itself. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3768-71 | Added on Wednesday, February 03, 2010, 01:38 PM America wanted a strong Afghan state under Hamid Karzai, while Pakistan saw Karzai as pro-India, and believed a strong Afghan state was a threat. Nothing in American plans for Afghanistan assured Pakistani generals that Kabul would not become a satellite of Delhi, and a pro-Delhi government in Kabul was a bigger worry for the Pakistani military than the Taliban. That calculation has led, however, to the unleashing of extremist mayhem within Pakistan itself. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 3821-28 | Added on Wednesday, February 03, 2010, 10:40 PM number of Chinese nationals whom they accused of running a brothel, the embarrassment grew to be more than Musharraf could stand. Here were thousands of aggressive fanatics who had somehow managed to stow huge arms caches in a mosque less than a mile from the headquarters of the all-seeing ISI—in fact, the Red Mosque was where many of the agency’s officers went for daily prayers. Clinton’s warning had proved prescient. After months of official dithering over what to do about the Red Mosque, Musharraf decided to act. In July, he ordered elite troops to storm the complex. Televised mayhem and scores of deaths ensued. Even secular Pakistanis were shocked at how badly Musharraf had handled the whole affair. Enraged extremists hit back with waves of urban suicide bombings targeting police and military facilities. The total number of suicide attacks for 2007 was fifty-six, and all but four happened after the Red Mosque siege. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 4045-48 | Added on Wednesday, February 03, 2010, 10:51 PM As a strategic calculation, the military leadership turned to Islam, viewing it as a bulwark against the radicals. By condoning the reentry of a modicum of religious conservatism into the public sphere, the generals hoped to divert youthful energies away from sedition and revolution. The ban on Islamic education was lifted, in the hope that piety in the classroom would make students less susceptible to recruitment by secular extremists. ========== Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World (Vali Nasr) - Highlight Loc. 4334-37 | Added on Wednesday, February 03, 2010, 11:01 PM Merçan was overstating the case; Turks do still passionately debate Islam’s role in their society and politics. But his call to focus not on conjectured contradictions between Islam and democracy, but rather on the practical, daily issues of providing economic opportunity was dead-on. The reconciliation of Islam and capitalism that the “critical middle” is voting decisively for is the only way forward toward a wider reconciliation of Islam and democracy. But the evolution of full democracy in the Middle East will take time. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 252-56 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 03:07 AM My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 319-28 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 12:46 PM I have seen two generations of my people die. . . . I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country. I am now grown old, and must die soon; my authority must descend to my brothers, Opitchapan, Opechancanough and Catatough—then to my two sisters, and then to my two daughters. I wish them to know as much as I do, and that your love to them may be like mine to you. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig break, they all cry out “Here comes Captain Smith!” So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same manner. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 330-32 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 01:31 PM Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum.” The Indians, he said, had not “subdued” the land, and therefore had only a “natural” right to it, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legal standing. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 364-67 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 01:33 PM The terror was very real among the Indians, but in time they came to meditate upon its foundations. They drew three lessons from the Pequot War: (1) that the Englishmen’s most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; (2) that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and (3) that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 385-92 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 01:35 PM Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples. Roger Williams said it was a depraved appetite after the great vanities, dreams and shadows of this vanishing life, great portions of land, land in this wilderness, as if men were in as great necessity and danger for want of great portions of land, as poor, hungry, thirsty seamen have, after a sick and stormy, a long and starving passage. This is one of the gods of New England, which the living and most high Eternal will destroy and famish. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 451-56 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 01:38 PM The concept of private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 1650s wrote: “No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers. . . . Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common.” Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives’ families. Each extended family lived in a “long house.” When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outside the door. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 467-71 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 01:39 PM All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners how to deal with their children: “And surely there is in all children . . . a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 531-34 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 10:36 PM The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 they sent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugs tainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despite their high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something so profitable. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 541-49 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 10:37 PM There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the Indian superiority at taking care of themselves, that made the Virginians especially ready to become the masters of slaves. Edmund Morgan imagines their mood as he writes in his book American Slavery, American Freedom: If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians’. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages. . . . But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. . . . And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much. . . . So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not grow much corn. . . . ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 626-34 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 10:42 PM In the year 1610, a Catholic priest in the Americas named Father Sandoval wrote back to a church functionary in Europe to ask if the capture, transport, and enslavement of African blacks was legal by church doctrine. A letter dated March 12, 1610, from Brother Luis Brandaon to Father Sandoval gives the answer: Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes who are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this I reply that I think your Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is a matter which has been questioned by the Board of Conscience in Lisbon, and all its members are learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops who were in Sao Thome, Cape Verde, and here in Loando—all learned and virtuous men—find fault with it. We have been here ourselves for forty years and there have been among us very learned Fathers . . . never did they consider the trade as illicit. Therefore we and the Fathers of Brazil buy these slaves for our service without any scruple. . . . ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 683-88 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 10:45 PM The refusal began in Africa. One slave trader reported that Negroes were “so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat and ship into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned.” When the very first black slaves were brought into Hispaniola in 1503, the Spanish governor of Hispaniola complained to the Spanish court that fugitive Negro slaves were teaching disobedience to the Indians. In the 1520s and 1530s, there were slave revolts in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Santa Marta, and what is now Panama. Shortly after those rebellions, the Spanish established a special police for chasing fugitive slaves. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 725-31 | Added on Thursday, February 04, 2010, 10:47 PM Mullin found newspaper advertisements between 1736 and 1801 for 1,138 men runaways, and 141 women. One consistent reason for running away was to find members of one’s family—showing that despite the attempts of the slave system to destroy family ties by not allowing marriages and by separating families, slaves would face death and mutilation to get together. In Maryland, where slaves were about one-third of the population in 1750, slavery had been written into law since the 1660s, and statutes for controlling rebellious slaves were passed. There were cases where slave women killed their masters, sometimes by poisoning them, sometimes by burning tobacco houses and homes. Punishments ranged from whipping and branding to execution, but the trouble continued. In 1742, seven slaves were put to death for murdering their master. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 860-67 | Added on Friday, February 05, 2010, 03:04 PM It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists’ tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King. Berkeley himself, returning to England years earlier to protest the English Navigation Acts, which gave English merchants a monopoly of the colonial trade, had said: . . . we cannot but resent, that forty thousand people should be impoverish’d to enrich little more than forty Merchants, who being the only buyers of our Tobacco, give us what they please for it, and after it is here, sell it how they please; and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper rates, than any other men have slaves. . . ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 883-87 | Added on Friday, February 05, 2010, 03:06 PM In the 1600s and 1700s, by forced exile, by lures, promises, and lies, by kidnapping, by their urgent need to escape the living conditions of the home country, poor people wanting to go to America became commodities of profit for merchants, traders, ship captains, and eventually their masters in America. Abbot Smith, in his study of indentured servitude, Colonists in Bondage, writes: “From the complex pattern of forces producing emigration to the American colonies one stands out clearly as most powerful in causing the movement of servants. This was the pecuniary profit to be made by shipping them.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1209-11 | Added on Sunday, February 07, 2010, 01:42 PM Gary Nash’s study of city tax lists shows that by the early 1770s, the top 5 percent of Boston’s taxpayers controlled 49% of the city’s taxable assets. In Philadelphia and New York too, wealth was more and more concentrated. Court-recorded wills showed that by 1750 the wealthiest people in the cities were leaving 20,000 pounds (equivalent to about $5 million today). ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1214-24 | Added on Sunday, February 07, 2010, 01:43 PM What seems to have happened in Boston is that certain lawyers, editors, and merchants of the upper classes, but excluded from the ruling circles close to England—men like James Otis and Samuel Adams—organized a “Boston Caucus” and through their oratory and their writing “molded laboring-class opinion, called the ‘mob’ into action, and shaped its behaviour.” This is Gary Nash’s description of Otis, who, he says, “keenly aware of the declining fortunes and the resentment of ordinary townspeople, was mirroring as well as molding popular opinion.” We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries. As Nash puts it: James Otis, Samuel Adams, Royall Tyler, Oxenbridge Thacher, and a host of other Bostonians, linked to the artisans and laborers through a network of neighborhood taverns, fire companies, and the Caucus, espoused a vision of politics that gave credence to laboring-class views and regarded as entirely legitimate the participation of artisans and even laborers in the political process. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1327-31 | Added on Sunday, February 07, 2010, 04:45 PM As more demonstrations were planned for November 1, 1765, when the Stamp Act was to go into effect, and for Pope’s Day, November 5, steps were taken to keep things under control; a dinner was given for certain leaders of the rioters to win them over. And when the Stamp Act was repealed, due to overwhelming resistance, the conservative leaders severed their connections with the rioters. They held annual celebrations of the first anti-Stamp Act demonstration, to which they invited, according to Hoerder, not the rioters but “mainly upper and middle-class Bostonians, who traveled in coaches and carriages to Roxbury or Dorchester for opulent feasts.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1474-77 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 09:00 AM Locke’s statement of people’s government was in support of a revolution in England for the free development of mercantile capitalism at home and abroad. Locke himself regretted that the labor of poor children “is generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old” and suggested that all children over three, of families on relief, should attend “working schools” so they would be “from infancy . . . inured to work.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1534-38 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 09:05 AM Scott was one of many Revolutionary fighters, usually of lower military ranks, from poor and obscure backgrounds. Shy’s study of the Peterborough contingent shows that the prominent and substantial citizens of the town had served only briefly in the war. Other American towns show the same pattern. As Shy puts it: “Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them did much of the actual fighting and suffering between 1775 and 1783: A very old story.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1546-47 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 09:06 AM What looks like the democratization of the military forces in modern times shows up as something different: a way of forcing large numbers of reluctant people to associate themselves with the national cause, and by the end of the process believe in it. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1707-11 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:19 PM Despite this, and the burning of villages, the British could not destroy the will of the Indians, who continued guerrilla war. A peace was made, with the British agreeing to establish a line at the Appalachians, beyond which settlements would not encroach on Indian territory. This was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and it angered Americans (the original Virginia charter said its land went westward to the ocean). It helps to explain why most of the Indians fought for England during the Revolution. With their French allies, then their English allies, gone, the Indians faced a new land-coveting nation—alone. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1728-35 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:21 PM What the Revolution did was to create space and opportunity for blacks to begin making demands of white society. Sometimes these demands came from the new, small black elites in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Savannah, sometimes from articulate and bold slaves. Pointing to the Declaration of Independence, blacks petitioned Congress and the state legislatures to abolish slavery, to give blacks equal rights. In Boston, blacks asked for city money, which whites were getting, to educate their children. In Norfolk, they asked to be allowed to testify in court. Nashville blacks asserted that free Negroes “ought to have the same opportunities of doing well that any Person . . . would have.” Peter Mathews, a free Negro butcher in Charleston, joined other free black artisans and tradesmen in petitioning the legislature to repeal discriminatory laws against blacks. In 1780, seven blacks in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, petitioned the legislature for the right to vote, linking taxation to representation: ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1755-67 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:23 PM To many Americans over the years, the Constitution drawn up in 1787 has seemed a work of genius put together by wise, humane men who created a legal framework for democracy and equality. This view is stated, a bit extravagantly, by the historian George Bancroft, writing in the early nineteenth century: The Constitution establishes nothing that interferes with equality and individuality. It knows nothing of differences by descent, or opinions, of favored classes, or legalized religion, or the political power of property. It leaves the individual alongside of the individual. . . . As the sea is made up of drops, American society is composed of separate, free, and constantly moving atoms, ever in reciprocal action . . . so that the institutions and laws of the country rise out of the masses of individual thought which, like the waters of the ocean, are rolling evermore. Another view of the Constitution was put forward early in the twentieth century by the historian Charles Beard (arousing anger and indignation, including a denunciatory editorial in the New York Times). He wrote in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution: Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1768-69 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:23 PM In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1769-76 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:23 PM Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department. Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1777-78 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:24 PM Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1909-11 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:30 PM When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1923-27 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:31 PM The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and moneyed interests of the North. For the purpose of uniting the thirteen states into one great market for commerce, the northern delegates wanted laws regulating interstate commerce, and urged that such laws require only a majority of Congress to pass. The South agreed to this, in return for allowing the trade in slaves to continue for twenty years before being outlawed. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 1989-97 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:34 PM Bailyn says: Everyone knew the basic prescription for a wise and just government. It was so to balance the contending powers in society that no one power could overwhelm the others and, unchecked, destroy the liberties that belonged to all. The problem was how to arrange the institutions of government so that this balance could be achieved. Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men trying to achieve a good balance? In fact, they did not want a balance, except one which kept things as they were, a balance among the dominant forces at that time. They certainly did not want an equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders, Indians and white. As many as half the people were not even considered by the Founding Fathers as among Bailyn’s “contending powers” in society. They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2016-17 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:36 PM A woman was more secure, because she was with her own family, and she could divorce the man when she wanted to, keeping their property. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2149-52 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:42 PM Nevertheless, Jefferson underscored his phrase “all men are created equal” by his statement that American women would be “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.” And after the Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York’s constitution specifically disfranchised women by using the word “male.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2190-97 | Added on Monday, February 08, 2010, 06:44 PM The assumption is twofold: the American female was supposed to be so infinitely lovable and provocative that a healthy male could barely control himself when in the same room with her, and the same girl, as she “comes out” of the cocoon of her family’s protectiveness, is so palpitating with undirected affection, so filled to the brim with tender feelings, that she fixes her love on the first person she sees. She awakes from the midsummer night’s dream of adolescence, and it is the responsibility of her family and society to see that her eyes fall on a suitable match and not some clown with the head of an ass. They do their part by such restrictive measures as segregated (by sex and/or class) schools, dancing classes, travel, and other external controls. She is required to exert the inner control of obedience. The combination forms a kind of societal chastity belt which is not unlocked until the marriage partner has arrived, and adolescence is formally over. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2420-25 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 07:06 PM That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches. . . . Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a’nt I a woman? Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a’nt I a woman? I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a’nt I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a’nt I a woman? ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2443-45 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 07:07 PM In the Revolutionary War, almost every important Indian nation fought on the side of the British. The British signed for peace and went home; the Indians were already home, and so they continued fighting the Americans on the frontier, in a set of desperate holding operations. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2496-99 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 07:10 PM Jackson’s 1814 treaty with the Creeks started something new and important. It granted Indians individual ownership of land, thus splitting Indian from Indian, breaking up communal landholding, bribing some with land, leaving others out—introducing the competition and conniving that marked the spirit of Western capitalism. It fitted well the old Jeffersonian idea of how to handle the Indians, by bringing them into “civilization.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2503-6 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 07:10 PM Jackson himself described how the treaties were obtained: “. . . we addressed ourselves feelingly to the predominant and governing passion of all Indian tribes, i.e., their avarice or fear.” He encouraged white squatters to move into Indian lands, then told the Indians the government could not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out. He also, Rogin says, “practiced extensive bribery.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2516-20 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 07:11 PM Jackson began raids into Florida, arguing it was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and for marauding Indians. Florida, he said, was essential to the defense of the United States. It was that classic modern preface to a war of conquest. Thus began the Seminole War of 1818, leading to the American acquisition of Florida. It appears on classroom maps politely as “Florida Purchase, 1819”—but it came from Andrew Jackson’s military campaign across the Florida border, burning Seminole villages, seizing Spanish forts, until Spain was “persuaded” to sell. He acted, he said, by the “immutable laws of self-defense.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2541-44 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 07:12 PM . . He is now a prisoner to the white men. . . . He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2583-85 | Added on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 07:14 PM Not all the Indians responded to the white officials’ common designation of them as “children” and the President as “father.” It was reported that when Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison, Indian fighter and future President, the interpreter said: “Your father requests you to take a chair.” Tecumseh replied: “My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother; I will repose upon her bosom.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2599-2608 | Added on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 01:16 PM Jackson’s instructions to an army major sent to talk to the Choctaws and Cherokees put it this way: Say to my red Choctaw children, and my Chickasaw children to listen—my white children of Mississippi have extended their law over their country. . . . Where they now are, say to them, their father cannot prevent them from being subject to the laws of the state of Mississippi. . . . The general government will be obliged to sustain the States in the exercise of their right. Say to the chiefs and warriors that I am their friend, that I wish to act as their friend but they must, by removing from the limits of the States of Mississippi and Alabama and by being settled on the lands I offer them, put it in my power to be such—There, beyond the limits of any State, in possession of land of their own, which they shall possess as long as Grass grows or water runs. I am and will protect them and be their friend and father. That phrase “as long as Grass grows or water runs” was to be recalled with bitterness by generations of Indians. (An Indian GI, veteran of Vietnam, testifying publicly in 1970 not only about the horror of the war but about his own maltreatment as an Indian, repeated that phrase and began to weep.) ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2691-98 | Added on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 02:47 PM The North was in general against the removal bill. The South was for it. It passed the House 102 to 97. It passed the Senate narrowly. It did not mention force, but provided for helping the Indians to move. What it implied was that if they did not, they were without protection, without funds, and at the mercy of the states. Now the pressures began on the tribes, one by one. The Choctaws did not want to leave, but fifty of their delegates were offered secret bribes of money and land, and the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed: Choctaw land east of the Mississippi was ceded to the United States in return for financial help in leaving, compensation for property left behind, food for the first year in their new homes, and a guarantee they would never again be required to move. For twenty thousand Choctaws in Mississippi, though most of them hated the treaty, the pressure now became irresistible. Whites, including liquor dealers and swindlers, came swarming onto their lands. The state passed a law making it a crime for Choctaws to try to persuade one another on the matter of removal. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2795-2801 | Added on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 02:51 PM Eight hundred Creek men had volunteered to help the United States army fight the Seminoles in Florida in return for a promise that their families could remain in Alabama, protected by the federal government until the men returned. The promise was not kept. The Creek families were attacked by land-hungry white marauders—robbed, driven from their homes, women raped. Then the army, claiming it was for their safety, removed them from Creek country to a concentration camp on Mobile Bay. Hundreds died there from lack of food and from sickness. When the warriors returned from the Seminole War, they and their families were hustled west. Moving through New Orleans, they encountered a yellow fever plague. They crossed the Mississippi—611 Indians crowded onto the aged steamer Monmouth. It went down in the Mississippi River and 311 people died, four of them the children of the Indian commander of the Creek volunteers in Florida. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 2844-48 | Added on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 09:15 PM The war went on for years. The army enlisted other Indians to fight the Seminoles. But that didn’t work either. Van Every says: “The adaptation of the Seminole to his environment was to be matched only by the crane or the alligator.” It was an eight-year war. It cost $20 million and 1,500 American lives. Finally, in the 1840s, the Seminoles began to get tired. They were a tiny group against a huge nation with great resources. They asked for truces. But when they went forward under truce flags, they were arrested, again and again. In 1837, Osceola, under a flag of truce, had been seized and put in irons, then died of illness in prison. The war petered out. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3057-60 | Added on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 09:23 PM Frederick Douglass, former slave, extraordinary speaker and writer, wrote in his Rochester newspaper the North Star, January 21, 1848, of “the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.” Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes): ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3102-7 | Added on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 09:25 PM We know much more about the American army—volunteers, not conscripts, lured by money and opportunity for social advancement via promotion in the armed forces. Half of General Taylor’s army were recent immigrants—Irish and German mostly. Whereas in 1830, 1 percent of the population of the United States was foreign-born, by the Mexican war the number was reaching 10 percent. Their patriotism was not very strong. Their belief in all arguments for expansion paraded in the newspapers was probably not great. Indeed, many of them deserted to the Mexican side, enticed by money. Some enlisted in the Mexican army and formed their own battalion, the San Patricio (St. Patrick’s) Battalion. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3247-52 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 06:27 AM As often in war, battles were fought without point. After one such engagement near Mexico City, with terrible casualties, a marine lieutenant blamed General Scott: “He had originated it in error and caused it to be fought, with inadequate forces, for an object that had no existence.” In the final battle for Mexico City, Anglo-American troops took the height of Chapultepec and entered the city of 200,000 people, General Santa Anna having moved northward. This was September 1847. A Mexican merchant wrote to a friend about the bombardment of the city: “In some cases whole blocks were destroyed and a great number of men, women and children killed and wounded.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3369-73 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 06:32 AM Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, her head injured by an overseer when she was fifteen, made her way to freedom alone as a young woman, then became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She made nineteen dangerous trips back and forth, often disguised, escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom, always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives, “You’ll be free or die.” She expressed her philosophy: “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive. . . .” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3457-58 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 06:34 AM Levine refers to slave resistance as “pre-political,” expressed in countless ways in daily life and culture. Music, magic, art, religion, were all ways, he says, for slaves to hold on to their humanity. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3480-82 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 06:35 AM Once, however, engaged in the inquiry, I was not very long in finding out the true solution of the matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake. . . . ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3536-40 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 06:36 AM Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. . . . ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3597-99 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 06:37 AM I imagine that I hear you, and all of you, mother, father, sisters, and brothers, say—“No, there is not a cause for which we, with less sorrow, could see you die.” Believe me when I tell you, that though shut up in prison and under sentence of death, I have spent more happy hours here, and . . . I would almost as lief die now as at any time, for I feel that I am prepared to meet my Maker. . . . ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 3978-81 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 09:20 PM Harlan was fighting a force greater than logic or justice; the mood of the Court reflected a new coalition of northern industrialists and southern businessmen-planters. The culmination of this mood came in the decision of 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, when the Court ruled that a railroad could segregate black and white if the segregated facilities were equal: ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 4016-20 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 09:22 PM The importance of the new capitalism in overturning what black power existed in the postwar South is affirmed by Horace Mann Bond’s study of Alabama Reconstruction, which shows, after 1868, “a struggle between different financiers.” Yes, racism was a factor but “accumulations of capital, and the men who controlled them, were as unaffected by attitudinal prejudices as it is possible to be. Without sentiment, without emotion, those who sought profit from an exploitation of Alabama’s natural resources turned other men’s prejudices and attitudes to their own account, and did so with skill and a ruthless acumen.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 4633-40 | Added on Friday, February 12, 2010, 09:39 PM We have seen, in our most recent wars, how a divided and arguing public opinion may be converted overnight into a national near-unanimity, an obedient flood of energy which will carry the young to destruction and overpower any effort to stem it. The unanimity of men at war is like that of a school of fish, which will swerve, simultaneously and apparently without leadership, when the shadow of an enemy appears, or like a sky-darkening flight of grass-hoppers, which, also all compelled by one impulse, will descend to consume the crops. Under the deafening noise of the war, Congress was passing and Lincoln was signing into law a whole series of acts to give business interests what they wanted, and what the agrarian South had blocked before secession. The Republican platform of 1860 had been a clear appeal to businessmen. Now Congress in 1861 passed the Morrill Tariff. This made foreign goods more expensive, allowed American manufacturers to raise their prices, and forced American consumers to pay more. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 4936-39 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 06:27 AM While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of “rags to riches” were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 4943-46 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 06:28 AM The Central Pacific started on the West Coast going east; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds, and paid $79 million, an overpayment of $36 million, to a construction company which really was its own. The construction was done by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese, over a period of four years, working for one or two dollars a day. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 4956-60 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 06:28 AM J. P. Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 4960-62 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 06:28 AM Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon’s father had written to him that “a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 5009-13 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 06:30 AM Meanwhile, the government of the United States was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a capitalist state: pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich. Not that the rich agreed among themselves; they had disputes over policies. But the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes peacefully, control lower-class rebellion, and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system. The arrangement between Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone. Whether Democrats or Republicans won, national policy would not change in any important way. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 5102-12 | Added on Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 06:34 AM Conwell was a founder of Temple University. Rockefeller was a donor to colleges all over the country and helped found the University of Chicago. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, gave money to two Negro colleges, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Carnegie gave money to colleges and to libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system—the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians—those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble. In the meantime, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of writing, reading, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers, skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority. A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote: “The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 5825-36 | Added on Thursday, February 18, 2010, 03:42 PM Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior. When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was “rather a good thing” and told her he had said as much at a dinner with “various dago diplomats . . . all wrought up by the lynching.” William James, the philosopher, who became one of the leading anti-imperialists of his time, wrote about Roosevelt that he “gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life. . . .” Roosevelt’s talk of expansionism was not just a matter of manliness and heroism; he was conscious of “our trade relations with China.” Lodge was aware of the textile interests in Massachusetts that looked to Asian markets. Historian Marilyn Young has written of the work of the American China Development Company to expand American influence in China for commercial reasons, and of State Department instructions to the American emissary in China to “employ all proper methods for the extension of American interests in China.” She says (The Rhetoric of Empire) that the talk about markets in China was far greater than the actual amount of dollars involved at the time, but this talk was important in shaping American policy toward Hawaii, the Philippines, and all of Asia. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6089-91 | Added on Friday, February 19, 2010, 07:50 AM The taste of empire was on the lips of politicians and business interests throughout the country now. Racism, paternalism, and talk of money mingled with talk of destiny and civilization. In the Senate, Albert Beveridge spoke, January 9, 1900, for the dominant economic and political interests of the country: ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6174-79 | Added on Friday, February 19, 2010, 07:55 AM The mixed reactions of labor to the war—lured by economic advantage, yet repelled by capitalist expansion and violence—ensured that labor could not unite either to stop the war or to conduct class war against the system at home. The reactions of black soldiers to the war were also mixed: there was the simple need to get ahead in a society where opportunities for success were denied the black man, and the military life gave such possibilities. There was race pride, the need to show that blacks were as courageous, as patriotic, as anyone else. And yet, there was with all this the consciousness of a brutal war, fought against colored people, a counterpart of the violence committed against black people in the United States. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6195-99 | Added on Friday, February 19, 2010, 04:23 PM There were four black regiments on duty in the Philippines. Many of the black soldiers established rapport with the brown-skinned natives on the islands, and were angered by the term “nigger” used by white troops to describe the Filipinos. An “unusually large number” of black troops deserted during the Philippines campaign, Gatewood says. The Filipino rebels often addressed themselves to “The Colored American Soldier” in posters, reminding them of lynchings back home, asking them not to serve the white imperialist against other colored people. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6626-33 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 06:56 AM James Green describes these Southwest radicals, in his book Grass-Roots Socialism, as “indebted homesteaders, migratory tenant farmers, coal miners and railroad workers, ‘redbone’ lumberjacks from the piney woods, preachers and schoolteachers from the sunbaked prairies . . . village artisans and atheists . . . the unknown people who created the strongest regional Socialist movement in United States history.” Green continues: The Socialist movement . . . was painstakingly organized by scores of former Populists, militant miners, and blacklisted railroad workers, who were assisted by a remarkable cadre of professional agitators and educators and inspired by occasional visits from national figures like Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones. . . . This core of organizers grew to include indigenous dissenters. . . . a much larger group of amateur agitators who canvassed the region selling newspapers, forming reading groups, organizing locals, and making soapbox speeches. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6825-33 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 11:41 AM Gabriel Kolko calls it the emergence of “political capitalism,” where the businessmen took firmer control of the political system because the private economy was not efficient enough to forestall protest from below. The businessmen, Kolko says, were not opposed to the new reforms; they initiated them, pushed them, to stabilize the capitalist system in a time of uncertainty and trouble. For instance, Theodore Roosevelt made a reputation for himself as a “trust-buster” (although his successor, Taft, a “conservative,” while Roosevelt was a “Progressive,” launched more antitrust suits than did Roosevelt). In fact, as Wiebe points out, two of J. P. Morgan’s men—Elbert Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, and George Perkins, who would later become a campaigner for Roosevelt—“arranged a general understanding with Roosevelt by which . . . they would cooperate in any investigation by the Bureau of Corporations in return for a guarantee of their companies’ legality.” They would do this through private negotiations with the President. “A gentleman’s agreement between reasonable people,” Wiebe says, with a bit of sarcasm. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6836-38 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 11:42 AM What radical critics now say of those reforms was said at the time (1901) by the Bankers’ Magazine: “As the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes. . . .” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6840-48 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 11:42 AM In 1909, a manifesto of the new Progressivism appeared—a book called The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly, editor of the New Republic and an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. He saw the need for discipline and regulation if the American system were to continue. Government should do more, he said, and he hoped to see the “sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints”—by whom he may have meant Theodore Roosevelt. Richard Hofstadter, in his biting chapter on the man the public saw as the great lover of nature and physical fitness, the war hero, the Boy Scout in the White House, says: “The advisers to whom Roosevelt listened were almost exclusively representatives of industrial and finance capital—men like Hanna, Robert Bacon, and George W. Perkins of the House of Morgan, Elihu Root, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich . . . and James Stillman of the Rockefeller interests.” Responding to his worried brother-in-law writing from Wall Street, Roosevelt replied: “I intend to be most conservative, but in the interests of the corporations themselves and above all in the interests of the country.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6866-71 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 11:44 AM The controls were constucted skillfully. In 1900, a man named Ralph Easley, a Republican and conservative, a schoolteacher and journalist, organized the National Civic Federation. Its aim was to get better relations between capital and labor. Its officers were mostly big businessmen, and important national politicians, but its first vice-president, for a long time, was Samuel Gompers of the AFL. Not all big businesses liked what the National Civic Federation was doing. Easley called these critics anarchists, opposed to the rational organization of the system. “In fact,” Easley wrote, “our enemies are the Socialists among the labor people and the anarchists among the capitalists.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 6974-79 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 11:50 AM In the United States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the state. Socialism was growing. The IWW seemed to be everywhere. Class conflict was intense. In the summer of 1916, during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, a bomb exploded, killing nine people; two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and would spend twenty years in prison. Shortly after that Senator James Wadsworth of New York suggested compulsory military training for all males to avert the danger that “these people of ours shall be divided into classes.” Rather: “We must let our young men know that they owe some responsibility to this country.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 7057-63 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 01:58 PM Du Bois saw the ingenuity of capitalism in uniting exploiter and exploited—creating a safety valve for explosive class conflict. “It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.” The United States fitted that idea of Du Bois. American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements. How conscious of this were individual entrepreneurs and statesmen? That is hard to know. But their actions, even if half-conscious, instinctive drives to survive, matched such a scheme. And in 1917 this demanded a national consensus for war. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 7518-21 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 02:21 PM A socialist critic would go further and say that the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable, and blind to human needs. The result of all that: permanent depression for many of its people, and periodic crises for almost everybody. Capitalism, despite its attempts at self-reform, its organization for better control, was still in 1929 a sick and undependable system. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 7609-14 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 02:24 PM The anger of the veteran of the First World War, now without work, his family hungry, led to the march of the Bonus Army to Washington in the spring and summer of 1932. War veterans, holding government bonus certificates which were due years in the future, demanded that Congress pay off on them now, when the money was desperately needed. And so they began to move to Washington from all over the country, with wives and children or alone. They came in broken-down old autos, stealing rides on freight trains, or hitchhiking. They were miners from West Virginia, sheet metal workers from Columbus, Georgia, and unemployed Polish veterans from Chicago. One family—husband, wife, three-year-old boy—spent three months on freight trains coming from California. Chief Running Wolf, a jobless Mescalero Indian from New Mexico, showed up in full Indian dress, with bow and arrow. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 9014-17 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 02:38 PM You’ll get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it. When you get that kind of attitude, they’ll label you as a “crazy Negro,” or they’ll call you a “crazy nigger”—they don’t say Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 11924-27 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 02:54 PM That illness came from a fact which was almost never talked about: that the United States was a class society, in which 1 percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth, with an underclass of 30 to 40 million people living in poverty. The social programs of the sixties—Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, etc.—did not do much more than maintain the historic American maldistribution of resources. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 12256-60 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 03:00 PM A much-publicized book by a philosopher named Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, expressed horror at what the social movements of the sixties had done to change the educational atmosphere of American universities. To him Western civilization was the high point of human progress, and the United States its best representative: “America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 12280-82 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 03:01 PM That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction—so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements—that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 12291-358 | Added on Monday, February 22, 2010, 03:03 PM The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media—none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty. One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country. Against the reality of that desperate, bitter battle for resources made scarce by elite control, I am taking the liberty of uniting those 99 percent as “the people.” I have been writing a history that attempts to represent their submerged, deflected, common interest. To emphasize the commonality of the 99 percent, to declare deep enmity of interest with the 1 percent, is to do exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them—from the Founding Fathers to now—have tried their best to prevent. Madison feared a “majority faction” and hoped the new Constitution would control it. He and his colleagues began the Preamble to the Constitution with the words “We the people . . . ,” pretending that the new government stood for everyone, and hoping that this myth, accepted as fact, would ensure “domestic tranquillity.” The pretense continued over the generations, helped by all-embracing symbols, physical or verbal: the flag, patriotism, democracy, national interest, national defense, national security. The slogans were dug into the earth of American culture like a circle of covered wagons on the western plain, from inside of which the white, slightly privileged American could shoot to kill the enemy outside—Indians or blacks or foreigners or other whites too wretched to be allowed inside the circle. The managers of the caravan watched at a safe distance, and when the battle was over and the field strewn with dead on both sides, they would take over the land, and prepare another expedition, for another territory. The scheme never worked perfectly. The Revolution and the Constitution, trying to bring stability by containing the class angers of the colonial period—while enslaving blacks, annihilating or displacing Indians—did not quite succeed, judging by the tenant uprisings, the slave revolts, the abolitionist agitation, the feminist upsurge, the Indian guerrilla warfare of the pre–Civil War years. After the Civil War, a new coalition of southern and northern elites developed, with southern whites and blacks of the lower classes occupied in racial conflict, native workers and immigrant workers clashing in the North, and the farmers dispersed over a big country, while the system of capitalism consolidated itself in industry and government. But there came rebellion among industrial workers and a great opposition movement among farmers. At the turn of the century, the violent pacification of blacks and Indians and the use of elections and war to absorb and divert white rebels were not enough, in the conditions of modern industry, to prevent the great upsurge of socialism, the massive labor struggles, before the First World War. Neither that war nor the partial prosperity of the twenties, nor the apparent destruction of the socialist movement, could prevent, in the situation of economic crisis, another radical awakening, another labor upsurge in the thirties. World War II created a new unity, followed by an apparently successful attempt, in the atmosphere of the cold war, to extinguish the strong radical temper of the war years. But then, surprisingly, came the surge of the sixties, from people thought long subdued or put out of sight—blacks, women, Native Americans, prisoners, soldiers—and a new radicalism, which threatened to spread widely in a population disillusioned by the Vietnam war and the politics of Watergate. The exile of Nixon, the celebration of the Bicentennial, the presidency of Carter, all aimed at restoration. But restoration to the old order was no solution to the uncertainty, the alienation, which was intensified in the Reagan-Bush years. The election of Clinton in 1992, carrying with it a vague promise of change, did not fulfill the expectations of the hopeful. With such continuing malaise, it is very important for the Establishment—that uneasy club of business executives, generals, and politicos—to maintain the historic pretension of national unity, in which the government represents all the people, and the common enemy is overseas, not at home, where disasters of economics or war are unfortunate errors or tragic accidents, to be corrected by the members of the same club that brought the disasters. It is important for them also to make sure this artificial unity of highly privileged and slightly privileged is the only unity—that the 99 percent remain split in countless ways, and turn against one another to vent their angers. How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred—by economic inequity—faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. But with all the controls of power and punishment, enticements and concessions, diversions and decoys, operating throughout the history of the country, the Establishment has been unable to keep itself secure from revolt. Every time it looked as if it had succeeded, the very people it thought seduced or subdued, stirred and rose. Blacks, cajoled by Supreme Court decisions and congressional statutes, rebelled. Women, wooed and ignored, romanticized and mistreated, rebelled. Indians, thought dead, reappeared, defiant. Young people, despite lures of career and comfort, defected. Working people, thought soothed by reforms, regulated by law, kept within bounds by their own unions, went on strike. Government intellectuals, pledged to secrecy, began giving away secrets. Priests turned from piety to protest. To recall this is to remind people of what the Establishment would like them to forget—the enormous capacity of apparently helpless people to resist, of apparently contented people to demand change. To uncover such history is to find a powerful human impulse to assert one’s humanity. It is to hold out, even in times of deep pessimism, the possibility of surprise. True, to overestimate class consciousness, to exaggerate rebellion and its successes, would be misleading. It would not account for the fact that the world—not just the United States, but everywhere else—is still in the hands of the elites, that people’s movements, although they show an infinite capacity for recurrence, have so far been either defeated or absorbed or perverted, that “socialist” revolutionists have betrayed socialism, that nationalist revolutions have led to new dictatorships. But most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens. When we look closely at resistance movements, or even at isolated forms of rebellion, we discover that class consciousness, or any other awareness of injustice, has multiple levels. It has many ways of expression, many ways of revealing itself—open, subtle, direct, distorted. In a system of intimidation and control, people do not show how much they know, how deeply they feel, until their practical sense informs them they can do so without being destroyed. History which keeps alive the memory of people’s resistance suggests new definitions of power. By traditional definitions, whoever possesses military strength, wealth, command of official ideology, cultural control, has power. Measured by these standards, popular ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 12498-500 | Added on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 07:39 PM Martin Luther King’s reaction to the buildup of military power had been the same as his reaction to the Vietnam war: “This madness must cease.” And: “. . . the evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together. . . .” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 12862-64 | Added on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 07:46 PM A 27-year-old woman named Kim Lee Jacobson, interviewed in the Boston Globe, epitomized the distorted national priorities. She had been named “U.S. Toddler Teacher of 1999” but, as she said: “I’m hitting $20,000 this year, after five years in the field. It all works out. I didn’t come for a lot of money, so I don’t expect to have a lot.” ========== A People's History of the United States (Howard Zinn) - Highlight Loc. 13264-70 | Added on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 08:28 PM But my partisanship was undoubtedly shaped even earlier, by my upbringing in a family of working-class immigrants in New York, by my three years as a shipyard worker, and by my Air Force duty as a bombardier in the European theater (a strange word for that—“theater”) in the second World War. That was all before I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights and began to study history. By the time I began teaching and writing, I had no illusions about “objectivity,” if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian. ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 506-10 | Added on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 09:23 PM In 2005 universities spent $45.8 billion on R&D. Of that amount, the federal government provided $29.2 billion. Industry provided $2.3 billion. Over the past quarter century, industry's share of academic R&D financing hit a peak of 7.4 percent in 1999 and a low of 4.9 percent in 2004, according to the National Science Foundation.2 Within academe, however, the dreams of industrial money live on, because the other sources are stretched and industry does indeed spend a great deal of money on research-far more than the U.S. government, again contrary to general misunderstanding. But very little of industry's R&D money is spent in universities. Rather, the industrial money stays close to home, in corporate America's own laboratories and, increasingly, in company-owned laboratories abroad because they are cheaper to operate and closer to local markets. ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 641-48 | Added on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 09:35 PM Another perspective was offered to me by Karl Koster, MIT's director of corporate relations: Companies are in the business of making money. Some of them are very secretive about what they do. And there are companies that like to contract for research, and there are various mechanisms outside the university system. Some companies really don't understand that the real benefit of working with MIT is really their investment in their human capital. Their brightest technical people can understand the leading edges of research in domains that are important to the company. That's the principal benefit of getting involved with a university. It's really an investment in their own knowledge acquisition and capital. Recently there's been a lot of press about intellectual property, but if you look at MIT, we had about $570 million worth of research on campus last year. We applied for two hundred and something patents. Every $z. million, you get maybe one patent. And how many of those patents actually wind up earning money or being a product or some subset of that? If all a company is after is acquiring intellectual property, I would say there's a lot cheaper ways to do it than getting involved with a university. We don't do proprietary research. If what they're really after is acquiring intellectual property, I think they're much better off acquiring it with companies that have it, not by working with MIT.25 ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 960-65 | Added on Wednesday, February 24, 2010, 01:44 PM What we don't really have is more the entrepreneurial type of culture, where the scientists can have start-ups and that sort of thing. We've avoided some of those problems, but we've had our own problems and other issues. But partly that is because we've been held to very high standards. And I guess in the end we can't complain about that. What do people really want from us? Do they really want more patents, more products, more companies down the street that are collaborating with us? Spin-offs, whatever? That kind of thing is being sorted out. We kind of get mixed messages. Part of it right now is that the NIH is above all that. It's still the last ivory tower-some days. But other days of the week, we're right mixed in it, and criticized for collaboration. So, it depends what day of the week.38 ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1009-16 | Added on Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11:26 AM In a policy statement issued in 2003, Keeping Science Open: The Effects of Intellectual Property Policy on the Conduct of Science, the organization disapprovingly noted the widening and lowering of patent standards in the United States and a growing tendency towards pushing the boundaries of patenting out from inventions into areas of knowledge. . . . Much rhetoric in the US has tended to regard patents as an almost absolute or natural right for inventors. By contrast, in Europe, patents are regarded less as an absolute right than a privilege granted at the discretion of governments in pursuit of economic, social or technological objectives.... It is of particular importance to the scientific community that modification to these exclusions from patentability do not lead to a greater risk of scientific knowledge being monopolised. We agree with the view of many scientists that pure knowledge about the physical world should not be patentable under any circumstances. That it should be freely available to all is one of the fundamental principles of the culture of science. Only by having knowledge unencumbered by property rights can the scientific community disseminate information and take science forward .41 Under the title "Not Wicked, Perhaps, but Tacky," an editorial by Science editor ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1018-20 | Added on Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11:27 AM So what we have here is a growing list of behaviors that, taken together, exemplify the gradual retreat from generosity and straight dealing in a community that is usually known for those qualities. Perhaps the core elements of "tacky" in these examples is that they all eat away at the sense of community, shared understanding, and public trust that are crucial to science. ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1122-26 | Added on Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11:32 AM "One of the things I really resent is the idea that everybody who discovers a mutation of certain genes can patent that mutation. That's absurd," he said. "You end up with patent clutter-too many patents on the same thing. And then it has become unaffordable. The whole point is to make sure things get out there and get out there at a reasonable price." And then he brought up the Onco Mouse, the Harvard invention, licensed to DuPont, that, for many, symbolizes ungoverned scientific commercialism, to the detriment of science and the public it claims to serve: "One of my longest and most acrimonious debates with ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1162-64 | Added on Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11:35 AM In announcing the winners, the Kauffman Foundation noted that it had initially imposed a matching dollar requirement of two to one for the awards, a standard technique for expanding philanthropic impact by requiring the winners to raise additional funds. The announcement noted, however, that the "selected schools were so enthused about the concept, they succeeded in securing a three-to-one match. As a result, the initial $z5 million commitment will be leveraged into a $zoo million investment for the creation of new interdisciplinary education programs."' ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1193-96 | Added on Thursday, February 25, 2010, 04:14 PM broad vision of entrepreneurship, explaining to me that it "is not about starting a business. It's something larger than that. And when you recognize that, it opens up the campus to act in a more collaborative cross-campus way, because there's space around the term `entrepreneurship' for everybody." Harrington, a successful entrepreneur and corporate executive before joining Wash U in zooz, says that the nation's "Founding Fathers were entrepreneurs; Martin Luther was an entrepreneur; impressionistic painters were entrepreneurs. And they had nothing to do with founding businesses." ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1321-22 | Added on Thursday, February 25, 2010, 10:26 PM Many of these dealings between science and industry are characterized more by silence or murkiness than by the vaunted transparency that is celebrated as a guarantor of upright behavior. It's usually only when something goes very wrong that the tawdry details of academic-industrial deals become visible to outsiders. ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1535-36 | Added on Friday, February 26, 2010, 01:43 PM In academic and scientific folklore, sunshine is prescribed as the best disinfectant against unsavory dealings. Under the new regulations, dimness, and sometimes darkness, descended on the outside business dealings of the savants entrusted to manage or conduct research at the NIH. How did this happen? In a ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 1808-15 | Added on Monday, March 01, 2010, 05:41 PM The shift to foreign sites became noticeable in the early 199os and continued to accelerate in the new century. In zoos Thomson CenterWatch, which monitors the clinical-trial industry, forecast that by 2008, up to 30% of global clinical trial activity will take place outside of the U.S. and Western Europe due to high demand for study subjects and well-trained clinical research professionals. China, Eastern Europe and Latin America are several key markets earmarked for rapid growth in clinical research grants. Some estimates are that India could capture up to 8-io% of the global clinical trial market by the end of the decade.... Central and Eastern European countries have become increasingly popular locations for clinical research, and the interest continues to push eastward as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic approach the saturation point. While lower costs remain a draw, access to motivated investigators and patients concentrated in large public hospitals are the biggest advantages. Major sponsors and CROs are all well represented in the region, aided by small but capable local CROs. Trial data overall are exceptional.... Investigator fees, shorter recruitment timelines, lower hospital fees, cleaner data all contribute to cost saving for biopharmaceuticals doing business in CEE [Central and Eastern Europe]." The long-standing as well as the new ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 2226-27 | Added on Tuesday, March 02, 2010, 06:36 PM We used to pour radioactive waste down the drain into the water supply. But the fact is," he emphasized, "these regs were driven by bad behavior, not by malevolent, powerful people who wanted to screw us up and tie us in knots." ========== Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Daniel S. Greenberg) - Highlight Loc. 14 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 01:46 AM 14 What's Right and Wrong, and How to ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 52-56 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 02:02 AM China's very existence creates a problem for Western accounts of world history. The Bible didn't say anything about China. Hegel saw world history starting with primitive China and ending in a crescendo of perfection with German civilization. Fukuyama's `end of history' thesis simply replaces Germany with America. But suddenly the West has discovered that in the East there is this China: a large empire, with a long history and glorious past. A whole new world has emerged. Gan Yang, `The Grand Three Traditions in the New Era: The Integration of the Three Traditions and the Re-emergence of the Chinese Civilization' ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 94-98 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 10:38 AM Wang Luolin's one-upmanship on size was just the beginning of a well-worn strategy designed to bewilder and co-opt outsiders. We spent many hours engaged in polite conversation without touching on the specifics of our co-operation. These elaborate courtship rituals, seemingly devoid of substance or direction, have been honed over centuries to nullify Western negotiating strategies, and bind foreigners into Chinese ways of doing things, creating webs based on personal contact rather than contractual obligations. At the beginning of the trip, I had hoped to get a quick introduction to China, learn the basics, and go home. But after spending what felt like weeks in these introductory meetings, sitting around sipping tea and exchanging pleasantries I ended up getting sucked in. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 111-19 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 11:57 AM `Yuanmingyuan' as it is known in Chinese, acts as an open wound that can be salted whenever citizens need to be mobilized, or reminded of how the Communist Party saved China from foreign defeat. Yuanmingyuan is a physical embodiment of the `century of humiliation' which ran from China's defeat in the Opium Wars of 1840, through the loss of Taiwan, the various Japanese invasions and the civil war right until the Communist Revolution of 1949. For some intellectuals, the remains of Yuanmingyuan also tell another story about modern China. This story is not about the damage which colonial powers have done to China, but of the destruction which the Chinese have inflicted upon themselves by importing - and misapplying - foreign ideas. In July 2006, Zhang Guangtian, an avant-garde theatre director, staged a controversial play, called Yuanmingyuan, that dramatized the relentless quest to modernize China by importing ideas from abroad, a history that has seen the country leap from one totalizing philosophy to another. Zhang Guangtian's play challenged his compatriots with a heretical question: who really destroyed Yuanmingyuan? Taking the spotlight off the imperial powers, he showed how the Chinese people themselves have been complicit in the despoiling of this national icon which he treats as a metaphor for their dreams and ideals. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 211-15 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 12:04 PM But life today is getting tougher for economists like Zhang Weiying. After thirty years of ruling the roost with imported ideas from the West, they can feel China turning against them. Opinion polls show that they are the least popular group in China - on a par with traffic wardens and used-car salesmen in the UK. Public anger is growing over the costs of reform, with protests by laid-off workers coming together with concern over illegal demolitions, corruption and unpaid wages and pensions. As a result, the ideas of the market are being challenged by a New Left' which advocates a gentler form of capitalism. A battle of ideas is raging which pits the state against the market; coasts against inland provinces; towns against the countryside; the rich against the poor. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 224-25 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 01:36 PM were derisively known as fanshipai or `whateverists' because they supported whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made). ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 243-48 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 01:38 PM Zhang Weiying's allegory is an explanation of his most famous idea, the theory of `dual-track pricing' which he first put forward in 1984. He argued that `dual-track pricing' would allow the government to move from an economy where prices were set by government officials to one where they were set by the market, without having to publicly abandon its commitment to socialism or run into the opposition of local governments with a vested interest in central planning. Under Zhang Weiying's approach some goods and services continued to be sold at state controlled prices while others were sold at market prices. Over time, the proportion of goods sold at market prices was steadily increased until by the early 1990s almost all products were sold at market prices. The `dual-track' approach embodies the combination of pragmatism and incrementalism that has allowed China's reformers to work around obstacles rather than confronting them head on. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 341-45 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 01:44 PM Wang Hui is one of the leaders of the `New Left, a loose grouping of intellectuals that is increasingly capturing the public mood, and setting the tone for political debate. They are `new' because unlike the `old left' they support market reforms. They are Left, because unlike the `New Right' they worry about inequality. Many sought exile in the USA in the 1990s, but now they are back to join the debate about China's future. In an interview, Wang Hui set out their stall: `China is caught between the two extremes of misguided socialism and crony capitalism, and suffering from the worst elements of both systems ... I am generally in favor of orienting the country toward market reforms, but China's development must be more equal, more balanced. We must not give total priority to GDP growth to the exclusion of worker's rights and the environment.' ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 355-58 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 01:45 PM Henan literally means `South of the River; because of its location on the banks of the Yellow River. This is the heart of inland China, the spiritual opposite of Shenzhen. Traditionally regarded as the birthplace of Chinese civilization, it is also home to a village that became the poster boy of the `New Left' in the 1990s: Nanjie. In a deliberate experiment, Nanjie's leaders created a synthesis of the market and collectivism, as they abandoned their agricultural heritage to embrace ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 365-66 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 10:30 PM protection of its workers. It was an emblem of an alternative form of capitalism to that practised in the Pearl River Delta, one which I will call `Yellow River Capitalism'. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 372-73 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 10:30 PM For the `New Left, the key to the Yellow River Capitalism is a philosophy of perpetual innovation - developing new kinds of companies and social institutions that marry competition and co-operation. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 400-404 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 10:32 PM The three letters that have come to symbolize the most brazen pillaging of collective resources are `MBO; short for management buyout. In 2004, a little-known Hong Kong-based academic called Lang Xianping became a national figure when he used his slot on an obscure local Shanghai TV station to investigate and expose some of these abuses. His show caused such waves that Gu Chujun, the chairman of one of the companies that he exposed, took him to court for defamation with a plucky battle-cry `I'm fighting for the honour of the entrepreneurs.' Before Gu Chujun lost his case and was put in prison, the economist Zhang Weiying came to his defence, complaining about the practice of ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 428-29 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 10:34 PM The growth-at-all-costs incentive structure for local officials was enshrined when Deng Xiaoping said, `It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white. All that matters is that it catches mice.' ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 464-70 | Added on Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 10:36 PM Zhang Weiying fears that the government has lost its drive to see the process through to its logical conclusion, to write itself out of the economic picture. Economic growth is now taken for granted, rather than seen as the most urgent goal. Fewer of the State Owned Enterprises are losing money, so the pressure to privatize has eased. And political leaders in Beijing now talk about the need to stop the economy overheating, to redistribute wealth, to achieve `balanced development, rather than the need to accelerate growth of privatization. Zhang Weiying and his `New Right' colleagues worry that President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have succumbed to a dangerous form of populism. They worry that measures to redistribute wealth will slow economic growth - and in the process threaten the achievements of the last thirty years. In an economy where many have made their fortunes through dubious means, they worry that the drive against corruption could lead the government to follow Vladimir Putin's Russian model of confiscating assets from business oligarchs. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 506-15 | Added on Thursday, March 04, 2010, 01:34 PM In policy terms, however, the balance of power is subtly shifting towards the Left. At the end of 2005, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao published the `11th Five Year Plan, their blueprint for a `Harmonious Society'. This report - based on the research of dozens of teams of party officials sent to examine social policy in Europe, the USA, Latin America, East Asia and Africa - marked a clear shift in the way the country thinks about its economic future. For the first time since the reform era began in 1978, economic growth was not described as the overriding goal for the Chinese state. In its place was a broader goal of `development' which China's leaders now define as `putting people first' (yiren weiben) while respecting the natural environment. They talked about introducing a Scandinavian model of social welfare with promises of a 20 per cent year-on-year increase in the funds available for pensions, unemployment benefit, health insurance and maternity leave. For rural China they promised a New Socialist Countryside' where arbitrary taxes would be cut, and health and education improved. They also pledged to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 per cent, and to introduce new performance indicators for party officials that stress social and environmental indicators as well as economic growth. China's shift in policy orientation was further sealed when the 2007 Party Congress enshrined Hu Jintao's Left-leaning `Scientific Development Concept' in the party's constitution at the same level as Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Thought, an achievement that eluded his predecessor Jiang Zemin while he was in office. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 521-23 | Added on Thursday, March 04, 2010, 01:35 PM Western democracy is like going to a restaurant and choosing whether you want a French, Italian or German chef who will decide on your behalf what is on the menu. With Chinese democracy we always have the same chef - the Communist Party - but we will increasingly get to choose which dishes he cooks. Fang Ning, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 574-78 | Added on Thursday, March 04, 2010, 01:38 PM metropolitan snobbishness: although local elected officials in Beijing have little impact on citizens' lives, in the countryside they are responsible for crucial policy objectives such as family planning, taxation and land acquisition. Yu Keping's claims are backed up in research by the economist Yang Yao of Beijing University, which shows that elections can help to tackle corruption and improve public services. In a study that looked at forty-eight villages over sixteen years, Yao Yang found that the introduction of elections had increased spending on public services by 20 per cent, while reducing the proportion spent on `administrative costs' (bureaucratic speak for the entertainment budgets and salaries of local bosses and their families) by 18 per cent. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 582-83 | Added on Thursday, March 04, 2010, 01:39 PM introduce democracy into the heart of the Communist Party. Because the party controls everything, he argues, there is hope that if it can be made democratic it will change the nature of the country. Yu Keping's assessment may be a little over-optimistic, but his idea of `inner party democracy' is catching on. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 615-19 | Added on Thursday, March 04, 2010, 01:41 PM Democracy = chaos `You talk about democracy as if it were a religion which needs to be spread around the world. But elections will not solve any of the problems facing China today.' This is how Pan Wei, a rising star at Beijing University, greeted me at our first meeting, castigating me for paying so much attention to the experiments in grass-roots democracy that have sprung up around China. `The Sichuan experiment will go nowhere,' he says, `the local leaders have their personal political goal: they want to make their names known. But the experiment has not succeeded. In fact, Sichuan is the place with the highest number of mass protests. Very few other places want to emulate them.' Unfortunately Pan Wei is probably right. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 625-28 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 10:23 AM once elected, the public officers are to serve electors on the one hand and money providers on the other.' The pressing issue for most people, he says, is not `who should run the government?" but `how should the government be run?' He argues that political reform should flow from social problems rather than universal or Western principles. Most theorists of democracy would not accept Pan Wei's attempt to separate how a government is run from how its leaders are selected: the former is very much a product of the latter. And the legitimacy that comes from elections would strengthen any ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 629-31 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 10:24 AM However, Pan Wei's aversion to democracy seems to have deeper roots than intellectual arguments. He claims that democracy conjures up three of the most painful images in the Chinese psyche: the collapse of the former Soviet Union which followed Gorbachev's political liberalization; the so-called `people's democracy' of China's own Cultural Revolution; and the risk of an independent Taiwan. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 662-67 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 01:28 PM Pan Wei berates Westerners for misunderstanding their own political systems. We assume, he says, that our countries are stable and prosperous because of democracy. But we confuse the benefits we get from democracy with those that we get from the rule of law. Pan Wei argues that democracy and the rule of law do not need to go together - in fact, like `Ping' and `Yang' they are in constant conflict with one another. Democracy is about giving power to the people, but the rule of law is about putting limits on that power. Democracy creates governments, but the rule of law regulates them. Democracy is about making laws, the rule of law about enforcing them. The powerbase of democracy lies in the officials we vote for - parliamentarians, ministers, prime ministers and presidents. But the power of the rule ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 668-69 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 01:29 PM `the former is about majority, and the latter about meritocracy'. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 677-78 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 01:30 PM Although it is a long way from reality, Pan Wei has a vision of a high-tech consultative dictatorship, where there are no elections but decisions made by a responsive government, bound by law, and in touch with its citizens' aspirations. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 760-61 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 01:35 PM According to Pan Wei, the quality of the proceedings is slowly improving: `Fifteen years ago most of the judges were retired officials or military officers. Today they all have legal training.' ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 770-74 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 01:36 PM The `New Leftist' Wang Hui argues that it will be impossible to develop the `New Left' agenda without wider political reform, because China's new rich have a stranglehold on politics. `You need democracy in order to empower the state to take money from special interests to pay for public goods. In the 1990s there was a dichotomy between a free market and an authoritarian state. People thought that the economic reforms were working and that we could reform the state later. Now we see that many of the problems we are facing are a product of economic reforms and we need political reform to correct them.' ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 795-800 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 10:27 PM These theories may well prove to be correct in the long term, but the assumption that political change can only lead in one direction has blinded many observers to the remarkable political changes that China has already implemented. After three decades of reform, China has made steady improvements in developing the rule of law and professionalizing its civil service but it has developed very few of the tenets of liberal democracy. With remarkable ease, the Chinese authorities have been able to co-opt each political reform to entrench the power of the ruling Communist Party. Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to the internet. The internet was one of the forces guaranteed to change China. However, in the event it is China that has changed the internet: forcing internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to play by its rules. Most dictatorships see the internet as akin to the weather. You can cover yourself when it rains, but you cannot control the seasons. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 820-24 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 10:29 PM The big questions are whether the Communist Party can continue adapting, and whether deliberative dictatorship can prove a robust alternative to liberal democracy? Certainly, the authorities seem willing to experiment with all kinds of political innovations. In Pingchang, they have been willing to introduce greater democracy within the party. In Chongqing, they have given up a certain amount of judicial power and allowed public voices to be heard. In Zeguo, they have introduced a form of government by focus group. The main criterion guiding political reform seems to be that it must not threaten the Communist Party's monopoly on power. You could call it `Anything but National Elections'. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 814-17 | Added on Friday, March 05, 2010, 10:33 PM and regularly banned. The ferocity with which the Communist Party suppresses the herbivorous and mild-mannered Falun Gong has puzzled many outside observers. But Beijing is not afraid of the content of their meetings; it is afraid of them meeting at all. China's history of revolutions organized by secret societies and religious sects has taught the government to be careful. Its greatest fear is that, in a country where political gatherings are restricted, the net could provide a virtual meeting place for the masses to organize. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 851-55 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 01:32 AM Power China must be the most self-aware rising power in history. It is hard to imagine advisers to Napoleon, Lord Palmerston, Bismarck, or even George Bush drawing up complex charts to rank their own country's economic, political and military power against the competition. But that is precisely what Hu Angang was trying to do in our seminar. And he is by no means alone. Measuring `CNP' - short for Comprehensive National Power - has become a national obsession. 'CNP' is more than a cute acronym for Chinese strategists. From the time of Sun Zi onwards, the Chinese have concluded that it is only by looking at your opponent's weaknesses that you can understand your own strengths. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 855-58 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 01:32 AM Each of the major foreign policy think-tanks has devised its own index to give a numerical value to every nation's power. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) was first to pioneer the approach - devising an index with sixty-four indicators of power in 1996. Not to be outdone the Chinese Institute for Contemporary International Relations - a vast think-tank banked by China's spooks at the State Security Ministry - developed a rival toolkit, using `expert surveys, regression analysis, nerve networks and cluster analysis'. In 1999, the military also joined the party, commissioning the Chinese Military Academy to develop its own seemingly scientific formula for measuring national power (P=KxHxS). ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 872-75 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 01:33 AM Chinese officials were terrified that the rest of the world would see China's rise as a threat, and therefore gang up against it. They hoped that if they refused to talk about their country's rise, the rest of the world might not notice it was happening. They preferred instead to talk of `development, a political euphemism which, in Orwell's words, would allow them `to name things without calling up mental pictures of them'. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 909-13 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 01:36 AM The theory of `Peaceful Rise' immediately provoked a counterattack from the assertive nationalists in Beijing's universities. They are China's neo-cons, or considering their formal affiliation, `neo-comms'. One of the most vocal is Professor Yan Xuetong, Director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University. `Peaceful Rise is wrong,' he told me in his Beijing office, `because it gives Taiwan a message that they can declare independence and we will not attack them.' Yan Xuetong, like many Chinese strategists, argues that no great nation in history ever rose in peace. While he thinks that China should do all it can to avoid war, he fears that one with Taiwan is probably inevitable if Beijing does not abandon its goal of reunification. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 936-39 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 01:39 AM They have taken three of the most striking Western ideas about globalization and turned them on their head, transforming concepts used to describe the decline of the nation state into strategies for increasing China's national power. For example, the idea of `soft power, which is associated in the West with the attractiveness of companies such as McDonald's and Levi's, has been transformed in Chinese hands into a quest by the Chinese state to recapture the `moral high-ground' of international relations. The ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 950-54 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 01:41 AM Chinese thinkers are desperately trying to free themselves from this trap. One of the hottest buzz-words in Chinese foreign policy circles is `ruan quanli' - the Chinese term for `soft power'. This modish concept was invented by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990, but it is being promoted with far more zeal in Beijing than in Washington DC. Unlike its more aggressive antithesis `hard power, which is about bribing or forcing other countries to do what you want, `soft power' is defined as the ability to get others to want what you want. It depends neither on economic carrots nor political sticks, but rather on the attractiveness of your culture and ideas, your legitimacy in the eyes of others, and your ability to set the rules in international organizations. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 963-66 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 09:51 AM China has begun to emulate these techniques. Its Education Ministry will set up 100 `Confucius Institutes' to teach Chinese and promote Chinese culture, in the same way that the British Council and Goethe-Institut do for European culture (it has already set up thirty-two in twenty-three countries). China's international TV station - the sinister-sounding CCTV 9 - is designed to grow into a global news station to rival CNN. Beijing has expanded and professionalized the party-controlled newswire Xinhua in the hope that it will be taken as seriously as Reuters or AP. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 1087-90 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:27 AM Top of their list is `economic warfare'. Referring to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the authors speak with awe about the power of international financiers like George Soros to undermine the economies of the so-called `Asian Tigers': `Economic prosperity that once excited the constant admiration of the Western world changed to a depression, like the leaves of a tree that are blown away in a single night by the autumn wind.' If a lone individual like Soros could unleash so much destruction simply for profit, how much damage could a proud nation like China inflict on the USA with its trillion dollars of foreign reserves? ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 1094-99 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:28 AM weapon, or `Lawfare' for short. The authors argue that citizens of democracies increasingly demand that their countries uphold international rules, particularly ones that govern human rights and the conduct of war. Governments are, therefore, constrained by regional or worldwide organizations, such as the European Union, ASEAN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO and the United Nations. The authors argue that China should copy the European model of using international law to pin down the USA: `there are far-sighted big powers which have clearly already begun to borrow the power of supra-national, multinational, and non-state players to redouble and expand their own influence'. They think that China could turn the United Nations and regional organizations into an amplifier of the Chinese world-view - discouraging the USA from using its might in campaigns like the Iraq War. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 1116-21 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:30 AM And Taiwan is just one of the `five poisons' that the Chinese fear will lead to the break-up of their nation - the others are separatists in the Muslim enclave of Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia and the provinces around Korea. Many of the issues that currently cause tension between China and the West - the competition for energy sources, China's role in Africa, stopping nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea - can be soothed with tactical shifts by both parties. But for all the talk of multilateralism, soft power and interdependence, the obsession with Taiwan has stopped China from truly adapting its outlook to an era of globalization. Whenever I hear Chinese strategists discussing the small island, I am reminded of the words of Michael Corleone in The Godfather: `Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again.' ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 1168-73 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:34 AM This controversy burst into the open in 2006 with a provocative newspaper article by Wang Yiwei, a young scholar at Fudan University, who asked `How can we prevent the USA from declining too quickly?' Wang Yiwei's question generated heated responses from neo-comms and liberal internationalists alike. One of Wang Yiwei's colleagues at Fudan University, Shen Dingli, has framed the challenge even more sharply: `have people asked themselves what would happen to the world if America declined?' he asked. `Could China, Russia, the EU, Germany or Japan deliver public goods as America can, or build international political or economic institutions?' For Shen Dingli, who believes that Beijing is not yet ready for prime-time, the goal should be to `shape an America that is more constrained and more willing to co-operate with the world'. China should use a mix of engagement and containment to shape the USA so that it becomes a responsible power: which, of ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 1316-23 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:52 AM upset the Chinese authorities by penning a best-selling novel, Please Don't Call Me Human, in which he imagined a Beijing Olympics where nations competed to prove their citizens' capacity for humiliation, rather than their athletic prowess. In this fantasy competition - which China was determined to win at any cost - the novel's protagonist, a delinquent pedicab driver called Yuanbao, who leads the Chinese team, scored the maximum points by performing a number of degrading rituals ranging from drinking another contestant's urine to being frozen alive in a fish tank. Wang Shuo's remorseless mocking of his country's greatest obsession - saving face - ends with the distressing scene of Yuanbao ripping off his own face to win the gold medal. The image of the faceless anti-hero standing in a pool of blood - holding his facial skin above his head in triumph - was such a shocking rebuke to the country's dreams of national greatness that Wang Shuo's writings were eventually banned in a government campaign against `spiritual pollution'. The country that Wang Shuo depicts had become so used to seeing the world order as a given to which it must adapt that it assumed that the only way to overturn the humiliation inflicted on China by foreigners was to embrace that humiliation itself. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 1335-38 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:53 AM history, was obsessed with the need to hold China together and shield it from its neighbours. The Chinese have labelled this obsession with boundaries the `Great Wall mentality'. It is a concern that runs so deep that it has infiltrated the country's identity, its lifestyle and even its alphabet: all Chinese cities are surrounded by walls, the traditional Chinese courtyard house literally takes the form of a wall surrounding an atrium, while the pictograph for `country' is made up of a four-walled pattern. ========== What Does China Think? (Mark Leonard) - Highlight Loc. 1365-68 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:54 AM Fang Ning is especially proud of his 1997 article `Socialism is about Harmony, which was one of the first to make a connection between socialism and harmony. He claims that his article was one of the inspirations for the now popular political slogans `Harmonious Society' and `Harmonious World'. As the Deputy Director of the Institute of Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, he is a prolific ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 110-14 | Added on Saturday, March 06, 2010, 11:58 AM large and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These critters -- let's call them publicly-held corporations -- may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them -- yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They are also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those humans who feed in their upper elevations. ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 159-61 | Added on Monday, March 22, 2010, 10:07 AM Upscale retail chains had embassies in the city center, and the service people drove in each day from vassal communities. Where the medieval city of Lyon had its Lane of Tanners, Southern California had its Vale of the Baristas and its Canyon of Firefighters and Rescue Personnel. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 63-67 | Added on Monday, March 22, 2010, 01:36 PM But slowly, technology filled in the gaps. First, praise God, came the Internet, where you could read the British sports pages and closely follow the players that you had encountered at the World Cup. Then Rupert Murdoch, blessed be his name, created a cable channel called Fox Sports World, dedicated almost entirely to airing European and Latin American soccer.* Now, a rooftop dish brings into my living room a feed from the Spanish club Real Madrid’s cable channel, as well as games from Paraguay, Honduras, the Netherlands, Scotland, and France, not to mention Brazil, Argentina, and England. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 176-81 | Added on Monday, March 22, 2010, 01:43 PM As I put away my pen and notebook, Krle reengages the group. He stands over me and demonstrates the three-fingered salute of Serb nationalism, the peace sign plus a thumb. The gesture signifies both the holy trinity and the Serb belief that they are the planet’s most authentic representatives of the holy trinity. “Now you,” he says in English. I comply. Before I leave the room, Krle makes me repeat the gesture four more times. When I later describe this moment to a human rights activist who has spent many years in Belgrade, he tells me that, during the war, paramilitaries forced Muslims and Croats to make this salute before their rape or murder. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 198-203 | Added on Monday, March 22, 2010, 10:17 PM Susan Faludi and a phalanx of sociologists have an explanation for this outburst. They have written about downsized men, the ones whose industrial jobs were outsourced to third-world labor. Deprived of traditional work and knocked off patriarchal pedestals, these men desperately wanted to reassert their masculinity. Soccer violence gave them a rare opportunity to actually exert control. When these fans dabbled in racism and radical nationalism, it was because those ideologies worked as metaphors for their own lives. Their nations and races had been victimized by the world just as badly as they had been themselves. ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1988-93 | Added on Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 07:41 PM DARPA: “No. They don’t. We believe the components are triggered not by each other, but by reading news stories. For example, one component just issued this press release”—he passed a printed page—“only after the siege story hit the wire services. The release is digitally signed. Sobol wants us to know it was his. We already tracked down the origin of the press release; it was e-mailed from a poorly secured computer in a St. Louis accounting firm. The program destroyed itself after it ran, but we were able to recover it from a tape backup. It was a simple HTML reader searching hundreds of Web sites for headlines about this estate siege.” ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 2986-92 | Added on Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 08:29 PM “A HyperSonic Sound system—or HSS—does not use physical speakers. HSS pulsates quartz crystals at a frequency thousands of times faster than the vibrations in a normal speaker—creating ultrasonic waves at frequencies far beyond human hearing. Unlike lower-frequency sound, these waves travel in a tight path—a beam. Two beams can be focused to intersect each other, and where they interact they produce a third sonic wave whose frequency is exactly the difference between the two original sounds. In HSS that difference will fall within the range of human hearing—and will appear to come from thin air. This is known as a Tartini Tone—in honor of Guiseppe Tartini, the eighteenth-century Italian composer who first discovered this principle.” Gragg was feeling slightly faint. ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 3308-11 | Added on Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 08:45 PM She continued, “Now combine an application like that—a widely distributed entity that never dies—with tens of millions of dollars and the ability to purchase goods and services. It’s answerable to no one and has no fear of punishment.” “My God. It’s a corporation.” “Bingo.” ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 4659-61 | Added on Saturday, March 27, 2010, 11:44 AM “Controls, no. Influences, yes. There are only five major media companies in the world. It doesn’t take a lot to influence content—particularly if you are inside their systems and you have secured key people.” ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 5360-62 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 02:23 AM Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too—but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees. ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 5373-81 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 02:24 AM Lindhurst was without decades-old family ties to the organization—but then again, the rapid expansion of computer systems in the corporate world in recent years had outpaced the ability of old-money families to produce senior technology talent. While Lindhurst hadn’t written any actual code since working with Fortran and Pascal back in his Princeton days, he had learned over the years how much systems should cost and what they needed to do. In essence, computer systems needed to do only one of two things: make money or save money. Everything else was just details. Scut work. These tasks Lindhurst delegated to the executive senior veeps, who, in turn, delegated them to someone else…and so on. It was only during times of complete disaster that Lindhurst involved himself with the actual computer systems themselves. Today was such a time. Lindhurst pointed at the CEO’s temple-like office doors as he passed the executive secretary’s desk. “He in?” ========== Daemon (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 5966-75 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 03:27 AM Sobol started to walk along the cliff’s edge. The camera followed him, Steadicam-like, in medium close-up. “Technology. It is the physical manifestation of the human will. It began with simple tools. Then came the wheel, and on it goes to this very day. Civilizations rise and fall based on technological innovation. Bronze falls to iron. Iron falls to steel. Steel falls to gunpowder. Gunpowder falls to circuitry.” Sobol looked toward the camera again. “For those among you who don’t understand what’s happening, let me explain: the Great Diffusion has begun—an era when the nation state dissolves. Technology will cause this. As countries compete for markets in the global economy, diffusion of high technology will accelerate. It will result in a diffusion of power. And diffusion of power will make countries an ineffective organizing principle. At first, marginal governments will fail. Larger states will not be equipped to intercede effectively. These lawless regions will become breeding grounds for international crime and terrorism. Threats to centralized authority will multiply. Centralized power will be defenseless against these distributed threats. You have already experienced the leading edge of this wave.” ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 296-300 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 09:07 PM In Yugoslav papers—and for that matter across the world—war had been a metaphor for sports. Teams would battle and attack; they had impenetrable defenses and strikers who fired volleys. Now, Arkan’s men brought the metaphor to life. As he put it in an interview a few years later, “We fans first trained without weapons…. Since our first beginning I insisted on discipline. Fans make noise, they want to get drunk, fool around. I decided to stop all this with one blow; I made them cut their hair, shave regularly, stop drinking, and everything went on track.” ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 350-56 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 09:11 PM Almost instantly, under Arkan’s stewardship, the club triumphed. Within a year of arriving in the top division, it won the national championship. Arkan liked to brag about the secrets of his success; the fact that he paid his players the highest salaries in the country; that he forbade them to drink before games; that he disciplined his players to act as a military unit. But his opponents provide another explanation for Obilic’s impossibly rapid ascent. According to one widely reported account, Arkan had threatened to shoot a rival striker’s kneecap if he scored against Obilic. Another player told the English soccer magazine Four-Four-Two that he’d been locked in a garage while his team played against Obilic. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 369-74 | Added on Saturday, January 03, 1970, 05:48 AM Obilic never flourished in continental competition. Arkan hadn’t dared lock players from Bayern Munich and other giant European clubs in garages. Soon, Obilic began to slip in the domestic game, too. After Obilic’s championship season, clubs understood that throwing the championship to Arkan had exacted too great a financial cost. They banded together and dared Arkan to kill them all. “The teams called one another and said, ‘We can’t let this happen again,’” the theater director and soccer columnist Gorcin Stojanovic told me. With the clubs aligned against him, Arkan deployed intimidation less frequently. Obilic began to fade into the middle of the league table. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 442-46 | Added on Saturday, January 03, 1970, 05:53 AM When police arrived, they found a door to a secret bunker beneath Ceca’s palace. It took several hours to break through the entrance, but when they did, they found quite a cache, dozens of guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, silencers, and laser guides, just like the one I had seen on the shelf in her office. The police locked Ceca in solitary confinement and left her there for a month. In the meantime, they began scouring her finances, especially related to Obilic, and found that there had barely been the pretense of legality in the operation. After selling her players, Ceca would allegedly stuff the profits into her personal accounts in Cyprus and Hungary. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 656-66 | Added on Saturday, January 03, 1970, 08:51 PM calls. Next, they recount that a player was ejected from a game in 1996 for crossing himself upon entering the pitch—a deliberately provocative gesture, the referee called it. In the mainstream press, there is a phrase to describe these complaints: Celtic paranoia. The notion is that Catholics have imagined the crimes committed against them, have grown too attached to the idea of suffering. This smells of victim blaming, but the closer one examines the evidence the more reasonable the thesis becomes. Celtic fans have a predilection for dredging up ancient history and conflating it with recent events. Burns’s Jesuitical study, for example, relies on newspaper clippings from the 1960s to make the case against the Scottish referees. In a way, this confusion of past and present perfectly captures the Scottish Catholic condition. Without question, they continue to suffer prejudice in the present day. But when asked to give examples of the wounds inflicted by Scottish Protestants, they fall back on stories they’ve inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. To be sure, these are often devastating tales: Catholics denied jobs, shut out of universities, and prevented from falling in love with Protestant women. Western Scotland had been a place, in the words of the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, where “the birds on the trees sang sectarian songs.” ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 877-84 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 07:11 AM If all this seemed exceptionally political, it was because these clubs were the products of a political doctrine. An entire movement of Jews believed that soccer, and sport more generally, would liberate them from the violence and tyranny of anti-Semitism. The polemicist Max Nordau, one of the founding fathers of turn-of-the-century Zionism, created a doctrine called Muskeljudentum, or muscular Judaism. Nordau argued that the victims of anti-Semitism suffered from their own disease, a condition he called Judendot, or Jewish distress. Life in the dirty ghetto had afflicted the Jews with effeminacy and nervousness. “In the narrow Jewish streets,” he wrote, “our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully; in the gloom of sunless houses our eyes became accustomed to nervous blinking; out of fear of constant persecution the timbre of our voices was extinguished to an anxious whisper.” ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 981-90 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 07:18 AM It’s not exactly breaking news that, sixty years after Hakoah, anti-Semitism persists in Europe. There are even signs—the flourishing of ultra-right politicians in France and Austria; a rise in physical violence directed at French Jewry; political cartoons redolent of classic hook-nose stereotypes—that it may be increasing. As scary as all that is, intellectual honesty demands a distinction between anti-Semitism then and now. Anti-Semitism now is something strange and new—not quite socially acceptable and not quite unacceptable, either. There’s perhaps no stranger case of this attitude toward the Jews than Tottenham, a soccer team based in North London. Tottenham’s fans refer to themselves as the Yids or the Yiddoes. When the name comes off their lips in a Cockney accent, it sounds like a crude slur. And, it’s true, the name doesn’t have the nicest connotations. When the English fascist Oswald Mosley’s gangs marched through the Jewish East End of London in 1936, they shouted, “Down with the Yids.” Throughout history, plenty of other Jew haters have used the term in exactly this fashion. But Tottenham fans actually apply the moniker to themselves in a complimentary, prideful way. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 1007-16 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 07:20 AM The key moment in this transformation came in an away game against Manchester City in the early 1980s. Tottenham’s opponents subjected them to a song that went, We’ll be running around Tottenham with our pricks hanging out tonight, We’ll be running around Tottenham with our pricks hanging out tonight, Singing I’ve got a foreskin, I’ve got a foreskin, I’ve got a foreskin, and you ain’t We’ve got foreskins, we’ve got foreskins, you ain’t. Instead of passively absorbing the blow, Tottenham rounded up its Jewish supporters, encouraged them to drop their pants, and defiantly wave their circumcised members. It was a retort so funny, so impossible to rebut that Tottenham effectively closed down the argument. Strangely, it was the hooligan element, the same one with members tied to the far right, which adopted the Jewish identity first. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 1209-14 | Added on Monday, January 05, 1970, 04:56 AM But these changes came at a cost. The new clientele eroded the old, boisterous working-class ambience. As Alan explained this transformation, he invoked a time when “ten thousand would come to the stadium. Six thousand of them would be up for a fight. The rest came to watch a fight. Yeah, they’d say they were disgusted. But you’d ask them in the pub afterwards, ‘Did you watch the fight or the football?’” He leans back and imitates a prig’s voice, “‘Oh, the fight, of course.’” He laughs at his own observation. “Now, people just want to go to the game so that they can say”—he reverts to the prig persona—“‘Look, I’m cool. I go to Chelsea.’ When I get up to sing, they say, ‘Sit down.’” ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 854-58 | Added on Friday, April 02, 2010, 06:27 AM But the Internet is not cable television. Net-based hosting outfits -- including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Scribd, and the Internet Archive -- offer free publication venues to all comers, enabling anyone to publish anything. In 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress considered the question of liability for these companies and decided to offer them a mixed deal: hosting companies don't need to hire a million lawyers to review every blog-post before it goes live, but rightsholders can order them to remove any infringing material from the net just by sending them a notice that the material infringes. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 903-7 | Added on Friday, April 02, 2010, 06:30 AM The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 915-23 | Added on Friday, April 02, 2010, 06:31 AM Rather, they're canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them. What's more, science fiction's early adopters defined the social character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between technical employment and science fiction reading, it was inevitable that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet would be about science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter, fannish organizing, publishing and leisure are descended from SF fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it's science fiction, the literature that coined the very word "cyberspace." ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1064-68 | Added on Saturday, April 03, 2010, 06:33 AM property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative work and her property. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1342-45 | Added on Sunday, April 04, 2010, 08:59 PM The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1497-99 | Added on Monday, April 05, 2010, 05:34 AM Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of creators with their audiences. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1616-18 | Added on Monday, April 05, 2010, 05:40 AM The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds," an apt description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1706-10 | Added on Monday, April 05, 2010, 05:45 AM Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever.Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2029-33 | Added on Monday, April 05, 2010, 02:30 PM once proposed a "social scheduling" application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with, old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2086-89 | Added on Monday, April 05, 2010, 02:32 PM You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like identity verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where small sums of money are collected for every email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too expensive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return on investment. If you did all these things, you'd solve spam. By breaking email. ========== Cory_Doctorow_-_Content (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2282-86 | Added on Monday, April 05, 2010, 04:27 PM I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 342-47 | Added on Tuesday, April 06, 2010, 05:36 AM NSA (handing over a list): “They’re filing suit against the U.S. government. Its lawyers claim that the Daemon has a constitutional right to exist under the precedent of corporate personhood.” CSC: “Holy hell . . .” BCM: “The Daemon has lawyers?” NSA: “And it’s retained lobbyists. We’re negotiating with the courts to keep these cases classified; however, we can’t be certain what the judicial branch is going to do about them.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 757-58 | Added on Wednesday, April 07, 2010, 06:42 PM The avatar looked to Sebeck. “But the question that needs to be answered is whether civilization’s inability to adapt is a failure of leadership—or an unwillingness in humanity itself. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 772 | Added on Wednesday, April 07, 2010, 06:43 PM Price stared up at the high quest icon now adorning Sebeck’s call-out. “You lucky bastard. . . ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 797-800 | Added on Wednesday, April 07, 2010, 06:44 PM Price shrugged. “Well, the public doesn’t really decide anything now—they just select from the options they’re given.” He stuffed the last of the churro into his mouth and chewed furiously. “Factions have a slang term for the general public. They call them NPCs—as in ‘non-player-characters’—scripted bots with limited responses.” “That’s just obnoxious.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 806-8 | Added on Wednesday, April 07, 2010, 06:45 PM Price stayed with him. “You, sir, are walking on a privately owned Main Street—permission to trespass revocable at will. Read the plaque on the ground at the entrance if you don’t believe me. These people aren’t citizens of anything, Sergeant. America is just another brand purchased for its goodwill value. For that excellent fucking logo.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 809-13 | Added on Wednesday, April 07, 2010, 06:46 PM “No conspiracy necessary. It’s a process that’s been happening for thousands of years. Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it. In the Middle Ages it was the Catholic Church. They had a great logo, too. You might have seen it, and they had more branches than Starbucks. Go back before that, and it was Imperial Rome. It’s a natural process as old as humanity.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 822-25 | Added on Thursday, April 08, 2010, 09:53 AM above the heads of all the shoppers moving past them. Dollar amounts, green for positive, red for negative. Most of the numbers floating over people’s heads were negative: “-$23,393” hovering over a twentysomething woman on a cell phone, “-$839,991” over a dignified-looking man in his forties, “-$17,189” over his teenage daughter, and on it went. Number after number. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 851-53 | Added on Thursday, April 08, 2010, 09:54 AM “What do we look like to a computer alogrithm, Sergeant? Because it will be computer algorithms that make life-changing decisions about these people based on this data. How about credit worthiness—as decided by some arbitrary algorithm no one has a right to question?” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 863-65 | Added on Thursday, April 08, 2010, 09:55 AM Price leaned close. “Imagine how easily you could change the course of someone’s life by changing this data? But that’s control, isn’t it? In fact, you don’t even need to be human to exert power over these people. That’s why the Daemon spread so fast.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 867-69 | Added on Thursday, April 08, 2010, 09:55 AM Price followed Sebeck’s gaze. “So you stand there and tell me that the Daemon is invasive and unprecedented. That it’s a threat to human freedom. And I tell you that Americans are fucking ignorant about their freedom. They’re about as free as the Chinese. Except the Chinese don’t lie to themselves.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 956-61 | Added on Thursday, April 08, 2010, 10:00 AM shirt with some sort of logo on the breast pocket. She also wore slim, stylish HUD glasses, through which she was gazing directly at Sebeck. She looked like a Santa Fe art gallery owner. Her D-Space call-out marked her as Riley—a fourteenth-level Shaman. Riley’s reputation score was five stars out of five on a base factor of nine hundred three—which, if Sebeck had understood Price’s ramblings over the weeks, meant that she had an average review by nine hundred-plus darknet operatives who’d interacted with her of five stars out of five. She was apparently highly regarded—about what Sebeck didn’t know. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1135-41 | Added on Thursday, April 08, 2010, 07:00 PM “The Daemon financed this.” Sebeck turned to her. “Didn’t it?” “The Daemon’s economy is powered by darknet credits, Sergeant. Imaginary credits are all that money is.” “But there’s a theft at the heart of it.” She thought about it and nodded slightly. “Yes, the darknet economy was seeded by real world wealth. Wealth that was questionable in origin to begin with. Here, it’s being invested in people and projects that have begun to return value—not in dollars, but in things of intrinsic human worth. Energy, information, food, shelter.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1208-12 | Added on Thursday, April 08, 2010, 07:03 PM “Holons are the geographic structure of the darknet. Any darknet community lies at the center of an economic radius of one hundred miles for its key inputs and outputs—food, energy, health care, and building materials. Balancing inputs and outputs within that circle is the goal. A local economy that’s as self-sufficient as possible while still being part of a cultural whole—a holon—thus creating a resilient civilization that has no central points of failure. And which through its very structure promotes democracy. That’s what we’re doing here, Sergeant.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1319-27 | Added on Friday, April 09, 2010, 11:42 AM Riley was an interesting woman. Sebeck couldn’t recall ever meeting a person so patient, yet unyielding. She also demonstrated a prodigious knowledge of the world around her. He was starting to realize he wasn’t the center of Sobol’s new world order. Strangely, that gave him a measure of relief. Sebeck considered the Daemon’s virulence. Riley had explained to him that the Daemon grew less virulent the more it spread. And that it became more ruthless as it contracted. It was designed like a natural organism to resist its own eradication with lethal force if necessary. It did explain the bloody origins of the Daemon, but Sebeck still couldn’t accept it. It was basically a parasite on human society, one trying to achieve symbiosis. A balance between what it took and what it gave. Yes, it drove them toward preserving civilization, but it diminished free will. And did they really want a cybernetic organism designed by a madman hanging over their heads? ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1449-56 | Added on Friday, April 09, 2010, 11:49 AM The Major had to hand it to Sobol. The dead bastard was clever. They’d been too focused on the digital threat to see it coming. By physically changing the economy of rural America, the Daemon could render their investment reallocation moot. They could no longer simply wait for a digital countermeasure to the Daemon. Sobol was forcing their hand, and The Major did not like the enemy dictating the tempo of battle. They needed to act. But quietly. Without anything that could be traced back to Daemon-infected companies. The Major stood and looked out the window again, at the gleaming towers lining Sheikh Zayed Road. “Change is our enemy, gentlemen. Change means disruption. Disruption means crisis. And crisis means conflict.” That was, after all, why the powers-that-be had called on The Major. Conflict was his specialty. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1642-44 | Added on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 06:34 PM “This is the logistics hub for the Greeley Faction—the local node of a global mesh network powered by a narrow AI agent that’s building a resilient, sustainable, high-technology civilization.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1665-66 | Added on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 06:35 PM “I know. That’s the last time. I promise. Our faction unlocked Level Four Legal Protection this week. It’s already been activated.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1675-76 | Added on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 06:36 PM “Because the dollar is about to go into hyperinflation. There’s nothing supporting it. The darknet currency is backed by joules of green energy—something intrinsically valuable.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1929-38 | Added on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 08:06 PM Through the sensors in his outfit, Loki could “feel” the world immediately around him, in a complete sphere. Next to his skin he wore a haptic shirt that pulsed electronic signals like pixels on a screen, to give him a sensory impression of the area all around him. He could “feel” the walls and shapes of obstacles ahead of him in darkness or smoke. Loki linked more than nearby geometry to his vest. He also reserved several areas of his skin for more powerful electrical pulses—alerts from his pack of razorbacks, darknet news, or news about The Major, or mentions of Loki’s real-life name anywhere on the Web. Loki was intimately connected to the world around him—both the real one and the numberless dimensions of D-Space. He surveyed the blood-spattered furniture and scattered body parts of dead military contractors. His air filtration system kept most of the intestinal stench out of his nostrils. Blood was still dripping down the walls and off the ceiling. There was a shattered razorback giving off smoke in the corner, but the piercing shriek of the smoke detector made no impression on Loki in his insulated motorcycle helmet. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1951-54 | Added on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 08:08 PM Loki activated a darknet telecommunications search portal, which appeared as a single orange ring of light floating in space a foot or so in front of him. It was a digital receptacle into which he swept each of the MEIDs of the dead men’s phones with a wave of his gloved hand. The orange circle flashed and in a moment shrank, transforming into a series of six names associated with those handsets. Aliases, of course, but Loki wasn’t looking for their names. He wanted their social network. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 1970-77 | Added on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 08:10 PM In the meantime, Loki wanted to see what sort of friends “Mr. Davis” had been speaking with. Loki clicked on the name and it quickly expanded into a map of variously sized dots radiating out from a central hub—like the map of a star system. Loki knew each dot represented a unique phone number that The Major had called with this specific handset. The size of the dot represented how often he had called it. With another click, Loki examined the calls made by The Major’s most talked-to colleagues. Intelligence experts called this sort of map a “community of interest,” and each level of detail was called a “generation.” He was now looking at a “two-generation community of interest” for The Major. Loki laid the calling data over a map of the world and noticed a very even geographic spread within the U.S.—plus a few dozen calls overseas to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 2337-41 | Added on Sunday, April 11, 2010, 07:08 PM Shen cast a wary look at Ross. Ross continued, “Because that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Someone has threatened to confiscate your company if you don’t perform. Is that how a free person lives, Liang? In fear of the powerful?” “Freedom is overrated. You can be completely free and starving in an igloo in Antarctica. Business is what makes people’s lives better, not democracy. The world is filled with dysfunctional democracies, paralyzed by idiots with votes.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 2717-20 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 07:50 AM The Burning Man Project has finished prototyping a fully functional Roy Merritt avatar linked to darknet and public Internet news feeds. Presidio and Enoble_6 have begun development of a “just-in-time” hero module. Individuals wishing to donate levels, credits, or powers to the avatar can contact any Order of Merritt signatory. Quillor*****/ 3,147 21st-level Programmer ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 2881-85 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 08:05 AM Railroad tunnels. Enthusiasts had meticulously recorded them worldwide—their GPS locations, direction, length, height, and width. The public Web already knew about these underworld places in great detail. And that meant the Daemon knew about them as well. Which made them a logical place for connecting worlds. There was something oddly appropriate in the symbolism of it, and Sobol knew his archetypes well. With Sobol, gates were critical points, where fate was determined. The one Loki was searching for was no exception. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 2885-89 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 08:05 AM Loki had been studying planar spells ever since he received his odd message. Of course, he was familiar with planar travel from a dozen games where players gate in and out of various dimensions and universes. But now, with the advent of the limitless layers of D-Space projected atop reality, dimensional gates suddenly had relevance to the real world. Artificial intelligences from digital dimensions were starting to appear, and in some cases gaining wireless control over real-world machinery. It was a message from just such a being that had brought Loki to this desolate place—a message from an old opponent. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 4106-10 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 09:42 AM call-outs over their heads walked, clicking on one another’s data, interacting in multiple dimensions as though it were a natural extension of reality. Already second nature. It reminded Sebeck of something Riley said to him months ago in New Mexico about social interactions where race and gender didn’t matter. They were all members of the network here, and Sebeck had found himself increasingly looking at people’s call-outs to really know who they were. Reputation mattered more than physical appearance, and he was shocked at how quickly his brain had made that transition. Everyone had the same color call-out in the darknet. ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 4136-41 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 09:46 AM “Exactly. Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What your Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.” “Laney calls it ‘neofeudalism.’ ” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 4149-54 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 09:47 AM “Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you—not just once every few years on things you haven’t got a chance in hell of affecting.” Sebeck finished the last of his espresso. “Look, I can see distributed democracy working in holons like this, but can we really run an entire civilization off something that was essentially a gaming engine?” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 4155-57 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 09:47 AM “Can you name anything else that’s as battle tested? It’s been attacked nine ways to Sunday by every leet hacker on the planet. Sobol basically used an army of teen gamers to beta test the operating system for a new civilization. I guess all those hours gaming weren’t a waste of time, after all.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 4249-55 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 09:52 AM Rob shook his head. “Betraying America doesn’t require a conspiracy. That’s what Sobol figured out. It’s why he was able to hack into it. The free market is just a system of positive and negative reinforcement with a few interchangeable fixers to maintain it. The sole purpose of that system is to maximize profit. For whom the returns are made is irrelevant. Those who make the profits might turn around and become great philanthropists—who knows? Who cares? Because there’s always another set of investors who want in. Who want to work the split-second fluctuations of the markets to get very rich, very fast. They might not ever know what’s done in their name. That was the secret Sobol knew. And what he did was create a new system that leveraged a broader human will. That’s what freaks these guys out. The Daemon is the first true threat they’ve faced.” ========== Freedom (TM) (Daniel Suarez) - Highlight Loc. 6293-96 | Added on Monday, April 12, 2010, 11:24 AM It had been ten days since Sobol’s Daemon had bankrupted the merchant princes of the world. Ten days since thousands of darknet operatives had scoured the five-star luxury survivalist lodge that was Sky Ranch. They’d cleaned out the warehouses and store-rooms, dismantled the weapon systems, and raided the vaults. They’d gone through the floor plans and databases to find everything there was to find. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 1503-9 | Added on Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 06:58 PM But while the Brazilian style and some Brazilian players have flourished in the global economy, Brazil has not. Across the world, sport isn’t renowned for its strenuous ethics. But the cartolas are a special breed. Every time a rising superstar becomes a fan favorite, he’s sold to Europe. It’s not just the greedy chasing of paychecks. A substantial number of Brazilians prefer unglamorous leagues in the Faeroe Islands, Haiti, and Albania to remaining at home. They’re fleeing the capricious rule of the cartolas, who overhaul the rules for the Brazilian championship annually—usually to benefit the most politically powerful clubs. As Ronaldo told reporters in 1998, “I wouldn’t return to Brazil now for any offer.” ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 1527-33 | Added on Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 07:00 PM Brazil is the bizarro version of the United States. It’s the fantastically vast, resource-rich, new-world culture that didn’t become a global hegemon. In Pelé’s prime, the fifties and sixties, Brazil made a self-conscious choice to reverse this condition. First a series of populist presidents (1956–1964), then the military dictatorship (1964–1985), practiced an aggressive brand of forced industrialization and economic nationalism, ratcheting up tariffs, opening state-run firms, and ordering public works projects at a furious pace. “Fifty years in five” was the Soviet-ish slogan of president Juscelino Kubitschek’s regime in the late fifties and early sixties. The pump had been primed. By end of Kubitschek’s presidency in 1961, the country’s GDP was growing at a pace of 11 percent per year. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 1922-27 | Added on Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 02:32 PM Yet their hatred doesn’t betray isolation, but the opposite. There’s a strange uniformity in the vocabulary European soccer fans use to hate black people. The same primate insults get hurled. Although they’ve gotten better over time, the English and Italians developed the tradition of making ape noises when black players touched the ball. The Poles toss bananas on the field. This consistency owes nothing to television, which rarely shows these finer points of fan behavior. Nor are these insults considered polite to discuss in public. This trope has simply become a continent-wide folk tradition, transmitted via the stadium, from fan to fan, from father to son. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 1987-92 | Added on Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 08:47 PM Applying the logic of scientific Marxism to the game, he believed that soccer could be mastered by uncovering the game’s mathematical underpinnings. He created a system of numerical values to signify every “action” in a game. As he envisioned it, a group of “scientists” would tally passes, tackles, and shots. These scientists would note “successful actions” and “unsuccessful actions.” Their data would be run through a computer, which would spit back an evaluation of the player’s “intensitivity,” “activity,” “error rate,” and “effectivity.” ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2207-10 | Added on Thursday, April 15, 2010, 02:49 PM The Italian intelligentsia paints an ominous portrait of Silvio Berlusconi. To launch his early real estate projects, they assert, he indentured himself to the Mafia for seed money. Berlusconi only ran for political office, they allege, after his political patron fled to Tunisia to evade jail, leaving his corrupt businesses exposed. When the journalists he employs challenge him, he often squashes their careers. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2309-14 | Added on Thursday, April 15, 2010, 02:56 PM Berlusconi invoked soccer so relentlessly because his club was in the middle of a spectacular run that included consecutive Champions League titles. He wanted to plant the idea in voters’ minds that he was a winner, at a time when the economy sputtered and all politicians in Italy seemed like corrupt losers. “We will make Italy like Milan,” he tirelessly repeated. There was also a populist brilliance to his use of soccer as a metaphor for society. It gave him a vocabulary that resonated with the lower middle class, the group that he wanted to cultivate as a political base. Explaining the rationale for his candidacy, he told voters, “I heard that the game was getting dangerous and it was being played in the two penalty areas, with the midfield being left desolately empty.” ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2370-76 | Added on Friday, April 16, 2010, 05:40 AM This is certainly not the first instance of irrationalism and inconsistency on the Italian left. More than any country in Western Europe, Italians have indulged a romantic politics. Where the show trials of the ’30s, the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the fall of the Berlin Wall turned off most of humanity to communism, the Italian enthusiasm for Karl Marx’s doctrine never really abated. They kept faith with the Communist Party into the 1990s, even though the party kept mouthing crusty words about revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This wasn’t a small segment of the electorate. Communists routinely received close to a third of the vote. And there’s another plague that curses the Italian left, a tendency toward snobbery. They’ve ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2443-48 | Added on Friday, April 16, 2010, 05:45 AM But if Barca’s enemies objectively considered the club they despise, they would find an important reason to stand up and bathe it in applause. Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself. Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but not ever releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2454-58 | Added on Friday, April 16, 2010, 05:46 AM Put more strongly, Barca doesn’t just redeem the game from its critics; it redeems the concept of nationalism. Through the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from the philosopher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity’s evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we could finally get past nasty ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans—shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2551-58 | Added on Friday, April 16, 2010, 02:20 PM Catalans have a self-description that explains this temperamental instinct toward going along. They like to say that they possess a national quality called seny, a word that translates into something in between pragmatism and canniness. It’s the legacy from their centuries as Mediterranean traders, a businessman’s aversion to trouble. (A classic example of seny: Catalans insist that their language be taught in universities and deployed on street signs. It can be found everywhere, except the real estate sections of many Catalan-language newspapers. Nationalism shouldn’t ever obstruct a deal.) In this self-description, the Catalans also admit that they possess a yin to the seny yang. They have another national characteristic called rauxa, a tendency toward violent outbursts. This characteristic propelled Catalonia to fight so determinedly during the Spanish Civil War and made it so pugilistic in the years before. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2591-94 | Added on Friday, April 16, 2010, 02:23 PM with this Catalan first name.) The foreigners can become Catalan, because the ideology of Catalanism holds that citizenship is acquired, not inherited. To become Catalan, one must simply learn the Catalan language, disparage Castilian Spain, and love Barca. Catalan nationalism is not a racial doctrine or theocratic one, but a thoroughly civic religion. Catalan nationalism is so blind that it will accept you even if you have an impossible personality. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 2755-63 | Added on Sunday, April 18, 2010, 09:33 AM No doubt, the old dictators have caused many headaches, but America basically knew how to deal with them. It could play them off one another, and ultimately dismiss them as relatively harmless buffoons. Islamists, on the other hand, were an unfamiliar, uncontainable problem. How to turn the tide against them? One answer has been to inject more globalization into the region. But so far it hasn’t worked. In places like Pakistan, a proliferation of KFC and Bolly-wood movies has arguably aggravated the problem. By displaying the western way of life, they draw attention to the Islamic world’s own humiliating lack of modernity. Another answer to the problem of Islamism, the neo-conservative solution, proposes that the U.S. aggressively push the Middle East toward democracy. But the mere fact that the U.S. is the only force seriously committed to democratizing means that blind hatred for the messenger will undermine the message. The football revolution shows that the best antidote to Islamism might not be something new, but something old—a return to secular nationalism. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 3009-16 | Added on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 06:17 AM But Major League Baseball, let’s face it, has been a loser in globalization. Unlike the NBA or NFL, it hasn’t made the least attempt to market itself to a global audience. And the global audience has shown no hunger for the game. Because baseball has failed to master the global economy, it has been beat back by it. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association of America, the number of teens playing baseball fell 47 percent between 1987 and 2000. During that same period, youth soccer grew exponentially. By 2002, 1.3 million more kids played soccer than Little League. And the demographic profile of baseball has grown ever more lily white. It has failed to draw African Americans and attracts few Latinos who didn’t grow up playing the game in the Caribbean. The change can also be registered in the ballot box that matters most. Nielsen ratings show that, in most years, a World Series can no longer draw the same number of viewers as an inconsequential Monday night game in the NFL. ========== How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin, Foer) - Highlight Loc. 3054-61 | Added on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 06:20 AM I mention this scene because many critics of globalization make America the wicked villain in the tale. They portray the U.S. forcing Nike, McDonald’s and Baywatch down the throats of the unwilling world, shredding ancient cultures for the sake of empire and cash. But that version of events skirts the obvious truth: Multinational corporations are just that, multinational; they don’t represent American interests or American culture. Just as much as they have changed the tastes and economies of other countries, they have tried to change the tastes and economy of the United States. Witness the Nike and Budweiser campaigns to sell soccer here. No other country has been as subjected to the free flows of capital and labor, so constantly remade by migration, and found its national identity so constantly challenged. In short, America may be an exception, but it is not exceptionally immune to globalization. And we fight about it, whether we know it or not, just like everyone else. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 390-92 | Added on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 09:32 PM Like many other future magnates—Andrew Carnegie (born in 1835), Jay Gould (1836), and J. Pierpont Morgan (1837)—he was born in the late 1830s and would therefore come to maturity on the eve of the post–Civil War industrial boom. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 427-30 | Added on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 09:35 PM it took time before his extended absences and repeated betrayals burned the romance out of her system, leaving a residue of stoic resignation. For the moment, whatever her anxieties or loneliness, she seemed girlishly lovelorn during his trips, still smitten with her flimflam man. “Just look at that moon!” she once sighed to a cousin when Bill was on the road. “Is William, miles and miles away, perhaps looking at it, too, at this moment? I do hope he is.”16 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 530-36 | Added on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 09:41 PM Though only dimly aware of such distant developments, John D. Rockefeller already seemed a perfect specimen of homo economicus. Even as a boy, he bought candy by the pound, divided it into small portions, then sold it at a tidy profit to his siblings. By age seven, encouraged by his mother, he was dropping gold, silver, and copper coins that he earned into a blue china bowl on the mantel. John’s first business coup came at age seven when he shadowed a turkey hen as it waddled off into the woods, raided its nest, and raised the chicks for sale. To spur his enterprise, Eliza gave him milk curds to feed the turkeys, and the next year he raised an even larger brood. As an old man, Rockefeller said, “To this day, I enjoy the sight of a flock of turkeys, and never miss an opportunity of studying them.” 9 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 572-75 | Added on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 09:43 PM Rockefeller explained. “I have always regarded it as a religious duty to get all I could honorably and to give all I could. I was taught that way by the minister when I was a boy.”15 The low-church Baptists didn’t prohibit the accumulation of wealth but did oppose its vain, ostentatious display, setting up a tension that would be threaded throughout Rockefeller’s life. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 815-21 | Added on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 08:21 PM We cannot tell when Rockefeller first felt shame about his father, but this emotion was so consequential for his entire development that we must pause briefly to consider it. In the towns of John’s boyhood, Bill was an engaging but notorious character who prompted interminable speculation about his travels and sources of income. A boy with such a father needed to screen out malicious gossip and cultivate a brazen indifference to community opinion. This bred in him a reflexive habit of secrecy, a fear of the crowd, a deep contempt for idle chatter and loose tongues that lasted a lifetime. He learned to cultivate a secretive style and a defiant attitude toward strangers. Perhaps out of a self-protective instinct, Bill taught his children to be wary of strangers and even of himself. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 953-55 | Added on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 08:29 PM As a roving salesman, William Avery Rockefeller was fast becoming a relic of an earlier America when markets were extended not by new methods of communication or transportation but by the salesman simply covering more ground. A magnetic pull lured Big Bill even farther west, away from the burgeoning cities and industries of the eastern seaboard and toward remote hamlets on the American frontier. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 990-92 | Added on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 08:31 PM Since it stressed composition, John had to submit essays on four topics to advance to the next grade: “Education,” “Freedom,” “The Character of St. Patrick,” and “Recollections of the Past.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 998-1000 | Added on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 08:32 PM As a self-made man, Rockefeller would always deplore aristocracies and priesthoods as effete, reactionary foes of true progress, defenders of privilege against enterprising commoners. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1146-49 | Added on Friday, April 23, 2010, 07:50 AM In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble, retroactive pay. For the rest of his life, he would honor September 26 as “Job Day” and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1159-66 | Added on Friday, April 23, 2010, 07:52 AM Business historians and sociologists have stressed the centrality of accounting to capitalist enterprise. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber identified “rational bookkeeping” as integral to capitalism’s spirit and organization.36 For Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism “turns the unit of money into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations, of which the towering monument is double-entry bookkeeping.”37 It thus seems fitting that John D. Rockefeller, the archetypal capitalist, betrayed a special affinity for accounting and an almost mystic faith in numbers. For Rockefeller, ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion. They gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies. In an imprecise world, they rooted things in a solid empirical reality. As he chided slipshod rivals, “Many of the brightest kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money on a certain operation and when they were losing.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1216-23 | Added on Friday, April 23, 2010, 05:24 PM Because American culture encouraged—nay, glorified—acquisitive behavior, there was always the possibility that it might be taken to extremes and people would end up enslaved by their greed. As a result, children were taught to monitor and supervise their behavior. In his posthumously published Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes how he drew up a little moral ledger that allowed him, at a glance, to track his virtues and vices every day. Many people in the mid–nineteenth century kept such journals to enforce thrift and also objectify their moral performance. Adolescents kept diaries larded with pep talks, exhortations, inspirations, and warnings. Andrew Carnegie wrote hortatory memos to himself, while William C. Whitney kept a small notebook of little homilies. A contradictory impulse was at work: People were spurring themselves to excel but also trying to curb their insatiable appetites in the new competitive economy. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1223-29 | Added on Friday, April 23, 2010, 05:25 PM John D. Rockefeller took such internal monitoring to an advanced stage. Like a good Puritan, he scrutinized his daily activities and regulated his desires, hoping to banish spontaneity and unpredictability from his life. Whenever his ambition was about to devour him, his conscience urged restraint. Since he worked a long day at Hewitt and Tuttle, business threatened to become an overwhelming compulsion. Starting work each day at 6:30 A.M., he brought a box lunch to the office and often returned after dinner, staying late. One day he decided to throttle this obsession. “I have this day covenanted with myself not to be seen in [the office] after 10 o’clock P.M. within 30 days,” he wrote to himself.49 It is telling that the young man made such a pledge to himself and equally revealing that he found it impossible to obey. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1287-98 | Added on Friday, April 23, 2010, 05:28 PM In the fall of 1854, after making a personal confession of faith, John was immersed in the baptismal basin by Deacon Sked and became a full-fledged church member. Never a snob, Rockefeller was proud of being “brought up in a mission church.”57 Notwithstanding his worldly ambition, he didn’t seek social shortcuts to success by joining a prosperous congregation or a high-church denomination. As a loner and outsider, he was drawn by the warm fellowship of the faithful and liked the egalitarian atmosphere of the Erie Street church, which gave him the opportunity to associate, as he put it, with “people in the most humble of circumstances.”58 A central tenet of Baptism is the autonomy of individual congregations, and the mission churches, which weren’t dominated by established families, were the most democratic of all. The Erie Street church was populated by salesmen, shop assistants, railroad conductors, factory workers, clerks, artisans, and others of extremely modest means. Even in its later, fancier incarnation as the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, the membership remained more plebeian than patrician. In his later years, Rockefeller declared, with heartfelt warmth, “How grateful I am that these associations were given to me in my early boyhood, that I was contented and happy with . . . the work in the church, with the work in the Sunday school, with the work with good people—that was my environment, and I thank God for it!”59 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1328-32 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 06:18 AM congregated at the church door to glimpse the world’s richest man, he would still clasp people’s hands and bask in the glow of familial warmth. The handshake acquired symbolic meaning for him, for it was “the friendly hand extended to the man who doesn’t know that he is wanted [that] brings many a one into the church. This early feeling about handshaking has stayed with me. All my life, I have enjoyed this thing that says: ‘I am your friend.’ ”66 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1374-81 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 06:21 AM with especial force to Rockefeller. Weber argued that the Puritans had produced a religion that validated worldly activity, with “the making of money by acquisition as the ultimate purpose” of life.76 They approached business in a rational, methodical manner, banishing magic from the marketplace and reducing everything to method. Because prosperity was a sign of future salvation, the elect worked with special diligence to reassure themselves of God’s favor. Even those who amassed great wealth continued to labor, since they worked, ostensibly, for God’s glory, not for their own aggrandizement. The church didn’t want to be in the position of promoting greed, so it circumvented this problem by legitimating the pursuit of money if channeled into a calling—that is, the steady dedication to a productive task. Once a person discovered his calling, he was supposed to apply himself with all-consuming devotion, the money thus acquired being deemed a sign of God’s blessing. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1382-85 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 06:21 AM One by-product of the emphasis on a calling was that Puritans relegated activities outside the religious and economic sphere to a lesser order of importance. The believer wasn’t supposed to search for pleasure beyond the sheltered confines of family, church, and business, and the gravest sins were wasting time, indulging in idle chatter, and wallowing in luxurious diversions. Bent on making money, the good Puritan had to restrain his impulses instead of gratifying them. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1406-11 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 06:24 AM A wave of hysterical breast-beating ensued, with President James Buchanan insisting that the crisis came “solely from our extravagant and vicious system of paper currency and bank credits, exciting the people to wild speculations and gambling in stocks.” 80 Rather than blaming the business cycle, many evangelical Christians interpreted the downturn as divine punishment for a society grown lax, worldly, and dissolute. One Boston reformer descried redeeming features in the slump, hoping it would “teach good and much needed lessons . . . and will ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1490-94 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 05:26 PM Rockefeller never regretted his apprenticeship at Hewitt and Tuttle and, like many self-made men, lavished a retrospective tenderness on his early years. If anything, he drenched the whole experience in a sentimental syrup that only grew thicker and sweeter with time. Even in 1934, at age ninety-five, Rockefeller tried to rally one grandson with tales of his heroic initiation at Hewitt and Tuttle, his stirring baptism in business. “Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all the way along.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1510-16 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 05:27 PM make liberal advances and consignments of produce, etc.”4 With his son, Bill often liked to play sadistic money games and then defended his knavish behavior by citing some warped, pedagogical purpose. As he bragged to a Strongsville neighbor, “I trade with the boys and skin ’em and I just beat ’em every time I can. I want to make ’em sharp.” 5 John was by now resigned to the bizarrely commercial character of his dealings with his father, and in his memoirs he even idealized Bill’s lending maneuvers as teaching him valuable lessons. “To my father I owe a great debt in that he himself trained me to practical ways. He was engaged in different enterprises; he used to tell me about these things, explaining their significance; and he taught me the principles and methods of business.” 6 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1573-80 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 05:32 PM period show a tall young man with a vigorous air and alert, penetrating eyes. His tightly compressed lips expressed a fierce determination and a guarded nature. Big and broad-shouldered, he had an incipient stoop that gave him a wary air. Despite his occasional, priggish blowups with Gardner, he had that sublime self-confidence that speaks with quiet authority. Neatly dressed and well groomed, Rockefeller was the first to arrive at and the last to leave work each day. In a natural division of labor, Clark took charge of buying and selling while Rockefeller tended the books. Rockefeller seemed destined to succeed as much from his fastidious work habits as from innate intelligence. With the avidity of a zealous auditor, he liked to smoke out wrongdoing and uncover errors. Maurice Clark thought John congenial but “too exact. He was methodical to an extreme, careful as to details and exacting to a fraction. If ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1608-10 | Added on Sunday, April 25, 2010, 05:34 PM Rockefeller owed much of his incandescent rise to their assistance. “The hardest problem all through my business career was to obtain enough capital to do all the business I wanted to do and could do, given the necessary amount of money.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1864-66 | Added on Monday, April 26, 2010, 03:36 PM stage of capitalist development, when the colorful daredevils and pioneering speculators give way, as Max Weber wrote, to the “men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles.” 18 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1880-84 | Added on Monday, April 26, 2010, 09:38 PM In talking to the hard-bitten wildcatters, Rockefeller must have seemed standoffish and self-possessed, but he professed to enjoy their company, calling them “pleasant fellows, the same type we meet in the mining regions, jolly, good-natured, happy-go-lucky. ”21 The description is not without a note of condescension. But he listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, “It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.”22 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1919-22 | Added on Monday, April 26, 2010, 09:41 PM Because Rockefeller had such respect for ledgers, Clark, nearly ten years older, looked down on him as a mere clerk, a rigid, blinkered man without vision. “He did not think I could do anything but keep accounts and look after the finances,” said Rockefeller.29 “You see, it took him a long time to feel that I was no longer a boy.” 30 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1927-28 | Added on Monday, April 26, 2010, 09:41 PM As part of Rockefeller’s silent craft and habit of extended premeditation, he never tipped off his adversaries to his plans for revenge, preferring to spring his reprisals on them. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1938-43 | Added on Monday, April 26, 2010, 09:42 PM Already contemplating the future, Rockefeller wanted to be surrounded by trustworthy people who could inspire confidence in customers and bankers alike. He drew a characteristic conclusion: The weak, immoral man was also destined to be a poor businessman. “We were beginning to prosper and I felt very uneasy at my name being linked up with these speculators.”35 Later on, the Clarks fully reciprocated this contempt, with James describing Rockefeller’s sole contribution to Andrews, Clark as that of a “financial manipulator” and claiming that in 1863 Rockefeller had cheated him of several thousand dollars.36 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2018-21 | Added on Monday, April 26, 2010, 09:48 PM “Then [the Clark brothers] woke up and saw for the first time that my mind had not been idle while they were talking so big and loud.”50 All of Rockefeller’s Baptist contempt for vanity, show, and loose talk is condensed in that single observation. On March 2, 1865, Clark and Rockefeller was also dissolved, and Rockefeller eliminated the three fractious Clark brothers from his life forever. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2187-94 | Added on Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 06:22 AM The period after the Civil War was the most fertile in American history for schemers and dreamers, sharp-elbowed men and fast-talking hucksters, charlatans and swindlers. A perfect mania for patents and inventions swept America, as everybody tinkered with some new contrivance. It was a time of bombastic rhetoric and outsize dreams. As always during a protracted war, millions of people postponed their lives until the ghastly bloodshed was over, then they turned to private life with newfound zeal. The sudden wealth of young businessmen such as Rockefeller fed envy among returning soldiers, who wished to emulate their good fortune. The money fever was, in part, the reaction to a war that had appealed to both the worst and the best in the national character, for Lincoln’s high-minded crusade had often been debased by profiteering contractors operating behind patriotic façades. For many in the North, the high drama of preserving the union and emancipating the slaves had exhausted their capacity for altruism, leaving a residual contagion of greed. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2215-17 | Added on Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 06:23 AM The triumph of the North meant the ascendancy of urbanization, immigration, industrial capitalism, and wage labor over an agrarian southern economy doomed to stagnate for decades. The war markedly accelerated the timetable of economic development, promoting the growth of factories, mills, and railroads. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 324-26 | Added on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 02:45 AM This flexibility is a crucial advantage that illicit trade has over governments, and is a defining aspect of the problem. It gives traffickers an incentive to organize in ways that maximize the jurisdictional tangle. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 448-54 | Added on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 02:49 AM Nauru, a tiny island nation in the Pacific, is well known as a haven for Russian laundered money. The small country of Suriname (population half a million) on South America's northern coast has become a trans-shipment haven for drug traffickers. No other economic activity in Suriname can compete in profits. It is hard to imagine that its government is immune to the seduction or the threats of the powerful foreign players that operate from there. Indeed, in 2004 the son and the half-brother of the former dictator Desi Bouterse were accused of belonging to one of the major drug organizations that used Suriname as a base to export cocaine to the Netherlands. Tajikistan's total economic output per year is about $7 billion. According to UN estimates, the street value in a European capital of just the drugs seized in Tajikistan in 2003 was equivalent to roughly half the value of all the goods and services produced in that country. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 516-20 | Added on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 02:51 AM two dominant images that we still carry of it in our popular imagination: the freelance smuggler-frontiersman or the “organized crime” syndicate. One reason is that these players no longer possess the ideal skills. The fast pace of world trade and the infinite combination of possibilities for supply, warehousing, transportation, banking, wire transfers, cell phone providers, Webmail accounts, encryption software, front company paperwork, and marketing to customers around the world stretch the capabilities of organized crime beyond the typical mafioso's comfort zone. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 683-90 | Added on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 02:24 PM In a word, Khan did it for the money. Real estate trumped ideology. Greed overrode geopolitics. Khan turned from engineer into entrepreneur by locating a niche. He took advantage of a rare, almost accidental opportunity—his role as gatekeeper to Pakistan's nuclear program—to develop a personal revenue stream. To do so, he deployed a businessman's assets and acumen, his relationships, drawing on ties forged decades earlier as a young engineer in Europe and connections in high places, easily mustered for a man of his public stature. He identified a rich source of demand: “rogue states,” and maybe other groups as well, that were shut off from nuclear techniques by the rules of nonproliferation. He found willing partners for each crucial role: manufacture, transportation, finance. And, brilliantly, he submerged his transactions into the ordinary workings of global commerce, sourced from legal factories, piggybacking on ordinary cargo shipments, and delivered through a dizzying maze of intermediaries. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 889-96 | Added on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 02:28 PM All of these conditions make the principal method devised to restrict sales into these conflicts—the embargo—poorly adapted to its purpose and exceedingly easy to circumvent. But for an arms broker they simply describe a marketplace where customers are scattered and typically place small orders, require extra secrecy, and have bad credit or no credit. On the other hand, these customers are willing to pay premium prices and can afford to because they often control natural resources: coltan from Congo, used in cell phones; “conflict diamonds” from Sierra Leone or Angola, excluded from official marketing channels; concessions for mineral exploration; or marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. And the nontraditional destination and the need to violate an embargo, breaking the law in a supplier or transit country, and the doling out of bribes and side payments throughout the process serves to boost the price. In his 1977 investigation The Arms Bazaar, the ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 1035-42 | Added on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 02:34 PM He first learned about the details and mechanics of drug smuggling when he decided to find out the real cause of the high turnover rate among his company's truck drivers. He discovered that with just one border crossing carrying a relatively small shipment of drugs, his drivers made the equivalent of one year's salary. Naturally, after making such a killing their truck-driving job was no longer appealing or needed. Through his inquiry, Alfonzo also found out that the funders who put up the money for the drivers to purchase the drugs were upstart members of the local business community and well-known politicians, who made a huge profit on their loans. The loans bore little risk because the drivers were rarely caught. Besides, in the prevailing honor code repayment was very important. “Finally,” Don Alfonzo said, “one day, and almost out of boredom and curiosity, I told one of my trusted employees who I knew was using our trucks for smuggling that it was only fair that he share some of the profits with the company. He immediately accepted and, as they say, the rest is history.” ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 1080-87 | Added on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 02:36 PM In Washington, a city famously divided by income and race, the drug economy connects segments of local society more effectively than any almost anything else. Twenty percent of D.C. high school students report regular marijuana use, and 5 percent say they've used heroin. The phenomenon spreads—even thrives—in the prestigious private schools where the children of top-tier officials and political players are groomed for success. The teenagers of the power elite have at their disposal an impressive array of substances: marijuana, hashish, cocaine, heroin, mushrooms, LSD, Ecstasy, PCP, and whatever designer compounds happen to be in vogue. They are at the teenagers' fingertips—literally, no more than a cell phone call or text message away. One young woman told me that she could rustle up a bag of weed in twenty minutes. For cocaine, give her a few hours. These fifteen-year-olds told me that it is easier for them to buy a joint than a pack of cigarettes. At the command center of the war on drugs, a stronger force is winning: the market. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 1242-45 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 04:21 AM it develops its own “brand”. In the scheme known as the Black Market Peso Exchange (BMPE), Colombian drug traffickers repatriate their proceeds by entrusting the dollars to brokers, who use the funds to make purchases in the United States on behalf of Colombian customers at a favorable exchange rate. The customers pay the brokers in pesos that the brokers pass on to the traffickers—after collecting their fee, of course. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 1399-1404 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 04:26 AM The opportunity is huge. Today people are moving as they have never moved before. In 2004 the world counted 175 million documented international migrants, 3 percent of humanity. Perhaps half as many again were undocumented. Still more were internal migrants, 150 million in China alone, drawn from rural hinterlands to fast-growing urban and industrial zones. Another 20 million refugees and displaced persons rounded out the picture. The United States and Western Europe remain prized destinations. The 2000 U.S. census found more than 30 million foreign-born residents, or 11.1 percent of the population. Of these, 13.3 million, or 44 percent, had arrived in the 1990s. In western Europe, close ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 2091-95 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 01:55 PM The September 11 attacks restored a sense of purpose, and urgency: as al-Qaeda's inner workings came to light, they exposed new vulnerabilities, focusing the public eye on such previously obscure entities as hawalas—trust-based remittance agents used by immigrants—and Islamic banks and charities. (In the same period, corporate scandals such as the collapse of Enron, which had barely paid any taxes since 1996, were spotlighting the spread of offshore shell companies. Few drew the connections, however.) ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 2549-56 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 05:17 PM It may seem shocking that in so many places the human body has become more valuable as a source of spare parts than for its intelligence or labor. Yet international economic disparities, illness, and conflict on one side, and ease of advertising, recruitment, and travel on the other, have created conditions for a lucrative traffic. Even where the trade is explicitly banned, traffickers have found ways to bypass the laws. Investigators in Brazil have witnessed kidney “gifts”—ostensibly unpaid, therefore legal—between patients of obviously differing circumstances and no prior acquaintance, but they have been helpless to intervene without concrete proof of a transaction. The recourse is not clear, and fraught with difficult legal and ethical challenges. While some campaigners argue for tighter laws and enforcement, others, including in Israel and the United States, have begun to advocate establishing some form of legal, regulated organ transplant trade. For now, the sheer force of supply and demand and the immense profits to be made render dim the prospects of ending the trade by any means. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 2658-63 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 05:20 PM But the market has a different idea. As rules to control CFCs have come into force, trade in violation of these rules has sprouted up and flourished, to the tune of 30,000 tons and $300–$450 million annually. As a result, developing country industries are not converting to substitute chemicals at the planned pace; the price of CFC on the market remains low while that of the substitutes, which one would expect to fall as use became more widespread, has instead failed to come down. The European Union, where a total use ban is now in force, remains a major producer of CFCs for the legal international market. But CFCs from this production also turn up as contraband, the cylinders deceptively labeled or smuggled among permitted chemicals, ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 2767-79 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 05:25 PM even after figuring itself out. With more than 20,000 employees, it billed itself as the “second-largest investigative agency” in the government, second to the FBI, and the brass lobbied to rename the unit Investigation and Criminal Enforcement. After the FBI announced that no other agency could use the word investigation, a year of high-level negotiations over names ensued. In the meantime, ICE officers went without badges—for what would the badges say? The FBI ended up winning that battle. Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was also taking stock of its upstart new partner. The powerful DEA had stayed put within the Justice Department. But its gambit to annex the customs' antinarcotics team during the merger upheaval was rebuffed. The team went to ICE instead, leaving the two agencies with overlapping missions and a simmering mutual suspicion over budget, turf, and prestige. Frustration and anxiety festered. One senior customs veteran told me: “I used to lose sleep wondering what new trick the smugglers and crooks and—since September 11—the terrorists would pull on us, but now I found myself awake worrying sick because I knew that our own internal strife was making life far easier for all of them at a time when we needed to be at our most effective. I knew how quick, creative, and dangerous the bad guys are. And here we were spending all the time in meetings and watching PowerPoint presentations by lawyers and politicians.” It didn't help that ICE soon found itself charged with additional duties that seemed removed from its original mission, including running the Federal Protective Service (FPS), responsible for the safety of government buildings, and the Federal Air Marshals program, ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 2803-6 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 09:18 PM A 2004 report by the inspector-general of the U.S. Justice Department, Glenn A. Fine, noted that the FBI, having shifted its focus to antiterrorism efforts, was paying far less attention to its fight against organized crime. Between 2000 and 2003 the FBI units fighting organized crime and drug trafficking lost 758 agents to antiterrorism, with the cuts concentrated in units fighting Mexican cartels. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 2818-20 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 09:25 PM dealing with one. Since the pioneering studies of Max Weber, sociologists have shown how the first purpose of an administrative agency is to perpetuate itself; and political scientists explain that government institutions are “sticky”—once you set them up, they are very hard to dismantle. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 2995-99 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 09:30 PM In theory, Noble's agenda makes sense. More than almost any law enforcement specialist, he sees the explosive growth and continual mutation of the global underground economy—the trafficking networks, the terrorist cells, the parallel markets—and realizes all too well how governments aren't keeping up. Both this visible need and the advanced technologies available to upgrade police work ought to point to a huge opportunity for Interpol. Yet Interpol has no authority over its members and has had to live with noncooperation in even the areas most fundamental to its work. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3053-61 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 09:31 PM Somewhere between the two poles—treaties and opportunistic partnerships—a glimmer of a third model has appeared, specifically in the fight against money laundering. The Financial Action Task Force, described in Chapter 7, has succeeded in coordinating banking rules in the G-8 countries (minus Russia) and a growing number of their peers by combining traditional strategies in new ways. The FATF committed member countries one by one, on a voluntary basis, until all the main “on-shore” financial centers were on board; it then turned to countries known as money laundering harbors and threatened to cut them off from the world's capital markets and banks. The FATF relies on peer review: each member country has its financial sector inspected by an expert team of fellow members, who identify needed reforms and supervise their implementation. As radical a willing suspension of sovereignty as the antitrafficking milieu has seen, this type of review is hard to imagine applied to police forces. But in the financial sector at least, it has functioned better than in other areas of global crime fighting. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3069-76 | Added on Thursday, April 29, 2010, 09:32 PM LABOR OF LOVE Governments are gravely impaired by all kinds of obstacles in fighting the global trafficking networks. Still, there sometimes surfaces from the murk of bureaucracy and interagency squabbling a surprising secret weapon: a hero. Antitrafficking still attracts some remarkable, dedicated public servants who are willing to incur the most enormous personal costs to stop the criminals. More than dogged determination, it is a labor of love, perhaps even obsession. These professionals ply their trade in some of the most hazardous environments—countries like Colombia, for instance, where the infiltration of public life by traffickers has reached the level of a cliché. Already a risky place to be a journalist, Colombia is even more dangerous for judges and prosecutors. Few people would call Maria Cristina Chirolla's job desirable, for instance. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3747-52 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:40 AM ILLICIT TRADE IS A POLITICAL PHENOMENON. Illicit traders cannot prosper without help from governments or accomplices in key public offices. Indeed, some governments have become traffickers themselves. We now have a mountain of evidence to show that trafficking is political. It infiltrates governments, and it can go so far as to control the government of an entire province or even take over a weak or failed state. Again, the enormous incentives associated with the profits involved in these trades drive this criminalization of politics and public service. Trafficking is political in another sense as well: public opinion and politicians define many of the expectations and constraints that shape antitrafficking efforts. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3808 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:41 AM RFIDs. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3814-15 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:42 AM PACKAGE AND PRODUCT TAGS. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3818 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:42 AM BIOMETRICS. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3824 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:42 AM DETECTION AND SECURITY DEVICES. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3829 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:42 AM SURVEILLANCE AND EAVESDROPPING. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3835-36 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:42 AM SOFTWARE. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3841 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:42 AM TRACKING HUMANS. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 3846 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:42 AM BIOTECHNOLOGY. ========== Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Counterfeiters are Hijacking the Global Economy (Moises Naim) - Highlight Loc. 4100-4102 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:44 AM The same report notes that 550 criminal groups operate in Spain, half of them foreign. José Antonio Alonso, Spain's interior minister, said that that organized crime was “as big a threat to Spanish security as Islamic terrorism.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2243-48 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:46 AM In many ways, Rockefeller seemed a finely tuned instrument of the zeitgeist, the purest embodiment of the dynamic, acquisitive spirit of the postwar era. Like other Gilded Age moguls, he was shaped by his faith in economic progress, the beneficial application of science to industry, and America’s destiny as an economic leader. He steeled himself to persevere, subordinating his every impulse to the profit motive, working to master unruly emotions and striving for an almost Buddhist detachment from his own appetites and passions. “I had a bad temper,” Rockefeller said. “I think it might be called an ugly temper when too far provoked.” 7 So he trained himself to control this temper and tried never to be guided by ego or pique. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2339-43 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:49 AM At the same time, John D.’s insatiable need for money outstripped the meager resources of Cleveland banks, forcing him to widen his search to New York, where he could secure credit at more advantageous rates. “And my dear brother, William, being located in the metropolis, where the opportunities were better for securing money, had upon him this financial burden, and he showed marked ability in keeping a steady nerve and presenting our case very well to the bankers.” 26 As a result of John’s foresight in assigning him to New York, William’s career became closely intertwined with that of Wall Street—to an uncomfortable extent, from John’s later perspective. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2344-47 | Added on Saturday, May 01, 2010, 06:50 AM As a gray eminence of the business world in his retirement, John D. betrayed a deep suspicion of financiers, boasted that he never borrowed, and was celebrated for his financial conservatism. Yet at this stage of his career, he turned inescapably to bankers. “One can hardly recognize how difficult it was to get capital for active business enterprises at that time,” he admitted.27 If Rockefeller ever came close to groveling, it was in his eternal appeals to bankers. “In the beginning ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2492-96 | Added on Monday, May 03, 2010, 07:54 AM During the first few years, the oil business was so effortlessly profitable that refineries sprang up in six competing centers. The inland centers (the Oil Regions, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland) and the seaboard centers (New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore) engaged in pitched battles to control the business. Favored by proximity to the wells, the western Pennsylvania refiners seemed to possess an incalculable edge, but they had to import chemicals, barrels, machinery, and labor and therefore labored under distinct handicaps. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2626-32 | Added on Tuesday, May 04, 2010, 05:41 AM railroads to give rebates, and the practice didn’t cease entirely until the 1903 Elkins Act. Nevertheless, by the end of the Civil War, a widespread belief had begun to take hold that railroads were common carriers and should shun favoritism. Ida Tarbell cited provisions in the Pennsylvania state constitution that, as she interpreted them, compelled railroads to serve as common carriers and avoid discrimination. Yet in the last analysis, she based her withering critique of Rockefeller less on specific laws than on her belief that he had violated a sense of fair play. “That is,” she wrote in McClure’s Magazine in July 1905, “rebate giving then as now, was regarded as one of those lower business practices which characterizes commerce at all periods, and against which men of honor struggle, and of ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2693-98 | Added on Tuesday, May 04, 2010, 05:45 AM Unlike his philandering father, John D. Rockefeller remained firmly, almost prudishly, anchored in domestic life. Much like Jay Gould—who didn’t drink, smoke, or gallivant with women—Rockefeller’s harsh business tactics were counterbalanced by exemplary behavior at home where he was a sweet, respectful Victorian husband. To borrow a line from Flaubert, to be fiercely revolutionary in business, he needed to be utterly conventional at home. Eternally at war with the devil, John and Cettie allowed their religious beliefs to define their entire cultural agenda. They subscribed to seats at the ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2864-68 | Added on Wednesday, May 05, 2010, 08:45 AM While all commodity prices fluctuated, crude-oil prices were especially volatile. Based on locating deep, unseen pools, the industry was an unpredictable, nerve-racking affair. Every time some lucky devil hit a gusher, this bonanza drove prices down. In 1865, producers began to torpedo wells by exploding gunpowder (later nitroglycerine) deep inside them to shake loose more oil, swelling the surplus. Within a year or two after the Civil War, the oil flood caused prices to skid to as low as $2.40 a barrel—they had traded as high as $12 in 1864—leading producers to contemplate forming a cartel to boost prices. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3000-3009 | Added on Thursday, May 06, 2010, 09:34 AM Why did the nation’s leading railroads offer Rockefeller and his confederates terms so generous as to render them all but omnipotent in oil refining? How did they benefit from this association? First, the railroads had engaged in such fierce, internecine price wars that freight rates had fallen sharply. No less than the oil producers, they needed somebody to arbitrate their disputes and save them from their own cutthroat tactics. The cornerstone of the SIC was a provision that Standard Oil would act as “evener” for the three railroads and ensure that each received a predetermined share of the oil traffic: Forty-five percent of the oil shipped by SIC members would travel over the Pennsylvania Railroad, 27.5 percent on the Erie, and 27.5 percent on the New York Central. Unless the railroads had greater control over the oil business, Rockefeller knew, they “could not make the divisions of business necessary so as to prevent rate-cutting.”23 Rockefeller would become their official umpire and try to govern their pool in a fair, disinterested fashion. As mentioned, the railroads also had an economic interest in greater consolidation among refiners to streamline their own operations. One other factor tempted the railroads to come to terms with Rockefeller: In a farsighted tactical maneuver, he had begun to accumulate hundreds of tank cars, which would be in perpetually short supply. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3011-15 | Added on Thursday, May 06, 2010, 09:34 AM Rockefeller’s supreme insight was that he could solve the oil industry’s problems by solving the railroads’ problems at the same time, creating a double cartel in oil and rails. One of Rockefeller’s strengths in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advantageous terms. Instead of ruining the railroads, Rockefeller tried to help them prosper, albeit in a way that fortified his own position. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3070-78 | Added on Thursday, May 06, 2010, 09:38 AM In this warlike atmosphere, the Oil City Derrick printed a daily blacklist of the conspirators—Peter Watson, followed by Rockefeller and six other directors— in a black-bordered box on the front page. Each day, a new inflammatory caption was supplied, such as “Behold ‘The Anaconda’ in all his hideous deformity.”38 It was in the context of such hysterical emotion that the world first learned the name of John D. Rockefeller. As if his foes already intuited his special power, he was singled out for abuse, one newspaper crowning him “the Mephistopheles of Cleveland.”39 As people learned of his central place in the SIC, vandals defaced the blue Standard Oil barrels with skulls and crossbones. Two Standard employees on Oil Creek, Joseph Seep and Daniel O’Day, barricaded themselves in their offices and fended off marauding mobs. “It was a tense situation,” said Seep. “Some of my friends were actually afraid to be seen talking with me in the street. There were threats of violence. Captain John W. Jones, a big producer, wanted the people to burn the Standard Oil Company’s tanks.”40 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3097-98 | Added on Thursday, May 06, 2010, 07:08 PM “You can abuse me, you can strike me,” Rockefeller said, “so long as you let me have my own way.”45 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3098-99 | Added on Thursday, May 06, 2010, 07:08 PM As always, the greater the tumult, the cooler Rockefeller became, and a strange calm settled over him when his colleagues were most disconcerted. When pushed, he always stood his ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3234-37 | Added on Thursday, May 06, 2010, 07:15 PM He made a cryptic statement to Hewitt that entered into Rockefeller folklore: “I have ways of making money you know nothing about.”77 Disconcerted by such assertions, Hewitt and his partners finally sold out for $65,000, though they believed their business was worth $150,000. Rockefeller ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3271-82 | Added on Thursday, May 06, 2010, 07:17 PM Like some of his contemporaries, he didn’t see how they could build vast, enduring industries in a volatile economy disrupted by recessions, deflation, and explosive boom-and-bust cycles, and he decided to subjugate markets instead of responding endlessly to their changing price signals. Thus, Rockefeller and other industrial captains conspired to kill competitive capitalism in favor of a new monopoly capitalism. Economic historians often cite the exuberance of Gilded Age businessmen, their red-blooded faith in America’s future, without noting the constant uncertainty that lurked underneath. As Rockefeller’s story shows, many of the age’s most controversial business practices were forged in a desperate spirit of self-preservation. “It was forced upon us,” Rockefeller said of Standard Oil’s genesis. “We had to do it in self-defence. The oil business was in confusion and daily growing worse. Someone had to make a stand.” Though he foresaw the triumph of cooperation, its far-ranging ramifications weren’t yet clear to him. “This movement was the origin of the whole system of economic administration. It has revolutionized the way of doing business all over the world. The time was ripe for it. It had to come, though all we saw at the moment was the need to save ourselves from wasteful conditions.” Then he added, as if enunciating his economic credo: “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return”82 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3338-45 | Added on Friday, May 07, 2010, 05:32 AM The conservative, Austrian-born economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, for example, contended that monopolies might prove beneficial during depressions or in new, rapidly shifting industries. By replacing turmoil with stability, a monopoly “may make fortresses out of what otherwise might be centers of devastation” and “in the end produce not only steadier but also greater expansion of total output than could be secured by an entirely uncontrolled onward rush that cannot fail to be studded with catastrophes.”91 Schumpeter imagined that entrepreneurs wouldn’t commit large sums to risky ventures if the future seemed cloudy and new competitors could easily spoil their plans. “On the one hand, largest-scale plans could in many cases not materialize at all if it were not known from the outset that competition will be discouraged by heavy capital requirements or lack of experience, or that means are available to discourage or checkmate it so as to gain the time and space for further developments.”92 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3376-81 | Added on Friday, May 07, 2010, 05:34 AM To reiterate an earlier point, John D. regarded God as an ally, a sort of honorary shareholder of Standard Oil who had richly blessed his fortunes. Consider this impassioned outburst he made to a reporter: I believe the power to make money is a gift from God—just as are the instincts for art, music, literature, the doctor’s talent, the nurse’s, yours—to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience. 94 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3389-92 | Added on Friday, May 07, 2010, 05:35 AM What’s most striking, both in the extensive Inglis interview and elsewhere, is that every time Rockefeller explained the rationale for Standard Oil, he resorted to patently religious imagery. “The Standard was an angel of mercy, reaching down from the sky, and saying, ‘Get into the ark. Put in your old junk. We’ll take all the risks!’ ”96 He referred to Standard Oil as “the Moses who delivered them [the refiners] from their folly which had wrought such havoc in their fortunes.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3611-13 | Added on Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 09:12 AM One of the consenting sellers was Captain Jacob J. Vandergrift, a husky little man with a Santa Claus beard. A former skipper on the Ohio River, Vandergrift was a wealthy, God-fearing temperance advocate who commanded universal power and respect. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3709-12 | Added on Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 09:18 AM the competitor felt injured because he could not use his rival’s capital and facilities for his own advantage and the disadvantage of the owner of the capital and facilities.”33 Rockefeller’s logic was unimpeachable—unless one accepted the still controversial proposition that railroads were common carriers and should deal with all shippers impartially. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3738-42 | Added on Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 09:21 AM Had oil been found in scattered places after the Civil War, it’s unlikely that even Standard Oil could have mustered the resources to control it so thoroughly. It was the confinement of oil to a desolate corner of northwest Pennsylvania that made it susceptible to monopoly control, especially with the emergence of pipelines. Pipelines unified the Pennsylvania wells into a single network and ultimately permitted Standard Oil to start or stop the flow of oil with the turn of a spigot. In time, they relegated collaboration with the railroads into something of a sideshow for Rockefeller. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3787-90 | Added on Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 06:52 PM Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel. Two of his most cherished maxims were “Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.”7 Big Bill’s deaf-and-dumb routine curiously prefigured his son’s habit of hearing as much as possible and saying as little as possible to gain a tactical edge. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3864-69 | Added on Thursday, May 13, 2010, 03:47 PM His employees tended to revere Rockefeller and vied to please him. As one said, “I have never heard of his equal in getting together a lot of the very best men in one team and inspiring each man to do his best for the enterprise. . . . He was so big, so broad, so patient; I don’t believe a man like him comes to this world oftener than once in five or six hundred years.”23 Rockefeller worked by subtle hints, doling out praise sparingly to employees and nudging them along. At first, he tested them exhaustively, yet once he trusted them, he bestowed enormous power upon them and didn’t intrude unless something radically misfired. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4111-15 | Added on Thursday, May 13, 2010, 04:05 PM A fidgety silence was always Rockefeller’s harshest expression of scorn. While Rockefeller resented being pumped for advice, he himself mingled business and religion and converted the church into a powerful platform for espousing capitalism. He had no interest in theological disputation or in discussing otherworldly matters. To Sunday-school classes, he frequently reiterated his motto, “I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can, fairly and honestly; to keep all you can, and to give away all you can.”26 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4456-60 | Added on Thursday, May 13, 2010, 06:45 PM long-distance transport. Before this time, pipelines had never covered more than thirty miles. This seaboard pipeline would eclipse the railroads and shatter the whole complex structure of secret rebates and drawbacks that Rockefeller had cobbled together. Before the seaboard-pipeline battle, one could argue that Standard Oil had been an innovative force, modernizing the industry through up-to-date plants, superior management, and smoother coordination of the oil flow from wellhead to consumer. Now, it became a benighted custodian of the status quo, squelching progress to safeguard its own interests. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4785-93 | Added on Thursday, May 13, 2010, 07:30 PM In these new quarters, the Standard Oil mandarins preserved a tradition launched years before. Each day at noon, the executive committee gathered for lunch in a top-floor room decorated with hunting and fishing trophies and with a port view that suited their global empire. There was no surer proof of favor in the Standard Oil empyrean than to receive an invitation to dine at the long table. Arriving in silk hats, frock coats, and gloves, the directors always took the same assigned seats. In his deceptively self-effacing style, Rockefeller yielded the head of the table to his most frequent adversary, Charles Pratt, who was the group’s oldest member; Flagler sat to Pratt’s right, then Rockefeller, then Archbold. It says much about his managerial approach that Rockefeller sat indistinguishably among his colleagues, though the leveling arrangement scarcely disguised his unique status. As philosopher Herbert Spencer once said, “A business partnership, balanced as the authorities of its members may theoretically be, presently becomes a union in which the authority of one partner is tacitly recognized as greater than that of the other or others.”16 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4975-77 | Added on Thursday, May 13, 2010, 07:37 PM “Most Americans when they accumulate money climb the golden spires of the nearest Episcopal Church,” H. L. Mencken later observed. “But the Rockefellers cling to the primeval rain-god of the American hinterland and show no signs of being ashamed of him.” 47 They would not have felt comfortable with the splendor and formality of a high-church denomination. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 159-67 | Added on Thursday, May 13, 2010, 08:04 PM a PTA co-president.9 If we had to worry that any information about us would be remembered for longer than we live, would we still express our views on matters of trivial gossip, share personal experiences, make various political comments, or would we self-censor? The chilling effect of perfect memory alters our behavior. Both Snyder and Feldmar said that in hindsight they would have acted differently. “Be careful what you post online,” said Snyder, and Feldmar added perceptively “I should warn people that the electronic footprint you leave on the Net will be used against you. It cannot be erased.”10 But the demise of forgetting has consequences much wider and more troubling than a frontal onslaught on how humans have constructed and maintained their reputation over time. If all our past activities, transgressions or not, are always present, how can we disentangle ourselves from them in our thinking and decision-making? Might perfect remembering make us as unforgiving to ourselves as to others? Still, Snyder and Feldmar voluntarily disclosed ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5303-6 | Added on Friday, May 14, 2010, 08:03 AM In the end, Count Sergei Witte, the Russian finance minister, spiked the scheme for a grand alliance of Standard Oil with the Nobels and Rothschilds—to the dismay of countless European newspaper cartoonists who had made sport evoking the clumsy embrace of the octopus and the bear. All the while, Russia kept pumping crude oil and by the late 1890s briefly overtook the United States in oil production, even though Standard Oil handily eclipsed it in refining. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5416-20 | Added on Friday, May 14, 2010, 08:08 AM Grocers and hardware merchants resented the demand to stock only Standard Oil kerosene or be starved out of the business. Along with wholesalers rendered obsolete by the Standard marketing effort, they emerged as Rockefeller’s most potent enemies. Conveniently, Rockefeller never set eyes on these men, had no sympthy for them, and chided them for standing in the way of progress. “Of course it is natural that the man who drove the stage coach should be antagonistic to the railroad and that the man who used to keep the small inn should look with disfavor upon the big, magnificent hotels.”22 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6108-15 | Added on Sunday, May 16, 2010, 06:51 PM Rockefeller’s reputation as an uncanny prophet of industry trends. Had Frasch not figured out how to use Lima crude, a critical shortage of American oil would have arisen between the depletion of western Pennsylvania crude and the Texas and Kansas booms of the early 1900s. For fifteen years, Frasch’s patents furnished dazzling profits for Rockefeller and Standard Oil and boosted the status of research scientists throughout the industry. The original oilmen were self-made roughnecks, biased against science and prone to operate by intuition, whereas Rockefeller brought a rational spirit to the business, and this counted among his greatest contributions. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”16 When Frasch cracked the riddle of Lima crude, he was probably the only trained petroleum chemist in the United States. By the time Rockefeller ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6349-54 | Added on Sunday, May 16, 2010, 07:07 PM Standard Oil had taught the American public an important but paradoxical lesson: Free markets, if left completely to their own devices, can wind up terribly unfree. Competitive capitalism did not exist in a state of nature but had to be defined or restrained by law. Unfettered markets tended frequently toward monopoly or, at least, toward unhealthy levels of concentration, and government sometimes needed to intervene to ensure the full benefits of competition. This was particularly true in the early stages of industrial development. This notion is now so deeply embedded in our laws that it has become all but invisible to us, replaced by secondary debates over the precise nature or extent of antitrust enforcement. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6581-86 | Added on Monday, May 17, 2010, 08:51 AM Yet precisely because Rockefeller had missed college, no school could stake a claim on him. While he had the option of distributing his educational largesse widely, such dispersed giving didn’t jibe with his philosophy. In religion and education no less than in business, Rockefeller thought it a mistake to prop up weak entities that might otherwise perish in the evolutionary race. “I think mistakes are made by organizing too many feeble institutions—rather consolidate and have good, strong working church organizations,” he wrote in 1886—a remark that could have applied to his educational views. 28 In the long run, Rockefeller transposed to philanthropy the same principle of consolidation that had worked so well for him in business. Worn down by masses of people clamoring for his money, ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6698-6705 | Added on Monday, May 17, 2010, 08:57 AM It was an auspicious time for such a venture. While enjoying the wealth of a nascent world power, America was still saddled with cultural institutions that seemed provincial beside their European counterparts, and many businessmen were eager to endow schools and museums. Rockefeller was not the only magnate to create a major university in the late nineteenth century: The railroad fortunes of both Johns Hopkins and Leland Stanford were similarly applied, while closer to home Rockefeller had the example of the Pratt Institute, set up by Charles Pratt in 1887. Instead of making isolated gifts, Rockefeller wanted to finance institutions whose research would have a pervasive influence. Of the University of Chicago, he later said, “Following the principle of trying to abolish evils by destroying them at the source, we felt that to aid colleges and universities, whose graduates would spread their culture far and wide, was the surest way to fight ignorance and promote the growth of useful knowledge. ”46 To Rockefeller, the least ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6705-8 | Added on Monday, May 17, 2010, 08:57 AM imaginative use of money was to give it to people outright instead of delving into the causes of human misery. “That has been our guiding principle, to benefit as many people as possible,” he affirmed. “Instead of giving alms to beggars, if anything can be done to remove the causes which lead to the existence of beggars, then something deeper and broader and more worthwhile will have been accomplished.”47 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6708-13 | Added on Monday, May 17, 2010, 08:57 AM Businessmen such as Rockefeller and Carnegie saw themselves as applying their managerial wisdom to the charity world. As at Standard Oil, Rockefeller wanted to reduce waste and duplication in the charitable sphere and deplored the lack of study behind much giving. “Today the whole machinery of benevolence is conducted upon more or less haphazard principles,” he stated in his memoirs.48 The University of Chicago was Rockefeller’s signature project in which he clarified his approach and schooled Frederick T. Gates, his son, and other advisers as his future surrogates. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7017-20 | Added on Monday, May 17, 2010, 07:32 PM [Rockefeller] feels that an institution of learning should be far more conservatively managed than, for instance, a bank, or even a savings bank or a trust company. These companies need only assure the depositor or investor that his funds will be duly cared for during the limited time in which they may be deposited. But a university invests the funds of those who are seeking to make an investment of money for the good of humanity, which shall last, if possible, as long as the world stands.88 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7156-62 | Added on Monday, May 17, 2010, 07:38 PM self-financing, very liquid at all times, and free from the thrall of Wall Street bankers. As a result, no other industrial corporation was so fearless or independent. It was one of Rockefeller’s proudest boasts that unlike other trusts, he had not needed a J. P. Morgan to forge his combine. Standard Oil anticipated a major feature of the twentieth-century economy: the tendency of sophisticated, cash-rich corporations to outgrow their traditional bankers and become financial-service giants in their own rights. As journalist John Moody perceptively wrote, “The Standard Oil Trust was really a bank of the most gigantic character—a bank within an industry, financing this industry against all competition and continually lending vast sums of money to needy borrowers on high class collateral, just as the other great banks were doing.” 9 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 8280-84 | Added on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 01:10 PM Morgan was not thrilled about catering to Rockefeller, who had flouted Wall Street by financing his trust from retained earnings and holding cash reserves equal to those of many banks. He was also well aware of William Rockefeller’s intimacy with James Stillman of National City Bank. When Morgan contemplated a merger with the London house of Barings in 1904, his counterpart, Lord Revelstoke, reported afterward to a partner that Morgan “inveighed bitterly against the growing power of the Jews and of the Rockefeller crowd, and said more than once that our firm and his were the only two composed of white men in New York.”97 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 8287-93 | Added on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 01:10 PM America and Europe, was a consummate insider in the business world. For more than forty years, he had been the chief conduit for British capital that had financed American railroads and industry. Blustery and theatrical, Morgan was impetuous and hot-blooded, cursed with a short attention span. At his headquarters at 23 Wall Street, he often seemed harried, ruling by brilliant snap judgments. Fond of luxury, Morgan inhabited the world of the ultrarich, with their gargantuan cigars, fine port, and oversized steam yachts. For Rockefeller, Morgan embodied all the sins of pride, luxury, and arrogance. When they first met at William Rockefeller’s Hudson River mansion, they took an instant dislike to each other. “We had a few pleasant words,” noted Rockefeller. “But I could see that Mr. Morgan was very much—well, like Mr. Morgan; very haughty, very inclined to look down on other men. I looked ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 8287-97 | Added on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 01:11 PM America and Europe, was a consummate insider in the business world. For more than forty years, he had been the chief conduit for British capital that had financed American railroads and industry. Blustery and theatrical, Morgan was impetuous and hot-blooded, cursed with a short attention span. At his headquarters at 23 Wall Street, he often seemed harried, ruling by brilliant snap judgments. Fond of luxury, Morgan inhabited the world of the ultrarich, with their gargantuan cigars, fine port, and oversized steam yachts. For Rockefeller, Morgan embodied all the sins of pride, luxury, and arrogance. When they first met at William Rockefeller’s Hudson River mansion, they took an instant dislike to each other. “We had a few pleasant words,” noted Rockefeller. “But I could see that Mr. Morgan was very much—well, like Mr. Morgan; very haughty, very inclined to look down on other men. I lookedvery much—well, like Mr. Morgan; very haughty, very inclined to look down on other men. I looked at him. For my part, I have never been able to see why any man should have such a high and mighty feeling about himself.” 98 For Morgan, Rockefeller was too dry and prudish, devoid of manly charms and vices. And how could he not grumble at the effrontery of someone who had created a cartel without him? Nevertheless, both men detested competition as a destructive force, a dangerously antiquated notion. For years, Morgan had arbitrated disputes ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 8320-25 | Added on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 01:12 PM If Morgan thought he was dealing with a choirboy, he was soon undeceived. Showing an unexpected pluck that nobody, not even Junior, knew was there, he shot back, “Mr. Morgan, I think there must be some mistake. I did not come here to sell. I understood you wished to buy.”102 He asked Morgan to name a price that his father might accept or decline. For Junior, it must have been a revelatory moment: He was sparring with Wall Street’s potentate. When Morgan stepped out briefly, Henry Rogers, flabbergasted, advised Junior to soften his tone, but Junior said he meant every word and that he and father were “absolutely indifferent about coming into the consolidation.”103 The tense standoff ended in a ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 8412-16 | Added on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, 01:17 PM and in April 1895 wrote Rockefeller to that effect. When he received the letter, Rockefeller was stunned. “Is it possible that ‘Jim Corrigan’ should be willing to write me such a letter,” he wrote back, “after my uniform kindness to him for a lifetime?” 118 Some years later, possibly with the Corrigan affair in mind, Rockefeller lectured his son, “John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.”119 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9064-66 | Added on Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 06:43 PM scarcely penetrate. As the World dryly observed, “The virtue of forgetting, which is one of the most valuable virtues that a monopolist can have under cross-examination, is possessed by Mr. Rockefeller in its highest degree.”2 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9165-68 | Added on Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 06:45 PM alone, redrew the industry map. By 1905, Texas accounted for more than a quarter of the crude oil being pumped in America. Popular antagonism toward Standard Oil in Texas prevented the trust from moving aggressively to exterminate these new competitors, though the trust did have several refining affiliates there. When the ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9181-87 | Added on Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 06:47 PM 1900. “With financial interests on a sound basis, the next four years ought to accomplish much for the general welfare of the American people.”14 In Roosevelt, however, whom he credited as the “shrewdest of politicians,” Rockefeller knew he had a formidable rival.15 In a political world degraded by corrupt bosses and ward heelers, Teddy Roosevelt was that rara avis: a cultivated, well-to-do man. Descended from Dutch settlers who had emigrated to New Amsterdam before 1648 and later made a fortune in Manhattan real estate, Roosevelt, like many of his social peers, was scandalized by the sordid ethics of the new industrial class. As a New York state assemblyman in 1883, this aristocratic renegade reviled Jay Gould and his ilk as members of “the wealthy criminal class,” the first of many ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9196-9201 | Added on Thursday, May 20, 2010, 05:38 AM By 1901, virtually all American industrialists were converts to the doctrine of cooperation preached by Rockefeller and feared Teddy Roosevelt’s reputation as a trustbuster, even if that anxiety was somewhat overblown. Like Rockefeller, the new president favored industrial consolidation to exploit economies of scale. Scoffing at calls by William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette to dismantle the trusts, he contended that any such course would thwart the economy’s natural tendency. “Much of the legislation not only proposed but enacted against trusts is not one whit more intelligent than the medieval bull against the comet, and has not been one particle more effective.”19 Roosevelt ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9218-20 | Added on Thursday, May 20, 2010, 05:39 AM arbitrate an end to the anthracite coal strike. As Roosevelt turned the presidency into an honest broker between capital and labor, Morgan, unlike the more myopic Rockefeller, saw that Roosevelt stood ready to make concessions to cooperative businessmen. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9325-27 | Added on Thursday, May 20, 2010, 05:45 AM a major trust came from Samuel McClure, one of the most gifted windbags ever to occupy an editorial chair, who recruited writers with marathon speeches about his magazine’s greatness. High-strung, mercurial, seized by hourly brainstorms, McClure was described by Rudyard Kipling as a “cyclone in a frock coat.”35 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9478-82 | Added on Thursday, May 20, 2010, 06:34 PM it by Napoleon work and the effort to keep the attention centered on Napoleon, never mentioning anybody if I could help it.”67 This great-man approach to history gave a human face to the gigantic, amorphous entity known as Standard Oil but also turned the full force of public fury on Rockefeller. It did not acknowledge the bureaucratic reality of Standard Oil, with its labyrinthine committee system, and stigmatized Rockefeller to the exclusion of his associates. So Flagler came off relatively unscathed, even though he had negotiated the secret freight contracts that bulk so large in the McClure’s exposé. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9733-39 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 09:49 AM The McClure’s series showed that the public-be-damned attitude that had served industrial barons well in the nineteenth century now made them easy prey for investigative journalists who fed a public famished for revelations of misconduct. The schizoid American worship of millionaires was shot through with envy and a desire to see these demigods punished and desecrated. So why did Rockefeller stick to his self-defeating silence? One side of him simply did not want to be bothered by libel suits. “Life is short,” he wrote to Parmalee Prentice, “and we have not time to heed the reports of foolish and unprincipled men.”109 He was also afraid that if he sued for libel, it would dignify the charges against him and only prolong the controversy. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9966-70 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 09:56 AM Rockefeller regarded his fortune as a public trust, not as a private indulgence, and the pressure to dispose of it grew imperative in the early 1900s as his Standard Oil stock and other investments appreciated fantastically. In the pre-Gates era, Rockefeller had found it difficult to expand his giving in proportion to his wealth—a strain that had pushed him steadily toward a psychic precipice. Tarbell stressed that Rockefeller had given away only a small fraction of his total wealth: between thirty-five and forty million dollars, or the equivalent of three years of Standard Oil dividends. (In fact, he had already given away several times that amount.) To parry ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9998-10000 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 09:57 AM He contributed to education and medical research, for they strengthened recipients and better prepared them for the evolutionary struggle—that is, he equipped them to compete but did not tamper with outcomes. For this reason, he never used his wealth to alleviate poverty directly and scorned any charity that ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 10073-76 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 10:02 AM mankind only as we can find able men with ideas, imagination and courage to put it into productive use.”11 That Rockefeller placed scientists, not lay trustees, in charge of expenditures was thought revolutionary. This was the institute’s secret formula: gather great minds, liberate them from petty cares, and let them chase intellectual chimeras without pressure or meddling. If the founders created an atmosphere conducive to creativity, things would, presumably, happen. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 10318-21 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 11:00 AM Without offending applicants, he could deftly expose weaknesses in their projects. His intuitions were so exact that Gates said Buttrick had “cat’s whiskers; he feels objects before he gets to them.”13 His greatest drawback—and a real one—was that he thought it expedient to truckle to white supremacists to maintain GEB operations in the South. He told an audience of Tennessee ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 10661-66 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 11:11 AM The tainted-money controversy elicited a splendid piece of satire from Mark Twain who, having befriended the Rockefellers and Henry Rogers, knew that rapacious businessmen could be kindhearted benefactors. In Harper’s Weekly, he published an open letter from Satan in which he chastised readers, “Let us have done with this frivolous talk. The American Board accepts contributions from me every year; then why shouldn’t it from Mr. Rockefeller? In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience-money, as my books will show; then what becomes of the sting when that term is applied to Mr. Rockefeller’s gift?”65 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 10687-90 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 03:38 PM Cheerful and jaunty, Rockefeller cultivated the sly asides, sage apothegms, and cornball humor of a codger. As a businessman, he had preferred dark, monochromatic suits, but now his wardrobe became dapper and eccentrically bright, like that of a retired stage actor. One favorite outfit consisted of a long yellow silk coat over a Japanese paper vest, a straw hat (likened by one periodical to “the headpiece of a rickshaw man”) or a pith helmet, and a pair of goggles.1 This ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 11284-88 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 03:54 PM never been especially proud of being an American.” 51 Fluent in German, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and French, he wanted to return to Europe, seeing it as the fountainhead of culture. For Rockefeller, American to the marrow, convinced that European society was decadent, such an attitude was incomprehensible. Around this time, when reporters asked whether he might ever retire to Europe, he replied, “The United States can’t develop enough drawbacks to make me lose the feeling that there is no place like home.”52 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 11484-86 | Added on Friday, May 21, 2010, 04:01 PM Since it represented nearly 30 percent of Standard Oil’s $100 million capitalization, Rockefeller’s theoretical share of the fine worked out to $8,011,760. Asked about the penalty, Mark Twain said it reminded him of the bride’s words the next morning: “I expected it but didn’t suppose it would be so big.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 11836-42 | Added on Saturday, May 22, 2010, 10:22 AM his hands. During the ten years after Standard Oil’s 1911 dismantling, the assets of its constituent companies quintupled in value. Beyond his talents as a businessman, Rockefeller benefited from a large dollop of luck in his life, making more money in retirement than on the job. The soaring fortunes of the Standard companies made it seem as if the cagey Rockefeller had outwitted the country again. Newspapers began running daily box scores of his wealth—not exactly the chastening sequel Washington had envisioned. As former J. P. Morgan partner George Perkins told a friend, Wall Street was “laughing in its sleeve at what has been going on.” 75 Nobody felt more frustrated than Teddy Roosevelt, who returned to the presidential fray with his third-party Bull Moose candidacy in 1912. Lashing out at Standard Oil again, he roared, “The price of stock has gone up over one hundred ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 12002-8 | Added on Saturday, May 22, 2010, 11:18 AM admonition that his gifts must keep pace with his exploding wealth, Rockefeller gave $100 million to the Rockefeller Foundation in its first year, bolstered by another $82.8 million by 1919. In current dollars, that would translate into a $2 billion gift during the foundation’s inaugural decade. It also meant that by 1919 Rockefeller had already given away an amount roughly equal to the $350 million that Andrew Carnegie gave away in his entire lifetime; the titan would donate another $180 million before he died. Since his son gave away an additional $537 million directly and another $540 million through the Rockefeller philanthropies, Rockefeller far surpassed his great rival’s benefactions and must rank as the greatest philanthropist in American history. By securing the Rockefeller Foundation charter in 1913, Rockefeller insulated a large portion of ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 12067-75 | Added on Saturday, May 22, 2010, 11:20 AM These moving crusades to eliminate infectious diseases generated one troubling afterthought: What if these diseases returned for lack of trained government personnel in the affected areas? It soon became evident that the best way to safeguard Rose’s work was to assist governments in establishing public-health machinery. It was an auspicious moment for such an approach, for pure science had now begun to outstrip applied medicine, which meant that enormous gains could be made simply by implementing existing knowledge. With this in mind, the Rockefeller Foundation gave six million dollars to Johns Hopkins for a new school of hygiene and public health that opened in 1918, a newfangled institution to train public-health professionals in such emerging disciplines as sanitary engineering, epidemiology, and biostatistics. In 1921, the foundation made a similar gift to Harvard to start a public-health school and finally spent twenty-five million dollars to create such schools from Calcutta to Copenhagen, along with numerous fellowship programs. Through its catalytic role, the Rockefeller Foundation played an integral part in the rise of American medicine to the pinnacle of world leadership. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 12080-84 | Added on Saturday, May 22, 2010, 11:40 AM subversion. So the interest in China turned to that old Rockefeller standby: medicine. In 1915, the Rockefeller Foundation set up the China Medical Board, which constructed the Peking Union Medical College and opened it in 1921. One of Rockefeller’s most ambitious projects, the medical complex contained fifty-nine buildings, roofed with jade-green tiles (it would be dubbed the Green City) scattered across a twenty-nine-acre site. Later nationalized by the Communists, the school introduced a generation of Chinese doctors to modern medicine. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 12139-48 | Added on Saturday, May 22, 2010, 11:42 AM If Senior’s philanthropies showed his broad-mindedness, his unrelenting opposition to organized labor brought out his more antediluvian side. He could never see unions as anything other than frauds perpetrated by feckless workers. “It is all beautiful at the beginning; they give their organization a fine name and they declare a set of righteous principles,” he said. “But soon the real object of their organizing shows itself—to do as little as possible for the greatest possible pay.” Workers were incorrigible spendthrifts who squandered surplus earnings. “They spend their money on picture shows, and whiskey and cigarettes.”5 At Pocantico, he did not allow employees to take Labor Day as a vacation and fired one group that tried to unionize. Right before the Colorado troubles, he even tried to halt contributions to YMCA building projects that employed closed-shop union labor, but he was talked out of it by his staff. Gates, if anything, was even more obdurate about unions, warning that “it is clear that if they get the power, they have the spirit to rob, to confiscate, to absorb remorselessly, cruelly, voraciously, if they can, the whole wealth of society.” 6 When union organizers targeted CFI, Rockefeller, Junior, Gates, and Bowers treated it as the industrial equivalent of Armageddon. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 12542-45 | Added on Saturday, May 22, 2010, 09:06 PM was moved to a personal utterance. “People tell me I have done much in my life,” he said. “I know I have worked hard. But the best thing I ever accomplished and the thing that has given me the greatest happiness was to win Cettie Spelman. I have had but one sweetheart and am thankful to say I still have her.”5 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 13229-30 | Added on Sunday, May 23, 2010, 01:43 PM She was the major benefactor of the Grace Dodge Hotel in Washington, D.C., a 350-room hotel for professional women operated by the YWCA and staffed entirely by women, down to the bellhops and elevator operators. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 13285-89 | Added on Sunday, May 23, 2010, 01:45 PM Yet Rockefeller’s insouciance also masked deeper concerns. Breakfasting with his grandchildren, he dispensed a nickel and a kiss to each, accompanied by a little pep talk. “Do you know,” he would ask, “what would hurt grandfather a great deal? To know that any of you boys should become wasteful, extravagant, careless with his money. . . . Be careful, boys, and then you’ll always be able to help unfortunate people. That is your duty, and you must never forget it.”31 The grandchildren credited their conceptions of philanthropic stewardship as much to their grandfather as to their father. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 13298-304 | Added on Sunday, May 23, 2010, 01:46 PM On Saturday mornings, stomachs aflutter, the children filed one by one into Junior’s study and had their account books scrutinized. Although they received only a thirty-cent allowance—much less than their friends—they had to account for every penny. They were fined a nickel for omissions and awarded a nickel for scrupulous record keeping. They were expected to spend a third of their money, save a third, and donate a third to charity. Bound by these rules, the Rockefeller children acted like destitute waifs and constantly scrounged small change from friends. As Nelson lamented, “I can honestly say that none of us has ever had a feeling of actually being rich—that is, of having a lot of money.”33 Like Junior as a boy, they often dressed in old clothes and were denied ordinary trips to theaters or the movies until they were well into their teens. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 277-94 | Added on Sunday, May 23, 2010, 02:43 PM Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making. It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events. Through perfect memory we may lose a fundamental human capacity—to live and act firmly in the present. Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Funes, the Memorius lays out the argument. Due to a riding accident, a young man, Funes, has lost his ability to forget. Through ferocious reading, he has amassed a huge memory of classic works in literature, but fails to see beyond the words. Once we have perfect memory, Borges suggests, we are no longer able to generalize and abstract, and so remain lost in the details of our past.33 What Borges only hypothesized, we now know. Researchers have recently published the case of AJ, a 41-year-old woman in California, who does not have the biological gift of forgetting.34 Since she was 11, she remembers practically every day—not in the sense of a day that passed, but in astonishing, agonizing detail. She remembers what exactly she had for breakfast three decades ago; she recalls who called her and when, and what happened in each episode of the television shows she watched—in the 1980s. She does not have to think hard. Remembering is easy for her—her memory is “uncontrollable, and automatic” like a movie “that never stops.”35 Instead of bestowing AJ with a superb facility, her memory repeatedly restricts her ability to decide, and to move on. It seems that those that have the capacity to store and recall unusual amounts of what they experience, feel and think, would like to be able to turn off their capacity to remember—at least temporarily. They feel shackled by their constantly present past, so much so that it constrains their daily lives, limits their decision-making ability, as well as their capacity to forge close ties with those who remember less. The effect may be even stronger when caused by more comprehensive and easily accessible external digital memory. Too perfect a recall, even when it is benignly intended to aid our decision-making, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave our past behind, and much like Borges’ Funes, incapable of abstract thoughts. It is the surprising curse of remembering. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 353-57 | Added on Sunday, May 23, 2010, 02:46 PM episodic memory, of things we have just experienced. Short-term memory is the information-processing bottleneck through which almost all information must pass before reaching long-term memory.5 Once a piece of information is transformed into long-term storage, it is stored in what we call “human memory.” Actually, remembering is a two-step process. The first is successfully committing information to long-term storage. The second is recalling that information from memory. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 604-13 | Added on Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 02:30 PM Ptolemy fell into a similar trap as a law school friend of mine, who had forced upon himself an intriguing system of improving his external memory. He had limited his personal library to exactly 200 books. Once he had read a new book, he would decide whether it was among the 200 best books he’d ever read. If so, he would add it to his collection, and discard the lesser one. Over time, he thought this process of constant filtering and deliberate forgetting would continuously improve his library’s quality, so that he would retain in his external memory only the really important and valuable thoughts. What he failed to understand was that as his own views changed over time, so did the basis for how he evaluated and decided which books to keep, and which to throw away. Ever after decades of industrious work, his library will never be the collection of the best books he ever read, but an amassment of books representing different views and values, and stages in his life. What he, like Ptolemy, had overlooked is that there is no objective measure that stays constant over time through which we humans can judge the meaning and value of the words we read, or of the external memories we recall. Scribes remained sought after professionals in ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 738-40 | Added on Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 02:35 PM election, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Mass media fosters the construction of a common shared memory beyond what people have witnessed together or a witness told a friend, and beyond the narrow confines of geographic proximity. Thus, ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 1499-1504 | Added on Wednesday, May 26, 2010, 04:34 PM buyers)—not because they are satisfied with a transaction, but because they hope to elicit an equally good rating in return.9 It is but one of the many ways in which eBay’s customers have been trying to influence eBay’s digital memory of transactional reputation.10 By the spring of 2008, the widespread behavior of gaming reputation memory led eBay to a dramatic reversal of its information policy. It announced that sellers would no longer be able to rate buyers except positively.11 Whereas, since its beginning, eBay’s trademark had been to remember reputation, it has now introduced the deliberate forgetting of bad experiences. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 1673-84 | Added on Thursday, May 27, 2010, 06:44 AM Unfortunately, human remembering is not a process of mechanistically retrieving facts from our past, but rather, as Daniel Schacter so eloquently argued, the constant reconstruction of our past based on the present.35 Or as he puts it “present influences play a much larger role in determining what is remembered than what actually happened in the past.”36 While we are constantly forgetting and reconstructing elements of our past, others employing digital remembering can access the unreconstructed facts. Thus, as the past we remember is constantly (if ever so slightly) changing and evolving, the past captured in digital memory is constant, frozen in time. Likely these two visions will clash—the frozen memory others have about us, and the evolving emerging memory we carry in our minds. Neither is an accurate and complete depiction of what we are. The former is locked in time, the latter our mind’s rendition of the past, strongly influenced by who we are in the present. In such a world, would we still resort to human memory, or switch ourselves to digital memory to ensure that others do not know more about us, even when recalling our very own history? And if we all switched from individual human to some external digital remembering, and thus gave up on our ability to see our past through the eyes of who we are in the present, would this not have perverted Brin’s very idea of preserving individuals’ ability to control information? ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 1710-17 | Added on Sunday, May 30, 2010, 06:20 AM A shift in information power therefore doesn’t have consequences just for a particular transaction, whether and under what conditions it takes place, it also has the potential to influence how humans behave. Remember the cases of aspiring teacher Stacy Snyder and psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar? Both said afterwards that in hindsight they would have acted differently. Had they known the consequences they would have self-censored themselves. But there is an important difference between Stacy’s and Andrew’s case. Stacy Snyder failed to understand the accessibility quality of digital remembering—what is available for one purpose and one recipient may be accessible to somebody else and used for a very different purpose; otherwise, she likely would have not posted the picture on her web page. Here is the important part: that information can be accessed, and for different reasons, by others than the original recipient restrains how Stacy expresses herself—in general. If one does not know how ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 1772-73 | Added on Sunday, May 30, 2010, 06:23 AM my second argument focuses on how digital remembering negates time, and thereby threatens our ability to decide rationally. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 1995-2000 | Added on Sunday, May 30, 2010, 01:44 PM power, I described how digital memory deepens the already existing chasm between the information rich and the information poor, further empowering the former to the detriment of the latter. I explained how comprehensive digital memory stifles societal debate. At the interface of power and time, permanent remembering creates the specter of a spatial and temporal panopticon, in which everybody may constantly be tempted to self-censor. Perhaps most importantly, comprehensive digital remembering collapses history, impairing our judgment and our capacity to act in time. It denies us humans the chance to evolve, develop, and learn, leaving us helplessly oscillating between two equally troubling options: a permanent past and an ignorant present. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 2400-2407 | Added on Sunday, May 30, 2010, 05:44 PM Togelius’ sentiments were echoed by Harvard Berkman Center fellow danah boyd, who is convinced that “[p]eople, particularly younger people, are going to come up with coping mechanisms. That’s going to be the shift, not any intervention by a governmental or technological body.” 28 Togelius and boyd (and quite a number of others) do not deny that we are fast approaching a world that will not forget, but they believe humans will be able to adjust their cognitive processes to deal with digital remembering. It is a striking idea: permanent presence of all information would lose much of its sting if we could consciously disregard old facts and accept that humans are ever-changing beings, never locked into a particular state. Such cognitive adjustment would eliminate the potential danger of clouded decision-making or failing to act in time. More precisely, cognitive adjustment is enticing ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 2569-71 | Added on Monday, May 31, 2010, 03:45 PM Only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, lifeloggers have correctly pointed out that what they advocate is not surveillance (one watching another), but sousveillance (we watching us). ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 2672-76 | Added on Monday, May 31, 2010, 04:00 PM One possible way we can mimic human forgetting in the digital realm is by associating information we store in digital memory with expiration dates that users set. Our digital storage devices would be made to automatically delete information that has reached or exceeded its expiry date.2 In its most bare-bones form, this I believe may be sufficient to reintroduce the contours of forgetting, although numerous more sophisticated variations are conceivable to fit a society’s specific needs and preferences. These ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 2996-98 | Added on Monday, May 31, 2010, 04:14 PM For example, we could make our digital storage devices aware of how often an individual recalls a particular piece of information over time, and have our devices adjust the digital lifespan for items that are often recalled. That way they would mimic human memory, in which often recalled information is remembered much easier (and longer) than information rarely queried. ========== Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger) - Highlight Loc. 2998-3002 | Added on Monday, May 31, 2010, 05:30 PM Similarly, information processors could provide users with visual cues that indicate how close a piece of information is to its expiration date, and thus make it easier for users to devalue information that is close to the end of its lifespan, and to focus instead on more relevant information (as signaled through its expiration date). Introducing such temporal cues is, I believe, one of the next big steps in improving web search and online services, and introducing expiration dates furnishes information processors with the necessary technical infrastructure to do so. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 268-71 | Added on Monday, June 14, 2010, 10:42 PM Scientists have now said farewell to the Holocene and have rung in a new epoch. They’ve dubbed it the Anthropocene—a human-dominated age in which urban-industrial society has contributed to global warming, mass extinctions, the displacement of species and cultures, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources. The impacts, they say, are permanent; the course of evolution itself has been thrust into the great unknown. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 297-302 | Added on Thursday, June 17, 2010, 12:29 PM The Galápagos are among the youngest and most geologically active archipelagos on Earth. The islands, which straddle the Equator about 600 miles west of Ecuador, were formed less than five million years ago. In geological time, that’s a nanosecond. The archipelago contains 13 major islands and 6 smaller ones. More than 40 islets have names, but scores of smaller islets and rocks, you could call them, remain nameless. The youngest islands are located on the western edge of the archipelago. Isabela Island is by far the largest at nearly 1,800 square miles. Shaped like a giant seahorse, it has five active volcanoes, one of which erupted in 2005 and another in 2008. The youngest island is Fernandina, a single volcano about 700,000 years old. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 329-34 | Added on Sunday, June 20, 2010, 06:19 PM How these denizens of the archipelago arrived there, where they came from, and how they learned to adapt are what make the Galápagos one of the most intriguing natural laboratories on Earth. It’s believed that over time, plants and animals accidentally reached the islands by water or air. Seeds were carried on the wind, on the wings or feet of birds, or in their bellies. Flamingos likely flew in from the Caribbean. Favorable currents could have carried sea lions south from as far away as California, and penguins swam north through the frigid waters of Antarctica aided by the powerful Humboldt Current. Land iguanas and other reptiles may have floated on rafts of organic debris spewed out as flotsam when rivers on the mainland crested their banks. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 390-94 | Added on Sunday, June 20, 2010, 07:13 PM Rivadeneira dubbed the Galápagos the Islas Encantadas (Enchanted Islands) because they would appear then disappear into the mist like phantoms. The Spaniards also dubbed the islands Galápagos (galápago: archaic for “saddle”), to commemorate the saddleback tortoise whose carapace had adapted to allow the giant reptiles to extend their necks and feed on tall stands of prickly pear cactus. In the 1600s, the Galápagos became a refuge for pirates who preyed on towns on the mainland, and on Spanish and Portugese galleons loaded with gold. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 470-72 | Added on Sunday, June 20, 2010, 07:19 PM “The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.” —E. O. Wilson ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 472-74 | Added on Sunday, June 20, 2010, 07:19 PM When Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos in 1835, he found the natural history of the islands “eminently curious.” Here were species so odd ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 486-87 | Added on Monday, June 21, 2010, 05:39 AM Charles Darwin was born into a wealthy family in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, on February 12, 1809, the same day Abraham Lincoln entered the world in the green woods of Kentucky. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 555-58 | Added on Monday, June 21, 2010, 05:46 AM Quammen wrote in his award-winning book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction, “God had supposedly stopped creating after the sixth day. But now, as the wider world opened to the taking of a more thorough biological inventory it seemed that God had stayed busier than anybody had dreamed.” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 558-61 | Added on Monday, June 21, 2010, 05:47 AM Darwin noted, correctly, that most Galápagos animal species had no defensive adaptations whatsoever. Throughout history, many attempts have been made to define this strange phenomenon with terms such as stupid, innocent, unwary, shy, tame, tranquil. Quammen calls it not tameness, but “ecological naïveté,” a trait born in an isolated world. My own term among some species is “natural indifference.” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 563-65 | Added on Monday, June 21, 2010, 05:47 AM Because evolution and adaptation have stripped them of their vulnerability. Like most visitors to the islands, I also experienced the delight of what I call “natural curiosity”: sea lions have peered into my mask while I was snorkeling. Tiny penguins have swum in circles around me in shallow surf. A hawk alighted on a branch above me and stared down at me with amber eyes. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 681-92 | Added on Thursday, January 01, 1970, 12:46 PM Fearing an attack on the Panama Canal, Franklin D. Roosevelt began to negotiate with Quito in 1938 to set up an air base in the Galápagos. Agreement wasn’t reached until 1942. The U.S. Army Air Corps was allowed to establish a base on Baltra Island. The base was huge, staffed by 2,500 U.S. and Ecuadorian servicemen and staff. The soldiers called the island the “Rock,” like Alcatraz, because there was no boat on which to leave the barren and desolate landscape. Construction of the airport, landing strip, barracks, cafeteria, bar, hospital and other buildings took a serious toll on the land iguanas for which the Rock had been home. Rumors flew that bored soldiers had picked off the reptiles one by one as target practice. In 1942 the Secretary of War ordered that the base commanders “take appropriate action to prevent any unnecessary molestation of the wild life in the Galápagos Archipelago and to prohibit the introduction of domestic animals that may prey on the native fauna.” Both the U.S. State Department and the Smithsonian Institution joined in monitoring the iguanas. Whatever happened to these four-foot-long reptiles is still unclear. By the time the American base was turned over to Ecuadorian authorities in 1946, the rare iguanas had disappeared. (A colony of Baltra iguanas removed to nearby North Seymour Island in 1932, however, survived; in the 1980s the reptiles entered a captive-breeding program at the Charles Darwin Research Station, where they were raised and repatriated to Baltra in 1991. Today, about 400 land iguanas live on the island.) ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 774-80 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 10:27 AM Like his old friend Lonesome George, Chapi may be the last of a breed as the Galápagos bend to pressures imposed by oil spills, widespread corruption, lack of enforcement of the laws, greed, lack of education, and skewed policies where authorities often look the other way. All of these factors have contributed to the fragmented ecosystems, extinct and endangered species, and dead zones of the Galápagos today. Now there’s a new trend in the islands: a surge in fundamentalist groups who believe the world is only 6,000 years old. A day earlier I had been on a day trip to Bartolomé Island with a naturalist guide who was studying the Bible of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and who told me he did not believe in evolution. When I tell Chapi about this and mention that I’ve met other creationists in the Galápagos, he visibly bristles. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 810-11 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 10:29 AM “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.” —Gary Snyder ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 907-12 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 10:34 AM The first, she says, is to stop shark finning. “It hurts me when I see sharks without fins when I’m diving. They [fishermen] just slaughter them.” The second is “to eliminate corruption.” The third is “to set limits on tourism” and regulate how it’s organized. “Is environmental education adequate here?” “It’s like a few drops on a hot rock; they just evaporate. It helps to plant a certain consciousness in people’s minds, to give them reasons to be proud to live here. [But] education is so basic that it’s hard to open people to the environment. We have to start with children, and I think we are. Some of the children are [now] educating their parents.” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 999-1002 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 10:41 AM inherited were huge: a lack of education, especially environmental education among Galapágueños; few models for sustainability within an island culture; widespread corruption; failure to regulate and control the way businesses are built and run; political patronage in hiring; almost no vocational education; the inability to build social capital (there are no credit or community banking systems in the Galápagos); and, finally, no sense of community, hence no identity with place. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1266-68 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 11:12 AM One solution, she says, is teaching Galapagueños why it’s important to protect the sea turtle and its environment. That’s why she works with high school and college students. The next step, she adds, is a series of workshops with fishermen. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1372-77 | Added on Friday, January 02, 1970, 11:15 AM “You can’t drink water out of the tap [here]. You don’t have medical service. If you are really sick, you need to go to the mainland. You cannot get hurt there. You cannot have an accident.” Then, back in town, all the traffic, the noise, the constant influx of tourists is almost too much to bear. But her biggest lament is the lack of education in Puerto Ayora, especially a university where she can expand her knowledge. Even the high school, she says, is completely inadequate. “That’s why my brother left [and returned to Chile]. He wasn’t happy with the educational system here; he wanted more options.” So does Mariantú. “I have aspirations,” she declares. “I want more opportunities. I want to meet people with more experience.” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1390-93 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 12:55 PM Jack Nelson is something of a legend in Puerto Ayora, a brilliant thinker, a dreamer, and an expatriate who moved here from his childhood home in California to escape the Vietnam War when his draft number came up 1A. Today he’s the U.S. Guayaquil consular agent for the Galápagos, a diplomatic role that requires intervention when Americans get into trouble or when their tour ships sink—and they do. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1411-15 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 12:57 PM For most journalists, the main questions are about the survival of the Galápagos. For one thing, the Galápagos have no indigenous roots; most colonists are newcomers with little sense of identity, as Cruz pointed out at the Charles Darwin Foundation They’ve lived here only a few years. The question then naturally arises: What does it truly mean to be Galapagueño—to connect with the land, the wildlife, and the ocean—to love the very resources that sustain you instead of destroying them to get rich quick? Herein lies the Galápagos koan—the question with no rational answer. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1468-73 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 01:01 PM Jack Nelson kept trying to leave the Galápagos. He lived for awhile in Hawaii, where he learned the art of scrimshaw, and then Alaska, where he tried to make a living fishing. Ultimately he moved back to California. “One of the lessons I’ve learned is that after you’ve lived in the Galápagos for too long, you’re not competent for anything else. You build a set of habits and skills and knowledge that are applicable here, and it’s such a unique place that if you try and take those skills somewhere else, you may or may not make it.” His life reminds me of the final lyrics from the Eagles song “Hotel California”: “You can check out anytime you like, But you can never leave!” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1744-46 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 01:40 PM Idrovo agrees with everyone I’ve spoken with that lack of education is destroying the islands. “I think the only people who can save the Galápagos are the children, because the adults’ objectives are already embedded. If you train children they ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1751-52 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 11:44 PM “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” —John Muir ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1755-56 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 11:45 PM The tour company I’ve chosen is Ecoventura, which is said to be one of the greener tour operators in the archipelago. It’s the beginning of the dry season, ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1863-65 | Added on Sunday, January 04, 1970, 11:54 PM on, and pigs dig up the nests to eat the eggs. On Baltra Island, where the United States built an air base during World War II and whose main airport is today located, the iguanas became extinct by 1954. The CDF continues a captive-breeding ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 1998-2002 | Added on Monday, January 05, 1970, 12:43 PM In the final stage of the assault, the men released about 700 sterilized “Judas” goats from New Zealand on strategic parts of the island. The Judas goat’s moniker comes from its ability to betray its own species. Each goat was fitted with a radio telemetry collar attuned to special equipment in base camps and in the air. Goats are social animals that seek each other out. When a Judas goat joins a herd, its collar triggers a signal to the hunters that exposes the exact location. I can only imagine what happens next. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 2003-9 | Added on Monday, January 05, 1970, 12:43 PM proven among biblical scholars that Judas Iscariot was not what he seemed. He was in fact a Gnostic, like Jesus, part of a mystical religion that predated Christianity. Judas, the gospel states, was Jesus’ closest spiritual ally—an entity capable of releasing him from the prison of human form by exposing him to authorities. Carrión responds: “We have already changed the word. We now call them chivos delatores.” “What does delator mean?” I ask, unfamiliar with the term. “The same. A delator is one who reveals a secret, like an informer. But it’s been very difficult to get that name to stick.” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 2025-27 | Added on Monday, January 05, 1970, 12:45 PM handling, and medical emergencies. The best shooter was a young man named Wilson Cabrera from Santa Cruz Island, who had learned to hunt with his father when he was eight years old. Cabrera scored a record of 1.8 bullets per eradicated goat. He later said that Project Isabela had taught him a wise lesson about invasive species: that humans must adapt to the Galápagos and not the other way around. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 2046-49 | Added on Monday, January 05, 1970, 12:46 PM Cruz later wrote that in conservation biology there’s less talk now about saving a species from extinction. “Now it is a discussion as to which species can be saved. We are rather like a collective Noah, deciding with a biblical coldness which life-forms will be able to accompany us on our new journey in the ark.” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 2357-62 | Added on Friday, January 09, 1970, 07:47 AM mobiles of the islands’ wildlife, all of them made by her students. “The vision,” she says, “is to educate people about biological diversity [in conjunction] with social and educational activities, and to simplify the science in a language that people can comprehend.” Children learn in three stages: The youngest, known as las iguanitas (little iguanas), learn the basics, like how the islands were formed and how species first arrived here. The middle-school children, los piqueritos (little boobies), learn more about science and natural history. The older students, las tortugas (tortoises or turtles), go into the field every week to study sea turtles or giant land tortoises or the biology of marine iguanas or the ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 3115-19 | Added on Friday, January 09, 1970, 11:54 AM where, if the water’s clear enough, you can snorkel with sea turtles. Diego Quiroga, co-director of GAIAS, and his wife, Tania, are with us. As a cultural anthropologist Quiroga is drawn to this shift in identity among local fishermen. He and his colleagues have been working with Ricaurte to help him focus his objectives. Quiroga also set up our fishing excursion the day before. As we enter the fisherman’s house the aroma of sizzling tuna fills the air. Wilma, one of Ricaurte’s daughters, stands before a propane stove tending several pots. It’s a small kitchen that opens to a living area with a tiled floor. The stucco walls are ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 3302-9 | Added on Sunday, January 11, 1970, 08:02 AM hatches about a day after the first. When the younger sibling breaks through the egg, the elder chick nudges it out of the nest to die of dehydration in the sun, or be eaten alive by hungry mockingbirds. The firstborn may kill its sibling outright. So why lay two eggs? “Insurance,” says Anderson. If the first egg does not hatch, the second provides fall back. The effort needed to raise two chicks in this harsh environment is just too great. A second chick is a liability. Anderson and his students have found out why. “Parents in this species have crappy hatching success,” he tells me. “Why? We don’t know. To assure that even a single chick survives, they have two as backup. This gets them to 85 percent probability that at least one will hatch. Sometimes two hatch, but if they try to raise two, moms have elevated mortality and the chicks are scrawny, performing poorly as adults. So, hatching two chicks constitutes a mistake. Siblicide ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 3411-12 | Added on Sunday, January 11, 1970, 10:45 AM when she wrote that creationists believe “God placed humans here as is—in toto—and that goes for Dorothy and her little dog, too.” ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 3417-18 | Added on Sunday, January 11, 1970, 10:46 AM cover-up for fundamentalist creationism.) Only 10 percent believe in “naturalist evolution,” the scientific view that humans evolved over millions of years from single-cell organisms, and that God had no hand in it whatsoever. ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 3594-3602 | Added on Sunday, January 11, 1970, 10:53 AM protest. “The central element of business in Galápagos is having a permit to run a boat. That’s the gold mountain called a patente (patent), or a cupo (quota), a space.” Those were selling for $30,000 to $50,000 a pop in the ministry in Quito back in the late 1970s to early 1980s, and very few people in the Galápagos could get one. “They didn’t have the capital to go bribe for one or the right connections through the park to get one. Even though we started tourism here and ran a boat of our own, I went to the park with all of the documents to solicit a boat permit because they were handing them out at that time. The park intendente just laughed in my face and said, ‘That was closed yesterday.’ At that time I think 14 or 17 permits had been handed out. That got us organized; about 20 of us met for hours almost every night for two years.” Finally in 1995, Nelson’s bay tour and scuba diving group got congressional approval, but the regulations kept changing, and Scuba Iguana was forced to renew its permit on a regular basis. Under the current ========== Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin's Cradle of Evolution (Carol Ann Bassett) - Highlight Loc. 3974-77 | Added on Sunday, January 11, 1970, 11:06 AM 40-year-old man to start snorkeling. But maybe if you start teaching kids when they’re small they’ll enjoy the ocean and feel safe in it. We should teach people to have fun in nature. But I don’t think that’s here yet in this culture.” Lately, Quiroga has seen a positive change among youth on the islands: Surfing. “More young kids are learning how to surf and are feeling more comfortable with the ocean, but it’s a slow process.” ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 109-17 | Added on Wednesday, August 11, 2010, 01:00 PM The question mark—“?”—in our title is the key to this book, and it will be doing double-duty. As we consider our country’s colleges and universities, two questions will recur on every page. The first is how much of what the schools are offering can reasonably be called education? For example, we will show that over half of all undergraduates now enroll in vocational training programs, which range from standbys like nursing and engineering to new arrivals like resort management and fashion merchandising. While we’re sure something is imparted in these classes, we’re not comfortable calling it education. For us, that designation has to mean more than any instruction coming after the twelfth grade. So enter our second question: even if not vocational, how far can what is being taught and learned reasonably be called higher? In our view, college should be a cultural journey, an intellectual expedition, a voyage confronting new ideas and information, together expanding and deepening our understanding of ourselves and the world. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 141-55 | Added on Wednesday, August 11, 2010, 01:02 PM •  As we’ve noted, we want to distinguish education from training. Today’s young people are likely to live to be ninety. So there is no need for them to start preparing themselves for careers while they are in their teens. We join Diane Ravitch, who laments that “American higher education has remade itself into a vast job-training program.” Indeed, since the mid-1960s, English majors have dropped 51 percent in relation to all degrees, history has experienced a 55 percent decline, and students opting for mathematics are down a whopping 74 percent, despite a putative demand for high-tech experts. •  Nor do we feel undergraduate years should be an apprenticeship for a PhD, let alone a first step toward an academic career. We feel obliged to say this because too many college courses center on topics of interest only to professors. But professors don’t have a monopoly on erudition. We believe that the arts and sciences, properly understood, must have a broader and deeper base. •  Perhaps the best way to get support for higher education, or so it is thought, is to warn that the United States is falling behind other nations in skills needed in a competitive world. But the alarms so resoundingly sounded don’t decry that we are lagging in philosophy or the humanities. Rather, it’s that in countries like China, India, and Korea more students are specializing in the sciences and engineering. The worry is that our workforce—including college graduates—isn’t ready for a high-tech age. At this point, we’d only ask, if our economy needs more scientists and engineers, why students aren’t enrolling? ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 281-85 | Added on Friday, August 13, 2010, 12:41 PM Under the venerable headings we see in college catalogs: physics, history, mathematics, drama, sociology, literature. The rigidity of these disciplines atomizes campuses, transforming departments into fiefdoms and actually hindering the transmission of knowledge. PhD programs, where fledgling professors are trained, are much like seminaries: elders impart the lore and litany of a liturgy. Were anything like this to occur at the Boeing company, few Dreamliners would ever get aloft. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 759-63 | Added on Saturday, August 21, 2010, 05:13 PM to be led. Every current and former college president we’ve met has related how every proposal he or she made was greeted by a chorus of no’s or simply stone-faced resistance. Add in faculty, trustees, alumni, legislators, and nowadays students, each with their own demands. Indeed, when presidents call for something new, they usually find they have no allies. So it’s not surprising that many of them settle for being custodians, along with honing a reputation for diplomacy and fund-raising that will propel them to a higher-ranked campus. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 922-25 | Added on Saturday, August 21, 2010, 05:22 PM Akron, performed. Out of curiosity, he surveyed sixty heads of departments at a sample of midwestern colleges. Only three told him they’d even consider hiring a contingent for a full-time post. Monaco created quite a stir at the 2008 meeting of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources when he declared: “We’ve helped create a highly educated part of the working poor.” ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 1355-59 | Added on Saturday, August 21, 2010, 05:40 PM Princeton has been rejecting over half—about 60 percent—of its legacy applicants, not so much from a desire to limit alumni children, but because their records don’t measure up. A list we obtained showed that only 120 members of the class had children who had also gone there. If something like a 60 percent rate holds for the Class of 1973, it could mean that another 180 had children who applied and were turned down. (No one confessed this in the reunion letters.) The reunion reports mentioned only three as accepted by other Golden Dozen schools, two by Harvard and one by Cornell. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 1834-40 | Added on Sunday, August 22, 2010, 02:47 PM Our argument for ending vocational training has several strands. To start, we deem it a huge mistake to squander years that could and should be devoted to enriching young minds. This is what the best colleges now endeavor to do. (But not always: the ten universities in our Golden Dozen all offer engineering degrees.) To devote that irreplaceable period in one’s life to ornamental horticulture or pastry arts subverts a sensible purview of higher education. But we also have practical objections. One is that vocational programs are chosen while students are applying from high school. While most seventeen-year-olds are natively bright and able to learn, there’s one thing they don’t know, and there is no way they can at their age. It is what the world of adult careers is actually like. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 2273-76 | Added on Sunday, August 22, 2010, 03:09 PM In some parts of Africa, when youngsters are about to come of age, they are taken to “adolescent huts,” outside their villages, where they hear stories, sing songs, take part in rituals, and eventually emerge as full-fledged members of their tribe. In many ways, our sleepaway colleges serve a similar function, as they provide a place for young people to wean themselves from their parents and begin shaping their adult identities. Still, we often wonder if this high-priced interlude is worth the cost. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 2694-98 | Added on Sunday, August 22, 2010, 03:33 PM The University of Texas is a major athletic power. In 2008, it reported spending $100,982,596 on its sixteen varsity teams. Revenue from football recoups most of that outlay, since it sells 98,046 tickets at a typical home game, including to undergraduates who pay through a compulsory athletics fee. In all, 525 students play on Texas teams, with 143 signed up for football or basketball, almost all of them especially recruited. But since there are 36,835 undergraduates, it means that only 1.4 percent of them participate in varsity programs. Nor has Texas shown interest in raising that ratio. Its aim is top rankings for its two high-profile sports. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 2736-40 | Added on Sunday, August 22, 2010, 03:35 PM •  College sports are akin to an arms race: once started, they create their own momentum. Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst, once suggested to some of his fellow liberal arts college presidents that they borrow a practice from international diplomacy, an athletics equivalent of mutual arms reduction. He’d downsize Amherst’s money-eating football program if others followed suit. It was as if Marx, a political scientist, had asked North Korea to dismantle their SCUD missiles. He had no takers. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 3129-34 | Added on Sunday, August 22, 2010, 04:30 PM “Life isn’t fair,” John F. Kennedy once said. Indeed, he knew this to be so, since he began life with a host of advantages. So we will simply add that higher education isn’t fair, either. At this point, two-thirds of young Americans will not be attending college or will drop out if they do. We may like to style ourselves as a middle-class nation, but most young people don’t have the kind of parental backstop that can help to make four full years of college possible. Our opinion on this matter is straightforward. Just as in an earlier century we decided that every American should finish high school, we should now make completing college this century’s goal. ========== Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It (Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) - Highlight Loc. 3729-33 | Added on Sunday, August 22, 2010, 05:05 PM More controversy yet was heard in June 2009, when the university invited the president of the United States to give the commencement speech. Because Barack Obama had been elected on a pro-choice platform, this irked some anti-abortion conservatives. For weeks, Reverend Jenkins was denounced and pressured to rescind the invite. His answer to the angry voices: “You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade, and if you cannot persuade them, show respect for them and listen to them.” That steadfastness makes John Jenkins worth every penny of the $475,000 he earns each year, which, interestingly, he donates completely back to the university. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 516-19 | Added on Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 12:24 AM Zawinski: Well, I think you want to arrange for there to be no more than three or four people working really closely together on a day-to-day basis. Then that can scale up a lot. Say you've got a project where you can divide it up into twenty-five really distinct modules. Well, you can have twenty-five tiny teams-maybe that's a little much. Say ten. And as long as they can coordinate with each other, I don't think there's a whole lot of limit to how big you can scale that. Eventually it just starts looking like multiple projects instead of like one project. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 609-13 | Added on Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 01:31 AM But I wouldn't go so far as to say you don't need that to be a programmer. There's obviously different kinds of programming. Without people who are not like me none of this would exist. But I've always seen much more in common with writing prose than math. It feels like you're writing a story and you're trying to express a concept to a very dumb person-the computer-who has a limited vocabulary. You've got this concept you want to express and limited tools to express it with. What words do you use and what does your introductory and summary statement look like? That sort of thing. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 1020-22 | Added on Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 09:43 AM Seibel: Do you think that would work for anyone? Instead of teaching kids long division, should we teach them how to program and then say, "OK, now your task is to write a program to do this long-division procedure"? By the time they've actually written that program, they'll understand division. Or does that only work if you have some natural inclination that way? ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 1330-32 | Added on Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 03:12 PM Seibel: So say we're doing a code reading of some of my code. I bring printouts and we put it up on the screen. Then what? Do I literally read it out loud? Crockford: Yeah, go through it line by line, and you'll be doing commentary on it. This is what's supposed to be happening here. If we have time, we'll go line by line. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 1668-69 | Added on Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 10:16 PM Crockford: For the most part, we've done pretty good. I think the world is a better place, although it's not always moving forward. Looking at, say, international politics over the last ten years, the consolidation of big media and the corrupting effects of that have not been compensated for by the open network. That's a big disappointment. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 1675-79 | Added on Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 10:16 PM Crockford: It may be that new social systems have to evolve on top of this new network infrastructure and it's just immature at this point and that's why it's not working. Maybe it just solves itself. I'm hoping that's the case. But I think there may be more involved. Right now, the network does an extremely poor job of identity, does an extremely poor job of security, and those are a necessary component, I think, of building robust social systems. So that aspect of the Web is still deficient and maybe that's why it's so noisy still. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 2074-75 | Added on Thursday, August 26, 2010, 01:41 PM The famous School of Athens painting with Aristotle pointing down and Plato pointing up-I'm more on the pointing-down side now. As I get older I get more and more skeptical and more and more interested in what works. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 2340-44 | Added on Friday, August 27, 2010, 02:15 PM Companies establish their DNA very early on. It can make them tremendously successful, but it can also make it hard for them to escape when what served them well in the early days doesn't serve them so well any more. I remember being an intern at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights around 1982, seeing the culture still dominated by batch processing. Even when they were doing timesharing, they talked in terms of virtual card readers and virtual card punches. Everything was still 80-column records. With DEC, it was the timesharing mentality that they never escaped. And I suppose with Microsoft it's an open question whether they'll be able to move beyond the desktop-PC mentality. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 2572-79 | Added on Friday, August 27, 2010, 03:54 PM There's this problem, which is, programming is so much of an intellectual meritocracy and often these people are the smartest people in the organization; therefore they figure they should be allowed to make all the decisions. But merely the fact that they're the smartest people in the organization doesn't mean they should be making all the decisions, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity; it's a vector quantity. And if you lack empathy or emotional intelligence, then you shouldn't be designing APIs or GUIs or languages. What we're doing is an aesthetic pursuit. It involves craftsmanship as well as mathematics and it involves people skills and prose skills-all of these things that we don't necessarily think of as engineering but without which I don't think you'll ever be a really good engineer. So I think it's just something that we have to remind ourselves of. But I think it's one of the most fun jobs on the planet. I think we're really lucky to have grown up at the time that we did when these skills led to these jobs. I don't know what we would have been doing a few generations back. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 2723-25 | Added on Friday, August 27, 2010, 04:28 PM younger, I would do the all-night hacks, programming to four in the morning and you get really tired and it's macho programming-you hack the code in hour after hour. And it's not going well and you persevere and you get it working. And I would program when the intuition wasn't there. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 3975-79 | Added on Saturday, August 28, 2010, 10:12 PM Norvig: Yeah, I think that's pretty interesting and I wish I could do more with that. I'm actually in a discussion now to see if I can do an experiment, company-wide and then maybe for the world at large, to understand more some of these issues. How do you classify bugs, but also what are some factors in terms of productivity? How do you know? Is there a certain type of person? What are the factors of that person that makes them more productive? And I think it's more interesting what the controllable factors are that make somebody do better. If giving them a bigger monitor increases productivity by such and such a percent, then you should probably do it. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 4055-59 | Added on Saturday, August 28, 2010, 10:17 PM Seibel: Do the people who are doing the interviews have those numbers beforehand? Norvig: No, we only see that when they're in the hiring committee, once we've gathered all the feedback. One of the interesting things we found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 4690-93 | Added on Saturday, August 28, 2010, 11:06 PM Steele: Yeah. And not knowing the future. If I could change one thing-this is going to sound stupid-but if I could go back in time and change one thing, I might try to interest some early preliterate people in not using their thumbs when they count. It could have been the standard, and it would have made a whole lot of things easier in the modern era. On the other hand, we have learned a lot from the struggle with the incompatibility of base-ten with powers of two. ========== The Teeth Of The Tiger (Tom Clancy) - Highlight Loc. 160-64 | Added on Saturday, August 28, 2010, 11:33 PM Absolved of the need to worry about heavy logistics, or even medical personnel—they had the squids to handle that for them—every Marine was a rifleman, and a forbidding, sobering sight to anyone who did not have a warm spot in his heart for the United States of America. For this reason, the Marines are respected, but not always beloved, among their colleagues in America’s service. Too much show, too much swagger, and too highly developed a sense of public relations for the more staid services. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 5474-75 | Added on Sunday, August 29, 2010, 12:32 PM Deutsch: Well, part of the reason that I don't call myself a computer scientist any more is that I've seen software practice over a period of just about 50 years and it basically hasn't improved tremendously in about the last 30 years. ========== Coders at Work (Peter Seibel) - Highlight Loc. 5808-10 | Added on Sunday, August 29, 2010, 12:49 PM Seibel: He contrasted what he called the MIT style, where correctness trumps everything else, and the New Jersey (i.e. Bell Labs) style, where simplicity of implementation is highly valued. His theory was that the New Jersey style, which he also called "Worse Is Better" made it possible to get stuff out and running and from there it will get improved. ========== The Teeth Of The Tiger (Tom Clancy) - Highlight Loc. 632-34 | Added on Sunday, August 29, 2010, 01:06 PM OPR was the FBI’s own “Internal Affairs” office, and while respected by rank-and-file FBI agents, was not beloved of them. There was a saying, “If he tortures small animals and wets his bed, he’s either a serial killer or he works for the Office of Professional Responsibility.” ========== The Teeth Of The Tiger (Tom Clancy) - Highlight Loc. 3257-63 | Added on Thursday, September 02, 2010, 01:26 PM comfortable distance. To the two Caruso boys, it was a humorous look at what they’d themselves been only a few short years ago, before harsh training and experience in the real world had turned them into something else. Exactly what, they were not yet sure. What had seemed so simple in school had become infinitely complex after leaving the academic womb. The world was not digital, after all—it was an analog reality, always untidy, always with loose ends that could never be tied up neatly like shoelaces, and so it was possible to trip and fall with every incautious step. And caution only came with experience—with a few trip-and-falls that brought pain, only the worst of which taught remembered lessons. Those lessons had come early to the brothers. Not as early as they’d come to other generations, but still soon enough for them to realize the consequences of errors in a world that had never learned to forgive. ========== The Teeth Of The Tiger (Tom Clancy) - Highlight Loc. 5143 | Added on Saturday, September 04, 2010, 10:47 PM floor—where the boss always was—was pretty vanilla, though it was Breyers vanilla instead of the Safeway house brand. ========== The Teeth Of The Tiger (Tom Clancy) - Note Loc. 5143 | Added on Saturday, September 04, 2010, 10:47 PM oh no you di'int ========== The Teeth Of The Tiger (Tom Clancy) - Highlight Loc. 6438-42 | Added on Sunday, September 05, 2010, 12:59 PM “Yeah, well, maybe that’s because international bankers don’t really recognize the concept of having a country to be loyal to,” Granger responded, sticking the needle in slightly. “Lenin once said the only country a capitalist knows is the ground he stands on when he makes a deal. There are some like that,” Hendley allowed. “Oh, did you see this?” He handed over the request from downstairs to root around for somebody called “the Emir.” ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 1226-33 | Added on Sunday, September 05, 2010, 04:46 PM In its determination to destroy the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration heedlessly embarked upon what was, in effect, a program of state-sponsored terrorism. In substance if not in scope, the actions of the United States toward Cuba during the early 1960s bear comparison with Iranian and Syrian support for proxies engaging in terrorist activities against Israel since the 1980s. The principal difference is that, whereas Hamas and Hezbollah have achieved considerable success, at least in enhancing their political standing, the U.S. attempt to unseat Castro achieved none whatsoever. Apart from expending the lives of several dozen guileless exiles who, at the CIA’s behest, attempted to infiltrate their home island, those efforts were stillborn. From a moral and legal point of view, Operation Mongoose was indefensible. From a practical point of view, it turned out to be arguably even more stupid than Operation Zapata. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 1665-70 | Added on Monday, September 06, 2010, 11:49 AM That moment soon passed. Within Washington, doubt briefly flickered, only to be quickly snuffed out. Although the Vietnam War ended in monumental failure, the consensus that had given birth to that failure survived. The Washington rules emerged all but unscathed. Indeed, within a few years of the last American soldier leaving South Vietnam, the national security consensus had been fully restored, once again enjoying all but complete immunity. Explaining this remarkable sequence of events is the story to which we now turn. Although nonconformists always exist, they rarely matter—a dictum that applies to American statecraft no less than to theology or any other pursuit that rests on faith rather than empirical evidence. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 1727-30 | Added on Tuesday, September 07, 2010, 02:30 PM Fulbright compared an ambitious foreign policy supported by a deteriorating domestic base to “the light cast by an extinct star,” destined to fade and fail. He judged it “unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or ideal while neglecting the needs of its own people.” In the long run, “an effective policy abroad depends upon a healthy society at home.”6 ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 1765-69 | Added on Tuesday, September 07, 2010, 02:32 PM As commandant, Shoup had reacted warily to the Kennedy administration’s quest for innovative ways to employ force. His own instincts were to avoid war except when the issue really mattered: For Shoup, the survival of South Vietnam didn’t qualify. When it was necessary to fight, Shoup favored going in big: The romance of counterinsurgency and nation building eluded him. A closeted dove, Shoup failed while a serving officer and member of the JCS to resist the drift toward direct intervention in Vietnam. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 1915-17 | Added on Wednesday, September 08, 2010, 03:09 PM demonstrate greater self-restraint. That the transformation of a people’s army into a professional force had the potential to produce just the opposite effect—decision makers gaining a free hand to use a military over which the American people had forfeited any ownership—was a prospect few anticipated. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 1918-23 | Added on Wednesday, September 08, 2010, 03:09 PM Vietnam adversely affected the remaining two elements of the national security triad as well. The humiliating withdrawal from Southeast Asia made the need for a continuing U.S. troop presence elsewhere the subject of debate. Senator Mansfield, for example, questioned the need to garrison U.S. troops in Europe. “I believe it is time,” he argued, “for us to insist that the European nations themselves take on the primary military and financial responsibilities for their defense.”19 For years thereafter Mansfield persisted in this effort, which struck at the very heart of the proposition that defending the United States against the communist threat required the quasi-permanent forward positioning of U.S. forces around the globe.20 ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 2154-59 | Added on Thursday, September 09, 2010, 04:18 PM That American leadership is indispensable, that Americans possess a unique grasp of history’s purpose, that these factors should empower the United States to act: As far as Washington is concerned, these remain unimpeachable truths. Conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, the editors of the right-leaning National Review and those of the left-leaning New Republic, not to mention the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the titans of Wall Street, all fervently subscribed to Albright’s belief that the United States is unique, irreplaceable, and able to see things that other more ordinary (or evil) nations are unable to discern. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 2271-75 | Added on Thursday, September 09, 2010, 04:24 PM Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, an influential military thinker, described these facilities as “nodes or hubs in a worldwide system of moving U.S. military forces anywhere we need them to go.” The “main purpose” of that system, explained one analyst, was “to facilitate the rapid deployment of U.S. forces throughout the world.” Rather than “deterring undesired operations by another nation’s traditional military forces,” global presence provided “a means to move preemptively against non-national groups for whom traditional deterrence has little meaning.”3 ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 2790-93 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 09:51 AM Finally, helped in part by the illusions propagated by counterinsurgency advocates, the Washington rules survived. Notwithstanding the aimlessness of the Long War, their proponents, both in and out of government and in and out of uniform, were able to quash rising popular doubts about the credo and the trinity. In this regard, as the Age of Bush gave way to the Era of Obama, little of substance changed. That was the greatest irony of all. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 3190-3202 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 10:16 AM Across the Greater Middle East hundreds of millions of people were in dire need of “economic development, good governance, and the provision of essential services.” GCOIN offered the way to meet those needs and thereby nip terrorism in the bud. Yet any GCOIN campaign worthy of the name would necessarily require the pacification of Afghanistan (population 28.4 million, in an area approximately the size of Texas) and of Pakistan (176.2 million, roughly twice the size of California), both facing imminent insurgent threats. Then there was Somalia (9.8 million, slightly smaller than Texas) and Yemen (23.8 million, more than twice as large as Wyoming), both known as countries in which the recruitment and training of violent jihadists were commonplace. Lurking in the wings were Iran (66.4 million, slightly smaller than Alaska), widely condemned for underwriting terrorist activity, and perhaps even Egypt (83.1 million, three times larger than New Mexico), a simmering caldron of radical Islamist sentiment.36 Only counterinsurgency on an epic scale could possibly satisfy the needs of all these people. The road ahead promised to be long and arduous. Yet for American soldiers, relieved to put Iraq in their rearview mirror, the immediate requirement was not to move ahead but to reverse course. Making a sharp about-face, they headed back to Afghanistan. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 3325-28 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 10:22 AM The Washington rules provide a sterling example of this tendency to disregard what actually works and stubbornly cling instead to familiar practices that manifestly fail to deliver what they promise: in this case, ensuring the safety and well-being of the United States at a reasonable cost while keeping faith with professed American values. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 3328-32 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 10:23 AM The world—we are incessantly told—is becoming ever smaller, more complex, and more dangerous. Therefore, it becomes necessary for the nation to intensify the efforts undertaken to “keep America safe,” while also, of course, advancing the cause of world peace. Achieving these aims—it is said—requires the United States to funnel ever greater sums of money to the Pentagon to develop new means of projecting power, and to hold itself in readiness for new expeditions deemed essential to pacify (or liberate) some dark and troubled quarter of the globe. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 3520-23 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 10:35 AM Lasch, who spent decades ruthlessly dissecting American culture, concurred. “The real promise of American life,” he insisted, was to be found in “the hope that a self-governing republic can serve as a source of moral and political inspiration to the rest of the world, not as the center of a new world empire.”10 ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 3531-38 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 10:36 AM The essential credo to which each of these figures subscribed, a variant of the convictions first articulated by the Founders, deserves renewed consideration today. Its essence is simply this: America’s purpose is to be America, striving to fulfill the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as reinterpreted with the passage of time and in light of hard-earned experience. The proper aim of American statecraft, therefore, is not to redeem humankind or to prescribe some specific world order, nor to police the planet by force of arms. Its purpose is to permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a “more perfect union.” Any policy impeding that enterprise—as open-ended war surely does—is misguided and pernicious. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 3638-42 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 10:39 AM Continental Army not least among them, disparaged standing armies as inconsistent with republican virtue while posing a potential threat to republican institutions. Today, Americans evince little interest in cultivating virtue, preferring instead the frantic pursuit of happiness, defined more often than not in terms of wealth, celebrity, and personal license. Washington meanwhile concerns itself less with the well-being of republican institutions than with feathering its own nest, relying on adventurism abroad to divert attention from chronic dysfunction at home. ========== Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Andrew Bacevich) - Highlight Loc. 3731-34 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 10:43 AM Americans today must reckon with a contradiction of gaping proportions. Promising prosperity and peace, the Washington rules are propelling the United States toward insolvency and perpetual war. Over the horizon a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits. To acknowledge the danger we face is to make learning—and perhaps even a course change—possible. To willfully ignore the danger is to become complicit in the destruction of what most Americans profess to hold dear. We, too, must choose. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 66-70 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 05:01 PM In everyware, the garment, the room and the street become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily life—things as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceries—are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves, the state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given moment. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 88-92 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 05:03 PM What we can already see is this: everyware will surface and make explicit facts about our world that perhaps we would be happier ignoring. In countless ways, it will disturb unwritten agreements about workspace and homespace, the presentation of self and the right to privacy. It contains an inherent, unsettling potential for panoptical surveillance, regulation, and "rationalization." Its presence in our lives will transfigure our notions of space and time, self and other, citizen and society in ways that we haven't ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 94-96 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 05:03 PM As a culture, we have so far been unable to craft high-technological artifacts that embody an understanding of the subtlety and richness of everyday life. And yet in everyware we're proposing to remake the very relations that define our lives, remodeling them on a technical paradigm nobody seems particularly satisfied with. A close reading of the existing literature on ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 106-8 | Added on Sunday, September 12, 2010, 05:04 PM This is not due to any inherent obscurity or lack of interest in the field; to date, there have been some seven annual Ubicomp conferences, three Pervasives, and a wide scatter of smaller but otherwise similar colloquia. These are established ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 140-43 | Added on Monday, September 13, 2010, 12:09 PM The stakes, this time, are unusually high. A mobile phone is something that can be switched off or left at home. A computer is something that can be shut down, unplugged, walked away from. But the technology we're discussing here—ambient, ubiquitous, capable of insinuating itself into all the apertures everyday life affords it—will form our environment in a way neither of those technologies can. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 228-32 | Added on Monday, September 13, 2010, 12:14 PM Historically, there have been some exceptions to the general narrowness of vision in the field. Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab saw their work as cleaving into three broad categories: "interactive surfaces," in which desks, walls, doors, and even ceilings were reimagined as input/output devices; "ambients," which used phenomena such as sound, light, and air currents as peripheral channels to the user; and "tangibles," which leveraged the "graspable and manipulable" qualities of physical objects as provisions of the human interface. ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 126-31 | Added on Monday, September 13, 2010, 12:16 PM You didn’t send us a résumé? Of course you didn’t—that’s our job! We know all about you, Nigel. You are an underpaid 29-year-old Maths and CS graduate from Edinburgh University. You’ve been employed by SprocketSource for one year and four months, and you’re three months overdue for a pay review. Your programming skills in Zone/Python 3000 and your expertise in distributed combat systems have generated an impressively high domain-specific reputation on WorldDEV Forums and HackSlashBurn, but does your line manager care? No. Bill does not care. He does not adequately appreciate you. And there’s a reason for this. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 261-68 | Added on Monday, September 13, 2010, 06:51 PM By contrast, what we're contemplating here is the extension of information-sensing, -processing, and -networking capabilities to entire classes of things we've never before thought of as "technology." At least, we haven't thought of them that way in a long, long time: I'm talking about artifacts such as clothing, furniture, walls and doorways. Their transparency is precisely why this class of objects is so appealing to engineers and designers as platforms for computation. These things are already everywhere, hiding in plain sight; nobody bats an eyelash at them. If nothing else, they offer a convenient place to stash the componentry of a computing power that might otherwise read as oppressive. More ambitiously, as we'll see, some designers are exploring how the possibilities inherent in an everyday object can be thoroughly transformed by the application of information ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 349-53 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 02:40 PM And it's this expansion in the available modes of output that is likely to exert a much stronger shaping influence on our lives. When so many more kinds of information can be expressed just about anywhere, the practical effect will be to bring about a relationship with that information that I think of as ambient informatics. Ambient informatics is a state in which information is freely available at the point in space and time someone requires it, generally to support a specific decision. Maybe it's easiest simply to ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 371-74 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 02:41 PM much of its power from its attention to the subtle, humble, profoundly comfortable ways in which people use the world—the unconsciousness with which people hang umbrellas from a lunch counter by their handles, use notepads as impromptu drink coasters, or gaze at their reflections in a mug of coffee. There's a lot in common here with Mark Weiser's dictum that "the most profound technologies are those that disappear." ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 387-91 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 02:42 PM One, relatively crude and timid, expression might propose that, instead of the inert slips of paper we now proffer, we hand out RFID-equipped "smart" cards encoding our contact information and preferences. (Maybe you'd tap such a card against a reader to place a call, without having to be bothered with the details of remembering a number, or even a full name; fans of Aliens may recall that Lt. Ripley availed herself of just such an interface, in her wee-hours call to corporate weasel Burke.) ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 533-39 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:20 PM Even the ways that you address such a system, or are kept apprised of its continuing operation, are different than the ones we're used to. As PARC's victoria Bellotti and her co-authors pointed out, in a 2002 paper, designers of user experiences for standard systems "rarely have to worry about questions of the following sort:   When I address a system, how does it know I am addressing it? When I ask a system to do something how do I know it is attending? When I issue a command (such as save, execute or delete), how does the system know what it relates to? How do I know the system understands my command and is correctly executing my intended action? How do I recover from mistakes?"   ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 613-17 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:26 PM only gesture were this simple! The association that Applied Minds suggests between a gesture of spreading one's hands and zooming in to a map surface is culturally specific, as arbitrary as any other. Why should spreading not zoom out instead? It's just as defensibly natural, just as "intuitive" a signifier of moving outward as inward. For that matter, many a joke has turned on the fact that certain everyday gestures, utterly unremarkable in one culture—the thumbs-up, the peace sign, the "OK" sign—are vile obscenities in another. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 856-59 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:36 PM * What gets lost, though, in all of this—as with so many digitally "rationalized" processes—is the opportunity for serendipitous interaction that happens when people from different floors share this particular forty-five-second interval of the day. Isn't the whole cherished trope of the "elevator pitch" based around the scenario of a kid from the mailroom finding him-or herself willy-nilly sharing a cab with the CXO types headed for the executive floors? ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 903-6 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:38 PM But what if the city itself could help you find your way? In 1971, in a landmark study entitled The Image Of The City, MIT professor and urbanist Kevin Lynch explored a quality of the city he called "legibility." How do people read a city, in other words? What sorts of features support their attempts to figure out where they are, which paths connect them to a given destination, and how best to actually go about getting there? ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 913-14 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:38 PM Tokyo's Shinjuku ward is currently tagging some 10,000 lamp posts with RFID panels that give visitors information on nearby public toilets, subway entrances, and other accommodations. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 925-31 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:39 PM clothing. Taken together, they would render the urban domain legible in a way Kevin Lynch could not have imagined in 1970. In such a place, locations self-identify, notices of congestion immediately generate alternative paths to the destination, and services announce themselves. (Anyone who's ever spent the day on foot in one of Earth's great cities will appreciate the prospect of knowing where the nearest public restroom is, even at what time it was last cleaned.) Information architect Peter Morville calls such interventions in the city "wayfinding 2.0"—an aspect of the emerging informational milieu he thinks of as "ambient findability," in which a combination of pervasive devices, the social application of semantic metadata, and self-identifying objects renders the built environment (and many other things besides) effectively transparent to inquiry. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 985-89 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:47 PM by everyware. How could it be otherwise? Any technology that has been so extensively insinuated into everyday life, at so many scales, in space both public and private, cannot help but implicate the greatest possible number and demographic diversity of users. Only a small minority of them will have any significant degree of competence with information technology (although it's also true that tropes from the technological realm are increasingly finding their way into mass culture). Still more so than the designers of personal computers, smartphones, or PDAs, those devising ubiquitous systems will have to accommodate the relative technical non-sophistication of their enormous user base. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1029-34 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:48 PM In turning on your machine, you enter the nonspace of its interface—and that nonspace is identical whether your laptop is sitting primly atop your desk at work or teetering atop your knees on the library steps. Accessing the Web through such interfaces only means that the rabbit hole goes deeper; as William Gibson foresaw in the first few pages of Neuromancer, it really is as if each of our boxes is a portal onto a "consensual hallucination" that's always there waiting for us. No wonder technophiles of the early 1990s were so enthusiastic about virtual reality: it seemed like the next logical step in immersion. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1079-81 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:51 PM Kindberg and Fox offer designers a guideline they call the volatility Principle: "you should design ubicomp systems on the assumption that the set of participating users, hardware and software is highly dynamic and unpredictable. Clear invariants that govern the entire system's execution should exist." ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1086-89 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:51 PM heap model proposes that coordination between heterogeneous computational processes be handled by a shared abstraction called a "tuple space." An event might be a notification of a change in state, like a wireless tablet coming into the system's range, or a command to perform some operation; any participating device can write an event to the tuple space, read one out, or copy one from it so that the event in question remains available to other processes. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1125-27 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:53 PM One of the more significant effects we should prepare for is how fiercely relational our lives will become. In a world saturated with everyware, responses to the actions we take here and now will depend not only on our own past actions, but also on an arbitrarily large number of other inputs gathered from far afield. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1180-88 | Added on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:58 PM Take JAPELAS, a recent Tokushima University project that aims to establish the utility of ubiquitous technology in the classroom—in this case, a Japanese-language classroom. One of the complications of learning to speak Japanese involves knowing which of the many levels of politeness is appropriate in a given context, and this is just what JAPELAS sets out to teach. The system determines the "appropriate" expression by trying to assess the social distance between interlocutors, their relative status, and the overall context of their interaction; it then supplies the student with the chosen expression, in real time. Context is handled straightforwardly: Is the setting a bar after class, a job interview, or a graduation ceremony? Social distance is also relatively simple to determine—are these students in my class, in another class at the same school, or do they attend a different school altogether? But to gauge social status, JAPELAS assigns a rank to every person in the room, and this ordering is a function of a student's age, position, and affiliations. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1195-99 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 12:00 AM Admittedly, JAPELAS is "just" a teaching tool, and a prototype at that, so maybe it can be forgiven a certain lack of nuance; you'd be drilled with the same rules by just about any human teacher, after all. (I sure was.) It is nevertheless disconcerting to think how easily such discriminations can be hard-coded into something seemingly neutral and unimpeachable and to consider the force they have when uttered by such a source. And where PC-based learning systems also observe such distinctions, they generally do so in their own bounded non-space, not out here in the world. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1199-1201 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 12:00 AM As someone nurtured on notions of egalitarianism, however hazy, the idea that affiliations have rank especially raises my hackles. I don't like the idea that the city I was born in, the school I went to, or the military unit I belonged to peg me as belonging higher (or lower) on the totem pole than anyone else. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1220-24 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 12:01 AM What we're headed for, I'm afraid, is a milieu in which sustaining different masks for all the different roles in our lives will prove to be untenable, if simply because too much information about our previous decisions will follow us around. And while certain futurists have been warning us about this for years, for the most part even they hadn't counted on the emergence of a technology capable of closing the loop between the existence of such information and its actionability in everyday life. For better or worse, everyware is that technology. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1629-42 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 11:03 AM In a sense this is only a return to a much older tradition. For most of our sojourn on this planet, human beings have understood the physical world as a place intensely invested with consciousness and agency; the idea that the world is alive, that the objects therein are sentient and can be transacted with, is old and deep and so common to all the cultures of humanity that it may as well be called universal. As Freud described it, "the world was full of spirits...and all the objects in the external world were their dwelling-place, or perhaps identical with them." It is only comparatively recently that most people have believed otherwise—indeed, most of the humans who ever walked the planet would have found it utter folly to conceive of the natural world as mainstream Western culture did until very recently: a passive, inert, purely material stage, on which the only meaningful actors are human ones. If we have always acted as though the things around us are alive, then the will to make it so in fact (or at least make it seem so) at the moment the technical wherewithal became available is understandable. That things like gestural and voice-recognition interfaces are so fervently pursued despite the many difficulties involved in perfecting them might tell us something about the deep roots of their appeal, if we're willing to listen. Their long pedigree in science fiction merely extends the earlier tradition; folklore is replete with caves that open at a spoken command, swords that can be claimed only by a single individual, mirrors that answer with killing honesty when asked to name the fairest maiden in the land, and so on. Why, then, should anyone be ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1695-96 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 11:05 AM Everyware surfaces and makes explicit information that has always been latent in our lives, and this will frequently be incommensurate with social or psychological comfort. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1731-34 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 01:42 PM But this is all a foretaste of what we can see coming. Where everyware is concerned, we can no longer expect anything to exist in isolation from anything else. It comprises a "global mnemotechnical system," in the words of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler—a mesh of computational awareness, operating in a great many places and on a great many channels, fused ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 1739-43 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 01:43 PM One trouble with this is that we've historically built our notions of reputation such that they rely on exformation—on certain kinds of information leaving the world, disappearing from accessibility. But with such mnemo-technical systems in place, information never does leave the world. It just keeps accumulating, simultaneously more explicit, more available, and more persistent than anything we or our societies have yet reckoned with. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 2067-73 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 07:22 PM Children who grow up using everyware, told always where they are and how to get where they are going, may never acquire the same fluency. Able to rely on paraphernalia like personal location icons, route designators, and turn indicators, whether they will ever learn the rudiments of navigation—either by algorithm or by landmark or by dead reckoning—is open to question. Even memorizing street names might prove to be an amusingly antiquated demonstration of pointless skill, like knowing the number of pecks in a bushel. If a reliance on ubiquitous systems robs us of some of our faculties, it may also cause us to lose faith in the ones that remain. We will find that everyware is subtly normative, even prescriptive—and, again, this will be something ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 2317-22 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 07:44 PM Rather than casting this as an example of how Japanese phone culture is "more advanced" than North America's, or, conversely, evidence that Japan "doesn't get the Web" (the latter a position I myself have been guilty of taking in the past), it is simply the case that different pressures are operating in these two advanced technological cultures—different tariffs on voice as opposed to data traffic, different loci of control over pricing structures, different physical circumstances resulting in different kinds of legacy networks, different notions about monopoly and price-fixing—and they've predictably produced characteristically different effects. This will be true of every local context in which ideas about ubiquitous computing appear. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 2619-23 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 08:23 PM When there are that many spare processing cycles available, some kind of market mechanism might evolve to allocate them: an invisible agora going on behind the walls, trading in numeric operations. But we can leave such speculations for other times. For the moment, let's simply note that—even should Moore's Law begin to crumble and benchmark speeds stagnate rather than continuing their steep upward climb—processing capacity presents no obstacle to the emergence of full-fledged ubiquitous services. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 2893-95 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 08:32 PM enough to live there, you know exactly what this would look like: Octopus. Octopus is a contactless, stored-value "smartcard" used for electronic payment throughout Hong Kong, in heavy and increasing daily use since 1997, and it gives us a pretty good idea of what everyware looks like when it's done right. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 2967-70 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 08:34 PM general-interest media—Mark Weiser had given some thought to this. In a 1995 article called "The Technologist's Responsibilities and Social Change," he enumerated two principles for inventors of "socially dangerous technology": 1. Build it as safe as you can, and build into it all the safeguards to personal values that you can imagine. 2. Tell the world at large that you are doing something dangerous. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 3150-57 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 08:38 PM Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, and capabilities. Everyware must, in other words, be self-disclosing. Such disclosures ensure that you are empowered to make informed decisions as to the level of exposure you wish to entertain. So, for example, if the flooring in eldercare housing is designed to register impacts, it should say so, as well as specifying the threshold of force necessary to trigger an alert. If the flooring does register a fall, what is supposed to happen? If the flooring is connected in some way to a local hospital or ambulance dispatcher, which hospital is it? Even in such an apparently benign implementation of everyware—and maybe even especially in such cases—the choices made by designers should always be available for inspection, if not modification. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 3256-60 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 08:40 PM Accordingly, we should assert as a principle the idea that ubiquitous systems must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations. You should be able to open a window, place a book upon a shelf, or boil a kettle of water without being asked if you "really" want to do so, or having fine-grained control of the situation wrested away from you. you should not have to configure, manage, or monitor the behavior of a ubiquitous system intervening in these or similar situations—not, at least, after the first time you use it or bring it into some new context. ========== Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Mobipocket (Adam Greenfield) - Highlight Loc. 3278-85 | Added on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 08:41 PM get into your house, and not have to have an RFID tag subcutaneously implanted in the fleshy part of your hand, well, you should be able to do that. If you want to pay cash for your purchases rather than tapping and going, you should be able to do that too. And if you want to stop your networked bathtub or running shoe or car in the middle of executing some sequence, so that you can take over control, there should be nothing to stand in your way. In fact—and here is the deepest of all of the challenges these principles impose on developers and on societies—where the private sphere is concerned, you should be able to go about all the business of an adult life without ever once being compelled to engage the tendrils of some ubiquitous informatic system. In public, where matters are obviously more complicated, you must at least be afforded the opportunity to avoid such tendrils. The mode of ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 885-88 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2010, 12:53 PM “We’re Hayek Associates. We were founded three…no, four years ago. Just over four years ago. We’re a diversified economics consultancy and market-maker. We run virtual central banks for ORGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games]. We stabilize the economies of seventeen imaginary realms with a combined VM2—that’s, uh, a measure of the total virtual money supply—about the same size as Japan’s. We’re ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 933-36 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2010, 12:55 PM customers. So, you’ve got out-of-band merchant sites like IGE and eBay’s Gameboard, and a whole bunch of coyotes who make their living by providing tools to migrate avatars from one environment to another, using the exit game assets as arbitrage against a position in the entry game. Which in turn means there are exchange rates between games—and not just game-to-game, I’m talking game-to-euro rates, game-to-yuan, game-to-rupee. All the strong ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 1903-5 | Added on Monday, September 27, 2010, 08:57 AM “I’ve asked London to try to get someone to talk to the police.” He drives a piece of bruschetta around his plate in pursuit of a puddle of olive oil. “Hopefully, tomorrow morning if we can just get through to this Inspector Kavanaugh’s boss.” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 3366-71 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2010, 04:31 PM “It’s in the end-user license agreement to SPOOKS. The usual, we let them do background checks to determine credit worthiness and ‘eligibility to participate,’ it says. The anti-nutcase clause. And we signed to let them vary the T’s and C’s.” “So?” “The anti-nutcase clause is effectively a privacy waiver for positive vetting. And the T’s and C’s—” “Official Secrets Act, as a click-through?” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 3685-87 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2010, 09:30 AM continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache—a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 3688-97 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2010, 09:31 AM “‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in—call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. America isn’t in play—they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It’s exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure—Europe’s—is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out, and you live in one of those powers, in case you hadn’t noticed.” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 3720-24 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2010, 09:32 AM 1940. About the only consolation is that the opposition is also wide-open, right now, and that’s why we’re going through the biggest renaissance in HUMINT—HUMan INTelligence—since the Cold War. It’s all mediated through artificial reality and live-action role-playing games like SPOOKS, in case you hadn’t guessed: adding the power of electronic information gathering to human espionage. Would you believe it used to cost us ten thousand euros a day to put a full surveillance team on a suspect? Now we’ve got volunteers who’ll pay us to let them do our leg work!” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 3738-43 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2010, 09:34 AM “As far as we can tell, it’s capture the flag—the first team to take control of the backbone routers of a medium-sized EU member state wins. And guess what? They were all set to succeed, because some bastard—no, I have no idea who it is—leaked them a copy of the backbone authentication pad. They’ve still got it, and they’re running all over our telecoms infrastructure in hobnailed boots, because we don’t dare shut down and reboot everything until we know where they got the keys. And you know what? We wouldn’t have had any idea at all, if one of their low-level grunts hadn’t hatched a plan to make some money on the side. Which is where you come in…” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 3867-72 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2010, 06:08 PM “Bugger.” You take an experimental sip of coffee. “Okay. So SPOOKS is basically a tool that permits an electronic intelligence agency to run a metric shitload of unwitting human intelligence agents, weekend spies. They trained us, and now we’ve been activated to deal with a threat. The alleged threat, the one they say they want us to look at, is a different kind of gaming gambit: a botnet attack on a small European state, where the zombies are obedient human gamers who think they’re just having fun and the director is a procedural content generator—” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 3991-92 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2010, 06:42 PM ah over, and made small-talk about gigs she’d been to (with a friend, you inferred, conveniently airbrushed out of the frame), ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 4164-69 | Added on Friday, October 01, 2010, 09:01 AM “Very…especially the worst case. Imagine you can’t get any money out of a cashpoint, even though there’s money in your bank account. That’s annoying, right? Now imagine the entire APACS network goes down. And, oh, the contents of your bank account are randomized, along with everyone else’s. And all the supermarket stock-control databases go down, so they don’t know what’s moving and what’s on the shelves. And all their suppliers’ networks go down, so nobody knows what stock they’ve got, and where it is. And finally, all the Internet service providers and telcos and cellcos go down hard, and stay down—” ========== Halting State (Charles Stross) - Highlight Loc. 4982-89 | Added on Saturday, October 02, 2010, 11:04 AM “They’ve set up a botnet, and now they’re controlling it through Zonespace. Zonespace runs distributed across most mobile phones—just about any multi-user game you play relies on one or another version of Zone/DB to handle transactions. They’re sending control packets disguised as flocks of birds or patterns of trees in the forests, or something, you know? Updating the database, and relying on the zombies in the botnet to pick up the changes. It’s their backdoor into the public network, by the way—they feed instructions to the zombies, and the zombies with the stolen authentication pad update the routing tables. The traffic looks like game-play to GCHQ or CESG or NSA or whoever’s sniffing packets; looking in-game for characters run by Abdullah and Salim holding private chat about blowing up the White House garden gnomes won’t get you a handle on what’s going on because they’re not using the game as a ludic universe to chat in, they’re using it as a transport layer! They’re tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D!” ========== Zeitoun (Dave Eggers) - Highlight Loc. 793-98 | Added on Sunday, October 03, 2010, 02:10 PM Growing up in Syria he had often heard the expression “If your hand doesn’t work for it, your heart doesn’t feel sorry for it.” But in the U.S., it wasn’t just the prosperity—because New Orleans was not uniformly prosperous, to be sure—there was a sense that everything could be replaced, and on a whim. In his children he was trying to instill a sense of the value of work, the value of whatever came into their house, but he knew that much would be lost in the context, the waste and excess of the culture at large. He had been brought up to know that what God hates as much as anything is waste. It was, he had been told, one of the three things God most hated: murder, divorce, and waste. It destroyed a society. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 581-89 | Added on Sunday, October 03, 2010, 04:01 PM Or, less formally, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I dub this: “Linus's Law”. My original formulation was that every problem “will be transparent to somebody”. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. “Somebody finds the problem,” he says, “and somebody else understands it. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.” That correction is important; we'll see how in the next section, when we examine the practice of debugging in more detail. But the key point is that both parts of the process (finding and fixing) tend to happen rapidly. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 808-9 | Added on Sunday, October 03, 2010, 04:06 PM I decided to add the multidrop support partly because some users were clamoring for it, but mostly because I thought it would shake bugs out of the single-drop code by forcing me to deal with addressing in full generality. And so it proved. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 812-17 | Added on Sunday, October 03, 2010, 04:07 PM But multidrop addressing turned out to be an excellent design decision as well. Here's how I knew: Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected. The unexpected use for multidrop fetchmail is to run mailing lists with the list kept, and alias expansion done, on the client side of the Internet connection. This means someone running a personal machine through an ISP account can manage a mailing list without continuing access to the ISP's alias files. ========== Zeitoun (Dave Eggers) - Highlight Loc. 4447-50 | Added on Friday, October 08, 2010, 01:11 PM Lima quit the NOPD in November 2005, and moved with his wife and daughter to Shreveport. He was a police officer in Shreveport for a time, but was treated, he said, “like a second-class citizen.” The officers there assume that all cops from New Orleans are corrupt, he said. So he quit, and now he’s looking for a new career. Before joining the force, he was a stockbroker, and he was considering going back to that. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 952-58 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 09:37 AM consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills. The “severe effort of many converging wills” is precisely what a project like Linux requires—and the “principle of command” is effectively impossible to apply among volunteers in the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet. To operate and compete effectively, hackers who want to lead collaborative projects have to learn how to recruit and energize effective communities ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1055-59 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 09:42 AM My friend, familiar with both the open-source world and large closed projects, believes that open source has been successful partly because its culture only accepts the most talented 5% or so of the programming population. She spends most of her time organizing the deployment of the other 95%, and has thus observed first-hand the well-known variance of a factor of one hundred in productivity between the most able programmers and the merely competent. The size of that variance has always raised an awkward question: would individual projects, and the field as a whole, be better off without more than 50% of the least able in it? Thoughtful ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1111-12 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 09:45 AM It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1111-12 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 09:46 AM It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Note Loc. 1112 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 09:46 AM Testing Kindle tweet sharing. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1263-65 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 09:55 AM Actually, in the case of the open-source culture this is an easy question to answer. The owner of a software project is the person who has the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to distribute modified versions. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1356-61 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 10:01 AM There is one way that open-source activity can help people become wealthier, however—a way that provides a valuable clue to what actually motivates it. Occasionally, the reputation one gains in the hacker culture can spill over into the real world in economically significant ways. It can get you a better job offer, or a consulting contract, or a book deal. This kind of side effect, however, is at best rare and marginal for most hackers; far too much so to make it convincing as a sole explanation, even if we ignore the repeated protestations by hackers that they're doing what they do not for money but out of idealism or love. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1382-85 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 10:02 AM Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1426-37 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2010, 10:07 AM The Many Faces of Reputation There are reasons general to every gift culture why peer repute (prestige) is worth playing for: First and most obviously, good reputation among one's peers is a primary reward. We're wired to experience it that way for evolutionary reasons touched on earlier. (Many people learn to redirect their drive for prestige into various sublimations that have no obvious connection to a visible peer group, such as “honor”, “ethical integrity”, “piety” etc.; this does not change the underlying mechanism.) Secondly, prestige is a good way (and in a pure gift economy, the only way) to attract attention and cooperation from others. If one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, or other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you. Thirdly, if your gift economy is in contact with or intertwined with an exchange economy or a command hierarchy, your reputation may spill over and earn you higher status there. Beyond these general reasons, the peculiar conditions of the hacker culture make prestige even more valuable than it would be in a “real world” gift culture. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1587-89 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2010, 06:01 PM hackers to homestead and cultivate.Note 22 No wonder hackers often refer to Microsoft's strategy as “protocol pollution”; they are reacting exactly like farmers watching someone poison the river they water their crops with! ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1622-25 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2010, 06:03 PM To have done work so good that nobody cares to use the alternatives any more is therefore to have earned huge prestige. The most possible peer esteem comes from having done widely popular, category-killing original work that is carried by all major distributions. People who have pulled this off more than once are half-seriously referred to as “demigods”. ========== The Cathedral & the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1959-60 | Added on Friday, October 15, 2010, 12:07 PM In other words, software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 134-40 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2010, 04:31 PM Economic systems do not exist in the abstract; they are embedded within the geographic fabric of the society—the way land is used, the locations of homes and businesses, the infrastructure that ties people, places, and commerce together. These factors combine to shape production, consumption, and innovation, and as they change, so do the basic engines of the economy. A reconfiguration of this economic landscape is the real distinguishing characteristic of a Great Reset. After the Great Depression, suburbs expanded, creating new demand for automobiles, appliances, televisions, and other goods, allowing the golden age of mass production to come into full flower. The resolution to the economic crisis of the late nineteenth century involved the rise not only of new industries and technologies but of massive industrial cities. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 159-63 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 11:05 AM We’ve reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the “ownership society.” Owning your own home made sense when people could hope to hold a job for most or all of their lives. But in an economy that revolves around mobility and flexibility, a house that can’t be sold becomes an economic trap, preventing people from moving freely to economic opportunity. Not only has that piece of the American Dream grown dark, but it’s also clear that financial excess in the housing sector was one of the central causes of the economic crisis. Housing sucked up far too much ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 222-26 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 11:08 AM These innovations, and many others that were developed during the First Reset, actually helped shape Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction. Innovation does not slow down during crises, but because the economy is depressed, they tend to accumulate and bunch up. They then come bursting forward as the economy recovers.6 “Well, one reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot,” explains the Nobel Prize–winning economist Edmund Phelps regarding the way that crises spur invention and lead to the formation of new businesses. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 259-64 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 11:30 AM The application of science and invention to industry was a massive spur to productivity. “The first industrial revolution—and most technological developments preceding it—had little or no scientific base,” writes Mokyr. “It created a chemical industry with no chemistry, an iron industry without metallurgy, power machinery without thermodynamics.”11 By applying science to invention directly and systematically to industry, inventions were generated that vastly increased productivity and brought all this technological innovation into the daily lives of the middle class and the working class. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 350-52 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 11:36 AM leading regions grow and evolve, some eventually fall victim to what the late economist Mancur Olson called “institutional sclerosis.”5 Committed to old behaviors and social systems, old technologies, and, even more important, outmoded and hard-to-change institutions, organizations, and business practices, they are either too slow or literally unable to change. This is what stymied ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 512-18 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 11:50 AM The 1920s are often referred to as the Jazz Age, when people rushed to embrace anything and everything that smacked of modernism, from telephones and airplanes to wailing trumpets and pounding drums, relaxed sexual mores, and even radical politics. The onset of the Great Depression brought with it a retrenchment, not just economically but in terms of social behavior and cultural development. With no cash in their pockets and grim prospects for the future, young people saw little chance to marry, establish a home, or start a family. Marriage and childbirth rates declined significantly in the 1930s. Even casual dating seemed problematic. Marriage might have been out of the question, but young men and women will do what they have always done, and at the height of the Depression, there could have been no more disastrous news than an unexpected pregnancy. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 632-34 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 05:29 PM The spatial fix effects a way out of crisis by creating a physical framework for development and further geographic expansion.1 It thus “provides a way to productively soak up capital by transforming the geography of capitalism,” adds the economic geographer Erica Schoenberger. The ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 659-66 | Added on Monday, October 18, 2010, 05:31 PM In each and every case, we find that spatial fixes are key to Great Resets. It’s a cycle that unveils itself in five distinct phases. In the first stage, as crisis sets in, old institutions break down and business and consumers cut back their spending. But eventually, in the second stage, new innovations emerge and begin to be introduced into the market. Third, those new technologies are forged together by entrepreneurs into bigger and better technological systems. As we get to the fourth stage, new public and private investments in energy, transportation, and communication infrastructure provide the broad skeleton of a new economic landscape and increase the speed and velocity of urban life. Ultimately, in the fifth stage, a new spatial fix emerges, creating a new economic landscape that is more closely in sync with the improved productive capacities of the underlying economy. This provides nothing less than the physical representation of a new way of life, unleashing powerful new kinds of consumption that can power economic growth. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 834-40 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 01:03 PM Still, the financial industry generates an enormous amount of the wealth that circulates around New York, and that has helped to support the city’s vibrant culture for a long time. But New York has always been much more than a financial center. Elizabeth Currid’s book The Warhol Economy provides detailed evidence of New York’s diversity.11 In her research, Currid found that finance accounts for only nine of the top fifty of New York’s leading professional and creative occupations and only one of the top ten. By this measure, New York is more of a mecca for fashion designers, musicians, film directors, artists, and, yes, psychiatrists than it is for financial professionals. New York’s continued success—its ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 957-60 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 01:26 PM somewhat ironic that in this era of supposedly frictionless communication and highly mobile talent, the local cultural and social life still determines who gets the talent. Even though talent is mobile and can flow freely, the issue remains: where does it want to go? That’s why I’m betting that New York and London will remain the key global financial centers for the foreseeable future. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1062-64 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 01:31 PM among large metro areas.3 Even longtime residents of the Washington, D.C., region are surprised to learn that government is not the biggest sector of the local economy—technology is. The region is second only to San Jose in high-tech electronics industries and ranks third nationally in total software employment. Greater D.C. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1271-81 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 01:48 PM Detroit has a substantial creative spark. The city that gave us Motown, Mitch Ryder, Iggy Pop, Bob Seger, and the White Stripes remains home to one of today’s most propulsive music scenes, spanning rock, electronic music, and hip-hop. While some of Detroit’s musical greats have migrated away from the region, many, such as Kid Rock and Eminem, remain and the city stays at the cutting edge and incubator of emerging musical trends. It has greater diversity and, in my estimation, a higher “coolness factor” than many other places. And Detroit’s downtown core is revitalizing, albeit slowly. Beyond the new stadiums and casinos a more organic grassroots kind of redevelopment is taking place. A designated “creative corridor” around Wayne State University and the city’s cultural institutions is springing back with coffee shops, art galleries, new restaurants, even a bed-and-breakfast. Young tech firms and design and architectural companies are converting old factories and warehouses into office space. New generations of young professionals and even some young families are moving back downtown into revitalized districts such as the city’s fabled Lafayette Park, a seventy-eight-acre development with an amazing mix of verdant open space and modern high-rises and town houses designed by one of the original “star-chitects,” Mies van der Rohe. Across the city, acre upon acre of ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1341-47 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 02:01 PM manufacturing.”23 My own view is that in most cases it makes sense to put people first. At the end of the day, people—not industries or even places—should be our biggest concern. As Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, aptly put it, “The plight of these people is also in a way our plight.”24 We can best help those who are hardest hit by the crisis by providing a generous social safety net, investing in their education and skills, and encouraging them, when necessary, to move from declining places to ones that offer better opportunity. Especially in tough economic times, we’re all better served by helping people. People need education and skills to shift from old industries to new jobs. And since these jobs are often in different places, they have to be able to move where the jobs are. This imperative ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1364-67 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 02:02 PM advocated as plain old good urbanism. And as chapter 21 will show, one of the most effective things the federal government can do to help revitalize older Rust Belt cities and regions is to invest in a high-speed rail network that would better connect them to one another and to other, more thriving economic hubs, shrinking the distance between them and building economic size and scale required to compete more effectively. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1383-87 | Added on Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 02:03 PM Gallup Organization. There are three key attributes that make people happy in their communities and cause them to develop a solid emotional attachment to the place they live in. The first is the physical beauty and the level of maintenance of the place itself—great open spaces and parks, historic buildings, and an attention to community aesthetics. The second is the ease with which people can meet others, make friends, and plug into social networks. The third piece of the happiness puzzle is the level of diversity, open-mindedness, and acceptance: Is there some equality of opportunity for all? Can ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1616-18 | Added on Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 11:39 AM something important. Not only has Las Vegas emerged as a center for business interaction, it’s also home to a cluster of firms specializing in gaming technology and entertainment staging, both of which have sizable export markets. The proximity of Vegas to the gargantuan southern California megaregion is another advantage as it ties the city to a broader population center and a ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1757-63 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 12:31 PM The role of finance changed from being, in the words of William Black, a “servant” of the economy to a “predator.”13 It has grown too large. “The finance sector is an intermediary—essentially a ‘middleman,’” he writes. “Like all middlemen, it should be as small as possible, while still being capable of accomplishing its mission.” Instead of supporting the real wealth producing parts of the economy, it has become a parasite on them. Rather than putting capital together with enterprise, as a middleman should do, finance itself became the target enterprise, its only product being more capital. “In addition to siphoning off capital for its own benefit, the finance sector misallocates the remaining capital in ways that harm the real economy,” he adds. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1772-75 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 12:31 PM It’s time we stop confusing the practice of moving money around with generating real wealth. If we want to prosper again, we’ll need to move the economy away from finance capitalism and back toward the aptly dubbed real economy—investing once again in technology and human capital along with the new infrastructure that can make long-term economic growth possible. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1862-66 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 12:35 PM The old manufacturing economy honed physical skills such as lifting and manual dexterity. But two sets of skills matter more now: analytical skills, such as pattern recognition and problem solving, and social intelligence skills, such as the situational sensitivity and persuasiveness required for team building and mobilization. Jobs that demand high analytical skills, such as medicine and bioengineering, and social intelligence skills, such as psychiatry and management, are not only increasing in numbers faster than other jobs but also pay much more. Moving from a job in the ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 1967-73 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 01:46 PM Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail argues that broader changes in the economy—the rise of knowledge and service work and the decline of manufacturing work—favor women over men. “The new economy (over the long term) is creating tons of service jobs in retail, customer support, and personal care,” she writes. “But no matter how much education and retraining we offer, we are not going to transform factory workers and high-school dropouts into customer-care representatives or nurses’ aides any time soon. It’s their wives and daughters who will get those jobs.” She concludes that “In the new world of work, the old values of working-class men are an anachronism. And what we are really asking of them is not to retrain or upgrade. We are asking them to abandon their very idea of masculinity itself.”12 ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2019-22 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 01:49 PM Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2104-7 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 03:23 PM housing prices fall. Still, with the basics sucking up so much of the family budget, the amount of money Americans spend on electronics, a reasonable proxy for high technology, increased from 1 percent in 1959 to just 1.6 percent by 2000, while the amount they spend on entertainment, a proxy for experiences, actually declined from 5.8 percent in 1950 to 3.9 percent in the year 2000.6   ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2264-75 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 03:38 PM Canada. The second biggest, which Gottman dubbed “Chi-Pitts,” covers more than 100,000 square miles and is home to 46 million people, producing $1.6 trillion in economic output. Other megaregions in North America include: Char-lanta: Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham, 22 million people So-Cal: Around Los Angeles, 21 million people Tor-Mon-tawa: Toronto, Montreal, and Ottowa, 22 million people Nor-Cal: Around San Francisco, 12.8 million people So-Flo: Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, 15 million people Dal-Austin: Dallas and Austin, 10 million people Hou-Orleans: Houston and New Orleans, 9.7 million people Cascadia: Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, 9 million people Pho-Tus: Phoenix and Tucson, 4.7 million people Den-Bo: Denver and Boulder, 3.7 million people ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2366-74 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 03:45 PM But remember that jobs were not the highest-ranked factor. Across the board, the survey respondents said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance. These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness. They not only desire a thick labor market but also seek what I have come to call a thick mating market, where they can meet new people, go out on dates, and eventually find a life partner. They recognize what psychologists of happiness have shown: it’s not money per se that makes you happy but rather doing exciting work and having fulfilling personal relationships. What do you think is more important to happiness—finding a great job or finding the right life partner? And whereas older Americans see high-quality schools and safe streets for their children as key, Gen Y understandably ranks the availability of outstanding colleges and universities higher. Many are likely to go back to graduate school and want to have good programs nearby. For all these reasons, big cities at the heart of megaregions top the list of their choices. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2411-17 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 03:48 PM These colossal cities benefit from high rates of innovation and a faster rate of “urban metabolism.” That’s according to a pioneering theory of the role of cities in economic growth developed by a team of mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and social scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.2 As you may be aware, the rate at which living things convert food into energy—their metabolic rate—tends to slow as they increase in size. Elephants digest their food and move at a slower rate, per pound, than ants or butterflies. But when the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they were in for a surprise: they found that the “metabolisms” of successful cities, unlike those of biological organisms, actually get faster as the cities grow. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2426-29 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 03:49 PM Talented people who live and interact in dense ecosystems generate ideas and products faster than they can in other places. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation (by widening the consumer market), the pull of innovative places, which are already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate. To realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2489-90 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 03:53 PM the way we live. The looming challenge is to speed the physical movement of goods, services, and people—the tangible bits of the real world—so that they are more in line with the lightning-fast flow of electronic information in the virtual world. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2721-24 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 04:09 PM In 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, the historian James Truslow Adams introduced the expression “the American Dream,” defining it as the “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”1 For the past half century, ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2816-19 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 04:13 PM The kind of future I’m imagining is one where you sign up with a large-scale provider of rental housing. You select the place you like and specify the paint colors and fixtures you like. If you get a new job or simply want to move, no problem: you send in your notice and go through the list of properties in the new city. It’s plug-and-play housing, if you will, that will facilitate the flexibility and mobility today’s economy needs. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2892-93 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 05:10 PM period I call the First Reset. Now as then, we are in the midst of a tectonic shift to a fundamentally new economic order: the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy then, the shift from an industrial to an idea-driven creative economy now. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2901-6 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 05:11 PM A simple, undeniable first principle is that every single human being is creative. Each and every effort and policy initiative we undertake can be measured by this simple yardstick: how do they increase the ability of people, organizations, places, and companies to mobilize human creative capabilities? No, not all of us can paint, write novels, make movies, compose symphonies, develop new software, build new energy-efficient systems, or invent new biotechnologies. But we all have something we’re good at, our own creative spark, and there’s little in life more satisfying and rewarding than the chance to exercise that talent. The real key to economic growth lies in harnessing the full creative talents of every one of us. ========== The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (Richard Florida) - Highlight Loc. 2968-71 | Added on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 05:14 PM The promise of the current Reset is the opportunity for a life made better not by ownership of real estate, appliances, cars, and all manner of material goods, but by greater flexibility and lower levels of debt, more time with family and friends, greater promise of personal development, and access to more and better experiences. All organisms and all systems ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 172-74 | Added on Friday, October 22, 2010, 12:49 PM Today, despite the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and two thirds of all petroleum supplies travel by sea. Globalization relies ultimately on shipping containers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for one half of all the world’s container traffic. Moreover, the Indian ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 197-99 | Added on Friday, October 22, 2010, 12:51 PM The Indian Ocean is where the rivalry between the United States and China in the Pacific interlocks with the regional rivalry between China and India, and also with America’s fight against Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, which includes America’s attempt to contain Iran. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 220-22 | Added on Friday, October 22, 2010, 05:23 PM Chinese president Hu Jintao, according to one report, has bemoaned China’s sea-lane vulnerability, referring to it as his country’s “Malacca dilemma,” a dependence on the narrow and vulnerable Strait of Malacca for oil imports from which China must somehow escape.15 It is ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 227-29 | Added on Friday, October 22, 2010, 05:24 PM The Chinese military’s so-called string-of-pearls strategy for the Indian Ocean features the construction of a large port and listening post at the Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, where the Chinese could monitor ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. There could be ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 254-60 | Added on Friday, October 22, 2010, 05:27 PM China’s long-term quest for a presence in the Indian Ocean in order to project power and protect its merchant and energy fleets is evinced by its well-heeled, very public commemoration of the historical figure of Zheng He, the fifteenth-century Ming dynasty explorer and admiral who plied the seas between China and the East Indies, Ceylon, the Persian Gulf, and the Horn of Africa. A Muslim eunuch of Mongolian origin who was captured and castrated as a little boy for service in the Forbidden City and rose up through the ranks, Zheng He took his treasure fleet of hundreds of ships with as many as thirty thousand men—including doctors, interpreters, and astrologers—to Middle Eastern shores to trade, exact tribute, and show the flag.19 China’s much renewed emphasis on this Indian Ocean explorer and his life story says, in effect, that these seas have always been part of its zone of influence. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 338-41 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 07:25 AM No one nation dominates, even as the U.S. Navy is still quietly the reigning hegemon of the seas. As one Australian commodore told me: imagine a world of decentralized, network-centric sea basing, supplied by the United States, with different alliances for different scenarios; whereby frigates and destroyers of various nations can “plug and play” into these sea bases that often resemble oil rigs, spread out from the Horn of Africa to the Indonesian archipelago. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 918-21 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 05:41 PM The Indian scholar and statesman K. M. Panikkar describes Portuguese maritime expansion in the Persian Gulf and South Asia as an attempt to “get around the overwhelming land power of Islam in the Middle East,” and thus to break out of the “ ‘prison of the Mediterranean.’ ”10 Along with this dry strategic logic came a hot-blooded Catholic religious fervor. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 989-96 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2010, 11:59 PM D’Albuquerque had made the voyage around Africa to India shortly after da Gama, where he made the strategic decision to prop up friendly rulers on the Malabar coast. He saw immediately that an area as vast as the Indian Ocean could not be controlled permanently by a small and distant country like Portugal, unless Portugal established not only bases but also an overseas civilization there. It was not enough for Portugal to control the principal egress points: the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, Hormuz, and Malacca. It needed a capital city of its own in India, which D’Albuquerque established at Goa, south of present-day Mumbai (formerly Bombay) on India’s western Konkan coast, which would grow into a great outpost of cathedrals and fortresses. In order to hold and develop Goa, cemented by his implacable hatred of the Muslims, he formed a strategic alliance with the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar. D’Albuquerque put every Moor in Goa to the sword; though he was a man of great accomplishments, he should not be romanticized. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1011-16 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2010, 12:01 AM As the first of the modern empires, Portugal’s was not only the weakest, but also the most medieval. Its navigators pried open the doors to the wider world, but at a savage cost. The Portuguese did not so much discover the East as launch a “piratical onslaught” upon it, breaking up, however slowly, the web of mutually profitable and peaceful maritime commerce that for centuries had bound the Arab and Persian worlds with the distant Orient. Indeed, the process that led China and Japan into hostile isolation was born of their bitter experience with the Portuguese. Yet, it wasn’t really the modern West that the peoples of the East came to know through the Portuguese, but Europe of the late Middle Ages. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1455-57 | Added on Friday, October 29, 2010, 12:58 PM Then came this warning: “No matter how hard they try to turn Gwadar into Dubai, it won’t work. There will be resistance. The future pipelines going to China will not be safe. The pipelines will have to cross through Baluch territory, and if our rights are violated, nothing will be secure.” ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1521-25 | Added on Friday, October 29, 2010, 06:45 PM Half of Karachi’s population lived in squatter settlements known as katchiabaadis. Barely 50 percent of the city’s water needs were being met, and there were constant power outages, known locally by the quaint term “load-shedding.”16 And yet Karachi, I thought, might be saved by its very pluralism. It was a port after all, with a vibrant Hindu population and a community of Zoroastrians who exposed their dead to vultures on hills known as “towers of silence.” No one sort of religious ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1614-16 | Added on Friday, October 29, 2010, 06:50 PM “The Indian Subcontinent has produced only one liberal, secular politician, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. [Mohandas] Gandhi was just a British agent from South Africa, a reactionary with a sweet tongue. Ever since Jinnah, though, we’ve been ruled by these gangsters who serve the Punjabis—the stooges of America. You know why the Indus is so ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1796-98 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 02:29 PM “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor,” Gandhi wrote. So “I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint. As the independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil.” ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1886-88 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 02:35 PM Leaders often sum up the geographical, political, and social landscapes out of which they specifically arise, so before I delve further into the character of Narendra Modi and describe my long conversation with him, let me provide a picture of Gujarat, a microcosm in more intense form of twenty-first-century India and the Indian Ocean world itself. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1909-12 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 02:38 PM Later, when the United States beckoned on the horizon and visa restrictions were loosened, Gujaratis flooded to its shores, becoming, among other things, motel proprietors and Silicon Valley software tycoons. It is estimated that 40 percent of the Indian immigrants in New York City are Gujaratis. In particular there are the Patels, village officials who in the nineteenth century amassed property and became landed gentry, and following that traveled to Africa and later the United States in search of commercial opportunities. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 1959-61 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 02:43 PM immigrants in the West, have engaged in a search for roots that they have transferred back to relatives in the homeland. Again, it is the very encounter with the wider world that has caused a certain narrowing of horizons. Out of this crucible Hindutva (Hindu-ness) mightily arose, with Islamic extremism a reaction. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 2075-77 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 02:50 PM personality. Sophia Khan, the human rights worker, put it bluntly: “He’s a fascist man. We Muslims don’t exist for him. Our neighborhoods are called mini-Pakistans, while the Hindus live where the malls and multiplexes are.” ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 2080-83 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 02:50 PM unsatisfactory victory.12 Fascism is an “anti-movement, it defines itself by the things against which it stands,” and in its hatred of the elite and cosmopolitans it is hyper-nationalistic, writes Juan J. Linz, an emeritus professor of political science at Yale. Modi exhibits little hatred ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 2184-88 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 04:36 PM Empires arise and fall. Only their ideas can remain, adapted to the needs of the people they once ruled. The Portuguese brought few ideas save for their Catholic religion, which sank little root among Hindus and Muslims, so these ruins are merely sad, and, after a manner, beautiful. By contrast, the British brought tangible development, ports and railways, that created the basis for a modern state. More importantly, they brought the framework for parliamentary democracy that Indians, who already possessed indigenous traditions of heterodoxy and pluralism, were able to fit successfully to their own needs.17 Indeed, ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 2184-90 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2010, 04:37 PM Empires arise and fall. Only their ideas can remain, adapted to the needs of the people they once ruled. The Portuguese brought few ideas save for their Catholic religion, which sank little root among Hindus and Muslims, so these ruins are merely sad, and, after a manner, beautiful. By contrast, the British brought tangible development, ports and railways, that created the basis for a modern state. More importantly, they brought the framework for parliamentary democracy that Indians, who already possessed indigenous traditions of heterodoxy and pluralism, were able to fit successfully to their own needs.17 Indeed, the very Hindu pantheon, with its many gods rather than one, works toward the realization of competing truths that enable freedom. Thus, the British, their flaws notwithstanding, advanced an ideal of Indian greatness. And that greatness, as enlightened Indians will tell you, is impossible to complete without a moral component. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 2340-47 | Added on Monday, November 01, 2010, 12:56 PM Chinese policy intellectuals are becoming deeply concerned with the emergence of a capable Indian navy.11 One Chinese analyst even worries that the 244 islands that constitute India’s Andaman-Nicobar archipelago can be used as a “metal chain” to lock shut the western entrance of the Strait of Malacca on which China so desperately depends for its oil deliveries. This analyst, Zhang Ming, reasons further that “once India commands the Indian Ocean, it will not be satisfied with its position and will continuously seek to extend its influence, and its eastward strategy will have a particular impact on China.” Ming sums up by saying that “India is perhaps China’s most realistic strategic adversary.”12 Of course, this may bear ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 2490-95 | Added on Monday, November 01, 2010, 01:02 PM Amid the arcaded porticoes and Mughal miniatures of the Foreign Ministry guesthouse, Menon, the foreign secretary, using the phrase of the scholar Sunil Khilnani, called India a “bridging power”—that is, something between America and China, between a global power and a regional power, between hard power and soft power, between the emerging power of its economy and navy and the poverty of many of its people and its weak borders.28 Indian cultural influence has always been more widespread and profound than conventional calculations of power would suggest. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 2946-53 | Added on Monday, November 01, 2010, 01:26 PM through his caste; outside it he is lost, no longer a man but a social outcast, a nonentity,” writes Madeleine Biardeau, a mid-twentieth-century French Indologist. In traditional India, she explains, “man means nothing in himself.” Even among those with large houses, families tend to cluster in the same room, while the others stand empty. “Fear plays a large part in this clinging together … an undefined, nameless fear; the fear, quite simply, of being alone.” Though Biardeau wrote those words almost fifty years ago, she foresaw how, because the caste system is bound up in the village, it ultimately would not survive the migration to urban areas, where, because of lack of living space, the patriarchal family would be “thinned out.”9 As the caste system is diluted, even as the achievement of full-fledged individual identity is not complete, ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 3009-14 | Added on Tuesday, November 02, 2010, 08:49 AM Orissa, and Bangladesh, with no place to live, because on the streets you can earn something, save something, and move on.” Opportunity, as much as poverty, creates slums. Indeed, if there is a trend in Kolkata’s slums, it is the fitful transition—gentrification in its own way—from kutcha (mud) and jhupri (burlap and cardboard) temporary housing to the more permanent pucca (cement and corrugated iron) housing. Whole areas are changing their appearance, as Kolkata begins to look less like some subcontinental Dickensian nightmare and more like just another dynamic city with great disparities of wealth. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 3028-31 | Added on Tuesday, November 02, 2010, 08:50 AM something deeper. Whereas wealth used to be a secret here, the newly rich now want to flaunt it; and that, in turn, creates a security problem where one did not used to exist. Thus, the well-off need to escape into protected neighborhoods where they can exhibit their fortunes. Along with the birth of gated communities has come an explosion in the number of private security guards, who themselves bestow a sign of status for the new rich. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 3628-31 | Added on Tuesday, November 16, 2010, 09:57 AM and rocket-propelled grenades. China’s aid to Sri Lanka jumped from a few million dollars in 2005 to $1 billion in 2008; by comparison, the United States gave only $7.4 million. The U.S. suspended military aid in 2007 over the human rights abuses of the Sinhalese government in its civil war against ethnic Tamils; China, which is also involved in gas exploration here, as well as the building of a coal power plant at a cost of $455 million, has had no such moral qualms.6 ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 3750-55 | Added on Thursday, November 18, 2010, 01:44 PM Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi attempted to play the role of peacemaker, even as the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian security bureaucracy—the spy service known as RAW—established training camps for militant Tamil youths to fight the Sinhalese. In the late 1980s the Indian military was dispatched to Sri Lanka as peacekeepers but ended up fighting the Tamil Tigers, the very group it originally had helped train. The Indians ultimately withdrew from the island in utter failure. In 1991 a female Tiger suicide bomber assassinated Indira Gandhi’s son Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 3930-35 | Added on Thursday, November 18, 2010, 01:51 PM Chinese aid model does have its logic. In his 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies, the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington points out what Thomas Hobbes and Walter Lippmann had observed earlier, that authority, even of a brutal kind, is preferable to none at all. Oh, how we have learned that lesson in Iraq! While we in the West scan the developing world for moral purity, decrying corruption in backward societies, the Chinese are content with stability, no matter how illegitimately conceived. Our foreign aid emphasis is on democracy, human rights, and civil society; theirs is on massive infrastructure projects and authority, civil or not. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 3935-41 | Added on Thursday, November 18, 2010, 01:52 PM We should keep in mind that our goals have been determined by our own unique historical experience, which, as Huntington notes, has been about limiting the power of authority, since our institutional practices were imported easily from seventeenth-century England, whereas much of the rest of the world has had to build a legitimate authority from scratch.19 Thus, America’s historical experience is not always irrelevant to many of the very countries that will be at center stage in the new century. Weak, unresponsive, or nonexistent government institutions define significant swathes of geography, as we are still living, and will be for some more decades, with the aftermath of the dismantlement of European empires that have exposed regimes in Eurasia and Africa to the rigors of modernity. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 4025-31 | Added on Friday, November 26, 2010, 04:25 PM Lately, it has become fashionable to extol the virtues of cultural area expertise given how the lack of it contributed to the mess in Iraq, even as it is forgotten that America’s greatest area experts have been Christian missionaries. American history has seen two strains of missionary-area experts, the old Arab hands and the Asia, or China, hands. The Arab hands were Protestant missionaries who traveled to Lebanon in the early nineteenth century and ended up founding what was to become the American University in Beirut. From their lineage descended the State Department Arabists of the Cold War era. The Asia hands have a similarly distinguished origin, beginning, too, in the nineteenth century and providing the U.S. government with much of its area expertise through the early Cold War, when a number of them were unjustly purged during the McCarthy-era hearings on China. The American ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 4042-45 | Added on Friday, November 26, 2010, 04:26 PM “Chinese intelligence is beginning to operate with the anti-regime Burmese ethnic hill tribes,” he told me. “The Chinese want the dictatorship in Burma to remain, but being pragmatic, they also have alternative plans for the country. The warning that comes from senior Chinese intelligence officers to the Karens, the Shans, and other ethnics is ‘to come to us for help—not the Americans—since we are next door and will never leave the area.’ ” ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 4102-5 | Added on Friday, November 26, 2010, 04:29 PM them. If they don’t run from the government troops, we don’t either. We have a medic, a photographer, and a reporter-intel guy in each team that marks the GPS positions of Burmese government troops, maps the camps and takes pictures with a telephoto lens, all of which we post on our website. We deal with the Pentagon, with human rights groups.… There is a higher moral obligation to intervene on the side of good, since silence is a form of consent. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 4111-18 | Added on Friday, November 26, 2010, 04:30 PM The Father of the White Monkey had taken this hard truth several steps further. Whereas the Thais host Burmese refugee camps on their side of the border and the ethnic insurgents run camps inside Burma for internally displaced people—even while the Karens and other ethnics have mobile clinics in forward positions near Burmese army concentrations—the backpacking Free Burma Rangers actually operated behind enemy lines. The Father of the White Monkey was, like my other acquaintance, a very evolved form of special operator: the kind that the U.S. security bureaucracy can barely accept, for he was taking sides and going native to a degree. Yet these special operators command the level of expertise that the U.S. desperately needs if it is to have influence without being overbearing in remote parts of the globe. Here is the Father of the White Monkey talking about the Wa, to whom he had been exposed relatively little, compared to his years of living in the jungle with the Karen and other tribes: ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 4242-47 | Added on Sunday, November 28, 2010, 01:18 PM But the problem is that while the former Green Berets and other Asia hands I interviewed saw Burma as central to American strategy, the active duty Special Operations community did not, because it has been under orders to be focused on al-Qaeda. And except for the Muslim Rohingyas, whose terrorist potential still remains theoretical, Burma lacks an Islamic terrorist theme. U.S. Special Operations Command was preoccupied mainly with the Arab-Persian western half of the Indian Ocean and much less so with the eastern half. This, my acquaintances said, was an example of how America’s overwhelming obsession with al-Qaeda has warped its larger strategic vision, which should be dominated by the whole Indian Ocean, from Africa to the Pacific. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 5211-15 | Added on Tuesday, November 30, 2010, 12:30 AM But the problem is that Chinese leaders are still many years away from having such a navy. Therefore, at the moment, according to the analyst James Mulvenon, they may be content to “free ride” on the “public good” that the U.S. Navy provides.2 Yet, as the Chinese navy is increasingly able to assume more and more responsibilities, such free ridership will become less necessary and the era of U.S.-China naval competition may begin in earnest, especially if America’s own fleet size goes down, bringing the two navies closer together in terms of capabilities. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 5399-5404 | Added on Tuesday, November 30, 2010, 06:31 PM The United States must eventually see its military not primarily as a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, but as a naval- and air-centric balancer, lurking close by, ready to intervene in tsunami- and Bangladesh-type humanitarian emergencies, and working in concert with both the Chinese and Indian navies as part of a Eurasian maritime system. This will improve America’s image in the former third world. While America must always be ready for war, it must work daily to keep the peace: indispensability, not dominance, should be its goal. Such a strategy will mitigate the possible dangers of China’s rise. Even in elegant decline, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity for Washington, which must be seen in Monsoon Asia as the benevolent outside power. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 5573-78 | Added on Tuesday, November 30, 2010, 10:56 PM fishing boat. The Somali pirate confederations are often broken up into cells of ten men, each cell distributed among three skiffs. The skiffs are old, ratty, roach infested, rarely painted, made of decaying wood or fiberglass, and offer no shade. The pirates navigate by the stars. West is home—Somalia; east is the open ocean. A typical pirate cell goes out into the open ocean for about three weeks at a time. The pirates come equipped with drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, knives, grappling hooks, short ladders, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They also bring along millet, narcotic qat to chew, and lines and nets with which to catch fish, which they eat raw. One captured pirate skiff held a hunk of shark meat with teeth marks all over it. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 5639-45 | Added on Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 06:53 PM clan-based government. After all, Somali piracy cannot be addressed solely as a sea-based issue. And unless the United States is willing to commit significant numbers of troops on the ground to engage in nation building (highly unlikely), it must accept the necessity of working with the government of Puntland to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, regardless of its lack of international legitimacy. Because the government of Puntland has been in conflict with the al-Shabab extremists, bolstering Puntland’s institutional capacity could point a way to not only deter piracy, but also to fight radical Islam in the Horn of Africa. Puntland is important because it shows that so-called anarchy in Somalia and elsewhere is often something else: the slow breakdown of European-drawn states and the restoration of sturdier forms of identity built on clan and tribe and region. ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 5939-43 | Added on Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 06:58 PM The fact that Doha, Qatar’s capital, is not the headquarters of a great power—even as it is geographically in the center of the Indian Ocean world—liberates Al Jazeera to focus equally on the four corners of the Earth rather than on just the flash points of any imperial or post-imperial interest. Some in the United States see Al Jazeera as biased, but that only reflects their own biases. Al Jazeera’s reporters cry out for justice, even as they are honestly representative of an emerging middle-of-the-road, middle-class viewpoint in developing nations. To wit, a new bourgeoisie arises, even as its members are insecure, and see ========== Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Robert D. Kaplan) - Highlight Loc. 5961-68 | Added on Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 06:58 PM Hundreds of millions of Muslims and others, quietly elevated into the middle classes, are seeking to live peaceful, productive lives, even as they confer legitimacy on the great power or powers whose actions help them in what my Persian friend and the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah both say man is ultimately on earth to do—“to trade.” Trade is what Zheng He did, and while the Chinese navy celebrates his Indian Ocean exploits, America, too, could learn much from this Ming Dynasty explorer, who saw military activity as an expression not only of hard but of soft power as well: to help protect the global commons and a trading system for the benefit of all. Only by seeking at every opportunity to identify its struggles with those of the larger Indian Ocean world can American power finally be preserved. * Twenty-five percent of Swahili ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 124-28 | Added on Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 10:56 PM mass to the negative quarter power. The math is simple enough: you take the square root of 1,000, which is (approximately) 31, and then take the square root of 31, which is (again, approximately) 5.5. This means that a cow, which is roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5 times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck’s. As the science writer George Johnson once observed, one lovely consequence of Kleiber’s law is that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species to species. Bigger animals just take longer to use up their quota. ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 131-36 | Added on Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 10:57 PM Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether Kleiber’s law applied to one of life’s largest creations: the superorganisms of human-built cities. Did the “metabolism” of urban life slow down as cities grew in size? Was there an underlying pattern to the growth and pace of life of metropolitan systems? Working out of the legendary Santa Fe Institute, where he served as president until 2009, West assembled an international team of researchers and advisers to collect data on dozens of cities around the world, measuring everything from crime to household electrical consumption, from new patents to gasoline sales. ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 146-49 | Added on Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 10:57 PM Kleiber’s law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West’s model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call “superlinear scaling”: if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be stable. West’s power laws ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 149-53 | Added on Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 10:58 PM that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand. “Great cities are not like towns only larger,” Jane Jacobs wrote nearly fifty years ago. West’s positive quarter-power law gave that insight a mathematical foundation. Something about the environment of a big city was making its residents significantly more innovative than residents of smaller towns. But what was it? ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 177-78 | Added on Thursday, December 02, 2010, 01:49 PM innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience. The ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 494-99 | Added on Sunday, December 05, 2010, 01:25 PM way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration. The infinite variety of life that so impressed Darwin, standing in the calm waters of the Keeling Islands, exists because the coral reef is supremely gifted at recycling and reinventing the spare parts of its ecosystem. ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 545-49 | Added on Sunday, December 05, 2010, 01:28 PM The question is how to push your brain toward those more creative networks. The answer, as it happens, is delightfully fractal: to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible. Certain environments enhance the brain’s natural capacity to make new links of association. But these patterns of connection are much older than the human brain, older than neurons even. They take us back, once again, to the origin of life itself. ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 655-58 | Added on Sunday, December 05, 2010, 01:34 PM terms of the profit motive. Consider the invention of one of capitalism’s key conceptual tools: double-entry accounting, which Goethe called one of the “finest inventions of the human mind.” Now the cornerstone of all financial bookkeeping, double-entry’s innovation of recording every financial event in two ledgers (one reflecting a debit, the other a credit) allowed merchants to track the financial health of their businesses with unparalleled accuracy. First codified by the ========== Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) - Highlight Loc. 2079-88 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 03:41 PM For forty years, ecologists have used the term “keystone species” to designate an organism that has a disproportionate impact on its ecosystem—a carnivore, for instance, who is the only predator of another species that would otherwise overwhelm the habitat with unchecked population growth. Remove the keystone predator and the habitat falls apart. But about twenty years ago, a scientist named Clive Jones at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies decided that ecology needed another term to describe a very specific kind of keystone species: the kind that actually creates the habitat itself. Jones called these organisms “ecosystem engineers.” Beavers are the classic example of ecosystem engineers. By felling poplars and willows to build dams, beavers single-handedly transform temperate forests into wetlands, which then attract and support a remarkable array of neighbors: pileated woodpeckers drilling nesting cavities into dead trees; wood ducks and Canada geese settling in abandoned beaver lodges; herons and kingfishers and swallows enjoying the benefits of the “artificial” pond, along with frogs, lizards, and other slow-water species like dragonflies, mussels, and aquatic beetles. As do those underwater colonies of coral, the beaver creates a platform that sustains an amazingly diverse assemblage of life. ========== Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 145-50 | Added on Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 12:43 PM Today Howard Baskerville is an honored figure in Iran. Schools and streets have been named after him. His bust, cast in bronze, commands a salon at Constitution House in Tabriz. A plaque beneath it says, “Howard C. Baskerville—Patriot and Maker of History.” Baskerville is more than just an Iranian hero. He embodied the shared values that bind Iranians to Americans. Long before many other Middle Eastern nations had come into existence, the Constitutional Revolution brought modern ideas to Iran. These ideas have produced a nation that has more in common with the United States than almost any of its neighbors in the world’s most troubled region. ========== Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1078-84 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2010, 03:45 PM “History has proven incontrovertibly that success in great enterprises requires the presence of a leader of unshakable capacity and power,” Kemal said in a speech after taking power. Reza put it somewhat differently. “I am not an ordinary man who is satisfied with eating and drinking,” he told a friend. “Whenever I thought I was not accomplishing something, I felt ill.” In their personal habits, the two men could not have been more different. Kemal was an alcoholic and compulsive womanizer; Zsa Zsa Gabor, who claimed to have had a liaison with him while visiting Istanbul as a teenager, wrote that she never saw him without a drink nearby. Although tending to melancholy in private, he was ebullient. He smiled often and gave long, folksy speeches. He wanted Turks to love him, and they did. ========== Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1235-38 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2010, 04:01 PM For boys who came from the countryside, Atatürk and Reza had another plan: use compulsory military service as a tool for social transformation. Many recruits arrived not only illiterate but unfamiliar with such refinements as toothbrushes and plumbing. By the time they were released from service, most had become comfortable with modern life. They returned home as missionaries for the new secular culture. ========== Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future (Stephen Kinzer) - Highlight Loc. 1579-82 | Added on Sunday, December 26, 2010, 04:31 PM The election of November 1952 had brought Dwight Eisenhower to power, and with him two brothers who would fundamentally reshape America’s approach to the world. John Foster Dulles, who had spent decades as a highly paid lawyer for multinational corporations, became secretary of state. Allen Dulles, five years younger, ran the CIA. This was the first and only time that siblings ran the overt and covert sides of American foreign policy. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 102-11 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:11 AM norteño, and its own Spanglish slang spoken on both sides of the frontier, a lexicon that sometimes just jumbles the two languages together, as on the door of a bar in El Paso: MINORES AND PERSONAS ARMADAS STRICTLY NO ENTRADA. Friends may address each other as “Mano!” mixing “hey, man” with hermano—brother. Across Mexico, a bicycle is a bicicleta, but on the border it can be a baica. Someone’s wife can be his waifa rather than esposa. In the United States, a Chicano gangbanger is a vato, but on the border he’s a cholo.3 Then there’s the word for diarrhea: turista, tourist, for obvious reasons. Perhaps the most useful border term of all is rasquache, or rasquachismo, defined by the writer Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as “to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness, to seek to subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside down. It is a witty, irreverent, and impertinent posture,” and if it doesn’t define the borderline, there is certainly no shortage of it.4 ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 204-10 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:19 AM makes it very much a war of its time. It is the first real twenty-first-century war, because it is about, in the end, nothing. Mexico’s war is a conflict of the postpolitical era. It is being fought in an age of belligerent hypermaterialism as an ideology in itself, the leading exponents of which run their corporations or banks with personal greed as their sole credo, and their brands as icons of this postmodern religion. Until this hypermaterialist era, the human race had been, and in places remains, an inhabitant of a world where, unfortunately, Muslims and Jews fight each other, communists and fascists, Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus, American or British soldiers and Islamic insurgents, and so on. We may all have different readings of why they do this, but they do so—at least nominally—for a cause, faith, or tribal identity, however crazy. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 210-14 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:20 AM But Mexico’s war (some do not like calling it a war) has not even the pretense of a propelling cause. Mexicans are mutilating, decapitating, torturing, and killing each other ostensibly over money and the drug-smuggling routes that provide it. Some argue that all wars are fought indirectly over money and resources—whether wars of empire fought from the nineteenth century until 1918, or of ideology or religion in the twentieth century. But most of the savage violence in Mexico is for the smaller profits of the domestic market and local street corner, meted out for its own sake. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 218-23 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:21 AM that. The narco war is fought for the accoutrements—brands, accessories, applications, and other possessions—of postmodern social kudos, social performance, the ability to show off the right labels, brands, and products in accordance with advertising; to wear the right clothes, to be accompanied by the appropriately desirable partner, chatter on the latest mobile phone with the latest so-called applications, own the right gadget, and drive the right SUV. For these definitions of status, thousands die. The narco war is fought on YouTube and mobile phones as well as in the streets and backroom torture chambers: cartels use YouTube to threaten rivals and public officials, boast of their killing, set up rogue “hot spot” digital sites to broadcast their savagery and invite comments. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 232-37 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:22 AM Instead, and interestingly, a war that is quintessentially materialist and largely male meets resistance from two quarters that do not belong to conventional politics. The postpolitical, materialist war meets resistance from the prepolitical clergy and church groups more than any other constituency of society—both Catholic (though not entirely from the organized church) and reformed. And the male war meets resistance from strong women, as individuals, as organizations—and in the home. That these social quarters provide the only measurable, let alone cogent, counterweight to narco violence at street level is something with which a secular mass media, forever seeking policy options and conventional political or military “solutions,” is deeply and visibly uncomfortable, not ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 337-38 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:30 AM Kalashnikov, or cuerno de chivo, goat’s horn, as an AK-47 is known around here. More screams follow ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 361-62 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:32 AM The other kind of slaying of police officers—la chota, as it is known on the border, the fuzz—involves those who become embroiled with the narcos, working for them or adding to the ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 519-21 | Added on Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 04:47 AM side. In his excellent account of Carrillo’s building the Juarez cartel, Down by the River, Charles Bowden relates that Carrillo paid a federal commander $1 million to mount the raid and ensure Acosta’s death.15 Carrillo Fuentes then ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 704-13 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2010, 04:33 PM The reality on the ground is elastic, mercurial, and in places much worse than the map suggests. The map shows a war caused by fighting among cartels for smuggling routes and a consequent government crackdown, but it does not show another, monstrous, reason for the war: the Mexican side of the borderline has become accursed by addiction to hard drugs. This seems of little consequence to the United States, and is virtually never mentioned in Mexico, but it is the cause of most of the killing and the most wretched circumstances in the drug war. All warfare creates resultant “sideshow” horrors. And the consequential sideshow of America’s addiction to hard drugs supplied by Mexico and both countries’ war against the traffic is twofold: first, the ravages of hard drugs along the border, and subsequently, the feral war for control of this domestic plaza, which is just as savage as that for narcotic exports, if not more so. Fundamental to both Mexican government strategy and the thinking of the DEA is that fragmenting the cartels would weaken them, thereby damaging drug traffic and reducing violence. “We want it to be disorganized,” says Eileen Zeidler, spokeswoman for the DEA in San Diego, of the cartels’ fragmentation since President Calderón’s offensive. “If they’re not organized, they don’t ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 718-19 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2010, 04:33 PM tender for a slice of the profits. Narco outsourcing even has a name: el derecho de piso—the right of tender, of passage. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 767-71 | Added on Thursday, December 30, 2010, 04:38 PM with a goatee and skin that has not seen daylight for a good while watches the writhing pole dancer. But that’s about it for the night, concedes the doorman. The narco “Juniors” themselves, once cocks of the walk, have disappeared too. Since war broke out, the modern narcotraficantes, out of prudence and self-preservation, keep a low profile, partying at the villa and entertaining ladies through home delivery rather than brazenly in public—as they did not long ago.   ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 890-98 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2010, 04:13 AM Dr. Hiram Muñoz, a forensic pathologist assigned to the Baja California state prosecutor’s department in Tijuana, talks about how “each different mutilation leaves a clear message. They have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means they talked too much—a snitch, or chupro. A man who squealed on the clan has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth.” This is logical, a traitor is known as a dedo—a finger. Sometimes fingers are stuck up the rectum. “If you are castrated,” continues Dr. Muñoz, “you may have slept with or looked at the woman of another man in the business. Severed arms could mean that you stole from your consignment, severed legs that you tried to walk away from the cartel. Decapitation is another thing altogether: it is simply a statement of power, a warning to all, like public executions of old. The difference is that in normal times, the dead were ‘disappeared’ or dumped in the desert. Now they are executed and displayed for all to see, so that it becomes a war against the people.” ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 983-84 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2010, 01:13 PM “Look,” says my friend Delgado, trying to explain, “we clean their toilets, we pick their fruit and water their lawns. But we can beat them in soccer.” ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 997-1002 | Added on Friday, December 31, 2010, 05:24 PM Most of the narco aristocracy, and more than a few of the sicarios, though, are devout Catholics, or at least they go through the motions of devotion—baptism, church marriage, cash donations, and confession. There is even an unofficial narco “saint,” Santo Jesús Malverde, a bandit with a Robin Hood legacy to whose shrine in Sinaloa devout traffickers pay homage with devotional pledges, mandas, in return for the holy outlaw’s blessing. During the 1980s, the narcos actively aligned themselves with the church’s conservative wing against priests advocating liberation theology. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 1027-35 | Added on Saturday, January 01, 2011, 02:31 PM killers plead for protection against their own death, a talisman and mass cult accompanying the war. Though Santa Muerte is regarded outside the country as yet another exotic piece of Mexican mumbo jumbo, the cult can make one’s flesh crawl as one watches others pull over their cars and whisper their devotions to her at these shrines. Santa Muerte has a calculated didactic iconography. In mystical Catholicism, the figure of the Antichrist—the notion of Satan in the guise of the Messiah—is more terrifying than the devil himself, because of the deceit. Perhaps that is why the Antichrist is so rarely portrayed in Christian art (among the few portrayals is Luca Signorelli’s very unsettling depiction in the Orvieto cathedral of Satan preaching to the prayerful masses, wearing a mask of Jesus). The point is this: all the accoutrements of Santa Muerte echo exactly the iconography of devotion to Mary in general, and the Virgin of Guadalupe in particular—the shrines, offerings, prayers, flowers, and candles decorated with her image. Santa Muerte is not, like satanism, an inversion of the faith. Rather, she wears the garb of faith—like the Antichrist, she is not an inversion but a masquerader. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 1211-16 | Added on Saturday, January 01, 2011, 02:39 PM There are names for the players in this business of people smuggling: the migrants are known as pollos, chickens, and those who recruit them therefore polleros, chicken runners, working for coyotes, who control the networks. Bottom of the criminal ladder are the guías, the guides, who actually do the walk. To the Border Patrol, the migrants are “wetbacks,” even if all they have crossed is sand, otherwise “bodies,” “wets,” or “tonkies.” Mexicans use the word mojados themselves: literally, wetted. The Border Patrol, of immigration police, is of course la migra. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 1918-22 | Added on Sunday, January 02, 2011, 03:17 AM But, says Barrett, “I still talk to some of the young agents. They’re no fools, and they get into situations when they need a little old-school advice, particularly when it comes to dealing with the people with their feet under desks. That was the only mistake I made, to get promoted behind a desk! The problem is what it always was: the REMFs in Washington, D.C. They’d come down in my day, look around for fifteen minutes with the press secretary, and we’d offer them a tour out with us once, good to go. But they never even sat in a car with us.” ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 1980-86 | Added on Sunday, January 02, 2011, 10:20 PM became almost impossible to do an effective undercover operation. It became harder to deal with Washington than to fight the criminals. When you go undercover, the REMFs hate it while you’re doing it, then go on TV and claim all the credit when you pull the outlaws in. Nothing substitutes for human intelligence and infiltration, and that’s something we’re losing, just as the drug lords are gaining it. While it gets harder for us to infiltrate them, they’ll use relatives and friends to infiltrate us, they’ll call a cousin on the U.S. side and tell ’em, ‘Hey, we need you to work in border law enforcement—for the U.S.,’ and there ain’t no saying no to them. We’ve seen it happen; we arrested one of our own customs people smuggling cocaine for a drug boss called Yolanda Molina. We ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 2006-9 | Added on Sunday, January 02, 2011, 10:22 PM by law enforcement for hunting humans. There is a special unit of the Border Patrol on the Tohono O’odham reservation called the Tracking Wolves, cutting for sign. And of course, sign cutting was perfected by men like Morgan, Rayburn, and Barrett. You need to know, says Morgan, the difference between a chevron and a starburst imprint, when a mat of some kind has been attached to the shoes, when footprints have been ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 2033-37 | Added on Sunday, January 02, 2011, 10:23 PM terrain of eastern Arizona, a sociologist at UT El Paso, Howard Campbell, suggests that we should try relabeling the narco cartels because of the money-go-round, calling them the Sinaloa-Phoenix-Denver cartel, the Juárez–El Paso–Chicago cartel, or the Gulf-Houston-Atlanta cartel so as to more accurately reflect their sphere of influence. It is out across the desert toward El Paso and its twin city of Ciudad Juárez that the road now beckons. But first, one last round with the horsemen of the John Wayne attitude, a toast to the reaper and his line in the sand. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 2271-78 | Added on Monday, January 03, 2011, 12:37 AM previously. “Narco installation art,” says Cardona. And later, a car with its windshield shot out: “the new Juárez window design.” In the waggish parlance of Juárez, recent architecture is categorized as being of the “early narco,” “mid-narco” or “high narco” period. A series of arches proclaim the entrance to the upscale Rincón San Marcos, or St. Mark’s Corner, a gated community of villas inevitably rechristened Rincón de San Narcos on the street. Around a pleasant green is arranged a quiet retreat of mansions, each more garish than the next, and advertisements for facial and cosmetic surgery. Here is a metaphor for the economy of power in Juárez. Outside some villas are vehicles marked with maquila corporate logos, and in the forecourt of those belonging to well-known drug barons are powerful four-wheel drives with blackened windows—which are now illegal in Juárez, but what the hell. ========== Amexica: War Along the Borderline (Ed Vulliamy) - Highlight Loc. 2349-51 | Added on Monday, January 03, 2011, 12:46 AM Each colonia also has what in Tijuana are called tienditas—little shops, outlets for cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs, and heroin—which in Juárez are called picaderos, usually marked by a shoe tied to a nearby telegraph wire. As the cartel ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 69-71 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 05:24 AM Breakdown and failure reveal the true nature of things. —KARL JASPERS ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 78-83 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 05:25 AM Twenty-first-century diplomacy is coming to resemble that of the Middle Ages: Rising powers, multinational corporations, powerful families, humanitarians, religious radicals, universities, and mercenaries are all part of the diplomatic landscape. Technology and money, not sovereignty, determine who has authority and calls the shots. This can be a good thing if it means getting all hands on deck to manage challenges that no government or organization can tackle alone. Success in this new world of mega-diplomacy hinges on bringing the key players together—governments, businesses, and organizations—into coalitions that can quickly move global resources to solve local problems. This is not your grandfather’s diplomacy, but today’s Generation Y intuitively gets it. ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 234-39 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 06:30 AM grown in power and stature. The number of meaningful communities is proliferating rapidly: Our maps of the world no longer reflect reality on the ground. Power in such a complicated landscape is not fixed but fluid. Armies and nuclear arsenals don’t matter in absolute terms but only in specific contexts such as deterrence, occupations, and interventions. Resource power and ideological power are as important as military and financial might. If the power you have is the wrong sort to get you what you want, then it is useless. The only correct answer, then, to the question of how much power someone has is “Over what?” ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 261-69 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 06:33 AM Rather than think of the world as run by coherent states, we should instead realize that we have more islands of governance than we have effective governments—and just as in the Middle Ages, these islands are not states but cities. Today, just forty city-regions account for two-thirds of the world economy. Their power lies in money, knowledge, and stability. New York City’s economy alone is larger than most of sub-Saharan Africa’s. Port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai act like twenty-first-century Venice: They are “free zones” where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Such mega-cities as Rio, Istanbul, Cairo, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Manila are the leading urban centers of their countries and regions, yet each teems with hundreds of thousands of new urban squatters each year. The migrant underclass lives not in chaos and “shadow economies” but often in functional, self-organizing ecosystems, the typical physical stratification of medieval cities. Whether rich or poor, cities, more than nations, are the building blocks of global activity today. Our world is more a network of villages than it is one global village. ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 300-301 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 06:39 AM business diplomacy” is a coveted major today. It’s only a matter of time before an uber-corporation issues its own passport with pre-negotiatied visa-free access to countries large and small. ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 496-505 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 08:01 AM In basketball there is no more efficient and dazzling act of teamwork than an alley-oop: passing the ball right into the hands of a leaping player already within inches of the net. This is the best metaphor for the most important principle for redesigning global order: Political will must support human will. If global resources are not supporting local solutions, then what are they doing? After decades of “analysis paralysis,” there is nothing left to do but to do. Cosmopolitan—or cause-mopolitan—“citizens of the world” aspire toward a global consciousness, a superego for humanity. How do we do it? British scientific journalist Matt Ridley put it best: “For St. Augustine the source of social order lay in the teachings of Christ. For Hobbes it lay in the sovereign. For Rousseau it lay in solitude. For Lenin it lay in the party. They were all wrong. The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating not a perfectly harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present. We must build our institutions in such a way that they draw out those instincts.”2 Pushing resources from the global to the local level is the surest step to getting there. ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 692-99 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 08:15 AM For the United States to even conceivably regain a global leadership role, it needs to think along three dimensions in all its foreign activities: which agencies to bring together (the “whole of government” approach), which nations to cooperate and coordinate with (the “multi-partner” approach), and how to leverage private sector and NGO resources and talent (the “public-private” approach). Combining public and private resources can generate a sophisticated diplomatic-industrial complex. America already has a military-industrial complex: the “iron triangle” of industry, politicians, and the military assailed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. Now it must do the same for diplomacy. From oil companies to chambers of commerce to environmental activists, America’s corporations, civic organizations, universities, churches, youth groups, and charities already have their own foreign policies—and Americans are expressing their diplomatic voice through these channels more than any other. ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 1192-95 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 08:51 AM aren’t yet universal. One of Independent Diplomat’s major advocacy platforms is therefore the “Universal Right of Address,” a proposal that all parties to a dispute be allowed to speak directly before the UN Security Council. Currently, 80 percent of disputes on the council’s agenda involve such stateless actors. Normally the United Nations sends a special representative to gather material and report back to the council, but why not cut out the middleman? ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 1399-1401 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 09:23 AM The Arab world does not need a dominant hub to regain its unity. It needs a remapping of Palestine, stability in Iraq, and a rehabilitation of the Ottoman infrastructure that once made the region a proud global passageway. ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 2238-39 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 05:29 PM China is the world’s factory floor, India its back office, Russia its gas station, and Brazil its farm. These are the “BRICs”: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. You’ve been told already that if you’re not ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 2448-52 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 06:46 PM armies. For Africa to benefit from China’s presence, Africans will have to manage China better than they did the Europeans. China claims it is helping African nations find their niche: Zambia is China’s “metals hub,” Mauritius its “trade hub,” and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania its “shipping hub.” For better or worse, the cobalt and copper needed to manufacture everything from jet engines and cell phone batteries are found in anarchic African countries. Like European companies, Chinese ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 2999-3002 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 07:13 PM Private remittance companies in Somalia issue ID cards to their customers, serving as registrars for communities in the absence of a government; they even cooperate with anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorist-financing initiatives. It may be years before multilateral organizations know who they’re dealing with in Somalia, but they could already leverage Somalia’s extensive diaspora and remittance networks to rebuild parts of the country not at war. ========== How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Parag Khanna) - Highlight Loc. 3545-49 | Added on Friday, January 14, 2011, 07:28 PM The next Renaissance, then, is about universal liberation through exponentially expanding and voluntary interconnections. We are in the early phase of a new era in which each individual and collective has the ability to pursue its own ends. The information revolution has empowered individuals to claim their own authority, leading us into a world of mutuality among countless communities of various sizes. This unfolding epoch will force us to appreciate the second law of thermodynamics: the inexorability of universal entropy. Complexity is our permanent reality. The future will be about multiple sovereignties, not exclusive ones. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 27-29 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 09:06 PM That is a sentiment not well understood by those outside the military, especially by those waddling masses who, between meals at the drive-thru, find a spare --------------------------------------- 10 minute to tie a yellow ribbon on a tree and congratulate themselves for being patriotic. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 186-89 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 09:35 PM lost profits. As I turned to look back down the dirt road, I heard the --------------------------------------- 23 drone of the unmanned aircraft that the Green Zone used to survey the area. I ducked back inside the culvert; I hated those spy planes as much as the Iraqis did. Often I felt as if I had to avoid both the mujahideen and the Green Zone, just to keep my sanity. Countless times, reports ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 189-92 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 09:35 PM specific activities that the operators had observed from their planes’ surveillance equipment. “Why did your trucks use that road?” “Why were your trucks stopped here for so long?” The insinuations and the accusations were nonstop, and the air of superiority from those who spent their days monitoring us from the comfortable confines of the Green Zone made me sick. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 259-62 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 09:43 PM fortune along your path. After the night at the mosque, I had realized that Said Mallek’s influence would be central to my survival. Where it did not exist, I had to create it. I would make him as powerful as possible, and he would protect me as well as he could. This had to be the way. Find allies and make them stronger. It ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 359-65 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 09:51 PM Living in the shadows of the former American base made them relatively better off than their peers, but the tall fence demarcated more than a --------------------------------------- 37 property boundary—it neatly sliced the world into “haves” and “have nots.” I would later see the same division and social stratification in Baghdad and learn that the strength and size of the wall do not matter. Societal attempts to starkly and artificially cordon and separate humans into a class structure based on an arbitrary variable are unsustainable. I picked up my pace and headed back to my hooch, still thinking about how I needed to prepare myself, mentally and physically. For all of those miles I’d spent running, I was no closer to understanding what was in front of me. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 379-81 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 10:17 PM of one. I did not have to wait long for an insight into the new commander’s persona. When the “fasten seat belt” video came on, it was presented in English, Spanish, and French. When the French sentences rolled across, the new commander looked back at me and accusingly asked whether I was smart. I ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 469-74 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 10:24 PM equipment issues, there were hours of surreal debate over standardization of the new equipment. Even as it prepared for a real combat mission, the army obsessed over its image. A hot-button issue was the logos of the corporate companies sewn onto the army gear. The most memorable was that of Camelback, the hydration system company. The army decreed that all soldiers would use 15 a black marker to cross out any name that could be read. The blackout attempted to obscure the fact that the army had been ill-equipped to fight this war and had recovered its position only with the help of last-minute contracting, which didn’t allow for the creation of standard army versions. Yet filling army shortfalls with ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 530-34 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 10:29 PM to refer to Baghdad. Immediately, the difference between --------------------------------------- 50 them and us was stark. Where our uniforms remained starched and new, theirs were tattered and grungy. Our weapons, gleaming and untested, contrasted sharply with theirs, which looked barely recognizable under the layers of matte green tape that held laser sights and tactical flashlights in place. Their swagger and confidence established an invisible barrier between them and us. We eyed them nervously, enviously, as they ate and chatted in their closed groups. As I observed the veteran soldiers and then our own, I felt a sense of vulnerability wash over me. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 642-45 | Added on Saturday, February 12, 2011, 10:40 PM the simplest of tasks. Most green lieutenants would succeed at the military tasks of securing a bridge. Likewise, most engineers would excel at demolishing a bridge. Yet in this case, the bridge could not be approached as either a military or an engineering obstacle. It was a political one, in the same way that every object in Iraq, from the smallest rock to the biggest building, had assumed an aura of political significance. The world ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1377-80 | Added on Sunday, February 13, 2011, 05:15 PM over an Islamic populace. The historical precedents for failure on this premise are many, and the analogy with the Israeli treatment of Palestinians was already headlining most sermons on the subject. The result was that mosques and religious convoys became free zones for weapons, and the open secret was that nothing could be done about it. The armed masses now surrounding the burning --------------------------------------- 120 mosque served as a reminder that weapons and ideology combined under the domes of faith to create an explosive mixture. Fearing that violence would ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1414-17 | Added on Sunday, February 13, 2011, 05:18 PM While he was speaking, people began looking to the sky and covering their faces. I asked Ali what was going on. --------------------------------------- 123 “Drone,” he replied. I could not hear or see anything, but within seconds the buzzing of a U.S. Army unmanned aircraft could be heard above the crowd. It was amazing that the people were so attuned to these surveillance measures. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1619-23 | Added on Sunday, February 13, 2011, 05:45 PM meetings. All of the Shi’a imams attended a central religious school and had a fairly unified chain of authority, going all the way to the ayatollahs, most of whom were in Iran. I considered this analogous to the Catholic Church and its hierarchy, leading back to the pope. If you could get a view from the Shi’a collectively, it was more or less a binding commitment on them all. The Sunni lacked this organization entirely. Any person could open a Sunni mosque, which I called the Protestant approach. The more secular Sunni and the religious Sunni who followed autonomous mosques were both nearly ungovernable. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 1700-1704 | Added on Sunday, February 13, 2011, 05:55 PM business. As it turned out, most of my theories on weapons had been correct. The biggest buyers were the mosques, which armed themselves via weapons-dealing cartels. The money came from within and outside Iraq, often carried by pilgrims from Iran or taxi drivers who made journeys between Baghdad and Amman. Similarly, the weapons would travel between regions as mosques prepared for violence. He elaborated that these --------------------------------------- 147 particular grenades had been bound for an insurgent group in Najaf during the uprising in April, but the fighting had ended, and the prices really fell there. ========== jason (exterior@benturner.com) - Highlight Loc. 2651 | Added on Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 05:31 PM but how committed where the American people to this war, really? The Iraqis ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 331-35 | Added on Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 06:16 PM Becoming further captivated with Thoreau’s proposition that “one honest man” could morally regenerate an entire society, King then discovered Gandhi, and the way he transformed Thoreau’s principle of individual nonviolent resistance into a seismic popular movement to expunge British power from India, through the enormous “soul force” of a patiently suffering mass resistance, impossibly inconveniencing not only the administrative agencies but the conscience of its rulers. ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 525-28 | Added on Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 06:34 PM There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There— ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 1022-23 | Added on Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 09:58 PM Look, normal people don’t challenge the law of the land, you got to be creatively maladjusted. We need people who’ll trouble the waters.” As often, though, the waters they seemed intent on troubling were each other’s. “Nobody got along,” ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 1551-56 | Added on Friday, February 25, 2011, 11:28 AM their willingness to suffer. . . .” The truth was, he proposed, it would be the protesting demonstrators in the South who would someday be recognized as the “real heroes” of these times, “carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.” King went on to lament, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block is not the White Citizens Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” Indeed, he declared to these religious worthies of Birmingham: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute understanding from people of ill will.” ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 1840-47 | Added on Thursday, March 03, 2011, 02:01 PM They were, King and Malcolm, really projections of two entirely different cultures. King’s was a ministry congenial to his mostly churchly, respectably middle-class black constituency, eager to join in a coalition of purpose with the nation’s white liberal establishment. But Malcolm was a prophet to another America, having arisen out of a childhood of cold misery that could not have been more unlike King’s snugly privileged upbringing, and the vicious and gaudy hustler society of the black underclass in those mammoth ghettos of the North’s “great cities of destruction,” in E. Franklin Frazier’s phrase. Such inner exiles lived without any sense of connection to the rest of the country, bereft of that sense of their individual worth without which “they cannot live,” as James Baldwin wrote during the time, and “they will do anything whatever to regain it. That is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.” ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 1934-38 | Added on Thursday, March 03, 2011, 02:07 PM effectively shared enforcement powers for repelling demonstrations with the Hunting Club’s chieftain, whom he had coached long ago in high school football—a pig farmer and sometime bootlegger named Holstead “Hoss” Manucy, a heavy heap of a figure with an affably beaming sun-singed ham of a face, who happily informed me once in his fog-throated wheeze, “I ain’t got no bad habits. Don’t smoke, don’t cuss. My only bad habit is fightin’ nigguhs.” ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 2444-49 | Added on Saturday, March 05, 2011, 02:42 PM undertaking, King was confronting a firmament of power and interests, a nebulous field of resistance, lacking the simple fevered palpability of a Wallace or Bull Connor. “His great strength in the old fight was his ability to dramatize the immorality he opposed,” wrote David Halberstam, but in Chicago, it was finally “an immorality with invisible sources.” Beyond that, he was attempting to transfer the preacherly inspirations of his movement in the South to blacks in the North, who “were more angry than afraid,” as Bevel himself recognized. Once ========== Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life (Marshall Frady) - Highlight Loc. 3005-14 | Added on Sunday, March 06, 2011, 07:01 PM bankruptcy of his image. The Reverend Samuel Kyles, with King on the balcony when he was shot, reflects now: “People wear leaders out. If you do fifteen years, you’re doing good. I tell you, if Martin had lived to be sixty-five, there’d never have been a holiday in his honor, because we would’ve used him up. Had he lived, he’d walk into a room now and we’d say, ‘Oh, there’s Dr. King. Hey, Martin, have a seat.” Cause life is like that, you know.” Even as it is, King’s own family members have since collaborated with certain other interests in a dismal trivialization of his memory, by not only personally syndicating him, despite his immense historical resonance, as their own patented, copyrighted property, exacting fees for the use of his image and words, but lending their license, for considerations accordingly, to such stupendous banalizations of his meaning as the exploitation of his great moment at the Washington March for an Internet company television commercial. But if King had lived, most likely he would, with his increasingly radical gospel, have departed steadily further from the temper and received liberal sophistications of his times, drifting to the outermost fringes of apparent relevancy—to the final true desert of the prophet, in a reverse of the scriptural sequence going back, as it were, to John the Baptist. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 102-6 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 09:39 AM amplified generosity. At the very cultural moment when pundits declared that writing was dead, millions began writing online more than they ever had written before. Exactly when the experts declared people would only bowl alone, millions began to gather together in large numbers. Online they collaborated, cooperated, shared, and created in myriad unexpected ways. This was new to me. Cold silicon chips, long metal wires, and complicated high-voltage gear were nurturing our best efforts as humans. Once I noticed how online computers stirred the muses and ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 212-15 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 09:45 AM Scientists had come to a startling realization: However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. And as technology was unveiled from its shroud of atoms, we could see that at its core, it, too, is about ideas and information. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 239-46 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 09:47 AM So I’ve somewhat reluctantly coined a word to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. I call it the technium. The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections. For the rest of this book I will use the term technium where others might use technology as a plural, and to mean a whole system (as in “technology accelerates”). I reserve the term technology to mean a specific technology, such as radar or plastic polymers. For example, I would say: “The technium accelerates the invention of technologies.” In other words, technologies can be patented, while the technium includes the patent system itself. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 279-85 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 10:33 AM of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in,[12] it processes keyword searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz (a barely audible high-pitched whine),[13] and it is so large a contraption that it now consumes 5 percent of the world’s electricity.[14] When computer ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 543-46 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 10:51 AM A typical tribe of hunters-gatherers had few very young children and no old people. This demographic may explain a common impression visitors had upon meeting intact historical hunter-gatherer tribes. They would remark that “everyone looked extremely healthy and robust.” That’s in part because most everyone was in the prime of life, between 15 and 35. We might have the same reaction visiting a trendy urban neighborhood with the same youthful demographic. Tribal life was a lifestyle for and of young adults. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 549-51 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 10:52 AM individual. But a short life span is also extremely detrimental for a society as well. Without grandparents, it becomes exceedingly difficult to transmit knowledge—and knowledge of tool using—over time. Grandparents are the conduits of culture, and without them culture stagnates. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 624-27 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 12:04 PM As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated. We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink (because of cooking, our external stomach), our muscles thin out, our hair disappears. Technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are coevolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 1069-72 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 12:42 PM them. It is not as if life and mind were simply embedded in the nature of matter and energy; but rather, life and mind emerged out of the constraints to transcend them. Physicist Paul Davies summarizes it well: “The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis. . . . Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.”[6] ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 1079-82 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 12:43 PM in the technium. In six years the average weight per dollar of U.S. exports (the most valuable things the U.S. produces) dropped by half. Today, 40 percent of U.S. exports are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms).[8] We are steadily substituting intangible design, flexibility, innovation, and smartness for rigid, heavy atoms. In a very real sense our entry into a service- and idea-based economy is a continuation of a trend that began at the big bang. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 1148-52 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 12:47 PM shelves.[2] Most of these contemporary products carry a bar code. The agency that issues the prefixes used in bar codes estimates that there are at least 30 million of them in use worldwide.[3] The variety of manufactured products available on the planet is certainly in the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 1294-99 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 01:00 PM Like any city, a slum is highly efficient—maybe even more so than the city’s official sections, because nothing goes to waste. The ragpickers and resellers and scavengers all live in the slums and scour the rest of the city for scraps to assemble into shelter and to feed their economy. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. The city as a whole is a wonderful technological invention that concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but it also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 1326-29 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 01:02 PM Then Mehta continues: “For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom.” Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.”[24] The ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 1333-36 | Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011, 01:03 PM for them. The Bedouin are lured, not pushed, to the city because, in their own words: “We can always go into the desert to taste the old life. But this [new] life is better than the old way. Before there was no medical care, no schools for our children.” An eighty-year-old Bedouin chief sums it up better than I could: “The children will have more options for their future.”[25] The migrants don’t have to come. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 1732-35 | Added on Friday, April 15, 2011, 04:47 PM discovered this law.[9] “Metabolic rate is the fundamental biological rate,” they claim—“a universal clock” reckoned in energy, the speed at which all life of any type proceeds. The clock is inevitable for anything living. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 2803-5 | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2011, 04:23 PM Like personality, technology is shaped by a triad of forces. The primary driver is preordained development—what technology wants. The second driver is the influence of technological history, the gravity of the past, as in the way the size of a horse’s yoke determines the size of a space rocket. The third force is society’s collective free will in shaping the technium, or our choices. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3032-35 | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2011, 06:15 PM We don’t calculate. We are in the process of offloading our remembering to Google, and we are eager to stop cleaning as soon as those cleaning bots get cheap enough. Eric Brende, an engineering student who spent two years living like an Amish, says, “Duplicating vital human capacities can have one of only two consequences: atrophying the capacities or creating competition between Homo sapiens and machine. Neither of these is ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3567-70 | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2011, 08:48 PM school up to 10th grade instead of eighth, as they now do? Just for starters. Well, you know, he said, “hormones kick in around the ninth grade, and boys, and even some girls, just don’t want to sit at desks and do paperwork. They need to use their hands as well as their heads, and they ache to be useful. Kids learn more doing real things at that age.” Fair enough. When I was a teen I wished I had been “doing real stuff” instead of being holed up in a stuffy high-school classroom. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3581-86 | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2011, 08:48 PM satellite settlements in South America.) I looked long and hard to find Japanese “Amish,” Chinese Amish, Indian Amish, even Islamic Amish but discovered none. I found some ultraorthodox Jews in Israel who reject computers, and likewise one or two small Islamic sects that prohibit TV and internet and some Jain monks in India who refuse to ride in automobiles or trains. As far as I can tell, there are no other ongoing large-scale communities based outside North America that have built a lifestyle around minimal technology. That’s because outside technological America the idea seems crazy. This opt-out option makes sense only when there is something to opt out of. The original Amish protesters (or ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3588-89 | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2011, 08:49 PM No longer persecuted, the Amish today are a counterpoint to the incredibly technological aspect of American society. Their alternative thrives in opposition to the unrelenting thrust of individual personal reinvention and progress that is the hallmark of America. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3605-8 | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2011, 08:50 PM of the 70s. As Stewart Brand, hippie founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, remembers, “‘Do your own thing’ easily translated into ‘Start your own business.’”[4] I’ve lost count of the hundreds of individuals I personally know who left communes to eventually start high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It’s almost a cliche by now—barefoot to billionaire, just like Steve Jobs. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3631-33 | Added on Friday, April 22, 2011, 10:01 AM before him has done. But for Berry, who uses horses to drive his farm gear, anything beyond the innovation of hand pump and horsepower works against the satisfaction of human nature and natural systems. When tractors were introduced in the 1940s, “the speed of work could be increased, but not the quality.” He writes: ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3696-99 | Added on Friday, April 22, 2011, 10:04 AM I owe the Amish hackers a large debt because through their lives I now see the technium’s dilemma very clearly: To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. The dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 3880-84 | Added on Friday, April 22, 2011, 10:13 AM In its efforts to be “safe rather than sorry,” precaution becomes myopic. It tends to maximize only one value: safety. Safety trumps innovation. The safest thing to do is to perfect what works and never try anything that could fail, because failure is inherently unsafe. An innovative medical procedure will not be as safe as the proven standard. Innovation is not prudent. Yet because precaution privileges only safety, it not only diminishes other values but also actually reduces safety. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 4126-34 | Added on Friday, April 22, 2011, 10:18 AM A convivial manifestation of a technology offers: • Cooperation. It promotes collaboration between people and institutions. • Transparency. Its origins and ownership are clear. Its workings are intelligible to nonexperts. There is no asymmetrical advantage of knowledge to some of its users. • Decentralization. Its ownership, production, and control are distributed. It is not monopolized by a professional elite. • Flexibility. It is easy for users to modify, adapt, improve, or inspect its core. Individuals may freely choose to use it or give it up. • Redundancy. It is not the only solution, not a monopoly, but one of several options. • Efficiency. It minimizes impact on ecosystems. It has a high efficiency for energy and materials and is easy to reuse. ========== What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly) - Highlight Loc. 5419-26 | Added on Saturday, April 23, 2011, 04:49 PM What technology brings to us individually is the possibility of finding out who we are, and more important, who we might be. During his or her lifetime, each person acquires a unique combination of latent abilities, handy skills, nascent insights, and potential experiences that no one else shares. Even twins—who share common DNA—don’t share the same life. When people maximize their set of talents, they shine because no one can do what they do. People fully inhabiting their unique mixture of skills are inimitable, and that is what we prize about them. Talent unleashed doesn’t mean that everyone will sing on Broadway or play in the Olympics or win a Nobel Prize. Those high-profile roles are merely three well-worn ways of being a star, and by deliberate design those particular opportunities are limited. Popular culture wrongly fixates on proven star roles as the destiny of anyone successful. In fact, those positions of prominence and stardom can be prisons, straitjackets defined by how someone else excelled. ========== In-N-Out Burger (Stacy Perman) - Highlight Loc. 722-29 | Added on Saturday, April 30, 2011, 04:00 PM Astonishingly, Harry Snyder and In-N-Out have received scant recognition for coming up with what is essentially the formula for today’s drive-through system. Certainly, others have come forward to claim credit. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, boasted that he invented “the first modern day, drive-through window,” when he rolled out his second Wendy’s location in Columbus, Ohio—but that was in 1971, a good twenty-three years after Snyder’s invention. Even McDonald’s first drive-through window didn’t appear until 1975, when it opened its initial model in Sierra Vista, Arizona, near the Fort Huachuca military base. In 1951, Jack in the Box introduced its own intercom “food machine” in San Diego. Back in 1931, the Pig Stand had devised a kind of primitive drive-through where motorists drove in and placed their order with a young male order taker and then exited—but their system relied upon an entirely human ordering and delivery process. ========== Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (Jason Stearns) - Highlight Loc. 454-59 | Added on Monday, May 02, 2011, 11:52 AM In southwestern Rwanda, the Hutu flight was stalled by the deployment of a UN-mandated French military mission, dubbed Operation Turquoise, intended to protect the few remaining Tutsi in that region as well as aid workers. It was one of the many absurdities of the Rwandan crisis: The French government and its contractors had made thirty-six shipments of weapons to Habyarimana’s government between 1990 and 1994, worth $11 million, and had deployed seven hundred fifty French troops, who helped with military training, planning, and even interrogation of RPF prisoners.12 Just months after they had finished helping to train the Interahamwe, the French, wolves turned shepherds, announced a humanitarian intervention to bring an end to the killing. ========== In-N-Out Burger (Stacy Perman) - Highlight Loc. 869-78 | Added on Friday, May 06, 2011, 02:08 AM of age just as the new youth and car culture emerged. In Baldwin Park, the two met at the little stand on Garvey Avenue. During those prosperous postwar years, Detroit had produced a whole new generation of vehicles. With a glut of new model automobiles traveling down America’s roads, there was a huge surplus of the older cars just lying around. These abandoned autos offered the perfect occupation for the legions of Southern California’s car-obsessed youths who enthusiastically took their parents’ beat-up and outmoded Model T Fords, Chevrolets, Hudsons, and other vintage-tin bodies and recycled them. Inventive and daring, they removed flathead engines, stripped door handles, eliminated transmission casings, appropriated spare fenders, and repainted the vehicles in bold colors and designs, giving birth to the American hot rod. Once built, the only thing left for the kids to do was to show off their four-wheeled metal peacocks. All across Los Angeles, hot-rodders and car enthusiasts converged on the plentiful neon drive-in burger palaces with their brightly lit interiors, wild angles, and giant V-shaped car canopies. During its ten-year heyday until 1968, the famous Harvey’s Broiler (later renamed Johnie’s Broiler) in Downey regularly attracted a parade of five thousand cars on weekend nights. “It would take ========== In-N-Out Burger (Stacy Perman) - Highlight Loc. 1025-28 | Added on Friday, May 06, 2011, 02:13 AM upon the automobile. The scheme as it was later uncovered began in the 1920s. GM and its associates created a front company, National City Lines, with the specific goal of purchasing streetcar lines in a number of large American cities including Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles—whereupon the lines were dismantled, shut down, and replaced with a bus system (the buses being manufactured by GM). It wasn’t long before the population was left with essentially one choice: to drive themselves. ========== Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (Jason Stearns) - Highlight Loc. 2682-85 | Added on Sunday, May 08, 2011, 12:42 PM Mobutu’s health began to fail him again. Within a month, he was back in Europe for further treatment. The vicious tongues in the capital began to wag with new rumors of his ill health. When the Central Bank issued yet another new banknote to keep track of rising inflation, it was quickly dubbed “the Prostate.” Just like the president’s gland, it was inflating daily. Just like the illness, these banknotes could seriously damage your health. ========== Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (Jason Stearns) - Highlight Loc. 3117-21 | Added on Monday, May 09, 2011, 02:50 AM of local sympathizers .”3 The insurgents held meetings in local schools at night and brought their office along, transporting official letterhead, stamps, and maps with them. They avoided using walkie-talkies for fear of being detected or overheard. Instead, Rwarakabije and his comrades relied heavily on locals, sending letters with operational orders via local farmers or market women, who then passed them on to other sympathizers. The insurgents were initially popular ========== Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (Jason Stearns) - Highlight Loc. 3274-77 | Added on Monday, May 09, 2011, 02:52 AM Sometimes even the Rwandans foul things up: Butera had forgotten to take down the pin code for the satellite phone, without which it was useless. In Kigali, his commanding officers waited in vain for word from the young soldier, while he tried frantically to punch in different six-digit combinations. No luck. (The correct code was apparently 123456.) The pilot also failed to reach ========== Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (Jason Stearns) - Highlight Loc. 4167-70 | Added on Monday, May 09, 2011, 01:46 PM Africa, Lebanese traders had cornered the diamond trade, taking advantage of transnational family networks that reach from Africa to the Middle East and Belgium. While many other shops in Kisangani closed, the main streets were still lined with dozens of small diamond stores with huge, painted diamonds decorating their walls. Their names voiced the traders’ eclectic backgrounds and dreams of a better future: Oasis, Top Correction, Force Tranquille, and Jihad. ========== In-N-Out Burger (Stacy Perman) - Highlight Loc. 1576-78 | Added on Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 02:43 PM pancakes, and sandwiches. The all-American meal had become the American way. Fast food was part of the great free enterprise system, and its corporate masters were spreading their message one french fry at a time. As the folksy host of CBS’s On the Road Charles Kuralt once remarked, “You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.” ========== In-N-Out Burger (Stacy Perman) - Highlight Loc. 1640-44 | Added on Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 04:08 PM Also around 1973, Harry purchased In-N-Out’s first mobile cookout trailer. Gleaming and portable, the trailers were small In-N-Out Burgers on wheels. They contained refrigerators and grills and could be rented for parties and events. When a store lost power or needed a supplemental grill, the trailers could be dispatched to just about anywhere. The net effect of the trailers was that they also helped to broaden the geographically limited chain’s footprint while providing a moving billboard as they traveled the Southland. In the years to come, hiring an In-N-Out trailer for a private event would come to be seen as sign of cool all over Southern California. ========== In-N-Out Burger (Stacy Perman) - Highlight Loc. 2274-77 | Added on Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 04:04 PM Like his father, Rich shared in the belief that running a successful fast-food business was not about cutting corners or about purchasing the right equipment. What it boiled down to was people management. Where the two differed, however, was that while Harry had hoped that his associates would work hard at In-N-Out, save their money, and then move on—perhaps even to open their own fast-food businesses (as a few of them did)—Rich had a different vision. ==========