Book Note

Before The Dawn: recovering the lost history of our ancestors by Nicholas Wade (The Penguin Press: New York, 2006)

Earlier this year I read Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and was rewarded with another reminder of how thin my understanding of our hemisphere's history is and how much new knowledge is being added by multiple disciplines. Here was a whole new world to be explored.

Nicholas Wade's book is another must read for those of us educated before the impact of the decoding of DNA had begun. He attempts to summarize what we have learned based on contemporary genetics combining it with the vast base of earlier research from paleoanthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and other fields.

Wade opens the book with a great little story about how genetics has determined a probably date for when human beings first began wearing clothing. Based on the fact that body lice are descended from head lice and show a special adaptation specifically providing body lice with the means to hang on to the fibers of our clothing, genetics is able to date our adoption of clothing to be about 72,000 years ago "give or take a few thousand years".

While discussing the evidence for the paths of human migration away from the African homeland, Wade mentions that the biggest region for the paucity of physical data is that because we were in glacial period, seal level was some 300 feet lower than today. Thus, since early humans would have followed the coast line to be close to a ready source of food, their early habitations are now well below water.

I won't attempt to summarize the book. Rather I urge you to retrieve it from your local library.

Thoughts on the future in Iraq

As we wait to see whether the Congress can get out of its rhetorical way and actually do something to force Bush to back away from his escalation policy in Iraq, I am struck by many different thoughts and impressions of the mess we have made.

The civil war in Iraq continues to gain force. New views of the multi-layered political religious, ethnic, clan bases of the strife come into view even from here via our poor media feeds. Now I am understanding how insufficient the terms Shia, Sunni and others so frequently used to sum up the situation in our media and government are. Each of these groups that I might otherwise think to be fairly unitary are actually composed of internally conflicted religious and clan based divisions now apparently at war even against their nominal brothers in arms.

Over the last weekend we had the reports of the large battle with the "Soldiers of Heaven", a splinter group of Shia who were reported to be preparing to assault other Shia in nearby Najaf. According to a BBC sketch, this group held some end of time beliefs involving the reappearance of some religious figure from over a thousand years ago(smells a bit like some of the craziness among Christian loonies over interpretations of the last book in the New Testament, Revelations). The exact rationale for the assualt by these Soldiers of Heaven on their brother Shia is unclear to me.

Nevertheless, I sense a jungle of religious conflicts that we can hardly perceive. Perhaps we if inflame and arm some of the many sects of Christianity so commonplace in the US and then put them into a social environment with much chaos and little countervaling threat of force from a government, we could envision some small part of what might be true in Iraq.

The recent surge in violent rhetoric out of the White House directed at Iran has brought my gaze up to the regional perspective. Somehow I have a hard time imagining the Sunni powers in the region, like Saudi Arabia, standing by while a Shia dominated puppet government in the Green Zone works with US troops to suppress the Sunni minority in Iraq's western provinces and in greater Baghdad. This of course is one of the intents of the new Bush policy. Couple this up with the natural conflict between the Sunni conservative countries (Saudi Arabia in the lead) and Shia Iran multiplied by the ethnic frictions between Arab and Persian......

You can see where this line of thinking is headed. Pile on top of these incendiary potentials the temptation of the Bushites to try to distract the US from Iraq by rousing up the thuggish spector of nuclear tipped President Ahmadinejad in Teheran. What a mess.

It is hard for me to imagine how all of this will be resolved. It is only clear that we have created an enormous mess in Iraq, now spreading about the region. Nothing good will come of this and most assuredly many more people will die and the law of unintended consequences will be demonstrated on a grandiose scale.

Noam to the Best Seller List

photo by Raimin Talaie/Bloomberg News

Just in case you missed this little drama, here is an article from the New York Times. Once again we are also reminded about how boring Alan Dershowitz is.

September 23, 2006
U.S. Best Seller, Thanks to Rave by Latin Leftist
By MOTOKO RICH

All the authors currently clamoring for a seat on Oprah Winfrey’s couch might do well to send copies of their books to the latest publishing tastemaker: Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.


Ever since Mr. Chávez held up a copy of a 301-page book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and left-wing political commentator, during a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, sales of the book have climbed best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com, the online site for the book retailer Barnes & Noble, and booksellers around the country have noted a spike in sales.

The paperback edition of “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” a detailed critique of American foreign policy that Mr. Chomsky published two years ago, hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list yesterday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6. At both Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, sales of the title jumped tenfold in the last two days.

“It doesn’t normally happen that you get someone of the stature of Mr. Chávez holding up a book at a speech at the U.N.,” said Jay Hyde, a manager at Borders Group in Ann Arbor, Mich.

In his speech, in which Mr. Chávez excoriated President George W. Bush as the “devil,” he held up a copy of “Hegemony” and urged his audience “very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it.”

Calling it an “excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century,” Mr. Chávez added, “I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.”

Julia Versau, 50, a real estate writer in Valparaiso, Ind., said she saw Mr. Chávez holding up the book during a newscast on CNN. Although she had read Mr. Chomsky’s work on propaganda at least a decade ago, she said, Mr. Chávez’s speech reminded her to try the book.

“I saw the title and I went darn, I haven’t read that one,” Ms. Versau said in a telephone interview. “If he’s reading that I better go check it out.” She said that she had previously found Mr. Chomsky’s work “a little dense,” but said that “our democracy could use more people telling the truth and more people taking the time to read and get themselves educated.”

Mr. Chomsky, who has retired from teaching full time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did not return calls or an e-mail message yesterday seeking comment. In an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, he said he would be happy to meet Mr. Chávez.

Demand for the book seemed to be spread across the country. In Florida, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller with locations in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Bal Harbour, said he had already ordered 50 more copies of “Hegemony,” while he usually keeps only about 3 per store. In Denver, Andrea Phillips, a manager at the Colfax Avenue branch of the bookseller the Tattered Cover, said “Hegemony” had sold three times as many copies this week as it normally would in a month.

On the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, Rainbow Books, a workers’ collective that specializes in leftist topics and carries many of Mr. Chomsky’s works, the last copy of “Hegemony” was sold on Thursday.

Allen Ruff, a manager at Rainbow Books, said “Hegemony” had not sold particularly well when it was first published three years ago, because many regulars were already familiar with Mr. Chomsky’s other works. But Mr. Ruff said the recent news media attention has meant that “people are now discovering him for the first time,” and the store has ordered a dozen more copies.

Mr. Chomsky’s publisher, Metropolitan Books, a unit of Henry Holt & Company, is printing an additional 25,000 copies of “Hegemony,” of which it said there are currently 250,000 in print in hardcover and paperback. A Holt spokeswoman said that print run could go higher after consultation with booksellers.

Up until now, the book, which Samantha Power, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2004, called “a raging and often meandering assault on United States foreign policy,” has been a steady seller but never hit the best-seller lists. To date it has sold about 66,000 copies in hardcover and nearly 55,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks bookstores and other outlets that usually account for 60 to 70 percent of a title’s sales.

Mr. Chomsky, 77, is hardly an obscure writer. Many people have heard of the outspoken professor, who is a darling of the left, even if they have not yet read his work. “I think Chávez speaking to it renewed interest and made people say, ‘I know that author and I’m going to check it out,’ ” said Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising at Barnes & Noble.

But Alan M. Dershowitz, the lawyer and Harvard Law School professor, said he doubted whether many of the current buyers would ever actually read the book.

“I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a Chomsky book,” said Mr. Dershowitz, who said he first met Mr. Chomsky in 1948 at a Hebrew-speaking Zionist camp in the Pocono Mountains where Mr. Dershowitz was a camper and Mr. Chomsky was a counselor.

“You buy them, you put them in your pockets, you put them out on your coffee table,” said Mr. Dershowitz, a longtime critic of Mr. Chomsky. The people who are buying “Hegemony” now, he added, “I promise you they are not going to get to the end of the book.”

He continued: “He does not write page turners, he writes page stoppers. There are a lot of bent pages in Noam Chomsky’s books, and they are usually at about Page 16.”

Regardless, most authors would be happy for a plug like Mr. Chávez’s. “All world leaders should be enlisted in book publicity,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster.

As a matter of fact, it is a growing trend. At a press conference in the East Room of the White House yesterday, Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, dodged a few questions by joking that Simon & Schuster, which is publishing his memoirs on Sept. 25, had barred him from commenting until his book is out. President Bush played along: “In other words, ‘Buy the book’ is what he’s saying,” Mr. Bush said.

Internet Dreamings

When the Web first came onto my screen in the '90s, it seemed like a place with a future substantially without historical precedence in its apparent immunity from government and corporate interferences. It was frequently referred to as the "new wild West" with cyber-cowboys and thugs. The technology appeared inherently democratic if not fundamentally anarchic. It was clear that commerce would appear, but the hope flourished that participation and access would be open and relatively cheap.

Recent years have brought on government efforts to control the Web. Most prominent is the so-called Great Firewall of China. Though even a quick glance at reporting (see, for example The Open Net Initiative) on government control over the Web reveals a slew at work. No surprise, big corporations have been supporting the reported 40,000 people at work in China keeping the government safe from its citizens. So, we have learned that the technology of the Web is hardly robust enough to withstand the efforts of repressive governments.

And, further, we have the emergence this year of efforts by the big corporations in the telecom field to pass laws that will enable them to control content on their pipelines. This could easily lead to a N-tiered system of speed and access driven by these pipeline companies. Verizon, AT&T, and so on.

Time to get busy fending off these twin challenges to the most important change in human communications since Gutenberg.

Beyond Words

Our national politics has left me beyond words for months now. An executive branch so mired in its own arrogance and lies that to begin to speak of it would require something like the cataloging of the ships in the Illiad. A legislative branch floats $100 tax rebates in response to energy problems decades in the making. A whole region of the country that appears still a wasteland almost nine months after a major natural disaster with no effective government action in sight.

But today I was bouyed by the presence of our President in action defending the country's borders.

More White House Health Care Rhetoric

Today's (April 6th) New York Times Op-Ed piece, "The Health of a Nation" by Mr. Alan Hubbard, assistant to the president for economic policy and director of the National Economic Council, made a number of claims concerning healthcare that seem to require supporting data if we are not to interpret them as coming from someone living in a different reality than the rest of us:

"Health care is expensive because the vast majority of Americans consume it as if it were free. Health insurance policies with low deductibles insulate people from the cost of the medical care they use so much so that they often do not even ask for prices. And people don't recognize the high premium costs of this low-deductible insurance because premiums are paid by employers."

These three sentences leave me feeling the hot breath of rhetoric and wondering how he might support these assertions with some fact-based research?

First, we have the claim that health care is expensive simply because of the behavior of us consumers. Where is the role of insurances companies sucking up a widely reported 15-20% of the cash for the administrative costs, or drug companies allowed to waste unconscionable amounts of money on marketing because they can pass this along through a patent-protected rip off system, or countless technological advances providing better treatments and longer life, or toher structural drivers to health care?" Then, in the same sentence, there is the assertion that we "... consume healthcare as if it were free". There is no way for him to know this except based on some social science research. Where is it?

Ditto for the second assertion.

And, as for the third, that "people don't recognize the high premium costs...", this claim can only have come from someone on the White House or university payrolls so long that like Bush The Elder he can't remember the last time he bought a gallon of milk or looked at the health deduction on his weekly paycheck. But, just in case he might be right here, it would be helpful to see a little supporting data here also.

But, then, we just have to wait for the "free market" to solve this one too. Religion always relieves us of the need to do the hard work of research and thinking.