Reading

Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson.

The great relief he gives comes in two flavours: things have indeed changed, changed utterly; he has a name for the disease, and it accounts for all the symptoms we see around us now. The disease is militarism (the worship of war and its weapons and accoutrements, its headlong destruction), and it has always been the deadly enemy of democracy.

And, as occasional relief from the austere comforts of Johnson, I am also reading The Red Queen*, by Phillipa Gregory. She's very good – and the covers of her Tudor novels have delicate lacework of red or silver foil tudor roses in a kind of Moorish arch across the top. They gleam when you tilt the book and the light glances off them. Whatever else falls, light still falls.

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*Which is something of a tour de force. Gregory takes this vain, ambitious, cold, narrow woman – cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd by her gender and circumstances, married off at 13 to Owen Tudor, half a country away, whose circumstances do not enlarge or gain in freedom until the Battle of Bosworth – and makes us see her. We pity her at times. Often, in fact. But in her cold, narrow, unlovely way, Margaret repels our pity. She is, finally, the mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII - as far and overtly above our pity as she always thought she was.

Gregory is very good. And no slouch at power relations.

The Karate Kid remake

11.13.10

The U.S. is now officially a client state. I saw it for a certainty when I watched The Karate Kid remake. Dre's mother had to go to China for a job.

That feeling of no bottom to my stomach was fear.

We've watched and lived through an epochal shift in geo-political power, and that moves the foundation of even an individual's identity.

You absorb the major power relations of the world as a cognitive and emotional foundation, a major indication of your place in it; and you do that when you're very, very young.

Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 2

Because Matt Taibbi has found the real budget, and we need to know about this steady, continual, corrosive looting of public wealth before the fact, not after.

A Weekend on the Couch: Balm for a Bad Back

The Bourne Identity – a man betrayed into redemption by his own unexpected, unsuspected compassion.

Michael Collins – a man who hates war and waste wages the first urban guerilla struggle, expels an occupying power from his country, and creates peace.

Red Cliff – An alliance of defenders defeats an invasion.

Ah... Integrity asserted, defended, discovered, maintained. Yes.

Candles for the darkness

For the darkness, candles.

David M. Koch and The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies (NOVA)

The Monarch butterfly migrates northward from high points on the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico in three stages. Three generations, living about two months each, each migrate northward before dying. The third generation reaches southern Canada. The fourth generation of caterpillars migrate southward through the eastern United States, taking about two months, eventually arriving at the species' winter shelter in the Sierra Madre. The first three generations live about two months each; the fourth lives about nine months.

In that area of the Sierra Madre the indigenous people welcome the butterflies' return each year with a festival incorporated into the Day of the Dead. The butterflies are said to be the returning spirits of their ancestors. This has happened for generations, the people, who are small farmers, the forest, and the butterflies co-existing in a balance. This part of the forest has been made a National Sanctuary.

One of the last points in the documentary is that this forest is now being logged to such an extent that it and the butterflies are now both endangered. The World Wildlife Fund pays locals to be informal wardens and prevent the logging. But the trees are cut down in the middle of the night and, as one of the WWF wardens said, "You don't want to meet these people. They will kill you."

On its face this didn't make sense. There had to be a third factor in this situation that NOVA hadn't mentioned.

Why is there so much more logging now? The WWF warden said that it was people "who couldn't meet their needs" who were doing the logging. So – very poor people.

As a result of NAFTA and its own corruption, the Mexican government stopped giving subsidies to Mexico's small farmers some years ago. As corn prices rose because the U.S. government subsidised ethanol for fuel, poor Mexican farmers were priced out of the corn market. The market in white bread and noodles, the cheaper, less nutritious subsitutes, is largely owned by Archer Daniels Midland.

This is missing third factor.

NOVA went nowhere near it – Archer Daniels Midland is a corporate underwriter of PBS, the entity which buys NOVA nature documentaries.

During the opening credits there are thanks to corporate sponsors of NOVA, among them David M. Koch. Who at the moment is doing his best to destroy both the butterflies and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which airs material from PBS).

On its face this doesn't make sense. There must be some third aspect.

In the film there is one very short sequence where a butterfly is caught in a spider's web. The wings are caught and stuck, splayed and beautiful and helpless. The butterfly is effectively paralyzed. And then the spider comes and wraps the butterfly up in its own organic cling-wrap, and hauls it off (up, out of the frame) to be eaten.

That's what David M. Koch was doing, along with many other corporations / billionaires, sponsoring programming for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Paralyzing it, keeping it unable to utter certain truths before moving to defund it entirely (wrapping it up in a complete lack of budget), and hauling off (up, out of our frame of reference) to be dissolved.

Libya

So the military-petroleum complex is getting itself another satrapy. Rapidly-advancing rebels from the east; Gaddafi losing his grip; the MPC saw its chance.

Libyan oil will go on flowing north and west, into the profit-columns of the war machine.