Frank Rich writes: STOP the presses! This election isn’t about the Clintons after all. It isn’t about the Acropolis columns erected at Invesco Field. It isn’t about who is Paris Hilton and who is Hanoi Hilton. (Though it may yet be about who is Sarah Palin.) After a weeklong orgy of inane manufactured melodrama labeled “convention coverage” on television, Barack Obama descended in classic deus ex machina fashion — yes, that’s Greek too — to set the record straight. America is in too much trouble, he said, to indulge in “a big election about small things.” …

As has been universally noted, Obama did what he had to do in his acceptance speech. He scrapped the messianic “Change We Can Believe In” for the more concrete policy litany of “The Change We Need.” He bared his glinting Chicago pol’s teeth to John McCain. Obama’s still a skinny guy, but the gladiatorial arena and his eagerness to stand up to bullies (foreign and Republican) made him a plausible Denver Bronco. All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.

But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech — each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the “the most important of his career” — has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day’s replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year’s story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.

At the Democratic convention, as during primary season, almost every oversold plotline was wrong. Those Hillary dead-enders — played on TV by a fringe posse of women roaming Denver in search of camera time — would re-enact Chicago 1968. With Hillary’s tacit approval, the roll call would devolve into a classic Democratic civil war. Sulky Bill would wreak havoc once center stage.

On TV, each of these hot-air balloons was inflated nonstop right up to the moment they were punctured by reality, at which point the assembled bloviators once more expressed shock, shock at the unexpected denouement. They hadn’t been so surprised since they discovered that Obama was not too black to get white votes, not too white to win black votes, and not too inexperienced to thwart the inevitable triumph of the incomparably well-organized and well-financed Clinton machine.

Meanwhile, the candidate known as “No Drama Obama” because of his personal cool was stealthily hatching a drama of his own. As the various commentators pronounced the convention flat last week — too few McCain attacks on opening night, too “minimalist” a Hillary endorsement on Tuesday, and so forth — Obama held his cards to his chest backstage and built slowly, step by step, to his Thursday night climax. The dramatic arc was as meticulously calibrated as every Obama political strategy. …

Despite our repeated attempts to see this election through the prism of those of recent and not-so-recent memory, it keeps defying the templates. Last week’s convention couldn’t be turned into a replay of the 1960s no matter how hard the press tried to sell the die-hard Hillary supporters as reincarnations of past rebel factions, from the Dixiecrats to the antiwar left. Far from being a descendant of 1968, the 2008 Democratic gathering was the first in memory that actually kept promptly to its schedule and avoided ludicrous P.C. pandering to every constituency.

Nor were we back at Aug. 28, 1963. As a 14-year-old in Washington, I was there on the Mall, taken by my mother, a tireless teacher, with the hope that I might learn something. At a time when the nation’s capital, with its large black population, was still a year away from casting its first votes for president, who would have imagined that a black man might someday have a serious chance of being elected president? Not me.

But even as we stop, take a deep breath and savor this remarkable moment in our history, we cannot linger. This is quite another time. After the catastrophic Bush presidency, the troubles that afflict us on nearly every front almost make you nostalgic for the day when America’s gravest problems could still be seen in blacks and whites.

As Obama said, this is a big election. We will only begin to confront the magnitude of our choice when and if we stop being distracted by small, let alone utterly fictitious, things. (08/31/08)
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Barrack Obama speaks: Tonight,
more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less.
More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home
values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit
card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your
reach.

These challenges are not all of government’s making. But
the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in
Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

This
country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of
retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a
lifetime of hard work.

This country is more generous than one
where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he’s worked on for
twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as
he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his
family the news.

We are more compassionate than a government
that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into
poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns
before our eyes.

Tonight, I say to the American people, to
Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land -
enough! This moment - this election - is our chance to keep, in the
21st century, the American promise alive. …

I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this
office. I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career
in the halls of Washington.

But I stand before you tonight
because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers
don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s
been about you.

For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one
by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand
that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same
old politics with the same old players and expect a different result.
You have shown what history teaches us - that at defining moments like
this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes
to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it -
because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new
politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments. (08/30/08)
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BBC Anthropological Science – The remote Amazon river basin was once home to densely populated towns and villages, Science journal reports. This part of the Amazon, once thought to be virgin forest, has in fact been touched by extensive human activity.

Researchers found traces of a grid-like pattern of settlements connected by road networks and arranged around large central plazas. There is also evidence of farming and wetland management, including possible remains of fish farms. The settlements are now almost completely overgrown by rainforest.

The ancient urban communities date back to before the first Europeans set foot in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon in the 15th Century.

Professor Mike Heckenberger, from the University of Florida, in Gainesville, said: “These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns. They have quite remarkable planning and self-organisation, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism.”

Dam used to funnel fish into submerged weirs (Science) In modern settlements, dams are used to funnel fish into weirs Although the remains are almost invisible, they can be identified by members of the Kuikuro tribe, who are thought to be direct descendents of the people who built the towns. …

Each community had an identical road, always pointing north-east to south-west, which are connected to a central plaza. The roads were always oriented this way in keeping with the mid-year summer solstice.

Evidence was found of dams and artificial ponds - thought to have been used for fish farming - as well as open areas and large compost heaps.

The people who once lived in the settlements are thought to have been wiped out by European colonists and the diseases they brought with them. (08/28/08)
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George Monbiot writes: In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of
the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger
began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan
plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the
export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While
Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other
extravangances, “the most colossal and expensive meal in world
history”, between 12 and 29 million people died. Only Stalin
manufactured a comparable hunger.

Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food
grab. As Tony Blair’s favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created
the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he
is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in
Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit
Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world’s poorest
people.

Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes
from fish. Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it
sustains a population which ranks close to the bottom of the human
development index. One in six of the working population is employed in
the fishing industry; some two-thirds of these workers are women.
Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to
collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal’s stocks.

The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as
a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can
no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won’t
confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats.
The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to
West Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of
Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result,
Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours.
Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country’s
waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by European
trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run
by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.

In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing
families which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or
twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The
same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which
the EU has maintained fisheries agreements. In return for wretched
amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been
looted. (08/27/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: As the political conventions descend like the soggy forces of
nature they have become — the tropical depressions of politics — the
Republican party will be seen, with growing clarity, as the party that wrecked America.
So many shoes are about to drop, and so many dominoes lined up to fall
‘out there’ on the financial landscape that the thump and clatter of
crashing institutions will sound like the percussion section of the
renowned USC marching band as the nation tramps toward the general
election.

In a classic calm-before-the-storm moment, last
week’s momentous Jackson Hole monetary conference played out like
Sherlock Holmes’s “dog that didn’t
bark in the night.” The poobahs of global banking turned out in the
Grand Tetons to compare Gulfstream jets and show off their concho
belts, and that was about it. For all the massive turmoil in the
banking system, almost no real news leaked out of the conference, and
one was inclined to come to the unsettling conclusion that nothing came
out because absolutely nothing happened there — because absolutely
nothing can be done about the gathering calamity of capital.

At the moment, two of the biggest elephants in the room, so to speak,
are going tits-up with X’s where their eyes used to be. These would be
the “affordable housing” enablers Fannie and Freddie, who managed
during the past decade to make housing virtually unaffordable for any
normal, responsible person unwilling to game the system — with the
additional consequence that not only the housing market but the general
credit-and-lending apparatus of the US has entered a state of morbid
failure. These two corporations are now dead, incurring a legacy of
obligation that will add five trillion dollars to the national debt at
one stroke. Nobody knows what the exact results of this debacle may be
– and the current silence about it is deafening — but odds are the
effect will range somewhere between destroying the currency and
bankrupting the United States altogether. (08/27/08)
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BBC Anthropological Science – Early stone tools developed by our species Homo sapiens were no more sophisticated than those used by our extinct relatives the Neanderthals. That is the conclusion of researchers who recreated and compared tools used by these ancient human groups. The findings cast doubt on suggestions that more advanced stone technologies gave modern humans a competitive edge over the Neanderthals.

The work by a US-British team appears in the Journal of Human Evolution. The researchers recreated wide stone tools called “flakes”, which were used by both Neanderthals and early modern humans. They also reconstructed “blades” - a narrower stone tool later adopted by Homo sapiens.

Some archaeologists often use the development of stone blades and their assumed efficiency as evidence for the superior intellect of our species.

The team analysed the data to compare the number of tools produced, how much cutting edge was created, the efficiency in consuming raw material and how long tools lasted. They found no statistical difference in the efficiency of the two stone technologies. In some respects, the flakes favoured by Neanderthals were even more efficient than the blades adopted by modern humans. …

Professor Stringer, who was not connected with the study, added: “We know that the Neanderthals were very capable technicians, and that their tools would have been excellent for activities such as butchery, working skins or wood. However, the blade tools manufactured by early modern humans in Europe were often modified for specialisation as piercers, chisels or engravers, and as parts of composite tools, such as harpoons. With modern humans we not only find a greater variety of tools, but also much greater working of difficult materials like bone, antler and ivory.” (08/27/08)
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International Herald Tribune – Economic trouble has spread far beyond the United States to major countries in Europe and Asia, threatening businesses around the world with the loss of the international sales and investment that have become increasingly vital to their sustenance.

Only a few months ago, some economists still offered hope that robust expansion could continue in much of the world even as the United States slowed. Foreign investment was expected to keep replenishing American banks still bleeding from their disastrous bets on real estate and to provide money for companies looking to expand. Overseas demand for American goods and services was supposed to continue compensating for waning demand in the States.

Now, high energy prices, financial systems crippled by fear, and the decline of trading partners have combined to choke growth in many major economies. The International Monetary Fund expects global growth to slow significantly through the end of this year, dipping to 4.1 percent from 5 percent in 2007.

“The global economy is in a tough spot, caught between sharply slowing demand in many advanced economies and rising inflation everywhere,” the IMF declared last month in its official World Economic Outlook.

One consequence of the changing dynamics of the global economy is a small but significant shift in currency trading. The dollar has been strengthening against many currencies in recent weeks — not so much because of a new-found belief in American prospects, economists say, but because investors are edging out of markets that are weakening, like Britain and other parts of Europe, sending down the pound and the euro.

“It’s the rest of the world going down, not the United States going up,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at Harvard. …

As the United States and many other large economies slip in unison, the reality of integrated markets is being underscored: just as globalization spreads prosperity — linking cotton farmers in Texas to textile mills in China — the same forces spread hurt when times go bad.

“The slowdown has reached such a wide range of countries that they’re now feeding on one another,” said Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital.

The impact of the downturn is reflected by the experience of the Vermeer Corporation in Pella, Iowa. The company, which manufactures farming and construction equipment, has become accustomed to looking abroad for growth as the real estate bust in the United States has crimped purchases of its gear by American home builders. Its overseas sales have doubled in the last five years as a percentage of its total business and now make up nearly a third of its revenue, the company’s senior director of international sales, Steve Heap, said.

But in recent months, even as growth has continued over all, some parts of the world have sunk into malaise.

“The U.K. has been really soft for the last six months,” Heap said. “Western Europe overall has been flat. We’ve not seen the growth we’ve seen in the last few years.”

Many other major economies are either stagnant or shrinking as well. In Japan, whose fortunes are tethered to exports, the economy contracted at a 2.4 percent annual rate from April through June after accounting for inflation. Germany, another export power, slid at a 2 percent clip. France and Italy slipped slightly.

Spain and the United Kingdom — both grappling with hangovers from their own real estate binges — were both flat amid talk that they have already slipped into recession. The festivity of easy money has given way to recriminations over bad loans, unemployment and inflation.

“The year 2009 in Europe is going to look significantly worse than 2008,” said Marco Annunziata, chief economist at the Italian bank UniCredit.

Even China and India, whose swift growth has occasioned talk of a new global order, have been cooling in recent months, though still expanding at rates that would bring envy in nearly any other land.  (08/24/08)
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Bill Ellis writes: We belong to the Webs-of-being — to the Cosmos — to Earth — to Gaia.

Belonging is the protovalue from which all other values derive.

We
belong to the physiophere, to the biosphere, to the ideosphere. We
belong to Gaia. As the aborigines said it  “we are the ownees of the
land, not the owners of the land.” As Chief Seattle said it, “We can
not own the land, we are part of the land.” We belong to and are
inseparable from our culture– from one another –from Earth — from
Gaia. We are interdependent with all that is.

Belonging is scientific fact; and, belonging is more than scientific fact.

Belonging
is not merely “being a member of,” but it is being subject to — being in
partnership with — being responsible for. We belong to — are
responsible for — the webs -of-being — the universe — the Earth –
Gaia. Belonging to-Gaia means recognizing that we are enmeshed in the
webs-of-being and that our well-being is dependent on the well-being of
Gaia. If we destroy Gaia, we destroy ourselves.

Belonging
implies “cooperation” — working with what is — with Gaia — the webs
of being. Belonging implies “community.” In our face-to-face
relationships with people we form community — we belong to community.
Belonging implies “responsibility.” We are responsible for Gaia. We are
responsible for one another. Belonging implies “Love.” We can not
separate love (agape) from the fact that we belong to Gaia. We love
because we must love to preserve Gaia — to preserve ourselves — to
preserve the webs-of-being

Cultures built on values other than
belonging are doomed to self-destruct. A culture built on “domination
of the earth, and all the animals therein” is doomed to disappear. A
culture based on “self-interest” is doomed to disintegrate. A Culture
based on “survival-of-the-fittest” will not survive. A culture based on
competition will destroy itself.

To be stable and sustainable a
culture must be based on cooperation, community, responsibility, love,
honesty, caregiving, and the other values which are implied by and
intertwined with one another and with belonging.

We can no more
separate ourselves from belonging — from Gaia — and remain a viable
culture; than an oxygen atom can separate itself from hydrogen atoms
and retain the qualities of water. (08/21/08)
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Eugene Gholz & Daryl Press write: WHILE oil prices have declined somewhat of late, the volatility of
the market and the political and religious unrest in major
oil-producing countries has Americans worrying more than ever about
energy security. But they have little to fear — contrary to common
understanding, there are robust stockpiles of oil around the globe that
could see us through any foreseeable calamities on the world market.

True, trouble for the world’s energy supplies could come from many
directions. Hurricanes and other natural disasters could suddenly
disrupt oil production or transportation. Iran loudly and regularly
proclaims that it can block oil exports from the Persian Gulf. The
anti-American rhetoric of President Hugo Ch·vez of Venezuela raises
fears of an export cutoff there. And ongoing civil unrest wreaks havoc
with Nigeria’s output.

Even worse, this uncertainty comes in the context of worrisome
reports that oil producers have little spare capacity, meaning that
they could not quickly ramp up production to compensate for a
disruption.

But such fears rest on a misunderstanding. The world actually has
enormous spare oil capacity. It has simply moved. In the past, major
oil producers like Saudi Arabia controlled it. But for years the
world’s major consumers have bought extra oil to fill their emergency
petroleum reserves.

Moreover, whereas the world’s reserve supply once sat in relatively
inaccessible pools, much of it now sits in easily accessible salt
caverns and storage tanks. And consumers control the spigots. During a
supply disruption, Americans would no longer have to rely on the good
will of foreign governments.

The United States alone has just more than 700 million barrels of
crude oil in its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Government stockpiles in
Europe add nearly another 200 million barrels of crude and more than
200 million barrels of refined products. …

Make no mistake, any major disruption — from a war, a terrorist attack or a natural disaster — would make prices jump until markets realized that the pipes feeding crude into refineries were not going to run dry. But recognizing the great capacity of global reserves to weather disruptions will go a long way to minimizing panic.

Emergency reserves have their limits. They cannot free the industrialized world from the underlying economic fundamentals that drive energy prices. As the global economy grows, demand for energy will rise and oil prices may remain high.

Government-controlled stockpiles should not be used to try to smooth out short-term blips in global supplies, the normal variations that companies account for with their inventories and financial hedging. Public inventories are a blunt instrument designed to protect the oil market as a whole from major disruptions — national strikes, hurricane damage, wars and attempts at geopolitical blackmail. (08/21/08)
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Tom Engelhardt writes: It was probably all those afternoons at my local library when I was a kid, reading Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi version of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Foundation Trilogy,
and those nights under the covers with a flashlight — long after I was
supposed to be asleep — frightening myself to death with H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and the like. …

Still, even at my age, I continue to enjoy a glimpse into the future. Of course, so do the Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community. In fact, in recent years, they have practically taken out a copyright on the future. These days, they’re always producing scenarios for (and plans and weapons for) 2020 and beyond. As Frida Berrigan noted
at this site recently, most federal agencies “project budgets just
around the corner of the next decade. Only the Pentagon projects power
and possibility decades into the future, colonizing the imagination
with scads of different scenarios under which, each year, it will
continue to control hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Complex
2030, Vision 2020, UAV Roadmap 2030, the Army’s Future Combat Systems
– the names, which seem unending, tell the tale.”

But my feeling is: Why leave voyages into the future to them? Okay,
when TomDispatch writers look ahead, they only control budgets in the
low double figures, but still. …

Back in December 2006, I asked site regular Rebecca Solnit to bring
that year to an end by stepping into the nifty TomDispatch Compac 1221
Time Machine, just the basic model of course, and zipping forward to
the year 2026 in order to take a gander at the past we have yet to experience. She ended that post:

“The future, of course, is not something you predict
and wait for. It is something you invent daily through your actions. As
Mas Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first
century: ‘One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and
as one walks, a path comes into being.’ We make it up as we go, and we
make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more elegantly put it,
‘Walking we ask questions.’ What else can you do?

“Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to which we all belong.”

Solnit’s piece was so satisfying that, every time I noticed that snappy
little, all-red Time Machine in my closet, I was beset by regrets.
Fortunately, just this week, out of the blue — and the future — I
received the following report. Buckle your seat belts, you’re in for a
ride.  (08/21/08)
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