The Agonist - Book Reviews

Review: Going Palin

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:47:00 -0800

I think that should be a new version of 'Going Postal:' Going Palin is when a wingnut politician goes off the deep end.

Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can't write, intended for an audience that doesn't read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn't think. God is dead.

Can I get a hallelujah?

The books cashing in on the crash

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:51:10 -0800

Sean O'Grady | Nov 20

The Independent - When the masters of the universe came crashing down to earth last year, the reverberations were felt far beyond Wall Street and the City. Sean O'Grady surveys the best of the books that explode the myth that greed is good

One of the few welcome consequences of the global recession has been a modest upsurge in economic literacy, or at least interest. That's not to be exaggerated; most people still don't know their asset-backed securities from the elbows, but at least we're making some attempt to redress that deficit of understanding.

No previous economic crisis has brought forth such a crop of words – over 3,000 new books, a few more reprints, trillions of column inches of newspaper, magazine and web pieces, official reports, not to mention a Facebook page devoted to "Recession Survivors" and those Twittering and blogging their way to an understanding of seismic changes. OK, it isn't much to throw into the balance when you have mass unemployment, the derangement of national finances and the destruction of the world's banking system on the other side, but at least we are creeping towards some acknowledgement of what went wrong, and why. That's something.

So, what to read? A bit like the bewildering complexity of "exotic derivatives" that helped to get us into this mess (and which the bankers themselves never understood), the choice seems endless. It really boils down to which of the three prevalent treatments of the crisis you prefer: the anecdotal, the analytical or the apoplectic.

Empires of The Silk Road

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:51:21 -0800

The publisher--they wanted me to review the book?!?-- recently sent me a copy of Christopher I. Beckwith's book, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. I've already read the book and have my own well worn, dog-eared, underlined and highlighted copy. So, the first person to email me at my personal email address--or a PM--I'll mail this copy to, if you are so inclined.

Book has already been claimed.

A Review For The Randheads

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:56:59 -0700

Now this is one funny book review:

The fact that this comparison (between central philosophy and doghouse blather) is so easily made is just one of the reasons why objectivism is a morally bankrupt, dilettantish, and fucking stupid way of thinking. People like it because it is the philosophical equivalent of college: a potentially meaningful but incredibly misused scaffolding that enables people to think, “Bitch, I do what I want.”

Read the rest here.

Brief Book Review

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:45:53 -0700

Early today I completed Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present by Christopher Beckwith. This is going to be a very brief review, but suffice it to say the book was erudite, well-written, insightful and an excellent revision of the tropes and stereo-types pervasive in Eurasian studies to this day. In the last several years I have become intimately familiar with literally thousands of sources, both primary and secondary on the region. If you have a decent foundation on the relevant literature of the period--400BC to roughly the late 18th century AD--and are interested in the area I cannot recommend this book enough. However, if you don't, this is not a good introductory work. It is dense. The arguments can sometimes seem abstruse and arcane. And the narrative is so wide in scope that one should really have taken an introductory course in the region just to keep up. There still is no standard one volume history of what is commonly called, "The Silk Road." This is unfortunate. Beckwith's book helps fill that role for specialists, but one is still, sadly lacking for the rest of us.

Bible - "handbook of bad morals"

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:57:11 -0700

Nobel laureate Jose Saramago:

The Bible is a manual of bad morals (which) has a powerful influence on our culture and even our way of life. Without the Bible we would be different, and probably better people

at the at the launch of his new book Cain - an ironic retelling of the Bible story of Cain, Adam and Eve's elder son who kills his brother Abel. AP

Islamist Terrorism, Past and Present

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:28:34 -0700

A review of Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, we were inundated by hysterical books which purported to give serious analysis of al Qaeda but which instead only added to our confusion – and also to our injudicious responses ever since. Leaderless Jihad was not published until well after the attacks and that is one of the reasons it is perhaps the most thoughtful book on al Qaeda and the social movement associated with it.

Though a psychiatrist, Sageman rejects a psychological approach to understanding terrorists. (A sign of an independent mind, this.) After going through his database of jihadists, he finds no personalty type or traumatic event that makes people heed the call to jihad. Nor does he see social context such as poverty to be helpful. Any such context is hopelessly vague and cannot explain why so many millions of people living in that context do not become terrorists.

Instead, he calls our attention to a middle ground between micro and macro explanations – social networks. It is within networks of émigrés from a particular locale, student groups, mosques, and internet communities that young men and increasingly young women, become jihadists. And it is these networks that provide fighters and plan and execute acts of terror.

His profile of jihadists is intriguing and often counterintuitive. They are not poor. They are most often from middle-class backgrounds, though the trend since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is toward poorer origins. They are not deeply religious. Indeed, many had relatively secular upbringings. As for the madrassa students we see swaying rhythmically as they recite the Koran, he notes that they tend to stay in their locale or perhaps go off to fight for the Taliban, who though militants, are not usually terrorists. Jihadists are not failures. Many have education and responsibilities to colleagues and families. Nor do they typically have criminal backgrounds, though there is an increasing trend toward criminal activity as fledgling terrorists get money for their attacks however they can. Inasmuch as the funds were once supplied by al Qaeda contacts, this suggests that the West has been successful in disrupting money flows.

So, jihadism is not based on psychological problems, social context, religiousness, or ignorance. Jihadism, Sageman finds, is based on moral outrage at injustices heaped upon fellow Muslims, chiefly in Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, and more recently, Iraq. Significantly, the initial US invasion of Afghanistan did not elicit outrage among Muslims, but the invasion of Iraq two years later, did.

Terrorist attacks today rarely come from foreign jihadists infiltrating a western country to attack, as with the September 11th events. The danger is more with homegrown terrorists, as attacks in Britain and Spain indicate. Europe faces more such terrorists than the US does – and for reasons that Sageman articulates. After the widespread death and destruction of the Second World War, Europeans brought in large numbers of Muslims (and other minorities) from their colonies to help rebuild. Foreign workers, many from Arab countries of North Africa, were unable to assimilate into European societies even after decades, and instead lived in urban ghettoes, generally disliked by the surrounding people. The US had no such postwar immigration; Muslims coming into the US are usually middle class if not professional; and most see the US as offering greater acceptance and advancement. For them, the American Dream is both attractive and attainable.

What to do about Islamist terrorism? Sageman argues that our military responses were wrongheaded. They increase moral outrage, encourage recruits for terror networks, and make jihadists into romantic figures. Instead, networks in the West and the Islamic world should be fought by intelligence and police work followed by non-sensationalized trials that present defendants simply as criminals, not as agents of an epochal, global movement. Western societies should work to reduce prejudice and arbitrariness directed against Muslims in the diaspora. And finally, the author recommends a good faith effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, which lies at the center of much of Islamist outrage, in and out of the Middle East.

~ ©2009 Brian M. Downing
Brian M. Downing is the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.

When a snowball hits the fan

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:41:37 -0700

Snowball's Chance, a follow-up to Orwell's Animal Farm.

It's many years after the events of Animal Farm. Napoleon and his successor Squealer have both died, and the farm is soldiering on in the hands of Minimus, the pig poet. Snowball comes back and institutes capitalism. This is a good thing. Or is it?

After being exiled from Animal Farm, a contrite Snowball returns insisting that he learned his lesson of excess and abuse of power and will harm no one. He slowly begins his means of taking over through "democratic" processes by promising if elected in charge he will reform the farm so that the animals will have plenty of pie and the stables will be heated and well lighted. No one will want under his enlightened leadership.

Snowball's reform succeeds so that newcomers from the surrounding areas begin to flock to Animal Farm for a taste of the good life. These refugees are given the jobs none of the old-timers want to do and live in the oldest dilapidated barns. The original loyal followers of Snowball move into choice property outside the crime ridden center. Snowball continues to expand Animal Farm bringing prosperity to his inner circle.

Winning a court case, Snowball gains control of the water rights. This leaves the Beavers with nothing but anger and frustration that leads to counterinsurgency with an opportunity to a better afterlife if they die for the cause of freeing the beaver woods.

Beavers = Islamic terrorists

Meet Omar bin Laden

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:48:09 -0700

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S son Omar first realized the depth of his father's evil when his beloved dogs were taken away and gassed in a chemical warfare experiment, he says in a new memoir { Growing Up Bin Laden. }

Omar also confirms what U.S. officials have long believed - that his father was tipped off to a 1998 U.S. attempt to kill him.

He writes that Bin Laden got a secret communication and fled his Afghan camp two hours before cruise missiles struck it.

He does not identify the source of the tip, which the U.S. suspects was Pakistani intelligence.

Omar's book, "Growing Up Bin Laden," written with his mother, Najwa - the Al Qaeda leader's first wife - describes the ultimate dysfunctional family.

The Bin Ladens lived austerely as their father staked his horrific claim as the world's most wanted man. His son eventually concluded Bin Laden hated his enemies more than he loved his family

For the Common Good -afterword

Mon, 11 May 2009 02:44:04 -0700

Yeah I've been remiss in posting thoughts as I've skimread my way through the book. But I got to the afterword: Money, Debt and Wealth in the revised 1994 edition and was particularly struck by this paragraph page425:

The logical contradiction between unlimited growth of debt and limited growth of real wealth is translated into a social conflict between the rentier (interest recipient) and worker. The conflict will take the form of debt repudiation. Debt grows at compound interest and, as a purely mathematical quantity, encounters no limits curb its to its growth. Wealth grows for a while at a compound interest, but having a physical dimension, it sooner or later encounters limits to further growth. The positive feedback of compound interest leads to the explosive growth of debt, which is met by counteracting defensive actions of debt repudiation, ie. inflation, bankruptcy, confiscatory taxation, fraud, theft- all of which breed violence.

fast forwarding to page 435:

the last thing (the banking sector) wants is for the government to leave the scene of the trainwreck.

We are waiting with bated breath down under, to see how much debt the federal government is budgeting for, when it releases it's budget Tuesday night.

One thing for certain: the huge surpluses from the mining boom over the past ten years are now but a shadowy memory.

Meanwhile, a quick glance at burgeoning fraud around the world: Japan , South Africa , UK & USA, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany, Greece, Russia, and frauds global summit meeting in HongKong.

Previous posts in forums

Blaxploitation, GOP Style

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:22:33 -0800

~by Russ Baker (Posted with the author's kind permission.)

With the Democrats set to break the White House color barrier, the GOP is attempting to crash the party. In the wake of Chip Saltsman’s “Barack the Magic Negro” mini-scandal—in which the aspiring Republican National Committee chairman sent out a music CD with the titular song to fellow Republicans—the GOP is stepping up efforts to stress diversity. A recent front-page article in the New York Times reports that two of the top candidates to become chairman of the Republican Party are African Americans.

In pushing these men forward, the Republican Party is seemingly attempting to shake off the parochial residue of the Bush years, and to share in Obama’s historic accomplishment. But the Republicans are in reality resorting to a tried-and-true W. tactic: the promotion of deeply compromised, often disreputable individuals—a kind of lemon diversity that only highlights their cynicism and contempt for the public.

One of Bush’s closest black friends is the former football player, professional wrestler and prison minister Ernie Ladd, who was put front and center at the 2000 Republican National Convention, and spoke at W.’s inauguration. In 2000, while the debate over the Florida outcome and the disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters there raged on, Ladd declared the election over, and criticized black leaders for “dividing this country.”

More after the jump.

In fact, members of the Bush clan have long sought to create an impression of broad-mindedness when the reality was otherwise. Grandfather Prescott Bush, who expressed less than flattering views about Italians in his hometown of Greenwich, CT, also sat on the board of the United Negro College Fund. Early in Poppy Bush’s political career, Poppy had gone after black votes in his 1960’s House and Senate campaigns, hoping to win enough to eke out a victory. Recalled Poppy’s friend and employee Bob Gow: “Most of the blacks in Texas were Democrats, but George had one prominent black man who was staunchly for him. This man had a tire distribution company…[that] was failing and George asked me to go and meet with this man…with the objective of helping them make the company prosper, if possible, but if not, at least stay solvent through the election.”

When George W. Bush was putting together his investor group to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team, appearances were very much on his mind. As Comer Cottrell, an African American hair products tycoon told me, “The first time I met George, he came up to my office and wanted to meet me and told me that he was wanting to have a true American diverse team partnership. He says, I would be his black partner, Afro-American. Then he had some Jewish people, and he had some European-Americans from Yale. Half the guys were from Yale.”

As George W. Bush scaled the political heights, he and his team deployed faces of color to imply a kind of egalitarianism and broad concern for all—a concern that seemed to vanish the moment he gained the White House. Moreover, he preached against affirmative action except in instances where it served him politically. Then he practiced the most morally repugnant form of it – the advancement of second raters to serve his own advantage.

The two most prominent African-American appointees, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, were without dispute major leaguers, but beneath them was a B-Team that was less than impressive.

Bush’s assistant on domestic policy was Claude Allen, a black Republican who had served as campaign spokesman for Sen. Jesse Helms, the man the Washington Post’s David Broder referred to as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.” Bush named Allen his policy assistant after Allen’s nomination for federal judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals stalled in the Senate. Allen resigned from his White House position in 2006, ostensibly to spend more time with the family—almost always a tip-off that something else is involved. Indeed, it soon came out that he had perpetrated a refund scam to swindle $5,000 out of Target and Hecht’s department stores. On at least 25 occasions Allen attempted to collect refund money on items he hadn’t purchased. At the time, he was the highest-ranking African-American on Bush’s staff.

Then there was Education Secretary Rod Paige, whose “Texas miracle” in education scores became a cornerstone of Bush’s 2000 campaign before being exposed as based on fraudulent numbers. Once in Washington, Paige strove assiduously to fit in, right down to his black cowboy boots. Bush basically ignored him. The New Republic noted that “In any Administration, the blatant marginalization of the only African American domestic Cabinet secretary would be noteworthy. In an Administration that loudly trumpets its commitment to Cabinet government and racial diversity it’s stunning…”

Bush’s high-profile African-American hires included also housing secretary Alphonso Jackson, whose inattentive and misdirected policies may have contributed to the collapse of the home mortgage market of 2008– a disaster that hit African-Americans especially hard. A front-page Washington Post article written the week Jackson left office characterized the secretary as a spendthrift who had a private chef and commissioned expensive personal portraits at taxpayers’ expense. His office also spent $7 million on a new auditorium and cafeteria at Housing and Urban Development headquarters. “How can you spend that much money on building a shrine to yourself?” asked the vice president of the fiscally conservative National Taxpayers Union. Meanwhile, said the Post, Jackson repeatedly ignored warnings from his colleagues that his easy-credit policies on mortgage loans were putting poor families at risk. Perhaps the most striking fact about Jackson—generally ignored by the media—was that Bush’s housing chief quietly exited the administration right in the middle of the housing crisis. That few noticed this embarrassing departure was in itself telling.

The irony was that Bush, an opponent of affirmative action designed to help the deserving, was using his own distorted form of it to reward the dubious for their loyalty—and, just as important, for their complicity in helping to perpetuate a myth.

Consider the current African-American candidates for chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor, benefited in his unsuccessful 2006 US Senate campaign from an election-day operation in which men were bused to voting stations in heavily African-American precincts to hand out flyers painting Steele as a Democrat.

Even more interesting is Kenneth Blackwell, who served simultaneously as Ohio Secretary of State and chairman of the Bush reelection campaign in Ohio in 2004. During that election Blackwell labored diligently to put obstacles in the way of black voters. While running for Governor in 2006, he oversaw restrictive new regulations that included making voter registration canvassers (who work mainly in lower-income and Democratic-leaning neighborhoods) criminally liable for any irregularities on their rolls. After the regulations went into effect, the number of registration cards collected dropped dramatically, from 7000 to 200 per month. But as George Will put it in a 2006 column, Blackwell “appeals to blacks by being black.”

Promoting candidates of this caliber as the new face of the Republican Party is blatant hypocrisy: the GOP skewers the Democrats for identity politics, then indulges in the most counter-productive forms of it. This opportunistic ploy should be seen as what it is: an insult not just to black Americans, but to all Americans.

Russ Baker is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. For more information on his book and the research behind it, please visit www.familyofsecrets.com. As an award-winning investigative reporter, Baker has a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at www.whowhatwhy.com.

Ebola alert shuts Angolan borders

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:01:39 -0800

Jan 6

BBC -

The authorities in Angola say they have closed the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to prevent the spread of the deadly Ebola virus.

Angolan officials said all movement of people from northern Luande Norte province to DR Congo would be stopped.

The outbreak in DR Congo was the first in Africa in several months and the fourth in DR Congo since 1976.

It is believed to have infected at least 40 people of which more than ten have died.

A tale of two books

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:40:20 -0800

The pictures of vanity and part two of the same article the oxford project.

Unjust Deserts: Book Review

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:53:51 -0800

Like a law of physics, corrupt politics, unshared national wealth and uncontrolled greed combine to produce economic inequality and delusional prosperity. Now comes a book that should have been titled Stolen Wealth. This would have been more consistent with its long subtitle: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back.

In today’s world of economic crashes and calamity it comes to this: Should there be higher taxes on the richest people in society? Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly make a very sound case that considerable research demonstrates that a huge fraction of the success of the wealthiest people results from inherited knowledge that society at large owns. The incredible economic inequality we see today, therefore, is morally unacceptable.

If President-elect Obama and his many economic advisors buy into the intellectual arguments presented in this book, which is very likely, then we can expect a strong push for higher rates of federal taxation on the highest incomes and capital gains, as well as on accumulated wealth by higher inheritance taxes. This book presents the central argument for such public policies, namely the incredible importance of inherited knowledge accumulated over long periods that forms the basis for financial success by some individuals. Their smartness, creativity and hard work cannot explain their disproportionate wealth. It largely results from inherited, accumulated knowledge from the past.

According to this understanding, it is not so much about redistribution of wealth from the richest people to everyone else, it is more about the morally correct and necessary action to rectify the unjust and immoral ownership of wealth that a relatively small fraction of the population has improperly (though legally) attained.

What Americans need to be told by politicians is that “ever-increasing knowledge, accumulating across the generations, is central to the creation of all wealth,” according to the authors. Therefore the proper role of government is to ensure that many more people get some of this wealth. And the practical way to do this is through higher taxation of the unjust deserts now enjoyed by the Upper Class.

Looking at this another way: the economic decline of the middle class and the expansion of the working poor result from all these unjust deserts. All the unshared wealth that has resulted from inherited knowledge that a few people have managed to unfairly benefit from. This has produced rising economic inequality and increased economic suffering by so many Americans.

This is not the easiest book to read because it is written in an academic rather than a populist style. Nevertheless, for anyone that wants better justification for “taxing the rich” public policies it is essential reading. Another good title for the book would have been: Battling Economic Injustice.

Indian satellite captured by Moon

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:03:14 -0800

Nov 8 UPDATED 11/14

BBC - India is celebrating the arrival of its Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft at the Moon.

An 817-second burn from the probe's engine on Saturday slowed Chandrayaan sufficiently for it to be captured by the lunar body's gravity.

The craft is now in an 11-hour polar ellipse that goes out to 7,502km from the Moon and comes as close as 504km.

Further brakings will bring the Indian satellite down to a near-circular, 100km orbit from where it can begin its two-year mapping mission.

Launched on 22 October, Chandrayaan is India's first satellite to break away from the Earth's gravitational field and reach the lunar body.

The mission will compile a 3D atlas of the lunar surface and map the distribution of elements and minerals.

Related link: Chandrayaan

Update November 14: “The Chandrayaan-1 team is over the moon”