Ducks, Rice and Bird Flu

The Food and Agriculture Organization reports that chicken are not the main agents in the spread of avian influenza in South-East Asia. It's ducks and rice paddies.

Research in Thailand, Vietnam and other countries of the region, the agency says, indicates that the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus is spread mostly by ducks flying around post harvest paddy fields in search of left over grain. FAO experts say in a paper published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States that flights of free range ducks have been strongly linked to outbreaks of bird flu. Their findings are based on research in 2004-2005 which used satellites to map the movements of birds and linked them to outbreaks of disease. According to FAO, its experts now have a much better idea of when to expect outbreaks of avian flum and can plan preventive measures. Evolution of the H5M1 virus may also become
easier to predict.

An estimated 90 per cent of the world's 1.044 billion domestic ducks is in Asia, with China and Vietnam accounting for 775 million of the birds. Thailand has some 11 million ducks.

Cures for Iraq Without Diagnosis

In the Washington Post today Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser (to Jimmy Carter) and first head of the Trilateral Commission secretariat, has a prescription to end the war in Iraq. Like all three candidates for the presidency of the United States, he offers a cure without a diagnosis. None of the movers and shakers has yet said why the United States is in Iraq.

Obviously, it is not because Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or a program to develop them; and there are few who believe that the hard-eyed neo-conservatives of the Bush administration initiated the Iraq adventure to spread democracy in the Arab world.

What then?

The closest Brzezinski comes to an answer is when he says "The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for 'staying the course' draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of 'falling dominoes' that were used to justify continued US involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier."

The comparison with Vietnam is misleading, for there is nothing comparable to the fear of international communism actuating American foreign policy. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was in no danger of falling to jihadist Islam; nor is such a fear realistic today; "al-Qaeda in Iraq" wouldn't last long in a post-occupation situation dominated by the Shiite majority and Sunni tribal leaders intensely protective of their turf.

Nor is fear of Sunni-Sh'iah carnage in a post-US Iraq an acceptable explanation for continued occupation of the country. If Washington announced today that it intended to pull out of Iraq and that it wanted an international force to oversee the transition, the rest of the world would be eager to help. That is not happening because continued conflict is enormously profitable to a handful of corporations and people; and it's not just military contractors: look at the balance sheets of the major oil companies. The geopolitical situation the war has created also benefits the same interests. Unless there is a public debate about all this, clearly identifying who loses and who benefits from the situation in Iraq, we are unlikely to see the path to peace.

Spitzer, the Sub-prime Mess, and China

New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer's spectacular fall from power because of a cheesy sex scandal is cast in an entirely new light in a new Brasscheck TV posting that's definitely worth a look:

 http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/291.html

Brasscheck TV is alleging that Spitzer did not merely trip on his own dick but was taken down because of an article he had in the Washington Post on 14 February, accusing the Bush administration of being a "partner in crime" in the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Spitzer said that the Justice Department had prevented action by the legal authorities of 50 states to curb predatory mortgage lending. It had invoked an 1863 banking law to nullify state laws and law suits to protect consumers.

Brasscheck TV concluded its report by saying that the White House had colluded with greedy and corrupt bankers in search of a quick buck; the implication was that the motivation was essentially financial. But could it be more? Could there be political method in the madness of the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

The answer is Yes. In fact, since Alan Greenspan began lowering interest rates to get the US economy out of the post 9/11 recession, there has been a descent into economic madness that can only be explained as politically motivated. The sub-prime mortgage mess has two elements: one is that people with little capacity to repay were given mortgages; the other is that the mortgages were then packaged into investment grade securities. That in itself can be explained away as greed overwhelming reason. But how was it that financial maestros in the United States and Europe invested so massively in those securities? Surely, greed is constrained by the foundation it is built on, self-preservation?

There is much evidence that bankers with the most sophisticated capacity for economic prognostication were the ones who plunged most deeply into the sub-prime mess. Stories about the extent to which major banks, insurance companies and hedge funds are burdened with bad debt invite disbelief. The New York Times reports on an arcane form of risk insurance in the bond market has led to an inverted pyramid of obligations amounting to $16 trillion. Another piece of punditry ricocheting around the the Internet notes that the funds available to the FDIC, which guarantees individual bank deposits, are only about a quarter of what would be needed in case of a general financial collapse. The ratio of American personal debt to GDP is reported to be the highest it has ever been, standing now at some $3 trillion; if mortgage debt is included, personal debt is over $13 trillion, almost as much as the $14 trillion GDP. The entire international financial system seems more and more like a ponce scheme ripe for collapse.

How is this political?

To understand how, we have to look to Asia.

I am among the many who do not believe that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 in an idealistic neocon attempt to bring democracy to the Arab world. Nor do I believe that the mess created under American auspices in Iraq is the result of ignorance and miscalculation. To me the bloody dismantling of the country seems coldly calculated. "Stuff happens," as Donald Rumsfeld put it, but for it to happen so consistently, and not just in Iraq, points to deliberate intent. The saber rattling over Iran and persistent talk of attacking its nuclear installations, the worsening situation in Afghanistan, the traumatized state of Pakistan reeling from terrorist attacks and political assassinations, the political fragility of Nepal in the aftermath of a brutal civil conflict, the insurgencies perking away in parts of India rich in resources or strategically important, and now the insurrection in Tibet, all seem to support the thesis that Asia is being destabilized.

To what end?

It might be to pull the rug out from under the totalitarian regime in China.

In a stable world economy, with peace in Asia, China would grow into a formidable and dangerous power. If the world economy tanked and there was general turmoil in Asia, Beijing would have little room for maneuver; key decisions on investments and exports are now made in the board rooms of foreign corporations. If the Chinese boom turned rapidly to bust, if there was massive unemployment accompanied by inflation or deflation (both possible under different scenarios), Hu Jintao and his party could lose the "mandate of heaven" in very short order.

How events will actually play out depends crucially on the responses of Asia's ruling elites. A firm commitment to avoid violence, to seek dialogue and compromise internally and externally, could lay the basis for a regional capacity for independent economic growth. This is especially true of China. If the regime there moves towards democracy in orderly fashion -- Tibet would be a good place to start -- the consequence would be enormously positive. If it tries to maintain itself with violence, we could be looking at a period of chaos, not just in China, but in the region as a whole. A global economic downturn and the major dislocation of China would seriously threaten the stability of South East Asia and India. Much of the Muslim world is already in turmoil, and things could get rapidly worse amidst growing regional distress.

In the scenario described above the United States and Europe would also be profoundly affected, but for them there would be an upside: the economic and political challenge of Asia would be laid to rest for the foreseeable future. It is possible that slowing economic growth and depression-level unemployment could cause upheavals in Europe too. The Kosovars, the Chechens, the Serbs, Croats and other volatile people in the European mosaic might feel the need for cathartic violence in the "Clash of Peoples" scenario outlined in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs (see post of 2-25-08). Social unrest is possible in the United States too, but if things tend that way the Patriot Act provides the means to maintain order.

Those who want peace, civil rights and democracy better start organizing right away (see my post of 2-20-08).

Wind-power Rankings

Wind power supplies a small but rapidly growing proportion of world energy supply. According to Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, "global installed wind power capacity will top 100,000 megawatts in March 2008." http://www.earthpolicy.org/Indicators/Wind/2008.htm.

The Institute says in a new report that the "cost of onshore wind power has decreased by more than 80 percent since the early 1980s to roughly 7¢ per kilowatt-hour at favorable wind sites." Wind is now competitive with conventional power generation in some markets, but in most others subsidies for conventional energy sources makes it uncompetitive. "If the full cost of carbon emissions were incorporated into the price of natural gas and coal, onshore wind would become the cheapest electricity source."

Some highlights of the report:

Germany leads the world in installed wind power capacity, with 22,200 megawatts, but it seems to have run out of offshore sites for installation of new capacity while other countries have scope for rapid growth. In 2007 the United States, Spain, China, and India installed more new capacity than Germany.

The United States installed a quarter of the world's new wind energy capacity in 2007: 5,240 megawatts. Spain was second, with 3,520 megawatts, and it now ranks third in the world in total installed wind capacity with 15,100 megawatts. India installed 1,730 megawatts of new wind power capacity in 2007, for a total of 8,000 megawatts. China installed 3,450 megawatts of wind capacity for a total of 6,050 megawatts.

France, which aims to generate 25,000 megawatts of wind energy by 2020, got off to a running start in 2007 with a 57 percent increase in captity, to 2,450 megawatts.

Displaced Iraqis: Image and Reality

Although the issue of Iraq has subsided from public consciousness in the United States because "the surge has worked" and attacks on American troops have been dramatically reduced, things have hardly gone back to normal for Iraqis. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that five years after the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, "more people than ever before are displaced from conflict and sectarian violence" in Iraq. Increased media attention to the return of refugees and displaced people to their old neighborhoods has created the impression that the situation has improved, but in reality, returnees are only about one per cent of those who fled.

"Although the rate of displacement has slowed over the past year due to improved security in cities such as Baghdad and to sectarian cleansing of previously mixed neighborhoods, there are now more 5.1 million Iraqis who are either displaced within Iraq or are living as refugees abroad," IOM says. Of that total, 2.7 million are Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and more than 2.4 million are refugees, most of them living in neighboring Syria and Jordan. These numbers represent successive waves of displacement: those who fled their homes to escape persecution by the Saddam Hussein regime, those who fled the American-led invasion, and those who fled the chaotic sectarian violence that followed. The third wave was the largest, peaking in 2006, when more than 60,000 people per month were fleeing their homes.

IOM says that conditions for the displaced have worsened over time. Shelter, food, and employment for IDPs and refugees remain in very short supply because of "a major lack of funding for humanitarian relief." A two-year IOM appeal to assist Iraq’s internally displaced is still only 28 per cent funded. Over 75 per cent of IDPs do not get government food rations, and nearly 20 per cent are without clean water; 33 per cent do not get the medical help they need. Only 20 per cent has received any assistance from a nongovernmental organization or an international humanitarian agency.

None of Iraq's provincial authorities has the capacity to deal with the situation, and some have refused to accept any new flows of displaced people. Neighboring countries "have imposed strict visa requirements that also restrict Iraqis from fleeing the country."

Drug War Idiocy

"The only thing worse than a fool is an earnest fool" said Mark Twain, and the living proof of that is Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC).

A longtime mid-level UN bureaucrat who skipped his way to the level of Under-Secretary-General by detouring his career through the OECD, the European Commission and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Costa has a Roberto Benigni capacity to sound utterly sincere saying the most absurd things.

In 2006, for instance, he turned up at NATO headquarters in Brussels, convened a Press conference, and called on the multinational force in Afghanistan "to destroy the heroin labs, disband the open opium bazaars, attack the opium convoys and bring justice to (sic) the big traders." It didn't seem to matter to him that a week earlier NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had said publicly that such a role was out of the question because the alliance lacked both mandate and resources. Actually, the multinational force in Afghanistan can barely protect itself, much less try to dismantle a fiercely guarded industry that produces some 90 per cent of the world's heroin supply.

Costa was in fine fettle also at the meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna last week. In his opening speech to the CND he argued against the "legalization" of drugs, referring inaccurately to the view of many experts that decriminalization of the drug control regime would deflate the profits to be made from trafficking to a level at which organized crime would no longer have an incentive to be involved. That argument has come from people across the political spectrum, from the late lamented William Buckley to ex-narcs to the leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The breadth of opposition to the existing international drug regime reflects the variety of concerns at what has been happening ever since the effort to ban narcotic drugs began in 1909 with the first International Opium Convention. The ban was thought to be necessary to stop the opium trade pioneered by the East India Company, which had created a very large body of opium addicts in China, but it proved entirely counterproductive. The corporate interests involved in the trade merely submerged it into a hugely profitable international black market for drugs, with annual proceeds now estimated to be between $500 and $600 billion.

Organized crime, national intelligence agencies, and corrupt politicians and police have been the main beneficiaries of that enormous flow of money. The main losers have been ordinary people who have to contend with drug pushers targeting their children, and addicts driven to crime to pay for their habit. Efforts to enforce the ban have led to ever more invasive surveillance, draconian anti-drug laws and sentencing guidelines, and weakening of civil liberties. A third of the American prison population is serving time on drug related charges.

The cost to taxpayers has been massive. As the Washington Post reported in February, the White House has asked for over $14 billion for the Drug Enforcement Agency in 2009, two-thirds of that to be spent on enforcement activities. The DEA expenditures are only a fraction of drug-war related costs incurred by 25 other government agencies, and Congress has asked the administration to resubmit a more transparent statement. There has been mounting concern in Congress at the lack of success of enforcement.

Unperturbed by such realities, Costa declared at the CND that the prohibitionist approach was a great success. It was perceived as a disaster only because of an "image problem," he said. As evidence of success he cited the following:

• "illicit drug use has been contained to less than 5% of the world adult population, as opposed to 5 to 6 times this proportion for people addicted to tobacco or alcohol;
• "there are no more than 25 million problem drug users - that's less than 0.5% of the world "population. There are more people affected by AIDS;
• "deaths due to drugs are limited to perhaps 200.000/yr, namely 1/10 of those killed by alcohol and 1/20 of those killed by tobacco;
• "world-wide, drug cultivation has been slashed (with the obvious exception of Afghanistan where the issue is insurgency, more than narcotics);
• "adherence to the international drug control regime is practically universal, with the principle of shared responsibility unanimously accepted;
• "the regulatory system of production, distribution and use of drugs for medical purposes, functions well."

He then proceeded to gut his own argument. The "fundamental objective of the [anti-drug trafficking] Conventions, namely restricting the use of controlled substances to medical purposes" had not yet been met, he said. "Yearly, world markets are still supplied with about 1.000 tons of heroin, another 1.000 tons of cocaine and untold volumes of marijuana, cannabis resin and ATS. Furthermore, while trying to seize these rogue amounts (with varying degrees of success), the drug control system has created a number of (let's call them) unintended consequences." Those "unintended" consequences were the huge international black market in drugs, the booming expense of enforcement efforts, and the social costs of their continued failure.

"Drugs are not dangerous because they are illegal: they are illegal because they are dangerous," Costa said. "In general, a hard-to-tackle problem cannot be spirited away by making it a matter-of-fact. Human trafficking is another crime out of control: should we legalize modern slavery just because it is difficult to stop? As I told a rowdy pro-drug conference in New Orleans a few months ago, legalization of an anti-social behaviour is a poison pill, not a silver bullet. It is a dangerous dialectic to call for a world of free drugs as opposed to a world free of drugs: they come with different degrees of collateral damage. With vision and resources we can enforce the UN drug conventions in a manner that, on balance, represents by far the healthiest and the safest option."

By conflating commercial promotion with decriminalization Costa obscured the reformist argument; by comparing the trafficking of drugs and human beings he muddied the moralities of both. But worse was to come. Appearing before a nongovernmental forum at the CND, he recalled a meeting on drug control reform he had attended in December: “I attended the meeting of the Drug Policy Alliance [DPA] in New Orleans last December, 1200 participants, 1000 lunatics, 200 good people to talk to. The other ones obviously on drugs.” He didn't realize that most of the sober people listening to him were also at the New Orleans meeting.

Editor of Slate at Columbia J-School

Jacob Weisberg, who edits Slate, the award-winning general interest web magazine, has a more than passing resemblance to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. He is at Columbia University's Journalism School on 6 March, delivering the latest of the Delacorte Lectures on magazine journalism.

Weisberg has been with Slate since its founding in 1996, serving as political correspondent and columnist before becoming editor. Before Slate he wrote for the New Republic, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. He co-authored with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin the 2003 book In an Uncertain World. He also wrote the 1996 book In Defense of Government, the 2000 eBook The Road to Chadville, and several books on Bushisms.

Among Weisberg's many credits, says moderator Victor Navasky, is that at Yale he declined an invitation (from John Kerry) to join the Skull and Crossbones secret society -- on the grounds that it would not admit women. His brother "wrote a book about the CIA;" and his mother was also "a literary figure." Navasky does not expand on that, but googling later I find that Weisberg's mother, Lois, was a major arts and culture figure in Chicago, whose 1999 profile in The New Yorker began: "She's a grandmother, she lives in a big house in Chicago, and you've never heard of her. Does she run the world?" Brother Joseph Weisberg is a former CIA agent who wrote the critically acclaimed novel An Ordinary Spy (December 2007).

Weisberg begins the lecture by calling up on the screen behind him a computer-generated image of Slate. Founded in 1996 as a web publication. From the beginning it has been "a native speaker of web." That was a distinct advantage over print magazines struggling to adapt. Web style is different from print. It is less formal, more personal, a "cross between an expository print essay and e-mail;" there's humor in it, a certain intimacy with the reader; online readers treat writers like people they know. At Slate some readers have an established presence; one specializes in finding mistakes; "he's the only fact-checking we have. "Post-publication fact-checking."

The online medium is not friendly to long articles; if you have a long piece it must be broken up. But short pieces add up. Slate "puts out the equivalent of a short book every week." The medium does allow innovations like group blogs; links within an article can nest a a great deal of information, different perspectives. The medium is addictive. Slate's daily report on what's in the newspapers is an addictive element; so are its videos, offering crisp, short, humorous takes on stories, always with a point. One on Hilary was downloaded 400,000 times.

Journalists of the future will be able to write articles and code, work with developers to convey information in new and innovative ways. Slate staffer Chad Wilson produced a new feature: "Map the Candidates," using Google Maps. Weisberg calls it up on the screen. You can also map correspondents, know where they are, where they've been. Some reporters now file "twitters" from cell phones, each fewer than 140 words. There's a strange haiku affect, but the story gets through. News about Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly misbehaving at an Obama event came through first as a twitter. The New York Times has labeled it "micro journalism."

There is constant innovation online. An example is The Root, a new launch that allows readers to input genealogical data, and see where it leads. One tool on the site allows African Americans to input DNA information and "reverse the middle passage" -- find out where in Africa their ancestors came from.

Answering a question about the ideal length of web articles, Weisberg says short is better; but "long form journalism" is not excluded; it has to be presented in shorter bits. There's been an extended dialog on Slate about the HBO series The Wire; probably 25,000 words by now. Another book-length effort is "Blogging the Bible," which intends to cover every chapter and verse.

Questions about the model for successful online magazines brings some obvious responses -- no printing costs, all the money can go towards content and design -- and unearths some unexpected revelations: "investigative journalism doesn't fit closely with what we do." News gathering is very expensive, and it is not something Slate has contemplated. In the beginning -- 1997 -- Slate was available only to subscribers. It had 20,000 readers. It is now owned by the Washington Post Company and offered free to a much larger readership. Advertising pays for it. Slate makes money.

Who reads Slate? About 85 per cent of readership is within the United States; the rest is mostly expatriate American or other native English speakers. The number of readers ranges from 500k to 1.5 million a day. There are about 10 to 11 million unique users per month.

After the presentation I go up and ask Weisberg if Slate tries to put a frame on the world as print magazines seek to do. He seems momentarily nonplussed, so I explain. Do you try to make sense of the world for your readers? Define what is important? Foreign news? He still seems puzzled, so I get really concrete. Does Slate, for instance, try to cover Africa? Oh yes. We have a Foreign Editor. We've had quite a few articles on Africa.

I checked for foreign content in Slate all week. There was little. Maybe because of all the excitement generated by Geraldine Ferraro's novel insight into the role of race in presidential politics, or the crash and burn of Governor Spitzer's political career.