Titles such as Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization fill faculty bookshelves. It has also provided fodder for literature and films, most recently Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. There is a grim, irresistible appeal to this tale of central American oblivion. Recent events have injected a jarring note into Mayan studies: a sense of anxiety, even foreboding. Serious people are asking a question that at first sounds ridiculous. What if the fate of the Maya is to be our fate? What if climate change and the global financial crisis are harbingers of a system that is destined to warp, buckle and collapse? No one is suggesting that vines will start crawling up the concrete canyons of Wall Street, or that howler monkeys will chase pin-striped bankers through Manhattan. Mayan kings who screwed up were ritually tortured and sacrificed with the aid of stingray spines to pierce the penis; an emphatic application of moral hazard. In our era, the only thing slashed is a bonus. There are, however, striking parallels between the Maya fall and our era's convulsions. "We think we are different," says Jared Diamond, the American evolutionary biologist. "In fact . . . all of those powerful societies of the past thought that they too were unique, right up to the moment of their collapse." Complex and organised it may have been but Mayan society resembled a frog who stays in slowly boiling water. The environmental trouble built up over centuries and was partly concealed by short-term fluctuations in rainfall patterns and harvest yields. But when the tipping point came, events moved quickly. "Their success was built on very thin ice. Kings were supposed to keep order and avoid chaos through rituals and sacrifice," says David Webster, author of The Fall of the Ancient Maya. "When manifestly they couldn't do it people lost confidence and the whole system of kingship fell apart." Which brings us to modern parallels. Webster, watching the season's first snowflakes through the window of his office at Pennsylvania State University, has been waiting for the question. Pinned to his wall is an old clipping about the fall of Enron Corporation in 2001. "That was the first tremor," he muses. "You know, human beings are always surprised when things collapse just when they seem most successful. We look around and we think we're fat, we're clever, we're comfortable and we don't think we're on the edge of something nasty. Hubris? No: ignorance."
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NASA climatologist James Hansen has continued, in recent years, to offer the most useful projections of climate change, and the most outspoken interpretation of their meaning. Last December, in a paper delivered at the American Geophysical Union, he said that carbon concentrations in the atmosphere (currently 387 parts per million) were already above the safe line for preventing the possibility of the rapid rise of sea levels, shifts in monsoons, and other civilization-shaking disasters. We needed, he said, to take emergency action to push that number back below 350 parts per million. The only way to achieve that result, he added, was to close all coal-fired power plants in the next few decades, a truly monumental challenge. This summer's rapid melt of Arctic ice has served only to underline the magnitude of Hansen's challenge, and indeed new data released in late September showed that carbon emissions have grown even faster than the most dire predictions of the IPCC. (The new numbers, ironically, came during the worst week so far of the Wall Street crisis, and the financial meltdown served to blot out any discussion of the meltdown meltdown.) If the Chinese continue building coal-fired power plants for another decade while we wait for America to construct a shiny green city on the hill, the carbon load from those Chinese plants will force us toward many of the dangerous tipping points that Hansen and other scientists have identified in recent years. In that world, the rising seas will be lapping at the bottom of the hill, and the city up on top will be spending most of its dwindling capital dealing with the damage. The world's governments are now nearing a real deadline: December 2009, when a negotiation session in Copenhagen is supposed to produce a new climate treaty, the successor to the Kyoto protocols And there's no good reason to think that the planet needs America alone to be in the lead position-the Europeans and the Japanese have already done far more, with technology and with policy, to limit global warming, and if you visit China you know that the hotels are already full of foreign consultants and advisers on global warming. There is, therefore, no escaping the need for politics, for a robust international agreement that, among other things, commits America to sharing the burden for helping China and India develop without burning their piles of coal; building wind farms in Mongolia is even more crucial than in Minnesota. The controlling metaphor here is not the Manhattan Project or the Apollo moonshot; it is a Marshall Plan for carbons by which the global north makes up some of the difference between cheap coal and more expensive renewable energy for the global south-another possibility that has probably grown less likely as our financial strains have increased. But if the conventional wisdom doesn't line up behind such a plan soon, before the Copenhagen talks, then the chance will pass. Consider the words of a scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, who last year accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC, which he heads: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." Full essay available here
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So, any of you lurkers wrinkling your nose or rolling your eyes at my objection to the ad depicting a young "HAWT CHICK" with the tagline "Organ donation is probably your only chance to get inside her" is over-reaction? That it's "just an ad", that guys don't really think like that? That it's just fun and games? Well, go read this. - One third of boys believe "it's not a big deal to hit a girl".
- One in seven thought "it's OK to make a girl have sex with you if she was flirting".
- 350,000 girls aged between 12 and 20 – one in seven – had experienced sexual assault or rape.
- Almost one third of girls in Year 10 had experienced unwanted sex.
While I don't know the details of how the study was conducted, it found that one in seven boys thought it was ok to foce a girl to have sex if she'd been flirting. The ads aren't produced in a vacuum. I'm not going to spend forever pondering chicken and egg, suffice to say there are connections. You have teenage boys exposed to violence towards women in their home, boys having attitudes like this, you have advertising that plays into it, you have a culture of disrespect for women...and the result? That one in four women will be raped, women will be held responsible for ‘preventing' themselves being raped, as if the onus is on us, men will do jackshit, and society will continue to perpetuate disrespectful shit about women and not take rape seriously. Go on, tell me I don't have a sense of humour, I dare you.
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Obama says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama's election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting from America since 4 November but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the "bailout" of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war. Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama never said the illegal invasion of Iraq was wrong, merely that it was a "mistake". Thereafter, he voted in to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama's election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a liberal Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to "investigate" and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush's secretary of state, Powell was often described as a "liberal" and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice. Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an "Israel-first" Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians – an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people's loathing of the United States and the spawning of jihadism. The once respected Observer newspaper, which supported Bush's war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that "America has restored the world's faith in its ideals". These "ideals", which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children. Prior to Blair's criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. "Blair can be a beacon to the world," declared the Guardian in 1997. "[He is] turning leadership into an art form." Today, merely insert "Obama". As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way – liberal democracy's shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. "True democracy," wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, "is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you're meant to think and keeping your eyes wide open at all times."
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The UK Daily Telegraph advises its share-shocked readers that Sotheby's contemporary art sale in New York last week (11 November) defied fears of an imminent international art market collapse. These fears failed to materialise at the Sotheby's auction of 63 artworks where ‘the majority of bidders were American, raised $125 million, significantly below the $200 million presale estimate, but Sotheby's stressed that the estimate was set in September, before the financial crash.' The clearance rate was a modest 68 per cent but Sotheby's remarked it was "very happy" with the sale. The Outsider was pleased to see that one work by Damien‘dollar-thirsty'Hirst failed to get a bid. The Telegraph then goes on to say ‘The fact that so many works were sold below their estimates reflects Sotheby's success in persuading sellers to lower their expectations and adjust the minimum price they would accept.' Now either this is a fatuous piece of spin to rationalise a poor sale or the owners must have stolen the artworks in the first place. Maybe it's a bit of both. When Eli Broad a high roller among collectors, who spent $8 million at the sale, describes the auction as a "half-price sale" you know the world is nuts. One thing however you can rely on. Art is long and life is fleeting. Valuing beats valuation every time.
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The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write.
I know, you're thinking I'm going too far. I haven't always been wrong about everything. I recently made some sense on global warming and what we needed to do about it, for instance.
But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq - and ourselves - is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.
In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it's time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself. (My wife suggested that I try not to even form opinions, but I think she might have another agenda.)
Baffled? I don't blame you. So I'll cite some facts to support my decision - a practice, I must admit, I have too seldom followed.
Let's start with the invasion itself. I was pretty much all for it. Mind you, I was not one of the pundits, reporters, or public figures who said that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States. I knew better - but I said it didn't matter!
Back in February of 2003, I wrote in this space: "Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice - but it's a legitimate choice." In other words, we should invade a sovereign state and replace its government in order to remake the world more to our liking.
Now the simple fact is, an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state is a war crime, even when linked to grand ideas of the future of mankind. In fact, that's exactly what Hitler did, for exactly the same reasons. The Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal called it the "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
What was I thinking? And more importantly, why didn't anyone stop me?
But wait, it gets worse. Having expressed how acceptable it was to commit Hitler's signature crime, I then applauded the invasion of Iraq as an "audacious roll of the dice." It should have occurred to me that this gamble would be unspeakably painful for an untold number of Iraqis who had done nothing to us - in other words, any of them.
Soon, when it became obvious that my pipe dreams for a peaceful and democratic subject nation were just that, I decided to say it was too soon to tell how things would turn out in Iraq, but that we would definitely know in six months to a year. I said this pretty much every six months for five years. And The Times just kept giving me more and more column-inches.
I'm not trying to beat myself up here. I've done that plenty already, believe me - and my wife has done the rest! But I have one question: why are newspapers like The New York Times letting people like me make fools of themselves, mislead the American people, and, worst of all, give their wives a lifetime of ammunition?
To err is human, but to print, reprint, and re-reprint error-mad humans like me is a criminally moronic editorial policy.
Nor, of course, is it only me. Just consider who populates the opinion pages of America's top newspapers. Bill Kristol, who was actually hired by The Times long after being proven wrong on Iraq. Charles Krauthammer. Robert Novak. Mona Charen. Fred Barnes. The list goes on and on of officially-approved wise men (and a woman or two) who never once doubted that Iraq had vast stockpiles of W.M.D.s. And that's just in newspapers.
We were all wrong again and again - and the consequences were devastating. Can anyone tell me why any of us should ever be asked, let alone paid, for our opinions ever again? Or, for that matter, why Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz should be allowed behind any sort of desk whatsoever as long as they live?
Peace in Iraq will undoubtedly have many far-reaching consequences. As promised, I'm not going to speculate publicly about what they might be.
Except one. As of today, I'm putting down my pen, to take up a screwdriver. I am going to retrain as an engineer and spend the rest of my life working to build non-carbon-based energy technologies. And I'm going to spend a lot of time washing my hands.
. . read more
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Lex Wotton was sentenced to six years, with a minimum of two to be served for rioting with destruction.
Marcus Kapitza was sentenced to 12 months jail after pleading guilty to one charge of riot. Brent Lohman was sentenced to 11 months jail with a parole period of six months for repeatedly punching a man of Middle Eastern appearance in the head at Cronulla railway station. Yahya Serhan, a Lebanese Australian was convicted of one count of being an accessory after the fact of malicious wounding over an attack outside Woolooware Golf Club in Sydney's southeast on 11 December 2005, that ended when a knife snapped off in the victim's back. Serhan had acted as the "getaway driver" during the attack and was convicted in April 2007 to which he was sentenced to thirteen months jail with a non-parole period of nine months. However, he was released on the day of his sentencing as he had already spent nine months in prison. What is the difference between these men? Lex Wotton led a riot that caused no physical harm to a human being. Lex Wotton is also an Indigenous Australian. I'm fluctuating between being stoked the sentence was so much smaller than expected, and horribly depressed that we were forced to keep our expectations so low that this seems like a positive outcome. It's not.
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