[1] Like the rest of the world, the mob only became interested in cruise ships after the 1977 premiere of The Love Boat—bad timing, since the FBI was then in the middle of an investigation of the International Longshoremen’s Association and already had wiretaps and informants in place. By the time the mob got untangled enough to make a move, the cruise industry had outgrown its reach. <<
[2] Cruise ships have, on average, crew members from sixty different countries. The cruise lines like to sell this as a happy byproduct of Let’s watch World Cup! globalism, but in reality the practice dates to a 1981 sit-in by the predominantly Honduran and Jamaican crews of two Carnival Lines ships that were docked in Miami. Standard practice now is to not allow any single nationality to make up more than 5 percent of a crew, and to have as many officers as possible be of the same nationality—ideally one that speaks a language that most crew members don’t understand, like Greek. <<
[4] The underlying problem is that cruise lines aren’t generally subject to labor laws, human rights laws, environmental laws, or healthcare regulations (or taxes, for that matter), because most of their ships—even the ones that operate solely out of American ports—are registered out of Panama, Bolivia, or Liberia. The last time anyone tried to do anything about this was during the Clinton administration, at which time the situation was judged too entangled with world trade issues to fuck with. <<
[5] I don’t actually say “Rec Bill.” “Rec Bill” is just a nickname I’ve started using because I keep hearing him referred to as a “reclusive billionaire.” <<
[8] Rec Bill’s wealth, as I understand it, comes from a piece of “underware” he bought for ten thousand dollars from a classmate in high school and then licensed to every computer operating system ever made. It allows computers to calculate time in binary as opposed to in the 60/60/24/7 system. <<
[11] Although I did see a UFO once. I was rotating through the Yucca Indian reservation during med school and one night I was lying on my back on top of a mesa you weren’t supposed to go on because it was sacred, and I saw something classically saucer shaped race upward across the stars. I rolled over to follow it, and as the angle changed I realized it was just a low-flying bird with white wings and a white bar across its chest. I’m still disappointed. <<
[12] This turns out to be a simplification. General Christopher C. Andrews did go there in 1902, and did argue the case for preserving the Boundary Waters to Teddy Roosevelt. However, the closing off of large portions to motorboats and airplanes didn’t happen until decades later. It was still being debated in 1949, for example, when people opposed to the ban (because they owned or worked for deeply placed hunting lodges that could only be reached by boat or plane) bombed the house of an outspoken guide and environmentalist who thought—correctly, it turned out—that a ban would increase rather than diminish the area’s appeal as a tourist destination. <<
[14] I’ve also seen the back of his neck, which has the remnants of acanthosis nigricans, a skin condition that for unclear reasons correlates with abdominal cancers. Clearly I should have just told him this, both for ethical reasons and because it might have saved a lot of trouble later, but apparently I’m too much of an angry dick. And besides, I’d already given away the thing with the painting. <<
[15] The Singularity Movement is a bunch of wealthy computer people who believe that when computers become sentient it will be possible to interest them in extending the life spans of wealthy computer people. It’s something you get involved in when you don’t have any problems left that are real. Or at least that are fixable. <<
[16] The issue is that David Locano, a former lawyer for the Sicilians and Russians, has a deal with both mobs where they keep trying to find me and kill me, and he keeps refusing to testify against them—even though that means he rots in supermax at the Florence Federal Correctional Complex in Colorado. I put him there, but that’s not why he wants me dead so badly. He thinks I killed his fuckhead son. Which I did, three years ago, and would happily do again.
It’s kind of a détente, because if the Russians or Sicilians ever do manage to find me and kill me, Locano will no longer have any reason to keep his mouth shut. Whereas if they stop seriously trying, and Locano finds out about it, he’ll turn state’s just to be able to get out and come after me on his own.
The obvious solution, it seems to me, is for someone to get off their mafia asses and have Locano whacked in prison. But it’s possible the Feds have realized this, too, and have him too well protected. If that’s true, and I were the Sicilians and Russians, I would probably try to take me alive to retain a bargaining position. Then again, Locano’s son tried that once, which is how this whole mess got started. <<
[18] Like most people raised on American movies, I have poor access to my emotions but can banter like a motherfucker. <<
[19] That they’re deluded racists who will vote their rights away to any plutocrat willing to name-drop Jesus. Just as conservatives blame poor people for not being wealthy, progressives blame them for not being educated. <<
[20] I listened to some early Bob Dylan a few months after having this conversation, and it seemed full of ambivalence about being from Minnesota. For example, “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, has a spoken introduction that sounds like something Sarah Palin would say: “Unlike most of the songs nowadays are bein’ written uptown in Tin Pan Alley—that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays—this, this is a song, this wasn’t written up there. This was written somewhere down in the United States.” But when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out, Dylan had been living within walking distance of Tin Pan Alley for two years. <<
[21] Zagat’s on a Greek place I used to go to in Ozone Park: “You’ll ‘shop for guns stolen from luggage at JFK’ at this ‘intimate’ ‘bazaar for sociopaths,’ but you may want to ‘Bring your own food from the chicken place next door’ and ‘Borrow your neighbor’s Purell.’ ” <<
[22] How I know this: Information for this exhibit, as well as for Exhibit J, comes from personal interviews and from testimony and surveillance transcripts included in the unsealed (public) redaction of Final Report of the Grand Jury in Re The People of the State of Minnesota, Plaintiff, v. Schneke et al., Defendants (CJ 69-C-CASP-7076). <<
[24] I stuck around these people, by choice, literally until they started trying to kill me. It’s something I like to think about whenever I feel that some shitty thing that’s just happened to me is anything other than justified. <<
[25] Factors believed to increase the success rate of tooth reinsertions: minimal time outside the mouth, transport of the tooth in an appropriate medium (ideally cold milk, next best the patient’s saliva), and minimal trauma to the root while cleaning the dirt off of it. <<
[26] The singular of “triceps” is “triceps,” because “triceps” means “three heads,” referring to how the muscle splits at one end into oh, shit, I drifted off there. “Biceps” and “quadriceps” are similar. <<
[28] “Pint glass”: 470 ml in the U.S., 570 ml in the U.K. (Britain’s not on the metric system either, which is why the pickup line “Funny how it’s ‘Gonna give you every inch of my love’ even though Britain’s on the metric system” doesn’t work as well there.) So Violet may be onto something. <<
[29] Although as someone who, in strictly medical capacities, has hauled my share of corpses around, it never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is to move someone who’s sleeping but alive—and therefore still balancing—than someone who’s actually dead. Moving a dead body is like moving a futon. <<
[35] I still don’t know. Autopsy privacy laws vary by state and are complicated by the fact that the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 protects in perpetuity the privacy of any medical conditions the patient had while alive. Which, it seems to me, would include whatever it was the patient died of. Wasn’t every victim of a fatal bow-hunting accident once just some geek with an arrow sticking out of him? <<
[36] This is evolutionary biology talk, but it’s interesting.
There are two great schools of junk science in evolutionary biology. One is people claiming to know the specific environmental pressures that led to the development of complex zoological phenomena, like when psychology textbooks say that people hate mimes because striped shirts set off our ancestral fear of tigers. Although that happens to be true. The other is people claiming that complex zoological phenomena can arise without any environmental pressures. Like when biologists call something a “spandrel.”
Technically, a spandrel is an evolutionary side effect—a trait that comes about not because it raises the likelihood that an organism will reproduce its genome, but as the result of the development of a different trait that does raise that likelihood. Ronald Pies calls a spandrel “a kind of genetic hitchhiker that does nothing to improve the ride.” It’s not that spandrels aren’t real, because they probably are, the classic example being nipples on men—which serve no known evolutionary purpose, so may only exist because nipples are beneficial on women, and get formed at such an early stage of fetal development that it’s easier to just hand them out to everyone. (The same argument used to be made about orgasms in women. I am but the messenger.) Usually, though, identifying any specific trait as a spandrel just means you’ve been too lazy to work out the real reason it evolved. (Or that you’re up to something worse. The history of people trying to judge human traits as either contributory or not to some idea of evolutionary “progress” is horrible, with individuals judged to have “decadent” or “degenerate” traits inevitably labeled as parasites—“a kind of… hitchhiker that does nothing to improve the ride.” Things that have been labeled as evolutionarily useless even though they clearly aren’t include grandparents, gay people, and the appendix.)
The appeal of spandrels, I believe, is that if things can exist that have a looser-than-usual relationship with cause and effect, then maybe things can exist that have no relationship with cause and effect. Which would mean they were outside reality, and therefore magic. Terms like sublime, supernatural, paranormal, epiphenomenal, etc. do their best to make this sound legitimate. But objects outside reality can’t be studied. And objects mistakenly thought to be outside reality, then shown to actually be within it, instantly become as boring as everything else. By definition, the Beyond stays out of reach. <<
[37] Namely yellow, orange, and red respectively. The presumed benefit being that leaves that reflect more (and absorb less) IR are less likely to catch fire as they dry out. Still, see the footnote here. <<
[40] Treating STDs on a cruise ship is mind-blowing. It’s like an episode of Iron Chef where the special ingredient is genitals. <<
[41] The role of the security guards is strictly to observe, in case a lawsuit is filed later for which the cruise line needs friendly witnesses. <<
[42] I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t the Aryan Brotherhood—who, sure, want you dead, but only on principle—famous for contracting prison hits to outsiders?” Well, yes, and they’re also famous for fucking those contracts up. If the AB couldn’t kill Walter Johnson in Marion for $500,000 from John Gotti, are they really going to kill David Locano in Florence for $85,000 from me? Plus, come on—sometimes you have to vote with your dollars. <<
[43] Here’s how I know Chris Semmel Jr. and Christine Semmel were good parents: they didn’t name their only child something with “Chris” in it. <<
[44] Guest Footnote by Violet Hurst: Actually, only about half the trees in the Boundary Waters have been logged. The reason the trunks of the trees are so skinny is that the area has a natural “burn cycle” of only 122 years, meaning that if the forest were left alone, every part of it would randomly burn to the ground, mostly from lightning strikes, during a period averaging 122 years. The Dakota and Ojibwe peoples managed to live in the Boundary Waters without changing the length of the burn cycle at all, but Europeans shortened it to 87 years through accidental and intentional fires, and then, with modern fire-fighting techniques, lengthened it to 2,000 years. Predictably (in hindsight), a 2,000-year burn cycle has even worse unintended consequences than an 87-year burn cycle, in the form of things like out-of-control insects and plant diseases. Current thinking is that the original 122-year cycle should be restored, but no one knows how to do it—particularly without aggravating the government-subsidized logging industry that still operates in the unprotected parts of the National Forest. You sniffed your fingers? <<
[46] I’m not going to get too far into official and unofficial terminology used by the U.S. Navy in the Vietnam War (according to which, for example, Rear Admiral Norvell G. Ward was the CHNAVADGRU, for “Chief, Naval Advisory Group”), even where I’ve been able to sort it out. But here are the essentials:
“Ruff-Puffs,” or RF/PFs, were the South Vietnamese Regional Forces / Popular Forces, i.e., the guerrillas who fought for the South as a kind of counterpart to the Viet Cong. According to Reggie, they were required to get tattoos saying “Sat Cong” on their chests to prove their loyalty—“Sat Cong” meaning, depending on the translation, either “Kill communists” or “Boy am I fucked if the North wins this war.”
A “shitcan” was an STCAN—a boat made by Services Techniques des Constructions et Armes Navales for the French, then transferred to the Americans when the French fled.
A “commandement” was the shitcan that the commanders of a RAG (River Assault Group) rode on.
“Dai-uy” was the South Vietnamese Navy rank equivalent to lieutenant.
And the Cuu Long Giang, aka d?ng b?ng sông C?u Long (“Nine Dragon River Delta”), aka “Cool and the Gang,” was the Mekong Delta. The Delta is at the southern end of Vietnam but was vitally important to the war because most of South Vietnam’s population and rice production were there. Since Vietnam is crescent shaped, the more-or-less-straight “Ho Chi Minh Trail” from Hanoi in the North to the Cuu Long Giang in the South cut through Laos and Cambodia, which is the reason the United States gave for bombing those countries. <<
[48] Psychos are at heart just people who think they’re smarter than everyone else. If they’re wrong it’s a debilitating condition, because education and hard work are galling to them, yet being exposed as unexceptional enrages them. The ones who are actually clever, though—as long as they stick to fields that prize social manipulation and high self-esteem over technical skills—can do anything. <<
[49] “MMVA” must be some kind of motor vehicle accident—“marine” or “moving” or something. Probably not “moving.” What kind of motor vehicle accident doesn’t involve something moving? <<
[50] Don’t get your hopes up. The history of human cryogenics is gruesome, particularly if you’re a Ted Williams fan. There are cases where children have survived without breathing for up to two hours in very cold water, but these seem to have been due to a combination of simple refrigeration and a circulatory response known as the mammalian diving reflex—which in humans, for unknown reasons, falls off sharply after early childhood. <<
[51] Particularly the fantasy I’ve been having where Violet and I are sitting on chaise lounges on what used to be a ninth-floor balcony but is now a landing on what amounts to a private bay because the waters have risen and the world has ended, and she and I—there’s also a parrot around, I might as well say—are playing gin with creased cards and drinking tropical drinks. After which we go inside so I can chase her tan lines across our mysteriously cool sheets. <<
[52] It may seem strange that a former criminal who’s dropped out of the federal witness protection program still has contacts in the Justice Department. But when I first entered WITSEC someone inside the U.S. Marshals’ office tipped off David Locano, who then murdered my girlfriend. And I would dearly like to find out who that person was. <<
[53] When I say I have almost no curiosity about her, I of course exempt the question of how she came to quote Westbrook Pegler in her 2008 speech accepting her nomination as Republican candidate for vice president. (Pegler, a racist so crazy he was expelled from the John Birch Society, wrote among other things that it is “clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry,” and—in 1965—that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter [Robert F. Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”) But since Palin has said that she didn’t write the speech, which she gave six days after meeting John McCain for the first time in person (and, according to some sources, as little as forty-eight hours after McCain chose her as his running mate), and since Palin doesn’t seem to have quoted or mentioned Pegler on any other occasion, the questions raised by his appearance in her speech—Did she know what she was saying? Did anyone? If they did, what did they mean by it, and what audience did they expect to understand that meaning?—aren’t exactly personal. <<
[55] This is what being Jewish has come to, by the way. Everyone you meet either believes the myth that Israel is an apartheid state built on land stolen from the Palestinians and given to European Jews by the U.S. and U.K. to make up for the Holocaust, and wants it destroyed, or believes it but wants Israel to stick around long enough to spark the Zombie Apocalypse. Either way it’s unpleasant. <<
[60] How I know this: Conversation with Teng Wenshu (westernized as “Wayne Teng”), various reference books. <<
[62] Yongle’s status as an emblem of cruelty in China seems to come in part from his having sentenced historian Fang Xiaoru to “extermination of the ten agnates.” An “agnate” is a generation, so sentencing someone to, for example, extermination of the three agnates would involve killing them and all their relatives in their generation, their parents’ generation, and their children’s generation. How, precisely, this would work to the ten agnates is unclear, since it can’t be easy to execute someone’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, and if the condemned leaves four or five generations of offspring then it seems like somebody’s not doing their job. But apparently the previous record was nine. <<
[66] Personally I don’t think technology’s all that bad. If digital devices really do make children less likely to develop the skills and focus to do things like design more digital devices, how is that not a self-limiting problem? <<
[67] For longer answers to these questions, see Beat the Reaper, by “Josh Bazell,” Little, Brown, 2009. <<
[68] I think it’s just this: the sharks I hate and am afraid of are the ones I faced with Magdalena Niemerover years ago. I carry them around, like I carry her around, and no real-life bull shark can compete. I doubt any real-life woman could either, despite any miraculous interlude with Violet Hurst I may or may not have had, and it’s unlikely I’ll get a chance to find out. <<
[69] Reggie’s motives are a different issue. I was asked about them numerous times, and had the opportunity to discuss them with Reggie himself. What I think, for whatever that’s worth, is that they weren’t particularly nefarious. Reggie wanted to go live on the beach in Cambodia, and maybe even take Del and Miguel with him. But he probably could have done that with the amount of money he ended up spending on the hoax anyway—an amount he saved up in advance, managing to stay out of debt until the legal fees hit later. I believe him when he says he wanted to honor Chris Jr.’s hoax project and thought there was a chance of finding out who or what killed Autumn Semmel.
Regarding his casual lawbreaking and disregard for the potential consequences of his actions, which placed people in mortal danger in a way he should have foreseen, I consider that part of his character more than the influence of greed. I’m not a psychiatrist, but what I see in Reggie Trager is someone who, apparently since the Vietnam War, has been so consumed by feelings of shock, sadness, and unreality that the outcomes he imagined possible from his scheme—both positive and negative, both to himself and to others—seemed almost weightless. I don’t think he acted out of malice. I think he’s just someone who was made dangerous at a young age and stayed that way. <<
[71] Just:
“Hello, stranger.”
“How are you?”
“I feel like I’ve got splinters in my boobs.”
“Do you, still?”
“Yeah. My surgeon says it would cause more damage to take them all out.”
“Makes sense.”
“You would know.”
“Violet, I am so sorry.”
“You didn’t blow me up.”
“Not directly.”
“And if you hadn’t stopped me from going into that cabin, it would have been a lot worse. I’m not going to say it was worth it, because I don’t know what my boobs are going to look like yet. But I don’t regret it.”
“How could you not regret it?”
“Mostly because they haven’t taken the morphine drip out of my arm. But right now, meeting you seems on balance like a good thing.”
“They could at least turn the drip down.”
“Am I ever going to see you again?”
“Probably not. I hope so.”
“Then make sure it happens. You’re going away?”
“Yes.”
“To hide?”
“No. I’m going to try and get these assholes to stop chasing me.”
“You mean by killing them?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“Don’t. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to kill anyone. Not even the people who tried to have us blown up.”
“I know.”
“And you did indirectly blow me up, so you pretty much have to do what I say.”
“I know that too.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.”
“Is there anything I can say or do to change your mind?”
“No. Come on, don’t cry.”
“Fuck you. Why do you have to be such a dickhead all the time? Will you be careful, at least?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Try to remember, for me, how shitty you are at getting yourself killed.” <<
[74] I know: Obama had proved a massive disappointment to anyone with progressive interests, and Democrats in Congress hadn’t done much to mark themselves as either honest or interested in public welfare. But that only explains apathy. It doesn’t explain actively voting Republican, two years after Republicans caused the worldwide financial meltdown. Write your love of anarchistic nihilism on your Doc Martens, if you must. Shoot your own hand off. Don’t vote Republican, for fuck’s sake. <<
[76] The bitching about “Climategate,” like the Tea Party itself, was brought to us by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch. Other disinterested parties calling for further “investigation” of “Climategate” include the government of Saudi Arabia. <<
[77] The case is Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Previous Supreme Court cases had addressed the concept of “corporate personhood,” but this one put it over the top, and has the clearest set of fingerprints on it—particularly given that the original decision granting corporations rights (beyond the simple right to enter into a contract), Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), may have mischaracterized the intent of the Supreme Court. Supreme Court decisions are always published with a “head note” by the court reporter that summarizes the action. In Santa Clara, the court reporter, who was for some reason J. C. Bancroft Davis, formerly president of the Newburgh and New York Railway, wrote that the justices had unanimously agreed that corporations should enjoy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed eighteen years earlier to establish the rights of former slaves. The actual opinion doesn’t say this, though, and in fact Chief Justice Morrison White specifically told Bancroft that “we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision” in deciding Santa Clara. Which is why Santa Clara—which gave American corporations Fourteenth Amendment protections thirty-four years before American women got them—was, until Bush v. Gore, often called the worst Supreme Court decision of all time. <<
[78] Guest footnote by Pietro Brnwa : Similarly, see the June 2009 failure of the Iranian “Green Revolution” after Michael Jackson died and suddenly no one gave a shit. <<
[80] 1994: Insurance company Riscorp Inc. makes an illegal $20,000 donation to Katherine Harris’s campaign for state senate. 1996: Harris sponsors a bill that makes it harder for companies that aren’t Riscorp to underwrite workers’ compensation insurance in Florida. 2004: Harris, now a member of the U.S. Congress, tells an audience that a Middle Eastern man has been arrested for trying to bomb the electrical power grid in Indiana, although this has not actually happened. 2006: Harris loses a reelection bid after being discovered to have taken illegal contributions from defense contractor MZM, whom she subsequently helped to get federal contracts. Incidentally, Harris’s grandfather Ben Hill Griffin Jr. was one of the 300 richest people in America. I’m not saying this makes her a bad person. I’m saying What sort of lowlife who’s as rich as Katherine Harris is sells out her constituents for $20,000? <<
[81] Current justices Scalia and Thomas are both known to have attended the Koch brothers’ annual meeting of conservative political activists, at which attendance is limited to 200. <<
[83] For example, to his Council on Environmental Quality, which is the primary environmental instrument of the executive branch, George W. Bush appointed (as chairman) James L. Connaughton, who had formerly lobbied for the Aluminum Company of America and the Chemical Manufacturers Association of America, and (as chief of staff) Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. After Cooney got whistle-blown for changing the results of government global warming studies to favor the oil industry, he was hired by the public affairs department of ExxonMobil. <<
[84] There’s no evidence that the Republicans and Iranians colluded in the election of Ronald Reagan. It’s just that eleven members of the Reagan administration were later convicted of illegally trading weapons to Iran (during an embargo led by the United States!) for a different set of hostages. Details about even that arms-for-hostages deal are hard to come by, though, because George Bush Sr., as one of his last official acts, pardoned everyone who had been or might be convicted in relation to it. On Christmas Eve. Tis-the-Season act of mercy, or timed so that as few people as possible would read about it in the newspaper the next day? You be the judge. <<
[86] For example: between 1819 and 1891 the population of New York City went from a hundred thousand to three million. <<
[87] Other shit, even from birds, just doesn’t have the same nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio. <<
[88] The most popular is probably Easter Island, where workers cut down all the trees to make statues honoring wealthy people’s ancestors—a process that sped up as it went along, because people became more and more desperate for the spirits of wealthy people’s ancestors to save them from deforestation. Eventually the military took over, 90 percent of the population died, and the survivors started toppling the statues. And that was before the Europeans started selling the Easter Islanders into slavery.
Another example: we tend to think of whaling as primarily an olde-timey activity, because of Moby Dick and so on, but 75 percent of the world’s whales were actually killed after WW2, by countries looking to use whale oil to supplement their petroleum supplies during the postwar oil shortage.
And one more: before mass human agriculture, most of the Middle East was forested. That’s right: there was a time when people who used the term “the Fertile Crescent” weren’t just being sarcastic. <<
[89] World population in 500 BC is unknown but is likely to have been under 200 million—less than 3 percent of what it is now. <<
[90] Or to the Constitution: the Second Amendment says “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” which people like to interpret as meaning that gun control is unconstitutional. But I’m pretty sure there’s a “well regulated” in there somewhere. <<
[91] Famously at the time, the striking workers held up a sign inviting the press—who instead mocked them from shore for being illiterate—to “COME ON BOARD AND LEARN THE TROUT.” <<
[94] Something I find particularly compelling in Bates is his observation that designed objects (and by extension designed spaces and “realities” and so on) tend to be drearier than natural ones in part simply because they have a lower level of detail—that just as we erase species from our reality, we also erase other kinds of complexity, to our detriment. See The Forest and the Sea, pg. 254. <<
[95] Released by WikiLeaks and published online in “US embassy cables: US queries Saudi Arabia’s influence over oil prices,” guardian.co.uk, 8 Feb 2011. <<
[97] For details on the biology of the various regenerative processes, see chapter 17 of Textbook and Color Atlas of Traumatic Injuries to the Teeth, by J. O. Andreasen, Frances M. Andreasen, and Lara Andersson, 2007. <<
[99] Consumer Reports blog for 3 Aug 2009. If corporations have rights, why can’t Consumer Reports run for president? <<
[100] When I graduated from medical school the most competitive field to enter was dermatology, because it was considered a sure path to wealth through easy-to-perform (and schedule) procedures. Family practice—which is where the heroes of the medical profession are, and where, demographically, the U.S. most needs doctors—was among the least competitive. For insight on how hard it is to get paid as a family practitioner, see “10 billing and coding tips to boost your reimbursement,” by Joel J. Heidelbaugh and Margaret Riley, The Journal of Family Practice, Nov 2008, Vol. 57, No. 11: 724–730. <<
[101] Notes General Surgery News: “A benign 1.5cm lesion of the face would be billed [to Medicare in Alabama] at $140; if you subsequently remove 3 more lesions of similar size, they would be reimbursed at $70 for a total of $350.” However: “When ultrasound guidance is added to a fine-needle aspiration (FNA; CPT code 10022), the physician can bill with code 76942, which reimburses $120 for the FNA, whereas the ultrasound component reimburses $150.” (“Minor Pay for Minor Procedures? Think Again: General Surgeons May Be Leaving Much on the Table By Passing on Minor Surgery,” by Lucian Newman III, GSN, Dec 2009, 36:12.) <<
[102] A 2009 report from the Committee on Energy and Congress of the U.S. House of Representatives (which at the time was controlled by Democrats) found that insurance companies had been routinely rescinding (without refund) coverage because patients failed to inform insurance companies of pre-existing conditions they didn’t know they had, because of errors in paperwork not committed by the patient, and “for discrepancies unrelated to the conditions for which patients seek medical care,” as well as rescinding coverage to the dependents of rescinded patients and evaluating insurance company employees based on how much money they were able to “save” the insurance companies through rescinding policies. For a PDF of this report, go to http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090616/rescission_supplemental.pdf. <<
[105] The piece by Pies that Coyne quotes is available (without any obvious date, although it states it was written in response to an essay in the New York Times Magazine of 28 Feb 2010) at http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/01/the-myth-of-depressions-upside. <<
[107] The lieutenant of Reggie’s River Assault Group would have reported directly to Rear Admiral Ward, who would have reported directly to General Westmoreland, who would have reported directly to Secretary of Defense McNamara. In other words, Reggie would have been five phone calls from President Johnson. <<
[109] See Molecular, Clinical, and Environmental Toxicology: Volume 2; Clinical Toxicology, by Andreas Luch, 2010, pg. 250. <<
[110] Widely reported. In the case of the Alcor scandal, almost invariably with the word “chilling” in the title. See below note on shellfish. <<
[112] The drought continued. See “Rick Perry’s Unanswered Prayers,” by Timothy Egan, the New York Times, 11 Apr 2011, according to which he also answered a question about how he would govern as president with “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this.’ ” <<
[113] For Perry on evolution, see, e.g., “Rick Perry: evolution is ‘theory’ with ‘gaps,’ ” by Catalina Camia, USA Today, 18 Aug 2011. For Perry on climate change, see, e.g., “Perry Tells N.H. Audience He’s a Global-Warming Skeptic—with VIDEO,” by Jim O’Sullivan, on website of National Journal, 17 Aug 2011; note that it’s the article that uses video, not Perry. <<
[115] Right from the Beginning, 1990, pg. 31. Buchanan, a turd whose frequent designation as a “paleoconservative” would make Violet Hurst vomit, speaks of Pegler with admiration, although even he notes that “Peg did go overboard—on not a few occasions.” <<
[116] P. 187. She describes Scully, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as “to use author Rod Dreher’s term, a ‘crunchy con.’ A political conservative, he is a bunny-hugging vegan and gentle, green soul who I think would throw himself in the path of a semitruck to save a squirrel.” I call the seat not next to that guy. <<
[117] If you watch the full 9:47 version (address below), you’ll get to see Muthee call Buddhism and Islam “witchcraft and sorcery” and say “In the economic area [it is] high time that we have top Christian businessmen, businesswomen bankers, you know, who are men and women of integrity running the economics of our nations. That is what we are waiting for. That’s part and parcel of transformation. If you look at the, you know, if you look at the Israelites, that’s how they won, and that’s how they are today.” Address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl4HIc-yfgM&feature=player_embedded. <<
[118] Palin’s own relationship to wildlife is less clear. In Going Rogue (pg. 250) she says that a man who had fooled her into thinking he was Nicolas Sarkozy (bear with me) “started talking about hunting, and suggested we get together and hunt from helicopters, which Alaska hunters don’t do (despite circulated Photoshopped images of me drawing a bead on a wolf from the air)…. He’s got to be drunk, I thought.” On the other hand, regardless of whether Alaskans shoot wolves from helicopters, during the Palin administration the Alaskan government offered $150 to anyone who could shoot a wolf from an airplane, and Palin approved a $400,000 “educational” program to advertise the practice. (For more on this, including Palin’s false claims that killing wolves was part of a scientifically sound wildlife management program, see “Her deadly wolf program: With a disdain for science that alarms wildlife experts, Sarah Palin continues to promote Alaska’s policy to gun down wolves from planes,” by Mark Benjamin, Salon, 8 Sept 2008; also “Aerial Wolf Gunning 101: What is it, and why does vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin support the practice?,” by Samantha Henig, Slate, 2 Sept 2008.) Also worth noting may be Palin’s successful promotion of construction considered likely to be detrimental to Wasilla Lake in 1998, while she was mayor, including her saying, “I live on that lake. I would not a support a development that wasn’t environmentally friendly” (Benet, ch. 7)—and her then moving to Lake Lucille, the town of Wasilla’s other lake, into a house that seems to have been paid for at least in part by construction contractors. To be fair, both Wasilla Lake and Lake Lucille are now considered “dead” lakes. For questions about funding for the Lake Lucille house, see, e.g., “The Book of Sarah (Palin): Strafing the Palin Record,” by Wayne Barrett, the Village Voice, 8 Oct 2008. For more on Lake Lucille itself, see “Sarah Palin’s dead lake: By promoting runaway development in her hometown, say locals, Palin has ‘fouled her own nest’—and that goes for the lake where she lives,” by David Talbot, Salon, 19 Sept 2008. <<
[119] Note, however, that Cameron had previously been caught attributing fake quotes to John Kerry, including, re Bush, “I’m a metrosexual—he’s a cowboy.” (The Associated Press article on this, by Siobahn McDonough, 2 Oct 2004, appeared in numerous publications.) In November 2008, Palin told reporters that “I think if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about NAFTA or about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context and that is cruel.” (Widely reported, e.g., “Palin hits back at ‘jerk’ critics,” BBC News, 8 Nov 2008.) In an interview in March 2011, Palin said, “Rumors like I didn’t know Africa was a continent, that’s still out there, that’s a lie.” (“Will Sarah Palin run for president and can she win?,” by Jackie Long, BBC Newsnight, 7 Mar 2011. The interview was with Long.) Carl Cameron still works for Fox News Channel. <<
[121] If you don’t think western activism based on Jew-hatred rather than actual sympathy for Arabs can and does harm Palestinians, note that by 2006 Palestinians had been so severely exploited and betrayed by Yassir Arafat, the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority that, despite favoring peace with Israel by a two-to-one margin at the time (according to Palestinian demographer Khalil Shikaki; see Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, by Robin Wright, 2008; note also that polls show Israeli Jews, themselves constrained by assholes at home and abroad, tend to favor a two-state solution by the same ratio), that they voted for fucking Hamas—a Syria-based organization that, while providing far better social services than the PLO ever did, is formally opposed to, among other things, peace or even negotiations with Israel, cooperation with non-Islamic states in general, and, evidently, ever giving Palestinians another chance to vote. That the same jackasses who lionized Arafat (in 2004, BBC’s Middle East correspondent Barbara Plett said on the air that she had cried at Arafat’s funeral, prompting an internal investigation of anti-Israel bias at the BBC the results of which the publicly funded network refused to release) are now lionizing Hamas does not constitute humanitarianism. <<
[122] My own much shorter history of the British vs. Yiddish conflict will eventually be available in some form or other. And, I’m sure, will end anti-Semitism forever. <<
[123] Source re Saudi ownership: “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus,” by Frank Rich, the New York Times, 21 Aug 2010; also widely reported elsewhere during the News Corp scandals that began in the summer of 2011. <<
[124] Historical aspects that Ross elides or glosses over for speed in this chapter, but which I would personally recommend for any longer study of the topic, include the demographics of the region prior to the twentieth century (which are contrary to what is commonly imagined) and the decision in 1921 by Great Britain, which had been “mandated” by the League of Nations to set up a homeland for Jews in the western 20 percent of Palestine and a homeland for Palestinian Arabs in the eastern 80 percent, to instead give the eastern 80 percent to the son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca to form first Transjordan and then Jordan. Jordan to this day has a disempowered Palestinian majority. For demographics see particularly Karsh, Segev, and Dershowitz, above. For an in-depth discussion of the history of Jordan see Britain, the Hashemites, and Arab Rule, 1920–1925: The Sherifian solution, by Timothy J. Paris, 2005. <<
[125] For an interesting perspective on this, see “Censors Without Borders,” by Emily Parker, the New York Times Book Review, 6 May 2010, although things have improved slightly since then. <<
[126] Unfortunately, the manner in which the WikiLeaks cables were disclosed tended to promote the Chinese government’s obfuscation of the event. For example, a 13 June 2011 article in The Telegraph, by Malcolm Moore, while noting that “instead, the cables show that Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters outside the centre of Beijing, as they fought their way towards the square from the west of the city,” was headlined “WikiLeaks: No bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables show.” <<
[127] Nicholas Kristoff calls the number a “rumor” in “A Reassessment of How Many Died in the Military Crackdown in Beijing,” the New York Times, 21 June 1989, which estimates the total killed in Beijing as 400–800. Other sources, e.g., “How Many Really Died? Tiananmen Square Fatalities,” Time, 4 June 1990, say that the Chinese Red Cross did in fact report the number 2,600 directly to reporters, and only afterward denied doing so. <<
[128] This article, because of its title, has been controversial. However, Hvistendahl’s argument is that around the world coal ash delivers much more radiation to humans than nuclear waste does, and not that, say, a kilogram of coal ash is more radioactive than a kilogram of spent plutonium. <<
[129] They probably aren’t, but they have somewhat different side effects and may be more effective for some levels of schizophrenia and less effective for others. See “Effectiveness and cost of atypical versus typical antipsychotic treatment for schizophrenia in routine care,” by T. Sargardt, S. Weinbrenner, R. Busse, G. Juckel, and CA Gericke, Journal of Mental Health Policy Economics, Jun 2008; 11(2): 89–97. <<
[130] This figure is from the 2009 report of the nonprofit US PIRG Education Fund entitled “Health Care in Crisis: How Special Interests Could Double Costs and How We Can Stop It,” by Larry McNeely and Michael Russo. Note that the only western countries in which direct-to-consumer advertising of medications is legal are the U.S. and Australia. <<
[131] Seminal vesicles are glands in males that produce, among other things, an ingredient of semen that has no known function and is actually spermicidal. Since it follows the sperm out, it is sometimes theorized to have developed to prevent other males from impregnating the same female. But, again, see the footnote here. <<
[132] Note that in his autobiography, Magician Among the Spirits (thanks to Jason White for the gift of this book), Houdini says, pg. xiii, “I firmly believe in a Supreme Being and that there is a Hereafter.” <<
[133] The late, great hacker Mark Hoekstra, for example, used two layers of (developed) color film negative (Geektechnique.org, 24 Oct 2005). Hoekstra credits an earlier site with some elements of his method. Note Hoekstra’s warning not to shock yourself on the capacitor. Better yet, don’t actually try this. <<
[134] Not to be confused with former chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele. <<
[135] E.g. as related in “McCain skeptical Supreme Court decision can be countered,” by John Amick, 44 blog, washingtonpost.com, 24 Jan 2010. <<
[136] Bork also, after years of arguing for tort reform, filed a million-dollar personal injury claim against the Yale Club after he fell and bruised his leg there. If you’re the kind of person who can’t wait for The Haldeman Diaries to come out as an e-book, the actual brief is online at http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/borksuit-060607.pdf. <<
[138] “Mr. Clean gets his hands dirty,” by Neil Lyndon, Sunday Telegraph (London), 1 Nov 1998, pg. 1 of the “Sunday Review Features” section. Lyndon was the personal assistant. He also says in this article that he ghost-wrote Hammer’s autobiography. <<
[139] For more on the sleaziness of the Cheney hunting accident, see “No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident,” by Anne Kornblut and Ralph Blumenthal, the New York Times, 14 Feb 2006. Note that the quails the party was supposed to be shooting instead of Harry Whittington had been raised in captivity and placed into bushes upside-down to confuse them and limit their mobility. (Regarding an earlier hunting trip on which Cheney personally killed 70 farm-raised ring-necked pheasants, the editor in chief of Field & Stream told journalist Elisabeth Bumiller [“After Cheney’s Private Hunt, Others Take Their Shots,” the New York Times, 15 Dec 2003] that “I don’t see anything terribly wrong with it, but I don’t think it should be confused with hunting.”) This raises the question of whether Cheney—who secured five draft deferments to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, had a daughter nine months and two days after the Selective Service said it would resume drafting childless husbands (Timothy Noah, Slate.com, 18 Mar 2004), and engaged in war profiteering for much of the rest of his life—would have happily gone to Vietnam if guaranteed he would only have to fight people raised in cages and placed upside-down into bushes by lobbyists. <<
[140] Although the “FAQs” section of the Carter Center’s website says “All donations of $1,000 or more are published in our annual reports, available for download,” the most recent annual report downloadable as of this writing (2009–2010) lists the first eleven donors in the “$100,000 or more” category as “Anonymous,” and doesn’t give specific amounts for donations even from people it does name. This report, which states the Carter Center’s assets to be slightly over $475 million, is downloadable at http://cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/annual_reports/annual-report-10.pdf. <<
[141] An article in the Washington Post from 1980, at which time the Saudi involvement in the purchase of NBG was known but BCCI’s was not, notes that controlling interest in the bank changed hands on 5 Jan 1978, Carter announced that his administration was selling sixty F15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia on 14 Feb 1978, and NBG changed the terms of Carter’s loans on 1 May 1978—a four-month period during which, as the article puts it, “The United States’ traditional pro-Israel policy was dramatically shifted to the Arab side at a time when President Carter’s family business [which owed even more than Carter did personally] was heavily in debt to an Arab-controlled bank.” The article also notes that Carter’s personal loan, “renewable each year, is still outstanding.” (“Of Arabs, Weapons, and Peanuts,” by Jack Anderson, the Washington Post, 10 July 1980.) In my opinion the clearest description of the purchase of NBG by the BCCI / Ghaith Pharaon consortium, and of the BCCI scandal generally, is, believe it or not, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, Dec 1992, which is also interesting as an example of how low-key American politics, and the world generally, seem to have been in 1992. (Available as a single, continuous PDF at http://info.publicintelligence.net/The-BCCI-Affair.pdf. See particularly pages 134-138.) Note that the loans to the Carter family that BCCI took over were already ones that “Bank regulatory officials said they would characterize… as improper but not illegal” (“Lance Bank Lent Carter Business $1 Million Without Full Collateral,” by Jeff Garth, the New York Times, 19 Nov 1978). If you really can’t stop yourself, note also that Carter’s brother Billy, again during the Carter administration, accepted $220,000 from the Libyan government and (possibly for legal cover) became a registered foreign agent for Libya. The Carter administration’s response when this was publicized was to depict it as a rogue act of self-enrichment, which it may have been, but Carter subsequently tried to use Billy as a liaison to Libya during the Iranian hostage crisis. For details, see the bipartisan Senate subcommittee report “Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya,” 2 Oct 1980, available at http://intelligence.senate.gov/pdfs_miscellaneous/961015.pdf. <<
[142] See, e.g., “Seized Bank Helped Andrew Young Firm and Carter Charities,” by Ronald Smothers, the New York Times, 15 Jul 1991; “Carter’s Arab financiers,” by Rachel Ehrenfeld, the Washington Times, 20 Dec 2006; The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace, by Alan Dershowitz, 2008, 33–34. <<
[143] On 27 Nov 2009, Johann Hari, writing for the London Independent, called Dubai “a morally bankrupt dictatorship built by slave labour.” The U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2009 notes that “migrant workers, who comprise more than 90 percent of the UAE’s private sector workforce… are subjected to conditions indicative of forced labor, including unlawful withholding of passports, restrictions on movement, non-payment of wages, threats, or physical or sexual abuse.” In Jan 2010, a British woman was arrested for illicit sex in Dubai after she reported she had been raped (“Woman raped in Dubai charged for having illegal sex,” by Hugh Tomlinson, The Times [London], 11 Jan 2010). Etc. As of this writing Carter’s acceptance speech is still available on the website of the Carter Center. <<
[144] It may be worth noting that after Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid came out, and fourteen members of the Carter Center’s advisory board resigned in protest, including a professor of Middle Eastern history at Emory who had formerly been the Carter Center’s executive director, Carter told Wolf Blitzer on 21 Jan 2007 that “I’ve never alleged that the framework of apartheid existed within Israel at all.” On 23 Jan he told an audience at Brandeis University that he hadn’t meant to equate Israel with Rwanda either. He told the same audience that “this is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist,” thereby airing one of the central premises of Jew-baiting, which is that criticizing Jews and Israel is somehow dangerous and brave rather than trendy and remunerative. Peace Not Apartheid went on to sell 365,000 copies in hardcover in the U.S. alone. For information on the Brandeis appearance, see “At Brandeis, Carter Responds to Critics,” by Pam Belluck, the New York Times, 24 Jan 2007. For the transcript of the Blitzer interview, see http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/21/le.01.html. The figure on sales is extrapolated from a figure reported by Nielsen BookScan (which tracks around 75 percent of book sales) of slightly over 275,000. <<
[145] The offer to Arafat was for limited return of refugees, continued custodianship of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, 100 percent of Gaza immediately, and 73 percent, rising to 94 percent over twenty-five years, of the West Bank. Arafat’s rejection of it ushered in the current age of nihilism in Arab-Israeli relations. See, including for an eyewitness account of Arafat’s rejection of the deal, The Missing Peace (recommended above) by Dennis Ross, the negotiator for the Clinton administration. (In 2007, Jimmy Carter was caught using maps from Ross’s book in Peace Not Apartheid, but with the borders changed to make Arafat’s rejection of the peace deal look more defensible. See “Don’t Play with Maps,” by Ross, the New York Times, 9 Jan 2007.) Peace Not Apartheid, Carter’s possible role in the collapse of the Camp David talks, and his refusal to answer questions about this, as well as other information, are discussed in The Case Against Israel’s Enemies (see above), 17–48. To be fair, the various parties with an interest in keeping the Palestinians as perpetual hostages may have paid Arafat directly. An audit by international donors to Palestinian causes after Arafat’s death discovered $800 million in his personal bank accounts. See “Where Is Arafat’s Money?,” by Rees, Hamad, and Klein, Time, 22 Nov 2004. <<
[146] http://books.google.com/books?id=oS0rAAAAYAAJ&lpg. Why are web addresses so fucking ugly? <<
[147] And is still called “The Surgeon’s Photograph,” even though Christian Spurling admitted in 1993 to both taking the picture and building the fake monster that appears in it. <<
[148] My favorite “believer” book about Nessie, however, is In Search of Lake Monsters, by Peter Costello, 1974, because of the following sentence, pg. 14: “Having had more than its statutory nine days, the Loch Ness monster had to give way to newer sensations: the Saragossa Ghost, the talking Mongoose of Cashen’s Gap, the German Occupation of the Rhineland.” I could look up shit from that sentence all day. <<
[149] 1855: Seven people at Silver Lake see a giant serpent swimming through the water. Other sightings follow. 1857: The Walker House Hotel on Silver Lake burns down. In the wreckage a giant mechanical monster is discovered, made of coiled wire and waterproof canvas and capable of being propelled under water by bellows. <<