SOURCES
This book is a work of fiction. While the sources mentioned below have been helpful in conceiving it, the book does not necessarily reflect those sources’ findings or opinions with any accuracy. Nor is it intended to. That said, and strictly for people who care about this kind of thing:
My understanding of what it’s like to be a doctor in the cruise ship industry owes thanks to the doctors and patients who have shared their experiences with me personally (MW in particular) and those who have seen fit to share them publicly, such as Gary Podolsky, John Bradberry, and Andrew Lucas, not all of whom perceive the industry in a negative light. For background I am indebted to Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America’s Cruise-Ship Empires, by Kristoffer A. Garin, 2006 (including for information about the 1981 strike),[91] and the Cruise Lines International Association guidelines for medical facilities.
The figure of approximately $7,000 a year for some cruise ship employees is from the “Policy Guidelines Governing the Approval of ITF [International Transport Workers’ Federation] Acceptable CBA’s [collective-bargaining agreements] for Cruise Ships Flying Flags of Convenience,” aka the ITF Miami Guidelines, 2004,[92] which to my knowledge have not been updated, and which suggest a minimum monthly basic wage for cruise ship workers of $302, rising to $608 when combined with overtime and leave. In “Sovereign Islands: A Special Report; For Cruise Ships’ Workers, Much Toil, Little Protection,” by Douglas Frantz, the New York Times, 24 Dec 1999, Frantz writes that “for laboring as long as 18 hours a day, seven days a week, most galley workers are paid $400 to $450 a month.” Details on some of the expenses of cruise ship workers are from Garin, above. Note also that the flag-of-convenience registry for Liberia is run by a private company in Virginia.[93]
The best piece of writing that I know of on the industry from the perspective of a passenger, even if you include The Poseidon Adventure, is the title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, by David Foster Wallace, 1997. Wallace’s essay is remarkable for how much behind-the-scenes information he was able to intuit even as it was hidden from him.
As far as I know there is no cruise ship with a Nintendo Dome, but if there is I hope it’s called the Mario D’Orio.
What Violet Hurst describes as catastrophic paleontology is primarily the mix of sociology, anthropology, and ecology that was pioneered by William R. Catton Jr. in the 1970s, and that is sometimes called either environmental sociology or human ecology. (Catton himself is a sociologist who has concentrated on environmental issues for most of his career.) Obviously the observation that human population growth tends to check itself in unpleasant ways goes back at least to Malthus, and books like The Forest and the Sea, by zoologist Marston Bates,[94] 1960, and Silent Spring, by marine biologist Rachel Carson, 1962, laid immediate groundwork for Catton. But as far as I know it was Catton who first applied concepts and technical terms from wildlife management, like “carrying capacity,” to human populations. His book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, 1980, remains definitive. One particularly elegant descendant of Overshoot is A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright, 2004, which in fact everyone on earth should read, and which has been particularly helpful to me here. I have also consulted Wright’s other two books, Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes, 1993, and What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order, for information about Native American populations. (See below.)
For information on a potential oil crash, I am indebted to Richard Heinberg, particularly his books The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, 2003, and Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, 2009. See also the 2008 cable from the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia to the CIA, U.S. Treasury, and U.S. Department of Energy that says “A series of major project delays and accidents… over the last couple of years is evidence that Saudi Aramco [the Saudi national oil company] is having to run harder to stay in place—to replace the decline in existing production.”[95] For more on government subsidies to oil companies see, for example, “As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Subsidies,” by David Kocieniewski, the New York Times, 3 July 2010.
The idea that the melting of the methane hydrate shelf, by which is generally meant the East Siberian Shelf, might cause an irreversible climate change loop is to my knowledge most closely associated with the work of Natalia Shakhova, PhD, of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. See, for example, “Methane Hydrate Feedbacks,” by NE Shakhova and IP Semiletov, in Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications, Sommerkorn and Hassol, eds., 2009.
For a counter-argument (granted, pre-Fukushima) saying nuclear power will become a viable replacement for oil, see Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, by Gwyneth Cravens, 2007. For a counter-counter argument I recommend the chapter on Three Mile Island in Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology, by James R. Chiles, 2002, which is a great book anyway and introduced me to Karl Weick and “cosmology episodes.” For moral support and ongoing updates I am thankful to the weekly feature on nuclear power on Harry Shearer’s radio broadcast, Le Show.
For the parts of catastrophic paleontology that are actually paleontology, I owe thanks to T. Rex and the Crater of Doom: The story that waited 65 million years to be told—how a giant impact killed the dinosaurs, and how the crater was discovered, by Walter Alvarez, 2008, which is readable and authoritative and also an unfortunate example of the modern tendency to put Internet search words into the titles of books. Alvarez and his father, Luis Alvarez, discovered that the climate changes that killed the dinosaurs came from a six-mile-wide asteroid plowing into the ground in Chicxulub, Mexico. Also helpful was Bones Rock!: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Paleontologist, by Peter Larson and Kristin Donnan, 2004.
The pictograph of a serpentlike creature menacing a moose exists in the Boundary Waters exactly as I have described it, but the location given for it in chapter 12 is fictional. Its actual location is Darky Lake.[96]
“It’s a cold hard world, love, and these are cold hard times” is, obviously, a quote from “Cold Hard Times,” by Lee Hazlewood.
The 100,000 golf balls on the bottom of Loch Ness figure is from “The Burden and Boon of Lost Golf Balls,” by Bill Pennington, the New York Times, 2 May 2010. The golf balls were located in a 2009 submersible sonar search for the monster.
For insight into American small towns plagued by meth, including that meth gangsters sometimes take low-level factory jobs as cover, I am particularly indebted to Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding, 2009. Methland is excellent and makes a particularly compelling argument about how meth appeals to the working poor by initially allowing them to work longer hours.
Sensei Dragonfire is of course Wendi Dragonfire of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, 9th Dan Shuri-Ryu Karate, 2nd Dan Modern Arnis.
Successful replacement of avulsed (knocked-out) teeth, with regeneration of nerves, vasculature, and even periodontal ligaments, is indeed possible.[97] The difficulty of doing controlled experiments on tooth replacement in humans makes statistics hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s worth a shot, and numerous-but-too-revolting-to-cite experiments on animals have demonstrated the validity of the principle. In “Milk as an interim storage medium for avulsed teeth,” by Frank Courts, William Mueller, and Henry Tabeling, Pediatric Dentistry 5:3, 183, 1983, the authors show the superiority of milk as a transport medium over air, water, and the patient’s saliva.
I don’t remember where I read or heard that gynecologists used to operate blind and don’t know whether it’s true.
The statistics on cranial bleeding that Dr. McQuillen cites are from Neurology Secrets, by Loren A. Rolak, MD, 4th ed., or at least from my understanding of that book. Also consulted for the discussion were “Factors Associated with Cervical Spine Injury in Children After Blunt Trauma,” by Julie C. Leonard et al., online version of Annals of Emergency Medicine, 1 Nov 2010, and “Low-risk criteria for cervical-spine radiography in blunt trauma: A prospective study,” by Jerome R. Hoffman et al., Annals of Emergency Medicine, Volume 21, Issue 12, Dec 1992. As always, if you take any part of this or any other novel as medical advice, you are a dumb fucking idiot.
According to The Manga Guide to Calculus, by H. Kojima and S. Togami, 2009, the formula relating temperature to the frequency of cricket chirps is Fc = 7(Tc) - 30, with Fc being the frequency of chirping and Tc the temperature in centigrade. Note that the same equation in Fahrenheit (Tf) looks unwieldy at first (Tf = 9/5[(Fc + 30)/7] + 32)) but reduces to Fc/0.26 + 39.71, which is usably close (particularly if crickets are less than perfectly accurate) to Tf = 4(Fc) + 40, or Tf = 4(Fc + 10). The metric system still rules, though. As Judith Stone says, “If God wanted us to use the metric system, he would have given us ten fingers and ten toes.”[98]
The author of the “Funny how it’s ‘Gonna give you every inch of my love…’ ” pickup line has given permission for its use here but has requested to remain anonymous. He (I’ll give you that much) is thanked.
Americans clearly have a strong interest in preventative medicine, since they spend $34 billion on unproven and unregulated health “supplements” annually,[99] just not in preventative medicine that actually works. American doctors, meanwhile, technically can bill for discussing preventative medicine with their patients, but can’t actually make a living that way. The way to get paid as a doctor in the U.S. is to do as many “procedures” as possible to repair or diagnose already-existing conditions.[100] Since the doctor getting paid to do the procedure is usually the doctor deciding whether the procedure is necessary, there’s an obvious potential conflict of interest. The healthcare industry (hospitals and so on) and the pharmaceutical and medical-equipment industries encourage excessive procedures as well. Opposing this, in principle, are government programs (which have odd quirks designed to lower the costs of procedures, like only paying full price for one procedure per visit[101]) and the private insurance industry, which profits by refusing payment for anything they can, regardless of necessity.[102] However, the federal government is limited in encouraging preventative medicine because of the above industries (as well as the food industry) and political opposition to any sane improvement of the healthcare system. Meanwhile private insurance companies tend to operate on profit cycles (and, more important, CEO bonus cycles) shorter than things like diet and exercise are able to affect.[103] The role of patients in all this is complicated. On one hand, they’re expected to make informed decisions to turn down unnecessary (or worse) interventions. On the other hand, they’re often accused of trying to coerce doctors into prescribing and performing expensive treatments that are unlikely to work—something pretty much anyone with the life of someone they cared about on the line would do.
For information about the Soudan Mine and the twenty-three-story-deep High Energy Physics Lab of the University of Minnesota (which because of its isolation from cosmic rays is currently conducting the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and the High Energy Main Injector Neutrino Search) I am grateful to my volunteer guides to both.
For information about law enforcement in Lake County I am grateful to the City of Ely Police Department, particularly Barbara A. Matthews and Chief of Police John Manning, both of whom were exceptionally kind and generous. This book is not in any way meant to be a depiction of that department or its personnel, or of actual events in or around Ely. Nor is it an accurate depiction of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, about which I know nothing except that it exists.
The chapter on the origin of the canoe from the perspective of Sheriff Albin is, to quote Sam Purcell, “drawn without reference material.”[104] However, the name Two Persons is an obvious reference to the work of the great Wayne Johnson, whose series of novels taking place in northern Minnesota began with Don’t Think Twice, 2000.
The preference of (at least some) mobsters for Canoe by Dana cologne and aftershave is mentioned in The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, by Philip Carlo, 2007. It’s one of the confessions.
Regarding whether the medical records of dead people are confidential information, note that the Supreme Court decision in Office of Independent Counsel v. Favish, 2003, was to disallow public access to photographs of the dead body of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, whose suicide ten years earlier continues to be a point of fascination for right-wing conspiracy nuts. (For more on the decision see “In Vincent Foster case, court upholds privacy,” by Warren Richey, the Christian Science Monitor, 31 Mar 2004.) One reason the issue is less than clear is that Medicare pays for some autopsies, but only indirectly, as part of general hospital fees. Which kind of half-defines autopsies as healthcare procedures.
The term “spandrel” as a biological (vs. architectural) entity was coined in “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” by Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 205, No. 1161, 21 Sept 1979. The overall argument is that since biological traits develop within complex organisms rather than independently, they are always subject to conditions beyond that of the strict Darwinian imperative. The literal spandrels of San Marco are decorative-appearing details that are in fact (the authors say) “necessary architectural by-products of mounting a dome on rounded arches.” (There’s even a body of literature questioning whether the metaphor is valid, i.e., whether architectural spandrels are really decorative or not.) The quote from Ronald Pies, MD, is from a citation in “The Evolutionary Calculus of Depression,” by Jerry A. Coyne, PhD, Psychiatric Times, 26 May 2010.[105] Both Pies and Coyne are refuting claims that depression is, on its own, an evolutionary adaptation.
I attended a seminar called “Is Female Orgasm Adaptive?” at the University of California, Berkeley, in, I believe, 1987. As I recall, it was led by a woman and there was some arguing. I could be wrong about the date or the place, though. Or any other part of that story.
Physiologist Loren G. Martin states in a brief article in Scientific American (“What is the function of the human appendix? Did it once have a purpose that has since been lost?,” 21 Oct 1999) that “We now know… that the appendix serves an important [endocrine] role in the fetus and in young adults [while a]mong adult humans, the appendix is now thought to be involved primarily in immune functions.” However, others (e.g., in passing, Ahmed Alzaraa and Sunil Chaudhry in “An unusually long appendix in a child: a case report,” Cases Journal 2009, 2: 7398) feel that the case for the immunological and endocrinological function of the appendix, though strong, remains circumstantial.
The Smurfs (originally Les Schtroumpfs) is a multiformat marketing and entertainment franchise created by Pierre Culliford in Belgium in the late 1950s that, bizarrely, reimagines the 1953 Josef von Sternberg film Anatahan (about a woman stuck on an island with twelve men)[106] as a children’s story, the primary difference being that where Sternberg treats aggression as innate, The Smurfs externalizes it onto the figures of a giant (named after Gargamelle, the giantess in Rabelais) and his pet cat Azrael (named after the Islamic and Sikh angel of death).
The principle behind carbon dating is that plants and animals take in but don’t produce radioactive isotopes of carbon that, over time, degrade, so the amount of those isotopes still in the body shows how long it’s been since a particular plant or animal interacted with its environment. It can be used on objects less than 60,000 years old (at which point the amount of radioactive carbon declines to the same as the background) and is generally accurate to +/- 40 years. Accuracy goes way up, however, for plants and animals (including humans) that have been alive since the hydrogen bomb tests of the 1950s, because of the large increase in the amount of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. See “The Mushroom Cloud’s Silver Lining,” by David Grimm, Science, 321, 12 Sept 2008.
The verses of Matthew in which Jesus says the world will end within a generation are 16:28 and 24:34. Mark 9:1 and Luke 9:27 and 21:32 (“Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all things take place”) are similar.
For information about the hit John Gotti tried to commission from the Aryan Brotherhood, see “Former Aryan Brother Testifies That Gang Kingpin Ordered Killings,” Associated Press, 14 Apr 2006, etc.
Information about the burn cycle of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is from The Boundary Waters Wilderness Ecosystem, by Miron Heinselman, 1996, which is by far the best book I’ve read on BWCA (Boundary Waters Canoe Area) history and ecology.
The use of alpha-blockers to treat PTSD symptoms is predicated on the theory that the psychological symptoms of PTSD, such as panic and nightmares, are the result rather than the cause of the physical ones, such as increased heart rate and sweating. Their efficacy continues to be debated: see, e.g., “Prazosin for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder sleep disturbances,” by LJ Miller, Pharmacotherapy 28(5), May 2008 vs. “Flawed Studies Underscore Need for More Rigorous PTSD Research,” by Aaron Levin, Psychiatric News 42(23), 7 Dec 2007. In any case it should not be confused with the use of beta-blockers to prevent PTSD by disrupting memory formation immediately after a trauma occurs, which looked good in rat studies but is now itself controversial. (See, e.g., “The efficacy of early propanolol administration at reducing PTSD symptoms in pediatric injury patients: a pilot study,” by NR Nugent et al., Journal of Traumatic Stress 2010 Apr; 23(2): 282–7, and “Limited efficacy of propranolol on the reconsolidation of fear memories,” by EV Muravieva and CM Alberini, Learning Memory 1;17(6), Jun 2010.) “Alpha” and “beta” refer to two different kinds of neuronal receptors for adrenaline and adrenaline-like substances. Though many neurons have both alpha- and beta-receptors, the two types send signals with opposite effects: for example, alpha-receptors activated by adrenaline cause blood vessels to contract, while beta-receptors activated by adrenaline cause blood vessels to dilate. This seems contradictory, but factors like the overall blood level of adrenaline favor the dominance of one type at a time.
My primary sources on the Vietnam War know who they are and that they have my admiration and thanks. Given how few Americans served in so-called riverine combat in Vietnam, there are surprisingly good secondary sources on the service, possibly because of interest brought about by the 2004 presidential candidacy of John Kerry (and its sabotaging), and possibly because the casualty rate was so horrendously high. My favorite and the most useful to me on the subject has been Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam, by Thomas J. Cutler, 2000. (Cutler is an instructor at the Naval Academy and himself a Vietnam veteran, although the book, which is excellent, is not about his personal experiences.) For a more general look at the experience of Americans serving in the South Vietnamese armed forces, I particularly like In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, by Tobias Wolff, 1995.
Note that for Reggie to be a chief radioman and an E-4 so soon after arriving in Vietnam would not have been unusual given the hierarchy and level of incident of his posting,[107] and that at the time he enlisted he would have been unlikely to be drafted, since in 1967 the draft was still based on seniority, with twenty-five-year-olds going first and seventeen-year-olds last. The birthday lottery, which sent over teenagers, wasn’t instituted until 1969. Ultimately 61 percent of American fatalities in Vietnam were under the age of twenty-one.[108]
Robert Mason says he was posted in an area of Vietnam where thirty-one of thirty-three species of snake were poisonous in his memoir Chickenhawk, 1984. Unfortunate title / great book. Mason was a helicopter pilot who quickly became disillusioned with the war.
Reggie’s CPO uses the French word “antivenin” rather than “antivenom” because until 1981 that was standard usage (and World Health Organization policy) on the grounds that snake antivenins were invented, in 1895, by Albert Calmette, a French scientist at the Pasteur Institute. Calmette was trying to cure cobra bites occurring in what is now Vietnam.[109]
For information about the abilities of various animals to survive very low temperatures (even including freezing) I am indebted to Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, by Bernd Heinrich, 2003, which is a beautiful book, along the lines of Konrad Lorenz’s best work, that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in nature.
The history of human cryogenics in the U.S. runs from the Chatsworth scandal of 1979 to the Alcor scandal of 2003 and beyond, with defrosting and rotting the least of your worries.[110]
The mammalian diving reflex occurs when the participating mammal gets hit in the face with water 21 degrees C (70 degrees F) or colder. Even on a leopard seal, it has to be the face. (See: “Cardiovascular effects of face immersion and factors affecting diving reflex,” by Y. Kawakami, B. Natelson, and A. DuBois, Journal of Applied Physiology, Vol. 23, No. 6, Dec 1967.)
Incidentally, according to the film version of Goldfinger, 1964, humans not only can breathe through their skin like reptiles and amphibians, but need to and die if they don’t. Also according to Goldfinger, “Drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above 38 degrees Fahrenheit is like listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”
Note that turtles can buffer their lactic acid, but only for six months or so of inactivity.
Sherlock Holmes says “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth” in The Sign of the Four, 1890. He uses another version of the same phrase later in The Sign of the Four, as well as in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” 1892, “Silver Blaze” (my favorite Holmes short story), 1893, “The Adventure of the Priory School,” 1905, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” 1917, and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” 1927. So apparently he means it. The other contender for stupidest thing said by Holmes is his report of having met the “head llama” of Tibet in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” 1903, which people who have difficulty separating Holmes from reality will tell you was just a spelling error by Watson. Like they don’t have llamas in Tibet![111]
Although Sarah Palin is a real person, the events of this book, as I’ve said earlier, are entirely fictional. I have never met Palin, nor have any of my characters, who are themselves fictional. I know of no events involving Palin similar to the ones that transpire in Minnesota in the book, and as far as I know I have entirely fabricated the belief system Palin espouses to Pietro in the book, as well as her relationship with anyone like the (also fictional) Reverend John 3:16 Hawke. The character of Palin’s young relation is fictional, too, and not meant to resemble any actual relation of Palin’s, young or otherwise. Furthermore, although I provide citations below for some references in the book that might be taken to apply to past events from the life of the actual Palin, please note that the actual Palin stands nowhere near the frontline of the anti-rationalist movement in the U.S., even among current and former politicians. For example, as I write this, the Republican frontrunner for the 2012 presidential election is Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas once proclaimed a period of three “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,”[112] and who has publicly repudiated both evolution and human involvement in climate change.[113]
Palin’s quotation of Westbrook Pegler in her acceptance speech as Republican candidate for vice president runs, in total, as follows: “And a writer observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.” The second part is particularly odd, since Pegler once called Truman “a thin-lipped hater,”[114] but may simply have to do with the fact that both the line in the speech and the “thin-lipped hater” line appear on the same page in Pat Buchanan’s autobiography,[115] and maybe the speech was concocted in a hurry by someone familiar, but only partly, with that book. Palin describes the writing of the speech as a “team effort” led by Matthew Scully in her memoir, Going Rogue, 2009.[116] For additional details see “The Man Behind Palin’s Speech,” by Massimo Calabresi, Time, 4 Sept 2008. Details on the tightness of the schedule leading up to the speech are from “Palin Disclosures Raise Questions on Vetting,” by Elizabeth Bumiller, the New York Times, 1 Sept 2008. For more information on Pegler see “Dangerous Minds: William F. Buckley soft-pedals the legacy of journalist Westbrook Pegler in The New Yorker,” by Diane McWhorter, Slate, 4 Mar 2004, which is my source for the “clearly it is the bounden duty…” quote. My source for the quote about RFK is “Palin and Pegler,” by Marty Peretz, the New Republic, 13 Sept 2008.
Video of Palin being prayed over by Pastor Thomas Muthee, famous for claiming to have successfully battled a witch named Mama Jane in Kenya, in which Muthee asks Jesus to “bring finances her way” and protect Palin from “witchcraft” is available on YouTube and elsewhere under the title “Sarah Palin Gets Protection from Witches.”[117]
Palin’s mother is quoted recounting Palin’s father’s fondness for ambushing seals as they surfaced in Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin, by Lorenzo Benet, 2009, pg. 9.[118]
Palin not knowing which three countries were in the North American Free Trade Agreement was reported on-air by Fox News Channel reporter Carl Cameron on 5 Nov 2008. Cameron also reported that Palin didn’t know until debate preparations began that Africa was a continent and not a country.[119] Similarly, Michael Joseph Gross in “Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury,” Vanity Fair, Oct 2010 reports that at the time of her nomination Palin didn’t know who Margaret Thatcher was, although this seems to have changed: Palin’s Facebook page of 14 June 2010 called Thatcher “one of my heroines.”
Current discussion of Israel, particularly in Europe, resembles in tenor and factuality the conversation that swept Europe in 1348 about whether to burn the Jews for causing the Black Death. For some reason,[120] and to the detriment of Palestinians as well as Israelis,[121] large numbers of people who have never, say, read a book on the subject by someone whose credentials they trust, and who might be surprised by what they’d learn if they did, now hold as their strongest political belief that Israel—not just the right-wing government that it, like most western countries (including the U.S. and U.K.), currently has, but the entire country—should be dismantled, and its civilian population, 20 percent of whom are Arab, subjected to random violence, something that gets wished on no other people in the world. For more on this phenomenon, see A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, by Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, 2009, or, if you can take it, Anthony Julius’s magisterial Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, 2010.[122] Alternately, perform the following thought experiment: imagine the largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation after the Murdoch family has turned out to be the government of Israel—instead of who it really is, which is the Saudi royal family. Now picture some British people.[123]
For evidence-based information on modern Israel and its history, two books that are particularly short and easy to read but at the same time heavily annotated and (to my mind) convincing are The Case for Israel, by Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, 2003, which is organized into chapters like “Did European Jews Displace Palestinians?” and “Is Israel a Racist State?,” and The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, by James L. Gelvin of UCLA, 2005. Longer books I like on the history of the mess include Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh, professor and head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program of King’s College, London, 2010, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev of Haaretz, 2000, and A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, by Howard M. Sachar of George Washington University, 1985. Robin Wright’s Dreams and Shadows from a couple of footnotes ago is a great interview-based account of the more recent history. For even less of a commitment I recommend the attempt to separately describe the history of Israel from the perspectives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs generally in the first chapter of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, by Dennis Ross, chief Middle East peace talks negotiator for the Clinton administration, 2005, although the whole book is good.[124] If you don’t have the time or interest to read even that much, but feel compelled to have strong opinions about Israel anyway, that’s your business. By which I mean shut the fuck up about it, at least around me.
There are fewer books in English about Tiananmen Square than you might think.[125] For the crackdown and the origins and legacy of what has come to be called in China the July 4th Movement, the sources that have been most important to me have been Tell the World: What Happened in China and Why, by Liu Binyan with Ruan Ming and Xu Gang, translated by Henry L. Epstein, 1989; and Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, by Philip P. Pan, 2008. Liu was a prominent Chinese intellectual who was investigated by the Central Disciplinary Committee (which doesn’t sound fun) after an earlier round of student protests in 1987. Ruan was one of the actual student demonstrators. I don’t really know what Xu’s deal was, but his chapter in the book is good. Their book overall, though showing some of the strains of having been produced so quickly after the events, is invaluable, and its narrative of the massacre happening en route to the Square rather than within it (an element semantically exploited by the Chinese government to argue that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre) was corroborated by leaked U.S. embassy cables published by the U.K. Telegraph in June 2011.[126] Philip Pan is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. His book is brilliant and will make you newly appreciate your own liberty, then make you wonder whether you would fight for it as hard as some of Pan’s heroes have. Li Gang is that guy’s father for sure. Particularly helpful was his profile of Wang Junxiu.
The number of people killed remains unknown. There were at least a million people involved in the demonstrations in Beijing. Millions more participated in over two hundred other Chinese cities. There were 120,000 arrests afterward. The Chinese Red Cross is said to have initially reported 2,600 dead during the first night of shooting in Beijing alone, but later retracted that number under pressure from the government.[127]
The idea that closing a coal plant in China could quickly cause noticeable changes in child development, likely due to a reduction in exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that can bind to and warp DNA, comes from the research of Dr. Frederica P. Perera of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. However, its presentation here is exaggerated and not at all meant to accurately reflect Dr. Perera’s actual studies or findings. For more on the dangers of ash from coal plants, see “Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste,” by Mara Hvistendahl, Scientific American, 13 Dec 2007.[128]
For more on income disparity in China, see “China’s unequal wealth-distribution map causing social problems,” by Sherry Lee, ChinaPost.com.tw, 28 Jun 2010, and “Hidden trillions widen China’s wealth gap: study,” by Liu Zhen, Emma Graham-Harrison, and Nick Macfie, Reuters, 12 Aug 2010.
For information on how radio stations work I am indebted to Douglas Thompson of Minnesota Public Radio / American Public Media Engineering and to the RCA section of The Broadcast Archive (oldradio.com) maintained by Barry Mishkind.
I first came across the idea that the “H” in Jesus H. Christ, while probably an eta, might also (as “an old bio major joke”) stand for “haploid,” in “Why do folks say ‘Jesus H. Christ’?,” by Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope, 1986. Other sources give different definitions of the “IHS” monogram, such as “Iesus Hominem Salvator,” “In hoc signo,” etc. But the “IHS” entry by René Maere in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Herbemann et al., 1910, agrees with Adams.
The biblical quote about apples is from Song of Solomon 2:12. In the King James: “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.” Which to me sounds more like Shakespeare than Psalm 46 ever did.
Note that while fresh fog is transparent to infrared, so-called old fog, which has had time to equilibrate in temperature with the air, is opaque.
The amphibious boat that appears in the book is based on models produced by the Sealegs corporation. See sealegs.com for pictures and other information.
Promotional materials of United Poultry Concerns quote the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service as counting 8,259,200,000 “broiler” chickens slaughtered in the U.S. in 2000; the 22-million-a-day figure is just that figure divided by 365. Non-broiler chickens I don’t know from. Incidentally, Humanefacts.org says chickens are typically slaughtered at five weeks of age but have a natural life span of seven years.
Ronald Wright argues in A Short History of Progress (see section on catastrophic paleontology, above) that technology progresses logarithmically because every new piece of it has at least a theoretical chance of interacting with every previously existing piece. Patent law, of course, would limit this.
The controversy over whether modern, or “atypical,” antipsychotic medications are any more effective than older and much cheaper ones[129] was probably inevitable in a system where the only thing pharmaceutical companies have to do to get a new drug approved for sale in the U.S. is show that it doesn’t kill people (at least within the time frame of the study) and that it works better than a placebo. (In other words, they don’t have to test it against other medications, which in addition to being cheaper could be twice as effective with half the number of side effects.) Not to mention a system in which you can spend 11.5 billion advertising dollars a year[130] promoting new drugs that, if they were actually better, physicians would presumably prescribe anyway.
The quote from Karl E. Weick is from Weick’s Making Sense of the Organization, 2001, Vol. 1, pg. 105, but cites work by him going back to 1985. I added the italics. Many thanks to Dr. Weick for kind permission to use it.
The statistics about “New World” populations and Spanish gold are from Ronald Wright’s What Is America?, pgs. 20–30, but Virgil Burton’s worldview is influenced by all three of Wright’s books. (Again, see section on catastrophic paleontology, above.) Note that the term “First Nations” is uncommon in the U.S., where “Native Americans” is used much more often, but since the Ojibwe lands are on both sides of the border I’ve taken the liberty.
There are reasons to at least wonder whether Hitler had syphilis besides the chapter of that name in Mein Kampf. By the end of his life, Hitler had numerous symptoms consistent with late-stage neurosyphilis, such as tremors, hallucinations, digestive problems, skin lesions, and so on. The memoirs of his former confidant and press agent Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl (who also claimed to have invented the “Sig Heil” chant, basing it on the fight song of his alma mater, Harvard) say he heard Hitler contracted syphilis at a young age in Vienna. Most sources on the topic (e.g., Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, by Deborah Hayden, 2003, which is agnostic) make a point of not trying to use syphilis to excuse or even explain specific actions taken by Hitler, but occasionally you luck into articles like “Did Hitler unleash the Holocaust because a Jewish prostitute gave him syphilis?,” by Jenny Hope, the Daily Mail (London), 20 June 2007. In any case, the symptoms could also have had other causes. For example, D. Doyle in the Feb 2005 issue of the Journal of the Royal College of Edinburgh notes that “the bizarre and unorthodox medications given to Hitler [during the last nine years of his life], often for undisclosed reasons, include topical cocaine, injected amphetamines, glucose, testosterone, estradiol… corticosteroids [and] a preparation made from a gun cleaner, a compound of strychnine and atropine, an extract of seminal vesicles, and numerous vitamins and ‘tonics.’ ”[131] Doyle calls Hitler a “lifelong hypochondriac,” and concludes that “it seems possible that some of Hitler’s behaviour, illnesses and suffering can be attributed to his medical care.” See also “Did Adolf Hitler have syphilis?,” by FP Retief and A Wessels, in the Oct 2005 issue of the South African Medical Journal, which examines evidence that, Retief and Wessels conclude, “swings the balance of probability away from tertiary syphilis.”
For a relatively recent discussion of the origins of syphilis, see “Genetic Study Bolsters Columbus Link to Syphilis,” by John Noble Wilford, in the New York Times of 15 Jan 2008.
Despite much subsequent information coming to light, the best book about Hitler in his bunker, as far as I’m concerned, remains The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper, originally published in 1947 but revised, God spare me, until 1995.
The one-in-four figure for diabetes among the Ojibwe/Chippewa is for people over twenty-five years of age, and is from “Diabetes in a northern Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Prevalence and incidence of diabetes and incidence of major complications, 1986–1988,” by SJ Rith-Najarian, SE Valway, and DM Gohdes, in Diabetes Care, 16:1 266–70, Jan 1993.
The story of Houdini shocking Arthur Conan Doyle by pretending to remove the end of his thumb is in Houdini!!!: The Career of Erich Weiss, by Kenneth Silverman, 1997, which is definitive and a great read.[132]
When I talk about the ancients linking invisibility to bad behavior, I’m thinking most directly about the parable of the Ring of Gyges in Book II of Plato’s Republic (which is a clear influence on Tolkien, although it’s interesting that in Plato, Gyges’ use of the ring, whatever moral corruption it brings, leads to lasting material success for his descendants, one of whom is Croesus), but also about the association of vision with shame (and both invisibility and sightlessness with relief from shame) in Oedipus Rex and so on.
Current digital pocket cameras often have a simple IR filter over the light sensor, because few of them still use IR to focus. For example, if your camera emits a series of stuttering flashes before it takes a picture in the dark, it’s focusing with visible light from the flash. In which case you could theoretically remove the IR filter and (to keep the signal from being drowned out) replace it with something that filters visible light but not IR,[133] ending up with a functional night-vision relay.
The fake article on bull sharks isn’t meant to be entirely scientifically sound but mostly is, because it draws heavily on two actual research papers, “Osmoregulation in elasmobranchs: A review for fish biologists, behaviourists, and ecologists,” by N. Hammerschlag, Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology, September 2006; 39(3): 209–228 and “Osmoregulation in Elasmobranchs,” by P. Pang, R. Griffith, and J. Atz, American Zoology, 17: 365–377 (1977).
John Boehner spokesman Michael Steel[134] is quoted from “House G.O.P. Eliminating Global Warming Committee,” by Jennifer Steinhauer, in the Caucus blog of the New York Times, 1 Dec 2010. Darrell Issa is quoted from “12 Politicians and Execs Blocking Progress on Global Warming,” by Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, 3 Feb 2011. The number of investigations debunking the “Climategate” scam (five) is from “British Panel Clears Scientists,” by Justin Gillis, the New York Times, 7 Jul 2010. Note that Darrell Issa has never to my knowledge been convicted of anything, nor has he been charged with arson. For more on his indictment for stealing a car (1972) and indictment for grand theft (1980), both dropped, and for details about suspicions that Issa may have been responsible for the 1982 burning of a warehouse three weeks after he more than quadrupled the fire insurance on it (as well as for details about his arrest on gun charges, and biography in general), see “Don’t Look Back: Darrell Issa, the congressman about to make life more difficult for President Obama, has had some troubles of his own,” by Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, 24 Jan 2011.
The mention of the impact of climate change on shellfish was inspired by “Dissolute Behavior Up North” from Biogeosciences, 6, 1877 (2009) as excerpted in the Editors’ Choice section of Science magazine, 9 Oct 2009—an article that among other things proves there’s no report so grim that someone won’t put a crappy pun in its title.
For more on the Koch brothers and the ways they’ve fucked you and will continue to fuck you, see “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war on Obama,” by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 30 Aug 2010. The Kochs’ 2011 meeting was described as a “four-day, invitation-only conclave of about 200 wealthy conservative political activists” by the Associated Press, 30 Jan 2011.
Two documents that are particularly useful for understanding the damage done by right-wing activist Supreme Court justices in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission are the original dissent by Stevens (joined by Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) and Laurence H. Tribe’s essay on the decision that appeared on the website of Harvard Law School on 25 Jan 2010. The disapproving reaction to the decision by 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain is also interesting.[135]
The quote from Orrin Hatch is from the (failed) confirmation hearing of Robert Bork, whom Hatch was trying to portray as apolitical, and who subsequently wrote the apolitical-enough-sounding Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.[136] Note that three (Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) of the five Supreme Court justices who gave George W. Bush the presidency are still serving. On Citizens United, they were joined by Roberts and Alito.
According to Armand Hammer’s former personal assistant, Hammer, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum,[137] used to brag that he had Al Gore’s father, Senator Al Gore Sr., “in my back-pocket,” and would then “touch his wallet and chuckle.”[138] For more on Al Gore’s financial ties to the oil industry, see “The 2000 Campaign: The Vice President; Gore Family’s Ties to Oil Company Magnate Reap Big Rewards, and a Few Problems,” by Douglas Frantz, the New York Times, 19 March 2000. You may also want to check out The Dark Side of Power: The Real Armand Hammer, by Carl Blumay and Henry Edwards, 1992, although it’s kind of a mess.
Even leaving aside environmental issues, the amount of corruption in the George W. Bush administration, and the extent to which it went unnoticed, is staggering. For example, when Vice President Dick Cheney shot his friend Harry Whittington in the face on 11 Feb 2006, the story was widely reported, but usually in ways that repeated the White House’s line that Katherine Armstrong, who owned the ranch where the incident occurred, was an old friend of Cheney’s and (in Cheney’s words) “immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department.” Both may have been true (although Armstrong had resigned from the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, to which she had been appointed by G. W. Bush, years earlier), but Armstrong was also a registered lobbyist, including for Parsons—a company with construction and engineering contracts in Iraq—and the defense contractor Lockheed Martin.[139]
Regarding Katherine Harris, see, e.g., “Harris backed bill aiding Riscorp,” by Diane Rado, the St. Petersburg Times, 25 Aug 1998; “Harris now regrets her tale of terror plot: Leaders in Carmel, Ind., contest U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris’s comments about an alleged plan to blow up the city’s power grid,” Associated Press, published in the St. Petersburg Times, 5 Aug 2004; “Harris Shuns Spending Requests,” by Keith Epstein, the Tampa Tribune, 3 Mar 2006; etc. Regarding the ties to industry of James L. Connaughton and other policy-making members of the Bush administration, including the companies at which they ended up, see “Bush Environment Chief Joins Power Company,” by Ned Potter, abcnews.com, 5 Mar 2009. For more on Phil Cooney specifically, see, e.g., “Ex-oil lobbyist watered down US climate research,” The Guardian (U.K.), 9 Jun 2005; “Ex-Bush Aide Who Edited Climate Change Reports to Join ExxonMobil,” by Andrew C. Revkin, the New York Times, 15 Jun 2005 (nice ambiguity in the title); etc.
The facts of the Iran-Contra scandal during the administration of Ronald Reagan are not in dispute. On 13 Nov 1986, Reagan held a press conference denying the exchange had occurred. On 4 Mar 1987, he held another one admitting that it had but denying he had known about it. On 19 Jan 1994, the independent counsel appointed at the request of the U.S. attorney general released its report finding that “the sales of arms to Iran contravened United States Government policy and may have violated the Arms Export Control Act,” “the Iran operations were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush,” et al., “large volumes of highly relevant, contemporaneously created documents were systematically and willfully withheld from investigators by several Reagan Administration officials,” and “Reagan Administration officials deliberately deceived the Congress and public about the level and extent of official knowledge of and support for these operations.” Source: “Excerpts from the Iran-Contra Report: A Secret Foreign Policy,” the New York Times, 19 Jan 1994. For a Christmas Day 1988 article on George H. W. Bush’s pardoning of Iran-Contra suspects, see “Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Aborting a Weinberger Trial: Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up,’ ” by David Johnston, the New York Times, 25 Dec 1988.
Jimmy Carter’s financial ties to the Saudis and other Gulf states, which have come to include tens of millions of dollars (at least[140]) in donations to the Carter Center, are known to go back to 1978, when the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI; primarily funded by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi), in secret partnership with the son of an adviser to King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, illegally bought controlling interest in the National Bank of Georgia. At the time, Carter owed NBG $830,000, but the bank quickly modified his loans, including by lowering the principal.[141] Prior to being shut down in 1991 for fraud and money laundering, BCCI donated $8 million to the Carter Center. Afterward, its founder donated an additional $1.5 million.[142] What Carter’s sponsors, who include OPEC and the Saudi Binladin Group, have gotten for their money is not fully clear, but may be only indirectly connected to oil policy. For example, in March 2001, Carter accepted the $500,000 United Arab Emirates’ Zayed [i.e., the same Zayed who funded BCCI] International Prize for the Environment, and at the ceremony called UAE member state Dubai an “almost completely open and free society.”[143] In September 2006, Carter legitimized the word “apartheid” in reference to Israel in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and two months later he called Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “even worse… than a place like Rwanda.”[144] By far the most serious allegation against Carter, however, is that in July 2000, while serving as an adviser to Yassir Arafat, he may have advised Arafat to turn down the peace deal that included essentially everything Arafat had been asking for during the previous seven years. Carter has been asked what advice he gave Arafat but has never answered. In any case, it was eight months later that Carter accepted the Zayed prize.[145]
The idea that the November 1962 report to the Kennedy administration had a significant impact on environmental policy is from Overshoot, by William R. Catton Jr., 1980 (see notes for catastrophic paleontology, above). The report itself, “Natural Resources: A Summary Report to the President of the United States by The Committee on National Resources of the National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council,” NAS-NRC Publication 1000, is available on Google Books[146] and is worth reading. For one thing, it’s a government document that’s only fifty-three pages long.
The concept of “constructing controversy,” and its invention by Hill & Knowlton, is discussed by Alan M. Brandt in The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America, 2007, which is one of the best books I’ve read in the past ten years.
The statistic about the population growth of New York City is from Melville: His Life and Work, by Andrew Delbanco, 2005. 1819–91 is Melville’s life span. Don’t pretend you knew that.
The history of Easter Island appears as a warning in both Ronald Wright’s A Brief History of Progress (see above) and in various works by Jared Diamond, the earliest that I know of being “Easter Island’s End,” in Discover Magazine, Aug 1995, and the most complete being the bestselling Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005.
Regarding the decline in whale populations in the second half of the twentieth century, climate change may be a factor. For example, from the early to late 1990s, during which time approximately a thousand minke whales a year are believed to have been killed by whalers, the number of minkes in the Southern Ocean (which circles Antarctica) is believed to have declined from 760,000 to 380,000. Blue whales, which have been protected since 1966, may currently exist in numbers as low as 5,000, down from their pre-whaling height of 275,000. (Source: “Whale population devastated by warming: Retreating of Antarctic sea ice reduces numbers of minkes by 50 per cent and fuels demands to keep whaling ban,” by Geoffrey Lean and Robert Mendick, The Independent [London], 29 July 2001.)
The quotation from Genesis is from the New International Version.
Note that while people do pass an average of 50 percent of their genes to their children, only about 1 percent of their genes are unique in the first place, i.e., different from those of their co-breeder. Only about 4 percent are different from those of a chimp. (See, e.g., “Genetic breakthrough that reveals the differences between humans,” by Steve Connor, The Independent [U.K.], 23 Nov 2006.)
For information that didn’t quite make it in but that I’ll use in the future, thanks to James Dorsey.
The plot of this book was partly inspired, of course, by the hoax perpetrated at Loch Ness in 1933 to rescue the city of Inverness as a tourist destination after the rail line to it was closed during the Great Depression. Two aspects were particularly important to me: the role played by London gynaecologist [Brit sic] Robert Wilson, who agreed to say he had taken what is still the most famous photograph of the monster,[147] and the brazenness (and ease) with which the conspirators invented a “history” of sightings of the monster going back to the Middle Ages. By far the best book I know of about the Loch Ness Monster and its myth is The Loch Ness Mystery: Solved, by Ronald Binns, 1985. All false beliefs should have as thorough and sympathetic an investigator as Binns. Of the many books that present themselves as believing in the monster’s existence, the most famous are by Tim Dins-dale, who claimed to have personally seen the monster on several occasions.[148]
Another case important to the book was the 1855 hoax in Silver Lake, Wyoming County, New York.[149] The fact that the hoax itself, despite being celebrated in Silver Lake every July, was almost certainly a hoax—that the Walker House Hotel did burn down, but almost certainly no mechanical monster was found in the wreckage[150]—just makes it better.
Finally, an ongoing inspiration has been the conversation I’ve been having with Joseph Rhinewine, PhD, for the past few decades about whether it’s better to be too gullible or too cynical. While I have no reason to think the Smurfs and Anatahan are actually related, neither do I have proof that they aren’t.