Elliott Hall

Time says get a round in:

a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one’s risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers’ mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.

Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. Moderate alcohol use (especially when the beverage of choice is red wine) is thought to improve heart health, circulation and sociability, which can be important because people who are isolated don’t have as many family members and friends who can notice and help treat health problems.

It’s best to give studies like this a lot of scepitcism. The Daily Mail has pretty much proven that everything in the world somehow both prevents and causes cancer at the same time, a delicate epidemiologocal pas-de-deux that science may never understand.

I think this is far more interesting than the link-bait headline:

But why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life? It’s true that those who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors — job and child-care worries that might not only keep them from the bottle but also cause stress-related illnesses over long periods. (They also don’t get the stress-reducing benefits of a drink or two after work.)

The above is almost a direct contradiction of the stereotype of poor people that has been in existence for centuries. Advocates of poor relief of any kind would run up against this belief that the poor would just spend any charity on booze.

I put Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane on top of this post to see how the 18th Century agonized over working people having too much fun. Back then the dangerous new drug was gin, a cheap spirit the gentle folk worried would destroy the moral-fibre-lacking working class. Fast forward a few hundred years, and everyone still thinks work is the curse of the drinking classes, as Wilde said. I’d really like to see this corroborated elsewhere, as it would turn a lot of the class stereotypes in this country on its head. If it is true, then who is smashing up town centres on Saturday night? Have middle class, Chablis-fuelled riots been going on for years and no one told me when to show up?

I am still deep in editing The Children’s Crusade, but I had to emerge from my seclusion to comment on the incredible article by Jane Mayer¹ on the Koch brothers in the most recent New Yorker. I tend to look down on conspiracy theories, as they’re usually a way of simplifying a complex and irrational world. It’s much easier, and I think more comforting, to imagine the world is controlled by sinister, all-powerful forces rather than confront how much simple chance has an effect on our lives.

In a way, conspiracy theories can enable the very forces they claim to be unmasking. Most ‘conspiracies’ are just sexed-up accounts of what’ been happening since the first crops were put in the ground: a small group of people screwing over the majority for the benefit of themselves and their offspring. The elaborate plots of EU² takeovers can distract people from the mundane details, of daily exploitation.

Then again, sometimes crazy people have a point:

In 1997, another Senate investigation began looking into what a minority report called “an audacious plan to pour millions of dollars in contributions into Republican campaigns nationwide without disclosing the amount or source,” in order to evade campaign-finance laws. A shell corporation, Triad Management, had paid more than three million dollars for attack ads in twenty-six House races and three Senate races. More than half of the advertising money came from an obscure nonprofit group, the Economic Education Trust. The Senate committee’s minority report suggested that “the trust was financed in whole or in part by Charles and David Koch of Wichita, Kansas.” The brothers were suspected of having secretly paid for the attack ads, most of which aired in states where Koch Industries did business. In Kansas, where Triad Management was especially active, the funds may have played a decisive role in four of six federal races. The Kochs, when asked by reporters if they had given the money, refused to comment. In 1998, however, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that a consultant on the Kochs’ payroll had been involved in the scheme. Charles Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, described the scandal as “historic. Triad was the first time a major corporation used a cutout”—a front operation—“in a threatening way. Koch Industries was the poster child of a company run amok.”

You have to read the whole thing to understand the scope of what the Koch brothers have been up to. In addition to fun activities like the above, their money is also helping to fund Tea Parties and related asshole activities. It’s impressive in a moustache-twirling sort of way. It’s also a frightening roadmap for just how completely money now dominates US politics.

And politics isn’t the only thing the Kochs want to control. Being primarily in oil & gas services, Koch Industries has an unscientific view of climate change. The article quotes Greenpeace calling them the “kingpin of climate science denial.”

The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

Curved spines for all! The Koch solution to climate change is basically a bad remake of Logan’s Run.³

Joseph Romm, a physicist who runs the Web site ClimateProgress.org, is infuriated by the Smithsonian’s presentation. “The whole exhibit whitewashes the modern climate issue,” he said. “I think the Kochs wanted to be seen as some sort of high-minded company, associated with the greatest natural-history and science museum in the country. But the truth is, the exhibit is underwritten by big-time polluters, who are underground funders of action to stop efforts to deal with this threat to humanity. I think the Smithsonian should have drawn the line.”

The thing that always annoyed me most about those BU$HITLER signs wasn’t just the stupid and offensive comparison to Hitler. The people they were protesting against control the most sophisticated propaganda machine the world has ever seen (the technical term is advertising.) You aren’t going to stop the Koch brothers with a couple of fucking puppets.

1. Is it bad to kind of have a crush on someone because of her writing on detainee and torture policy? [↩]
2. Read UN, my US friends. Our crazies talk in the same breathless tones about Brussels. Yes, they’re terrified of Belgians. [↩]
3. Maybe they should have watched Soylent Green instead. [↩]

I’m deep into editing The Children’s Crusade, the final book in the Strange Trilogy. That means posting will be even more casual than it has been.

In the meantime, enjoy the above video, courtesy of io9. It’s more creative than Lucas’ last three films combined. My personal highlight is the awesomely bad fight choreography.

Infographic by The Big Picture

Via our good friend (from a distance) PunchFace, The Big Picture lays out Glenn Beck’s scam on his listeners/viewers/idiots. This type of anti-government survivalism nuttiness has a long and proud tradition in post-WWII America, and will re-appear whenever insecure white people begin to lose their minds at times of national crisis. The last time was the Clinton administration, that seemingly-endless nightmare of peace and prosperity.

We used to have our own share of GoldBugs (though Churchill later regretted his own bout of the disease) but not in the same anti-government way. I wonder where they went.

As a break from the usual national security/dystopia blogging, I give you Jane Austen Fight Club:

(h/t Boing Boing)

Photo by Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post

‘And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’

-Matthew 4:19, King James Version

MAJOR RAPTURE SPOILERS AHEAD

As the title above says, if you don’t know who Fisher Partners are, I’d stop reading now.

So far I’ve mostly talked about Janus Intelligence Services, one of two contractors that feature in The Rapture. Janus closely resembles the actual intelligence contractors currently working for the United States government. They are more ruthless than actual contractors (I hope) but the difference is in degree, not in kind.

Fisher Partners, on the other hand, is what happens when the profit motive of companies and the political belief in the unlimited efficacy of violence are taken to their logical extremes. It begins after the Battle of Christopher Park, the failed anti-gay pogrom in The First Stone. The Elders become afraid of the people they claim to represent. Cassandra near the end of The Rapture:

The Elders saw their own blood on the pavements of Christopher Park, their own bodies against the wall. They made the same evil bargain with Glass
that we’d made with them: keep us safe, and we’ll do anything
you say.’

This fear is the seed of LEVIATHAN the operation to destroy all possibility of domestic resistance. The Elders could have turned to the FBI to become their secret police, but they don’t trust secular institutions and fear a confrontation with the Pentagon. It’s unlikely that government agencies would even be capable of carrying out LEVIATHAN on their own anyway. From the Post article:

At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the number of contractors equals the number of federal employees. The department depends on 318 companies for essential services and personnel, including 19 staffing firms that help DHS find and hire even more contractors. At the office that handles intelligence, six out of 10 employees are from private industry.

Given this hollowing-out of government agencies and an ideological belief that the private sector can always do it better, a corporate solution is inevitable.

As I said in the earlier post on Top Secret America, the revolving door between government and business has all but collapsed. By the time of The Rapture, they’ve dispensed with the fiction entirely:

‘Four Elders sit on the board. Every Elder is a stockholder; together they have the controlling share. When a task order is sent to Fisher Partners, who do you think pays the Fishermen’s salaries, the cost of transport and logistics? Who do you think pays to have the clients held in an undisclosed location and tor-
tured?’
‘The government,’ Benny said. ‘From the black budget, I’d
expect.’
‘And Fisher Partners, like any other company, pays dividends
to its stockholders, and rewards those who bring it new business.
What a coincidence that the Elders are both.’
‘The more people the Elders order disappeared, the more
money they make,’ I said.

From a toxic mix of fear, ideology, and greed, Fisher Partners, a private, for-profit Gestapo, was born.

Photo by Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post

Following on what I said earlier about the killing to be made as an intelligence contractor, Part Two of Top Secret America is about the companies that cash in:

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.
…
Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency’s training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American spies.

Task Force Seventeen, the group General Glass heads in Tehran looking for weapons of mass destruction, is based on this weird new paradigm. The Task Force is a mixture of regular soldiers and mercenaries, with the latter especially represented in interrogation and intelligence.

The idea that private contractors are interrogating terrorists sounds nuts but has been going on for a while. An employee of CACI International (one of the biggest intelligence contractors) named Steven Stefanowicz was named in the Taguba report as one of four contractors “either directly or indirectly responsible” for abuses at Abu Ghraib.(Spies for Hire, 281) Torture for profit is already here.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns

Emphasis mine. The conflicts of interest that would spring from being more obligated to profit than the mission is something I take and run with in The Rapture.
(continue reading…)

Part one of Top Secret America is about the out of control growth of the US security state:

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.
…
Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities.

Readers of this blog and the Strange Trilogy will know that I’m fascinated by rackets. Not scams in a The Sting-like way (though those are also interesting) but organized systems of theft and persecution like the old mob protection rackets.

The modern security state is starting to resemble the latter more and more. Not that I think anyone in the intelligence community would set off a Reichstag fire or something equally nefarious – hi there, Truthers! Now go fuck yourself – they don’t have to. Fear is all that’s necessary, not only fear of actual terrorism, but fear of being seen as insufficiently weak on it. Nobody wants to take on the national security apparatus, because if something does happen, the prudence about cost and effectiveness shown earlier could be spun into penny-pinching in the face of EVIL.

The United States has already spent $1 trillion on the War on Terror. That’s a pot of gold so big it’s visible from space. Waste and fraud are inevitable in any industry that grows as fast as intelligence has in the last nine years. Intelligence is a murky business at best, a place of ever-shifting goalposts that is incredibly difficult to evaluate in business terms. Combine that rapid growth and lack of oversight with privatization and you have a recipe for profiteering.

How I used all this in The Rapture is after the jump.
(continue reading…)

The Washington Post has started a new series on the American national security state called Top Secret America. I did a lot of research on the privatization of intelligence and war for the Rapture, so I’m indecently excited to see what the Post digs up.

Rather than try to write a massive post about the whole series I’m going to try and keep up with the series, a day behind because the earth is round. We’ll see how well that works.

Thanks to Deadline we can now see Hollywood accounting in action. The above image is a financial statement for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. To those of you who may not have heard of this little film, it’s based on one of the most popular series of children’s books of all time and was shown all over the frickin’ galaxy.

Warner Brothers claims it lost $167 million on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, despite the movie making $938 million in revenue. You can bet if that were true there would have been an epidemic of defenestration at Warner Brothers Headquarters carried out by its shareholders. Of course it isn’t, and TechDirt explains why:

In that statement, you’ll notice the “distribution fee” of $212 million dollars. That’s basically Warner Bros. paying itself to make sure the movie “loses money.” There are some other fun tidbits in there as well. The $130 million in “advertising and publicity”? Again, much of that is actually Warner Bros. paying itself (or paying its own “properties”). $57 million in “interest”? Also to itself for “financing” the film. Even if we assume that only half of the “advertising and publicity” money is Warner Bros. paying itself, we’re still talking about $350 million that Warner Bros. shifts around, which get taken out of the “bottom line” in the movie accounting.

The whole thing isn’t far off from how Milo Minderbinder pulled off the impossible feat of making a profit by buying eggs for seven cents and selling them at five. That character is still the perfect embodiment of the modern business ethic in all its cheerful amorality.

We’ll see how long Hollywood can keep up this dirty business. Don Johnson won a recent lawsuit against Rysher Entertainment, producers of the show Nash Bridges. According to the article, Rysher had argued in the trial that the show, now syndicated in 45 countries, had actually lost $160 million because Johnson’s salary was so large and shooting in San Francisco was expensive, among other things. The jury weren’t inclined to take them at their word. Nor were the jury who awarded Celador $270 milllion in damages from Disney over Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

These are encouraging signs, but being a non-lawyer, I don’t see how this isn’t straight up fraud. The practice almost sounds like a reverse-Enron. Where the energy company was hiding debt by farming it out to Star Wars-themed dummy corporations, Warner Brothers was hiding profit. How is that any different?