Book Review - We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran

I receive several opportunities a month to do book reviews. I turn most of them down in spite of the fact it means I won't get a free book. I almost decided against reviewing We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran but eventually agreed. After reading the first few pages I knew I had made the right decision.

We Heard The Heavens Then by Aria Minu-Sepher is the story of the last few years of Shah’s Iranian monarchy and the revolution that brought it down as seen through the eyes of a young boy who's father was a powerful general in the Shah's air force. The author has had decades in the United States to think about what happened and presents us with a measured and fair account of social-political reality that led up to the revolution.

There are several characters in this story both family members and others. Aria Minu-Sepher grew up in a privileged world. As we might say now he was part of the one percent. His mother is mentioned but it is rarely a flattering picture. She was proud of the fact she was part of the aristocracy. His father, “Baba,” plays a key part in the narrative. A very competent pilot and General who adores his son and attempts to mold his son in his own image. In a way this book is a tribute to his father. The rest of the authors extended family represent an eclectic mix of Iranian society. The household staff also plays a part but none more than the housekeeper “Bubbi.” She is a very conservative Muslim, a classic member of the Iranian 99%. She is offended by Western influence. She objects to serving wine, shrimp and ham. She objects to automobiles and thinks the F14 fighters the General commands are straight from the devil. We get the impression that she represents a lot of the 99%.

The author paints a picture of an Iran that is not just divided along 1% - 99% line but also on a secular – pious line, but there is a great deal of overlap. Much of Iran was not enjoying the miracles from the west but they didn't want to. I think that we can see some of the problems we are having in Afghanistan – a majority who simply don't want to be forced into a secular world.

Normally this subject matter would be rather dry but this book is an enjoyable and easy read because it is made up primarily of personal anecdotes. I highly recommend this book.



Note

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran
by Aria Minu-sepehr

Thomas W. Benton - Artist/Activist

There are many ways to study history. We have written history but that always reflects the philosophy of the individual writing it and that history will change over time. Even the memories of those who lived the history changes over time. There is one thing that is constant - the art that was created in response to the world as the present became history. Thanks to Daniel Joseph Watkins we have the opportunity to see the art of Artist/Activist Thomas W. Benton. Benton's poster art documents the political issues of his home in Aspen Colorado and the United States beginning in the turbulent 60's.



Thomas Benton was born in Oakland California on November 16, 1930. Before enlisting in the Navy during the Korean War he attended Glendale Junior College. Following his time in the Navy he studied architecture at the University of Southern California and practiced architecture in the LA area for several years. In 1962 he moved to Aspen Colorado where he built a studio and taught himself the art of silkscreen. His studio became the meeting place for local intellectuals and Benton became a local activist. Like many during that period the Vietnam war shaped his politics but his fear that the commercialization of the Aspen area would destroy the paradise was also influential. In the late 60s he first met "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thomson and his career as a political poster artist took off.

In addition to 150 posters, both political and artistic, this beautiful coffee-table book contains several of the Aspen Wallposters which were a collaboration of Benton's art and Hunter S. Thompson's writing.

Hunter walked into my studio one day and said, "we should do an Aspen wallposter." I said, "what the hell is that?" He said, "It's gonna be a single sheet thing, and it'll have your graphics on one side and my writing on the other." He would write about local politics and other things. We would get together at night in my studio and I'd work on the graphics while he would write the whole damn back page in one night. Of course, that night might take a day and a half.

~Tom Benton

For those interested in the politics of late 60's and early 70's this book is truly a visual treat.

You can find more examples here.

Senator James Inhofe(Sociopath, OK)

While peak oil may threaten our civilization peak water threatens our species. Hydraulic fracking is seen by some to be the next solution to the fossil fuel shortage but what about it's impact on water resources.  While we are told that it can be done safely experience tells a different story.  This from yesterday:

Gas Drilling Emergency in Bradford County

Officials said thousands of gallons of fluid leaked over farm land and into a creek from a natural gas well in Bradford County.

This of course is just the latest example of contamination resulting from fracking.  Just hours after this latest contamination event Oklahoma's sociopathic senator, James Inhofe said this:

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is perhaps Congress’ most reliable defender of dirty energy and evangelizer against the “hoax” of global warming. This morning, he took his message to Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show, where he extolled the virtues of hydraulic fracturing, a method of extracting natural gas known widely as “fracking.” Fracking is a relatively new and untested technique, but Inhofe insisted that there’s nothing to worry about, as he claimed fracking has “never poisoned anyone” nor ever contaminated groundwater:

Here's the audio:

Of course this is pure bull shit:

While fracking has the potential to create vast new American energy supplies, Inhofe’s claim that it is completely without risk is either stunningly ignorant or intentionally dishonest. Just yesterday, a blowout at a Pennsylvania natural gas well engaged in fracking spilled thousands of gallons of toxic chemical-laced water, “contaminating a stream and forcing the evacuation of seven families who live nearby as crews struggled to stop the gusher,” the AP reported. Inhofe referenced the Pennsylvania spill in his interview, but said that it has “nothing to do with fracking” because it was a stream, not groundwater that was contaminated.

But fracking has contaminated groundwater. As a recent New York Times investigation confirmed, waste from fracking has contaminated groundwater and even drinking water with toxic and radioactive chemicals. The process relies on pumping toxic chemicals deep underground to break rock, and between 2005 and 2009, “hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals” have been pumped into wells. Large amounts of radioactive material have been found in water supplies near fracking sites, many Pennsylvanians have gotten sick, the tap water in homes near fracking sites have caught on fire, and a home in Celveland, Ohio blew up.

It’s worth noting that the oil and gas industry has been Inhofe’s top contributor over his political career, giving him over $450,000 in the last election cycle alone, even though Inhofe wasn’t up for reelection. Inhofe’s single largest campaign donor is oil conglomerate Koch Industries.

Inhofe is a sociopath who will sell his soul to the highest bidder.  That of course makes him a Republican Christian.

But They Won't!

Matt Yglesias correctly points out that the Obama administration and the Democrats don't have to be held hostage when the rise in the debt ceiling comes up and he has a plan.

This isn’t a sudden “shutdown.” Nor is is true that we have to default on obligations to our bondholders. Rather, it means that government outlays are now limited by the quantity of inbound tax revenue. But for a while, the people administering the federal government (to wit Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner) will be able to selectively stiff people. So the right strategy is to start stiffing people Republicans care about. When bills to defense contractors come due, don’t pay them. Explain they’ll get 100 percent of what they’re owed when the debt ceiling is raised. Don’t make some farm payments. Stop sending Medicare reimbursements. Make the doctors & hospitals, the farmers and defense contractors, and the currently elderly bear the inconvenient for a few weeks of uncertain payment schedules. And explain to the American people that the circle of people who need to be inconvenienced will necessarily grow week after week until congress gives in. Remind people that the concessions the right is after mean the permanent abolition of Medicare, followed by higher taxes on the middle to finance additional tax cuts for the rich.

Of course this won't happen - because they really don't want to. Obama and the Democrats are owned by the same people that own the Republicans. We on the the progresive side used to say the Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Well Obama has accepted the imperial presidency of George W. Bush which as I see it makes him the best Republican president since George H.W. Bush. While Clinton was to the right of Eisenhower Obama is to the right of Bush 41. He is owned by Wall Street and the military industrial complex. The most important paragraph in Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald's Crossing Zero is this:

By late 2009 it was clearer than ever that both Congress and the State Department had come to rely on the American military to set the policy agenda. In fact, it appeared that it might even be impossible for Washington to return to a civilian-orchestrated strategy of nation-building anywhere, after thirty years of militarily enforced privatized foreign policy schemes. An entire industry now existed to lobby against any efforts to reverse the trend, change the status quo or even to make private contractors accountable for the taxpayer money they received. A book by Allison Stanger, One Nation Under Contract, outlined the dimensions of a problem where the private sector had become a "shadow government" operating outside the law with billions of federal dollars, but little to no accountability for how or where the money was spent.

It's impossible for congress to reduce military spending because they depend on money from defense contractors get reelected - the best government money can buy. Of course the same thing can be said for the too powerful to fail banks. The plutocrats are in the drivers seat. If the Tea Party figures that out they may prove to be our salvation.

The New Confederacy

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice has a must read post, Making money the Confederate way. There are to ways to create wealth - you can create it or you can steal it. There are those who say the Civil War was not about slavery and in a sense they are right.

150 years ago the Confederacy launched the Civil War to protect an economic systems based on the theft. Slavery was the most obvious example, but the system also exempted the rich from taxes and the burdens of war. It also refused to support innovation, invention or infrastructure as tools to generate wealth. It was a Kleptocracy.

One of the Confederacy’s biggest gripes against Lincoln was that Old Abe wanted to invest Federal money in Education, railroads, ports, and other physical improvements. Worst from their POV was that Lincoln also wanted to invest in people and protect the rights of workers. Lincoln’s desire to limit the amount of wealth the elites could steal was why the South started the war.

That brings us to to Paul Ryan's budget plan:

Case in point is Paul Ryan’s very “serious” wealth redistribution plan. At its core it is a plan to steal the labor, savings and wealth from most Americans and redistribute it to the elites. It is just another plan—in an endless series of plans—designed to steal money while passing along the cost of social and environmental destruction to others. It is just theft, plain and simple.

And like the Confederates of old, Ryan and his fellow eunuchs of the the elites are against any Federal involvement in wealth creation through innovation, invention or infrastructure spending. That might create new winners and losers and we can’t have that in their Galtian wonderland.

Ryan’s plan is distinctly Confederate, but then again that could be said about almost everything offered by the Republican controlled House. All of their policies are an effort to turn the clock back to some time before the Civil War and recreate a distinctly Confederate economy—an economy controlled by an elite handful of old white guys who could steal anything they wanted and below them a mass of poor folks struggling just to survive.

Thom Hartman has said that the goal of the Koch brothers and their Republican lawmakers is to turn the United States into Charles Dickens' England. I think Dennis G's analogy is better. As conservative Clive Crook points out Ryan's plan will do nothing to reduce medical costs and in fact will not even reduce the deficit problem. What it will do is to further redistribute the wealth to the elites at the expense of the middle class and the poor - the Confederate model.

Dennis G's post is one I wish I had written but I didn't so go read the entire thing here.

The Black Hole Economy

Richard Heinberg has a great analogy for the world economy - it used to be a star but it has collapsed and is now a black hole.

Maybe it is more accurate to think of the economy itself as the black hole. At its heart is a great sucking void created in 2008 by the destruction of trillions of dollars’ worth of capital. The economy used to be a star, spewing out light and heat (profits and consumer goods), but it imploded on itself. Now its gaping maw will inevitably draw all surrounding matter into itself.

You can’t see the black hole, of course; it’s invisible. It is composed largely of unrepayable debt in the form of mortgages, and of toxic assets (mortgage-backed securities and related derivatives) on the books of major financial institutions, all of which are carefully hidden from view not just by the institutions themselves but by the Treasury and the Fed. Added to those there is also a growing super-gravitational field of resource depletion—which is again invisible to nearly everyone, though it does create noticeable secondary effects in the form of rising energy and food prices.

As I noted here:

The world economic system is credit based and requires constant growth. That constant growth is dependent on cheap oil.

Peak cheap oil was already here but the events in the middle east have accelerated the rise in prices.

The trillions of dollars of toxic debt and the end of cheap oil are drawing the world economy into a black hole. What will we find on the other side? It won't look like anything we have now.

Tribal Warfare and the Budget Kabuki Dance

Nearly 60% of Americans are in favor of a government shutdown to reduce spending, but of course Americans are painfully ignorant of where the money in the budget goes. As I noted here the Tea Party wants to cut the budget but they really don't want to cut anything that really matters. What they do want to cut are some rather insignificant budget items they don't like. The current budget fight is not about balancing the budget, it is tribal warfare. There is little or no talk of cutting military spending, the Republican base likes bombing brown people and Muslims and the Military Industrial Complex would not stand for it. There is little or no talk of cutting Medicare, many of the Tea Partiers are on Medicare and the Medical Industrial Complex depends on Medicare for much of it's revenue.

I leave Social Security out of the budget equation because it is not a budget item. Unless you object to repaying the Treasury Bonds you and I have been buying for over thirty years Social Security does not contribute to the deficit anymore the repaying any of the other treasury bonds.

The Republican party is the party of corporate America and corporate America does not like regulations that make the water and air clean - so they are on the chopping block. And then there is the war on the truth - the measly five billion dollars a year NPR receives is a target. The truth is not a friend of conservatives. Planned Parenthood equals abortion to the base which puts it in the cross hairs. When you look at the budget these programs represent a few grains of sand in a large bucket.

If you really want to reduce the deficit you have two choices:

1. Slash Medicare and defense spending

or

2. Raise taxes

None of these are on the table so the present discussion is little more than tribal warfare - a political Kabuki dance. And yes, it is bi-partisan.

Back in Business?

I am going to start cross posting all of my Newshoggers and The Moderate Voice posts here. There won't be any original content but I would like to have a little more control. Continue to visit the above linked sites.

Book Review - The Arms Maker of Berlin

 This weeks book is a historical spy/mystery/ thriller but mostly it's a work of fiction and as such should be judged mostly on it's entertainment value. I received Dan Fesperman's The Arms Maker of Berlin (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) right before dinner on Thursday and started to read it after dinner. Before I turned out the lights that night I had read over a third of it and had a hard time putting it down.

I can't do much better than this description from the dust jacket.

When Nat Turnbull, a history professor who specializes in the German resistance, gets the news that his estranged mentor, Gordon Wolfe, has been arrested for possession of stolen World War II archives, he's hardly surprised that,even at the age of eighty-four, Gordon has gotten himself in trouble. But what's in the archives is staggering: a spymaster's trove missing since the end of the war, one that Gordon has always claimed is full of "secrets you can't find anywhere else . . . live ammunition."

Yet key documents are still missing, and Nat believes Gordon has hidden them. The FBI agrees, and when Gordon is found dead in jail, the Bureau dispatches Nat to track down the material, which has also piqued the interest of several dangerous competitors. As he follows a trail of cryptic clues left behind by Gordon, assisted by an attractive academic with questionable motives, Nat's quest takes him to Bern and Berlin, where his path soon crosses that of Kurt Bauer, an aging German arms merchant still hoarding his own wartime secrets. As their stories and Gordon's-intersect across half a century, long-buried exploits of deceit, devotion, and doomed resistance begin working their way to the surface. And as the stakes rise, so do the risks . . .

The characters are well developed and the novel takes place both in the present and in Berlin and Switzerland in the mid 40's. Some of the characters are real like John Foster Dulles, America's spy chief in Switzerland during the war and Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust.

You also get some insight into the anti-Hitler resistance in Germany as much of the plot centers around the White Rose student movement.

I recommend this book for both it's entertainment and it's history but beware, once you start it's hard to put down. I had not heard of Dan Fesperman before but I am going to check out some of his earlier works.

The Arms Maker of Berlin (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
by Dan Fesperman

Weekend Book Review - World Made By Hand

Tainter makes this observation; substantial increased costs occurred late, shortly before collapse and were incurred by a population already weakened by a pattern of declining marginal returns. It was not a challenge that caused the collapse but a system that had been unproductively complex was unable to respond.


Tainter says that the only solution for over complexity is simplification but complex systems are unable to voluntarily simplify. Collapse is nothing more than involuntary simplification.

The above is from my review of The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter. At the forefront of those predicting the collapse of our civilization is James Howard Kunstler. In a 2004 article Kunstler had this to say:

When the tipping point comes, Americans will be compelled to live very differently than they do today. One leading American social critic, James Howard Kunstler, sees serious political and cultural turmoil up ahead as the way of life Americans have built over the last 60 years begins to break down. With decreasing access to cheap oil, Kunstler sees the fundamentals of industrial agriculture, manufacturing and retail trade changing significantly.


"The whole Archer Daniels Midland model of turning oil into corn into Taco Bell that whole complex, that system, is really going to be over," says Kuntsler. "We're going to be forced to grow more of our food locally and return to a kind of agriculture that really hasn't been practiced here in a long time. A lot of the land that has only had value as suburban development in the past 30 or 40 years is going to have to be reassigned."


Likewise, Kunstler foresees "the demise of Wal-Mart style, big box, national chains." Companies whose profit margins depend on "merchandise made by factories 12,000 miles away" simply won't function in a world of $100-plus barrels of oil. "We're going to have to seriously reorganize our whole system of retail trade and economy."

Kunstler expanded on this in his book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. But what might the collapse look like? To answer this question Kunstler turns to fiction, World Made by Hand

It is the summer of 2025 and the location is Washington County in upstate New York. There has been a major war in the middle east. Washington DC has been destroyed taking out the US Government and Los Angeles has been destroyed dealing a death blow to the US economy. There is no government, no electricity, no oil, no automobiles, no newspapers or any other communication. Millions have died and the ones that remain spend most of their time producing food. The main character is Robert Earle, a former software salesman turned carpenter/handyman. We also meet a minster and his wife, a group of thugs that work as scavengers, a large landowner who has a fiefdom complete with serfs and a charismatic religious cult leader.
This is all about a group of people trying to create a new civilization on top of the ruins of the old one with very little to work with. Robert Earle is forced into a position of leadership he really doesn't want but he knows that someone has to do it. The subjects are humans so there a good people and bad, many with a lot of ambition and many with just enough to survive. There is love and murder, lawlessness and frontier style justice. As depressing as it sounds there is always a thread of hope.
This novel may have a political message but even those who don't but the message were forced to admit it is a well written story and a good read. It is not what you would expect from an author known primarily for non fiction. Kunstler manages to take us into the hearts and souls of the characters.

Even if you don't agree with the premise I would still recommend the book because it is simply a very good read.  You can find out more about the book here. I can hardly wait for the sequel, The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel, which is coming in September.



Cross posted at The Moderate Voice