March 21, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Why I Was Fired
By DAVID C. IGLESIAS
Albuquerque
WITH this week's release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.
Of course, as one of the eight, I've felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for "performance related" reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly.
United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.
Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.
Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn't think so, he said, "I am very sorry to hear that," and the line went dead.
A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a "diverse up and comer" in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)
When some of my fired colleagues — Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas; Paul Charlton of Phoenix; H. E. Cummins III of Little Rock, Ark.; Carol Lam of San Diego; and John McKay of Seattle — and I testified before Congress on March 6, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. Not only had we not been insulated from politics, we had apparently been singled out for political reasons. (Among the Justice Department's released documents is one describing the office of Senator Domenici as being "happy as a clam" that I was fired.)
As this story has unfolded these last few weeks, much has been made of my decision to not prosecute alleged voter fraud in New Mexico. Without the benefit of reviewing evidence gleaned from F.B.I. investigative reports, party officials in my state have said that I should have begun a prosecution. What the critics, who don't have any experience as prosecutors, have asserted is reprehensible — namely that I should have proceeded without having proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.
What's more, their narrative has largely ignored that I was one of just two United States attorneys in the country to create a voter-fraud task force in 2004. Mine was bipartisan, and it included state and local law enforcement and election officials.
After reviewing more than 100 complaints of voter fraud, I felt there was one possible case that should be prosecuted federally. I worked with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department's public integrity section. As much as I wanted to prosecute the case, I could not overcome evidentiary problems. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. did not disagree with my decision in the end not to prosecute.
Good has already come from this scandal. Yesterday, the Senate voted to overturn a 2006 provision in the Patriot Act that allows the attorney general to appoint indefinite interim United States attorneys. The attorney general's chief of staff has resigned and been replaced by a respected career federal prosecutor, Chuck Rosenberg. The president and attorney general have admitted that "mistakes were made," and Mr. Domenici and Ms. Wilson have publicly acknowledged calling me.
President Bush addressed this scandal yesterday. I appreciate his gratitude for my service — this marks the first time I have been thanked. But only a written retraction by the Justice Department setting the record straight regarding my performance would settle the issue for me.
March 21, 2007
Britain Proposes Allowing Schools to Forbid Full-Face Muslim Veils
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, March 20 — British authorities proposed new rules on Tuesday to allow schools to forbid Muslim students to wear full-face veils in class, reflecting a wider debate over Britain's relationship with its Muslim minority.
The recommendation was the latest episode in a saga of rancorous discussion of the full-face veil, known as the niqab. Last October, Prime Minister Tony Blair described the niqab as a "mark of separation" that made "other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable."
The Department of Education published the new guidelines after a court in Buckinghamshire rejected a 12-year-old Muslim girl's demand to wear the niqab in class last month.
The proposed regulations, which have yet to be formally adopted, said the individual right to "manifest a religion or belief" did not bestow a right to demonstrate faith "at any time, in any place or in any particular manner."
School principals should be allowed to order pupils to show their faces because otherwise "the teacher may not be able to judge their engagement in class," the proposed regulations said. Moreover, they said, "schools need to be able to identify individual pupils in order to maintain good order and identify intruders easily."
The issue of Islamic dress in schools has been contentious in many parts of Europe, sometimes pitting secularist ideologies against the religious beliefs of growing Islamic minorities.
But Islamic dress made headlines in Britain for another reason recently, when a trial of terrorism suspects included surveillance television footage of a male suspect at a bus station as he fled London in what appeared to be an all-covering burqa-style dress.
Jim Knight, the schools minister, said Tuesday that schools should consult with parents when setting their regulations on permissible uniforms. "While they should make every effort to accommodate social, religious or medical requirements of individual pupils, the needs of safety, security and effective learning in the school must always take precedence," he said in a statement.
The government's position drew angry responses from some Muslim groups, including the Islamic Human Rights Commission, whose chairman, Massoud Shadjareh, said it was "simply shocking" for the government to "issue guidance against Muslim communities."
"Successive ministers dealing with education issues have failed to give proper guidance when requested by human rights campaigners about schools' obligations regarding religious dress, including the head scarf," he said.
Others sought to defuse the debate by insisting that disagreements over dress codes could be resolved within schools. "The vast majority of schools are able to solve these issues locally, and that should continue to be the case," said Tahir Alam, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain .
The proposed dress regulations also included recommendations enjoining school principals not to discriminate indirectly against minorities by banning hair styles "more likely to be adopted by specific racial groups."
The rules urged school authorities to outlaw forms of dress "associated with gangs," but said students should not be expelled for refusing to wear standard school uniforms except in the event of "persistent and defiant" transgressions.
March 20, 2007
Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior
By NICHOLAS WADE
Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.
Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists' bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.
The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book "Sociobiology" that "the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress.
Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book "Moral Minds" that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, "Primates and Philosophers," the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.
Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped.
Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.
Dr. de Waal's views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.
He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.
Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.
Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males' hands.
Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.
Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.
These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.
Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society's moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.
Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal's view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. "I look at religions as recent additions," he said. "Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do."
As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. "The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare," he writes. "The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter."
Dr. de Waal has faced down many critics in evolutionary biology and psychology in developing his views. The evolutionary biologist George Williams dismissed morality as merely an accidental byproduct of evolution, and psychologists objected to attributing any emotional state to animals. Dr. de Waal convinced his colleagues over many years that the ban on inferring emotional states was an unreasonable restriction, given the expected evolutionary continuity between humans and other primates.
His latest audience is moral philosophers, many of whom are interested in his work and that of other biologists. "In departments of philosophy, an increasing number of people are influenced by what they have to say," said Gilbert Harman, a Princeton University philosopher.
Dr. Philip Kitcher, a philosopher at Columbia University , likes Dr. de Waal's empirical approach. "I have no doubt there are patterns of behavior we share with our primate relatives that are relevant to our ethical decisions," he said. "Philosophers have always been beguiled by the dream of a system of ethics which is complete and finished, like mathematics. I don't think it's like that at all."
But human ethics are considerably more complicated than the sympathy Dr. de Waal has described in chimps. "Sympathy is the raw material out of which a more complicated set of ethics may get fashioned," he said. "In the actual world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our sympathy. And the business of ethics is deciding who to help and why and when."
Many philosophers believe that conscious reasoning plays a large part in governing human ethical behavior and are therefore unwilling to let everything proceed from emotions, like sympathy, which may be evident in chimpanzees. The impartial element of morality comes from a capacity to reason, writes Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton, in "Primates and Philosophers." He says, "Reason is like an escalator — once we step on it, we cannot get off until we have gone where it takes us."
That was the view of Immanuel Kant, Dr. Singer noted, who believed morality must be based on reason, whereas the Scottish philosopher David Hume, followed by Dr. de Waal, argued that moral judgments proceed from the emotions.
But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious evaluation of moral choices. The reasoning came afterward as a post hoc justification. "Human behavior derives above all from fast, automated, emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes," Dr. de Waal writes.
However much we may celebrate rationality, emotions are our compass, probably because they have been shaped by evolution, in Dr. de Waal's view. For example, he says: "People object to moral solutions that involve hands-on harm to one another. This may be because hands-on violence has been subject to natural selection whereas utilitarian deliberations have not."
Philosophers have another reason biologists cannot, in their view, reach to the heart of morality, and that is that biological analyses cannot cross the gap between "is" and "ought," between the description of some behavior and the issue of why it is right or wrong. "You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it," said Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York University. "That's not to discount the importance of what biologists are doing, but it does show why centuries of moral philosophy are incredibly relevant, too."
Biologists are allowed an even smaller piece of the action by Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina. He believes morality developed after human evolution was finished and that moral sentiments are shaped by culture, not genetics. "It would be a fallacy to assume a single true morality could be identified by what we do instinctively, rather than by what we ought to do," he said. "One of the principles that might guide a single true morality might be recognition of equal dignity for all human beings, and that seems to be unprecedented in the animal world."
Dr. de Waal does not accept the philosophers' view that biologists cannot step from "is" to "ought." "I'm not sure how realistic the distinction is," he said. "Animals do have 'oughts.' If a juvenile is in a fight, the mother must get up and defend her. Or in food sharing, animals do put pressure on each other, which is the first kind of 'ought' situation."
Dr. de Waal's definition of morality is more down to earth than Dr. Prinz's. Morality, he writes, is "a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values." The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies "in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval." By this definition chimpanzees in his view do possess some of the behavioral capacities built in our moral systems.
"Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are," Dr. de Waal wrote in his 1996 book "Good Natured." Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But this is a fallacy, in Dr. de Waal's view. Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in "Primates and Philosophers," with "a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality."
February 25, 2007
Music
Same Stooges. Different World. Finer Wine.
By BEN RATLIFF
THERE are the Stooges, from Ann Arbor, Mich., accidental inventors of punk, in the summer of 1970, on nationwide television. And there's Iggy Pop, their singer: bare torso and sausage-casing jeans, silver gloves, dog collar, chipped front tooth.
The song is "TV Eye," and they have gotten wickedly good at their primitive groove — as good as they will ever get. Iggy weaves in and out of the beat: one second borne by the music, one second abstracted from it. Suddenly he does a violent knock-kneed dance and slips into the audience, gone except for his wounded-animal noises.
"There goes Iggy, right into the crowd," says the host of the special NBC program "Midsummer Rock." It's Jack Lescoulie, an announcer on the "Today" show, the Al Roker of his day. In his late 50s he looks like the anti-Stooge: professional, good-natured, well fed, well insured.
After a commercial break we see Iggy crawling on the stage. "Since we broke away for our message, Iggy has been in the crowd and out again three different times," Mr. Lescoulie says. "They seem to be enjoying it, and so does he." The camera centers on a scrum of teenagers looking downward. Iggy surfaces, hoists himself up so he's standing on shoulders, and remains aloft, pointing forward like the prow of a ship. Next he's scooping something out of a jar, wiping it on himself, flinging it around. "That's peanut butter," Mr. Lescoulie says, incredulous.
I'M going to be straight," Iggy Pop said recently, talking about that film, which circulated for years in certain circles and is now of course available on YouTube. "I was more than a little high."
He was often more than a little high. But these days Iggy Pop, a k a Jim Osterberg, is ferociously grounded. He swims and practices a form of tai chi, and his only vice, he says, is a few glasses of Bordeaux. Coming up on his 60th birthday, he bears signs of age: creased and ropy, he limps from cartilage lost in his right hip, and can't hear well over ambient noise.
For the first time in 34 years, however, he and the members of his onetime band are putting out a new record: "The Weirdness," which will be released by Virgin on March 6. (Careful historians will say 37 years: this is the version of the Stooges that made "Fun House," around the time of the peanut butter concert — the brothers Ron and Scott Asheton on guitar and drums and Steve Mackay on tenor saxophone.)
In the intervening years they too have changed. As has the world around them.
Once upon a time Iggy and the Stooges defined themselves against the Lescoulies of the world: they were outrageous, truculent, elemental. But these days it seems there are more Iggys than Lescoulies. Everyone's subversive, everyone's perverse. What can the Stooges be, if not a band that defines itself against the rest of the world? What happens when they're old and experienced, and punk attitudes, already in their third generation, have infiltrated so many corners of the culture? How do they climb back into that frame of mind?
BREAKING up" doesn't exist anymore. A band only has extended periods of downtime.
The Stooges' downtime was a little more down than others. Ron Asheton used to say that Iggy had become too self-involved for the Stooges to play together again. Scott Asheton pursued Iggy at various points over the last 10 years, and the answer was always no. "I wasn't going to go backwards," Iggy explains now. "And I wasn't going to do anything to what I thought was a great band."
At some point, however, the incentives just became too powerful: prime gigs at the best rock festivals in the world, both the best-paid and the most creatively run.
Plus, what else was there to do? Scott Asheton, who lives in Florida, had been working in construction. His brother, Ron, had been in a series of bands that hadn't made a stir, still living in his boyhood home on the west side of Ann Arbor, where the band had its first rehearsals. (All three went to Ann Arbor High together.)
Iggy needed the Ashetons just as much. "We managed to stay in a band together during a protracted period of failure," he said of those early days, gigging and making records and living in a filthy house. "No rewards. No approval. No money. These are really the only guys I know. That doesn't mean, 'Oh, shucks, I like them so much.' I mean, we lived together."
Besides, "I'd hit a wall playing alone, in my solo music," he said. "I was just at wit's end about what to do — bands, songwriting, everything."
He invited the Ashetons to work on a few songs with him for his album "Skull Ring" in 2003. A week after they convened, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival floated the idea of a Stooges reunion show. (They did the show; Iggy wouldn't say how much they were offered, though he does say that the Stooges now get paid much better than he did for concerts during his solo career.) And the bassist Mike Watt came on board, once of the Minutemen, to take the place of Dave Alexander, who died in 1975.
Before they all headed into the studio, Mr. Watt flew to Florida to go over the new songs, and Iggy gave him a lesson about finding his "inner stupidity."
They were practicing "She Took My Money." ("She took my money/And didn't say thank you/She took my money/And immediately banked it.") Mr. Watt has a strong melodic style on the bass, but Iggy leaned on him to play with a pick instead of his fingers, and to stay with the backbone of the song, even if it meant sounding as dumb, he explained, as the guy singing the bass notes in a doo-wop group. "Play the content," Iggy urged. "As soon as one of us isn't playing that, we don't have a song."
It might have seemed like square advice, but Mr. Watt took it in stride. "Don't get me wrong," he said the other day. "There wouldn't be punk without the Stooges. But after punk, things changed. And they come from the '60s, so there's a different sensibility there. Iggy just said: 'Let go, Watt. Let go of ego. Learn from the source.' "
Over the 70 or so shows the group has played since 2003, it has developed a routine, including a repertory of 14 songs from the earlier albums "The Stooges" and "Fun House." At least once Iggy writhes on top of the bass amp; artfully he keeps his pants in danger of falling down; he chants "I am you" during the free-jazz portion of the song "Fun House."
You can't be prepared for the power of a Stooges show; it still baffles you, makes you a Lescoulie. Iggy juts his hip out like a bumper, skips and punches the air, dives into the audience. On the final night of the All Tomorrow's Parties Festival, which the Stooges headlined in Minehead, England, in December, Iggy encouraged about 60 people to dance onstage, endangering the backline of amplifiers. And he practices his extraordinary physical vocabulary, tilting his shoulders and extending his arms above and behind his head. (Not insignificantly, he was a backstroker on the Ann Arbor High swim team.)
Afterward, backstage, Iggy let two glasses of wine last him 40 minutes. He was in a fine mood. "I sang about twice as hard as I usually do," he marveled. "And I was worrying. A little voice was saying to me, 'Do you sound too demented?' You know, you don't want to overdo it. It happens to any musician. If you want to do really well, sometimes you take it all on yourself. And that ain't it. You've got to tone down to fit into the beauty of the percolation. This is all part of finding the stupidity, you know."
IN October at Electrical Audio studios in Chicago the overall picture was of scheduled productivity. After the basic tracks for "The Weirdness" had been recorded, each band member was given his own day to make suggestions and additions. I came during Ron Asheton's day, when he was tracking some extra guitar solos. The day before had been Steve Mackay's day; Iggy thanked him with a bottle of very nice wine.
Around one another the three original Stooges communicate in shorthand. Iggy Pop, famous as a wildman and credible as a sage, is less well known as an organized type: a note taker, a list maker. He led the discussion on the fine points of each playback. Scott Asheton, a brooding figure who rarely left his chair, voiced a few reservations — "Too much solos sounds too amateurish," he said at one point — and little else. (He was right, and more solos made it on to the record than probably should have.) Ron Asheton just confidently got his job done. After recording one screaming guitar overdub, he re-entered the control room. "Was I too obtuse?" he asked, feigning an epicene British accent. Nobody answered.
While recording, Iggy swam laps in the hotel pool every day before going to work at noon. During the recording of "Fun House" in 1970, by comparison, he dropped acid before each day's session.
Still, Ron Asheton says the Iggy Pop of today is not altogether unfamiliar. "He's more like the Jim I knew in the beginning," Mr. Asheton said. (To old friends, Iggy is Jim.) "It's like the better Jim times. When we first started hanging out, he didn't smoke cigarettes. Jim and I were always more conservative, hesitant to drink, the last ones to smoke marijuana. When we got to Chicago, he had a piece of paper, and it said exactly what's going to happen on every given day. He asks our opinion; we have a mutual pact that we all have to agree. I love that he deals with the schedules. I know that he needs to do that. He's clear about what he wants to do."
The resulting album takes pains to remind you that the Stooges are authentic, that their simplicity and roughness isn't just a casual disposition, or a consequence of being messed up, but a dogma. But "The Weirdness" sounds nothing like "Fun House." Gone are the medium and slow tempos, the glorious cosmic drone of old songs like "Dirt" and "Ann"; the band "wants less uncertainties," in Iggy's words, and in the process has shed half its old sound. It's almost all fast and rough — almost a punk album, with the hard riffs and commitment to bashing that one wishes the Rolling Stones still had. The spirit is there, even when, in some cases, the songwriting is not.
Its engineer is Steve Albini, who has become known for his own dogma of simplicity: analog equipment, full-band live takes, no filters and reverb. The Ashetons' drums and guitars are big, and Iggy, relatively speaking, is small. He pushes his voice, yelping the lyrics, which are typically zen-mundane. Stooges songs used to be about boredom, sex and hanging out. Now they are about boredom, aging, money, sex, greed and hanging out.
The best example is "ATM." Most of its words have one syllable; it is a smart-stupid rendering of a cash machine as a symbol for money, efficiency, and aging. And it has a provocative aside. "The leaders of rock don't rock," he sings at one point. "This bothers me quite a lot."
He wouldn't tell me who he was talking about specifically, he said, but he believes that the rock business is too big, run by people who know nothing about it.
Wasn't that always the case?
"No," he said, decisively. "The people I met at the top in 1972 tended to be crackpots from the fringes of the lowest parts of the entertainment industry. And they tended to know their stuff. Jac Holzman" — the president of Elektra, the Stooges' old label — "was a former record-store owner in the Village. The guy who ran the very biggest talent agency in New York had ties to the pinball industry, I guess you could say. They could really screw an artist up, but they weren't just someone from Legal."
He started warming to the subject: the real subject of the song, he said, was "a fairly loosely aggregated industry-slash-palace guard that has coalesced around the corpus of something called rock, and that something has grown to have something to do with units of digital information, and filling a parking lot." He paused. "It's impressive. It's brutally compelling, sometimes. But it's not enjoyable."
He says he can hear moments of wildness in the old Stooges record that he knows he can't reach anymore. "But some of that's youth."
"And the time period," said Scott Asheton. "What was goin' on."
"So, you know," Iggy responded. "I don't worry about it too much. Other people are going to do plenty of yakety-yak on that subject for me. Who needs another comment from me?"
How is it to make a new Stooges record without drugs?
"You know, I don't feel the difference," he said, thoughtfully. "You?" he asked Scott Asheton.
"Ah, no," he replied, turned 180 degrees away, smoking a cigarette.
"I feel just like I did when I was stoned," Iggy continued. "I feel the same. The thing is, it's wonderful to know we can't take them," he said, and smiled crisply.
March 15, 2007
Google Is Reviving Hopes for Ex-Furniture Makers
By SHAILA DEWAN
LENOIR, N.C. — Almost 40 years ago, when Irene Marsh was a young woman, she took a few months of computer science courses. But when Ms. Marsh realized that would not help her find a job in this Appalachian furniture region, she dropped out and went to work in a factory making tabletops.
Then, like thousands of other furniture makers here in the last five years, she lost her job to workers overseas, after 37 years at one company. But Ms. Marsh, who recently sat with a mouse and keyboard in a basic-skills classroom at Caldwell Community College a few miles south of here, may yet have her chance at a computer job.
Last month, the Internet search giant Google announced that it would take advantage of the area's underused electric power grid, cheap land and robust water supply to build a "server farm" — a building full of computers that will become part of the company's worldwide network.
Google says it hopes laid-off furniture workers, most of whom never graduated from high school, will be among the 250 employees at two facilities on the 215-acre site, much of which was once a lumberyard.
Ms. Marsh, 58, intends to apply. "Of course, you know, it's come a long way," she said cheerfully. "Back then you used to have punch cards and all that. They needed a whole room for one big gigantic computer."
That Google chose Lenoir, a town that still uses some 18th-century techniques to make its signature products, may seem odd: Server farms require relatively little human labor, and they do not produce anything, not even baby computers.
But the choice of Lenoir, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, bodes well for other struggling manufacturing economies in the South, as Google is already considering two sites in South Carolina for similar facilities. Google will not reveal how many server farms it has or intends to build, but they are important components in its race to stay ahead of competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo.
Since the deal in Lenoir (pronounced leh-NORE) was announced in February, city and county officials have found themselves on the defensive, criticized for the secrecy of the negotiations and the package of incentives, potentially worth $260 million, that Google will receive.
At Google's request, the state legislature passed a law exempting some high-tech businesses from paying sales tax on electricity — a tax the company says it would not pay in many other states. And as long as the server farm is operational, the city and county will forgive 100 percent of the company's personal property taxes and 80 percent of its real estate taxes for up to 30 years.
The deal's critics point out that although Google said it would invest $600 million and create 250 jobs at an average salary of $48,000, it made no minimum guarantees, often considered an important part of shielding economic development deals from accusations that they are corporate giveaways. The incentive package is one of the largest ever in the state, and when it is broken down per job, it is as much as $1.24 million each.
"I agree that jobs are what we need," said T. J. Rohr, the only city councilman to vote against the incentives (on principle, he said; he is a Libertarian). "But what's the limit that you're willing to pay for a job?"
Local officials argue that the company will pay hundreds of thousands in franchise fees, sales taxes and payroll taxes and that it has filled local hotels with construction workers, bought tons of stone and concrete and hired security guards. Since the deal was announced, a former Winn-Dixie store, on the market for more than a year, has sold, and the town mall is under contract, officials said.
"Here's what I've asked people, too: What's the disadvantage?" said David Barlow, the mayor. "What if they weren't coming? Then we'd have 100 percent of nothing."
Most of the criticism has come not from locals but from the state's two biggest newspapers, The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh, which have, among other things, questioned the secrecy employed in negotiating the deal.
At times, things have gotten personal. "God bless them if they can learn how to run a server farm," a Charlotte Observer columnist wrote of Lenoir's work force. "A lot of folks in Charlotte and Atlanta and D.C. already know how."
Tim Sanders, a county commissioner during the bulk of the negotiations, said officials simply researched competing sites and tried to make a better offer. He said Google had already paid $4 million to the city and county to offset some infrastructure costs, while the local governments have lost nothing.
"We're being criticized like we're a bunch of country hicks out here and we can't count," Mr. Sanders said.
Mr. Barlow and Mr. Sanders considered the deal so important that they went door to door to ask some 35 homeowners to sell their land to amass a tract of the size Google wanted to buy. "I dreaded living here if Google did not choose that site," Mr. Barlow said.
Still, local residents have wondered how many of them will be qualified for the jobs Google has to offer. (The company says contractors will employ landscapers, janitors and security workers in addition to the 250 jobs.)
Kyle Kiziak, 22, who works for a welding supply company, said his stepfather was recently laid off from his job as a truck driver. "He sits there and thinks, 'Will they hire someone like me?' " Mr. Kiziak said.
Lloyd Taylor, Google's director of global operations, said there was a false assumption that the data center would have "a team of rocket scientists holed up in a room." Many of the company's computers, he said, can self-diagnose problems and be repaired by trained workers. Google is already helping the community college develop a technology training program. And, he said, the company believes that furniture makers have "a great work ethic."
The need for jobs, economic diversification and good news is dire. Lenoir's furniture industry has been decimated by overseas competition, and the transformation has been swift. The unemployment rate went from one of the state's lowest, 2.4 percent, in 2000, to 6.9 percent last year, after peaking at 9.8 percent in 2003. Some 5,000 furniture jobs have been lost. Many workers in their 40s and 50s, who raised families and paid mortgages on factory salaries, have had to go back to school.
G. Alex Bernhardt Sr., chairman and chief executive of the Bernhardt Furniture Company, said the industry had collapsed so quickly because a depression after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks coincided with a substantial increase in China's capacity to handle furniture manufacturing jobs, leading to a series of difficult announcements to Lenoir's workers.
"I usually say to them, 'I shop at Wal-Mart, I think most of you shop at Wal-Mart — we can't have it both ways,' " Mr. Bernhardt said during an interview in his office.
Even though his company is a major taxpayer that does not get the same breaks promised to Google, Mr. Bernhardt said, he is enthusiastic about the center.
"They're bringing something new and fresh to the community that we need," he said. "People who have to pay for those incentives, like Bernhardt, are not complaining about it."
Then Mr. Bernhardt began to muse about the county's transition from agrarian to industrial and now, he hopes, to a knowledge-based economy. "My grandfather started the first furniture factory in Lenoir," he said.
"I wonder how long that took them," he said. "It certainly didn't take only five years."
March 9, 2007
Protocol Is Cited in Limiting Scientists' Talks on Climate
By FELICITY BARRINGER
WASHINGTON, March 8 — The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the agency requirement that two employees going to international meetings on the Arctic not discuss climate change, saying diplomatic protocol limited employees to an agreed-on agenda.
Two memorandums written about a week ago and reported by The New York Times and the Web site of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Thursday set strict parameters for what the two employees could and could not discuss at meetings in Norway and Russia.
The stipulations that the employees "will not be speaking on or responding to" questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice are "consistent with staying with our commitment to the other countries to talk about only what's on the agenda," said the director of the agency, H. Dale Hall.
One of the two employees, Janet E. Hohn, is scheduled to accompany a delegation to Norway led by Julia Gourley of the State Department at a meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants.
Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department , parent of the wildlife service, said the memorandum did not prohibit Ms. Hohn from talking about climate change "over a beer" but indicated that climate was "not the subject of the agenda."
The other employee, Craig Perham, an expert on polar bears, was invited by the World Wildlife Fund to help advise villagers along the Siberian coast on avoiding encounters with the bears, said Margaret Williams, director of the Bering Sea program of the fund.
With increasing frequency, polar bears are being found near the villages of the Chukchi in part because their migrations have shifted as warming trends alter the sea ice.
In 2006, after a 15-year-old girl was killed by a marauding bear, the local groups reached out to Russian scientists and the World Wildlife Fund for help, Ms. Williams said. She asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to take along Mr. Perham to seacoast villages less than 250 miles from Alaska to offer his expertise.
A memorandum on Feb. 26 said Mr. Perham "understands the administration's position on climate change, polar bears and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to those issues."
Mr. Hall, the director, said in an interview Thursday that "these memoranda could have been better worded," but that requiring strict adherence to a set agenda had "been a longstanding practice."
Asked for the formal agenda of the Russia meetings, Ms. Williams of the World Wildlife Fund said no such document had been negotiated.
"There was," she said "an invitation letter from us to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It always talked about human-bear interactions."
Top-down control of government scientists' discussions of climate change heated up as an issue last year, after appointees at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration kept journalists from interviewing climate scientists and discouraged news releases on global warming.
The NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, ordered a review of policies, culminating in a decision that scientists could speak on science and policy as long as they did not say they spoke for the agency.
In April, John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science adviser, sent the new NASA policy to more than 12 agencies urging them to follow suit.
March 7, 2007
Editorial
A Libby Verdict
There will be a great deal written and said in coming days about the frustrations of the Scooter Libby verdict — that it did not tell us whether someone deliberately blew Valerie Plame Wilson's cover or erase serious concerns about the prosecutor's abuse of the First Amendment. Let's focus first on what the verdict does say.
One of the most senior officials in the White House, Lewis Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was caught lying to the F.B.I. He appears to have been trying to cover up a smear campaign that was orchestrated by his boss against the first person to unmask one of the many untruths that President Bush used to justify invading Iraq. He was charged with those crimes, defended by the best lawyers he could get, tried in an open courtroom and convicted of serious felonies. Mr. Libby walked freely out of the court, had his say in public and will be allowed to appeal.
It was another reminder of how precious the American judicial system is, at a time when it is under serious attack from the same administration Mr. Libby served. That administration is systematically denying the right of counsel, the right to evidence and even the right to be tried to scores of prisoners who may have committed no crimes at all.
And although we still do not know the answer to the original mystery, the case provided a look at the methodical way that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby, Karl Rove and others in the Bush inner circle set out to discredit Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph Wilson IV. Mr. Wilson, a career diplomat, was sent by the State Department in 2002 to check out a British intelligence report that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the government of Niger for a secret nuclear weapons program. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Mr. Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
In July 2003, Mr. Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in The Times that what he had found did not support that claim. The specter of a nuclear-armed Iraq was central to Mr. Bush's case for rushing to war. So, the trial testimony showed, Mr. Cheney orchestrated an assault on Mr. Wilson's credibility with the help of Mr. Libby and others. They whispered to journalists that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and that nepotism was the reason he had been chosen for the trip.
That is what we know from the Libby trial, and it is some of the clearest evidence yet that this administration did not get duped by faulty intelligence; at the very least, it cherry-picked and hyped intelligence to justify the war. What Mr. Wilson found, and subsequent investigations confirmed, was that there was one trip in 1999 — not "recently," but four years before Mr. Bush's statement — by an Iraqi official to Niger and that during that trip, uranium was never discussed.
What we still do not know is whether a government official used Ms. Wilson's name despite knowing that she worked undercover. That is a serious offense, which could have put her and all those who had worked with her in danger. We also do not understand why the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, chose to wage war with the news media in assembling his case, going so far as to jail a Times reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source.
The potential damage from that decision remains of real concern. But it was still a breath of fresh air to see someone in this administration, which specializes in secrecy, prevarication and evading blame, finally called to account.
March 6, 2007
Layoffs Follow Scandal at Colorado Megachurch
By DAN FROSCH
DENVER, March 5 — In the wake of a scandal involving its founding pastor, the Rev. Ted Haggard, the New Life Church in Colorado Springs has been forced to lay off 44 of its 350 workers to offset a sharp drop in donations.
Mr. Haggard resigned as president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals in November and was removed as senior pastor of the New Life megachurch after a former male prostitute said that he had had a three-year sexual relationship with Mr. Haggard and had helped him obtain methamphetamines.
After initially denying the accusations, Mr. Haggard confessed to buying drugs from the former prostitute, Michael Jones, and admitted to what he termed "sexual immorality." Mr. Haggard has since gone through counseling, and was declared "completely heterosexual" by a member of a panel of ministers appointed to oversee New Life.
Since the announcement of Mr. Haggard's removal on Nov. 5, New Life's donations have fallen to $4.9 million in the past four months, compared with $5.3 million in the same period a year earlier, said Rob Brendle, the associate pastor. The drop was previously reported in The Denver Post.
Attendance at New Life, which has an estimated 14,000 members, has declined about 15 percent, Mr. Brendle said.
"We are in a position where the reality of our financial situation is causing us to look at how we can be more efficient," he said, "and we spent a lot of time thinking and analyzing how best to do that. These are difficult times, and these have been difficult decisions. But the floor of this church has not fallen out."
Shortly after the scandal, the church's board of overseers began a "moral audit" of New Life's leaders. The audit resulted in disciplinary action against a small number of employees and the resignation of one more for "unrelated issues of sin," said Mr. Brendle, who was among those interviewed by the board for the audit.
"Everyone's trust was shaken," he said. "They asked me what I know about Ted, when I knew and what I did about it. They asked me questions about the general health of my spiritual life and about personal morality and character."
Mr. Brendle said the recent layoffs, which affected pastoral staff members and administrative assistants, among others, would help restore fiscal stability. Congregants, some of whom learned of the firings at a question-and-answer session held by a panel of church leaders during Sunday services, remained upbeat about New Life's fortunes.
"It's unfortunate and sad, and it hurts," said Tim Chambers, 43, who has attended New Life for 10 years. "There are a lot of emotions that come with this, because a lot of these employees have been around a good while.
"But these individuals are getting a lot of love and support. And I think this is going to help us move forward when our new pastor comes in."
Despite New Life's struggles, Chris Paulene, director of member services for the National Association of Evangelicals, said other evangelical churches had not been affected by Mr. Haggard's case.
"This is a completely isolated incident," Mr. Paulene said. "It won't affect the rest of the churches, at least not measurably."
New Life, which Mr. Haggard started in his basement in 1985, is searching for his successor.
"I speak with Ted every week," Mr. Brendle said. "He is authentically repentant and humble."
Mr. Brendle added: "I would say that the people at New Life are confident in the process of transition that is under way and hopeful for the future. There is a pervasive sense that our best days are ahead of us."
March 6, 2007
Editorial
Manufacturing Misdemeanors
The New York Police Department has been going fishing. Not content to nab criminals when they break the law on their own, the department has been planting unattended bags in subway stations to see who might take them, at which point waiting officers pounce.
As NY1 News reported last week, 220 people were arrested last year in the sting, known as Operation Lucky Bag. In dismissing one of these cases, a Brooklyn judge said the police "do not need to manipulate a situation where temptation may overcome even people who would normally never think of committing a crime." This program bothers us for that and many other reasons and should be discontinued immediately.
Civil libertarians have argued that the program is entrapment. That is a legal distinction for the courts to decide, but it certainly looks like that to a layperson. It is clearly a poor use of resources. People wandering off with lost property ranks far down the list of law enforcement priorities.
There is also the question of whether the sting does actual harm. In an era of terrorism, where the police have to rely on the help of average people to notice anything suspicious — including apparently abandoned bags — the last thing New York needs are cynical operations that encourage mistrust between the police and subway riders.
And of course, there is the effect on neighborliness. It is remarkable how many people in this city are willing to track down the owners of lost cellphones, wallets or bags. Arresting good Samaritans is bad enough, but encouraging them not to help in the future through this kind of overly aggressive policing is a downright shame. The best thing to do with this misbegotten program would be to end it.
February 27, 2007
Justices Decline Case on 200-Year Sentence for Man Who Possessed Child Pornography
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 — An Arizona man who received a 200-year prison sentence for possessing 20 pornographic images of children failed Monday to persuade the Supreme Court to consider whether the sentence was unconstitutionally excessive.
Arizona law imposes a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for "sexual exploitation of a minor," and it requires that sentences for multiple convictions be served consecutively.
The sentence that the man, Morton R. Berger, received was consequently longer than the sentence any other state would have imposed for a similar offense, a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court wrote in an opinion last year dissenting from that court's decision upholding the 200-year sentence.
A majority of the Arizona Supreme Court declined to examine the aggregate sentence as a whole, instead focusing on the sentence of 10 years for possessing a single pornographic image, which it found was not excessive or disproportionate. It was this aspect of the analysis that Mr. Berger, a 57-year-old former high school teacher, challenged in his appeal to the United States Supreme Court .
"If this court reviews Berger's entire punishment instead of examining the sentence for a single count," the brief said, "it would find Berger's punishment cruel, unusual and unconstitutional."
His appeal said that in most states, sentences for similar crimes would run concurrently, and an offender would serve no more than five years, with the additional possibility of probation or early release. Both are barred under Arizona law. Had the offense been prosecuted under federal law, Mr. Berger's brief said, the federal guidelines would have provided a five-year sentence.
The case, Berger v. Arizona, No. 06-349, has drawn considerable attention in criminal law circles as providing a possible occasion for the justices to take a fresh look at a subject they have treated only sparingly. While fully engaged in reconsidering the respective roles of judges and juries in criminal sentencing, the court has been extremely reluctant to strike down particular sentences as excessive.
Douglas A. Berman, a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University and an authority on sentencing, also noted the difference in the court's treatment of punitive damages and criminal sentencing.
In an interview on Monday, recalling that the court last week vacated an award of punitive damages against Philip Morris, Professor Berman said, "For a host of good reasons, the justices think they have a role in regulating extreme corporate punishment, but I fear the court doesn't embrace a role in regulating extreme individual punishment." Professor Berman has been writing about the Berger case for months on his blog, Sentencing Law and Policy.
Arizona vigorously opposed Supreme Court review of the sentence, telling the justices that it had been properly based on "overwhelming evidence" of Mr. Berger's "large-scale, deliberate and long-term acquisition of child pornography."
The state's brief said that after Mr. Berger turned down a plea bargain, the prosecutor whittled the case to 20 counts out of fear of "deluging the jury" with highly graphic and disturbing images. The police had found the images in Mr. Berger's possession after learning that his credit card number had been used to buy contraband images from a child pornography Web site based in Dallas.
These were some of the court's other activities on a busy Monday:
Primary Elections
The justices agreed to decide the constitutionality of the open primary system adopted in 2004 by Washington State. Under that system, people can vote for any candidate without regard to the party affiliation of the candidate or the voter. Candidates, however, can designate their own party preference on the ballot. The top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party label.
The Republican, Democratic and Libertarian parties in the state challenged the system on the ground that it violated their First Amendment right to freedom of association by depriving them and their members of the ability to control the selection of candidates running under their banner. Two lower courts agreed, on the basis of recent Supreme Court precedents upholding the rights of political parties to control their own affairs.
The justices granted and consolidated two separate appeals, one filed by the state (Washington v. Washington Republican Party, No. 06-730) and one by the Washington State Grange, an organization that advocated for the voter initiative that established the new system (Washington State Grange v. Washington Republican Party, No. 06-713).
Gun Use
In its latest effort to parse a federal law that makes it a crime to "use" a gun in relation to a drug offense, the court agreed to decide whether the receipt of an unloaded firearm as payment for drugs amounted to a prohibited "use."
The federal appeals courts are divided on this question, which the Supreme Court did not directly resolve in 1995 when it ruled that "use" required "active employment" of the gun, a definition that the court said then included using a gun as an item of barter or commerce even if the gun was never fired.
In the new case, Watson v. United States, No. 06-571, the defendant, Michael A. Watson, acquired a gun from a police informant in return for 24 doses of the drug OxyContin. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected his argument that receipt of a gun under such circumstances did not meet the "active employment" test.
The question occurs often, in various permutations, because a violation of the statute in question carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison in addition to any underlying offense. More than one in 10 of all federal drug convictions carry an enhanced sentence for use of a firearm.
An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New 'Heresies'
By JOHN TIERNEY
Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn't plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They'll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They'll stop worrying about "frankenfoods" and embrace genetic engineering.
He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.
He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he's been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called "America Needs Indians." That's somewhere in the neighborhood of romantic.
But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic hierarchies with horizontal information networks — a scientific vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along.
Mr. Brand, who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., has stayed ahead of the curve for so long — as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker — that he's become a cottage industry in academia.
Last year, Fred Turner of Stanford published "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism." This fall Andy Kirk of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is putting out "Counterculture Green: The Environmentalism of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog." By next year we should be due for a revisionist historian's discovery of a modern social movement that Mr. Brand did not orchestrate.
In addition to publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, he organized the first Hackers Conference, in 1984, and helped found The WELL, the early electronic community that was a sort of prototype of the Web. In Professor Turner's history, he was the impresario who knew everyone and brought the counterculture and the cyberculture together, from the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s to Wired magazine in the 1990s.
He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.
He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture's fears of computers turning into Big Brother. "Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines," he told Conservation magazine last year. "Where are the green biotech hackers?"
He's also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.
"There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective," he says. "Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don't know where it is and you don't know what it's doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody's atmosphere."
Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he's been shifting toward the minority.
"My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by," he says. "I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind."
Mr. Brand got his first look at the big picture one afternoon in 1966 while sitting on a roof in San Francisco at what he calls an "altitude of three stories and 100 mikes," meaning micrograms of LSD. He contemplated the skyline and decided the buildings weren't parallel because he was seeing the curvature of the Earth.
This reminded him of Buckminster Fuller's theory that people abused the environment because they thought of the Earth as flat and infinite, not as a finite globe. The next day the Earth looked flat again, but the 28-year-old Mr. Brand had a new cause. He printed up buttons asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"
Two years later, when Earth's portrait from space was finally released, he used it on the cover of his new project, the Whole Earth Catalog. The catalog became the bible for the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement, but Mr. Brand was not into the simple self-sufficient life on the farm. He was into new tools and new ways of sharing information. As he famously explained in the introduction to the catalog: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."
Along with the potter's wheels and organic-farming tips, the catalog featured a state-of-the-art offering from Hewlett Packard: a desktop calculator that cost $4,900. In 1968, which was 16 years before the Apple Macintosh, Mr. Brand helped arrange the first demonstration of a computer mouse.
In a 1972 article, he contrasted "hackers" (a novel term then) with old-fashioned "planners," hailing the experimental, collaborative culture that was taking shape in cyberspace. At the first Hackers Conference, he uttered another of his enduring aphorisms, "Information wants to be free."
Mr. Brand's latest project, undertaken with fellow digerati, is to build the world's slowest computer, a giant clock designed to run for 10,000 years inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, powered by changes in temperature. The clock is an effort to promote long-term thinking — what Mr. Brand calls the Long Now, a term he borrowed from the musician Brian Eno.
Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn't always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.
The famine never arrived, and Professor Ehrlich's theories of the coming "age of scarcity" were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Simon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon's cornucopian theories.
Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon's victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn't. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.
"It is one of the great revelatory bets," he now says. "Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they're wrong, it's really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we'd have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I've been wrong is when I assume there's a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought."
He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he's afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.
Old-fashioned rural simplicity still has great appeal for romantic environmentalists. But when the romantics who disdain frankenfoods choose locally grown heirloom plants and livestock, they're benefiting from technological advances made by past plant and animal breeders. Are the risks of genetically engineered breeds of wheat or cloned animals so great, or do they just ruin the romance?
Mr. Brand would rather take a few risks.
"I get bored easily — on purpose," he said, recalling advice from the co-discoverer of DNA's double helix. "Jim Watson said he looks for young scientists with low thresholds of boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things."
That's a good strategy, whether you're trying to build a sustainable career or a sustainable civilization. Ultimately, there's no safety in clinging to a romanticized past or trying to plan a risk-free future. You have to keep looking for better tools and learning from mistakes. You have to keep on hacking.
Game With No Winner
It's almost enough to make us nostalgic for streaking and sitting on flagpoles. College students from Michigan to Florida have found a new way to get attention, offend others and make a right-wing statement all at once. It's a game with a name that says it all: "Catch the Illegal Immigrant."
The game is a variation on hide and seek: one player poses as the immigrant, and everyone else tries to find that person. There's a prize, usually $200 or less, which is not much, but enough to celebrate the cheap exploitation of a fellow human.
"Catch the Immigrant" is the brainchild of an intern with the College Republican National Committee, who lost her post after coming up with this and other campus recruitment gimmicks. Another game, called "Fun With Guns," invited young Republicans to fire BB guns or paint balls at cardboard cutouts of Democratic leaders. Republican Party leaders have tried to distance themselves from the games, but seem to have done little to stop them.
The right-wing organizers of the immigrant games — particularly Young Americans for Freedom and Young Republicans — have declared piously that they're just trying to spark debate. At that, they have succeeded. Protesters defending immigration and human dignity have outnumbered the game's players at the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Pennsylvania State and other campuses, including, most recently, at New York University.
The reaction from schools has been mostly tepid. Administrators are in a tough spot, trying to balance free speech with offensive behavior. More speech is the answer, including voices of authority pointing out the nastiness of this game as well as the inherent cruelty of hunting people for sport.
"Catch the Immigrant" also reflects a larger misunderstanding of the immigration issue. The more than 11 million illegal immigrants cannot be caught. Even if they could be, rounding them up and deporting them would be disastrous, economically and socially. Educators should teach the game players about the real world.
Billions Over Baghdad
By JOHN B. TAYLOR
The story of the currency plan is one of several that involved large sums of cash. For example, just before the war, Saddam Hussein stole $1 billion from the Iraqi central bank. American soldiers found that money in his palaces and shipped it to a base in Kuwait, where the United States Army's 336th Finance Command kept it safe. To avoid any appearance of wrongdoing, American soldiers in Kuwait wore pocket-less shorts and T-shirts whenever they counted the money.
