He's funny and informative. He's promoting his relatively new book in this 70 minute video presentation. Ha-Joon Chang is a Korean economist now in Cambridge, UK.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Switzerland is a post-industrial society, Smoot Hawley ruined the world, and the British Empire was founded on Free Trade.

Chang makes a good case that these shibboleths are incorrect. A developing society needs to protect its infant industries. They have always done so, and Chang feels this truth is not appreciated by most economists and commentators today. He's doesn't oppose free trade - he takes a swing at the current mania for patents in the USA, for example.

There's no panic yet, actually, maybe because I don't think this message is getting heard. I saw this interview with the American academic and retired army colonel Andrew Bacevich last night, and wondered how his message would resonate in The Forvm, which seems to content to slavishly follow mainstream narratives. Discussions on the day to day minutia of campaign ads etc abound.

For something more than a little different, the transcript and video (50 min.) with Bacevich is here:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08152008/watch.html

The Closing of the American Mind was written by Allan Bloom some 20 years ago. I’ve just got round to it now. Much of it lacked interest for me. I did not find Bloom’s speaking on behalf of American university students, their parents, women or minority groups worthy of much attention. A good deal of the book is taken up by Bloom’s presentation of what others think and want, only to be knocked down as straw persons. I chafe against this sort of polemical exercise.

Not too long ago, I finished reading Among The Dead Cities, by British philospher A. C. Grayling. The book is about the morality of area (or indiscriminate carpet) bombing, and its history up to the end of WWII.

The very beginning goes back to some eccentric Italians back in 1911 while they were fighting the Turk in Libya. While flying over enemy lines on a reconnaissance mission, on a whim the pilot dropped a handful of grenades as he flew by. Such an unsporting stunt disgusted the public, but Giulio Douhet, the commander of Italy's aviation battalion saw the future in this action. After a career of more downs than ups for an aviator - he spent his last year in uniform in prison for predicting disaster for the Italian army in 1917 - Douhet published "The Command of the Air" in 1921. This book spelled out the strategy that motivated much of the thinking behind the Allied bombing campaign of WWII.

This is a link to the film The Origin of AIDS which is available for online viewing.

It's produced by Edward Hooper, a one-time journalist, now a full time researcher on the origins of AIDS. It is claimed that AIDS almost certainly comes from one of two sources, hunters who contracted the virus from eating chimpanzee meat, or from contaminated Polio vaccine given to a million subjects in the Congo. If it came through the hunters, and there are researchers believe it did, why did the AIDS virus only appear in the last century?

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the end of the Atlantic Slave trade. This has received a fair amount of attention in the United Kingdom, as far as I know, the only place where the anniversary is celebrated. Gresham College of London has hosted a number of lectures on the topic. They are available online in mp3 and transcripts here.

The Collapse of Complex Societies is a book written by archaeologist Joseph Tainter. I came across a reference to the book at the Global Guerrillas website. The site, by the way, is on The Forvm blogroll and is worth a visit from time to time. I think John gives us a good insight as to how, almost 5 years since the good guys captured the red flag, we still have US military wandering around Baghdad getting themselves shot.

Instead of giving a book review, I'll attempt a summary. It's a work directed to an academic audience, so there's a fair amount of padding, dead horse flogging, and straw man creation and destruction. Still the crux of the thesis is interesting and simply stated: the collapse of complex societies ("civilization" in politically incorrect terms) can be traced back to the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns. Before going ahead with that, I can quote Tainter on what is complexity, and what is collapse:

I love a paradox, and I´m always happy to uncover one. I assume some of the readers here have similar tastes.

I was reading a thread of comments about the Middle East and the War there, and came across a series of comments by Ken White.

The ME has been doing its thing for 7,000 years; time has a totally different meaning there.
...
You're thinking like a westerner, logically and naturally. Though processes in the ME don't work the same way; not that they're bad, just different.

http://www.theforvm.org/diary/spartacvs/is-failure-and-its-author-so-har...

I could go on, I suppose, but I think you get the picture. The Middle East is a place characterized by almost an unspeakably alien and incomprehensible culture. I´m prepared to go along with this. bin Laden was bad enough to plan and carry out the 9/11 attacks, but not that evil so as to profit from his actions by manipulating the markets. Inscrutability goes a long way to clear away such questions.

This started out as a response to a Traveller Diary, but grew.

Replacing Saddam with a pro-US stooge along the lines of the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt is no solution in my books. It is the sort of policy responsible for the 9/11 catastrophe, accepting that coddling these dictators has the side-effect of fostering nihilist ideologies.

The elections in Iraq are probably the only unequivocal positive from the last 4 years, and unfortunately, it seems that anti-muslim sentiment is preventing them from being recognized as such. (Among some at the Forvm, at any rate.) First though, we have to split off those Islamists like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranians from those who follow the teachings of bin Ladenists. I don´t see this being done here. In fact I see the introduction of terminology such as the ¨war against militant islam¨ replacing ¨war against terror¨ as being designed to conflate the two. I see the former as populist, pro-business and anti-zionist. They are not a threat to the US. Hezbollah is not even up to dominating the local scene in Lebanon. However, they have deep roots and are not about to be easily exterminated. These former groups engage in terror operations, black marketeering, arm themselves, and train for and fight wars with Israel, but they are not to be confused with the bin Ladenists who are almost completely without popular support. We can see the experience of the Algerian Civil War in the 90s when secularists and nationalists fought the popular Islamists (FIS). The latter part of that conflict saw the extremist ¨Afghan Arab¨ GIA turning on the populists (and society as a whole) in violence very similar to what we see every day in Iraq. Iraq is another example of the division between Islamists, and more confirmation that THEY perceive the differences between themselves, even if we refuse to.