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Sahel of a good song.

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Coulibaly is a common West African name.[1] A couple of ambitious hustlers named Coulibaly set up a Bambara “kingdom” in the 17th and 18th Centuries on the Niger River. The village of Segou served as the capital. Another ambitious hustler named Ngolo toppled the last of the Coulibalys in 1750. He and his son built up a larger and more solid kingdom that lasted until the late 19th Century, although bits and pieces were falling off for decades. In 1861 a jihadist hustler named El Hadj Umar Tall added the remnants to his own empire. Then, in 1890 an ambitious French hustler named Louis Archinard showed with troops, shot a bunch of opponents, and added the whole thing to the French Empire. Segou today has about 130,000 people living in and around it. There’s farming and fishing and crafts that are sold in the markets. There are a great many low lying buildings constructed of mud-block. Pretty much what one would expect a very arid land adjacent to a river. There’s a big steel bridge over that river. Poorly maintained roads run south to Bamako and north to Timbuktu.

One of the many attractions of Segou is the “Festival on the Niger” held in February each year.[2] If you want to hear the best of Sahelian music live, the Segou festival is second only to the annual “Festival of the Desert” held west of Timbuktu.

About three years ago a joint rebellion by Tuareg tribesmen and a small number of local Islamists swept over the northern part of Mali. The Islamists turned out to be against guitars (as well as many other things). Half a million people fled from the northern part of the country. The French—channeling Louis Archinard—weren’t taking this guff. A bunch of heavily-armed hard cases from the Marines and Foreign Legion paratroopers showed up. Soon thereafter, the leaders of the Tuareg-Islamist rebellion decided to take in the sights in remote areas of Libya or Algeria.

Meanwhile, the “Festival in the Desert” got cancelled for several years, what with the danger of getting shot and all. The “Festival on the River” took place in February 2014. Then the West African Ebola outbreak briefly edged into Mali in Fall 2014. So, that was concerning. In December 2014 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Mali Ebola-free. Deep sighs of relief followed among many people. Among them were the producers of the “Festival on the River.” They announced that the show was on for February 2015.

One of the people in the audience in 2014 was Josh Hammer (1957- ). Hammer got a first-rate education (Horace Mann School, BA in English from Princeton University), then went into journalism. He did well at this and became the bureau chief for Newsweek in a series of places: Nairobi (1993-1996), South America (1996–1997, Los Angeles (1997–2001), Berlin (2000–2001), and Jerusalem (2001-2003). In 2001 he and his cameraman were “detained” (i.e. kidnapped) by Hamas gunmen. He has written about a wide range of subjects and places in a sensitive way.[3] One of his interests is the music of the Sahel. So, having made the pilgrimage to Segou, who does he recommend?

Ten minute film giving views of Segou, with a nice sound track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob-Rc-IZ5Ps

 

Salif Keita. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZVzWsyGzRc&list=PL759F989C11E57C86

Khaira Arby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C85F6TJ3gI

Achmed Ag Kaedi and Amanar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3B2R7GHWyE

Tinariwen (band). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gINDDDo3do8

Sekouba Bambino. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3cxsCjRBg

Stelbee (Burkina Faso). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41GsivXUhf4

[1] If you’re scratching you head trying to place the name, Amedy Coulibaly was the Frenchman of Malian origins who shot a police woman and seized hostages in Paris a little while back.

[2] Joshua Hammer, “Along the Niger, the Beat of the Sahel,” NYT, 18 January 2015.

[3] A lot of biographical detail is hard to find. Bits and pieces found on the internet suggest that his father also was a foreign correspondent; that the parents’ marriage broke up; and that the life itineraries of human beings can take odd courses. His book about his younger brother’s journey to intense religious belief sounds fascinating.

Big discounts at the Organ Loft!

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Popular culture side-swipes reality when it comes to organ-theft. Organ theft is a “trope” (a recurring motif, AKA cliché) in many Japanese anime and manga, and in American comic books, video games, and television (C.S.I.; Law and Order; Justified, Futurama). Examples:

Robin Cook, Coma (1977). The recent development of successful transplantation techniques suddenly creates an imbalance between the supply of and demand for organs, so a black-market arises. A deranged doctor in a Boston hospital induces comas in healthy patients undergoing minor procedures, then harvests the organs.

“Coma” (1979). The movie version of the book, directed by Michael Crichton.

1989: a Turk came to Britain, sold a kidney, got stiffed on the payment, and lied to the police that he had been robbed of a kidney. This is the origin of the urban legend about “I woke up in a bath tub full of ice…”

“Death Warrant” (1990). No one cares what happens to the inmates in maximum security prisons. An evil warden, corrupt guards, and a greedy doctor, kill inmates to harvest organs for sale on the black market. The very institutions that guard us are actually criminal.

“The Harvest” (1993). Writer goes to Mexico, gets robbed of a kidney, tries to find the people responsible, partially succeeds, and then finds out that his boss has just had a transplant.

Christopher Moore, Island of the Sequined Love Nun (1997). Predatory missionaries.

“Dirty Pretty Things” (2002). Hard-pressed illegal immigrants in Britain sell organs.

“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (2002). Hard-pressed South Korean factory worker sells a kidney to save his sister’s life, gets cheated, she dies, and he wreaks a bloody vengeance.

“Shichinin no Tomurai (The Innocent Seven)” (2005). Seven groups of abusive parents get an offer from a mysterious figure. They’re likely to either kill their kids or lose them to the child welfare people. Why not make a different kind of “killing” by selling the children so that their organs can be harvested? A week at a mountain vacation camp will close the deal. This may reflect Japanese discomfort with transplants, plus the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist cult.

Kazuo Ishiguru, Never Let Me Go (2005). Test tube babies + cloning = human spare tires for when you come down with some life-threatening disease. Your liver goes? Just pop one out of the “donor” you paid to have created many years ago. Now everyone can live to be 100! In the meantime, the future donors are raised in ignorance of their intended function.

“Turistas” (2006). The developed world has exploited the developing world for centuries. (See: Andre Gunder Frank.) Now it is time for reparations. A deranged doctor abducts gringo tourists who visit a remote beach resort. He harvests their organs, which are donated to the poor in a Brazilian hospital.

“Repo! The Genetic Opera” (2008). In the sinister future a big corporation supplies organs for transplant on credit. Transplant technology has progressed so far that you can get replacement intestines and spines. If you fall behind on your payments, however, the company sends around some guys to re-possess your implanted organ, just like your car or washing machine. The consequences aren’t the same as having your car or washing machine repoed, however. You die. The movie is a musical.

Eric Garcia, Repossession Mambo (2009). Uses the same sinister future/big corporation/buy on credit/get repoed premise as above. Adds bio-mechanical organs/people hiding from their creditors and being hunted by repo men twists for product differentiation.

“Repo Men” (2010). The chop-socky movie version of Garcia’s novel.

“Never Let Me Go” (2010). The excellent movie version of Ishiguro’s novel.

The 9/11 Commission Report.

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The 9/11 attacks took place in 2001.  The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, commonly called the 9/11 Commission, issued its report in 2004.  Ten years on seems like a useful point at which to look back on the Report.

The historical “lessons” of the 9/11 Report have entered into the understanding of that “informed public” beloved of college professors and newspaper editors.  They shape much  American policy in the world.  They are worth examining if only on those grounds.

The Report also identified serious problems in American government and politics.  It defined a broad agenda for reform.  In this it resembles earlier American manifestos, like the journalism of the “muckrakers” in the Progressive Era and the reports on crime and violence, and on race relations that came out in the 1960s.  It is fair to ask, ten years on, how far have we come in reforming our problems?

I thought that I would spend some time  revisiting what we learned from the Report fo the 9/11 Commission.  Comments are always welcome.

What did we learn from the Report of the 9/11 Commission? I

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By the end of the 20th century the CIA was “an organization capable of attracting extraordinarily motivated people, but institutionally averse to risk, with its capacity for covert action atrophied, predisposed to restrict the distribution of information, having difficulty assimilating new types of personnel, and accustomed to presenting descriptive reportage of the latest intelligence.” (p. 137.)

How had this situation come into being?

First, “although covert actions represent a very small fraction of the [CIA’s] entire budget, these operations have at times been controversial and over time have dominated the public’s perception of the CIA.” (p. 126.) Furthermore, whenever covert actions turned into highly public exploding cigars, the Presidents who ordered them have left CIA officers to carry the can. The CIA became very reluctant to engage in them. (p. 132.) Eisenhower’s initiation of and JFK’s approval of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs scheme offered an important early example of this behavior. Allen Dulles lost his job as head of CIA and Dick Bissell got fired. It would not be the last time. The Global War on Terror involved “extraordinary rendition,” “secret prisons,” and torture, all under presidential order. Now there is a public shaming of the CIA officers who acted on those orders.

Second, Counter-Intelligence chief James J. Angleton’s long obsession with a Soviet “mole” in the CIA, then the Aldrich Ames case in 1994, left the Agency security conscious almost to the point of paralysis. The CIA disliked everything that it heard about the then-new Internet communications and it established almost impossible barriers to the recruitment of agents who could be used against foreign terrorist groups. (pp. 134-135.)

Third, intelligence agency budgets were sharply reduced from 1990 to 1996, then kept flat from 1996 to 2000. Policy-makers insisted upon ever more-robust technological capabilities in intelligence gathering, without providing additional funds to procure them, so intelligence agencies cannibalized both human intelligence and analysis to get the money. (p. 136.)

In the Clandestine Service the budget cuts of the Nineties meant the loss of many experienced officers and the closure of facilities abroad. The CIA adapted to this by relying heavily upon foreign intelligence service liaison, and by “surging” (running around putting out brushfires instead of covering regions with experts).

After the end of the Cold War, the Directorate of Intelligence’s “university culture with its version of books and articles was giving way to the culture of the newsroom.” (p. 133.) That is, analysts began churning out descriptive reports on more subjects based on a shallower understanding than had been previous reports.

People recognized that a problem existed at CIA. In 1997 George Tenet was appointed DCI with the mission of rebuilding the agency. In 1998 and 1999 two panels (the second chaired by Donald Rumsfeld) that evaluated the CIA warned of “the dispersal of effort on too many priorities, the declining attention to the craft of strategic analysis, and security rules that prevented adequate sharing of information.” (p. 134.)   Tenet obtained expanded budgets for all aspects of the CIA. (pp. 512-513.) In 1998 Tenet persuaded both Congress and the Clinton administration to begin rebuilding the Clandestine Service, but the 5-7 years of training needed to bring a new officer up to full speed meant that it would be 2005 or 2006 before the first recruits were of any real use to anyone. (p. 133.)

Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

Runnin’ all ’round my brain.

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Cocaine prices per gram in selected American cities, 1999 and 2005.

1999.             2005.               Change in base price.

Seattle.                       $80-100           $30-100          -62%

Denver.                       $100-125         $100-125         0%

Los Angeles.               $50-100           $30-100           -40%

Dallas.                        $90-125           $50-80             -44%

Chicago.                     $75-100           $75-100              0%

Detroit.                       $75-100           $50-120           -33%

Atlanta.                      $100                $80-100           -20%

Miami.                        $40-60             $20-110           -50%

New York.                 $21-40             $20-25             -0%

 

There are a bunch of ways of cutting up this data, so to speak.

First, in 1999, cocaine was a glut on the market in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. These were major cities with a large over-all market, ports of entry, and centers of a counter-culture. In contrast, it was hard to come by in Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, and Seattle. These were chief cities of “the provinces,” as the Romans would have put it. Six years later Seattle had joined New York, Miami, and Los Angeles as the capital cities of cocaine. This probably has something to do with the explosion of the computer and software industries in Seattle. Maybe writing software allows for blow in a way that designing airplanes for Boeing does not. Still, the “cocaine revolution” hadn’t reached Denver, Atlanta, and Chicago. These cities remained the ones with the highest priced (and thus least available) cocaine.

Second, even in two of the original core cities of cocaine consumption, Miami and Los Angeles, prices fell sharply. New York began with the lowest price and pretty much stayed there. Perhaps $20 a gram was the rock-bottom price for cocaine. Lots of people hustling on a big, but limited, market, all of them competing to deliver the best product to the most people at the lowest price. Adam Smith take note. Labor costs driven down to the subsistence minimum. David Ricardo take note.

Third, prices fell while the Drug Enforcement Agency was spending billions of dollars to drive up the price (and thus reduce consumption) through interdiction and eradication. Why didn’t this effort produce better results?

One reason is that cocaine producers in Columbia dispersed their coca-growing operations into more remote areas and spread into Peru and Bolivia as well. These are outside the range of US-sponsored eradication efforts. Production went up, not down.

Another reason is that, since the signature of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, there has been a huge increase in trans-border truck and vehicle traffic between Mexico and the United States. This made it much easier to move cocaine into the United States. One government policy warred with another government policy. The thing is that people trying to make money won in both cases. What’s more American than that?

Final thing to think about: 88 percent of cocaine moved through Mexico. Eventually, the Mexican intermediaries for the Columbians wanted a better deal. Much violence followed. (See: Narcostate with a State.)

 

Ken Dermota, “The World in Numbers: Snow Fall,” Atlantic, July/August 2007, pp. 24-25.

International sex standards.

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According to a 2005 internet survey done by the Durex condom company—“Butch, I work for Mr. E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad, and…”—the average respondent had sex 103 times a year and spent just under 20 minutes per time on foreplay. On the other hand, the mean is 109 times (twice a week) and 21 minutes on foreplay.

Who are the big losers in this international competition? Far and away, it’s the Japanese: they average 46 times a year. Less than four times a month. It must be like a subscription to a magazine: they call the January and July issues the January-February and July-August issues, but they aren’t any bigger. You’re just left wandering around the house looking at back issues of National Geographic.

The trajectory of Japan’s population has shifted from growth to decline. In 2007 Japan’s population reached its highest historical level at 128 million people, then it began to fall. If the country stays on this track there are projected to be only 87 million people by 2060. Of these, almost half will be aged 65 or over. Yikes! Projecting out to 2100, there might be no Japanese at all. That’s probably good news for the Council of the Learned Elders of Blue-Fin Tuna.

There are broad social and economic explanations for the change in Japanese demography. However, the issue has revealed several curious elements of Japanese culture as well. Social status and reputation are very important in Japanese society. Mess up in public on something and you can be tarred for life. So, lots of young men who have had some sort of embarrassment have become “shut-in” living with their parents and withdrawing from life. This is probably good for the on-line games and porn industries.

Interestingly, the Japanese are followed by Hong Kong (79 times a year), India (82), and China (90).   Why do Asians have less sex? A housing shortage that leads to a lack of privacy (self-conscious family limitation)? Government anti-natalism in societies threatened by over-population? Furthermore, if NPR finds out, will we have to listen to heart-rending stories about how people in western industrial countries are using up all the orgasms without concern for sex-starved Bangladeshis? Will environmentalists re-discover Wilhelm Reich and try to extend the Kyoto Protocol to cover an “orgone hole”?

Who are the winners? Inevitably, it’s the French (137 times a year). Two to three times a week, and almost 44 hours of foreplay. Americans and Israelis[1] clock in at 111 times a year and just under twenty minutes of foreplay per encounter. With stats like this to fall back on, American comedians and politicians (but I repeat myself) making fun of French military prowess just isn’t going to dent French national self-confidence.

Obviously, there’s a generational element here. It is young people who are most comfortable using the internet and least inhibited about answering questions on it, so the survey probably didn’t capture the experience of the middle aged. All the same, among the digerati, there is a big range of sexual practices. One suspects that the French are using the internet to access photos of Anna Kournikova falling out of her dress, while the Chinese are pirating industrial designs.

 

See: Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2005, p. 56; “Japan’s population crisis,” The Week, 17 January 2014, p. 11

[1] Apparently we have more in common than just a hatred of radical Muslims.

 

Zombies in International Relations

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What if the whole world, rather than just some remote hamlets populated by attractive young people with no future in movies, was attacked by zombies?  Daniel Drezner has addressed this question in Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton University Press, 2010).  Drezner analyzes how a zombie apocalypse would be explained by political scientists.

“Realism” holds that conflict is normal as each country pursues its own advantage regardless of what happens to the rest of the world.  Countries can co-operate when they have a shared goal, but only so long as it takes to accomplish that goal and they are striving for individual advantage even when they are co-operating.  What happens inside another country is irrelevant to international relations.  Three of George Romero’s “Dead” movies illustrate this.  In “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), a zombie attack forces quarrelsome people to put aside their disputes and to co-operate.  However, selfish individualism constantly strains the need to co-operate.  Further problem arise from an imperfect understanding of events as they are under way.

In “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), zombies spread faster than can the government response, which always lags behind because of bureaucratic inertia, partisan political infighting, and the resistance of civil libertarians.  In a rip-off of Boccacio’s The Decameron, a handful of doomed survivors take refuge and indulge their worldly desires.  Their reverie is interrupted by an irruption of equally selfish barbarians.  In “Day of the Dead” (1985), a deluded bleeding heart liberal scientist hopes to reform the zombies by first understanding them.  His rival is a vicious, authoritarian Army officer.  People don’t have much of a choice once the crisis hits.

“Liberalism” holds that conflict is abnormal since countries naturally co-operate on matters of shared concern.  The more that “globalization” integrates the whole world into one system, the more co-operation will develop.  This co-operation takes the form of building international institutions and formulating rules of conduct.  From this perspective, one could anticipate the creation of a World Zombie Organization equivalent to the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund.  The internal politics of a government do matter for international relations because governments that are oppressive at home tend to be aggressive abroad.  Unfortunately, humanitarian liberalism would probably produce countervailing groups that argued for comprehension and conciliation of the zombies.[2]  “28 Days Later” (2002),  “Shaun of the Dead” (2004) and “Zombieland” (2009) illustrate liberalism as people are awakened from their selfish individual pursuits by the appearance of danger and co-operate.  The end result is durable community.  In “Shaun,” even the outcome for the remaining zombies also is positive as they are allowed to survive by playing a constructive role in society.  (This is a metaphor for post-1945 Germany.)

“The George W. Bush Administration.”  Do you want to fight the zombies over there or over here?  Better to fight them there to stop them before the start to expand.  Use air power and special forces to the extent you can, but it may be best to invade the central home of the zombies.  Wipe out as many as you can until the others realize the error of their ways and change sides, becoming—I don’t know—Zuslims?  Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, “28 Weeks Later” (2007) is a good example of both the theory and of its unintended consequences: the failure to destroy the zombies in the original site followed by their flight into new areas as they seek sanctuary.

[2] People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies or Zombie Amnesty.  That sort of thing.  You could start a club.

Dengue Fever

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The Aedes aegypti type of mosquito likes humans.  It likes to lay its eggs in artificial water containers, like in flower pots or old truck tires lying on the ground in the rain, rather than in puddles or ponds.  It likes to feed on humans, not on other animals.  Scientists call it “domesticated,” like dogs and cats.  It’s nice to have friends.

The Aedes aegypti type of mosquito likes Spring Break.  They live between 35 North latitude and 35 South latitude, and below an elevation of 1000 meters.  So, warm to hot places close to the shoreline.  So, all your favorite resorts: Panama City, Florida; South Padre Island, Texas; Cancun, Mexico; Lagos, Nigeria, Jakarta, Indonesia; “Soi Cowboy” in Bangkok, Thailand (if that’s how you roll).

The Aedes aegypti type of mosquito likes Capitalism.  The mosquitoes broke out of Africa between the 15th and the 19th Centuries as a side effect of the massive expansion in the slave trade.  In the many days ago, ships carried their drinking water in wooden barrels.  Probably the A. aegypti were passengers in the holds of the ships.  Slave ships crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean carried the skeeters to the Americas.  Probably ships trading between the Americas and the Far East carried them to Asia.  Then the range of A. aegypti greatly expanded between 1960 and 2010 because of global warming (not stuck between 35 N and 35 S any longer), the growth of towns and cities[1], and increased international migration/travel.

Other than the fact that they are kind of hard to keep as pets (try buying a mosquito leash), the big problem with A. aegypti is that they carry dengue fever.[2]  (“Dengue” is a Spanish word that may have begun as an African word brought to the Americas by slaves.  Nobody knows what it means.)  The symptoms are fever around 103 degrees, torrential sweating, headaches that make you feel like your eyes are going to pop out of your head, muscle and joint pain, and an ugly rash.  It used to be called “breakbone fever” if that gives you a clue.

The first recorded dengue epidemic washed over Asia, Africa, and North America in 1779-1780.  One of the places hit hard by dengue was Philadelphia, because an unusual weather pattern had pushed the range of the A. aegypti farther north that summer.  There weren’t a lot of world-wide epidemics after that, but dengue kept killing people on a smaller scale all the time.  Once Western people started building empires in Africa and Asia in the 19th Century, dengue and other tropical diseases came to their attention.  Europeans used to call Africa “the white man’s graveyard.”  Generally, disease posed a greater danger than did native resistance.  So, scientists and sawbones got busy trying to deal with diseases.  In 1906 doctors confirmed that A. aegypti transmitted dengue; in 1907 doctors confirmed that dengue came from a virus.

Dengue evolved (I’m not sure that this is the correct term for a virus) in some fashion around the time of the Second World War.  Dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome began to be identified in Asia and the Americas.  You got deader sooner.

Dengue now is endemic (never goes away, but never kills everyone, in a specific place) in more than 100 countries.  Between 50 million and 100 million people get it every year.  On average, 25,000 of them die each year.  Scientists haven’t come up with a way to prevent infection (a vaccine).  Until they do, the chief method is to reduce the skeeter habitats.  Failing that, they kill them with bug spray.  That’s fine with me, but don’t tell PETA.

[1] Towns and cities have in-door toilets instead of out-houses or lush shrubberies where you squat in the nightime.  A.aegypti just loves the stagnant water found in toilet tanks as a place to lay their eggs.

[2] To be fair, they also carry yellow fever.

Yemen and Nomen

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The Christmas Day 2009 “Underwear Bomber” brought attention to a little-known, impoverished, physically desolate, ill-governed, violent corner of the world.  No not Detroit.  Yemen, on the southwestern tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Conditions in Yemen are miserable.  Yemen consists of mountains and deserts and tribes.  Furthermore, there are fewer than thirty million Yemenis, but they own sixty million guns.  Then, the economy is dead: about half the population lives in poverty and over a third of the work force is unemployed.  What little oil there is won’t last much longer.  There is a shortage of water that will only get worse.  Yemeni women have an average of six children, so the population is rising rapidly.

Political conditions make this dire situation even worse.  First, the recetn President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was seen as a crook and a tyrant.  After two successive presidents had been assassinated, the army put him into power in 1978.  He quickly entrenched himself.  Then, in 1990 his government managed to get control of the southern region, which is home to the oil resources of the country.  Since then it has bled the region of the oil revenue while starving it of resources.  So there is an insurgency underway.  Then, in the north there are Shi’a Muslims who dislike being ruled by a Sunni government.  So there is an insurgency under way.  Then, because the economy is in poor shape, unemployed young men tend to have a lot of time to kill.  Fundamentalist religious preachers abound, usually spewing stuff about Islam establishing its world predominance through struggle. One of these preachers was the Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who was in touch via internet with Major Nidal Hasan before he killed thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood in November 2009, and he met with the “underwear bomber” before his mission in December 2009.  Guy appeared to be in a rut.

So, it is a natural environment for Al Qaeda.  The first Al Qaeda people showed up as early as 1992.  In 2000 Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole when it was entering port in Yemen.  Later on, Yemeni jihadists went to fight the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Many of the survivors of those adventures have returned home over the years.  When the Saudi Arabian government stomped down on jihadists sympathizers after 9/11, many of them fled to Yemen.  Right now it is estimated that anywhere from 300 to 500 committed Al Qaeda fighters are somewhere in Yemen.  (For obvious reasons, it’s a little tricky to go door to door doing a proper census.)  More recently the British and American embassies in the capital city of Sanaa were attacked.  Most recently, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian Muslim studying in Yemen, was recruited as the “Underwear bomber.”  So, the place is a pain-in-the-neck for the United States.

Generally, Yemenis don’t like the United States as an abstract concept.  The government is less anti-American than are the people generally, but people don’t like the government either.  If the government co-operates too openly with the United States in opposing Al Qaeda, it will become even less popular than it is now.  The result may be that it will be over-thrown by people who are pro-Al Qaeda.  So, we can let the situation sort of fester in hopes that nothing worse will appear, or we can push for action against Al Qaeda and make that worse situation appear.  I suppose we could invade the place to bring them hope and change, just like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.  “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for you?”

“Terrorism’s new hideout,” The Week, 22 January 2010, p. 11.

The Majestic Blue

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I say “tuna” and you think “little cans of cat food.”  Not true: blue-fin tuna is light years better than yellow-fin or albacore or skipjack tuna.  Those other kinds end up in tuna-noodle casserole with little bits of potato chip crumbled on top and baked in the oven.  (Or so says Tom Tuttle from Tacoma.)  Blue-fin tuna can grow to be 12 feet long and weigh in at as much as 1500 pounds, although mostly they don’t.  The underbelly on blue-fin yields this yummy meat known as “toro.”  The Japanese use “toro” from blue-fin tuna to make sushi.

I say “sushi” and you think “it’s like eating live bait.”  Not true: sushi consists of fish, vinegared rice, and vegetables.  You can think of it as a rice-and-fish sandwich.  It started out in south Asia, was introduced to south China, and was borrowed by Japan.  In Japan sushi began out as a fast-food sold on the streets.  People going to the theater in the Edo Period often bought sushi from a stall to take to the theater with them.  A sushi-chef (which is different from a sous-chef) made sushi from whatever fish were caught locally.  The main tuna fisheries were off Honshu and Okinawa.  After the Second World War, those clever Americans figured out how to freeze-dry new-caught tuna.  It didn’t lose its flavor sitting on layers of ice in the hold of a fishing boat for weeks before it got back to Japan.[1]  “Toro” became the mainstay of sushi.  Japanese sushi-eaters went wild.

By about 1975 sushi started to become popular in certain quarters of the United States.  OK, you won’t find it on the menu at Appleby’s and you can’t get a McSushi (yet).  But the very sophisticated Don Rumsfeld took General Tommy Franks out for dinner to a sushi place in DC before we invaded Iraq.  It was Rumsfeld’s idea of making nice with the guy he had ordered to invade another country on a sketchy—as you young people say—justification.  Take the Japanese sushi market and add in the American “I-wanna-be-sophisticated” market, you end up with a HUGE demand for tuna.  Now, a big blue-fin fresh offa da boat can be worth $100,000.

I say “tuna” and you think “guppies with a thyroid condition.”  Not true: they’re big fighting fish.  Drag you out of the chair on the back of a 25-foot Bartram sports-fisher if you aren’t strapped in.  It’s OK with the fish if you drown in the Gulf Stream and what’s left of you washes up months later in Plymouth, England.  (It’s kind of like casting for pit-bulls from the back of an F-150 in North Philly.)  So, fishermen started seining for them with big nets.  In 1953, a refugee from Croatia named Mario Puratic[2] invented an improved system for setting and hauling purse seine nets.  (It’s called the “Power Block.”)  Seining fish, including blue-fin, became much easier.  There used to be a lot of blue-fin tuna.  In the 1940s there were 20 times as many Atlantic and Mediterranean tuna as today.  Also, now they’re runty when they get caught.  Tuna caught in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are only about half the weight of tuna caught in “the old days.”  Pretty soon, no more Atlantic blue-fin tuna.  (Pacific blue-fin stocks seem to be holding up alright for the moment.)  Once they go, there will need to be 12-step programs to help people suffering from sushi-withdrawal.  What do the Japanese think of 12-step programs?

[1] Also, the Americans stopped testing atomic weapons on Pacific atolls, so the fishing boats didn’t have to pass through clouds of radiation on their way home with their holds full of irradiated fish.  See: “Fishzilla.”

[2] Puratic was born in 1917 on the incredibly cute little island of Brac.  If you retired to the town of Supetar on Brac you could sit under the grape arbor beside your old stone house in the afternoon, sipping wine and watching the ferry from Split arrive.  A developer near Dallas is building a resort modeled on Supetar.  The signs at the garbage dump will be in Croatian.  Puratic left in 1938 and wound up working as a fisherman in San Pedro, California.