Nineteen Years Ago Today, I Was Here

At the Poll Tax Riots in London. Where Obama is right now. It was a Saturday about 3 o'clock and I was striding south through Trafalgar Square, past the fountain late to meet my Affection on the steps which still lead down to the lapping Thames. We were set to interlope as guests of a wild Italian countess I knew, off to a yacht tethered before the Chiswick Bridge. As I learned, it sat at the finish line of the annual Cambridge Oxford Boat Race.

The Boat Race starts four miles upriver and couldn't be seen so Maria and I didn't care a whit who won or lost. As their straining hypoxiated oars and coxswain's calls drew closer we drank free Moet Chandon while alumni strained to see and we laughed, "Oxford or Cambridge is ahead!" We had hit it off with a couple about our age. He was a charming Lotus salesman originally from East London and she had been spun off by some gaping cyclotron which threw her from her parents' shire into the City. We were there to be young fast and pretty despite our common class and although long shots, we were mining the opportunities in Margaret Thatcher's England. We agreed to keep going.

Walking past those lions and Nelson's victory column I was the only person amongst perhaps forty thousand, with far more pushing in, who wore an open white dress shirt and camel hair coat. Notices I hadn't read warned to expect a rabble of thugs. More than anything else it looked like an overcrowded leisurely middle class picnic at Brighton and Hove. People lined the available walls and steps, setting down blankets on the stones, they had baskets, there were groups and families all comfortable and orderly. It was densely packed but they let me pass as if through a parted sea, no animosity. What I most remember is how many of them were eating leisurely, like for a party requiring good manners and stamina. The pervasive scent of tea was evident, sometimes strong and sometimes less but never leaving. It was a civilized gathering, a very English revolution and there had been some quiet resolution which was not addressed to me.

We disembarked from the yacht to a lawn party at a house by the bridge, had a good time and left, and our taxi ride into the West End around 8 PM was complicated by mobs, broken bottles, blocked streets and burning cars. Apparently the picnic was pissed off. We went to the Ritz two blocks off Piccadilly and debated class warfare, whether violence was required or not and I don't remember my position. Hopefully I argued for restraint.

We said our well-lubricated goodbyes, exchanged cards as couples and never saw each other again. Maria and I held hands and we walked straight through the centers of discontent. They say 5,000 people were injured, Piccadilly blitzed and half London looted. They had closed the pubs yet we walked undisturbed back to my hidden hotel in Covent Garden which if you look it up had burned too and we didn't see a damned thing along the way except people like us and so we slept between our high-thread cotton sheets like sinning babies. To this day they blame it all on Anarchists, as to why Thatcher's government fell. I don't agree.

London Calling

The G-20 are having their get-together in The City starting on Wednesday. April Fool's Day. If Manhattan is the heart of the world's financial system, London is the lungs and I've been wondering how soon the anger on Europe's periphery would spread to there. Nothing more violent is needed to take down some governments than a spoon banging on a frying pan, and while England's may be made of sterner stuff than Iceland's or Latvia's, the money's gone just the same. At least one group is planning creative non-violence which might take control of some air time, and it doesn't sound too crazy. Via Furtherism:

On April 1st, the G20 are coming to London to face up to economic crisis and political meltdown. Lost your home? Lost your job? Lost your savings or your pension? This party is for you!

At 12 noon, April 1st the Bank of England.

Capitalism has been heating up our world for years, melting the icecaps, burning up the rainforests, pushing the planet to tipping point. Now we're going to put the heat on them. At the London Summit , the G20 ministers are trying to get away with the biggest April Fools trick of all time. Their tax-dodging, bonus-guzzling, pension-pinching, unregulated free market world's in meltdown, and those fools think we're going to bail them out. They've gotta be joking!

We can't pay, we won't pay and we are taking to the streets. Many, many imaginative actions will be taking place across London on April 1st. One major focus will be four separate carnival parades culminating in direct action against the financial follies in the City of London among them carbon trading.

Full circle back to 1649? 'A very English revolution!'
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will lead themed processions starting at 11 a.m. from the following rail stations:

Moorgate
Red horse against War;
Liverpool St

Green horse against Climate chaos
London Bridge

Silver horse against Financial crimes
Cannon Street

Black horse against land enclosures and borders in honour of the 360th full circle anniversary of the Diggers

At 12 noon, April 1st, we're going to reclaim the City, thrusting into the very belly of the beast: the Bank of England.

Early a.m. April 2nd, we're going to bang on their hotel doors, @ the Excel Centre, Canning town to deliver our message of a world beyond capitalism.

http://www.g-20meltdown.org/

This Is Outrageous! They're Starting To Fight Back...

h/t to Cat in the Bag

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Game over. Today's Financial Times:

"China's central bank on Monday proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund."

The Nasdaq and Dow went up by 7% today, despite China making this official statement. Because David Axelrod (Obama's Karl Rove) lost a battle over the bank plan to Tim Geithner, who just told his friends that Cash for Trash was in, there will be no repercussions and no limits on executive compensation. I can honestly tell you that people are partying on Church Street tonight buying some 50 dollar teenies and inhaling some 80s snuff.

There's a Chinese saying: to enslave someone, indebt them. The Fed is going to have to keep buying it's own Treasury Bonds, sure, I know the Fed isn't part of the govmint, right, and that's not change we can believe in. If you are fortunate enough to have some money in a bank, get it out. Tomorrow. Buy power tools, generators, a few thousand pills of Xanax, and enough booze to keep a bar open for a few months. Hell, buy a still. You can sell it all later on Craig's List after the dollar has inflated by 1,000% because while the bankers party they're too stupid to have known what the message said:

君達の基地は, 全てCATSがいただいた. 君達の艦も, そろそろ終わりだろう

Translation from the Chinese: "If you inflate your bonds, and you are, there is no longer any reason for us to hold them. Since the Fed is buying its own bonds maybe it won't mind buying ours back, too."

Translation from the Japanese Sega Game: "With the help of Federation Government forces, CATS has taken all of your bases. Your ship is about to meet its doom also."

I Love The Future But There'll Be So Many Ads

When we remember we're all mad the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. Well the "financial crisis" is making us mad in more ways than one and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone remembered that. Even channeled a little Hunter S while he gained his financial literacy devouring and digesting the strange objects he found in Financial Wormholes. Anyone who reads "The Big Takedown" (courtesy of the Twelfth Bough) will understand and want a six gun in their hand. An excerpt:

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

I already had this shit down on the evening of 9-12-01 was a Wall Street refugee already knew it deep within sucking in the ticker tape parade of my ex-boss my co-workers asbestos and blood-soaked obscenities. The perps were going to take everything just a question of what next and we've known for awhile now. Wall Street is LBO'ing our government and the government's bank is redeeming checks to itself. Excuse me. It's not good business to point out a problem if you don't have a solution. Luckily enough there is one it's simple and good.

They're only stealing money and that's the funny thing. It's the key thing. You see their version of money is magnetically charged positive and negative bytes that can appear or disappear with the strike of a return key. That's not real. It's the definition of Virtual. It's the Matrix. So if you've still got your electronic money in big banks in money markets or certificates of deposit you need to take it out. You need to convert the key-strokes while you can into something tangible even if it's only paper then convert it to something harder. Join a community bank or a credit union while you figure it out.

Same if you have shares in things halfway around your country or the world. Sell them carefully but sell some because the devil skewers the hindmost. Distance unfamiliarity and lack of accountability guarantee you'll be the first to get screwed when it comes falling down and not all of us are interested in becoming Warren Buffet's Buddy. Delay the mortgage payment for a week, ten days, two weeks into Credit Debt Obligations. Give them a cleansing fast. Pull the pins on your holy hand grenades niggers I don't use the word lightly because the plan is to make us all slaves.

The solution is to re-scale and make your world small but still extensible. The technologies are already there. Grow vegetables and swap them with your neighbors. Get your ass on facebook your face on assbook on Twitter and introduce the transgender girl you met in Thailand to Louie up the street and share pics of kohlrabi. Invest in good things near you like a brewery or a share in a farm's crop. A cow's milk. You've heard how it was the Vandals and Visigoths who took down Rome but that's not the big history. It was Christ took Rome because he took down their puppets. Thing was the Romans built great roads and couldn't close the Appian Way to Christians. Close the roads and close the commerce so the Christians used their roads and brought in a stronger network. Like the internetz are now. Emperor Constantine in the East converted and his empire lasted another century.

Only thing matters in the end is what your family your friends and neighbors think of you. They are your credit score. My grandfather Karl Elzenbeck died and a quarter of the city showed up for his funeral because he spread good will. The world's going to start looking a lot like how it used to only bigger better and far far more interesting. That's our Future and I can hardly wait. Now is the time to discredit the people we're bailing out with their electronic bonuses to hire protective armies. The people we can't know. There are The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. There are They Who Are Too Big to Fail. Let's do this thing.

Hamid Karzai Needs To Rethink Afghanistan

Speaking alongside NATO's secretary-general, Karzai told a news conference in Kabul that his government's foreign partners should respect and honor his country's independence"Afghanistan ... will never be a puppet state," Karzai said.

"No, my arms and legs are not spastically twitching on hidden strings. Not not not!"

The elections were to be held August 20th, but Karzai brought them up to April 21st to improve his chances of remaining Mayor of Kabul. Even if he manages to get elected again, however, his reason for being there is already over. Team Obama has no apparent plan other than to huddle with counterinsurgency experts who use the basic population control metrics and time frames. These usually work out to be 600,000 soldiers for 8 more years. That's not a solution. It's a hallucination.

At this point the only guy capable of bringing order to Pashtunistan is war hero Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruler from 1996-2001. He's the guy who told BushCo to shove its pipeline someplace else than through his country. He is renowned by Pashtuns as a man of integrity, bravery, and faith. He hasn't been seen since the US bombed his house in 2001 and killed his 10-year old son, effectively ruining our diplomatic options, and he is "rumored" to be under the ISI's protection. It is he who commands his people's will, now more than ever, and his rep as the toughest mo-fo around is necessary for governing the rampantly corrupt, comically chaotic region.

Yes, I am advocating The Big Dee-Dee Mao, leaving it all to the wrath of the Taliban. Bombing more villages of the poorest people in the world, well you might better try and kill them all and these are not the folks you want to have a "Who's Toughest" contest with. They'll win every time, and they have.

Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films is going to interview people on the ground for a new documentary, "Rethinking Afghanistan." The upshot is of course that the US shouldn't send more soldiers in to worsen a bad situation, so that's predictable enough, but Robert will also be there right when the plastique is blowing up the fan. Anything could happen, he won't have the US military or a team of handlers to protect him and the spring thaw will bring out the roadside bombs. Robert is a truth-seeking missile and all he's asking for is $20 to buy some rocket fuel in exchange for a production credit on his movie.

Sounds like a good deal to me, because we sure need to Rethink Afghanistan.

Caravaggio Cheated!

And it's comforting, in a way, because elephants and cats paint better than me. Via the Guardian:

Revered as the baroque master of lifelike portraits and light and shadow, the 16th-century painter Caravaggio is now being touted as the first master of photographic technique, two centuries before the formal invention of the camera.

The Italian artist has long been suspected of turning his studio into a giant camera obscura, punching a hole in the ceiling to help project images on to his canvas. But new research claims that Caravaggio also used chemicals to turn his canvases into primitive photographic film, "burning" images he then sketched on to for works such as St Matthew and the Angel.

"We were already sure Caravaggio projected images of his sitters, but we have now found mercury salt in his canvases, which is light-sensitive and used in film," said Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at Florence's SACI institute.

Lapucci said she investigated the use of chemicals after building a camera obscura with artist David Hockney. The technique of using lens and mirrors to project an image was written about by Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio was reputedly inspired to use one by the philosopher Giovanni Battista della Porta.

"You get the image by turning the whole studio into the camera obscura, but you need darkness, and the problem is you cannot paint in darkness," she said. "X-ray fluorescence shows the presence of the mercury salt in his canvases. That is not uncommon because it was used in glue, but we are awaiting proof he was using it on the surface, in his primer."

The image burned into the primer would last about 30 minutes and only be visible in the gloom. "Therefore he used a white lead paint to sketch, mixed with barium sulphate which was luminous, and which we have found traces of. That way he could see where he was sketching."

The image above is Judith Beheading Holofernes, a depiction of yet another comforting Bible story, this one from the Book of Judith. Holofernes was Nebuchadnezzar's general besieging a Hebrew city. Judith was a beautiful widow in the city who seduced him, got him drunk, and cut off his head with his own sword. She carried his head along the ramparts to avert the city's imminent surrendur, simultaneously lifting Nebuchadnezzar's siege. Perhaps some good woman in Washington, D.C. will be inspired to do likewise with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

The excellent Bee Keeper's Apprentice uses Christofano Allori's 1613 version of the event as her blog graphic, and by coincidence the same massive, ornately framed, seven-foot by nine-foot painting would greet visitors to the living room in my stepfather's house, as follows:

Pakistan In 45 Seconds

Pakistan was created in 1947 by Indian Muslims who believed they needed their own nation state separate from India. The creation was bloody and, since then, Pakistani military and political leaders have been gripped by the fear that India wants to reabsorb them by force. This fear is fueled by the conflict over the disputed province of Kashmir and in turn has fueled Pakistan's building of nuclear weapons and its efforts to prevent India from having influence in Afghanistan.

Books Don't Burn Easily

books don't burn easily you'll know that if you've ever tried a pile
they're anti-flammable so you've got to put them down and pour
on gasoline and that's good because we have so many in our house
it will never burn neither but my body does and it will burn to cinders
after i'm gone if they come for my wife they will need to negotiate
narrow pathways and breach bocages because she'll have the whole
place barricaded and her protectors will be loyal phalanxes of books

How Neanderthals Go Extinct

It came like this: sapiens had domesticated animals around the time of Neanderthal extinction. There is not a shred of evidence suggesting Neanderthals had any animal husbandry, but there's plenty which attests to how they excelled in close combat and could use their overwhelming strength to take down 1000+-lb. animals by themselves. It doesn’t take much to imagine them grabbing a sheep or a goat under each arm and carrying them off with increasing frequency as smooth-browed herders grazed further and further up into the high country. The resulting conflicts sealed their doom when they were trailed back to their caves by overwhelming numbers until finally dwindling to a last incomprehensible haven under an overhang just above a beach in south Gibraltar.

Experts love being experts so they have this way of missing obviousnesses watching down on them as they scrabble around in the dirt over their pet details. First they said Neandertals died out because they were dumber, then they said it's because they weren't as loving or close-knit, didn't have language, weren't as facile at tool-making. All these theories and their common thread of arrogance have been steadily disproven and the emerging facts indicate the Neanderthals were every bit as human as us. I have long suspected it was them of whom the Bible says:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

The picture above (note: will add soon) is of a Neanderthal tool a farmer found in the Dordognes and it's a regular prehistoric Swiss army knife. It's got a tip for drilling holes in bones and skulls on one side and an edge for cutting meat on the other. It's made of jasper which was coveted as a gemstone all over the ancient world because of its beauty and diamond-like hardness. It lays in my hand like it was made for me and it's still so sharp after 30,000 years it has cut my steaks. If they could make this thing of patient angle and precision, they easily could have made the jasper bow-drills found at Mehrgahr starting 7,000 BCE. They could make art. When you hold this stone in your hand, this eloquent marvel which I myself am not capable of making, you can feel just how obvious it is that they were artists. Maybe some of it remains and will be found.

Another conceit is bruited when it's said they were too gentle or weren't warlike enough to compete with us. I'd put my money on the precisely opposing proposition. Our thinner bones snapped against theirs in many an unrecorded mismatch, many disputes over herds and ancestral hunting grounds which we lost hands-down. Man for man it wouldn't have even been close. Some have recently drawn an extinction analogy using the Native American disease pattern after their population was collapsed by European-bred germs. That may well have happened or played a part, but existing evidence doesn't support the population densities, collections, and rapid interchanges so characteristic of the rise of deadly plagues.

There’s at least one simple sapien macro-advantage which definitively drove Neanderthal withdrawal. We ate less. Neanderthal caloric requirements were about twice those of our sapiens, which would mean twice as many of us could be supported per a given hunting ground. Those extra numbers surely provided for enhanced defense of those grounds, and would have favored steady and gradual expansion. To make matters worse for our near-forgotten friends, overwhelming evidence in both historic times and those before shows our collective humanity was usually just a step ahead or behind of famine.

I try to imagine how the human arc would have altered if our baseline requirement had been 4,000 calories a day. Both sapiens and Neanderthals were opportunistic cannibals, but a double-eating individual would suffer a much-increased caloric deficit during periods of food scarcity and would have to resort to survival cannibalism far more quickly. The image that comes with wondering "what if we had to come up with 4,000 calories a day," is that we'd still be roasting each other on spits.

Thoughts of Neanderthals keep on coming back to me. I'm always thinking about them, really, because they were so close to us, may be partially preserved in us, and were in some ways definitely better. It may just be that they were the Nephilim, once celebrated as men of renown, respected for their power and wisdom, and it's quite possible we picked some of our tool-making up from them. For our tools held no technical advantages over theirs. And they were at least as smart as we are right now. It was our bodies which turned out to be more sustainable during times of resource scarcity, so we survived being thrown out of the garden and they stayed. Does that not provide a sweet irony right now as we wrestle with our unsustainabilities and struggle to understand the natures of our multiplexed doom.

People Got A Lotta Nerve, Music & Lyrics By Neko Case

Fair warning. If you click on that vid there will be returning. It'll take you back to your daddy's Ford to wild scallions growing up alongside gutted roads to the flat bench with your almost sixteen year old girl smushed up just as close as she can sit beside without you driving with her in your lap. There's a rifle in the gun rack enough gas to get there and back so you're driving off to find Paris in the dark.

She was right there with you too on the stainless steel cover of the cooling fan you sat on when you were nine watching people in the pavilion dancing and drinking their heads off to the Country Playboys singing promenade all the way swing your corner lady and promenade the hall. This girl is right where you're from doesn't even think about fighting fair she does not compromise and she told the whole music industry to go fuck itself and it did. So if you choose not to click on the vid I understand but here's what she had to say:

So the saying says an elephant never forgets. Standing in the concrete cave, sway inside and sing! They walked over the ocean and their dreams they dreamed awake until the lights grew dim. Until the cop cars came. Everybody tells me this is crazy yes I know but I'm a man man man man man man man eater! But still you're surprised prised prised, when I eat ya.

You know...they call them killer whales but you seemed suprised when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank where you can't turn around it took half your leg and both your lungs and I craved, I ate hearts of sharks. I know you know it and I'm a man man man man man man man eater but still you're surprised prised prised when I eat ya. It will end again in moon-lit song, it will end again in moon-lit song.

As an added bonus, Neko Case has been banned for life from the Grand Ole Opry for taking off her top during a performance. Let's go see her when she comes our way.

Attack Of The MBA Zombies

The good news is I didn't write this. The bad news is I may as well have. Like its author the prophet of a new religion called Furtherism I ran away screaming from the inside refused to take my MBA and hang it on a wall like a death certificate. Sure it was hard but it's all about staying alive.

Warning: If you are ever attacked by a zombie, you will become one. That is what they say. If you or anyone you know has a mortgage, a credit card, or has attended one of three business schools, you had better move to Cuba. It is one of the few places outside of rural Alaska where you can avoid the dreaded MBA Zombie.

Crack researcher (and Zombie fighter) Deborah Barrow has just released her top-secret study of where the Generation Z (that is Generation Zombie) became that way. While not reminiscing about the good old days where kids could run free after school and climb trees with abandon, she does identify where the Zombies go through their initiation rituals and final transformation.

And the biggest Zombie Mill that spawned our current threat? Harvard, or as said by the Zombies themselves, Haaavaad. Don't say it out loud - there may be evidence that if chanted, zombies will appear.

The next on the list: NYU Stern School of Business. Stern is the German word for star, so this must be where they get their training in astrology, figuring out the exact moment to strike. I never knew how they could act in unison. I always thought it was a keen sense of smell, but this changes everything.

And the third? Cornell? That school that wants to be in the Ivy League, but can't decide if it is a state school for the unwashed masses or an elite up-yours-I'm-privileged private school. Somehow that makes sense. Only Zombies would want to have a dairy and farm lab nearby for their ghoulish experiments. Frankenstein is making way too much sense right now.

Now we know what happened to the banks. Be very careful out there. And destroy your credit cards and mortgages, if you have any. It is very important to stay alive. Plant a garden.

Smokestack Lightning, Music & Lyrics By Howlin' Wolf

Chester Arthur Burnett was better known as Howlin' Wolf. He was an ass-kicker in the crafts of the blues and life, stood six foot six and traveled north and south across a border of 300 pounds. He was born in West Point, Mississippi, in a sharecropping triangle of the Delta as flat and hot as a pancake off the griddle. His were the people who invented deep blues and his mother never accepted any money from him because it came from the Devil's music.

Charley Patton taught Chester how to play guitar and Sonny Boy Williamson schooled his harmonica while living with his sister. Chester backed up Robert Johnson in juke joints as a teenager. First time I heard the Wolf too late I cursed my culture for hiding him from me and just like Sam Phillips did I said, "This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies." Chester fell in love at first sight with a girl named Lillie from a good family in an audience in West Chicago. They had kids he became a devoted dad drove a Pontiac station wagon while he succeeded and for Lillie he sloughed off illiteracy in his 40s and passed a middle-aged GED.

Near the end of his career he had painful terminal cancer but he'd still go play a set at a bar and sing stop your train darlin' let a poor boy ride. His manager Eddie Shaw would drive him back to the hospital in Chicago where his big body died in 1976. He wanted all of it not just some of it. He wanted all of it. This song is about chasing after women and experimenting with electricity and waiting for that card that's so high and wild you'll never have to deal another. Much of a muchness.

This song is about Chester Arthur Burnett and a little bitty boy inside seeing his future brown-eyed wife out in the audience. It's like those feelings you may remember when you were a little child when you woke up and the morning smiled so you tilted your head worked your mouth but the words didn't come out yet so you did what you could do and smiled back. Chester and Lillie did that. When lightning hits, it doesn't arc down from the sky. It is spit up from the ground, its undeniable frictional energy searches for some high and appropriate dense object, tenses around it and bolts up through the cradling clouds out into higher space. Smokestack Lightnin' is about thunderstorms its about how a cold front hits a warm front and how the earth we walk upon ejaculates. The lyrics:

Ah, oh, smokestack lightning
Shinin', just like gold!
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Ah, whoo hoo, ooo-ooh...
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, tell me, baby
What's the, matter with you?
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, tell me baby
Where did ya...stay last night?
A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh--stop your train
Let a poor boy ride
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, fare ya well!
Never see, ah, you no more
Ah, why don't ya hear me cryin'?
Ooh, whoo hoo, whoo hoo
Whoo-ooo...

Whoa, oh, who been here baby since
I, I been gone, maybe a little, bitty boy?
Girl, be on!
Ah, whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whoo hoo

"I Told Her Not To Call When I'm At The Office"

Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, looks at his iPhone during an interview with Associated Press at his residence in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009. Zaeef spent almost four years in Guantanamo.

How Neanderthals Go Extinct

It came like this: sapiens had domesticated animals around the time of Neanderthal extinction. There is not a shred of evidence suggesting Neanderthals had any animal husbandry, but there's plenty which attests how they excelled in close combat and could use their overwhelming strength to take down 1000+-lb. animals by themselves if necessary. It doesn’t take much to imagine them grabbing a sheep or a goat under each arm and carrying them off with increasing frequency as smooth-browed herders grazed them further and further up into the high country. The resulting conflicts sealed their doom when they were trailed back to their caves by overwhelming numbers until finally dwindling to a last incomprehensible haven under an overhang just above a beach in south Gibraltar.

Experts love being experts so they have this way of missing obviousnesses watching down on them as they scrabble around in the dirt over their pet details. First they said Neandertals died out because they were dumber, then they said it's because they weren't as loving or close-knit, didn't have language, weren't as facile at tool-making. All these theories and their common thread of arrogance have been steadily disproven and the emerging facts indicate the Neanderthals were every bit as human as us. I have long suspected it was them of whom the Bible says:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

The picture above (note: will add soon) is of a Neanderthal tool a farmer found in the Dordognes and it's a regular prehistoric Swiss army knife. It's got a tip for drilling holes in bones and skulls on one side and an edge for cutting meat on the other. It's made of jasper which was coveted as a gemstone all over the ancient world because of its beauty and diamond-like hardness. It lays in my hand like it was made for me and it's still so sharp after 30,000 years it has cut my steaks. If they could make this thing of patient angle and precision, they easily could have made the jasper bow-drills found at Mehrgahr starting 7,000 BCE. They could make art. When you hold this stone in your hand, this eloquent marvel which I myself am not capable of making, you can feel just how obvious it is that they were artists. Maybe some of it remains and will be found.

Another conceit is bruited when it's said they were too gentle or weren't warlike enough to compete with us. I'd put my money on the precisely opposing proposition. Our thinner bones snapped against theirs in many an unrecorded mismatch, many disputes over herds and ancestral hunting grounds which we lost hands-down. Man for man it wouldn't have even been close. Some have recently drawn an extinction analogy using the Native American disease pattern after their population was collapsed by European-bred germs. That may well have happened or played a part, but existing evidence doesn't support the population densities, collections, and rapid interchanges so characteristic of the rise of deadly plagues.

There’s at least one simple sapien macro-advantage which definitively drove Neanderthal withdrawal. We ate less. Neanderthal caloric requirements were about twice those of our sapiens, which would mean twice as many of us could be supported per a given hunting ground. Those extra numbers surely provided for enhanced defense of those grounds, and would have favored steady and gradual expansion. To make matters worse for our near-forgotten friends, overwhelming evidence in both historic times and those before shows our collective humanity was usually just a step ahead or behind of famine.

I try to imagine how the human arc would have altered if our baseline requirement had been 4,000 calories a day. Both sapiens and Neanderthals were opportunistic cannibals, but a double-eating individual would suffer a much-increased caloric deficit during periods of food scarcity and would have to resort to survival cannibalism far more quickly. The image that comes with wondering "what if we had to come up with 4,000 calories a day," is that we'd still be roasting each other on spits.

Thoughts of Neanderthals keep on coming back to me. I'm always thinking about them, really, because they were so close to us, may be partially preserved in us, and were in some ways definitely better. It may just be that they were the Nephilim, once celebrated as men of renown, respected for their power and wisdom, and it's quite possible we picked some of our tool-making up from them. For our tools held no technical advantages over theirs. And they were at least as smart as we are right now. It was our bodies which turned out to be more sustainable during times of resource scarcity, so we survived being thrown out of the garden and they stayed. Does that not provide a sweet irony right now as we wrestle with our unsustainabilities and struggle to understand the natures of our multiplexed doom.