Silflay Hraka

Today’s Samir Vincent roundup;

The text of his indictment in the Southern District Court of New York is available here.

Some highlights;

Between in or about 1992 and early 1996, SAMIR A.VINCENT, the defendant, and other individuals, including United Nations officials, met in Manhattan in an effort to secure terms favorable to the Government of Iraq in connection with the adoption and implementation of Resolution 986.
…
At the direction of the Government of Iraq, between in or about 1998 and January 2003, VINCENT lobbied former officials of the United States Government who maintained close contacts to high-ranking members of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations in an unsuccessful effort to convince the United States Government to support a repeal of sanctions against Iraq. VINCENT reported the results of those consultations to the Iraqi Intelligence
Service and other officials of the Government of Iraq.
…
b. In or about 1995 and 1996, SAMIR A. VINCENT, the defendant, conveyed messages from a United Nations official to representatives of the Iraqi government in Manhattan and elsewhere.
c. In or about February 1996, SAMIR A. VINCENT, the defendant, traveled to Baghdad, where he participated in the drafting of agreements with an Iraqi official relating to VINCENT?s and others? compensation regarding their efforts on behalf of the Iraqi government with respect to Resolution 986.
…
In or about April 2001, SAMIR A. VINCENT, the defendant, wrote a letter to an official of the Government of Iraq, in which VINCENT emphasized his efforts on behalf of the Government of Iraq in the United States and recommended that any required surcharges on his oil allocations under the Oil-for-Food Program be deducted from the amounts still owed to him under the agreements referenced above
…
In or about November 2001, SAMIR A. VINCENT, the defendant, collected a message in Baghdad from officials of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and the Government of Iraq, for delivery to a former official of the United States Government regarding the Government of Iraq?s position on re-admitting weapons inspectors to Iraq and the repeal of sanctions.

Still, no word about Samir’s alleged actions before 1992, during the first Gulf War–though his organization of this religious tour was apparently against the law.

From the Concord Monitor;

Vincent, 64, could not be located to comment yesterday. His Washington attorney, Robert Litt, did return phone calls.

There’s a phone number to look up tomorrow.

Word to the Wise: Gosh, wish I knew a Washington attorney who could contact this guy…

The Sierra Times, from an AP report:

In New York, the U.N. Independent Inquiry Committee, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said in a statement Tuesday night that it has been “fully aware of the involvement of Samir Vincent in these activities.”

“I think this is part of the issues, allegations that the Volcker commission should look into, and as I said Volcker’s group has indicated they are in touch and aware of this, and I’m sure whatever evidence there is, the Volcker group will follow through,” Annan said.

The New York Post smells blood in the water.

So much for former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker’s suggestion that there is no truly sub stantive corruption to be found in the United Nations’ corruption-plagued Oil-for-Food program.

Alas, federal prosecutors yesterday made public their first conviction in the Oil-for-Food program ? further shredding Volcker’s once-estimable reputation and making it crystal clear that the clock is ticking on Kofi Annan as well.

Update: Our latest Samir News roundup, as of 11/21, can be found here.

Sadly, I’m not made of money, nor am I a fancy-pants reviewer who is able to score advance copies of an upcoming book release, so I’m still waiting on the Library to deliver up my copy of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

One would think that entering the relevant info into the library database and gluing the return-by form onto the inside cover of a book would take something less than three weeks, but perhaps there are secret librarian rituals–no doubt involving goats, entrails and nubile scythe-wielding virgins perched on black-velvet draped tables–that need to be performed before a particular tome is allowed to be pawed at by the grubby hands of the public.

Mind you, once upon a time I was a lowly Barnes & Noble bookstore clerk–the equivalent of a fancy-pants reviewer when it comes to the publishing industry, or so it would seem, judging by the number of free books I got in the mail–but I soon tired of the Ramen and white bread lifestyle associated with those wages and moved on the greener pastures that came with a dot-com lifestyle, at least for a while.

But while I’m waiting, I can at least read some of the other Collapse reviews making the rounds, like this one by Chris Shea of the Boston Globe. I found this passage particularly interesting.

”Collapse” begins as a series of engrossing case studies of failed civilizations — Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, Mayan Mexico — brought low by a combination of fragile ecosystems, environmental destruction, climate change, human conflict, and human folly. By the end, the book turns into a full-throated environmentalist jeremiad. Given population growth, deforestation, soil erosion, oil consumption, and diminishing biodiversity, Diamond declares, ”our world society is presently on an unsustainable course.”

The “unsustainable” argument has been a recurring trope among doomsday detectors since Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published in 1968.

In the prologue to The Population Bomb he wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”

Not only was the world headed for catastrophe, but there was little that could be done to avoid it. Some parts of the world might see some minor and temporary recovery, but “a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century” (emphasis in the original).

Paul Erhlich’s predictions of disaster came to naught in the end, of course. He was also humbled by University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, who famously bet him in 1980 that five natural resources, all of which could be chosen by Ehrlich, would be cheaper ten years down the road. Ehrlich took the bet, and lost.

Prices of the metals chosen by Ehrlich fell so much that Simon would have won the bet even if the prices hadn’t been adjusted for inflation.

Now of course none of the above impacts directly on evidence upon which Diamond constructs his arguments, but it does speak to the way in which those arguments are evidently constructed. (Remember, until the Durham County Library gets off its duff and processes the damn book, I haven’t read it. I’m taking the word of the reviewer, which in the case of the New Yorker review, at least, appears to have been a mistake.)

Take a look at Diamond’s paragraph ending quote, again.

Given population growth, deforestation, soil erosion, oil consumption, and diminishing biodiversity, Diamond declares, ”our world society is presently on an unsustainable course.”

Ehrlich’s mistake, the same one that every prophet of doom has fallen into since academic doom saying was popularized by Thomas Malthus, was that he took a single current trend, in this the rate of population growth in the 1960′s, and extrapolated it into the future, while at the same time assuming that, no only would nothing else change, but that the rate of population growth itself was a constant. As it turns out, it wasn’t.

Here’s a prediction, using the same kind of logic. Last Thursday, the temperature was 80 degrees outside. Today, it’s 20. Given the current rate of change, the temperature will reach absolute zero sometime on March 8th. Better wrap up!

The theme of the Population bomb can basically be boiled down to one sentence.

“Given the rate population growth, our world society is presently on an unsustainable course.”

Sound familiar? In fact, in the passage above what Diamond does is to adopt Ehrlich’s position wholesale, then update it with “deforestation, soil erosion, oil consumption, and diminishing biodiversity”. It sounds remarkably like the The Global 2000 Report to the President–issued, of course, in 1980.

if present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now [i.e., 1980]. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.

For hundred of millions of the desperately poor, the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it will be worse. Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now–unless the nations of the world act decisively to alter current trends.

Slate’s Timothy reviewed the predictions of the The Global 2000 Report back in 1999, finding it at best half-right, and that’s without taking into account the declining population growth rates. Yet here is Jared Diamond, almost 25 years later, making almost exactly the same predictions.

Everything else changes, save for the predictions of anthropogenic disaster. It’s the secular humanist version of the Rapture.

But, back to the review. Interestingly Diamond stands by the argument that originally drew me into the controversy surrounding his book, the on-the-face-of-it ludicrous view that the Greenland Norse didn’t eat fish.

Kirsten Seaver, an independent scholar based in Palo Alto and author of ”The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America” (Stanford), a book Diamond himself recommends in his endnotes, is also skeptical of Diamond’s argument. ”To say that they did not eat fish was ridiculous,” she says.

But Diamond stands firm. ”I think that’s the only serious explanation. There are some archaeologists who think maybe the fish bones will turn up, but there’s now been 80 years of serious archaeology in Greenland” — and still no fishbones.

In fact, as I mentioned in my first post on this tar-baby of a subject, there is–against all odds–good evidence that fish was a part of the Greenland Norse diet. The problem with their preservation in the Norse middens can be traced directly to the wet, low tundra environment of southern Greenland. Fish bones are far more likely to vanish from the archeological record in a wet environment, so from the very beginning any competent archaeologist would be surprised to find them, yet fish bones have been located in Greenland Norse trash piles nonetheless. For Diamond to baldly state otherwise shows that he is either unfamiliar with current theory on the subject, or that he is ignoring it, perhaps in an attempt to move more copies of Collapse before its moment in the sun is over–something one of his defenses of Collapse suggests he realizes may be happening sooner, rather than later.

”False alarms are an inevitable part of an alarm system,” he says. ”You want to give the alarm early, so that the fire engines can come out to put out the flames. If you never had a false alarm, you’d know you didn’t have an adequate warning system.”

Oddly enough, I don’t think that excuse would fly were I to pull down the on the fire alarm out in the hall at work.

“Just testing the system officer, and I must say I expected you earlier. What do mean, turn around and put my hands behind me?”

The 122nd edition of the Carnival of the Vanities is hosted for the third time by Friend of Hraka and evident masochist The People’s Republic Of Seabrook this week.

If you’d like to host the Carnival, drop us a line. Information on how to join the Carnival can be found here. If you would like to be added to the Carnival announcement list, send an email to cotvanities-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

January 26th The Raving Atheist
February 2nd – Ken Sain
February 9th – Coyote Blog
February 16th – Soccer Dad
February 23rd – Pundit Guy
March 2nd – Belief Seeking Understanding
March 9th – Solomonia
March 16th – Bird’s Eye View
March 23rd – CodeBlueBlog
March 30th – Eric Berlin
December 21 – Ravenwood’s Univers

All other dates are currently open for hosting. Also, be sure to check out the Carnival’s offspring:

The Bharteeya Blog Mela
Bonfire of the Vanities
Carnival of the Capitalists
The Kissing Booth
Carnival of the Canucks
The BestOfMe Symphony
The Carnival of the Cats
Carnival of the Dogs
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