One more little item for the disaster file (Nafeesa Syed, Associated Press):

An explosion and fire Monday at a chemical plant northeast of Des Moines sent plumes of thick smoke into the sky and forced officials to close two interestate freeways. [ . . . ]

The explosion at the Barton Solvents plant was reported at 1:15 p.m., and nearly two hours later was burning out of control, said A.J. Mumm, coordinator for the Polk County Emergency Management Agency.

Flames and clouds of black smoke soared above the plant, and exploding barrels could be seen jetting intothe sky. Mumm said 55-gallon barrels and 300-gallon tanks were exploding and that there were concerns about loaded rail cars and truck tanks on the site.

Police closed I-80 and I-235 near the fire.

"There is thick smoke and they're concerned drivers can't see," said Dena Gray-Fisher, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Transportation. "There's also toxic fumes associated with chemicals and they're going to do some testing of the area."

Another Barton Solvents plant in Valley Center, KS -- about 10 miles north-northwest of where I live in Wichita -- exploded and caught fire earlier this year. Terrorism is not suspected in either case. Incompetence suffices. In America's post-2000 disaster file, acts of terrorists are few and far between -- 9/11/2001 now looks like an anomaly, even though the Bush gang has worked overtime to provoke potential enemies into further strikes. That we worry so much more about terrorism may reflect a subliminal, uninspected guilty conscience over what we do (or is done in our name) abroad. But real disasters here are due to ordinary things: development that pushes the limits of our resources, natural events that are made worse by that development (or possibly unnatural ones given our contributions to global warming), cutting corners to scratch out short-term profits, and a general dumbing down of everything.

The Wichita Eagle carried an article today by Halimah Abdullah of McClatchy Newspapers, titled "Majority of students in South are poor":

For the first time in more than 40 years, the majority of children in public schools in the South are poor, according to a report released today. [ . . . ]

Twenty years ago, Mississippi was the only state in the country with such a high percentage of poor public school students. However, as textile mills shut down in the Carolinas, Appalachian coal mines cut workers and a recession swept the nation, families in the South were especially hard hit, the Southern Education Foundation report found.

Also hitting the South disproportionately were federal cutbacks in anti-poverty programs, the region's higher rates of underemployment and the increased birth rates of Hispanic and African-American children, who are statistically more likely than their white peers to be born into poverty.

Now, a majority of public school students are considered low income in a total of 14 states, including 11 in the South. The South shows tremendous variability, with 84 percent of students considered low-income in Louisiana, 75 percent in Mississippi, 62 percent in Florida, 49 percent in North Carolina, but only 33 percent in Virginia.

According to the report, public schools in the West may face similar problems in the next five to seven years. Already, 51 percent of public school children in California and 62 percent of those in New Mexico are considered low income.

All told, the report said, 54 percent of students in Southern states are judged to be poor, a significant increase from the 37 percent so classified in the late 1980s. Nationally, 46 percent of public school students are low-income.

This isn't much of a surprise. All my life it's been clear that the people who run Mississippi would rather be part of a third world banana republic than a developed first world democracy, and probably for no better reason than spite: having lost the Civil War, they resolved to keep blacks as poor as they were during slavery, and wound up treating most whites little better, lest anyone get the idea that progress was possible. I've been reading Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, which has many examples of this. Katznelson quotes a letter to Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo in 1944, which displays the basic sentiment (p. 81):

I am a typical American, a southerner, and 27 years of age, and never in the world will I be convined that race mixing in any field is good. All the social "do-gooders," the philanthropic "greats" of this day, the reds and the pinks . . . the disciples of Eleanor . . . can never alter my convictions on this question. I am loyal to my country and know but reverence to her flag, but I shall never submit to fight beneath that banner with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see this old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

For whatever it's worth, the author was Robert Byrd, who became (and still is) a Senator himself, representing West Virginia. I picked out Katznelson's book because it follows up on a main theme in Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal: the single most important reason why America abandoned the New Deal welfare state was race hatred. In doing so, the white middle class created in "the Great Compression" of the New Deal and WWII has allowed itself to dissolve into inequality and uncertainty for no better reason than spiteful resolve to keep blacks from joining in the same benefits. As Katznelson points out, the white south took the lead, especially in turning against organized labor in the 1940s. The crippling of the south then (and now) cannot be attributed to diminished political power. Rather, in both cases it is the fruit of the south's political ascendency -- abetted, of course, by alliance with the Republicans, which finally have been remade in the confederacy's image.

Lack of education is nothing new to the south. Katznelson writes (p. 101):

The 1940 Census had revealed that some 10 million Americans had not been schooled past the fourth grade, and that one in eight could not read and write. This, primarily, was a southern problem. A higher proportion of blacks living in the North had completed grade school than whites in the South.

To blame the current rising figure on "federal cutbacks" ignores the fact that southern politicians have agitated for those cutbacks, and that southern states do little if anything on their own to make up for them -- unlike northern states, which are consistently better off precisely because their state governments take some interest in the welfare of their citizens.

Most likely, the trends noted are due to more than increasing poverty, although that's certainly the tide that lifts the entire region. The numbers are also increased by whites withdrawing from the public education systems their political power has wrecked. Backlash against immigrants (illegal and otherwise) is also a likely factor, especially in the west. But all three trends are squarely the fault of the political right and the wrath they take out on the poor. Not realizing that we all depend on each other for our overall welfare, they, like Byrd, would rather perish than share. The numbers show that they are succeeding.

One of the chores I face each time I end a Jazz Consumer Guide cycle is the need to cut back my ever-growing file of hopefuls for the next column. I can only slot about 30 records per column, and only manage to get columns published every three months or so. Most low B+ and lower records (excepting a few dud candidates) get cut as soon as I rate them, but that still leaves more than I can possibly fit in. By the end of this latest cycle I had 108 records languishing in my "done" file. I've trimmed them back to 67, which still leaves a lot of records that will never make it, but helps to make my paperwork more manageable. In most cases, I don't have much to say beyond what I've already said in my jazz prospecting notes, but in a few cases I thought I'd add a few parting words:

Alvin Batiste: Marsalis Music Honors Alvin Batiste (2006 [2007], Marsalis Music/Rounder): Released along with a Bob French tribute, which nabbed an honorable mention right with a slight edge over this. Then Batiste, a veteran New Orleans clarinetist who had rarely been recorded well, passed away, making this all the more valuable. B+(**)

Stefano Bollani: Piano Solo (2005, [2007], ECM): An attractive, eloquent album, well crafted, patiently executed, enough to overcome my congenital resistance to solo piano, but still didn't quite inspire me to write about it. B+(**)

Harry Connick Jr.: Chanson du Vieux Carré (2003 [2007], Marsalis Music/Rounder): A big band album of old New Orleans, dusted off post-Katrina and sloughed off on Connick's B-label, where he had to get others to take the vocals. I ultimately decided that the A-label Oh, My Nola (2006 [2007], Columbia) was slightly better overall, then wound up using neither. B+(**)

Joel Futterman/Alvin Fielder/Ike Levin Trio: Live at the Blue Monk (2006, Charles Lester Music): An old-fashioned avant-garde trio, which is to say they like to make a racket in additional to wheeling and dealing freely. Futterman is a pianist of the Cecil Taylor school; Levin a saxophonist who can get dirty; Fielder has his AACM credentials. I always dig their records, but somehow never get around to writing about them. B+(**)

Gold Sparkle Trio With Ken Vandermark: Brooklyn Cantos (2002 [2004], Squealer): The Trio already has a fine saxophonist in Charles Waters, as well as a superb drummer in Andrew Barker. Adding Vandermark doubles the fun, but this was old when I got it and kept slipping behind newer records. B+(***)

Dave Holland Quintet: Critical Mass (2005 [2006], Dare2/Sunnyside): Seems like Holland is such a big name this should have been dealt with in a more timely fashion, but I was real slow on the uptake, or maybe just fascinated with the idea of cutting it down. Ultimately, there's just too much talent here for that. B+(***)

Jerry Leake: The Turning: Percussion Explorations (2005 [2006], Rhombus Publishing): Nine out of ten jazz musicians claim to be educators these days, but Leake really is one, and this is a world-class textbook on percussion. B+(***)

Abbey Lincoln: Abbey Sings Abbey (2006 [2007], Verve): Aside from We Insist -- Freedom Now, under husband Max Roach's name, I've never found a record by her that I've really cared for. At first these were disappointing; over time they became annoying. She does have her fans, including critics I rarely argue with, so I figure my resistance to her is just one of those weird personal quirks. For whatever it's worth, I think this is her best record, at least of the half-dozen or so I've heard. The songs are field-tested, the arrangements cleverly developed. Her voice is rougher than it used to be, and I think that helps. Francis Davis wrote a rave in the Voice already. I don't see much value in adding my lukewarm consent. B+(***)

Roswell Rudd & Yomo Toro: El Espíritu Jíbaro (2002-06 [2007], Sunnyside): One of Rudd's world music match-ups, with Bobby Sanabria reinforcing Toro's Puerto Rican country beat, and Rudd just being the great trombonist he's always been. Better than his beatless Mali album; not as intriguing a mix as those Mongolian throat singers. Francis Davis reviewed this among a bunch of Rudd records in the Voice, and I wrote plenty on this in RG. B+(***)

David Smith Quintet: Circumstance (2005 [2006], Fresh Sound New Talent): Young Canadian trumpet player gets a nice coming out party, with a strong assist from saxophonist Seamus Blake. B+(***)

Toph-E & the Pussycats: Live in Detroit (2004 [2006], CD Baby): Basically a funk band, not all that special, but fun enough I was long tempted to slip them in somewhere. B+(**)

Lars-Göran Ulander Trio: Live at the Glenn Miller Café (2004 [2005], Ayler): Swedish saxophonist, a local legend from the 1960s, given a shot at a headline album, which he aces. Between the obscurity and the competition, I never got back to this. The label has since moved into a new download-only business model, which is a shame given the nice packaging. Also given the distaste I have for downloading. B+(***)

The complete list of surplus cuts for this cycle is here.

Jazz Consumer Guide appeared in the Village Voice last week, so this week should have kicked the prospecting for the next one up a gear. But as it turns out, I have little to report below. I'm still working on finishing up November's Recycled Goods column. Working on that took most of my time, and skewed what little follows. Also played another That Devilin' Tune box. That looks to be December's "In Series" feature, but will take a sizable chunk of time to even partially digest.

I've made a pass on culling the surplus in preparation for next Jazz CG. I knocked the "done" file down from 108 records to a more manageable 67. A lot of good records got knocked out there, but the pending file is up to 188 records. I've also moved the print/flush notes to the notebook, mostly to make them easier to find in the distant future. I'll do a follow-up post on the surplus later today, at worst tomorrow. November Recycled Goods is a day or two away from going to the editor. Just looking at the shelves, next week should see a lot of new jazz prospected.

Choro Ensemble: Nosso Tempo (2007, Anzic): Anat Cohen, on clarinet, fronts a Brazilian group, with Gustavo Dantas' 6-string guitar, Carlos Almeida's 7-string guitar, Pedro Ramos' cavaquinho and tenor guitar, Zé Mauricio's percussion (pandeiro, zabumba, surdo). Aside from the clarinet, the choro is felt and authentic. The clarinet isn't authentic, to choro at least; the exultant uplift Cohen brings to the proceedings sounds much like the stock-in-trade worldview of klezmer. B+(*) [advance]

Wendy Fopeano: Raining on the Roses (2006 [2007], Outside Shore): Vocalist, originally from Kansas City, now based in Denver. Second album. Likes vocalese, writing her own lyrics to David Murray and Kenny Barron pieces, as well as using some of Jon Hendricks' lyrics. Likes to scat. Does two Jobim songs, several standards, one co-credit with pianist-husband Marc Sabatella. Gives one song slot up to fellow KC vocalist Carol Comer. Recorded live with a pretty upbeat group. B

Julie Hardy: The Wish (2006 [2007], World Culture Music): Vocalist, from New Hampshire, now in Brooklyn after studying in Boston. Second album, after A Moment's Notice (2005, Fresh Sound New Talent). Wrote half or a bit more, including three pieces subtitled parts of "The Wish Suite." Also does a Beatles song, some standards, and added lyrics to a Wayne Shorter piece. Band includes some minor names -- guitarist Ben Monder is probably the best known. I didn't care much for the voice or the arrangements, thought "All or Nothing at All" was especially clunky; but I was working on other stuff at the time, wasn't paying enough attention to get technical, and gave her the benefit of my doubts on the grade, seeing little prospect in pursuing this further. B-

Marsha Heydt: One Night (2007, Blue Toucan): Plays sax, flute, clarinet. Grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, tracing her family back to the eighteenth century. Moved to Los Angeles in 1991, then to New York in 1992. First album. Wrote four songs, including one done both as an instrumental and with a nuanced Carla Cook vocal. That's the only vocal. The rest, with the marginal exception of a Monk piece, is rather schmoozy easy listening music, often with quasi-Latin rhythms, three with a string trio, six more with Erik Friedlander's cello. Booklet doesn't specify what Heydt plays where, but her website gives the breakdown as: alto sax 6, soprano sax 3, flute 4. Heydt's alto sax sounds rather wobbly, although her "Georgia on My Mind" has some charm. In fact, quite a bit of this is likable, but it's hard to see much point to it. C+

Ella Fitzgerald: Love Letters From Ella (1973-83 [2007], Concord/Starbucks): I don't really know what's going on here. I just have an advance copy and a PR sheet that's more concerned with hyping Starbucks than any of the music here. Plus I figured I'd put it off until some Verve reissues showed up, but they never did. Now I'm just cleaning up. What we have here are ten previously unreleased vocal tracks from Fitzgerald's 1973-83 Pablo period. They are strong performances of familiar material. Eight are presented as featuring special guests: Count Basie, the London Symphony Orchestra, Joe Pass, André Previn, and/or Scott Hamilton. Some have been merged in the editing -- LSO and Hamilton for sure, Pass and Basie are dead although the latter retains a ghostly form, especially at Concord. I'm only partly inclined to reject such adulteration out of hand -- for instance, I don't have a big problem with remixes and mash-ups, but there the shoe is on the other foot. But I do like to know what I'm dealing with, and there's a whiff of dishonesty here that may or may not be dispelled in the final product -- the reviews I've read add some info suggesting it is, but not enough to be sure. In any case, "Our Love Is Here to Stay" with André Previn is a choice cut -- holds up even though my mind keeps interjecting snatches from her duet with Louis Armstrong. B [advance]

Pablo Ziegler-Quique Sinesi: Buenos Aires Report (2006 [2007], Zoho): Artist credit includes, in smaller type, "with Walter Castro." Castro plays bandoneon. Haven't found much on him; he's the youngest of the trio, but due to his instrument is a large part of the group's sound. Ziegler and Sinesi hail from Buenos Aires. Ziegler was born in 1944, plays piano, and was part of Astor Piazzolla's group from 1978-89. He composed all but two of the pieces here. Sinesi was born in 1960, plays guitar, composed one song. The last is by Piazzolla, and it seems significant that it is a much livelier, more fully realized piece. By comparison, the others feel like sketches -- maybe studies is the better word. B+(*)

Cique (2007, Capri): Cover explains: "cique (sik) -- (n) post retro trans genre hippy trippy spank a lank; (adj) really totally happening; (adj) not at all well." Latter sounds like "sick." Denver group, with Jeff Jenkins on keyboards (rhodes, organ, synths), Bijoux Barbosa on bass (electric & acoustic), Matt Houston on drums. Steve Holloway guests on bodhran (a celtic frame drum) on one track. John Abercrombie plays guitar on four tracks, rating a "with special guest" honorific. Abercrombie's easy-going fusion is probably the main interest here, but Jenkins contributes some tasty funk as well. B

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

TomDispatch: Mark Danner: The President at Peace With Himself. A new set of documents on deliberations between Bush and Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar from February 22, 2003, leading up to the Iraq War. This just adds to what we already know.

TomDispatch: Tom Engelhardt: Do We Already Have Our Pentagon Papers?. Goes over a long list of now-public documents from the Bush administration, primarily relating to the use of torture. I haven't followed this thread, nor for that matter the complementary one on NSA spying -- probably because I don't expect much more from the US government (Bush or no Bush). But the following quote struck me, probably due to how it shows the Bush regime's sense of its own culpability:

In the process of twisting arms, the administration suspended over $47 million in military aid "to 35 countries that ha[d] not signed deals to grant American soldiers immunity from prosecution for war crimes." In this attempt to get every country on the planet aboard the American no-war-crimes-prosecution train before it left the station, you can sense once again the administration's obsessional intensity on this subject (especially since experts agreed that the realistic possibility of the ICC bringing Americans up on war crimes was essentially nil).

Also, their paranoia: the ICC should be flattered that the US takes them so seriously.

TomDispatch: Chalmers Johnson: 12 Books in Search of a Policy. A review of Stephen Holmes, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (Cambridge University Press), which in turn surveys a dozen other books by the architects and fans of Bush's GWOT. I've pulled most of the details out for a future post on Holmes' book. (Even if I don't get around to reading it, it's useful reference info.)

John Brady Kiesling: Getting Real About Iran. Starts with a discussion of legitimacy; specifically why Americans treating Iran's Presient Ahmadinejad rudely hurts us but not him. The idea that if we treated him with respect we'd "legitimize" him only plays to our own egos (which is, incidentally, the only thing that seems to matter in our political discourse).

One odd thing is that delegitimizing Ahmadinejad is not really in our best interest, even if we knew how. We are asking Iran to renounce a sovereign right to a full nuclear fuel cycle. No current U.S. politician could make such a renunciation and survive in office, no matter how money and praise foreigners showered on him for doing so. Gorbachev, who nobly relinquished an oppressive Soviet empire, is despised by his own people.

Tony Karon: Jewish Glasnost Update: Zionist Panic! Evidently Daniel Pipes and CAMERA have found a new major threat to Israel's existence: the English-language edition of Haaretz.

The New York Times ran an article today by Adam Liptak on the early cases presidential candidates handled as lawyers. Giuliani and Thompson worked as prosecutors; Obama handled civil rights cases, and Edwards defended the little guys in personal injury cases. All of those were indicative of future political careers, although the prosecutorial stepping stone isn't so interesting. But the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton's case is down right prophetic:

The first jury trial Mrs. Clinton handled on her own, for instance, concerned the rear end of a rat in a can of pork and beans. She represented the cannery, and she argued that there had been no real harm, as the plaintiff did not actually eat the rat. "Besides," she wrote in her autobiography, describing her client's position, "the rodent parts which had been sterilized might be considered edible in certain parts of the world."

The report goes on to say that she was "amazingly nervous" in front of the jury. Of course, she's gotten much more assured at defending corporate scum since then.

Made birthday dinner tonight. I don't recall clearly when this tradition started -- sometime in the mid-'90s, although I must have missed a year or two along the way. The early ones were meant to give me a chance to explore interesting cuisines in some depth, usually with a dozen or more dishes. This one was just based on the recollection that I hadn't had mariscada in green sauce in quite some time. That's a Spanish dish, so it was tempting to pile on the tapas. I usually fix potatoes with it -- fried is what I'm used to in restaurants, but I usually slice them thin like chips and roast them. I wound up fixing rice instead -- felt like it would be easier than fried and better than roasted. Originally thought I'd fix green beans as a side vegetable, but they looked awful, so I picked up some asparagus and mushrooms, figuring I'd find a recipe. Thought I'd have a chopped or mixed salad, but didn't get to either. Did find a jar of piquillo peppers, a chunk of rather tough chorizo, and some manchego cheese, so tried to work them in. The recipes come from Penelope Casas, mostly from Delicioso! The only new ones for me were the asparagus and mushrooms. Menu looked like this:

• Clams in almond sauce -- augmented with shrimp, scallops, lobster; green with parsley
• Saffron rice with pine nuts
• Asparagus in almond sauce -- this one is red with tomato
• Mushrooms in sherry sauce
• Roasted vegetable canapes with anchovy/olive paste (toasted garlic bread, garum, escalivada)
• Garlic shrimp
• Piquillo pepper salad with raisins and pine nuts
• Cheese pate with walnuts and peppers -- chevre and gorgonzola
• Sliced Spanish chorizo and manchego cheese
• Orange yogurt cake

I'm way behind in updating my recipes section, but half or so of these recipes are posted already.

My Jazz Consumer Guide column appeared in the Village Voice today. This is the 14th such column, going back to July 2004. Historically, they've been running every three months. The previous one came out on June 26, so this time it's been close to four months. There's no simple explanation for the slowdown. I run infrequently enough that the Voice doesn't give me a schedule, so I don't have to work against deadline pressure, then we get long delays once I do have something to hand in. I think we should be able to speed up the process, but I tend to let down after each cycle, then have trouble getting to the close again. Whether the Voice would run columns more frequently isn't clear. Until I produce them, I probably won't get an answer.

One thing for sure is that I'm not hurting for records worth writing about. The Jazz Prospecting file for this cycle has notes on 269 different albums. This Jazz Consumer Guide reviews 29 albums -- not sure why, but that's actually down 5 albums and 120 words from the previous column. (Actually, I was told that the cuts included Joshua Redman's Down East and Nicole Mitchell's Indigo Trio/Live in Montreal, but they're both in the web column. That would change my figure to down 3 albums and 27 words, not so bad.) By the time I closed down, I had a lot more prospected than I could fit in. The following is the list of A- records that I've prospected but didn't get into the column:

• Chris Byars: Photos in Black, White and Gray (Smalls) *
• The Claudia Quintet: For (Cuneiform)
• The Neil Cowley Trio: Displaced (Hide Inside)
• Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet: Early and Late (Cuneiform) **
• Adam Lane/Ken Vandermark/Magnus Broo/Paal Nilssen-Love: 4 Corners (Clean Feed) *
• Matt Lavelle Trio: Spiritual Power (Silkheart)
• Hugh Masekela: Live at the Market Theatre (Times Square/4Q)
• William Parker/Raining on the Moon: Corn Meal Dance (AUM Fidelity) *
• Art Pepper: Unreleased Art, Vol. 1: The Complete Abashiri Concert (1981, Widow's Taste) **
• Art Pepper: Unreleased Art, Vol. II: The Last Concert (1982, Widow's Taste) **
• Alvin Queen: I Ain't Looking at You (Enja/Justin Time) *
• Louis Sclavis: L'Imparfait des Langues (ECM)
• John Sheridan and His Dream Band: Swing Is Still the King (Arbors)
• Joan Stiles: Hurly-Burly (Oo-Bla-Dee)
• Assif Tsahar/Cooper-Moore/Chad Taylor: Digital Primitives (Hopscotch)
• Fay Victor Ensemble: Cartwheels Through the Cosmos (ArtistShare)
• David S. Ware Quartet: Renunciation (AUM Fidelity)

That's more than I managed to fit into the top section of this column. Some of those aren't written yet (* or **, the latter having appeared in Recycled Goods are lower priorities), but I'm probably not far short right now -- don't have clear pick hits here, and don't have the obligatory dud written. The backlog on Honorable Mentions is even worse -- I can't begin to list the unwritten ones, many of which will regrettably never get written, but the following are ready to go, presumably next time:

• Slavic Soul Party!: Technochek Collision (Barbès)
• Frank Morgan: A Night in the Life (High Note)
• Sonic Openings Under Pressure: Muhheankuntuk (Clean Feed)
• Matt Chamberlain/Bill Frisell/Tucker Martine/Lee Townsend: Floratone (Blue Note)
• Paul Zauners Blue Brass: Soil (PAO/BluJazz)
• Quadro Nuevo: Tango Bitter Sweet (Justin Time)
• Charlie Haden/Antonio Forcione: Heartplay (Naim)
• The Rocco John Group: Don't Wait Too Long (COCA Productions)
• The Phil Woods Quintet: American Songbook II (Kind of Blue)

I didn't get the surplus file done yet, and right now working on Recycled Goods is a higher priority. But I'll try to figure out the surplus soon, and get a bead on the next column soon. It should be well within reach.

Jazz CG #14 should be in the Village Voice later this week. I got details on the layout -- Matt Lavelle, Joshua Redman, and David S. Ware got cut from the top section; Slavic Soul Party, Frank Morgan, Paul Zauner, and Nicole Mitchell from the HMs. They'll run next time, as well as a bunch of stuff I wrote but didn't bother handing in -- #15 is currently over half-written. Still need to surplus purge, which I'll get to next thing -- "done" file is currently 108 deep, which isn't exceptional by historical standards, but could still stand some pruning. Pending file is a bigger concern at 158, and that's short -- I've fallen a bit behind on my paperwork, even before I got a package of Fresh Sounds from Spain this morning.

I've complained a lot about stripped-down promo advances lately, so let me note here that I received final copies of two new Cryptogramophone releases (Myra Melford, Alan Pasqua) and one of the ECMs that follow (Keith Jarrett). I also got a package with seven recent Concord releases, including a couple I didn't bother asking for. They're among the stuff I still need to catch up to. Next week looks likely to be split between Recycled Goods and Jazz Prospecting.

The Karl Denson Trio: Lunar Orbit (2007, Bobby Ace): From San Diego, plays sax and flute, more funk than jazz. Got his break in 1989 with Lenny Kravitz. Other credits include Fred Wesley, Blackalicious, the Allman Brothers, Steve Winwood, John Scofield, and a couple of organ grinders I like: Robert Walter and Ron Levy. The trio here is an organ-drums thing, but it's not really a trio: he uses three different organ players and three different drummers (counting Steve Haney on congas). This leads off with a flute piece, awful really, and he returns to flute several more times -- "That Other Thing" is a tolerable example, but it still seems like a pretty silly funk instrument. The sax, of course, works better -- cf. "Dingo Dog Sled," probably the most retro piece here, easily the funkiest. B-

Amy London: When I Look in Your Eyes (2005 [2007], Motéma): Can't glean much from her bio: born somewhere in Ohio, got a BA from Syracuse, been in New York since 1982 (at least), took time from her career for children -- presumably she's recovered from that. Discography shows nine albums: this one, a duo with guitarist Roni Ben-Hur (who plays here), the rest without her name on the cover -- Broadway cast recording City of Angels, movie soundtrack Radioland Murders, something based on Rainer Maria Rilke, Tom Browne's Funkin' for Jamaica, more Ben-Hur. She has a Broadway voice: precise control, projects well, able to exploit a nuance to tell a story. She's also managed to assemble an admirable band, including the late John Hicks on piano, Rufus Reid on bass, Richie Vitale on trumpet, and Chris Byars on sax, as well as Ben-Hur and others -- they don't stand out so much as they fit in. Choice cut: "The Best Is Yet to Come." Evidently she's taught voice for quite a while; she does a whole textbook on that one. B+(**)

Tony Adamo: Straight Up Deal (2007, Urban Zone): Smooth jazz vocalist, or so he claims. I find he's got some grit to his voice, and his studio musicians are agreeably funky -- a couple of spots with Eddie Henderson and Ernie Watts even show some jazz cred. Could use better songs. B

Freddy Cole: Music Maestro Please (2006 [2007], High Note): Nat's brother, 14 years younger, although he seems like a generation removed, recording his first album 13 years after Nat's death, and his second 12 years later. The latter was called I'm Not My Brother, I'm Me, and they've come out steadily ever since. He's never been in the same league, but the family resemblance is real enough -- perhaps too much so to avoid unfavorable comparison. Still, this holds up well on its own. He's older now than Nat ever got -- it moves him into new territory, and he seems comfortable there. Of course, the Bill Charlap Trio helps, a lot. [B+(***)]

Eric Alexander: Temple of Olympic Zeus (2007, High Note): A mainstream tenor saxophonist with a strong, clear tone, plenty of chops, the whole kit. I've liked most of what I've heard from him before, but this runs straight into one of my pet peeves. There must be a technical explanation for this: what happens is that when two horns -- tenor sax and trumpet or, more often here, flugelhorn -- lock onto each other they create these harmonics that sound really polluted to me. This happens a lot in postbop contexts -- seems to be something taught in jazz school nowadays -- but this yokes the horns to old-fashioned bebop, which used to know better. Still, that only explains the four of eight cuts Jim Rotondi joins in on. Alexander sounds much cleaner on his own, but he's still stuck in the same damn rollercoaster ride. A dud. C+

Houston Person: Thinking of You (2007, High Note): Eddie Allen plays trumpet on four cuts. Unlike Alexander-Rotondi, he plays clean and distinctly, even though he has little to add. Person is aging beautifully -- the more he slows down, the better he sounds. [B+(***)]

Steve Nelson: Sound Effect (2007, High Note): Vibraphonist, from Pittsburgh, only has a half-dozen albums since 1987, but has a huge list of side credits -- AMG's count is 134 albums, including compilations I wouldn't normally count, but for the list stops in 2003, surely a glitch; it's safe to say he pops up on 6-8 albums per year, sometimes more. That means he doesn't write much -- three tracks here. But this quartet is a marvelous way to frame his work. Vibes often mesh well with piano, and pianist Mulgrew Miller gives Nelson a lot to bounce off of. The bass-drums combo: Peter Washington and Lewis Nash. [B+(***)]

Funky Pieces of Silver: The Horace Silver Songbook (The Composer Collection Volume 1) (1997-2005 [2007], High Note): An unnecessary label sampler, but it's hard to go wrong with Silver songs. Six of nine feature the Hammond B-3, including four by Charles Earland, three from the same album. The only surprise is that I like Joey DeFrancesco's trumpet more than his organ. Everything is tight, and funk is its own reward. B+(*)

Manu Katché: Playground (2007, ECM): ECM has gone to a system of distributing promos via downloads. Universal, which distributes ECM in the US, has used this for a couple of years, but I've only managed to put aside my chagrin in the last week, using it for Recycled Goods -- like Elvis Costello and Bo Diddley releases that complement ones they actually sent to me, and a Police set I knew backwards already. I haven't bothered with the ECM downloads, because I've been sitting on a pile of advances that I got before the new policy went into effect. Originally I was wating to see what would happen. This one his the shelves Sept. 25, and nothing happened. ECM has been generous in their support in the past, and would probably respond now if I made a stink. I don't mean to do that here. I'm trying to work with the new system, and explain how it works. Anything marked [advance] here with no date has already been released, but I'm working off a CDR with no booklet or cover art. At least thus far I have press releases, which with ECM have more info than the picture-oriented booklets have, and I'm trying to make up what's missing by searching the internet. (One problem with Universal's download system is that it doesn't provide useful collateral documentation -- lack of discography is a big problem, more so for Recycled Goods than ECM.) So much for that. As for this record: Katché, from France, has a handful of albums since 1992, and has done sideman work notably with Jan Garbarek. Garbarek and Tomas Stanko's band appeared on Katché's Neighbourhood, which came out in 2006 and got a Jazz CG A- rating. This one has Trygve Seim for Garbarek and Mathias Eick for Stanko -- interesting players, but they lose a lot of presence. A couple of pieces tighten up the groove to where it seems to have some potential; otherwise this is lax and fluid, attractive, but not all that compelling. [B+(**)] [advance]

Eberhard Weber: Stages of a Long Journey (2005 [2007], ECM): German bassist, been with ECM since The Colors of Chloe in 1973. Most of his albums are fairly minimal, but this is a live recording built around the SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra -- the group pictured on the cover is massive, with Gary Burton (vibes), Jan Garbarek (soprano and tenor sax), Rainer Brüninghaus (piano), Marilyn Mazur (percussion), and Weber added to the Orchestra. The Orchestra itself takes a background role, sloshing back and forth like an uneasy sea, while the group vies for your attention. The saving grace, unsurprisingly, is Garbarek. B+(*) [advance]

Miroslav Vitous: Universal Syncopations II (2004-05 [2007], ECM): All this shares with its precedessor is title, bassist, and painstaking assembly. But what made Universal Syncopations remarkable was the individuality of its superstars' performances -- Jan Garbarek, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette. They're replaced by a committee here, maybe several, but this could just as well have been assembled from Vitous's legendary library of digital samples -- indeed, the sole voice credit, one Vesna Vasko-Caceres, only hints at how he uses voice to whitewash a heavenly aura over what sounds like a throwback to the Czech's Communist (err, classical) education. The funk horns and multiple drummers only exist on paper. Their syncopations are anything but universal. B- [advance]

Paul Bley: Solo in Mondsee (2001 [2007], ECM): Released for Bley's 75th birthday. Touted as his first solo piano on ECM since 1972's Open, to Love. He's recorded numerous solo albums elsewhere -- Penguin Guide mentions 12, most recently Nothing to Declare (2003 [2004], Justin Time), recorded after but out before this one. This one is slower, of course; per Dr. Eicher's Rx, no doubt. I also like it a shade better, although with solo piano I'm not much of a judge. Ten Roman-numeraled variations, on what I'm not sure, but consistently interesting, never dull. Bley has had quite a career, starting in 1953 with the marvelous Introducing Paul Bley, a trio backed by guys named Blakey and Mingus. A couple of years later he hired an unknown alto saxophonist, Ornette Coleman. He also married a pianist, Carla Borg; after she took his name and went her own way, he married vocalist Annette Peacock. He moved into free jazz in the 1960s, most notably with Jimmy Guiffre's trio. He has a vast discography, which I've only occasionally sampled and barely grasp, but often find intriguing. B+(**)

John Surman: The Spaces in Between (2006 [2007], ECM): Started recording for ECM in 1979, which by now makes up the bulk of his career. The more I listen to his pre-ECM stuff, the more I wonder about why he wound up dedicating himself to intricate, composerly postbop chamber music when he seemed early on to have both fusion and avant-garde by the balls. With a full string quartet, known as Trans4mation, plus bass (Chris Lawrence) as the sole accompaniment to his bass clarinet, baritone and soprano sax, this seems more chamberish than ever. But all the strings do is flesh out the reeds, which intrigue and never lose interest. [B+(**)]

Christian Wallumrød Ensemble: The Zoo Is Far (2006 [2007], ECM): Norwegian pianist, b. 1971, has four albums now, all on ECM. This is a sextet, but it seems much more minimal, with percussion, baroque harp, cello, violin (viola, Hardanger fiddle), and Arve Henriksen's vanishing trumpet. Some of the piano fragments remind me of Another Green World, with acoustic instruments somewhat complicating the sound and the melodies. The string bits are scarcely more complex, but don't have the same elegance. Textures mostly, probably related to Norse folk and baroque and such. Small pleasures, or maybe just pleasantries. B+(*) [advance]

Frode Haltli: Passing Images (2004 [2007], ECM): Norwegian accordionist, second album, both on ECM. This one with Arve Henriksen on trumpet, Garth Knox on viola, and Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje singing (or vocalizing -- there's not a lot of conventional singing). Songs are evidently folk based, including one by good ole' trad. Dense, dark, minimal sounds; any other trumpet player would bust out of this, but Henriksen provides little more than harmonic overtones to the accordion. Might be worth another play, but the pickings look pretty slim. [B] [advance]

Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack DeJohnette: My Foolish Heart: Live at Montreux (2001 [2007], ECM, 2CD): This trio, introduced here as The Trio, debuted circa 1983 as The Standards Trio, but has been fixed ever since, perhaps from habit, possibly, well, if you're Jarrett, who else would you rather play with? I don't know how many albums they've done together -- pretty much everything in Jarrett's catalog for the last score-plus years except for the numerous solos. Given my relatively thin and unnuanced bandwidth for processing piano trios, they've long since achieved a plateau where they all pretty much sound the same. I'm not sure whether this is the exception, or it just started off so brightly that I kicked back and let myself enjoy it. It is a standards exercise, with two Fats Waller pieces unexpected pleasures in the middle -- I'm not sure how distinctive they are, but I'm glad to have them. [A-] [advance]

Sinikka Langeland: Starflowers (2006 [2007], ECM): Norwegian father, Finnish mother, sings the Norwegian words of lumberjack-poet Hans Børli -- like Langeland, hailing from the Finnskogen, the "Finnish Woods" of northeast Norway -- while playing santele, a Finnish table harp. She has several previous albums, probably more authentically folkish. For ECM, Manfred Eicher hooks her up with his favorite Nordic jazzers, most notably Trygve Seim on sax and Arve Henriksen on trumpet -- his third appearance in this batch, finally making a memorable appearance. Most of this is slow, cold, a little arch, but now and then they crank up the tension, and interest. B+(*) [advance]

Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions (1972-75 [2007], Columbia/Legacy, 6CD): I had a day when I wasn't able to sit at the computer, so figured I'd give this a preliminary spin, just to get acquainted. I don't have notes on who played what when or anything like that. The hype sheet describes this as "the eighth and final deluxe 'metal-spine' multi-CD box set in the Miles Davis Series." This collects all of the 1972-75 studio sessions, resulting in the albums On the Corner, Big Fun, and Get Up With It, but it isn't actually the end of Davis' Columbia records -- that would be Aura, in 1985, ten years later, but evidently not part of the box plan. There are also live albums from this same period, including Dark Magus (1974), Agharta (1975), and Pangaea (1975). The group was exceptionally fluid, with bassist Michael Henderson the constant presence along with Davis. Henderson's electric buzz permeates everything, with everything else -- guitars, electric keyboards, saxes, trumpet -- stacked on top. On the Corner itself has a reputation as one of the few weak spots in the discography. My first impression doesn't find me disliking any of it, although this is certainly a mixed bag. Will work on it more later. It may come down to historical import: this is likely as far as Davis was able to push his funk-fusion aesthetic; surprisingly, no one since has managed to push it further. [B+(***)]

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

Tony Karon: Rice-Olmert-Abbas: End of the Affair. On the dim prospects for Bush's mideast summit. I read this, then added the following comment:

Reading this article tempts me to play devil's advocate. Bush has switched tactics on occasion, e.g. viz. North Korea. He backed Sharon unconditionally from the start, and what good has that done him? The single biggest problem he faces is the meltdown in Iraq, and Israel is more liability than asset there. Lately he's been leaning towards the Sunnis in Iraq's civil war, fulminating against Iran -- less, I suspect, because he sees Iran as a threat than because he needs to keep the pro-Iranians in Iraq's government on their heels. So why shouldn't he change tactics and use Annapolis to impose a two-state settlement on Israel? He's on record favoring a Palestinian state. He owes it to Abbas, who's a complete political criple without it. The Saudis laid the foundation for pan-Arab support for it. Olmert will have a cow, but the only thing that's propping him up in power is US support -- can he risk losing that? He'd have to get some face-saving adjustments -- not quite 1967 borders, some sort of lease-back on the settlements, stuff that has been floated around so long even the Bush administration must be cognizant of it. Much of the bluster on the Israeli right is based on the unconditional US support they've grown accustomed to; take that away and they'll crawl back to fringe minority status. The Israel Lobby will pop a vein, but are they really as powerful as they claim not to be? Are they willing to buck Bush if he decides his interests are elsewhere? This Bush is as tight with the Saudis as his father was, and as Karon has argued elsewhere, the Saudis are in the driver's seat now. No doubt they're telling Bush that a settlement on Israel will neutralize Hamas and Hezbollah, flip Syria, isolate Iran, and shift the playing field in Iraq. It would also recast Bush's legacy, which currently is pretty tarnished.

Of course, this makes too much sense to be something the Bush administration would actually do. The cards are all in place, and it's pretty straightforward how to play them, but you have to think their instinct for destruction will get the best of them. Still, look at the picture. How deluded can such political basket cases really be?

If this were to go in the direction I'm suggesting, the Mearsheimer-Walt book will play an interesting role: first by putting the Israel Lobby on the defensive, but also by setting up the opportunity for Bush to threaten to expose differences between American and Israeli interests. The success of the Lobby depends on their ability to merge the two, and they're probably in a much weaker position than Bush if push comes to shove.

I've just started reading Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (2007, WW Norton). Which, by the way and contrary to my initial guess, is not an old column collection, although it does reiterate points made in recent columns. Also, the title is an explicit reference to Barry Goldwater's movement-defining The Conscience of a Conservative. So figure the book as a political manifesto, but it also looks like it'll work pretty well as a political history of the last 30 years -- basically, the rise of the political right and the decline of many other things, ranging from political civility to most folks' living standards. Consider the following quote (pp. 12-13):

Republicans won a stunning victory in the 2002 midterm election by exploiting terrorism to the hilt. There's every reason to believe that one reason Bush took us to war with Iraq was his desire to perpetuate war psychology combined with his expectation that victory in a splendid little war would be good for his reelection prospects. Indeed, Iraq probably did win Bush the 2004 election, even though the war was already going badly.

But the war did go badly -- and that was not an accident. When Bush moved into the White House, movement conservatism finally found itself in control of all the levers of power -- and quickly proved itself unable to govern. The movement's politicization of everything, the way it values political loyalty above all else, creates a culture of cronyism and corruption that has pervaded everything the Bush administration does, from the failed reconstruction of Iraq to the hapless response to Hurricane Katrina. The multiple failures of the Bush administration are what happens when the government is run by a movement that is dedicated to policies that are against most Americans' interests, and must try to compensate for that inherent weakness through deception, distration, and the distribution of largesse to its supporters.

As far as it goes, this is pretty much exactly what I've been driving at in my own scratchings toward a book: the conservative movement has been able to exploit America's political system, but its thinking and practice are so inherently flawed that whenever they manage to take power they prove to be dysfunctional, often disastrously so -- as we can see in virtually everything that the Bush administration has done since 2001. As Krugman's book shows, mine isn't a unique, or even far-out, understanding. Will read more and report more. Meanwhile, note that there is a long interview with Krugman here.

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination for president. He's consistently trailed all the other candidates both in opinion polls and in the more important matter of fundraising. His failure is pretty remarkable. He failed to rally the religious right in any meaningful way, which in itself raises a number of questions: whether the fundamentalist protestants actually feel any kinship with ultraconservative roman catholics; how single issue the religious right really is; how influential the religious right actually is in the Republican party. Whatever the answers to those questions are, Brownback wasn't able to convert his abortion obsession into any meaningful measure of support. His efforts to distinguish himself as compassionate and saintly did him no good. He also found few takers for his middling break with Bush on Iraq -- he came out backing Joe Biden's dangerous and foolish partition plan. Nor did his mostly pro-immigration stance win him any rank and file Republican support. Going into the race I figured he'd lose in the end for his extremism, but within the Republican field it now looks like he lost for his moderation. The idea that Republicans vote to kill still holds sway.

One thing Brownback's failure shows up pretty clearly is how tightly controlled the Republican Party is by the money people at the top, and how little prospect the rank and file -- especially the Christian right -- has of bucking their masters. The Christians exist to serve, mostly by stuffing ballot boxes. They get a bone every now and then, but their agenda is secondary and incidental. The money people have evidently decided that they want a candidate shifted far away from Bush, which explains why they've kept Romney and Giulliani in the lead. Both will say whatever they need to placate the Republican right, just as they said whatever they needed to say to get elected in Democratic turf. Their dance to the right will no doubt be followed by a dance back to the left after the nomination, as they try to recover the middle ground that Bush left scorched. They only thing consistent about them is their devotion to the rich, which seems to be all the GOP elites really require. Beyond that, anything that works will work well enough for them. Brownback never stood a chance in their world.

Kansas was also in the news today for rejecting plans to build two major coal-fueled electric power plants, mostly in recognition of how much the plants would contribute to global warming. A few weeks back it looked like the fix was in to approve the plants, even though they had little popular support and much opposition.

I thought I'd follow up Studs Terkel's "The Good War": An Oral History of World War II with something on Vietnam. Since Terkel hasn't gotten around to writing "The Bad War", the closest thing looks to be Christian G. Appy's Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides, which for starters comes with a Studs Terkel quote on the blurb. However, for now I backed off, going for Tom Bissell's The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2007, Pantheon). I'll write more about this when I'm through it. But for now I want to focus on one quote: the beginning of a section that starts with a subhead: "Query: Why did officials at all levels of the U.S. military and government lie so often during the war?" (p. 184):

A journalist named Murray Marder coined the term "credibility gap" during the Vietnamese War's early years, and this shattering of the public trust is probably the war's most profound and seemingly irreversible bequest. But any serious discussion of the war must consider the argument, made by some revisionists, that the lies told by those waging the war were, in many cases, understandable. After all, the appropriateness of "telling the truth" is always mutable in the face of higher imperatives. During times of conflict, one can hardly expect governments to behave with complete transparency, since a major component of every war is secrecy of action and misdirection of intent.

Especially in a war that saw the United States constantly playing catch-up. However one regards Vietnam's Communists, it is hard to deny that they were on the verge of winning power in 1945 when a multilateral fiat blew out that verge from beneath them. Or that the Communists were again on the verge of winning power in 1954 when another multilateral fiat blew out that verge from beneath them. Or that the Communists were on the verge of winning power a third time in 1964 when the United States slammed down its foot to roadblock the verge once and for all. For the U.S. officials responsible for widening the Vietnamese War, anti-Communism as a practice had become synonymous with freedom as an ideal, and if one had to lie to ensure that freedom, so be it. Lying often and enthusiastically became not only desirable but absolutely crucial to keep hidden the various miscalculations of U.S. policy.

We need to look here at the justification for lying both in principle and in fact. The question of whether "higher imperatives" justifies lying should be examined both in theory and in practice. In principle, the first thing lying does is to distort and corrupt public understanding of the circumstances -- in this case, affecting the decision of how to fight a war, including whether to enter into one in the first place. In a democracy, it should be axiomatic that war is a decision that must be debated in public; therefore, all information pertaining to the debate must be public. But lying not only misinforms the debate. It taints the decision and all of the results that come from it -- a problem that grows in importance the more unfortunate the consequences.

Iraq and Vietnam are good examples. Iraq, of course, you remember. The lying leading up to the war was shameful, misleading not just the public debate but also the planning and execution of the war. But at least there was a debate on Iraq, and something resembling a straight up or down vote in Congress, even if more than a few didn't realize what they were voting for at the time. US support for the critical decisions listed above -- for France to recolonize Vietnam in 1945; for dividing Vietnam and installing Ngo Dinh Diem in 1954; for the coup that overthrew Diem in 1963 and the subsequent escalation in 1964 -- were never debated in public in the US, and were barely, and often incoherently, given consideration in the deepest recesses of government power. (The best documented is the coup against Diem, which was based on signs that Diem would negotiate a deal with the NLF, was debated inconclusively by Kennedy's cabinet but effectively given the green light by ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who set it up then washed his hands of it.)

Bissell continues (pp. 184-185):

According to the historian Fredrik Logevall, Paul Kattenburg, the State Department's leading expert on Vietnam, announced in 1963 that the war was hopeless, that the South could never win, and that the only option left for the United States was withdrawal. Within a year the State Department's resident Vietnam expert had been excluded from all policy decisions involving Vietnam. Years later, with the oral historian Christian G. Appy, Kattenburg would have words for th emen who had pushed him out: "[W]hat struck me more than anything else was just the abysmal ignorance around the table of the particular facts of Vietnam, their ignorance of the actual place. They didn't know what they were talking about. It was robot thinking about Communism and no distinctions were being made." The meeting in which he voiced his career-ending objections ended with Kattenburg thinking to himself, "We're walking into a major disaster."

That's a good example of the sort of information not only the public but pretty much everyone in the chain of command was denied by the willingness of a handful of insiders to raise their "higher imperatives" above considerations of fact and truth. Of course, the lying is still going on: once you start lying, and once it starts to go bad, what else can you do but keep lying? That really depends on what your "higher imperatives" really are. The anti-communism that drove us into Vietnam was never honestly, openly debated in the first place -- otherwise we might have worked to help leaders who wanted the progressive opportunities for their countries that we expect for ourselves, instead of letting us get pinned into war by dictators like Syngman Rhee and Ngo Dinh Diem who first made enemies of their own people. If our "higher imperative" was really a functioning democracy, we would never have let that lying get out of hand. Instead, we settled for a chain of deceit that dogs us today.

Cynthia Stokes Brown's book aspires to cover everything. The title is Big History: From the Big Band to the Present (2007, New Press). Part I covers what we think of as pre-history, in four chapters: the universe from the big bang to the formation of our solar system; Earth from the early emergence of life to 5 million years ago, when the ancestors of humans and our nearest relatives (chimpanzees) diverged; the evolution of humans up to widespread dispersion of modern homo sapiens 35,000 years ago; development of hunting and gathering cultures in humans up to the appearance of organized agriculture 10,000 years ago. Part II adds eight chronological chapters (with some overlap) from early agriculture to industrialization, followed by a brief "What Now? What Next?" All this is covered in less than 250 pages.

The book starts off with the Big Bang, the expanding universe, the formation of galaxies, stars, on through the formation of Earth and our solar system (p. 12):

On the three smallest planets -- Mercury, Venus, and Mars -- all activity came to a halt within a billion years with the formation of rocks. On the four largest planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune -- the boiling gaseous activity continues today, similar to what it was at the beginning of the solar system. Only Earth has a size that produces a gravitational and electromagnetic balance, which allows a solid rock crust to form around a burning core. Only Earth has a position in respect to the sun, a mean distance of 93 million miles, that establishes a temperature range in which complex molecules can form. Within our solar system, only here on Earth does chemical activity continue in constant change.

Then on to the evolution of life (p. 17):

Every human life begins as a single cell, replaying the fact that all life on Earth began as a single cell. The first cells were bacteria, and our bodies contain ten times more bacteria cells than animal cells. Our cells contain three structures (mitochondria, plastids, and undulipodia) that evolved as separate bacteria before they were incorporated into our more complex cells.

Our blood still has the salt content of seawater; we cry and sweat seawater, testimony to the fact that all life began in the seas. Our children grow and develop for nine months in a watery environment; no life on Earth can develop its initial stages except in a wet place. As embryos, our babies still develop temporary gills -- which look like tiny scars behind an embryo's ears -- as a step toward developing lungs for breathing. Our bodies, like the surface of the planet, are 65 percent water. We belong to Earth in the deepest and most fundamental ways.

Brief coverage of the evolution of plant and animal life through the geologic ages, focusing down on primates leading to homo sapiens, initially a hunting and gathering animal, eventually to master agriculture (p. 86):

The advantage of agriculture -- more food per unit of land -- meant that people had to figure out how to store and preserve food. They had to defend their towns against large animals and other people, since they had too much to lose to pull up and move on. They needed people who specialized in creating storage (pottery, baskets, and storage bins) and in defending the town. Surplus food could be used to support these specialized people. It could also feed babies; with cereal available, they could be weaned earlier, and women could produce more children closer together.

Cultivation, however, also meant that people had to work harder. They had to learn to exercise internal restraints on themselves, such as working long hours when they would rather be sleeping or socializing, or not eating the best seeds on long winter nights because the seeds had to be saved for spring planting. People had to spend long hours grinding seeds and weaving cloth, possibly not their favorite activities. Once they had domesticated animals and plants, they, too, had become domesticated in a mutual exchange.

The growth of agriculture carried with it the potential for collapse (pp. 123-124):

The people added by agricultural success came at a cost, both natural and human. The natural cost consisted of the human degradation of the environment that sustained them -- principally deforestation, soil erosion from deforestation, and salinization of the soil from irrigation. Deforestation, caused by the pasturing of sheep and goats and by the need for fuel for heating and cooking and for charcoal for pottery and metallurgy, is the background for the development of all human society.

These environmental impacts were strongly in evidence in Afro-Eurasia by 200 CE. The plains of Sumer had become completely barren. The complex society that emerged in the Indus Valley lasted only about 500 years due to deforestation and salinization. The loss of trees in China caused flooding by the Yellow River, which came to be known by the color of soil carried in it. The cedars of Lebanon, prized for their height and straightness, were a mainstay of Phoenician commerce; only a few small groves remain today. The Mediterranean shores lost their natural vegetation of oaks, beech, pines, and cedars; only olive trees would grow on badly eroded hillsides, their roots strong enough to penetrate the limestone rock. The Roman provinces of North Africa were reduced to vast deserts. These areas never recovered from the degradation of their environments from 800 BCE to 200 CE. Only Egyptians reached a sustainable balance, for 7,000 years, with a river that naturally renewed the soil downstream each year (with soil eroded from up-river locations) until, in the twentieth century, irrigation and dams stopped the flooding and destroyed the natural cycle.

China under the Tang dynasty, 618-907 CE (p. 134):

Imports changed China. Men shifted from wearing robes to the pants favored by horse-riding Turks in central Asia. As the Chinese learned how to produce cotton, it replaced hemp as the most commonly worn fabric. Grape wine, tea, sugar, and spices modified the Chinese diet. All this trade was conducted with no central banking system; the Tang were wary of great accumulations of wealth. Individual scholars and landholders loaned money at interest.

The Tang capital at Changan became the largest urban center in the world with nearly 2 million people, 1 million within the walled area of thirty square miles. China had twenty-six cities with a population of over half a million. Twenty percent of its citizens lived in cities, the most urbanized society of its day.

Europe's ascendency after 1500 was rooted in a greater interest in learning that gradually developed over 500 years, in large part begun by acquaintance and rivalry with the Muslim world (pp. 184-185):

During the period 1000 to 1500, learning expanded dramatically in Europe from the days when people lived with just the Bible and reminders of Roman achievements. In the eleventh century Latin Christians took Toledo, Spain, and Sicily back from the Muslims, and they regained southern Italy from the Byzantines. In doing so they acquired the manuscripts of Greek and Arabic monks. In the twelfth century papermaking arrived in Morocco and Spain, having spread from Baghdad to Egypt by 900.

After 1200, new colleges arose in Europe that may have been patterned after the madrassas, the endowed places of study spreading in the Muslim world that provided subsidized housing for students and paid the teachers' salaries. Teachers for the new colleges often came from two new religious orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. Europeans, moreover, added to the idea of college, by forming universities, which were defined as degree-granting corporations specializing in research and advanced teaching -- a significant invention.

Before 1300, Europeans had created twenty universities; they added sixty new ones between 1300 and 1500. In all of them, Latin was used as the language of instruction. Sometimes students banded together to start a university; more often guilds of professors did. The university in Bologna specialized in legal training; those in Montpellier and Salerno focused on medicine; those in Paris and Oxford excelled in theology. Abelard (1079-1142) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), famous professors in Paris, used logical reasoning to find answers to religious and philosophical questions.

After 1450 three improvements revolutionized printing, and hence learning: moveable metal type of individual letters, new ink suitable for paper, and a modified wooden screw press that pressed inked type onto paper. Johannes Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1454, a book whose beauty testified to his years of experimentation. By 1500 printing presses in Europe were printing annually 10 to 20 million volumes, both ancient texts and contemporary political and religious tracts, in more than a dozen languages.

In Europe private persons could buy guns (power) and books (knowledge). Governments were not able to control change or the continuing commercialization in their societies. This set Latin Europe apart from other Eurasian societies, where more controlling governments were more nearly able to enforce traditional patterns and conduct. In Japan, for example,the manufacturing of guns was restricted and, after 1637, the ruling samurai allowed guns to disappear as not worthy of a gentleman.

On Europe's conquest of the Americas (pp. 196-197):

Why were the Spanish conquistadors able to conquer the empires of the Americas so quickly with so few men? Why did the encounter between cultures isolated from each other for over 15,000 years result in one dominating the other with such swiftness? This drama of human history, recent enough to feel directly connected to us, haunts our imagination.

The answer seems to lie in the fact that the Spanish had the advantage of living on the Afro-Eurasian continents where people had gotten a head start on cultural specialization and invention. This happened because domesticatable plants and animals were much more abundant than in the American hemisphere, and agricultural techniques could be spread laterally in similar climates. The surplus food enabled complex societies to develop earlier, producing the skills and attributes that made the difference; guns, horses, swords, cannon, ships, immunity to disease, literacy for communication, centralized political organization for resources, and scholarship for maps and navigation. The Spanish had enjoyed the benefits of exchange with all the complex societies of Afro-Eurasia that had risen and fallen since Sumerians made the transition to urban life.

Of all the advantages that accrued to the Spanish and Portuguese, the one that many historians believe made the most difference was their relative immunity to the human diseases that came from animals: measles, smallpox, influenza, diphtheria, bubonic plague, and, from tropical Africa, malaria and yellow fever. Native Americans, with no exposure to domestic animals, had never before encountered these bacteria and succumbed in overwhelming numbers without being able to fight. The smallpox epidemic of the Columbian Exchange proved one of the two worst population disasters in recorded history; the other was the plague pandemic in the fourteenth century. At least half, and perhaps as much as 90 percent, of the Amerindian population was lost between 1492 and 1650 to repeated epidemics. The Indians encountered by the Europeans were often the traumatized survivors of intricate civilizations collapsing suddenly from overwhelming diseases.

On the "Columbian exchange" (pp. 201-202):

It is difficult to imagine culinary life before the Columbian Exchange. What did Italians put on their pasta before tomatoes came from America? Likewise, chocolate came from the Americas; no one in Afro-Eurasia had any before 1492. Corn and potatoes, new to Europe, helped keep many people alive. Cassava, or manioc root, a highly caloric root crop of tropical America (native to Brazil) that thrived in poor soil and drought, became a lifesaver in tropical Africa. Beans, squash, sweet potatoes, peanuts, chilies, dyes, tobacco, and medicines all flowed to Afro-Eurasia as gifts from the Americas.

Flowing back to the Atlantic coast were the European crops -- wheat, olives, grapes, and garden vegetables. Also, Europeans took the Afro-Asian crops -- rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, sugarcane, citrus fruit, melons, figs, onions, radishes, and salad greens. The Spanish took horses, which had originated in the Americas but had died out there during the last ice age, cows, pigs, sheep and goats, rats, and rabbits. The enslaved Africans took okra, black-eyed peas, yams, millet, sorghum, and mangoes.

On the end of slavery (pp. 217-218):

With the harnessing of coal, which made labor less scarce, slavery and forced labor gradually became less attractive or economical. Right at the height of slavery and serfdom in the world, these two ancient arrangements were, rather rapidly, mostly abolished worldwide.

The peak of slavery and serfdom came in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slavery quintupled between 1800 and 1860 in the U.S. South to produce cotton. It expanded in the Caribbean and Brazil to produce more sugar. In southeast Asia slaves on plantations produced sugar and peppers. In Russia millions of serfs raised wheat; in Egypt they formed the army and raised cotton; in North Africa slavery increased during this time, especially to raise palm oil, used as an industrial lubricant.

Agitation to abolish slavery began with the Quakers in England and with the enlightenment philosophers in France in the late eighteenth century. Printing and travel circulated the idea. By 1807 in England and 1808 to 1830 in France the selling of slaves was abolished. In the 1820s Chile and Mexico abolished slavery itself; England did so in 1833. Other Atlantic countries followed: the United States in 1865, Spain in 1886, Brazil in 1888. In 1861 Russia abolished private serfs, who had to work at least nine more years to own their land communally; government serfs were freed in 1866. The Ottomans succumbed to European pressure and banned slave trading but never slavery itself, since it was recognized in Muslim law. In Africa trading ceased by 1914, and abolition came in the first third of the twentieth century. On the whole, the abolition of slavery and serfdom represented a historic liberation for humanity; 50 million serfs in Russia alone gained their freedom. The use of fossil fuels helps explain why slavery has officially if not completely vanished.

On European domination and the rise of racism (p. 219):

By 1870 Europe had about 70 percent of all world trade. By 1914 it occupied or controlled 80 percent of the world's area. In 1900 China had only 6 percent of the world's output, falling from 33 percent in 1800, and India had only 2 percent, falling from 25 percent in 1800. Africa had been parceled out to the European powers.

In Europe and the United States the peak of racist thinking and policies based on racism marked this period. Racism exists ". . . . when one ethnic or historical collectivity dominates, excludes or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences it believes are hereditary and unalterable," while at the same time professing to believe in human equality. Racism seems to be mainly, if not exclusively, a product of Europe and the United States; its logic was fully worked out and implemented in three societies in the twentieth century: in the South of the United States against African Americans (1890s-1950s), by European colonists in South Africa against Africans (1910s-1980s), and in Hitler's Germany against Jews (1933-1945).

On the expansion of science in the 20th century (pp. 224-225):

The achievements of science in the last half of the twentieth century reached astonishing proportions. Antibiotics, developed during World War II, became available to save lives regularly. Scientists continued to find other life-saving medications; by 1987 the world's highest life expectancy was reached in Japan at seventy-eight years. Russians put the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) into orbit around Earth in 1957. U.S. astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, while in 1977 the Voyager I spacecraft was launched to travel past the outer limit of our solar system. In the 1950s U.S. scientists unraveled the genetic code in DNA molecules, nailing down Darwin's theory of evolution by showing the random mutations in genes. In the 1960s cosmologists found concrete evidence for their big bang theory that the universe began in a single explosive instant. Chemists produced plastics from oil residues in the 1940s. New strains of wheat, rice, and corn increased crop production two to four times from about 1960 to 1980.

(pp. 225-226):

The last half of the twentieth century witnessed a spectacular sixfold growth of the world's economy. This seems normal to those who have lived through it, but such economic growth is historically unprecedented on a global scale and depended on science and technology as noted above, population growth, and increased energy use. The world population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.1 billion in 2000. Oil production soared six times from 1950 to 1973. In the 1900s the average world citizen used energy equal to the power of twenty slaves, but that figure obscures the inequality in distribution of energy. The average U.S. citizen directed more than seventy-five "energy slaves," while a citizen of Bangladesh directed less than one. Nevertheless, between 1950 and 1975 inequality between the richest and the poorest regions narrowed, as well as inequality within industrial societies. The ancient gulf separating the rich and the poor in all previous urban societies actually decreased during this twenty-five year period.

Since the 1970s, however, the inequality between the richest and poorest areas, and between the richest and poorest people, has started to widen. After the 1980s the richest one tenth of people grew much richer, while the lowest one-tenth grew slightly poorer. By 2000 the income per capita of six nations containing almost half the world's population could hardly be plotted on a graph with that of the wealthiest nations. In 1985 the independent democracies, with a sixth of the world's population, enjoyed five-sixths the world's wealth. In 2000 the richest 20 percent of the world's population controlled more than 80 percent of the world's gross product.

Richard Rhodes opens his new book, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007, Knopf), with a quote from Peter Viereck that was true enough I had to copy it down:

Reality is that which, when you don't believe it, doesn't go away.

Viereck was a name I recognized but had to look up: 1916-2006, poet, history professor, regarded by some (including himself) as a conservative political theorist. Wikipedia has several quotes from him, mostly contra other conservatives -- in this he may be seen as a forerunner of Kevin Phillips, John Dean, Andrew Sullivan, and others who have lately (much too lately) tried to rescue conservatism from today's conservatives. For instance, in 1962 Viereck wrote about "that whole inconsistent spectrum of Goldwater and right-radical magazines":

Most of them are so muddled they don't even know when they are being 19th-century liberal individualists (in economics) and when they are being 20th-century semi-fascist thought-controllers (in politics). Logically, these two qualities are contradictory. Psychologically, they unite to make America's typical pseudo-conservative rightist.

In 2006, Viereck added:

I think McCarthy was a menace . . . because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right . . . and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we are all suffering from it.

I actually think the original sin goes back further: first, to American triumphalism coming out of WWII, which convinced a whole generation of would-be conservatives to love rather than fear war -- the euphemism they often used was "military strength"; and deeper, to the threat to their privilege (or the privilege of their betters) they felt from Bolshevism, which they saw as a scourge that had to be exterminated.

The deep definition of conservatism is the instinct to side with and defend the status quo, which for all practical purposes means the powerful against the powerless, the rich against the poor. The other ideological traits are historical: conservatives were every bit as happy to defend the bourgeoisie against the proletariat as they were to defend the aristocracy against the bourgeoisie. (For further proof, cf. the Soviet Union, where conservatives supported the old guard against any and all reformers. Or Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, Islamist Iran, Imperial Japan -- it's hard to imagine a regime conservatives couldn't grow to love, unless they were categorically excluded.)

Viereck's father, George Sylvester Viereck, was born in Germany, emigrating to the US in 1897. Like his son, he was a poet, historian, and had political interests -- unlike the son, he was famous as a Nazi apologist, spending 1942-47 in jail under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. That may have predisposed Viereck to conservatism, but he also justified it as an alternative to contemporary creeds: "He claimed communism and nazism were utopian and would sanction the murder of oppositions (as in anti-semitism) and that liberalism shared a naive belief in progress and humanity's essential goodness." The latter point is another conservative signature: conservatives tend to argue that human nature is inherently inclined to mischief if not flat-out evil, and that this can only be contained by the imposition of order (cf. Hobbes). This view fits the psychological divide between left and right: leftists tend to hold generous views of other people, being respectful of and generous to others, while rightists hold harsh views, based on projecting their own ill-will to others. The argument that utopianism equals murder is itself a rightist view under this same psychology; a leftist would point to the acceptance of murder as a separate problem, one unfortunately embraced by some nominal leftists as well as many on the right.