Wild Thing: A Novel (46 page)
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Nicholas Kristoff calls the number a “rumor” in “A Reassessment of How Many Died in the Military Crackdown in Beijing,” the
New York Times
, 21 June 1989, which estimates the total killed in Beijing as 400–800. Other sources, e.g., “How Many Really Died? Tiananmen Square Fatalities,”
Time
, 4 June 1990, say that the Chinese Red Cross did in fact report the number 2,600 directly to reporters, and only afterward denied doing so.
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This article, because of its title, has been controversial. However, Hvistendahl’s argument is that around the world coal ash delivers much more radiation to humans than nuclear waste does, and not that, say, a kilogram of coal ash is more radioactive than a kilogram of spent plutonium.
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They probably aren’t, but they have somewhat different side effects and may be more effective for some levels of schizophrenia and less effective for others. See “Effectiveness and cost of atypical versus typical antipsychotic treatment for schizophrenia in routine care,” by T. Sargardt, S. Weinbrenner, R. Busse, G. Juckel, and CA Gericke,
Journal of Mental Health Policy Economics
, Jun 2008; 11(2): 89–97.
*
This figure is from the 2009 report of the nonprofit US PIRG Education Fund entitled “Health Care in Crisis: How Special Interests Could Double Costs and How We Can Stop It,” by Larry McNeely and Michael Russo. Note that the only western countries in which direct-to-consumer advertising of medications is legal are the U.S. and Australia.
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Seminal vesicles are glands in males that produce, among other things, an ingredient of semen that has no known function and is actually spermicidal. Since it follows the sperm out, it is sometimes theorized to have developed to prevent other males from impregnating the same female. But, again, see the footnote
here
.
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Note that in his autobiography,
Magician Among the Spirits
(thanks to Jason White for the gift of this book), Houdini says, pg. xiii, “I firmly believe in a Supreme Being and that there is a Hereafter.”
*
The late, great hacker Mark Hoekstra, for example, used two layers of (developed) color film negative (
Geektechnique.org
, 24 Oct 2005). Hoekstra credits an earlier site with some elements of his method. Note Hoekstra’s warning not to shock yourself on the capacitor. Better yet, don’t actually try this.
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Not to be confused with former chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele.
*
E.g. as related in “McCain skeptical Supreme Court decision can be countered,” by John Amick, 44 blog,
washingtonpost.com
, 24 Jan 2010.
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Bork also, after years of arguing for tort reform, filed a million-dollar personal injury claim against the Yale Club after he fell and bruised his leg there. If you’re the kind of person who can’t wait for
The Haldeman Diaries
to come out as an e-book, the actual brief is online at
http://online.wsj.com//files/16/50/79/f165079/public/resources/documents/borksuit-060607.pdf
.
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And interesting character for a lot of other reasons.
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“Mr. Clean gets his hands dirty,” by Neil Lyndon,
Sunday Telegraph
(London), 1 Nov 1998, pg. 1 of the “Sunday Review Features” section. Lyndon was the personal assistant. He also says in this article that he ghost-wrote Hammer’s autobiography.
*
For more on the sleaziness of the Cheney hunting accident, see “No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident,” by Anne Kornblut and Ralph Blumenthal, the
New York Times
, 14 Feb 2006. Note that the quails the party was supposed to be shooting instead of Harry Whittington had been raised in captivity and placed into bushes upside-down to confuse them and limit their mobility. (Regarding an earlier hunting trip on which Cheney personally killed 70 farm-raised ring-necked pheasants, the editor in chief of
Field & Stream
told journalist Elisabeth Bumiller [“After Cheney’s Private Hunt, Others Take Their Shots,” the
New York Times
, 15 Dec 2003] that “I don’t see anything terribly wrong with it, but I don’t think it should be confused with hunting.”) This raises the question of whether Cheney—who secured five draft deferments to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, had a daughter nine months and two days after the Selective Service said it would resume drafting childless husbands (Timothy Noah,
Slate.com
, 18 Mar 2004), and engaged in war profiteering for much of the rest of his life—would have happily gone to Vietnam if guaranteed he would only have to fight people raised in cages and placed upside-down into bushes by lobbyists.
*
Although the “FAQs” section of the Carter Center’s website says “All donations of $1,000 or more are published in our annual reports, available for download,” the most recent annual report downloadable as of this writing (2009–2010) lists the first eleven donors in the “$100,000 or more” category as “Anonymous,” and doesn’t give specific amounts for donations even from people it does name. This report, which states the Carter Center’s assets to be slightly over $475 million, is downloadable at
http://cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/annual_reports/annual-report-10.pdf
.
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An article in the
Washington Post
from 1980, at which time the Saudi involvement in the purchase of NBG was known but BCCI’s was not, notes that controlling interest in the bank changed hands on 5 Jan 1978, Carter announced that his administration was selling sixty F15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia on 14 Feb 1978, and NBG changed the terms of Carter’s loans on 1 May 1978—a four-month period during which, as the article puts it, “The United States’ traditional pro-Israel policy was dramatically shifted to the Arab side at a time when President Carter’s family business [which owed even more than Carter did personally] was heavily in debt to an Arab-controlled bank.” The article also notes that Carter’s personal loan, “renewable each year, is still outstanding.” (“Of Arabs, Weapons, and Peanuts,” by Jack Anderson, the
Washington Post
, 10 July 1980.) In my opinion the clearest description of the purchase of NBG by the BCCI / Ghaith Pharaon consortium, and of the BCCI scandal generally, is, believe it or not,
The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown
, Dec 1992, which is also interesting as an example of how low-key American politics, and the world generally, seem to have been in 1992. (Available as a single, continuous PDF at
http://info.publicintelligence.net/The-BCCI-Affair.pdf
. See particularly pages 134-138.) Note that the loans to the Carter family that BCCI took over were already ones that “Bank regulatory officials said they would characterize… as improper but not illegal” (“Lance Bank Lent Carter Business $1 Million Without Full Collateral,” by Jeff Garth, the
New York Times
, 19 Nov 1978). If you really can’t stop yourself, note also that Carter’s brother Billy, again
during
the Carter administration, accepted $220,000 from the Libyan government and (possibly for legal cover) became a registered foreign agent for Libya. The Carter administration’s response when this was publicized was to depict it as a rogue act of self-enrichment, which it may have been, but Carter subsequently tried to use Billy as a liaison to Libya during the Iranian hostage crisis. For details, see the bipartisan Senate subcommittee report “Inquiry into the Matter of Billy Carter and Libya,” 2 Oct 1980, available at
http://intelligence.senate.gov/pdfs_miscellaneous/961015.pdf
.
*
See, e.g., “Seized Bank Helped Andrew Young Firm and Carter Charities,” by Ronald Smothers, the
New York Times
, 15 Jul 1991; “Carter’s Arab financiers,” by Rachel Ehrenfeld, the
Washington Times
, 20 Dec 2006;
The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace
, by Alan Dershowitz, 2008, 33–34.
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On 27 Nov 2009, Johann Hari, writing for the London
Independent
, called Dubai “a morally bankrupt dictatorship built by slave labour.” The
U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2009
notes that “migrant workers, who comprise more than 90 percent of the UAE’s private sector workforce… are subjected to conditions indicative of forced labor, including unlawful withholding of passports, restrictions on movement, non-payment of wages, threats, or physical or sexual abuse.” In Jan 2010, a British woman was arrested for illicit sex in Dubai after she reported she had been raped (“Woman raped in Dubai charged for having illegal sex,” by Hugh Tomlinson,
The Times
[London], 11 Jan 2010). Etc. As of this writing Carter’s acceptance speech is still available on the website of the Carter Center.
*
It may be worth noting that after
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
came out, and fourteen members of the Carter Center’s advisory board resigned in protest, including a professor of Middle Eastern history at Emory who had formerly been the Carter Center’s executive director, Carter told Wolf Blitzer on 21 Jan 2007 that “I’ve never alleged that the framework of apartheid existed within Israel at all.” On 23 Jan he told an audience at Brandeis University that he hadn’t meant to equate Israel with Rwanda either. He told the same audience that “this is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist,” thereby airing one of the central premises of Jew-baiting, which is that criticizing Jews and Israel is somehow dangerous and brave rather than trendy and remunerative.
Peace Not Apartheid
went on to sell 365,000 copies in hardcover in the U.S. alone. For information on the Brandeis appearance, see “At Brandeis, Carter Responds to Critics,” by Pam Belluck, the
New York Times
, 24 Jan 2007. For the transcript of the Blitzer interview, see
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/21/le.01.html
. The figure on sales is extrapolated from a figure reported by Nielsen BookScan (which tracks around 75 percent of book sales) of slightly over 275,000.
*
The offer to Arafat was for limited return of refugees, continued custodianship of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, 100 percent of Gaza immediately, and 73 percent, rising to 94 percent over twenty-five years, of the West Bank. Arafat’s rejection of it ushered in the current age of nihilism in Arab-Israeli relations. See, including for an eyewitness account of Arafat’s rejection of the deal,
The Missing Peace
(recommended above) by Dennis Ross, the negotiator for the Clinton administration. (In 2007, Jimmy Carter was caught using maps from Ross’s book in
Peace Not Apartheid
, but with the borders changed to make Arafat’s rejection of the peace deal look more defensible. See “Don’t Play with Maps,” by Ross, the
New York Times
, 9 Jan 2007.)
Peace Not Apartheid
, Carter’s possible role in the collapse of the Camp David talks, and his refusal to answer questions about this, as well as other information, are discussed in
The Case Against Israel’s Enemies
(see above), 17–48. To be fair, the various parties with an interest in keeping the Palestinians as perpetual hostages may have paid Arafat directly. An audit by international donors to Palestinian causes after Arafat’s death discovered $800 million in his personal bank accounts. See “Where Is Arafat’s Money?,” by Rees, Hamad, and Klein,
Time
, 22 Nov 2004.
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http://books.google.com/books?id=oS0rAAAAYAAJ&lpg
. Why are web addresses so fucking ugly?
*
And is still called “The Surgeon’s Photograph,” even though Christian Spurling admitted in 1993 to both taking the picture and building the fake monster that appears in it.
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My favorite “believer” book about Nessie, however, is
In Search of Lake Monsters
, by Peter Costello, 1974, because of the following sentence, pg. 14: “Having had more than its statutory nine days, the Loch Ness monster had to give way to newer sensations: the Saragossa Ghost, the talking Mongoose of Cashen’s Gap, the German Occupation of the Rhineland.” I could look up shit from that sentence all day.
*
1855: Seven people at Silver Lake see a giant serpent swimming through the water. Other sightings follow. 1857: The Walker House Hotel on Silver Lake burns down. In the wreckage a giant mechanical monster is discovered, made of coiled wire and waterproof canvas and capable of being propelled under water by bellows.
*
See: “The Silver Lake Serpent: Inflated Monster, or Inflated Tale?” by Joe Nickell,
Skeptical Inquirer
, Vol. 23.2, Mar/Apr 1999.
