Too Many Cats and Dogs? Impossible!

According to an article in this morning’s Independent, I’m going to live forever. The author, Rebecca Armstrong, in her article, Heal, boy: How Pets Can Keep You Healthy, reveals what researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered:

“After studying nearly 4,500 adults aged between 30 and 75 for 10 years, it was found that cat owners had a 40 per cent lower risk of suffering a fatal heart attack.”

But it’s not just cats. Further along she reveals:

“And in a study published last year, Dr Deborah Wells of Queen’s University Belfast found that dog owners tend to suffer less from ill health, have lower cholesterol, and lower blood pressure. ‘It is possible that dogs can directly promote our well-being by buffering us from stress,’ says Dr Wells.”

So, if every one of our four cats (Mica, Pinky, Elena and Sophie) lowers my fatal heart attack probabilities by 40%, do the math, which is beyond me. Add to this the benefits of being buffered by five dogs, and it’s clear: I’m going to live forever. And that’s not counting Sophie’s four as-yet-unnamed kittens which are still upstairs in the closet. Do you get points for kittens, too?

This article has an added benefit for my overall wellbeing. Now I know what to say to people who are always asking, “Mike, why have you got so many animals?”

“I’m going to live forever.”

But Seriously Folks

In a sidebar which discusses a long list of benefits which pets offer their owners, author George Bull writes:

“Dog owners tend to have lower cholesterol and lower blood pressure, as dogs can reduce the risk of spikes in blood pressure due to stress or tension.

In some cases, the emotional support offered by an animal is greater than that offered by a human. For older people in particular, an animal can fulfil “the need to be needed”.

Owning a pet can improve a person’s chances of survival after a life-threatening illness, by helping to lower blood pressure. Pets can also help speed up rehabilitation following a stroke.

Children with pets have higher levels of self-esteem and function better emotionally than those without, studies have shown. Some teachers have introduced pets into the classroom and children with learning disabilities and behavioural disorders such as autism, for example, show immediate benefits from animal-assisted therapy.

Children who live with a cat or dog in their first years have a lower incidence of hay fever and asthma and are less likely to develop animal-related allergies, or to suffer a bout of gastroenteritis.”

Thank You Elena, For Your Contribution to Immortality

It was Juan Carlos’s idea to shoot yesterday’s interview and upload it to YouTube. It was a lot of fun making it, and it’s great to see it online. I hope you agree.

If the painter sounds exceptionally cheeky for an interview, it’s because it’s her husband who is asking the questions. He’s cheaper.

This first video, a 2006 interview with Harry Kreisler from “Conversations with History” includes a hilarious (“hilarious” as in “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…”) account of his job interview with the CIA:

This second clip, “Nickel and Dimed from the American Ruling Class,” is full of wonderful Lapham humor and irony, and even includes a musical number:

I’ll leave you with this quote from Lapham’s 2006 homage to Molly Ivins:

As we know from any reading of the morning papers, liberty is never at a loss for ambitious enemies, but the survival of the American democracy depends less on the magnificence of its Air Force or the wonder of its fleets than on the willingness of its citizens to stand on the ground of their own thought. Unless we try to tell one another the truth about what we know and think and see, we might as well amuse ourselves–at least for as long as somebody in uniform allows us to do so–with fairy tales.

The book, entitled “Astrolabio,” was written by Angel Olgoso, a Granada writer I was not familiar with. The presentation was the usual ritual: introduction by a local intellectual who likes to talk about himself, brief comments from the author, a few chapters (in this case stories, as they were extremely short) read by colleagues of the author in the literature business. Then the audience files out out of the room, buys the book at a table on the way out and has it autographed by the author. There follows the ritual rounds of wine and tapas at not-my-favorite bars, the compensation being that book presentations and their subsequent bodega crawls are attended by an inordinate number of attractive women.

It wasn’t till a couple of days later that I picked up the book and started to read it. I’ll spare you the literary criticism and get straight to the point. I want to share the shortest of Olgoso’s short, short stories with you. I found it a profoundly moving account of a life, done in just 14 words. You don’t believe me? Wait. First in Spanish, then I’ll translate it into English. It’s called “Cuenta Atrás:”

Siete decenios. Seis trabajos. Cinco infidelidades. Cuatro operaciones. Tres hijos. Dos latidos. Un suspiro.

“Countdown”
Seven decades. Six jobs. Five infidelities. Four operations. Three kids. Two heartbeats. One sigh.

If that didn’t give you a shiver, maybe you’re watching too much reality television.

British journalist, editor, world traveller, and old Spain hand David Baird has written a new book, his seventh, and he didn’t have to go far to research it. He’s been sitting virtually on top of it since he arrived in the Andalusian village of Frigiliana to live in 1971. Between Two Fires: Guerrilla War in the Spanish Sierras, about to be published by Maroma Press in English and Editorial Almuzara in Spanish (where the title is Entre dos fuegos: Guerra sin cuartel en las sierras andaluzas) tells the long-ignored story of “the people of the sierra”. This was the anti-Franco guerrilla movement which operated in the mountains of Spain’s Málaga and Granada provinces in the 1940s and 50s during the fierce Franco repression after the Spanish Civil War.

For years Baird had heard hushed references to “la gente de la sierra”, and “el maquis”, as the anti-Franco resistance fighters were known, but it wasn’t till he started doing his research for Between Two Fires that he discovered that his own adopted village of Frigiliana was one of the principal centers both for guerrilla and counter-guerrilla activity.

One of his principal informants was Rosario “La Pichana”, a village grandmother who had lived just three doors away from Baird’s own house ever since he arrived there in the 70′s. He had greeted her on the street hundreds of times over the years, without ever suspecting that Rosario was a protagonist of one of the most dramatic series of events of recent Spanish history. Her story, the most moving in the book, tells how her young husband was arrested for no apparent reason by Franco’s militarized police, the Civil Guard, and taken to their headquarters in the village, never to be seen alive again.

Rosario’s testimony goes beyond mere murder to catalog the grueling lives of the peasants in the “years of hunger” after the civil war. Not only were they assailed by poverty, drought and hunger, but by the relentless coercion dished out by the Franco police state. Rosario sums it up nicely: “A lot of people went to Barcelona, because the life here was just beatings and killings.”

Though more than half a century has elapsed since the events portrayed in Entre Dos Fuegos, Baird was fortunate enough to have been able to interview not only witnesses but some of the actual participants in the events.

“My research was a battle against time,” he says. “The old-timers who lived through those desperate years are fast disappearing — in fact eight of those I interviewed have since died.”

Francisco Aguado, the Civil Guard colonel who wrote the official version of the conflict, denigrates “the bandits” and dots his account with terms like “eliminated”, “liquidated” and “exterminated”. But he also expresses grudging respect for the canny guerrilla leader, “Roberto”.

In an interesting aside from the story of the people of the sierra and the village of Frigiliana, Baird dedicates a chapter to what he calls “Operation Banana”, the efforts of the Allied secret services, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), from 1943 to infiltrate intelligence operatives into Spain, whose dictatorial regime was theoretically neutral but in fact sympathized with Hitler and Mussolini.

The Allies’ activities in Spain during World War II could best be described by a Spanish word: “esperpento,” a grotesque comedy of errors in which the two intelligence services not only competed with one another, but within their own teams and their own diplomatic corps on the ground in Spain. Didn’t a wise man once say: “Military intelligence is to intelligence what military music is to music.”

With Between Two Fires David Baird has written a valuable and necessary book, particularly for those of us who are fascinated by the tragic events in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War. He got there in time to speak with witnesses and participants — on both sides, adding to our understanding of post-war Spain at a moment when the legacy of the Franco years is a subject of fierce debate. This is no doubt why the book was snapped up by Almuzara, one of Spain’s best and brightest young publishing companies.

Fisk gives the reasons for his decision to leave active duty, and describes his sense of despair at how little positive impact he feels his work has had.What has made Fisk’s journalism unique is his personalized, combative reporting style, along with a notable disregard for personal danger. When he was in Pakistan covering the first days of the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001, he was beaten nearly to death by a crowd of Afghan refugees.The next article he wrote included these lines: “I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing…” and their “brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the ‘War for Civilisation’ just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them ‘collateral damage.’”

American actor John Malkovich precipitated an international incident when he declared in 2002 at the British Cambridge Union Society, when asked whom he would most like to “fight to the death,” he replied that he would “rather just shoot” journalist Robert Fisk. Fisk’s reply to Malkovich, (published here: http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles77.htm) was eloquent and all inclusive.

Taking for granted the fact that human issues should take first priority in any political considerations, Fisk is as much an advocate as an informant. It is his opinion that journalism must not just inform, but should challenge authority, “especially so when governments and politicians take us to war.” Having lived for the past 25 years in Beirut, Lebanon, he covered all the principal Middle East conflicts since 1976, first for The Times and then, from 1989 for The Independent. This long contact with the Middle East has given Fisk privileged first-hand knowledge of the people, places, and issues which make up his dispatches. He speaks Arabic and has interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times for The Independent: December 6, 1993; July 10, 1996; and March 22, 1997. The Great War for Civilization; The Conquest of the Middle East (2006) his last book, sums up Fisk’s privileged view of the major events of that region–especially those of its battlefields– since the First World War. Fisk’s take on the current impasse in the Middle East is straightforward. Despite the breast beating of the Western “coalition,” insisting they want to give the Muslims democracy, Fisk says: “They don’t want democracy. They want justice and we don’t want to give them justice.”

Fisk’s admirers have created a website where they have posted many of his past articles: http://www.robert-fisk.com. He has been awarded the British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year award seven times. In 2006 he won the $350,000 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

According to Madrid’s El Mundo newspaper this morning, Sal Emergui, their correspondent in Jerusalem, filed the following report yesterday: “The United States and Israel are daily forging an alliance to confront Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadineyad’s nuclear project, but the pistachio question has provoked certain differences. This is not a joke. The Bush government has protested to Israel through various channels accusing them of consuming large quantities of Iranian pistachios.” (My translation.)

A quick tour of the online newspapers indicates, however that the issue is not as clear as it seems. According to Reuters from Jerusalem, “Israel Seeks U.S. Help to Fight Iranian Pistachios.” This version has Israel initiating the crisis, asking for U.S. help in “cracking down on illegal pistachio nut imports from Iran.”

The Israeli news site, Ynetnews.com, adds an interesting twist: “Washington Displeased with Nuts Smuggled to Turkey from Tehran and Imported to Jewish State.” According to this news source the current tense international pistachio situation is due, at bottom, to the fact that Iran is the world’s largest producer of pistachio nuts, and Israel is their biggest importer. The Ynetnews reporter, Itamar Eichner, quotes Zvi Alon, senior deputy-director (foreign trade) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development: “We all know what the Israelis like to do on Friday night in front of their television sets. The Israelis just love their pistachio nuts.”

The International Herald Tribune contributes a more sinister note to the discussion: “California is the second largest producer of pistachios in the world, according to the former California Pistachio Coalition. Iran is first. ‘As a proud native of the golden state (California) I think Israelis should eat American pistachios, not Iranian ones,’ said Steward Tuttle, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.” So, what this is really about is an American black-ops effort to eliminate Iranian competition for California nuts? If so, the implications are terrifying. California not only produces pistachios. They also grow walnuts and almonds? Does this mean that Spanish growers of these nuts could be next on the American hit list? California also has a formidable aviation industry. Does that mean that Toulouse, France, the home of the European Airbus factory, might also be a potential target. Is the nuclear option on the table? Could the Iranian-Israeli pistachio crisis give rise to a catastrophic domino effect? The possibilities are mind boggling.

Insofar as California is not a significant producer of crumpets, presumably London and the “special relationship” are not in jeopardy.

I don’t suppose that it has occurred to any of the Pentgon’s top minds that it might be a good idea just to look the other way while Israeli families indulge in the Friday-night Iranian-pistachio munch ups, in the interest of world peace.

Let’s give equal time to the Iranian PressTV news service: “Israel is trying to block the illegal flow of Iranian pistachio to its markets as a desperate move against Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.”

And this pistachio flavored brouhaha is not a joke? You could have fooled me. Meanwhile, you might consider digging your bomb shelter a little deeper, just in case.

The World Wide Web has changed all that, both for professional researchers and concerned citizens. I am convinced that, if anything is going to be done to rectify the current world situation, the Web will play a determinant role. It already does, but I think that role will become increasingly important. We need only look at the Web’s unique characteristics to see why:

• It functions day and night, every day of the year.
• It’s present in almost everyone’s homes.
• It’s instantaneous. Just connect and you’re off.
• It’s constantly updated, every minute of every hour of every day.
• It’s permanent. It’s there waiting for you when you need it.
• It presents all shades of opinion, so you can contrast them and make up your own mind.
• It’s searchable, so you lose no time in getting to the topic you’re interested in.
• It’s content comes in text, audio and video, making the information both more accessible and more convincing.
• It’s interactive. You can even contribute your own content to the Web.

Never in human history has there been a news medium with such advantages for the population. People can be informed as never before, and they can publish their own views if they see fit. And if they want to mobilize around an issue, there’s email, which makes communication faster, simpler, and cheaper than ever before.

There is one major inconvenience, however. It’s harder than ever to plead ignorance, that you hadn’t heard, that you didn’t know. With up-to-date, reliable, contrasted, multimedia knowledge so close at hand, so inexpensive and so easy to navigate and classify, you have no excuse. Unless you’re a toddler, or you’re brain dead, you must know. You can’t not know. So you–and your fellow citizens, all of us–have a grave new responsibility. We can now be held accountable. Accountable for Afghanistan, accountable for Iraq, accountable for the erosion of civil liberties in our own countries. These debts to ourselves and the rest of the world are not abstract or imaginary. They are real and urgent. Is there anything we can do to offset this debt, to fulfill this accountability? Yes, there is, and it’s not even complicated. It’s easy: Do something to help. And the Web shall make you free.

My last post referred to a New Yorker video interview with Seymour Hersh. If you liked that conversation between Hersh and New Yorker editor-in-chief, David Remnick, there are lots more on YouTube.com. This one is required watching, it seems to me:

Or this one, on Al Jazeera (one of the “alternative sources” worth watching):

Enjoy! Do something to help! See you later in the week.

The secret of Hersh’s success lies in his dense network of high-level sources, not only in the United States government, but in foreign governments and international agencies. His long history of documenting and publishing high-level cases of abuse has made him the most sought-after reporter in the business for anyone with a big-time scandal to air. Any civil servant or military person who is outraged by his or her employer’s abuses or conspiracies and wants them made public always knows whom to turn to: Sy Hersh.

This is a video of Hersh being interviewed by The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick. He talks about his ongoing investigation of the Bush administration’s plans for bombing Iran. Hersh’s remarks, based on contacts with high-level informants are both fascinating and blood chilling.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/festival/2007/HershRemnick

You can find a lot of other Seymour Hersh talkies on YouTube.com. I found them all fascinating, and think you will, too.

That’s all for now. Have a good weekend. See you next week.

I want to mention an amazing source which I ran across while doing the research for The You of My Song. I thought that YouTube.com was a site for teenagers to show off their skills in skate boarding and ukelele playing, and for nostalgia buffs to find performances by Leadbelly and Buddy Holly. It is that, but it is much more. I found that it is also a vast audio-visual library of historic and present personages and events. This discovery occurred when I was searching the Web for President Eisenhower’s farewell address, the one where he warns about the potential threat to the American democracy posed by “the military-industrial complex.”

Not only did I find the full text but also a link to a YouTube video where I could watch and listen to Eisenhower giving the speech. I found it fascinating, both for its content and its incredibly easy availability. Now we have instant access to discourses of all sorts, from Winston Churchill’s “We will fight them on the beaches” address to Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and George W. Bush’s bloopers. Thanks to YouTube we can see and hear Malcom X, Alexander Fleming, Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt, in the comfort of our own computers. Don’t just take my word for it. See for yourself. Here’s the Eisenhower speech I mentioned:

YouTube is not only good for historic figures. You can also search contemporary subjects, and the results are equally enriching. If you liked Eisenhower’s farewell address from 1951, have a look at this speech by Canadian journalist and activist, Naomi Klein, presented to a Los Angeles audience in 2005:

Enough for today. If you hadn’t used YouTube before, I hope you will enjoy discovering it. It’s not the only source of audio-video content on the Web, however. Next time we’ll take a look at a fascinating interview from The New Yorker site. See you then.