The Defense Budget and the War on Terror

Charles V. Peña of the Cato Institute looks at runaway U.S. defense spending, in Issues in Science and Technology.

For fiscal year (FY) 2005, military spending will be nearly $500 billion, which is greater in real terms than during any of the Reagan years and surpassed only by spending at the end of World War II in 1945 and 1946 and during the Korean War in 1952. The White House is asking for an FY 2006 Department of Defense (DOD) budget of $413.9 billion, which does not include funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The administration argues that increased military spending is a necessary part of the war on terrorism. But such logic assumes that the war on terrorism is primarily a military war to be fought by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. The reality is that large conventional military operations will be the exception rather than the rule in the war on terrorism. Instead, the military’s role will mainly involve special operations forces in discrete missions against specific targets, not conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing entire regimes. The rest of the war aimed at dismantling and degrading the al Qaeda terrorist network will require unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not expensive new planes, helicopters, and warships.

The Misleaders: Who is Dick Cheney kidding?

From Slate:

Bush_3 Dick Cheney calls it “dishonest,” “reprehensible” and “not legitimate” to claim that the administration misled the public about prewar intelligence. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Nov. 21, the vice president added for good measure that “any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false.” Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not “fabricated,” which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of “lying,” is a straw man of Cheney’s. Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others misrepresented what our government knew about Saddam Hussein’s WMD capacity and his links to terrorists in order to make a stronger case for invading Iraq.

So, who’s right? Did Bush officials mislead us, or didn’t they?

More here.

Interview with Jirí Grusa

In Context, an interview with Jirí Grusa.

Jirí Grusa was born in 1938 in Pardubice, East Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. After receiving a degree from Charles University in Prague in 1962, Grusa became involved with several literary magazines and with the Prague Theater. Grusa was arrested in 1974 for “the crime of initiating disorder” after distributing nineteen copies of his novel The Questionnaire and expressing his intent to have it published in Switzerland. He was released after two months as a result of worldwide attention and protests. After his citizenship was revoked in 1981, he moved to West Germany and, ironically, as a result of the political changes of the late ’80s, became the Czech ambassador to Germany. In 2004 he became the president of International PEN.

___________________________

ANA LUCIC: In the interview entitled “The Questionnaire, or the Sixteen Answers of Mr. Grusa” you say that “all good authors are really nothing but translators—from a universal and ideal language.” Could you elaborate on this idea?

JIRI GRUSA: “All good authors are really nothing but translators”—for me, to a certain extent, this is a kind of a “psychological preservation philosophy.” If an author (like myself) loses one language (and in my case this is the Czech language), the characteristic style that brought him readers also dwindles away. In an attempt to find another language—in my case it was German—I determined that it had nothing of this “meta-language” quality. What binds the authors around the world is the Lingualität, also the possibility to name what is not named yet. At the same time this is the reason for all personal misfortune, and also for metaphysical fortune.

On the question of human rights, so-called ‘Asian values’ aren’t what they used to be

From The Boston Globe:China

HANOI – As China’s President Hu Jintao welcomes President Bush to Beijing this weekend, he’s surely hoping to avoid another lecture on human rights like the one Bush delivered Wednesday in Kyoto, Japan. These days, however, it’s not only America or the international community that are pushing China and Vietnam towards greater respect for human rights. It’s their own citizens. In Hong Kong in recent years, democracy rallies have drawn hundreds of thousands of marchers; on the mainland, mass protests over corruption and environmental degradation have proliferated. Private property rights, the freedom to assemble and to criticize the government, and the expectation that government is bound by the rule of law, are all gradually becoming ”Asian values” – even in Hanoi.

More here.

Young and Privileged, but Writing Vividly of Africa’s Child Soldiers

From The New York Times:

Iwea184 POTOMAC, Md., Nov. 21 – Uzodinma Iweala’s brutal debut novel, “Beasts of No Nation,” is filled with the stink of violence. Mr. Iweala’s own life couldn’t be further removed from his main character’s. Mr. Iweala, or Uzo, as his friends call him, grew up in this Washington suburb. He attended the elite St. Albans School, then Harvard, from which he graduated in 2004. He has perfect posture, a soft, polite voice, a scarf elegantly draped around his neck. He has just turned 23, and he has known little suffering in his young life. From where, then, did this horrifying story about child soldiers in Africa come?

“In my senior year of high school, I read an article in Newsweek about child soldiers in Sierra Leone,” said Mr. Iweala, sitting in the large living room of his parents’ home, his voice still hoarse from yelling at the Harvard-Yale football game. “I felt a sense of shock – this was happening in the region where I’m from and people don’t know about it. I wanted to understand.” So he wrote a three-page sketch about a child soldier, then put it away.

At Harvard, Mr. Iweala studied creative writing, learning the basics of character and plot development in fiction. Then, one day in his junior year, Mr. Iweala, who was co-president of the African Students Association, heard a speaker, China Keitetsi, describe her experiences after being kidnapped at 9 and forced to fight in the Ugandan civil war. Afterward, Mr. Iweala said, he told Ms. Keitetsi that his parents wanted him to go to medical school. “She said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting; I have no parents.’ ”

Deeply moved by their meeting, he dug up his old sketch and began to expand it. This time “it just flowed,” he remembered.

More here.

Supernovae Back Einstein’s “Blunder”

From Scientific American:Einstein_1

When Albert Einstein was working on his equations for the theory of general relativity, he threw in a cosmological constant to bring the universe into harmonious equilibrium. But subsequent observations by Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was not static. Rather, galaxies were flying apart at varying speeds. Einstein abandoned the concept, calling it the biggest blunder of his life’s work. Observations in the 1990s, however, proved that the universe was not only flying apart, it was doing so faster and faster. This seemed to point to a dark energy filling space that actually repelled ordinary matter with its gravity, in contrast to all other known stuff, including dark matter. A number of theories have been developed to explain what this dark energy might be, including Einstein’s long discarded cosmological constant.

More here.

How a virus can morph into a killer

From MSNBC:Flu

The 1918 Spanish flu killed at least 20 million people around the globe. Fears of a similar pandemic have health officials concerned the death toll could be much higher in a modern outbreak, which researchers say is very likely if the current deadly bird flu morphs into a strain that can be transmitted by humans. Travel between countries has become vastly more frequent and quicker, which would hasten the spread of a highly contagious and lethal virus. In the last of a three-part series, LiveScience examines how a virus jumps from birds to humans and reaches pandemic proportions.

More here.

the press

In a previous article, I described many of the external pressures besetting journalists today, including a hostile White House, aggressive conservative critics, and greedy corporate owners.[2] Here, I will concentrate on the press’s internal problems—not on its many ethical and professional lapses, which have been extensively discussed elsewhere, but rather on the structural problems that keep the press from fulfilling its responsibilities to serve as a witness to injustice and a watchdog over the powerful. To some extent, these problems consist of professional practices and proclivities that inhibit reporting —a reliance on “access,” an excessive striving for “balance,” an uncritical fascination with celebrities. Equally important is the increasing isolation of much of the profession from disadvantaged Americans and the difficulties they face. Finally, and most significantly, there’s the political climate in which journalists work. Today’s political pressures too often breed in journalists a tendency toward self-censorship, toward shying away from the pursuit of truths that might prove unpopular, whether with official authorities or the public.

Michael Massing on ‘the press’ in the New York Review of Books.

etchasketchathon

4950220

The first thing you must do is go upstairs to see the hand-coloured etchings in the series called Etchasketchathon. Walk straight to the picture of the zombie clown shaking hands with the little boy. Look at the burning cottage. Black skeletal rafters, all that survives of the roof, are seen against soft red-and-pink fire. The effect is as tender as a watercolour, as shocking as the blazing village in Rubens’ The Consequences of War. The Chapman brothers are back.

The last time I saw a roof wasted like that was when I watched the last embers of the Saatchi fire. The Chapmans’ big work, Hell, was destroyed, and they seemed remarkably blasé. This exhibition explains why. Like the Renaissance Countess of Forli – who, when the besiegers of her castle threatened to kill her children, stood on the battlements, lifted her skirts and said, “Look, I’ve got the equipment to make more” – the Chapmans are not easy to defeat. Unusually in contemporary art, they have this thing called talent.

more fromk The Guardian here.

nicolas carone

Artwork_images_423885474_113076_nicolasc

It was not to be expected that a great many people in the New York art world would recognize the name of the American painter Nicolas Carone, whose works on paper were recently the subject of a very engaging exhibition at the Lohin Geduld Gallery in Chelsea. Mr. Carone is now 88 years old, and his work has not been exhibited here since the 1960’s. Yet in his heyday, which preceded the emergence of the Pop and Minimalist movements, he was a greatly admired figure in the ranks of American modernists—a representational painter schooled in the aesthetic innovations of Hofmann, Pollock and de Kooning. He belongs to a generation that had to work its way through the challenges of Abstract Expressionism before it could return to figuration with a renewed perspective. In that endeavor, Mr. Carone’s greatest asset was always his draftsmanship: drawing that’s classical in spirit, yet radically modernist in the expressive liberties it brings to his depiction of the most classical subject of all, the nude female figure.

more from Hilton Kramer at the NY Observer here.

A Self-Help Book of Science

From American Scientist:

Honey_1 The Velocity of Honey’s 24 chapters are short meditations on questions that are probably never going to make the cover of Science or Nature, such as why toast falls butter side down and why time seems to speed up as we grow older. You might call them crossword puzzles for the scientifically minded—they offer a mental workout for its own sake but also soothe and amuse. In fact, author Jay Ingram calls The Velocity of Honey “a self-help book.” Its essays “reduce stress,” he says, and offer “a brief interruption in the ridiculous rush of life.” Ingram, who hosts the Discovery Channel’s science program Daily Planet, says he picked the topics for their appeal—adding with characteristic self-irony that this means their appeal to him. Somehow, he says, that turned out to mean there is a lot of physics and psychology and not much in between. (Ingram himself has a master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Toronto.)

But the greatest attraction of The Velocity of Honey is Ingram’s intelligent but gentle, even self-deprecating, personality. Maybe I’m getting old, but I”m increasingly reluctant to buy a book by a brash young man who wants to buttonhole me and convince me that science is dead or everything bad is good for me. I’d rather spend the time with someone who asks me with a twinkle in his eye whether I’d venture to guess why toast always falls butter side down.

More here.

Benazir may `finally return soon´

Bbchildren160

From despardes.com:

Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) workers are reportedly active  planning Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan from self-exile. A party meeting is scheduled in London on November 27, and topmost on the agenda is BB’s return, says a reliable source who chose to remain anonymous. Asked when she may return, the source told DesPardes.com “it could be as early as on or about January 5, 2006 – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s birthday or sometime in summer.” According to the source, Benazir’s chances of being “relieved” as a party to the Swiss Case which is scheduled for hearing on November 25 are very high. Expecting the case outcome to be “in her favor”, Peoples’ Party leadership and workers have scheduled a high level  meeting in London two days thereafter “so they can discuss BBs return” the source added. Ms Benazir Bhutto will appear before a Swiss magistrate on November 24 and 25 to assist in the inquiry triggered by allegations of kickbacks and money laundering.

General Musharraf has time and again said that Benazir Bhutto was most welcome to come back to Pakistan after receiving “a clean chit” from the Swiss court even though she will be still barred from contesting for third premiership.

More here.

The Green Helmets of Darfur

Samantha Power in The New Yorker:

For the past two and a half years, the Arab-dominated government of Sudan has teamed up with sword-wielding marauders on horses and camels, known as janjaweed, to butcher, rape, and expel non-Arabs living in the western region of Darfur. In May of 2004, the United States, Europe, and Africa settled on an imperfect solution for stabilizing the region: send in the African Union. The A.U. accordingly dispatched sixty unarmed observers and three hundred “green helmet” soldiers to monitor a ceasefire between the government and the non-Arab rebels who were fighting it.

What followed was a textbook example of “mission creep.” The ceasefire collapsed, the Sudanese Air Force and the janjaweed continued their deadly raids, thousands more non-Arabs were killed, and the rebels began to splinter into rivalrous groups.

More here.

The Martini

Sean Carrol at Cosmic Variance:

Martini1_medThe martini’s perfection is deceptive because of its near-inevitability. Every aspect of the cocktail manifests its individual degree of perfection, so we are hardly surprised (that is, not as much as we should be) when it all comes together so elegantly. Gin, originating in the Low Countries and elevated to iconic status in Britain, forms the foundation of this quintessentially American drink. The basic white grain spirit is enlivened by the slightly exotic flavors of juniper and other botanicals. It’s everything you want in a foundation: solid and agreeable, perfectly transparent without being empty or boring. Dry vermouth, a fortified wine that is quite acceptable as a separate aperitif, but only reaches toward divinity in its role as a secondary ingredient against the gin. And the olives, suggesting a touch of the Eastern Mediterranean, adding a worldly spiciness and lush green roundness to the austerity of the cocktail.

More here.

JONATHAN MILLER’S BRIEF HISTORY OF DISBELIEF

Jonathan_miller_lead“In this first ever television history of disbelief, Jonathan Miller goes on a journey exploring the origins of his own lack of belief and uncovering the hidden story of atheism.”

From the BBC:

Shadows of Doubt
BBC Two Monday 31 October 2005 7pm-8pm
Jonathan Miller visits the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first ‘unbelievers’ in Ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic.

Noughts and Crosses
BBC Two Monday 7 November 7pm-8pm
With the domination of Christianity from 500 AD, Jonathan Miller wonders how disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist, Baron D’Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses.

The Final Hour
BBC Two Monday 14 November 7pm-8pm TBC
The history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Jonathan Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a ‘thought disorder’. He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.

More here.  [Thanks to Akeel Bilgrami.]

mao more than ever

Linkmao1

Andrew Nathan at the London Review of Books looks at recent biographies of Mao and the continuing changes and developments of Mao studies inside and outside China.

Of course Mao deserves harsh moral judgment. Too many previous accounts of his life, awed by his achievements, have overlooked their human cost. But this portrayal impedes serious moral judgment. A caricature Mao is too easy a solution to the puzzle of modern China’s history. What we learn from this history is that there are some very bad people: it would have been more useful, as well as closer to the truth, had we been shown that there are some very bad institutions and some very bad situations, both of which can make bad people even worse, and give them the incentive and the opportunity to do terrible things.

Chang and Halliday’s white-hot fury no doubt represents the unpublished and anonymous Chinese sources that they have used. More authentically than the officially licensed propaganda, these as yet subterranean opinions reflect the current evaluation of Mao within the Party as well as outside. This book can thus be read as a report on the crumbling of the Mao myth, as well as a bombshell aimed at destroying that myth. That the Chinese are getting rid of their Mao myth is welcome. But more needs to take its place than a simple personalisation of blame.

paul berman on the french

A major piece from Paul Berman in The New Republic analyzing the intellectual condition, as it were, among the French, and making a number of claims about the rise of a new anti-anti-Americanism.

Anyone who visits Berlin will recognize instantly that Germany is a nation that has suffered stupendous and unbearable defeats–a nation that has been reduced to rubble repeatedly by events, even if the Germans have themselves to blame for some of those events. A visitor to France will come away with no such impression. Rubble, in France? And yet it may be that France, too, is a nation covered with scars–a wounded nation, different from Germany only in France’s gallant insistence that it is not a wounded nation. I turn the pages of Roger’s history and the other books, and I contemplate Glucksmann’s observations about the hatred that arises from a revulsion at one’s own weakness, and it occurs to me that, instead of rubble, which the Germans have aplenty, the French possess the very remarkable literature that Roger and the others describe. Not exactly rubble, but a kind of wreckage–the literature of a wounded culture, expressing more than two hundred years of conscious and unconscious injury.

But I don’t want to go too far with this observation. France’s grandeur is not, after all, entirely an illusion. It may even be a sign of French grandeur today that, at a moment when a more-or-less systematic anti-Americanism has blossomed from right to left all over the world, France has, ever so quietly, made itself the international home of a new literature of anti-anti-Americanism–this new and radical and brilliant literature that has not yet worked a powerful effect around the world, or even on conventional opinion in France, and is certainly not going to produce a sudden shift in outlook, but which, even so, might well turn out to be, in years to come, an event in the history of ideas. A flash of self-awareness. The stirring of an eyeball, breaking through sleep. A new realization, just beginning to awaken.

elizabeth murray, shape

Article001_1

“Shape” as an issue for painting was the demon spawn of the critical program initiated by Greenberg and elaborated by Michael Fried. Most notoriously, Frank Stella’s manipulation of the shape of the physical support in his work of the ’60s was seen as an inevitable evolutionary step in the reduction of painting to its own medium-specific essence, and perhaps also as a way out of the cul-de-sac of graphic decorativism. In Stella’s case this reasoning eventually resulted in weird objects that were difficult to accept as either radical or profound, but younger artists of a non-Greenbergian bent surprisingly found rich potential in this train of thought. In the late ’60s Mangold, Murray’s contemporary in age but forerunner on the curve of artistic self-realization, began exploring the reciprocity, implied by Stella’s earlier forays, between a shaped support and the marks on its surface. Throughout the ’70s and beyond, Mel Bochner, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Tuttle worked with shape in their pictorial investigations of thought’s relationship to material, and Ron Gorchov made truculent and repetitive canvases with round corners and a surface curved in two directions like a saddle. Always present in the minds of Murray’s generation of painters was the example of Ralph Humphrey, a currently underestimated figure who began a series of ethereal surfboard-shaped paintings in 1970 and who continued to develop his extremely specific supporting structures until his death twenty years later.

more from Artforum here.

This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis

From The New York Times:

Brain_7 Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized.

More here.

The Trials of Life: Intelligent Design

From Scientific American:Penguin_1

On September 13, the New York Times ran an article that discussed how the documentary March of the Penguins was a big hit among some groups because of the lessons it imparted. A reviewer in World Magazine thought that the fact that any fragile penguin egg survived the Antarctic climate made a “strong case for intelligent design.” Conservative commentator Michael Medved thought the movie “passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.”

Penguins are not people, despite their natty appearance and upright ambulation. Their traditional norms include waddling around naked and regurgitating the kids’ lunch. But it would be as absurd to castigate them for those activities as it is to congratulate them for their monogamy. Besides, the movie clearly notes that the penguins are seasonally monogamous–like other movie stars usually reviled by moralists, the penguins take a different mate each year. And there are problems with them as evidence of intelligent design. While caring for the egg, the penguins balance it on their feet against their warm bodies; if the egg slips to the ground for even a few seconds, it freezes and cracks open. A truly intelligent design might have included internal development, or thicker eggshells, or Miami. Finally, penguin parents take turns walking 70 miles to the sea for takeout meals. The birds have to walk.

From tribulations to trials. On September 26, I sat in a federal courtroom in Harrisburg, Pa., where a lawyer said for almost certainly the first time ever, “Can we have the bacterial flagellum, please?”

More here.