Wendell Jamieson in the NYT:

Many are pulling the movie out of the archives lately because of its prescience on the perils of trusting bankers. I’ve found, after repeated viewings, that the film turns upside down and inside out, and some glaring — and often funny — flaws become apparent. These flaws have somehow deepened my affection for it over the years.

Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.

And what about that banking issue? When he returns to the “real” Bedford Falls, George is saved by his friends, who open their wallets to cover an $8,000 shortfall at his savings and loan brought about when the evil Mr. Potter snatched a deposit mislaid by George’s idiot uncle, Billy (Thomas Mitchell).

Ewen Callaway in New Scientist:

Being dumb has its benefits. Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.

The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test – which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 – averaged 97.4.

The unprecedented demands of the second world war – fought more with brains than with brawn compared with previous wars – might account for the skew, says Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. Dozens of other studies have shown that smart people normally live longer than their less intelligent peers.

“We wonder whether more skilled men were required at the front line, as warfare became more technical,” Dear says.

His team's study melds records from Scottish army units with results of national tests performed by all 11-year-olds in 1932. The tests assessed verbal reasoning, mathematics and spatial skills.

Strip the words away, and his and the Iraqi people’s cry of deep pain, anger and defiance would amount to no more than a shoe-throwing insult. But the words were heard. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” he shouted as he threw the first shoe. The crucial line followed the second shoe: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq .” Once those words were heard, the impact of a pair of shoes became electrifying. A young journalist has put aside the demands of his profession, preferring to act as the loudest cry of his long-suffering people. If one considers the torture and killings in Iraqi and US jails that Muntadhar often mentioned in his reports for al-Baghdadia satellite TV station, he was certainly aware he risked being badly hurt. As the Iraqi and Arab satellite stations switched from the live press conference to reporting reaction to the event, the stunned presenters and reporters were swept away by popular expressions of joy in the streets, from Baghdad to Gaza to Casablanca.

more from The Guardian here.

Being Mary Beard is a difficult balancing act. On the one side is the unrepentant scholar, trained in Latin epigraphy in the rigorous school of Joyce Reynolds, passionately determined to get things exactly right, ready to weigh probabilities judiciously, and thoroughly informed about the contents of the latest Dutch festschrift. On the other is the ardent blogger, and the writer (and TLS Classics editor) determined to communicate with audiences larger than a Roman historian or archaeologist can normally reach. Pompeii: The life of a Roman town combines these two personae, often triumphantly, sometimes a little uneasily. Beard’s knowledge of what has been written about Pompeii – a huge amount – is encyclopedic and up-to-the-minute. She knows, for example, who has argued (in a Dutch festschrift) that the wall painting which shows a man on horseback labelled “Spartaks” is not after all Spartacus with his name in Oscan, as some of us had fondly imagined and as I still believe.

more from the TLS here.

///
Evaluate
Idries Shah

Always evaluate evidence critically,
said a wise man of the Land of Fools.

I shall test you on feasibilty.

What if I were to say: Climb that moonbeam,
what would you answer?

I would say, I might slip on the way up.

Wrong! You should have thought of
chopping footholds with an axe.

From: The Magic Monastery
.

From The Telegraph:

Gwarlingo: Welsh description of the sound of a grandfather clock before it strikes.

Pisan zapra: Malay for the time needed to eat a banana.

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper – literally, “an enraged sheep”.

Kati-kehari: Hindi meaning to have the waist of an elegant lion.

Yupienalle: Swedish for a mobile phone – literally, “yuppie teddy” like a security blanket.

Ikibari: Japanese, a “lively needle” and describing a man who is willing but under-endowed.

Tantenverführer: German for a young man with suspiciously good manners.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone's parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door – literally, a “see-you-home wolf”

Trennungsagentur: German for someone hired by a woman to tell her boyfriend he has been dumped.

Picture: Chantepleurer: French for singing at the same time as crying, exactly what these North Korean children are doing as they sing 'Kim Il Sung we want to see you one more time'

More here.

From MSNBC:

Why would anyone want to create diseased cells in the lab? Because that's the best way to learn how to cure those diseases. The ability to transform a patient's ordinary skin cells into virtually any kind of tissue – including the cells that caused the illness in the first place – ranks as this year's biggest breakthrough in the journal Science's annual roundup. The other stars of this year's scientific show include the gene-decoders who are figuring out the instructions for making a woolly mammoth, or even a Neanderthal. Then there are the astronomers who, for the first time, spotted what appear to be planets circling alien stars. And let's not forget the biggest science experiment on the planet, the Large Hadron Collider, which started up this year (and almost immediately broke down).

One of the year's biggest science stories is breaking too late for Science's annual list – but came to light today on the journal's ScienceInsider blog: Harvard physicist John Holdren, who is the director of the Woods Hole Research Center as well as an adviser to President-elect Barack Obama on science and environmental issues, is in line to be named the next White House science adviser, Science's Eli Kintisch quotes sources as saying. The report is spreading like wildfire through the blogosphere. It's worth noting that Holdren's name surfaced as one of the top prospects more than a year ago on Cosmic Log, in the midst of our discussion about future science czars.

More here.

Roly Allen in the New Statesman:

Martyn Amos holds the rare distinction of having been awarded the world's first PhD in his chosen field, DNA computing, and Genesis Machines is his eye-opening presentation of this young science to the lay reader. Attacking our preconceptions, Amos briskly surveys the history of computing from Descartes to Turing and beyond, demonstrating that the concept of “the computer” is a question to which our ugly silicon, plastic and metal boxes are not the only answers.

True, the pace of their development has been jaw-dropping, but it pales into insignificance next to the implications of our recent understanding of the molecules of DNA and the enzymes which act upon it. Indeed, if the book has a hero, it is DNA, whose four bases (A, G, C and T) have powerful properties – notably their tendency to bond to each other in predictable and manipulable ways.

And if you need a human hero, then it may be Len Adleman, the American polymath who was among the first to realise the resemblance between the DNA chain and Turing's theoretical information strings – a foundation of modern computing. (This was in 1983, shortly after he invented the cryptography that secures your internet shopping, and around the same time as he coined the phrase “computer virus” – quite a chap, this Adleman, it seems.)

It is hard not to share Amos's excitement as the computational possibilities of the DNA revolution become clear.

More here. [The book has recently been published in the U.S. and I highly recommend it.]

Nathan Schneider in Seed Magazine:

Harun Yahya is a pen name for Adnan Oktar, the leader of a small but well-financed religious community that's based there. After years of refusing to grant interviews, Oktar has begun welcoming Western journalists to meet with him. The BBC, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and many others have taken him up on his offer. In mid-October, I made the journey.

To many scientists, Oktar and his books are a running joke. His 17-inch tall, 850-page book called The Atlas of Creation, which began appearing in mailboxes of scientists across Europe and the United States two years ago, aims to debunk Darwinian evolution with brilliant color, sensational photo-collages, and Qur'anic exegesis. It presents hundreds of fossils, pictured alongside modern flora and fauna, as evidence that all species were created separately by God millions of years ago and have undergone no modification at all. The Atlas goes on to blame Darwinist theories for a whole roster of worldly ills, including fascism, terrorism, and even the Columbine shooting.

The Atlas's claims about genetics, zoology, and paleontology are full of error. Like many creationists, Yahya mistakes ongoing debates about the mechanics of evolution as evidence that the theory as a whole is in crisis. He grossly exaggerates the age of fossils of modern animals, labeling a snow leopard skull as 80 million years old, while the oldest remains known to scientists are far more recent. One blogger even discovered that some of the creatures pictured in the Atlas are photos of realistic fishing lures, with their hooks still visible. Yahya has arranged to have RichardDawkins.net banned in Turkey — along with dozens of other sites — for publishing this fact.

More here.

“Pakistani people watch as an acrobat rides his motorcycle around a circular track during the memorial of Muslim saint Syed Lal Shah next to his shrine in Muree, about 60 kilometers north of Islamabad, Pakistan on June 15, 2008. Hundred of pilgrims gather during six days every year to pay respect at the tomb of Syed Lal Shah.” (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Lots more great photos in the Boston Globe here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

Those who cheer on shameful and despicable acts always want to encourage everyone to forget what they did, and those who commit crimes naturally seek to dismiss demands for investigations and punishment as nothing more than distractions and vendettas pushed by those who want to wallow in the past.

Surprisingly, though, demands that Bush officials be held accountable for their war crimes are becoming more common in mainstream political discourse, not less so. The mountain of conclusive evidence that has recently emerged directly linking top Bush officials to the worst abuses — combined with Dick Cheney's brazen, defiant acknowledgment of his role in these crimes (which perfectly tracked Bush's equally defiant 2005 acknowledgment of his illegal eavesdropping programs and his brazen vow to continue them) — is forcing even the reluctant among us to embrace the necessity of such accountability.

It's almost as though everyone's nose is now being rubbed in all of this: now that the culpability of our highest government officials is no longer hidden, but is increasingly all out in the open, who can still defend the notion that they should remain immune from consequences for their patent lawbreaking? As Law Professor Jonathan Turley said several weeks ago on The Rachel Maddow Show: “It's the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime.”

More here.

Editorial in the New York Times:

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.

More here.

James Kwak in The Baseline Scenario:

One might have hoped that one collateral benefit of the end of the election season would be the end of the attempt to pin the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1970s law designed to prohibit redlining (the widespread practice of not lending money to people in poor neighborhoods). Unfortunately, Peter Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute (thanks to one of our commenters for pointing this out) has proven that some people will never give up in their fight to prove that the real source of society’s ills is government attempts to help poor people. Regular readers hopefully realize that we almost never raise political topics here, but sometimes I just get too frustrated.

Many people who are more expert than I in the housing market have already debunked the CRA myth. Here are just a few: Janet Yellen, Menzie Chinn, Randall Kroszner, Barry Ritholtz, David Goldstein and Kevin Hall, and Elizabeth Laderman and Carolina Reid. Mark Thoma does a good job keeping track of the debate.

One of the main arguments against the CRA-caused-the-crisis thesis is that the large majority of subprime loans, and delinquent subprime loans, and the housing bubble in general, had nothing to do with the CRA; it was done by lenders who are not governed bythe CRA, and was done in places like the exurbs of Las Vegas or the beachfront condos in Florida, not poor neighborhoods (which generally saw less price appreciation than average). So Wallison comes up with a new argument: relaxed lending standards, encouraged by the CRA, caused lending standards to be relaxed in the rest of the housing market. Really, I’m not making this up.

An audio of Daniel Barenboim's conversation with Paul Holdengräber over at NYPL Live:

Faisal Devji in The Immanent Frame:

Since colonial times the practice of religious violence had possessed a mirror-like character, in which the defilement of a temple was repaid by that of a mosque or the murder of three Muslims by that of an equal number of Hindus, often leading to a spiral of violence as the stakes were incrementally raised. Such tactics lend a measure of control and predictability to tribal feuds as well as gangland conflicts in many parts of the world. The 1993 blasts, however, departed this logic for the first time to provide a different kind of “retaliation”, one that not only stepped through the mirror of religious violence but also exited the political arena because it was unattached to any political claim let alone to a political party, creating only a sense of existential self-respect and agency for ordinary Muslims that was much-remarked upon at the time. A consequence of the disparity of numbers between Hindus and Muslims, or between the firepower of militants and the state, terrorism effectively removed the mirror that had for so long been set between the two communities, with “Muslim” bombs and “Hindu” riots following each other until very recently, when it appears as if explosions at mosques and other places of Muslim resort indicate an attempt to “balance” mutual violence again.

Arthur Danto in The Nation:

///
Window
—1st Part
Forough Farrokhzad

A window for seeing.
A window for hearing.
A window I like well
that plunges to the heart of the earth
and opens to the vast unceasing love in blue.
A window lavishing the tiny hands of loneliness
with the night's perfume from gentle stars.
A window through which one could invite
the sun for a visit to abandoned geraniums.

One window is enough for me.

I come from the land of dolls, from under
the shade of paper trees in a storybook grove;
from arid seasons of barren friendship and love
in the unpaved alleys of innocence;
from years when the pallid letters of the alphabet
grew up behind desks of tubercular schools;
from the precise moment children could write
“stone” on the board and the startled starlings took wing
from the ancient tree.

I come from among the roots of carnivorous plants,
and my head stills swirls with the sound
of a butterfly's terror – crucified with a pin to a book.

When my trust hung from the feeble rope of justice
and the whole city tore my heart's lamps to shreds,
when love's innocent eyes were bound
with the dark kerchief of the law, and blood gushed
from my dreams' unglued temples,
when my life was no longer anything,
nothing at all except the tick tick of a clock on the wall,
I understood that I must, must, must
deliriously love.

One window is enough for me.

Translation: Sholeh Wolpé
Via: The Middle Stage

From Scientific American:

Male pipefish, seahorses and their kin are the stay-at-home dads of the fish world, rearing their young in placentalike pouches from the time they are fertilized eggs until they can swim away. New research shows that these involved fathers not only shelter their young but transfer key nutrients to their offspring via their own versions of a placenta, helping to supplement what the embryos received from their mother in the egg yolk. “In this study, we clearly demonstrate embryonic uptake of paternally derived nutrients in two pipefish species,” says researcher Jennifer Ripley, a biologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown (W.V.U.). “This is the first time we actually have evidence for this placental-like role in these fishes. It has been hypothesized for years but not demonstrated until now.”

To test whether males of two pipefish species, Syngnathus fuscus (northern) and S. floridae (dusky), pass nutrients to their young, Ripley and her colleague Christy Foran, a biologist at W.V.U., injected brooding fish—those carrying embryos in various stages of development—with the lipid (fat) palmitic acid and the amino acid lysine, two important embryonic building blocks. The substances—both of which are essential for development and must be supplied by the dad if egg reserves are not sufficient—were tagged with isotopes (a traceable version of an element) that allowed the researchers to track them with spectroscopy from father to embryo. Although the pipefish embryos did not take up much of the lipid, for reasons that are not clear, Ripley says, the amino acid readily moved from father to offspring. Moreover, the researchers say, the amount of amino acid that was transferred rose as the embryos matured—suggesting that as the nutritional needs of the babies grew, their fathers provided more of the substance.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

A little background is in order. Last summer, I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book Blink. Then I wrote a belated review for 3QuarksDaily. The book, like most everything Gladwell writes, is a fun and sometimes exciting read. But I decided that, in the end, there wasn't much of an argument in it. A nasty feeling crept over me. I wondered whether we'd all been duped into thinking that Gladwell had been saying something interesting when it really boiled down to well-placed anecdotes and well-told stories. The nasty feeling transformed into an admittedly nasty review titled “Down, I Say, Down With Malcolm Gladwell!”

I asked the reader to allow me to prove that Blink is “a piece of shit.” I talked about “sliminess” and “outright incoherence.” I called him a “huckster” (I've always liked that word) and then confessed that I hated his looks, “his hair scuffed up just so,” “his cute little suits.” And just for fun, I concluded the diatribe with the thought that the only thing that may salvage Gladwell as a human being is that he's a “bad fraud.” Done.

A couple of days later, I got an e-mail from Mr. Gladwell. He responded to my argument seriously and honestly and wondered, in good humor, whether I really needed to go after his hair and suits. I am a suck-up to power anyway but this disarmed me. Directly upon the heels of our civil and pleasant e-mail exchange, Gawker picked up my review as part of what they called the “Malcolm Gladwell backlash.” This was really too much. I have signed the notional contract that every pretentious intellectual has: We must at all times thumb our noses at Gawker. I began to feel bad about the tone of the review even in its humor. Rapidly, I capitulated. I wrote an apology to Malcolm, though, in an act of astounding bravery, I held to my basic philosophical position as regards Blink. I was, inevitably, denounced by most everyone I know for managing both to be a jerk and an ass-kisser all in one short week. Such is the plight of courageous men. History will absolve me.

But I promised one thing to my faithful readers and perhaps more importantly, to literary culture itself. I promised to review his next book, with a freshened eye. Well, the world of belles-lettres can release its collective breath. I have read the book. I am prepared to speak.

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George Packer in The New Yorker:

The cover of the December 15th Nation magazine features an article by the veteran foreign correspondent Sean Penn on his recent trip to Venezuela and Cuba. Travelling in the company of Douglas Brinkley, the noted actor, and Christopher Hitchens, the world-famous hedge-fund executive and philanthropist, Penn was the invited guest of President Hugo Chávez, of Venezuela, well-known as an advocate for the Social Gospel, and of Raúl Castro, Cuba’s humorous, wonky, and athletically gifted new chief executive.

During the course of his extensive interviews with Chávez and Castro, Penn displays skills as a stenographer that would come as a pleasant surprise to fans of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Many pages of Castro monologue are transcribed and transmitted to North American readers without interruption (except when “Raúl interrupts himself”), proving that Penn understands the first principle of the good interview: make the subject feel comfortable enough to open up. Good interviewers also know how to analyze the material they work so hard to elicit, and Penn treats his readers to gems such as “Inside, I’m wondering, Have I got a big story to break here? Or is this of little relevance?”

More here.