In actuality, Ryan is like a lot of politicians who merely cherry-pick Hayek to promote neoclassical policies, says Peter Boettke, an economist at George Mason University and editor of The Review of Austrian Economics. “What Hayek has become, to a lot of people, is an iconic figure representing something that he didn’t believe at all,” Boettke says. For example, despite his complete lack of faith in the ability of politicians to affect the economy, Hayek, who is frequently cited in attacks on entitlement programs, believed that the state should provide a base income to all poor citizens. To be truly Hayekian, Boettke says, Ryan would need to embrace one of his central ideas, known as the “generality norm.” This is Hayek’s belief that any government program that helps one group must be available to all.

more from Adam Davidson at the NY Times Magazine here.

Ilse has grown up in the shadow of Cosmo-culture, where drastic measures are encouraged if beauty, and therefore confidence and “empowerment”, is the end result. The death of Cosmopolitan’s Helen Gurley Brown, plastic surgery pioneer, has brought some of her choice quotes to the surface. “Self-help,” she said to Nora Ephron, explaining the methods she used to improve her flaws. “I wish there were better words, but that is my whole credo. You cannot sit around like a cupcake asking other people to come and eat you up and discover your great sweetness and charm. You’ve got to make yourself more cupcakable all the time so you’re a better cupcake to be gobbled up.” The formula she laid down for Cosmopolitan in 1965 relied on constant renovation, improvement and a continual quest for achievement, where anybody can be beautiful, if only they try hard enough.

more from Eva Wiseman at The Observer here.

Dickens is so brilliant a stylist, his vision of the world so idiosyncratic and yet so telling, that one might say that his subject is his unique rendering of his subject, in an echo of Mark Rothko’s statement, “The subject of the painting is the painting”—except of course, Dickens’s great subject was nothing so subjective or so exclusionary, but as much of the world as he could render. If Dickens’s prose fiction has “defects”—excesses of melodrama, sentimentality, contrived plots, and manufactured happy endings—these are the defects of his era, which for all his greatness Dickens had not the rebellious spirit to resist; he was at heart a crowd-pleaser, a theatrical entertainer, with no interest in subverting the conventions of the novel as his great successors D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf would have; nor did he contemplate the subtle and ironic counterminings of human relations in the way of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, who brought to the English novel an element of nuanced psychological realism not previously explored. Yet among English writers Dickens is, as he once called himself, part-jesting and part-serious, “the inimitable.”

more from Joyce Carol Oates at the NYRB here.

From Nature:

Conflict between women and their daughters-in-law could be a factor in explaining an evolutionary puzzle — the human menopause. Humans, pilot whales and killer whales are the only animals known to stop being able to reproduce long before they die. In terms of evolution, where passing on your genes is the main reason for living, the menopause remains puzzling. Now, using a large data set from Finland, researchers have for the first time been able to test a hypothesis that competition between different generations of genetically unrelated breeding women could have promoted the evolution of the menopause. The results are published today in Ecology Letters¹. Mirkka Lahdenperä, an ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland, and her colleagues used data from meticulous birth, death and marriage records kept by the Lutheran church in the country between 1702 and 1908. As they dug into the data, the researchers found that the chances of children dying increased when mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law gave birth around the same time. For children of the older women, survival dropped by 50%. For children of the daughters-in-law, it dropped by 66%. However, if mothers and daughters had children at the same time, the survival of those children wasn’t affected. The results suggest that it would be beneficial to stop having children once your daughter-in-law entered the fray. “We were surprised that the result was so strong,” says Andrew Russell, an ecologist at the University of Exeter, UK, who was part of the research team. He suggests that perhaps in-laws fought over food for their children instead of cooperating as mothers and daughters might.

Other theories to explain the menopause include the mother hypothesis, which suggests that older women have an increased chance of dying in childbirth, and the grandmother hypothesis — that the benefits to the family when women care for their grandchildren provide an evolutionary reason to stay alive after reproductive age. Using an inclusive-fitness model, which counts the number of gene equivalents passed from generation to generation, the team showed that when mothers and their sons' wives had children at the same time, there was strong selection against women remaining fertile past the age of 51.

More here.

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

There’s something trying about an unforgiving man suddenly in need of forgiveness. Yet Todd Akin is right. He shouldn’t have to get out of the United States Senate race in Missouri simply for saying what he believes. He reflects a severe stance on abortion that many in his party embrace, including the new vice presidential candidate.

…In asserting that women have the superpower to repel rape sperm, Akin ratcheted up the old chauvinist argument that gals who wear miniskirts and high-heels are “asking” for rape; now women who don’t have the presence of mind to conjure up a tubal spasm, a drone hormone, a magic spermicidal secretion or mere willpower to block conception during rape are “asking” for a baby.

“The biological facts are perhaps inconvenient, but whether the egg meets the sperm is a matter of luck or prevention,” says Dr. Paul Blumenthal, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology who directs the Stanford Program for International Reproductive Education and Services. “If wishing that ‘I won’t get pregnant right now’ made it so, we wouldn’t need contraceptives.” When you wish upon a rape. Dr. Blumenthal is alarmed that Akin is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. “What is very disturbing to me is that people like Mr. Akin who have postulated this secret mechanism for avoiding pregnancy have developed their own make-believe world of science based on entirely self-serving beliefs of convenience or just ignorance,” he said. “I don’t think we want these people to be responsible for the lives of others.” But, for all the Republican cant about how they want to keep government out of the lives of others, the ultraconservatives are panting to meddle in the lives of others. Contrary to President Obama’s refreshing assertion Monday that a bunch of male politicians shouldn’t be making health care decisions for women, this troglodyte tribe of men and Bachmann-esque women craves that responsibility.

More here.

A Song

(A poem composed in 28 A.D. Korea)

When my dead mother comes to me
and asks me to lend her my shoes
I take off my shoes.

When my dead mother comes to me
and asks me to hold her up, for she has no feet
I take off my feet.

When my dead mother comes to me
and asks me to lend her, lend her
I even rip out my heart.

In the sky, mountains rise, trails rise.
At a place where there is no one
two round moons ascend.

(Translated from Me Korean by Don Mee Choi)

by Kim Hye-Sun
from Arts & Letters, Fall 2000

Robert W. Merry interviews Zbigniew Brzezinski in The National Interest:

No one disputes that Zbigniew Brzezinski resides within the circle of America’s most brilliant and prolific foreign-policy experts. The former White House national-security adviser under Jimmy Carter has written or coauthored eighteen books, including his most recent, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Order, a probing analysis of America’s challenges in a fast-changing world. Brzezinski is a counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a senior research professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The National Interest caught up with Brzezinski at his CSIS office for an interview about his book and the current state of the world. The interview was conducted by TNI editor Robert W. Merry.

In your book, you talk about the Atlantic West’s grand opportunity for what you called a “new era of Western global supremacy” after the Soviet collapse. But it didn’t happen. To what extent do you think this failure resulted from human folly, and to what extent was it a product of forces beyond the control of the Atlantic West or its leaders?

I think both. But the West was fatigued, and Europe, certainly, lost a sense of its global responsibility and became more provincial in outlook. That, in part, was connected unavoidably with the task of constructing something that was called, originally, the European Community, that led to the European Union (although the two names should have been in a different sequence, because the European Community had more coherence than the current European Union). And the United States embarked on a kind of self‑gratification and self‑satisfaction, almost acting as if it really thought that history had come to an end.

More here.

Harriet Hall in Slate:

The military uses some of the most technologically sophisticated machinery and innovative medical techniques in history. But a disturbing current of pseudoscience in the military is wasting money, perpetuating myths, and putting our troops in danger. I am a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, so this hits close to home. An organization I was once proud to belong to has become a source of embarrassment.*

An ongoing DoD failure is the infiltration of quackery into military medicine. It’s not as dangerous to our troops as a bomb detector that can’t detect bombs, but it’s wasting tax dollars and medical resources on unscientific mumbo-jumbo that “works” only as a placebo. In some cases, it is demonstrably harmful.

Acupuncture is based on a mythical, nebulous energy called qi that has never been detected, even though scientific instruments are capable of measuring quantum energies at the subatomic level. It is said to flow through hypothetical meridians and to be altered by sticking needles into hypothetical acupuncture points. Originally, there were 360 acupuncture points, corresponding to the days of the year, which is not surprising since the idea grew out of astrology. Now so many acupoints have been described that one wag suggested there was no place left on the skin that wasn’t an acupuncture point in someone’s system.

More here.

Declan Walsh in the New York Times:

Channeling the American comic Stephen Colbert, the determinedly anonymous blogger behind @MajorlyProfound adopted the voice of a pompous, paranoid, honor-obsessed nationalist — Twitter posts typically started with cries of “whoa!” or “OUTRAGE!!” — then took things a step or three further. The result was a searingly funny and often jet-black perspective on Pakistan’s rolling crises that pushed the boundaries of what is considered politically acceptable — or personally prudent.

A Pakistani should have been given the honor of lighting the Olympic flame, @MajorlyProfound declared during the recent opening ceremony, in recognition of “our expertise at burning things” like NATO supply trucks and Indian luxury hotels.

Later, he suggested that the national team could do well in archery, but only if a photo of an Ahmadi — a religious minority that suffers grave persecution — were placed on the target board.

“Pakistani shooters sure to win gold,” he wrote on Twitter. “But there is a danger they might throw grenade instead.”

Such jagged wit won @MajorlyProfound more than 10,000 followers on Twitter, many of them influential in the Pakistani and Indian news media. Foreign journalists started to quote him in stories, sensing he had become a cultural touchstone of sorts.

But the man behind the phenomenon assiduously shunned the spotlight. “I’m just a nobody,” he wrote in an e-mail exchange started by The New York Times before his disappearance. “I like to poke fun at absurdity.”

More here.

We are in an era when gardens are front and center for hopes and dreams of a better world or just a better neighborhood, or the fertile space where the two become one. There are farm advocates and food activists, progressive farmers and gardeners, and maybe most particular to this moment, there’s a lot of urban agriculture. These city projects hope to overcome the alienation of food, of labor, of embodiment, of land, the conflicts between production and consumption, between pleasure and work, the destructiveness of industrial agriculture, the growing problems of global food scarcity, seed loss. The list of ideals being planted and tended and sometimes harvested is endless, but the question is simple. What crops are you tending? What do you hope to grow? Hope? Community? Health? Pleasure? Justice? Gardens represent the idealism of this moment and its principal pitfall, I think. A garden can be, after all, either the ground you stand on to take on the world or how you retreat from it, and the difference is not always obvious.

more from Rebecca Solnit at Orion Magazine here.

William Flesch in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Some evolutionary biologists, David Sloan Wilson among them, think that there are reasons for seeing human cooperation as deriving from a genuine genetic propensity for altruism. Altruism and prosocial tendencies may be taken as roughly synonymous. Species (humans pre-eminently) that tend to engage in behavior which promotes the general welfare — even at the cost of some individual sacrifice — are able to cooperate in ways that help everyone.

They can do this despite the huge risk that free riders will derail the whole system. What prevents free riders from undermining altruism by taking such advantage of altruists that they die out? The answer that many evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, game theorists, and, even narrative theorists like yours truly, have converged on is the concept of what’s now known as altruistic punishment.

The idea behind altruistic punishment is that uninvolved third party witnesses will punish defectors, cheaters, and free riders. They, or a significant number of them, won’t let a self-dealer or serious violator of social norms get away with social or moral transgressions, even if they have to pay a price themselves. And they won’t even let those who are indifferent to the violators get away with such transgressions either. Many people are still angry at the 38 people who allegedly witnessed the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese from the safety of their apartments in 1964 and didn’t bother to call the police.

More here.

Instead of subscribing to the ideology that views the world through the “hard” lens of conflict between “the West and the Rest”, let us try a theory that looks at the world through the “soft” lens of “westernistic” civilization. An analogy between Hellenistic and westernistic civilization is helpful. In much the same way as classical Greece cannot be equated with Hellenic civilization, the modern West is not the same as westernistic civilization. Until 4 BC and the twilight of city-states, classical Greek civilization remained within the territorial borders of the southern Balkans. Similarly, the civilization of Latin Christianity or the traditional West was firmly rooted in the western countries of Europe until the advent of modernity. The Hellenistic civilization of Alexander the Great emanated from classical Greek heritage, but territorially it stretched across the entire world then known to man, reaching to Egypt and India, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In the same way, the westernistic civilization that has arisen from modern western heritage comprises the entire known world today.

more from Ales Debeljak at Eurozine here.

Mehdi Hasan in the Huffington Post:

You could not make it up. An 11-year old Christian girl in Pakistan with Down's Syndrome is in police custody, and could face the death penalty, forallegedly burning pages from the Quran.

The girl, who has been identified as Rifta Masih, was arrested on blasphemy charges and is being held in Islamabad pending a court appearance later this month. She was detained by police after an angry mob turned up at her family's single-roomed home in a poor district on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital.

“About 500-600 people had gathered outside her house in Islamabad, and they were very emotional, angry, and they might have harmed her if we had not quickly reacted,” Pakistani police officer Zabi Ullah told reporters.

“Harmed her”? Really? I mean, really? What on Allah's earth is wrong with so many self-professed Muslims in the self-styled Islamic Republic of Pakistan? Have they taken leave of their morals as well as their senses?

More here.

With the Tea Party and the Obama campaign of 2008 we can see an emergent reality more complex than that of OWS, which eleven months after September 2011 looks like the almost pure type of a flash movement. The Tea Party’s success and Obama’s victory entailed a dense interweaving of longstanding and newer organizational forms and strategies with dynamic flash elements that no one really predicted. These elements helped turn a right-wing sectarian current into a national political force and a long-shot candidate into a president. The Tea Party and of course Obama’s 2008 campaign overshadow OWS in political significance, but for the moment they stand together as three instances of a volatile and exciting politics that we are deep into without understanding very well. If Occupy was mainly a vivid and significant flash movement that had a real effect on public debate, that’s important now and later.

more from David Plotke at Dissent here.

Mark Ames in Not Safe For Work News [via Doug Henwood]:

Part of the hostility to Pussy Riot is that they’ve become a cause-célèbre in the West. Russians have not had a very good historical experience with things the West think Russia should do, going back a few centuries — the memory of America’s support for that drunken buffoon Yeltsin while he let the country and its people sink into misery is still raw — “a painful memory” like John Turturro's character says in “Miller's Crossing,” a memory woven tightly into the Russian RNA’s spool of historical grievances. And nothing triggers that reactionary Russian live-wire gene like an earful of Westerners moralizing about any topic, even the most obvious topic, even the topic where it’s 100% clear we’re on the right side for once.

So when they hear us finally paying attention again to Russia because a punk band with an English name using Latin script falls under the Kremlin’s gun, they don’t necessarily see “injustice” the way we do from our far-away vantage point — they see another dastardly plot by the West to humiliate Mother Russia and bring her to her knees.

Bill and his band [Faith No More] are still the only Westerners who put something on the line for Pussy Riot — and the only ones who nearly paid for it. And yet in spite of the hostile reaction, and in spite of his support for Pussy Riot, and in spite of being weirded out by the whole thing, when Bill and I talked about the infuriating “Russian soul” over the phone, his reaction was the same as mine: “This is why I fucking love Russians.” You can't take the maximalism and the authenticity only when it's safe for you and not for others.

Getting every single fact wrong in a magazine cover story is a great way to get everyone's attention.

Alex Pareene in Salon:

Niall Ferguson is an intellectual fraud whose job, for years, has been to impress dumb rich Americans with his accent and flatter them with his writings. It’s a pretty easy con, honestly, if you’re born shameless and British (or French). His main argument is that Western Civilization as embodied by the British Empire is awesome and wonderful even though it traditionally involved quite a bit of killing and enslaving of non-Westerners. Since becoming an insufferable American political commentator he’s decided that America needs to cut Medicare and spend the savings on fighting neo-imperialist wars with an army made up of “the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts.” (Also he sued the London Review of Books for publishing this devastating review of his career.)

So Ferguson wrote a Newsweek cover (Newsweek has become “trolling America weekly” since Tina Brown took over) about how he thinks Obama shouldn’t be president anymore, and while there are tons of very legitimate and compelling arguments against the Obama presidency, Ferguson instead based his article on a bunch of crap he made up. And the piece is full of just really obvious fallacies and little moments of mendacity like this:

In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak.

Hm! Weird that one thing is measured from January 2009 and the other thing from January 2008, right?

So his piece is just fundamentally dishonest, top to bottom.

More here.

From The Paris Review:

• A literary moonscape by Guy Laramée.
• More amazing book art: a visit to Quebec’s Garden of Decaying Books.
• “A hundred and twenty five years ago, Oscar Wilde edited a fashion magazine, his first and only office job. We have yet to learn from the experience.” LARB on Wilde’s day job.
• For the first four decades of competition, the Olympics awarded official medals for painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and music, alongside those for the athletic competitions.
• If you’re in Boston this weekend, enjoy the Dog Day Poetry Marathon, featuring Dorothea Lasky, Jim Behrle, and Eileen Myles (among many others).
• “As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.” Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, has won the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst in writing.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Consider two questions. First: Who are you? What makes you different from your peers, in terms of the things you buy, the clothes you wear, and the car you drive (or refuse to)? What makes you unique in terms of your basic psychological make-up—the part of you that makes you do the things you do, say the things you say, and feel the things you feel? And the second question: How do you use the internet?

Although these questions may seem unrelated, they’re not. Clearly the content of your internet usage can suggest certain psychological characteristics. Spending a lot of late nights playing high stakes internet poker? Chances are you are a risk taker. Like to post videos of yourself doing karaoke on YouTube? Clearly an extravert. But what about the mechanics of your internet usage—how often you email others, chat online, stream media, or multi-task (switch from one application or website to another)? Can these behaviors—regardless of their content—also predict psychological characteristics? Recent research conducted by a team of computer scientists, engineers, and psychologists suggests that it might. Indeed, their data show that such analysis could predict a particularly important aspect of the self: the tendency to experience depression.

More here.