Our Animal Hell

Robert Pogue Harrison in the NYRB blog:

Francisco_de_Zurbaran_006_jpg_600x579_q85The Pope spoke not of dogs but of all of God’s creatures. Where does that leave humankind? To call us a species among others is both correct and misleading, for whether by divine design or nature’s random ways, Homo sapiens has extended its dominion over everything that walks, crawls, swims, or flies. This makes us a singular, unearthly kind of creature. From the extinctions we cause, to the alteration and destruction of animal habitats, to the daily mass slaughters that feed our collective Cerberus-like appetite for meat, poultry, and fish, our species terrorizes the animal world in ways that could only offend, if not outrage, a God who loves his creatures enough to open the prospect of heaven to them…

From a quantitative point of view our species guilt is more aggravated today than it ever was in the past, when Plutarch or Pythagoras cried out against animal murder and the consumption of animal flesh. As the French philosopher and biologist Jean Rostand put it, “Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.” While the scale of animal death has increased exponentially, the main issue today is no longer death but the coercive reproduction and perpetuation of animal lifeunder infernal conditions of organic exploitation. Industrialized farming today, in its manipulation of the biological processes of genesis, growth, and multiplication, forces animals like cows, calves, turkeys, pigs, ducks, and geese into artificial, barely endurable forms of existence. Far more demonic than the slaughters and animal sacrifices of the past, our relegation of these creatures to a standing reserve of consumable stock reduces their “lives” to a worldless, merely mechanical process of flesh production. In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote of the malaise of the earth: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” That creaturely groaning has gotten a lot louder of late, and if God indeed loves his creatures enough to open heaven to them, it is highly likely that, when our pets get there, they will find themselves on their own.

Read the rest here.

A Dubious History of Targeted Killings in Afghanistan

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Spiegel Staff in Spiegel International (AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth):

Predator drones and Eurofighter jets equipped with sensors were constantly searching for the radio signals from known telephone numbers tied to the Taliban. The hunt began as soon as the mobile phones were switched on.

Britain's GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA) maintained long lists of Afghan and Pakistani mobile phone numbers belonging to Taliban officials. A sophisticated mechanism was activated whenever a number was detected. If there was already a recording of the enemy combatant's voice in the archives, it was used for identification purposes. If the pattern matched, preparations for an operation could begin. The attacks were so devastating for the Taliban that they instructed their fighters to stop using mobile phones.

The document also reveals how vague the basis for deadly operations apparently was. In the voice recognition procedure, it was sufficient if a suspect identified himself by name once during the monitored conversation. Within the next 24 hours, this voice recognition was treated as “positive target identification” and, therefore, as legitimate grounds for an airstrike. This greatly increased the risk of civilian casualties.

Probably one of the most controversial decisions by NATO in Afghanistan is the expansion of these operations to include drug dealers. According to an NSA document, the United Nations estimated that the Taliban was earning $300 million a year through the drug trade. The insurgents, the document continues, “could not be defeated without disrupting the drug trade.”

According to the NSA document, in October 2008 the NATO defense ministers made the momentous decision that drug networks would now be “legitimate targets” for ISAF troops. “Narcotics traffickers were added to the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) list for the first time,” the report reads.

In the opinion of American commanders like Bantz John Craddock, there was no need to prove that drug money was being funneled to the Taliban to declare farmers, couriers and dealers as legitimate targets of NATO strikes.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Invisible Waiter

Maitreya Bodhisattva, raising a bite of rare steak to his mouth, said,
“Even we sometimes get hungry.
Mere peace of mind doesn’t satisfy the flesh,
though, on the contrary, the sense of fullness at times does lead to peace of mind.”

“Each of us is aware that we should avoid eating unbalanced meals.
Our calling requires nothing but the capital of soul and body.
The American way of taking nutritional pills, however,
is severely prohibited by Buddha.”

Maitreya Bodhisattva, using knife and fork quite adeptly,
talked on and on with the accent of Pure Land Buddhism.
“I had a very hard time learning European table manners.
Anyway we had to master all at once
in a three-night training session
what Europeans had developed over hundreds of years.”

“Of course even we are not perfect.
Like you, we have our troubles.
There are some anorexic ascetics and some depressive goddesses of mercy.”
A Bodhisattva I met the other day in a Laundromat has insomnia,
so at night he seems to read by reading lamp
Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
He said he hadn’t slept for an entire month
and had now read 3,000 pages.

“And a nirvana incarnation I know well
who seems to be categorized by the present administration
as ‘a bed-ridden old man’
was high-handedly removed
to a special old folks’ home in Shibuya.
I saw him for the first time ever crying, ‘No! No!’”

It was already late at night.
All the waiters had gone home.
All that remained was people’s sighs,
like the laughter of the Cheshire cat.

In front of Maitreya Bodhisattva now fallen silent,
I put a non-existent cigarette in my mouth. Just then,
a transparent waiter appeared
and gently lighted it for me.
.

by Inuo Taguchi
from Armadillogic
publisher: Shichosha, Tokyo, 2002
translation: William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura

Original Japanese

Discontent and Its Civilizations – Pakistan’s place in the world

Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian:

MohsinIn 2010, Mohsin Hamid was asked by Granta to contribute to a piece entitled “How to write about Pakistan”. Other poets or novelists might have railed against accounts littered with mullahs, military generals, secret agencies and American drones. Hamid, characteristically droll, drew up a list of 10 commandments of which the first three were: “Must have mangoes”; “Must have maids who serve mangoes”; “Maids must have affairs with man servants who should occasionally steal mangoes.” In Discontent and Its Civilizations, a collection pulling together essays and reviews from the past 15 years, he talks about the way in which Pakistan “plays a recurring role as villain in the horror sub-industry within the news business”. In his eyes, the nation in which he grew up, and to which he returned in 2009 after lengthy stints living in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, is less diabolical; he loves the “out-of-character Pakistan, Pakistan without its makeup and plastic fangs, a working actor with worn-out shoes, a close family, and a hearty laugh”.

…In one essay, Hamid says he’s in “self-exile from the United States”. His reflections on that country are pointed. Discussing “the Great American Novel”, he observes that “‘the’ is needlessly exclusionary, and ‘American’ is unfortunately parochial. The whole, capitalised, seems to speak to a deep and abiding insecurity, perhaps a colonial legacy.” Rather too many pieces – on fatherhood, ebooks, Obama’s election – feel dated or too short. Then again, as he proved in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, brevity has its virtues. Writing about Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains, he claims: “Novels are like affairs, and small novels are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.” It’s a lovely notion and Discontent and Its Civilizations has just enough others to make it worth spending time with.

More here.

Cancer’s Random Assault

Denise Grady in The New York Times:

CancerIt may sound flippant to say that many cases of cancer are caused by bad luck, but that is what two scientists suggested in an article published last week in the journal Science. The bad luck comes in the form of random genetic mistakes, or mutations, that happen when healthy cells divide. Random mutations may account for two-thirds of the risk of getting many types of cancer, leaving the usual suspects — heredity and environmental factors — to account for only one-third, say the authors, Cristian Tomasetti and Dr. Bert Vogelstein, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We do think this is a fundamental mechanism, and this is the first time there’s been a measure of it,” said Dr. Tomasetti, an applied mathematician. Though the researchers suspected that chance had a role, they were surprised at how big it turned out to be. “This was definitely beyond my expectations,” Dr. Tomasetti said. “It’s about double what I would have thought.” The finding may be good news to some people, bad news to others, he added. Smoking greatly increases the risk of lung cancer, but for other cancers, the causes are not clear. And yet many patients wonder if they did something to bring the disease on themselves, or if they could have done something to prevent it. “For the average cancer patient, I think this is good news,” Dr. Tomasetti said. “Knowing that over all, a lot of it is just bad luck, I think in a sense it’s comforting.”

Among people who do not have cancer, Dr. Tomasetti said he expected there to be two camps. “There are those who would like to control every single thing happening in their lives, and for those, this may be very scary,” he said. “ ‘There is a big component of cancer I can just do nothing about.’ “For the other part of the population, it’s actually good news. ‘I’m happy. I can of course do all I know that’s important to not increase my risk of cancer, like a good diet, exercise, avoiding smoking, but on the other side, I don’t want to stress out about every single thing or every action I take in my life, or everything I touch or eat.’ ”

More here.

History and Heartbreak: The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

9781781681077

Vivian Gornick in The Nation:

There she was: a girl, a Jew, a cripple—possessed of an electrifying intelligence, a defensively arrogant tongue and an unaccountable passion for social justice, which, in her teens, led her to the illegal socialist organizations then abounding among university students in Warsaw. In the city’s radical underground, she opened her mouth to speak and found that thought and feeling came swiftly together through an eloquence that stirred those who agreed with her, and overwhelmed those who did not. The experience was exhilarating; more than exhilarating, it was clarifying; it centered her, told her who she was.

At 18—already on the Warsaw police blotter—Rosa was sent to Zurich to study, and never went home again. Although she was registered at the university as a student in natural sciences, it was at the German socialist club—with its library, reading room and lecture hall—that she got her education. There, in the autumn of 1890, she met Leo Jogiches, a Lithuanian Jew three years her elder and already a student revolutionary of local reputation. A self-styled hero of Russian radical literature, Leo was brooding, angry, remote, enamored of Bakunin’s famous definition of the revolutionary as a man who “has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings, he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution.” Rosa was enraptured. Leo, in turn, was aroused by her adoration. They became lovers in 1891; but, from the start, theirs was a misalliance.

From earliest youth, Rosa had looked upon radical politics as a means of living life fully. She wanted everything: marriage and children, books and music, walks on a summer evening and the revolution. Personal happiness and the struggle for social justice, she said, shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. If people gave up sex and art while making the revolution, they’d produce a world more heartless than the one they were setting out to replace. Leo, on the other hand, withdrawn and depressed—he hated daylight, sociability and his own sexual need—told her this was nonsense; all that mattered was the Cause. Yet Rosa’s longing for intimacy with him did not abate.

More here.

He’s So Ronery

by Misha Lepetic

“Data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.”
~ William Gibson, Neuromancer

I'm_so_ronery02

Sometime last September, to add to what was already a fairly stressful month, I received a text message from my bank inquiring about some charges that had been made to my credit card. Once I got on the phone with a representative, I was asked if I had spent a few thousand dollars the previous evening at a nightclub in Sofia, Bulgaria. I told them that I hadn't, and that I was furthermore upset that I hadn't even been invited. Two large dropped in a dump like Sofia – it must have been quite the party. The bank made me whole again, but I was left to wonder, like so many other people these days, about the inscrutable question of how my card had been procured and deployed with all the instantaneity allowed by today's global flow of money and data – concepts that are becoming increasingly interchangeable or even undifferentiated. In all likelihood, neither I nor the bank will ever know what happened, and the event was written off simply as a cost of doing business.

This event reproduced itself more recently on a much larger scale. What has become known as the “Sony Hack” is continuing to reverberate across several worlds: computer security, entertainment and even foreign policy, to name a few. Much of the conversation seems to be concerned with the whodunit aspect of things: Who could possibly have had the skills and chutzpah required to not only spirit away approximately 100 terabytes of information of every stripe from underneath the multinational's nose, but then also proceeded to wipe much of the data from the network itself? Even though the breach was noticed on November 24th, it's a good bet that Sony itself still hasn't assessed the full extent of the damage. While things are nowhere near to shaking out, let's consider some of the consequences that have so far followed the smashing of this particular piñata.

Fast forward about, umm, fifteen minutes after November 24th, and we already had our culprit, which could be no one other than North Korea (I guess Iran got a bye because we need them right now in order to fight Islamic State). I find it challenging to believe North Korea was involved. Eleven years ago, Kim père didn't seem quite so phased the last time a Hollywood satire “took him out” – is it possible that Kim fils is such a thin-skinned grasshopper?

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The Imitation Game

by Jonathan Kujawa

In The Imitation Game Benedict Cumberbatch plays the amazing, fascinating, and ultimately tragic Alan Turing. I haven't seen it yet, but the reviews are good and it is bound to be up for a bunch of awards. It certainly does a thorough job of covering the Oscar checklist: Historical setting? Public and personal drama? English accents? Beating the Nazis? Check 'em all!

498px-Turing-statue-Bletchley_10

Turing Statue at Bletchley Park [1].

The basic storyline should be well known to all. Turing was an instrumental part of the UK's successful efforts to break the “unbreakable” German Enigma code. The work of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park is widely acknowledged to have shortened World War II by several years and, consequently, to have saved many thousands of lives. The tragedy of the story is that Turing was convicted in 1952 of “gross indecency” for having a relationship with another man (Arnold Murray). Turing was given the option of either prison or hormone treatments (i.e., chemical castration). He chose the latter. In 1954 Turing died of cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in what was ruled a suicide [2].

Appallingly, it wasn't until 2009 that the UK government apologized for its treatment of Turing. And it wasn't until public pressure during the 2012 centennial of Turing's birth that they considered a pardon. He was finally pardoned on December 24, 2013.

If there was ever a place where one's sexual preferences, gender, race, economic status, religious beliefs, what-have-you should be irrelevant, it should be mathematics. After all, the Pythagorean Theorem doesn't give a hoot about such things. But mathematics is a human endeavor and humans can't seem to help but care about these things. I recently read a quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adihie which put this nicely:

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognizing how we are.

Things continue to improve [3]. It's heartening to note that Turing's treatment by the UK government is absolutely shocking now. And ten years ago I couldn't imagine that gay marriage would now be widespread in the US and on the verge of becoming universal [4].

For mathematicians Turing's place in history was guaranteed long before he helped beat the Nazis. At the age of 24 Turing answered Hilbert's famous “Entscheidungsproblem” (Decision Problem). More importantly, he did it by inventing theoretical computer science; and did it before there were computers!

Hilbert asked the following the following rather innocuous question: Is there a step-by-step procedure which can decisively determine if any given mathematical statement is true or false? More precisely, is there an algorithm which can decide if a given statement can be proven using the rules of first order logic?

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Typical Dreams: A Comparison of Dreams Across Cultures

by Jalees Rehman

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats – from “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Dreams

Have you ever wondered how the content of your dreams differs from that of your friends? How about the dreams of people raised in different countries and cultures? It is not always easy to compare dreams of distinct individuals because the content of dreams depends on our personal experiences. This is why dream researchers have developed standardized dream questionnaires in which common thematic elements are grouped together. These questionnaires can be translated into various languages and used to survey and scientifically analyze the content of dreams. Open-ended questions about dreams might elicit free-form, subjective answers which are difficult to categorize and analyze. Therefore, standardized dream questionnaires ask study subjects “Have you ever dreamed of . . .” and provide research subjects with a list of defined dream themes such as being chased, flying or falling.

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Walking Home

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

PhotoWhen home comes back to you as a calamity, its name appearing with death tolls and gut-wrenching photos of its youngest population, it feels as if the place itself, its memory, is lodged inside you like a bullet. The wound, inflicted by the War-terrorism binary, is a complicated wound, worsening with time. Peshawar, my hometown, has been in its throes for more than three decades. But who cares to remember?

On my way from my son's piano class to the farmer's market, I walk, carrying in my mind images of children in bloodstained green school uniforms, coffins, and the excruciating pain on the faces of the mourners of the Peshawar Attacks. I'm in a daze; grief-struck, isolated from what is around me. I walk bearing voices. In the cacophony of eyewitness accounts, sirens, prayers and news media, I hear the ghosts of my own past with heartbreaking clarity. The voice of a teacher, a sacred thing in my culture, recalled on so many occasions in my life as a migrant, comes back now with an instruction to hide under the desk. I know this voice, not this instruction; it is a different time. Eyewitness accounts are chilling. Pretend to be dead. The child who whispered this to his classmate, hiding under a desk, as bullets were fired, was killed, while his classmate, the eyewitness who followed his advice, survived. He survived, we survived but we only pretend to be alive, weighed down as we are by despair.

The despair of Pakistanis against the tyranny of Taliban on one hand and the tyranny of the US sponsored wars on the other, is countered by faint glimmers of hope, of the people finally protesting institutions, organizing themselves to rally against those who use religion to bully, blackmail and butcher innocents: a movement against the silencing of the ordinary Muslim, the ordinary Pakistani, Muslim or not. The focus of this movement is to restore social justice, to dismantle abusive religious rhetoric and to strengthen the country against international pressure.

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The Implications of Food Access: Ben Lerner’s New Novel and the Park Slope Food Coop

by Kathleen Goodwin

Psfc_1Exaggerated concern about what one eats is predominantly an obsession of the privileged—usually the white, wealthy, and educated. Having the luxury of time to contemplate the calories in your food or the distance it traveled from field to supermarket aisle; and the money to purchase costlier foods that were produced without the aid of pesticides is one of many intractable barriers separating the rich, or at least middle class, from the poor in the United States. In this country many low-income families live in neighborhoods characterized by the USDA as “food deserts” meaning there is a shortage of proximate grocery stores—making it necessary for residents in urban areas to purchase significantly marked-up food at bodegas and generally preventing access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. The obesity epidemic's correlation to income level is a tangible effect of this phenomenon, but even more than the connection between being poor and eating foods high in sugar, fat, and calories is the way attitudes towards food provide a rift along lines of class and race.

This meditation comes from a quick yet pointed scene in Ben Lerner's new “autobiographical novel”, entitled “10:04“. The book considers a few months in the life of a Brooklyn dwelling writer who has written one novel to critical acclaim and now is under pressure to produce another— precisely the situation Lerner found himself in until 10:04's unveiling at the end of this past summer. The narrator is a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, the nation's oldest cooperative grocery store which serves approximately 16,000 people. Presumably Lerner, like myself, is a member of the Coop, because he describes the claustrophobic aisles and the love-hate relationship all members seems to have with it with uncanny accuracy. The narrator of 10:04 is fulfilling one of the work shifts that all members are required to complete every 4 weeks in order to gain access to foods and goods that are predominantly locally grown or produced, organic, non-animal tested, non-genetically engineered, and minimally packaged; and not marked up at the same rates as for-profit commercial grocery stores. The protagonist describes a conversation he overhears while sorting dried mango: Another Coop member is explaining why she pulled her son, Lucas, out of a public school first-grade to attend a private one because the “junk food and soda” his fellow classmates consumed caused unruly behavior that detracted from Lucas's education. The narrator reflects:

“It was the kind of exchange…with which I'd grown familiar, a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were—for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren't really their fault—compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside …This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism—ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.—in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality”

This small scene, most likely based on actuality, brings up many of the complicated factors that permeate America's unequal society.

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When Is a Meal Like a Van Gogh? When the Chef is Telling Secrets

by Dwight Furrow

Atelier crenn

Atelier Crenn A Creation of Chef Dominique Crenn

In the humdrum course of daily life, we tend to ignore most of the objects we encounter. We focus only on what will break down or threaten us if we aren’t paying attention and neglect anything that is in its proper place benignly performing its function. Such inattention is a shame but inevitable. We wouldn't survive for long if we maintained a child's fascina tion with what can be taken for granted.

One of the functions of art is to resist that inattention and sustain, if only at very special moments, a fragile fascination with the commonplace. The history of art is full of examples of works that illuminate the ordinary: The Rembrandt portrait that reveals a little-known character of its subject; or beams of light from an undisclosed source in a Caravaggio that reveals God's presence in an everyday scene. But it is especially true of modern art. The still-lifes of Cezanne, the ready-mades of Duchamp, the bricolage of postmodernism, all exemplify one prevalent theme of the art of the past 150 years—the commonplace is extraordinary.

Van Gogh was especially gifted at wresting revelation from the commonplace. In explaining why he left Paris for Arles in Provence, Van Gogh wrote that he wanted to “paint the South” to help others “see” it. Convinced that previous painters had failed in this task, he painted roughly 328 canvases of the area in a little over two years, a body of work which included 14 canvases of trees in bloom in the fields near Arles, a number of paintings of the Alpilles hills just outside of town, and 12 paintings of wheat fields visible from his window in the asylum, to which he consigned himself after cutting off his ear.

Trees in bloom, distant hills, wheat fields? These are commonplace objects we might superficially admire while on a leisurely walk, but they typically escape our focused attention. Yet, Van Gogh was convinced there is something to see in these objects, which our ordinary modes of perception cannot easily discern and which require an artist of his stature to make visible. (I hope cutting off one's ear is not a requirement for such an ability to see.)

What does Van Gogh see in the fields and hills near Arles that others miss?

Read more »

The Art World’s Patron Satan

Christopher Glazek in the New York Times Magazine:

ScreenHunter_918 Jan. 04 22.40Since 2007, [Stefan] Simchowitz has sponsored and promoted roughly two dozen young artists. In addition to arranging sales for their work, Simchowitz often provides them with a studio, purchases their materials, covers their rent and subsidizes their living expenses. Perhaps most consequentially, he also posts photos of them and their work on his influential Instagram account, thereby creating what he calls “heat” and “velocity” for the artists he supports, who have included market darlings like the Colombian Oscar Murillo, the Japanese-American Parker Ito and the Brazilian Christian Rosa, all under the age of 35. But Simchowitz’s methods call down the opprobrium of art-world stalwarts, who are contemptuous of his taste, suspicious of his motives and fearful of his network’s potential to subvert the intricate hierarchies that have regulated art for centuries.

Reputations in the art world are forged over many years across countless fairs, openings, reviews and dinners. Although laypeople may look at a $30 million Richter and compare it to splatters from a second grader, Richter’s prices are determined not by chance but by the elaborate academic, journalistic and institutional infrastructure the art world has built to mete out prizes and anoint the next generation of cultural torchbearers. The collector class has traditionally come from the very top of the wealth spectrum and has included people looking to trade money for social prestige by participating in the art world’s stately rituals. Over the last few years, though, a new class of speculators has emerged with crasser objectives: They are less interested in flying to Basel to attend a dinner than in riding the economic wave that has caused the market for emerging contemporary art to surge in the past decade.

More here.

The search for truth in a graveyard for boys

Ben Montgomery in Miami Herald:

BC-LOST-BONES-PART1-TBT_01The pressure on Kimmerle, 40, was intense. The associate professor of forensic anthropology was scorned by some academics, watched by Panhandle lawmakers. County officials complained about the bad publicity. The local newspaper publisher called her work “this greed motivated waste of money.” Some locals even wanted her arrested.

In town, she noticed the sideways glances. Her colleague swore somebody was following her. They didn’t know whom they could trust.

Kimmerle knew the risks. What if she didn’t find anything? What if it was a waste of money?

They started with shovels, then trowels. The first hole they’d dug was empty, nothing but Jackson County clay. But, now, on the third day of digging, a graduate student got Kimmerle’s attention. Her eyes were wide.

“Want to come take a look?”

Kimmerle descended into the open grave.

The months to come would bring protests and press conferences, more threats and a massive search for a second cemetery. Kimmerle would come close to breaking. She’d find more bodies than anybody expected. She’d find an empty casket. She’d find a hundred more questions.

Now, though, in early September 2013, at the bottom of the grave, she brushed away the earth.

There in the dirt was a perfect set of baby teeth.

Read more here.

Obama May Not Be the President Progressives Hoped For, But He’s Still Getting Lots Done

Steven Rosenfeld in AlterNet:

Barack_obama_cornel_westWhat a difference six years makes! When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, people were literally dancing in the streets—as was the case in Philadelphia. Today, as Obama appears to be finding new muscles to flex in office, a great many of his earliest enthusiasts, who have been disappointed for years, are wondering if the candidate they believed in is coming to life. “High office shouldn’t be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better,” wrote economist Paul Krugman in Rolling Stone,in a high-profile piece reconsidering and defending Obama's presidency. “Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes.” Krugman’s judgment came before Obama announced sweeping executive actions on immigration, protecting from deportation 40 percent of undocumented immigrants and single-handedly overturning five decades of anti-Cuba policy. Other positive assessments have ensued, causing speculation about a new and more powerful Obama.Obama seized the agenda, saw his initiative dominating the front pages and television news discussions and sent Republicans in Congress scrambling,” wrote the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman, about the Cuba initiative. “This could well be the template for much of the next two years.”

While many pundits are focusing on the future, a more pressing question arises. Have progressives been missing the boat on Obama’s accomplishments in office?

More here.