How fences could save the planet

Mark Stevenson in the New Statesman:

Kids-earth Nobody would blame you for being pessimistic about the future. After all, if you listen to the media (and, it seems, anybody over 25) we're all going to hell in the proverbial handcart, as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – economic meltdown, climate change, terrorism and, who else, Simon Cowell – bear down on us.

But I have news. Some people are rather fed up of this narrative and are quietly getting on with solving the grand challenges our planet faces, using both new technologies and forgotten wisdom. Their mantra? “Cheer up, it might just happen.” I've spent the past 18 months researching a book about these people.

One of them is Tony Lovell, an accountant from Australia, where farming has become synonymous with drought. A decade of low rainfall, heatwaves and wildfires has scorched much of the land. Australians call it “the Big Dry” and it means that when the rains come – as they are doing now on the eastern seaboard – water runs over the parched surface, resulting in devastating floods. Many farms survive on “drought assistance” handed out by the government. Rural suicide is depressingly common.

Lovell thinks he has the answer. At a climate-change conference in Manchester, I find him talking about a new method of farming. “This is a typical ranch in Mexico,” he explains, showing an image of a terracotta dust bowl with bare, compacted soil. Then he puts up a second image of lush green vegetation. “This is the ranch next door. Same soil, same rainfall. These pictures were taken on the same day.”

More here.



Marital Deafness

Scott Adams in his blog:

Being married is a lot like being deaf. If you hear the same person talking day-after-day, you literally lose the ability to hear what that person is saying. I will give you two examples from my own life. Both are true. This one happened last week:

Shelly: Do you want some carrot cake?

Me: Hurricane? What hurricane?

In that particular case, we eventually got to the bottom of it, but only because Shelly needed an answer. I estimate that half of the time she says lamp, I hear doorknob, and it doesn't really matter so we go on with our lives. I might spend a few seconds confused about the larger point, but I shake it off.

Within a day of the carrot cake incident, I made an offhand comment to Shelly to the effect that she might enjoy a certain sport. That conversation went like this:

Me: That's your new game, honey.

Shelly: What did you call me?

Me: (slower and louder) I SAID, “THAT'S YOUR NEW GAME, HONEY.”

Shelly: Oh. I thought you called me Jimmy Bean

Me: Why would I call you Jimmy Dean

Shelly: Not Dean, Bean. Jimmy Bean.

Me: Why would I call you Jimmy Bean?

Shelly: That's what I wondered too.

Me: No, I said, “That's your new game, honey.”

Shelly: What's my new game?

Me: I forget.

As I'm sure you've learned, it's impossible to speak to a spouse if he or she is near running water, or using power equipment, or concentrating on something else, or eating something crunchy, or wondering if the squeak in the distance is the cat dying, or there is a child within a hundred yards. Amazingly, that covers 90% of every conversation you might attempt at home.

Recently I discovered that spouses, like computers, must be booted up before they can hear what you say.

More here.

Darkness on the Edge of the Universe

Brian Greene in the New York Times:

16greeneimg-articleInline The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing — literally — ancient times.

During the past decade, as observations of such ancient starlight have provided deep insight into the universe’s past, they have also, surprisingly, provided deep insight into the nature of the future. And the future that the data suggest is particularly disquieting — because of something called dark energy.

This story of discovery begins a century ago with Albert Einstein, who realized that space is not an immutable stage on which events play out, as Isaac Newton had envisioned. Instead, through his general theory of relativity, Einstein found that space, and time too, can bend, twist and warp, responding much as a trampoline does to a jumping child. In fact, so malleable is space that, according to the math, the size of the universe necessarily changes over time: the fabric of space must expand or contract — it can’t stay put.

More here.

When Self-Knowledge Is Only the Beginning

Richard Freidman in The New York Times:

Men It is practically an article of faith among many therapists that self-understanding is a prerequisite for a happy life. Insight, the thinking goes, will free you from your psychological hang-ups and promote well-being. Perhaps, but recent experience makes me wonder whether insight is all it’s cracked up to be. Not long ago, I saw a young man in his early 30s who was sad and anxious after being dumped by his girlfriend for the second time in three years. It was clear that his symptoms were a reaction to the loss of a relationship and that he was not clinically depressed.

“I’ve been over this many times in therapy,” he said. He had trouble tolerating any separation from his girlfriends. Whether they were gone for a weekend or he was traveling for work, the result was always the same: a painful state of dysphoria and anxiety. He could even trace this feeling back to a separation from his mother, who had been hospitalized for several months for cancer treatment when he was 4. In short, he had gained plenty of insight in therapy into the nature and origin of his anxiety, but he felt no better. What therapy had given this young man was a coherent narrative of his life; it had demystified his feelings, but had done little to change them.

Was this because his self-knowledge was flawed or incomplete? Or is insight itself, no matter how deep, of limited value?

More here.

Monday, January 17, 2011

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather

By Alyssa Pelish

Comic2-1034

I. What We Talk About

“It would seem that the variability of the weather was purposely devised to furnish mankind with unfailing material for conversation.” –Emily Post, Etiquette

It can’t be a difficult thing to compile a commonplace book on that most commonplace of topics, the weather. (In fact, a quick search at Amazon reveals at least six such efforts, including three variations of a Webster’s book of quotations, an illustrated book of Yankee weather proverbs, and a significant portion of the Pooh Book of Quotations.) As a fact of life, it’s inescapable (Wallace Stevens: “What is there here but weather…?”), as a conversation topic it’s failsafe (see Emily Post’s sincere advice, above), and as a failsafe conversation topic it is and has been poked and poked fun at by linguists, anthropologists, and the generally sardonic (Samuel Johnson: “It is uncommonly observed, that when two Englishman meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.”). But despite its completely talked-out status, the banality of talking about it and of talking about talking about it (or maybe because of it?), I can’t stop thinking about how we talk about the weather.

For a number of years, I wanted to believe that there were hidden depths to our talk about the weather. Of course, such small talk does contain an accepted subtext: phatic communion is what it’s called, coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski while living with the Melanesian tribes of Eastern New Guinea, where he equitably observed how “a mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing room, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. Enquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things – all such are exchanged…not in order to express any thought.” He finally concluded that “each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment other.” So yes, small talk is a social gesture; it is connective tissue, not content – and weather comprises a substantial part of it. But still it seemed to me that passing talk of sunlight and snowfall and heat and humidity was different from other small talk. Or, at least, I needed to believe it.

Generations of parent-child relationships subsist on phatic communion: there may be real family feeling there, but inconsequential speech is the major mode of communication. With my father, it was always the weather. I was contemptuous of this in college, where I made a show of searching for profound conversation, while my father unfailingly tagged a report of the local weather to the documents he forwarded me, or inquired about the temperature where I was, three hours south. And I was amused by it in my mid-twenties, when he fondly informed me that, first thing every morning, he checked the forecast in the distant cities where my brother and I lived. But finally, when I was going through a depressive period and, consequently, checked the predicted hours of sunlight each day the way a diabetic monitors her blood sugar, I began to wonder about this consistent exchange of local forecasts that still largely comprised our regular if brief phone conversations.

In a piece Samuel Johnson wrote for the Idler – the one whose first line everybody who writes anything about the weather quotes—he castigates the idea that one’s mood – indeed, one’s very constitution – could be affected or determined by the weather. “Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason,” he very scathingly writes, “than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind.” He dismisses such convictions as if they were so much astrology.[1]

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The Incantatory City: Kuru-Kuru Svaha

by Gautam Pemmaraju

I was once arrested, detained for a few hours, and then let off with a malevolent bubblegum pop song stuck in my head. The very first time I had the occasion to visit an after hours club in Bombay, in mid 1997, having ventured out but a few times with work colleagues, the place was raided by the very same cop who had asked us beforehand if we wished to enter. As the hundred odd people there were being let out one-by-one, under the watchful gaze of two male cops and the lone policewoman clad in a khaki sari, a small group of ten men, including yours truly, was detained and led to Vile Parle police station. At that hour, 3 AM, I was too bemused, bleary-eyed and somewhat tipsy to grasp the situation; it was only later I surmised that my appearance, a poor advocate of my peaceable nature, proved to be my undoing and, unsurprisingly, my turpitude. Consequently, I found myself amidst a bunch of pimps, social outcasts, suspect criminal types and baleful degenerates. After a few hours of erratic verbal abuse, nothing too harsh I must concede, a few slaps directed at a defiant detainee, an inqilaabi 1in my mind, we were corralled into the Sub-Inspector’s room to be personally questioned (and abused) by him for a bit, and thereupon lined-up outside the little courtyard-facing cubicle where the dastardly arresting officer was seated to note down our contact details. Abdul, the only other ‘media type’ in the group and a true Bombay chaava, a filmic fast-talking, smooth hustler, who had characteristically skipped ahead, emerged with a raffish smirk and ushered me in. I respectfully furnished the sparse details of my recent Bombay residency. As I exited the room, expectant friends in the courtyard watching on, the cop, a mere step behind, proceeded to sing the hook and chorus of the hit single by the Danish-Norwegian group Aqua, I’m A Barbie Girl,2 to me.

In many more ways than I can articulate here, Bombay/Mumbai is incantatory in tone and spirit. Its PRAYER1 emanations, at once surreal, primordial and metronomic, cast many a curious spell on its residents. The perceptual city3, with its countless sensorial attributes, is richly textured, particularly to those who seek to ‘imagine’ it. I posed this proposition to a few people and several descriptions came forth – transient, multiple interlinked realities, portal, hypnotic city, fast-paced, dark clouds, drum, percussive, bubbling cauldron, organic entity, fickle friend, tempestuous lover, etc. One friend said she and the city conversed. Another described it as a city of ‘practical magic’ wherein its residents conduct and receive discrete, accumulative acts of magic – from its many temples, churches, mosques, dargahs, to its cricket pitches, empty mills4 (no longer one might add), quarter-system bars, financial markets, race track, gambling joints, and entertainment industry. The promise of lucre is invoked alongside cautionary chants – mayanagari, the illusory city, is to then be negotiated by propitiating the appropriate ‘gods’ and the consequential fortune if any, it is advised, is to be put to good use. Mumbadevi, the patron goddess of the city (and its original residents, the koli fisherfolk) and mythical tamer of the marauding demon Mumbaraka, steadfastly keeps her divine glance upon the city – the money made here must remain here, it is often proverbially chanted. At a recent book launch, when one of the panelists declared to the audience that ‘Bombay smells of sex and money’, it begged the protest of other formidable claimants: what about the smell of rotting fish and public defecation?

The incantations, inward and voiced, speculative and substantive, imagined and real, visual, aural and olfactory alike, constitute a literary construct of the city: the very city itself as an incantation. The city as a chant.

A fabulously imagined example of this construct, irradiated with sharp original thought, slick irony and deft technique is Kuru-Kuru Svaha, Hindi writer/journalist/screenwriter, Manohar Shyam Joshi’s uttaradhunik, post-modernist masterpiece5.

The idea is held within the book’s very title – a common concluding phrase to many Vedic mantras, particularly used in Tantrik ritual, and often found in certain forms of spells known as Vashikaran Mantra which are cast in order to wrest control over a person, lovers and enemies alike.

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Grasping for the Lunatic Fringe

by Akim Reinhardt

Slave Irons It wasn’t so very long ago that some Americans held people as slaves, other human beings as their own private property, as if that person were a horse or a chair, to do with, to use, abuse, exploit, beat, and rape as they pleased. What’s more, until the late 1840s most Americans thought that slavery was acceptable. The great majority found themselves somewhere along a spectrum that at one end actually exalted slavery as a positive thing, a benefit to black people they deemed radically inferior, and at the other end said, Well, it’s a real shame, and I certainly don’t condone it or want it where I live, but what’s done is done, and I guess it isn’t the worst thing in the world, and anyway there’s nothing we can do about it now, so that’s that. And in between those two ends of the spectrum rested any number of justifications and rationalizations that people used to explain, excuse, praise, rationalize, or simply accept the reality of human bondage in their nation.

Abolition Map Black slaves had been owned and held in every English colony prior to the Revolution and in every U.S. state after it, the practice only ending for good in the North during the early 19th century. Indeed, before the sectional crisis that began to emerge in the 1840s, the acceptance of slavery was so widespread that there was even a small number of black slaveholders, free blacks who themselves had purchased a slave or two.

Headgear Yet here we are, in our post-civil rights world, and we find the idea of slavery to be repugnant, horrific, and wretched. How could our ancestors have found this acceptable on any level, much less have engaged in it (Obviously I’m speaking as white person here.)? So it is left to us, as future generations, to try to make sense of it and, inevitably, to judge it. To cast our squinty gaze upon them and say: What the fuck. How on earth could you have been so incredibly fucked up? I just don’t get it. You people were fucking monsters.

Or there’s the whole process of murdering Indians and stealing their lands. Let’s judge that one. Pretty easy from this distance, huh?

What about the Holocaust? Care to take a whack at whether that was really, really wrong? Go ahead. My money says you’ll agree with us.

I study the past. It’s what I do for a living. Like any historian, I strive to understand the past in a historical context and on its own terms. But as a human being, I inevitably use my own Let Us Be Brotherspresentist sense of morality and ethics when passing judgment on it. And here’s the thing. Slavery and genocides, those are easy for us now. Yeah, super wrong, we get it. But who would you have been back then, in the moment? We all want to believe that we would have been the person working to free slaves through the underground railroad, or living peaceably with Indians, or smuggling Jews out of Europe. But guess what? You wouldn’t have. Or at least, it’s not very likely. No, odds are, you would’ve been some douche bag who justified it with mealy mouthed excuses, or laid low and avoided talking about such unpleasantness. Why? I’ll tell you why.

Because when crazy shit is the norm, the lunatic fringe are the ones who embrace the right choice. If crazy is normal, then the right answer seems crazy. I’ll say it again. If crazy is the norm, then opposing it seems crazy.

Are you crazy? Are you John Brown on the fringe? I mean really on the fringe.

You know who the abolitionists were? Not to paint with too broad of a brush here, but a lot of them were religious fanatics. They were the crazies, the radicals, the ones that everyone else pointed to and said: Hey, you’re really nuts. What the hell’s wrong with you? Knock it off already. Abolitionists were the ones who regular people mocked, jeered, and cursed. They were the outsiders of their day, the lunatic fringe of the early 19th century. Slavery was normal, so a society that largely accepted slavery labeled them as crazy.

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Telling Tales

Obama Although, these days, my children would normally prefer to read to themselves than to have me read them a bedtime story, they both love it when I tell them stories of my family. Both my parents died before my daughters were born and so their only connection to their grandparents is through the people I conjure up with my stories. I tell them the stories my mother told me; sitting on my bed when I was home sick, she would tell me about her fights with her brother, about the family vacations to Butlins, a somewhat cheesy English vacation resort, and other stories that I would make her repeat over and over. And now my children ask me to tell them these stories, even though they can repeat them almost word for word.

Stories are important. They help us frame who we are, personally, culturally, professionally, morally. When we call up a friend and tell our latest love woes, we're telling a story; when we go for a job interview, we tell the story of our career so far. There are many types of stories, but one kind is a story that creates and shares a vision of the future, aiming to inspire people to follow the storyteller. As Steve Denning quotes in his book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, “Winning leaders create and use future stories to help people break away from the familiar present and venture boldly ahead to create a better future…they help others understand why and what they must do to get there.” Denning gives examples of some of the most powerful uses of future storytelling, Martin Luther King's, “I have a dream” speech and Winston Churchill's, “We shall fight them on the beaches.”

I listened to President Obama's speech on Wednesday night in Arizona; it was inspiring, moving, and heartfelt as he wove the victims' stories into a compelling narrative. He told the story of the 9-year old victim, Christine Taylor Green, urging the American people to envision a different kind of future, a future where “…our democracy is as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it.” It was a powerful speech that, while seeming to sidestep partisan politics, instead urging all sides to abandon “the usual plane of point scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle”, extremely effectively scored huge political points – of course. Obama was presidential, an inspirational leader.

This speech was a vivid reminder of why people voted for him in 2008. Yet, what really struck me was this thought: clearly, this man knows how to use storytelling to inspire and lead, so why didn't he do a better job of this selling healthcare and TARP (amongst other, wildly unpopular policies). Don't get me wrong, I know he tried, but somehow he seemed to never manage to strike the same notes that he did the other day. And he should have been able to.

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Where it hurts

Morphine now!

When most people think of back problems they think of “slipped disks” or muscle pain. That's not what has caused my stepbrother Mark's troubles. His official diagnosis is degenerative disk disease. That means exactly what it sounds like—the disks between his vertebrae that are supposed to protect the nerves and bones are slowly deteriorating. The MRI of the area makes it look like he has a broken back: it's full of jagged discontinuities; the bones in his back are pushing straight into his nerves.

This is what has led to his disability. He has trouble walking, sitting, sleeping, doing almost any activity for any length of time—not to mention living with excruciating pain. In addition, he has arthritis in his feet that has become increasingly burdensome and painful in its own right. As I mentioned in my last column, he's finally receiving some disability payments from the government, but they are barely enough to survive on. Still, the Social Security Administration requires regular visits to a doctor to confirm that the disabling condition persists. A recurring feature of Mark's doctor visits is a urine test. There's nothing about the treatment of his back problems or arthritis that actually requires a urine sample; the test is for drugs. No, Mark's not some kind of recovering drug addict. His doctor is obligated by the government to make sure he's taking his pain medication and not selling it for profit.

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My Botfly, Myself

When I was in my mid-twenties, I visited Costa Rica as an ecotourist. One of the more memorable field experiences was watching a small snake consume a large toad over a period of several hours. I photographed the progression of this feast at a cost of just a few mosquito bites on my head,… or so I thought. As it turned out, the snake and mosquitoes were not the only ones dining that night.

Two weeks after my return home some of the mosquito bites had not gone away. Then one morning, I felt a small movement in the bite on my right temple. Weird. Maybe I imagined it. A while later, more movement. Definitely not my imagination. I looked closely in a mirror. At the center of the bite was a small opening with a snorkel periodically emerging from it! I had read about bot flies but never imagined becoming a host.

Bot flies have an interesting life cycle. The offspring must be deposited on living mammals or birds, but the adults, being large, noisy fliers, chase down quiet-flying mosquitoes and lay their eggs on them to avoid getting swatted. When the mosquitoes get a blood meal, the eggs, in response to the host's body heat, hatch and drop onto the host. Then they burrow into a hair follicle or sweat gland, where they begin feeding. The maggots or “bots” traverse their new home with alternating contractions of rows of hooks that encircle their bodies. As parasites go, they are usually pretty good guests despite dining on your flesh. They are careful to eliminate their waste outside their burrow, which they keep antiseptic. After a few weeks of feeding, they crawl out, drop off their host, and pupate in the soil. Some time later, an adult fly emerges to mate and repeat the cycle.

Botflies-usda

My thoughts alternated between excitement and revulsion. Fearing a highly visible scar, I squeezed the “bite” and the tiny maggot popped out like a zit. So much for that.

The next day, I noticed a now familiar movement in the upper, right rear portion of my head. This area was well concealed by hair and I thought even if this things takes a big hunk of flesh, no one will see it unless I become extraordinarily bald (so far this prognostication has held, if only just barely,…). Could I nurture my guest to pupation? As a male I thought this is probably the only opportunity I will ever have for another organism nourish itself on my living flesh. I imagined the movements of the maggot in my head were analogous to the kicking that pregnant women feel from their developing fetuses. It was thrilling, humbling, and a little alarming to suddenly be a link in the food chain rather than its terminal end.

For the next week or so, I proudly showed off my offspring to anyone who was interested. Most people were horrified but a few understood my motivation. Unfortunately, as the maggot grew it became much more active and painful. An occasional nibble could make my eyes water. Eventually it began waking me if I rolled over on it in my sleep. At that point I decided to end my experiment as a host.

Luckily, one of my housemates was from Brasil where botflies are fairly common and their removal is routine. There they hold a piece of meat over the fly's breathing hole until it begins suffocating and backs out into the meat. Alternatively, they cover the hole with Vaseline and sieze the maggot as it backs out. We tried this latter technique, and as the maggot emerged, my other housemate grabbed its snorkel with tweezers and pulled. It reflexively withdrew deeper into my scalp. A tug of war ensued and the rows of hooks dug into my flesh and felt like a hot poker. The inch long maggot, slowly stretched to over four inches before finally letting go. Note: I got lucky, because if the larva tears apart, whatever remains behind can lead to a nasty infection. As a single drop of blood oozed from my scalp, I preserved the bot in vodka.

As a result of my experience, I became much more interested in parasitology as a discipline within biology, and also began to think a bit more about humanity's place in the world. For several years afterwards, I would occasionally get tingling feelings where the botfly had once dined: A reminder that, to much of life on the planet, we are merely food.

Douglas Adams and the “Grand” Reflection

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A Short History of DNA

Douglas Noel Adams was a best-selling British writer, born in 1952. (As you may have noticed, he had the distinct pleasure of having “DNA” as his initials.) He studied literature at Cambridge, UK, after being extended an invite on the basis of his essay writing. It appears he wanted to be part of the great university to join the the Footlights, an exclusive comedy club that was the springboard for many British comedians. There were various incredible opportunities that flew into Adams’ life, such as: being noticed by Python, Graham Chapman; being one of two non-Pythons to get a writing credit in Monty Python; performing with the likes of Pink Floyd (my favourite band) because he was friends with the incredible David Gilmour; and so on. More importantly, for us, was a radio-series he pitched to BBC Radio 4 in 1977, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

His Hitchhiker series was not constrained to only one medium, of course. It began as this radio-show, then leaked into other mediums: a television series, a stage show, a three part DC Comics series, a computer game, and a major film. More importantly it became a series of books. Being bored easily by sounds, the written-version (and computer game) is my favourite medium of Adams’ universal message of weirdness, brilliance and the overall irony of existence in an uncaring universe.

The overarching story in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (now shortened to H2G2) is about Arthur Dent who is a dreary British Earthman (a tautology to many). Dent is friends with Ford Prefect – who is not in fact from Guildford, as he claims but “a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.” In the beginning of the story, Earth is destroyed by horrible aliens called Vogons – who appear to be based on any Home Affairs Department anywhere in the world. They are making way for a “hyperspace bypass”; an event that mirrors Dent’s troubles in the beginning of the books where his own house is about to be destroyed to make way for a bypass. (The idea of mirroring houses and planets will return later in this essay.)

From there, Dent finds himself transported all over the universe experiencing adventures that involve: hunting couches, the true nature of humanity, the bored and postmodernist ruler of the Universe (not god), god’s Final Message to his Creation, the evils of making tea, time-travel, and, famously, a cynical bowl of petunias and the first and final thoughts of a sperm whale.

We discover fascinating details about humans in the series. For example, the Guide tells us something rather interesting about human arrogance: “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Yet, what makes these books and the whole series so important is the reflection that is thrust upon us as a species. Adams manages to deflate the petty worries and doubts of everyday human concerns by juxtaposing it to the movements and thoughts of greater, more intelligent alien-life forms: Beings who can create planets, talk to the controller of the universe, go to different dimensions and times, and so on. But throughout, he still manages to compact everyday human concerns but mock them at the same time.

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The Spooky Silence Of Sarah Palin — Why, For Four Long Days After The Giffords Shooting, She STFU

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

We-came-unarmed-this-time So some crazy young man (they're always men) shoots a Congresswoman pointblank through the head and sprays thirty more bullets from a gun clip he bought at Walmart, killing a 9-year-old girl and five others in Arizona, “the mecca for prejudice and bigotry” according to the sheriff of Tucson … and for four long days, the biggest mouth in American politics was as MIA as an atheist in a foxhole.

How come?

Let me tell you why.

The only thing Sarah Palin could've said that would've really pricked the nation's ears was this: “I wish I hadn't put out that map with the cross-hairs, with one of them targeting the district represented by Gabby Giffords. And I wish I hadn't talked about 'don't retreat, reload' in a political context. Gun talk and threats around guns don't belong in politics. We can agree to disagree, angrily if we wish, but we shouldn't be threatening each other. I'm sorry I added to the gun talk.”

Unfortunately Sarah Palin can't do this. Because if she did, she would lose face with her constituency. They're ALL about guns and gun talk, and they think only wuzzes apologize. She can't disappoint them. Mama Grizzlies don't apologize. They attack.

Sarah Palin is screwed by her own persona. She's boxed in by her own political posture. With no mea in her culpa, her pitbull persona has lipstick but no grace. So she has nothing worthwhile to say. Gun talk is what she is all about. How can she walk away from what she is, and what people who like her are all about?

The Tea Party extremists that Sarah Palin represents are all about threats. All about taking guns to political rallies. All about watering the tree of liberty with blood. All about taking up arms against our tyrannical government. All about “Second Amendment remedies,” i.e. using the Constitutional right to bear arms to get what they want. All about “we came unarmed — this time.” All about war and macho frontier posturing.

Sarah Palin stands for something all right: the victory of right-wing dumbfuckery in America. We're dysfunctional because we have more influential idiots in our nation than any other industrialized nation has in theirs. You have to ask yourself what kind of a nation elevates dumb-brunette loons like Michele Bachmann into our government and raging moonbats like Glenn Beck into our punditry and considers a celebrity airhead like Sarah Palin a viable presidential candidate. Anywhere else they'd be laughed out of public life, but here they're heroes. It's like the Attack of the Zombies, or the Rule of White Trash. Half the nation is not embarrassed by these blithering lunatics, and the other half puts them on TV.

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Sunday, January 16, 2011

The Intellectual at Play in the Wider World

Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times Book Review:

02mishra-articleInline I don’t think of myself as a literary critic. I write about novels and short stories. But I am reluctant to describe what I do as “literary criticism,” as I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text — whether narrative techniques or quality of prose — and its aesthetic pleasures, to engage with the author’s worldview, implied or otherwise, and his or her location in history (of nation-states and empires, as well as of literary forms).

This kind of reading came naturally to me in the new, very poor and relatively inchoate Asian society in which I grew up. When I first began to read literary fiction I could assume neither a clear backdrop of political and social stability, nor a confident knowledge of the world and assumptions of national power. Everything had to be figured out, and literature was the primary means of clarifying a bewilderingly large universe of meanings and contexts.

Much of my self-education was assisted by American writers like Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, F. W. Dupee and Irving Howe. Some of these were literary critics, but they were, above all, public intellectuals (a species whose irrelevance and powerlessness Alfred Kazin seems to be mourning — rather more than the demise of a critical genre — when he writes, “We are rushing into our future so fast that no one can say who is making it, or what is being made; all we know is that we are not making it, and there is no one, no matter what his age is, who does not in his heart feel that events have been taken out of his hands”).

Coming of age during and after the progressive era, when intellectual argument and political activism promised to reshape America’s future, these critics took it for granted that literature was among the main signs of the times, and subject to the inquiring gaze of history and politics.

In this presumption, they were supported not so much by the Marxian ideologues of the 1930s as by the great realist novelists, from Stendhal to Tolstoy and Mann, who could not have written their most mature works without grappling with the political and moral challenges of their day.

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Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?

Jesse Bering in Slate:

ScreenHunter_08 Jan. 16 21.40 Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that “adaptive” does not mean “justifiable,” but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, “No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape.”

The unfortunate demonization of this brand of inquiry is rooted in the fallacy of biological determinism (according to which men are programmed by their genes to rape and have no free will to do otherwise) and the naturalistic fallacy (that because rape is natural it must be acceptable). These are resoundingly false assumptions that reveal a profound ignorance of evolutionary biology. Yet the purpose of the remaining article is not to belabor that tired ideological dispute, but to look at things from the female genetic point of view. We've heard the argument that men may have evolved to sexually assault women. Have women evolved to protect themselves from men?

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Kenneth Tong: The Interview (or Portrait of a Sociopath)

Johann Hari in his blog (was also published in the London Evening Standard):

550w_bb10_kenneth Women should “get thin or die trying,” and you can “never start too young.” It is better for a girl to “risk [her] life dieting than be sub-par by being a plus-size.” Remember: “Hunger hurts but starving works.” When an ultra-wealthy but forgotten former British reality show Big Brother contestant called Kenneth Tong started Tweeting these sentiments – and worse – a fortnight ago, a Twitter-storm broke. Everyone from Rhianna to Gordon Ramsay told their followers he was a dangerous fool, but Tong gathered tens of thousands of young girls who followed him. He became the most discussed subject on Twitter in the world for three days. His message? “The words lunch, breakfast, and dinner should now mean nothing to you, you have eaten enough for a lifetime. Stop. You are disgusting.”

Then Tong claimed it was all a hoax – just an hour after I interviewed him. In our long discussion he passionately defended every word he had said, but when I told him that his arguments could kill young girls and expose him to serious legal liability, he visibly began to panic. When I spoke to him on the phone later in the day, after his ‘revelation’, he said “it was dangerous ground we were treading on, I can see that now” and begged me not to publish his comments. So I don’t believe it was a hoax at all – but that he was finally scared off by the legal implications of what he was saying and doing. You can judge for yourself.

I meet Tong at a dingy restaurant in Chinatown in London. He is a short man in a gray suit who manages to look both baby-faced and wizened at the same time. He is lined with great wodges of bling: a sparkling silver necklace hangs from his neck and gold flashes from his wrists. He hurries up to me and smirks: “I am the most hated man in Britain!”

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Izzeldin Abuelaish: I Shall Not Hate

Rachel Cooke in The Observer:

9780307358882 For the duration of the war, the Israeli government allowed no journalists to enter Gaza; they could only gather on the border, and listen to the shelling. But Abuelaish knew plenty of Israelis – thanks to his work as an infertility specialist, he had worked in several Israeli hospitals – and among his many friends on the other side was Shlomi Eldar, a reporter for Israel's Channel 10. Eldar began calling Abuelaish late every afternoon to ask what had happened during the course of the day. Live on air, his friend would then describe the scene – from the vantage point of his living room window, he could see entire neighbourhoods being obliterated – for the benefit of viewers of the evening news show. Abuelaish knew that his audience was not likely to be particularly sympathetic to his point of view. Most Israelis believed the Gazans had brought this crisis on themselves. He also knew that there was a chance that someone on his own side would take against his addressing Israel, and that this might involve reprisals against his family, but he kept taking the calls. “With my voice in their ears, the Israelis couldn't entirely ignore the cost to the Palestinians of their military action.”

More here.