Chakaia Booker. Conversion. 2006
Rubber tire, wood, steel pipe with fittings.
Current show at De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, MA here.
Humane Terror, Sacrificial Horror: Suicide Bombing and Contemporary Global Politics
By Omar Sarwar
As part of my doctoral studies, I have written extensively about the the historiography of the global jihad movement. In the interest of conciseness, however, I present here a long overdue comparative review of what I believe to be the most provocative, controversial work on the global jihad, Faisal Devji’s The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (2008), and Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing (2006). My hope is that this analysis will offer a starting point on this website for further discussion about the moral and political logic of jihadi violence.
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The greatest merit of Devji’s earlier work on the global jihad, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005), is its elucidation of al-Qaeda’s eclectic approach to Islamic theological and juridical traditions, the transnational and global horizons of its militancy, and its ambition to achieve globality by way of the media. In his latest monograph, Devji succeeds in affirming the existence of a global arena bereft of its own political institutions but within which al-Qaeda acquires force and legitimacy through its search for a politics that takes humanity as its object. Nonetheless, he fails to prove the ethical (or suprapolitical) sovereignty of suicide attacks, something crucial to the peculiarly modern coloration of the jihad.
Investigating the globalization and democratization of the jihad movement and the supremely ethical (as opposed to political) character of suicide bombings, Devji holds that al-Qaeda’s militants regard Muslim suffering as a humanitarian cause that, “like climate change or nuclear proliferation, must be addressed globally or not at all.”[1] The search for humanity lies at the heart of militant action and those who profess allegiance to al-Qaeda invoke humanity as both the agent and object of an as yet unrealized global politics.[2] They believe that Muslims are not members of a religious group but “the contemporary representatives of human suffering.”[3] Thus, Devji argues, al-Qaeda’s militants target their enemies not for maintaining heathen religious beliefs or atheistic secular convictions, but for “betraying their own vision of a world subject to human rights.”[4] Claims about humanity are far more central to militant rhetoric than the scriptural material whose medieval exoticism has preoccupied so many of those studying the global jihad movement.[5]
Terrorists have assumed humanity’s historical role, which in the past was part and parcel of the civilizing mission of European colonialism.
Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – “A Dream of Undying Fame”
Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – “A Dream of Undying Fame”
Norman Costa
I invited Louis Breger, PhD to join me in this article devoted to a discussion of Sigmund Freud. After my two-parter, “Sigmund Freud – Personal and Scientific Coward?” [PART 1, PART 2], I received an email from Dr. Breger. A friend directed him to 3Quarksdaily.com, and my second article. He had a few things to say about my article, including a couple of critical comments.
I recognized, immediately, that Breger knew a great deal about Freud – far more than I. Breger has been 
My interest in Freud is highly circumscribed. Breger is best described as a lifelong scholar of Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as a practitioner, a trainer, and a teacher. Breger directed me to his two books on Freud. The first is an analytical biography, “FREUD: DARKNESS IN THE MIDST OF VISION”, John Wiley & Sons, 2000. The second is “A DREAM OF UNDYING FAME: HOW FREUD BETRAYED HIS MENTOR AND INVENTED PSYCHOANALYSIS,” Basic Books, 2009. The more recent book, included in the title of this article, deals with the territory covered in my writing, and so much more.
Well, I couldn't let him get away after offering only a few comments. He has too much to tell us on the subject. He possesses a great deal of knowledge, and deeply informed views from a lifetime of work. So I asked Dr. Breger if he would contribute to my Monday Musings column on 3Quarksdaily.com. Very graciously, and generously, he agreed to write something for my readers. What follows is a discussion of his latest book and my two-part article on Freud. I will have a few comments following his well done and informative piece.
YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.
Monday Poem
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and
dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
………………–Tony Hayward, CEO British Petroleum, on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill
The Mean Density of a Corporate Brain Ghazal
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
Shakespeare said —and not just in dreams if truth be told.
Devils on TV and on the radio —even in the street
ordinary demons walk among us terrors to behold.
Just yesterday someone I know remarked that we may be indiscreet
and inconsiderate of the earth; adding smugly: We may be bold.
We may have our wonton way with her without repercussion
even if we leave her desiccated —as God’s my witness, it’s foretold.
The earth’s ours to be consumed; to be sucked utterly to death.
We have the right, he said –being the prime plums in god’s fold.
So what if the earth bleeds into the sea? The sea’s huge enough
to handle whatever comes: run-off nitrogen, sludge, black gold.
As long as skulls are stuffed with want and hearts trussed in bottom lines
it’s just routine to deal in death and decimate the earth which rolls & rolls.
If we’re dumb as Gump, blind as Lear and demonic as a corporate brain
we’ll, tout de suite, smother and annihilate even our dreams if truth be told.
by Jim Culleny, 5/23/10
The Dance of Indian Democracy
By Namit Arora
Why did democracy take root in India against all odds? What are its distinguishing features? What should we make of its attempts to combat inequalities among its people, especially via reservations? Over six decades later, how close is it to Ambedkar's inspiring vision of democracy?
The Republic of India began life as an unlikely nation. Gaining independence in 1947, India adopted a democratic form of governance, a liberal constitution, and secular public institutions (at least in intent if often not in practice). None of these sprang from a living indigenous tradition.[1] Rather, they were chosen by an elite class of Indians that had developed a taste for them via its exposure to the West, and had even acquired some experience in representative self-rule in the closing decades of the British Raj. Many observers thought the experiment was doomed to failure. Among them was the stodgy imperialist Winston Churchill, who felt that if the British left, India would ‘fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.’ Indians were unfit to govern themselves, and needed ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire.’
Doubters abounded for decades after independence. Unlike so many post-colonial nations, including those in South Asia, the continued existence of democracy in India—its fair elections and peaceful transfers of power—puzzled not just the lay observers, but it also became, according to historian Ramachandra Guha,
an anomaly for academic political science … That India ‘could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable,’ wrote the distinguished political scientist Robert Dahl, adding: ‘It lacks all the favorable conditions.’ ‘India has a well-established reputation for violating social scientific generalizations,’ wrote another American scholar, adding, ‘Nonetheless, the findings of this article furnish grounds for skepticism regarding the viability of democracy in India.’ [2]
The naysayers rightly saw democracy as an outgrowth of a particular historical experience in the West, rooted in a consciousness we now call modernity. They spoke of the conditions thought to be necessary for the flourishing of democracy: an egalitarian social order, an ethos of individualism, and a culture of secular politics and pluralist tolerance. India had mostly the opposite: a deeply hierarchical social order, subservience of the individual to family and community, and a culture of political quietism, though it did have a kind of tolerance (more on this below). Only a tiny class of Indians saw themselves as citizens of a nation-state, or could lay claim to political participation. Nor had the masses agitated to be rid of the hundreds of kings in as many princely states of British India, though discontent did exist in pockets. Indians were notoriously diverse, with identities spanning caste, class, region, custom, language, religion, and more, all impediments to a shared ideal of citizenship. Indeed, how was democracy expected to survive in such inhospitable terrain?
Committing savage satire, respecting readers and finding the odd in sex: Colin Marshall talks to Alexander Theroux, author of Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual
Alexander Theroux is the author of stories, poetry, essays, fables, critical studies and such novels as Three Wogs, Darconville's Cat, An Adultery and his latest, Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual, which came as Theroux's first novel in two decades. Rain Taxi calls the book “a massive, 878-page compendium of vituperation against contemporary society, jabs at pop culture, exposés of office politics, and exploration of life and love in modern times,” an encyclopedic novel that's “wandering, erudite, funny, opinionated, didactic, repetitive.” Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]
I've always been interested in a person that was both idealistic and something of a failure. Vladimir Nabokov once pointed out that every character is a little ramification of the author, so I've distributed some of my hostilities and fascinations and occasional quirks to him. I wanted to have him as a kind of raisonneur and a satirical point of departure for the multifarious views on life that are presented in the book. He's the thread through the book, which is not to say that he's normal or well-balanced.
You say you give him a few qualities, a few opinions of your own. Which ones are the most prominent in him that you took for yourself?
It's really hard to say, because, as Goethe once said, all writing is confession. In away, I've distributed myself throughout the book in various characters. John Keats once pointed out that Shakespeare maybe had a very empty personality, he might have been a very bland person, because he gave away his personality, the various voices that he had, to different people as various as Prospero, Lady Macbeth, you name it. I can't really say there's a one-to-one correspondence to much in Eyestones. His rooms, in many ways, echo mine: I have a lot of books, I have a portrait of Dostoevsky, blah blah blah.
But I think I can be found in other characters with equal force. There's an occasional shotgun in the corner, metaphorically speaking. My toothbrush over there, a particular vase in the room, but I can't deny that I'm in other places as well. I distributed myself throughout, and probably have as bland a personality as Keats argued Shakespeare had — not to make any major analogies here, by the way.
You talk about Eyestones' idealism. He has a huge number of ideals, strongly held. What ideals of his really define him for you?
He has an elevated view of women, although a lot of people would argue, vociferously, the opposite direction. His expectations are high. The genre of this novel is a satire. Through dramatic irony, I try to present him as a corrective to the wayward world, the quark-reversal world, the nutty world, the excessive world, the secular world. His point of view I like to think is balanced, although, as I say, a lot of people wouldn't agree. Laura Warholic attacks him three-quarters of the way through the book for a lot of lunatic excesses she finds in him, but a lot of those excesses and ideals — let's take one to make this clear.
He's kind of disbelieving in the possibility of democracy. Indeed, he sees it as a leveling force. I spent quite a bit of time on an essay on democracy in this book, which aims in the direction of trying to talk about couples. There's a certain kind of democracy required of people involved in coupledom. You have to settle on man and woman — in these days, man and man, whatever — he's kind of doubtful about the possibility of that being successful. That would be one example. There are many I could go into, but that would be one.
Read more »
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Mark Twain left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now
Guy Adams in The Independent:
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.
Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.
One thing's for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he'll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy.
More here. [Thanks to David Schneider.]
rocket man
Janelle Monáe
world cup, baby
Sunday Poem
“The human capacity to stain cannot be overcome by Mr. Clean.”
……………………………………………….R–Raul Dorset
A Diver for the NYPD Talks to His Girlfriend
I can't even see my hands in front of my face
through the darkness—mud, raw sewage,
black clouds of who knows what,
gas and oil leaking out of all the cars
that have been shoved into the river.
But my hands have learned to see,
sliding sideways down wrinkled concrete,
over slime coated rocks, broken glass, plastic bags,
barbed wire, as if there were a tiny eye
at the end of each finger. There are sponges down there
shaped like puffed-up lips, with silky tentacles
that retract at my touch. For some reason all the grocery carts
in the city are making their way to the bottom of the river.
Did I tell you about the body wrapped in plastic
and chains, and the pile of pistols, rifles,
enough to start a gun shop? Once, looking for a missing
Piper Cub, we found it next to a trainer
from World War Two, both parked side by side
as if waiting for permission to take off.
People throw strange things in the river,
I don't know, some kind of voodoo—jars
filled with pig eyes, chickens with their throats slit
stuffed into burlap sacks. Everything—TVs, couches,
lamps, phone books—is down there—if we ever grow gills
and live in the river we'll have whatever we need.
Today it was a fishing boat missing five days.
Easy to find now by a certain odor that seeps
through our wet suits that we call corpse soup.
The fishermen were sitting in the cabin, bloated hands
drifting as if they were swapping stories.
We tied them together and rose toward the surface
in a slow spiral. Once, I was feeling around in the dark
for this drowned lady, I was about to go back,
to call it a day, when her arms shot up
and grabbed me tight, round my waist.
Even when we're out of the river there's more water,
bath, shower, bath, shower, disinfectant, rinse—
but I never feel clean. Everything seems dirty: crowds
in the market, car horns, alarms, the barking of dogs.
by Richard Garcia
from Touching the Fire;
Doubleday, NY, 1998
How Much Oil’s Spilling? It’s Not Rocket Science
John Allen Paulos in his excellent Who’s Counting column at ABC News:
How much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico? Many, including BP, have made estimates and remarked on the difficulty of determining the answer.
As Steve Wereley, an engineering professor at Purdue University, has shown, however, and as many others would have shown had pictures of the leak been released earlier, an approximate estimate is quite easy to come by and indicates a vastly greater oil spill than BP has admitted.
Wereley and a few other scientists, who have come to the same general conclusions, have performed a public service.
Basically, the method for determining oil spillage boils down to common sense and high school (or even middle school) geometry, specifically the formula for the volume of a cylinder.
More here.
Why she abandoned Islam
Theodore Dalrymple in The Globe and Mail:
All men are created equal, perhaps, but they do not by any means lead lives of equal interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is still only in her later 30s, has already ensured her place in history and is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable people in the world. Her linguistic abilities alone would be more than enough to satisfy most people: Having learned Somali (her native tongue), English, Amharic, Arabic and Swahili, she learned Dutch sufficiently well in a couple of years to be able to stand for the Dutch parliament.
But, of course, it is her public and uncompromising repudiation of Islam for which she is best known. The brutal murder of Theo van Gogh, with whom she had made a brief film denouncing the treatment of women in Islam, brought her to world fame. In this book, which one might describe as a philosophical memoir, she describes and explains her intellectual journey from pious, veiled Muslim woman to proselytizer for the European Enlightenment view of the world.
More here.
How Many Cancers Are Caused by the Environment?
From Scientific American:
Traces of chemicals known to cause human cancer lurk everywhere. But after decades of research, figuring out how many people might contract cancer because of them remains an elusive goal. More than 60 percent of U.S. cancer deaths are caused by smoking and diet. But what about the rest?
A report by the President's Cancer Panel, released earlier this month, reignited a 30-year-old controversy among cancer experts and environmental epidemiologists about how large a role environmental factors play in the No. 2 killer of Americans. Some experts, including the President’s panel, say a decades-old estimate that six percent of cancer deaths are due to environmental and occupational exposures is outdated and far too low. But scientists most likely will never be able to tease out the true role of environmental contaminants because environmental exposures, genetics and lifestyle seem to all intertwine.
More here.
Christopher Hitchens talks about old arguments and his new memoir
Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian:
I'm not sure what a legend should look like exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's not this. The paunchy, middle-aged figure who opens the door at 10am has a crust of dried toothpaste around his mouth, an air of bleary dishevelment and the stooped shuffle of a man just out of bed and wishing he'd postponed the appointment to a less ungodly hour. Expecting to meet a sort of rakish Russell Crowe, I appear to have found a hungover Timothy Spall.
Where is the celebrated rhetorician, famed for speaking in perfect paragraphs sculpted from flawless sentences? Gruff, vague and nursing a cup of tea, he clasps one hand discreetly over the other in a manner suggestive of some practice in taming the morning shakes. Having flown in from America only the previous afternoon, he explains that he had been out with his old friend Martin Amis until 3am. Gradually – fortified by two packets of cigarettes – he begins to reconstitute himself, looking less and less like Spall but, strangely, more and more like Terry Wogan. He can't really manage eye contact. Once noon arrives, though, he brightens up, proposing the first scotch of the day with one of those bluff jokes about rules for drinking so dear to saloon bar bores the world over.
This, then, is the legendary Hitch – one-time titan and hero of the left, latterly post-9/11 neocon turncoat – the man who took on Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, George Galloway, God and Saddam Hussein. Really? This guy?
More here.
Craig Venter unveils and explains “synthetic life”
An organism which has the URL for its website encoded in it’s DNA!
Martin Gardner, math and science writer, dies at 95
From the Associated Press:
Prolific mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner, known for popularizing recreational mathematics and debunking paranormal claims, died Saturday. He was 95.
Gardner died Saturday after a brief illness at Norman Regional Hospital, said his son James Gardner. He had been living at an assisted living facility in Norman.
Martin Gardner was born in 1914 in Tulsa, Okla., and earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago.
He became a freelance writer, and in the 1950s wrote features and stories for several children's magazines. His creation of paper-folding puzzles led to his publication in Scientific American magazine, where he wrote his “Mathematical Games” column for 25 years.
The column introduced the public to puzzles and concepts such as fractals and Chinese tangram puzzles, as well as the work of artist M.C. Escher.
Allyn Jackson, deputy editor of Notices, a journal of the American Mathematical Society, wrote in 2005 that Gardner “opened the eyes of the general public to the beauty and fascination of mathematics and inspired many to go on to make the subject their life's work.”
Saturday, May 22, 2010
James Joyce’s Words Come To Life, And Are Promptly Desecrated
Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:
This old English major’s heart is warmed by the news that the new synthetic cell carries a line from James Joyce, inscribed in its DNA: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
What would Joyce have thought if someone had told him that one day the synthesized genome of a goat pathogen would carry his words? I would hope that whoever told him would make sure that he did not think this moment marked his literary immortality. In fact, his deathless prose is probably being desecrated by the relentless erosion of evolution right now.
The scientists who produced the new synthetic cell copied the genome of a microbe, letter for letter, and then inserted the synthetic version into a host cell. To determine that their experiment worked, they needed a way to tell the genomes of their synthetic cells from the natural genomes that were their model. So they inserted “watermarks” into the artificial genome. These sequences of DNA (which spelled out the work of Joyce and others through the genetic code) sit in non-coding regions of the microbe’s DNA. As a result, these watermarks cannot disrupt any essential protein-coding genes or stretches of DNA that are vital for switching genes on and off.
More here.
the limestone formed by whatever volcanic calamity brings our particular puppet show to an end
Like most Englishmen, I have been brainwashed by William Wordsworth. Although I don’t much like walking, I love seeing the landscape but if I spot a person, then that “spoils” it. We all want to wander lonely as clouds. Given that there will be more than 70m lonely clouds in this archipelago by 2050, the prospects for Wordsworthianism do not seem very good. Yet the strange fact is that in Britain we can still “get away from it all” with ease. From the strange, bleak, featureless isles of North and South Uist in Scotland, which contain some of the oldest geological formations in this complicated, beautiful archipelago, down to the crags and coves of Cornwall; from the deserted Borders between Scotland and England to the Lincolnshire wolds, which roll for seemingly endless miles beneath the huge sky; from the deeply green valleys of unvisited mid-Wales to the great cornfields of Suffolk, the British landscape is both varied and, for so many miles, awe-inspiringly unwrecked. It is still possible to drive through these landscapes and pass scarcely another car.
more from AN Wilson at the FT here.
heidegger’s secret lecture
Now everyone can read for themselves what, according to student transcripts, Martin Heidegger lectured on between November 1933 and February 1934 under the title “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State”. In April 1933, he became rector of the Albert Ludwig University and in 1934, he handed in his resignation. During his year in power he applied himself single-mindedly to organising the university’s Gleichschaltung (bringing into line). All the documents from his rectoral term are now all being published together. The lack of empathy in their tone stands in contrast, for example, to his speech honouring the the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter from May 1933. The documents show that during the one year intermezzo, the new masters could rely on Heidegger. He cancelled the evening readings in January 1934, so that the “swearing in of People’s Chancellor” could be celebrated in style. He called upon people to make donations to the Winterhilfswerk so that it might become a “visible demonstration of the Volksgemeinschaft” (people’s community). He arranged, “after consultation with leaders of the student body” that the hand should only be raised for the fourth verse of the Horst Wessel Lied.
more from Albert Kissler at Sign and Sight here.