Andrew Sullivan in his blog, The Daily Dish:

The Daily Dish nominates not Ben Bernanke but Neda Agha-Soltan. Neda was just one young woman, eager to protest the coup that rigged and then stole the June elections in Iran. She was shot in the street by the coup regime, as shown in the grueling video….that electrified the Iranian people. Wiki tells us that

Nedā (ندا) is a word used in Persian to mean “voice”, “calling,” or “divine message,” and she has been referred to as the “voice of Iran.”

The most remarkable event of this past year, it seems to us, was the uprising for freedom, sanity and peace in Iran. We witnessed it thousands of miles away but the miracle of technology meant we also lived it alongside those far braver than we will hopefully ever have to be. Neda remains the symbol of that uprising and her awful secular martyrdom will never leave the psyche of the Iranian people.

We saw them this year as we hadn't before: like us, eager for change, confident in their own capacities, able to see through the lies and the certainties and the violence that marks the vicious regime they live under. We saw this movement as a spontaneous revolt against transparent injustice, but also as a response in a way to the American people, who also rose up in 2008 to demand new leadership, less confrontation, and less fundamentalism in government.

Next year will be a crucial one.

As the Ashura holiday approaches and as the death of Montazeri has infused Iranians with yet more courage to face down the neo-fascist goons who police this comically inept regime, the Green Movement faces yet another test.

More here.

From Vice Magazine:

Before The Wire, David Simon was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. During his time there, he wrote two meticulously researched and richly human books about his city. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) was the result of a year spent with the murder police of a town where murder seems to be a major mode of employment. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997, with writing partner Ed Burns) was the result of a year spent among the families, addicts, and dealers of one of Baltimore’s more infamous drug corners. Homicide resulted in the long-running cop show Homicide: Life on the Street, which was cool and everything, better than most cop shows, but also kind of just a cop show. The Corner resulted in an HBO miniseries that was pretty much a direct antecedent to what The Wire would end up tackling.

After The Wire, Simon and Ed Burns, who is a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher, adapted Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill into an HBO miniseries. It stands as the most effective document yet produced on the daily reality of the life of marines in the current Iraq war.

And now, today, as I type this, Simon is filming his new HBO series down in New Orleans. It’s called Tremé, and it is said to take as its center the lives of local musicians. But I have a feeling that would be like saying that The Wire took as its center the Baltimore drug trade. Sure, it started there. But given Simon’s obsessions with the American city and the decreasing institutional value of life in this great country of ours, we’re pretty much guaranteed that Tremé will have the same reach and impact as The Wire. In other words, I wish I could be cryogenically frozen until the day this show debuts, because I can’t fucking wait.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

To err on the side of caution, I am stuffing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. And I would imagine that the sight of spiral-shaped penises inflating in less than a third of second might be considered in some quarters to be not exactly safe for work. It’s certainly not appropriate for ducklings.

So, if you’re ready, join me below the fold.

More here.

Losing Track

Long after you have swung back

away from me

I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore

on the tide

and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:

am I a pier

half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion

I lose track,

the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before

I know I'm

alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black

timbers of me,

a light growth of green dreams drying.

by Denise Levertov

From Harvard Magazine:

What if the stem cells in our bodies live on, even as we age? What if they are just asleep, quiescent, like forgotten sentinels nodding off at remote outposts, waiting for orders? If only scientists could discover how to send them messages, could they be reawakened? “When you’re little and fall off your bike,” says Cabot professor of the natural sciences Douglas Melton, “you barely remember it the next day and a week later you don’t remember it at all. I ride my bike all the time, and if I fall off now, I remember it for weeks.” Bruises last longer when you get older. But is the slowness of repair due to some deficiency that arises with age, that stops normal processes from working well? Or is it due to the absence of some youthful factor?

Amy Wagers, an associate professor of stem-cell and regenerative biology, has begun to answer this most provocative of questions—could we marshal the body’s own repair mechanisms to slow the process of aging?—with a simple experiment. Using mice that have been surgically joined so that their bloodstreams become shared, Wagers investigated whether the blood of a young animal might awaken the muscle stem cells in an old one and enhance muscle repair.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

More here.

Tony Karon in The National:

The key character in the US president Barack Obama’s Afghanistan fairy tale is Pakistan – the erstwhile protector and enabler of the evil Taliban, but only out of ignorance, despair and an exaggerated fear of India. If only, goes the story, Pakistan could see that the Taliban is plotting to destroy it and recognise that its true interests lie with the noble purposes of the United States, it would ignore India, turn on the Taliban and flush out the insurgents to be crushed by US firepower. And so, a steady stream of US officials has traipsed through Islamabad this year, bearing carrots and brandishing sticks, trying to get Pakistan to see the light.

But the Pakistan of Washington’s imagination is a little like the Iraq of Bush Administration’s pre-war imagination – the one that was going to greet its invaders with sweets and flowers. But the US is choosing to ignore the writing on the wall. Just last week, back to back visits by two of the most senior commanders in the US military, General David Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen, failed to convince their Pakistani counterparts to go after the Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban and the allied Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks. Instead, Pakistan’s own counterinsurgency effort will be confined to the Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the local extremist group challenging the Pakistani state.

The explanation given to the Americans by Pakistan’s generals is usually that Pakistan doesn’t have the resources to tackle all the militant groups on its soil at once. They ask the Americans, their key benefactor, to be patient, suggesting that once the TTP has been dealt with, they will be in a position to tackle other problems. That, of course, is a polite rebuff in the spirit of “maybe some other time”.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. James Wood and Zadie Smith were doing battle in the sky. James was in silver armor and upon it the starlight did twinkle so. Zadie was in flowing white gowns. Her face was aglow with what I can only describe as a honey radiance. Still, I could see her freckles, which, I recall, pleased me to no end even as the terrible battle raged on and on. Twice, James smote her a heavy blow. Twice, Zadie raised herself up and hurled herself back upon him with swirling gowns and not an infrequent flash of thigh. Then the heavens went dark again and these two titans were seen to retire, he to one side of the galaxy and she to another. I thought I saw them both smile as the dream dissolved and the reality of a new day roused me from this nocturnal emanation.

James was mean to Zadie once in the real world. Without rehashing the whole thing, he accused her of laziness and self-absorption, of silly tricks and meager powers of concentration. He described what she — along with a few other young writers — was doing as Hysterical Realism. That now-famous piece in The Guardian included these devastating sentences:

This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).

This was in the early autumn of 2001, the heady days just after the 9/11 attacks when everyone felt that the world had changed somehow and that the frivolity of the recent past just wouldn't do. Zadie took the criticism standing up.

More here.

Joe Kloc in Seed Magazine:

The Hopi people of the southwestern US have a story: During a long drought when corn wouldn’t grow, the tribe began running out of food. Two children made a toy hummingbird that, as they tossed it into the air, came to life. It flew to the center of the Earth and begged the god of fertility for help. And he made it rain.

For as long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about weather, trying, in the absence of scientific certainty, to understand its influence on our lives. In the small body of research there has been on the topic, we’ve found that wind and heat can make us cranky, violent, sick, and suicidal. We honk more horns, have more headaches, kill more people and, according to a recent study, even fight more wars.

“Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa,” reads the title of a paper published in PNAS in November that looked at the relationship between temperature and armed conflict in the sub-Sahara. Researchers found that violence was more likely to erupt in years with hotter weather. “If the temperature goes up by just one degree, crop yields can decline by 20 percent or more,” explains Marshall Burke, one of the study’s authors. “Since 75 percent of poor Africans are engaged in agriculture for their livelihoods, these small changes can have big influence on their incentives to join rebellions.” It’s a frighteningly simple logic that suggests a frighteningly simpler one: The hotter Africa gets, the more violent a place it will become.

More here.

Gilbert Garcin. Le moulin de l’oubli – Mill of oblivion. 1999.

“Gilbert Garcin spent most of his life managing a lamp factory in France. At 65, he retired and took up a trick photography workshop. For the past ten years he has been creating comical, surrealistic photographs which warmly highlight sometimes cold, existential questions. Garcin inhabits this strange world and ponders it together with the viewer; with Garcin you have a dedicated, but perplexed, guide.”

In February, (2009) Gilbert's work was celebrated at the Festival at Rennes.

More here, here, and here.

By Evert Cilliers

Here's the story as I see it.

In 2008, after eight years of Bush/Cheney, the horrors and wrongs of this worst-of-all presidencies were plain to see — like Dresden after the fire-bombing, or a maroela tree after an elephant chomped it. The country had been wrecked by the dotty ideology-driven actions of extremist nutters: the false prophets of anti-science, anti-common-sense, anti-democracy, free-market-gone-crazy, conservatism-gone-fundamentalist, male-belligerence-gone-psycho.

Economically we were down the toilet and halfway to the sewer. Internationally we were pariahs. Psychologically we ping-ponged between genuine anxiety and false bravado. Worst of all: morally, we were hollowed out. Wars. Torture. Human rights abuses. Tora Bora. FEMA. Washington corruption. Wall Street fraud. Foreclosures. Unemployment. Deficits. Off-budget accounting. 30% interest charges on credit cards. Debt. Debt. Debt. Had we been ruled by the Kremlin, we couldn't have done worse. It was as if America had become a nation of 300 million suffering Jobs, struck down by the vengeful hand of an old-testament God.

It was the worst of times, and the best of times only for the nicely rich, dah-links.

But this most horrible of horrorshows opened up a great opportunity. The longing for change ached in every sensible American heart. The time for a progressive moment in our history had arrived.

Enter Barack Obama. Fueled by a compelling story, inspiring oratory, obvious decency, a challenging intellect and seemingly progressive liberal beliefs, he stepped into the moment with dazzling ability. He benefited from the progressive moment and took full advantage of it. After all, he was one of a very few voices who had spoken up against the Iraq War when it was political suicide to do so. He was the dewy rose in the scratchy patch of weeds.

Read more »

Tariq Ali has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Glenn Greenwald: Greg Craig and Obama's worsening civil liberties record
2. Strange Quark, $300: Black Agenda Report: The Great Black Hajj of 2009
3. Charm Quark, $200: News From the Zona: Republican Virtue and Equality

Here is what he had to say about them:

Glenn Greenwald's well-argued and well-written critique of Obama's record on civil liberties with trials for some and not for others is my choice for the best piece. Interesting to note that the honeymoon with Obama has not lasted as long as the liberal love-affair with the Clintons. More was expected of Obama which is why disenchantment levels are much higher as this piece demonstrates.

Glenn Ford's 'The great Black Hajj of 2009' continues the tradition of black dissent at a time when black politics are in decline. The opportunist wing of Afro-American groups appears to have won out temporarily and the rainbow alliance consigned to the dustbin, while advancement through the Democrats is the rage. Ford's anger is understated but a good sign that there are many out there who might stay at home on election day in 2012 rather than countenance an administration on its knees before Wall Street with the motto: 'What is Good for Goldman Sachs is good for America'–caving in to the lobby system on health reforms and fighting a 'just war' in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

News from the Zona is a useful description of the differences between cold war liberalism and its successor. The lip-service (and not just that) to equality in the former was related to the needs of the system at the time. When communism collapse this was no longer considered necessary and neo-liberalism became the new mantra…till the Wall Street Crash of 2008.

Congratulations to the winners (please contact me by email, I will send the prize money later today–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Tariq Ali for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carlos, Matthew Daniels, and Jennifer Prevatt. Our thanks to each of them. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about how the 3QD prizes work, here.

In Brooklyn Vegan:

It was approximately a year ago that Shilpa Ray left her band Beat The Devil to focus on her own project with her own band that she calls Shipa Ray and The Happy Hookers. That would make 2009 not only their year, but their first year.

My own excitement for the band came right around January/February when I first heard their 8-song unreleased CD-R. Soon after that they accepted my invitation to play the official BrooklynVegan SXSW showcase, and they've managed to keep busy all year. Shilpa ended up self-releasing their album, and she and her hookers have played numerous shows in NYC – too many to count, but they've included a Woodstock tribute at Castle Clinton, a residency at Pianos, and this year's CitySol festival. And they're ending the year strong. They just opened two NYC gigs for the Fiery Furnaces, are opening for Grant Hart of Husker Du this Saturday at 92YTribeca (12/19), and now have a glowing recommendation from Nick Cave.

Shilpa answered some questions about her year. Read them below…

You released a record in 2009. How'd that go?

Arduous and fun. I loathe tedious, mundane tasks, which works against me in this Golden Age of DIY. I guess I missed out on the “Golden Age” where all a musician had do was play music and snort big record company advances. Part of me wishes I was Rod Stewart. Hell, I don't even get to have a hopelessly devoted girlfriend to takes care of me or at least tolerate my “genius”, my tortured soul, and my many many mistresses.

Have you met Nick Cave? Did you know he was a fan at all before that interview came out?

Actually the story has more to do with my friend Ratso (aka Larry Sloman) than Nick Cave. Ratso's a badass writer who's written for Rolling Stone, High Times, and has authored/co-authored several biographies, namely Howard Stern, Bob Dylan and Harry Houdini. I met him after the Sly Stone Tribute Concert at Castle Clinton, and agreed to do his variety radio show at KGB bar on the Lower East Side. It was mind blowing. I felt like we were transported to 60s, 70s era New York. The kind of stuff I'd skip homework for and read about when I was a teenager. There was even a singer with a platinum white bee-hive hairdo, the spitting image of Dusty Springfield, who opened the show. The whole look and feel of this radio show against the commie red lit backdrop of the KGB bar was so complete.

Evan Lerner in Seed Magazine:

The discovery of a new planet has always been exciting, but the bloom is starting to come off the rose now that we’ve done it more than 400 times. A University of California–Santa Cruz team announced the discovery of six new planets orbiting two stars earlier this week, but they weren’t even the toast of the exoplanetology world, much less international newsmakers. Those honors went to a team led by Harvard’s David Charbonneau.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to such discoveries, and Charbonneau’s planet has a number of newsworthy traits. At more than six times our own planet’s mass, it’s a “super-Earth,” but this new world’s relatively low density means it’s likely made mostly of water. Though it orbits uncomfortably close to its star, the planet’s water may be kept liquid at 200° C by a dense, highly pressurized atmosphere. Not exactly a tropical paradise (though Dennis Overbye’s New York Times headline describes it as “sultry”), but easily the most Earthlike planet we’ve been able to characterize thus far.

Orbiting the red dwarf star GJ 1214 in the Ophiuchus constellation, the planet is also quite nearby by astronomical standards. At a distance of 42 light-years, it would still take several thousand lifetimes for us to get anything there, but its close proximity makes it an excellent target for ranged study by the James Webb Space Telescope scheduled to launch in 2014. In the meantime, the aging Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes may be used to study this bizarre waterworld.