Why do Romantic writers personify technology? Why do Modern writers robotize it? Perhaps because one group of writers is studying its causes, and the other its effects on human culture and the human psyche. Is it because some Romantic writers worship technology? Consider Walt Whitman’s and Stephen Spender’s panegyrics on the steam locomotive. Do they view the creators and custodians of such power as little less than Gods? Adam was promised divine status by the serpent, and his descendants immediately set about building the first cities, and the tower of Babylon.

more here.

Jack Shafer points out the many ways in which Richard Posner’s review in The New York Times Book Review is sloppy.

“He ignores journalistic history as he spots emerging “trends” and gets basic facts wrong. A 4,600-word piece about the decline of journalism should cite numerous specific transgressions, yet Posner is too lazy to collect the evidence. He names only Newsweek‘s Quran retraction, CBS News’ mishandling of the Air National Guard story, and the media’s saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson trial. . .

[W]hen Posner cites a rise in press sensationalism, what is his baseline year? Surely he’s familiar with the journalistic circuses run by such press titans as William Randolph Hearst, Col. Robert R. McCormick, Joseph Pulitzer, Harry Chandler, and press midgets like Walter Annenberg. . .

When Posner declares that media competition has pushed the established press to the left, he gives only one example: Fox News making CNN more liberal. Has Posner lost his cable connection? The success of Fox News convinced CNN of the opposite. CNN realized that the demographic that has the time and interest to watch a lot of cable news tends to be older and more conservative, as this Pew Research Center report indicates. If anything, the one-worldist CNN of founder Ted Turner has been vectoring right in recent years.”

In New Perspectives Quarterly, an interview with the writer Elif Shafak.

“NPQ: Modernization in Turkey came from above. Today modernization again comes from above in Turkey in the form of a soft Islam ideology that is trying to appease Europe in order for Turkey to get into the EU.

Shafak: I think we should take into account the fact that most of the Turks do want to join the EU, sometimes for different reasons. But it’s not only a political decision. The Turkish society too wants to join the EU. We should all struggle for it because it’s important for many reasons. I want to see the role of the military and the role of the state apparatus diminish in Turkey. I want Turkey to become a more civil society-based country rather than a state-centered country. Even academic intellectuals are so state oriented, they always think about the well being of the state but not really the well being of the civil society. . .

Turkey in the EU. Turkey’s inclusion in the EU is going to be good for both sides. We are living in a very dangerous time. There is the danger of the world being divided into two camps. There are people who believe in a clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the Western world. . . My worldview is that it’s not a clash of civilizations but it’s a clash of opinions.

On the one hand we have the nationalists with a lot of xenophobia, people who want to live with their mirror images; on the other hand there are the cosmopolitans, people who are willing to live with others coming from different backgrounds. It’s also a big test for the Europeans because most Europeans are asking themselves ‘what are we going to do with so many Muslim minorities in the middle of the EU?’ So it’s a big question of coexistence for all of us.”

Alexander Cockburn seems to show some kind of aesthetic failing (to editorialize) here.

“I’ve never cared for the Taj Mahal, depicted on the biscuit tins of my childhood. And after seeing Akbar’s first palace compound at Fatehpur Sikri, I feel this more strongly. Kitsch is emotional blackmail and the Taj Mahal, blaring Shah Jehan’s bereavement, seems to me the very essence of kitsch. Part of the problem is Shah Jehan’s snobbery about red sandstone. Both here and a mile up river at the Fort he ordered white marble and in the case of the Taj Mahal the result is a sort of airless sterility. The manic symmetry amplifies this. Also, the Taj Mahal is just too big. Akbar’s tomb, a few leagues back down the road towards Delhi, though large, seems proportionate. But the vast Taj Mahal diminishes its skeletal contents, ensconced in two sarcophagi at its core. Shah Jehan was locked up by Aurangzeb in the Fort, a mile upstream, and spent many years looking down the river at his wife’s mausoleum, apparently squinting in a little piece of mirror at night to catch the reflection. When he died Aurangzeb shipped him downstream to join Arjumand in the comity of the sepulcher, though symmetry is for once controverted since his stone coffin is slightly larger and higher than hers. These days the river is shallow and dirty. In the mid seventeenth-century it was clear and twenty feet deep.”

Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali discuss Iraq, American foreign policy, imperialism, oil, democracy, exploitation, and, well, Noam Chomsky-Tariq Ali kind of stuff here, the audio archives of the Lannan Foundation.

In Foreign Policy, William Dobson looks at Japan’s chances of becoming a permanent member of the  UN Security Council.

“Of course, based on the merits, Japan is a natural candidate to take a permanent seat at the council’s table. Its share of financial contributions to the U.N. budget—now at 19 percent—has been second only to the United States since 1986. Indeed, its share is greater than the combined contributions of Britain, China, France, and Russia. During those years that the United States was in arrears to the world body, Japan actually stood as the single greatest underwriter of the U.N. system. Although Tokyo has trimmed its official development assistance in recent years, scores of Japan’s fellow U.N. members have benefited from the country’s generosity for decades. Nor are Japan’s diplomats strangers to the Security Council’s corridors. This year, Japan is serving its ninth term as one of the nonpermanent members to the council. Aside from Brazil, no country’s diplomats have logged as much time in this role.

But these same qualifications raise an important question: Has Japan truly conducted a foreign policy worthy of a world leader? What difference does it make if Japan frequently serves as a rotating member of the Security Council if its diplomats are seen as wallflowers? When has Japan introduced bold new initiatives or helped build coalitions to lead an international effort?”

From The Economist:

The true story of how your wife’s stalker rang her to discuss killing you isn’t supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband’s help.

So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall’s thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt at Space.com:

A host of hidden black holes have been revealed in a narrow region of the sky, confirming astronomers’ suspicions that the universe is loaded with many undetected gravity wells.

Black holes cannot be seen directly, because they trap light and anything else that gets too close. But astronomers infer their presence by noting the behavior of material nearby: gas is superheated and accelerated to a significant fraction of light-speed just before it is consumed.

The activity releases X-rays that escape the black hole’s clutches and reveal its presence.

The most active black holes eat so voraciously that they create a colossal cloud of gas and dust around them, through which astronomers cannot peer. That sometimes prevents observations of the region nearest the black hole, making it impossible to verify what’s actually there.

These hyperactive black holes are called quasars. They can consume the mass of a thousand stars a year and are thought to be precursers to large, normal galaxies. The exist primarily at great distances, seen as they existed when the universe was young.

More here.

William Lobdell in the Los Angeles Times:

In 1994, then-Archbishop of Portland William Levada offered a simple answer for why the archdiocese shouldn’t have been ordered to pay the costs of raising a child fathered by a church worker at a Portland, Ore., parish.

In her relationship with Arturo Uribe, then a seminarian and now a Whittier priest, the child’s mother had engaged “in unprotected intercourse … when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy,” the church maintained in its answer to the lawsuit.

The legal proceeding got little attention at the time. And the fact that the church — which considers birth control a sin — seemed to be arguing that the woman should have protected herself from pregnancy provoked no comment. Until last month.

That’s when Stephanie Collopy went back into court asking for additional child support. A Times article reported the church’s earlier response. Now liberal and conservative Catholics around the country are decrying the archdiocese’s legal strategy, saying it was counter to church teaching.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

“Cézanne & Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is a mind-numbingly schematic exhibition. It may have been mounted on West 53rd Street, but it has none of the imaginative reach or scholarly originality or quickening lucidity that we used to expect from the Museum of Modern Art. It’s just another gimmicky blockbuster, roughly on the model of that previous one-from-column-A-and-one-from-column-B fiasco, “Matisse Picasso,” which came to the Modern in 2003. As with “Matisse Picasso,” so with “Cézanne & Pissarro,” a pair of extraordinarily rich and varied artists are forced into a meaningless face-off–a confrontation that tells us next to nothing about the artists and more than we ever wanted to know about the bookkeeper minds of curators who are fixated on the most superficial correspondences. (That “Cézanne & Pissarro” was organized by Joachim Pissarro, the artist’s great-grandson, is not a fact I care to linger over.)

Like “Matisse Picasso,” “Cézanne & Pissarro” is an impersonation of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition. This one even steals its subtitle from William Rubin’s 1989 triumph, “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism.” While that show zeroed in on a period of years when the two youthful Cubists were working hand-in-hand to create the language of abstract art, “Cézanne & Pissarro” insists on an apples-and-oranges juxtaposition of two painters who, although great friends and colleagues, were engaged in fundamentally different enterprises.

More here.

Excerpts from a TV interview of 3 Quarks Daily editor Azra Raza, by The Boston Channel (WCVB):

Raza said cooking spices that kill bacteria — like ginger, tumeric, onion and garlic — could be a powerful weapon to fight certain pathogens that can cause cancer.

“At least 15 percent of the world’s cancer globally has been linked to pathogens, including cervical cancer and (human papillomavirus),” Raza said. “Who would have believed stomach cancer would be related to a bacteria? Now we know it’s related to H. pylori.”

The idea comes from warm-climate cultures, like Asia and Raza’s native Pakistan, that heavily use the spices to preserve food and meats. The cancer rates in these counties are dramatically lower than in the United States.

“For example, in America the incidence of breast cancer now is 660 per million. In India, it’s 79 per million,” said Raza.

Raza thinks spices may also interrupt the pathways that allow cancer cells to thrive. She’s been given a donation of $1 million from a former patient to start her research. She said she feels major discoveries are not far away.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Want your own personal genome sequenced? Researchers said they had found a faster and cheaper way to do it that would cost only about $2.2 million. George Church and colleagues at Harvard Medical School hope eventually to reduce the cost further to $1,000 per genome — the entire DNA code of a person, plant or other organism. Their new method, described in a report in the journal Science, bypasses the traditional gel-based technology for analyzing DNA and instead uses color-coded beads, a microscope and a camera. It is considerably cheaper than the current methods, which cost an estimated $20 million for a human genome.

More here.

Israel kastner is one of the most controversial figures in the Israeli historic perspective of World War II. Some look at him as an angel and a savior. Some think he sold his soul to the devil. Though he was cleared by court from the latter accusations he was assassinated by those who did not forgive him.

“Israel Kastner gave letters of exoneration to four Nazi officers in 1946, during the Nuremberg trials, journalist Dan Margalit said yesterday at a public debate marking the 50th anniversary of the Kastner trial.The debate was held as part of the 14th World Congress for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus.

…Dr. Israel Kastner, one of the leaders of the Jewish community of Hungary, negotiated with the Nazi regime in Budapest, including Adolph Eichmann, to save 1,684 Hungarian Jews who had been sent to Auschwitz in World War II.”

more Here

and this is kastner’s website

and something about moral choices

A new poem from Charles Simic.

There are one or two murderers in any crowd.
They do not suspect their destinies yet.
Wars are started to make it easy for them
To kill that woman pushing a baby carriage.

The animals in the zoo don’t hide their worry.

They pace their cages or shy away from us
Listening to something we can’t hear yet.
The coffin makers are hammering everywhere.

The strawberries are already in season
And so are the scallions and radishes.
A young man buys roses, another rides
A bike through the traffic using no hands.

Old fellow bending over the curb to vomit,
Betake thee to thy own place of torment.
The sky at sunset is red with grilling coals.
A hand in a greasy pot-holder hovers over us all.

I fell for the name “Timbuktu” long ago, before my own terrors and before Sept. 11 ushered in America’s collective agoraphobia. Now I’m finally in the dusty city that prompted no less an Afrophile than Bob Geldof to wonder, “Is this it?”

Timbuktu is a sad place, dispirited and angry. The most visible signs of its faded glory are the ugly sheets of corrugated metal that adorn most doorways. The doors here were legend, massive wooden portals with ornate silver workings. Tourists have bought them off the hinges. In 10 years, there won’t be a door in Timbuktu.

The harmattan wind keeps a constant layer of silt in the air, a light-diffusing mist that softens the squalor. Camels—who for some reason always remind me of Mick Jagger—blink contentedly in the shade of sparse trees. A mud-brick wall is tagged with graffiti. “Masta Wu Tang.”

I am here. This is it.

more here.

T.A. Frank in The New Republic:

Non-despotic countries may complain about tyranny, but at least they do not have to tolerate a steady stream of provocations by reactionaries, self-seekers, and political dwarfs. The outposts of tyranny have maintained a positive outlook despite the impertinence of their critics, and, as the saying goes, living well is the best revenge. Failing that, however, the quelling of dissent is a close second…

Cuba. Cuba has been the calmest and happiest tyranny lately. Perhaps that’s because it’s been enjoying a visit from the “16th U.S.-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan,” as reported in the article “CUBA IS STRONG AND BEAUTIFUL, SAYS U.S. CARAVAN MEMBER.” And smart and handsome, too. The article relates that “[t]he 16th Pastors for Peace U.S. Cuba Friendshipment Caravan includes 145 people divided into groups to visit Villa Clara, Havana, Matanzas and the special municipality of the Isle of Youth.” To be sure, these guests might sound irritating; but, with visitors like Oliver Stone, perhaps Cuba cannot afford to be too choosey.

More here.

From CNN:

It may not have the instantly identifiable primary-colored logo of eBay, but another Web site is having a big impact on how business is done in Cyberspace.

Craigslist.org is a simply-designed site — it does not even have a fancy logo, just the words “Craigslist” in plain type.

But, a decade after it was created, it is now one of the most popular Web sites in the world — currently number 22 on Alexa.com, an Amazon-owned site that provides detailed statistics and information about Web site visitors.

Founder Craig Newmark started the privately owned online business with the aim of keeping his friends up to date with what was happening in his hometown, San Francisco.

The “stay local” philosophy has stuck, but the business is anything but — Craigslist.org attracts more than 10 million unique visitors each month.

Craigslist.org is a place to find a new job, new apartment or even a new love interest. It does not charge individuals to make a posting, but does charge businesses who want to advertise situations vacant.

More here.

From Neutopia Magazine:

At a time when the daily headlines are all about North Korea and Iran trying to get nuclear weapons, it is good to return to Hiroshima. With its broad boulevards, tree-lined rivers and low-slung mountains, Hiroshima today is one of Japan’s most attractive cities, a spacious contrast to densely packed Tokyo, 400 miles to the north. But even these assets are a reminder of the event sixty years ago that instantly made this city known throughout the world.

More here.

From BBC News:

One of the puppies died soon after birth but the other, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, is still doing well after 16 weeks, the researchers say. Snuppy joins a host of other cloned animals including Dolly the sheep, CC the cat and Ralph the rat. Scientists hope dog clones will help them understand and treat a range of serious human diseases. “The dog has characteristics similar to human beings,” lead researcher Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University, South Korea, told the BBC. “Some of their diseases are almost the same as human diseases. “So [dog clones] could be very valuable in finding technologies useful for curing human diseases. This is our main research call.” 

More here.

“Huge rise in race attacks on all ethnic minorities across Britain. Senior Tory MP tells Muslims: ‘If you don’t like our way of life, get out’. Senior Muslim tells women not to wear veils in public for fear of assault.”

Terri Judd, Nigel Morris, Ian Herbert and Paul Kelbie in The Independent:

Increasing evidence has emerged of a backlash against Muslims and members of ethnic minorities in the wake of the London bombings. Police forces across Britain have recorded a dramatic rise in racist assaults and abuse in the aftermath of the July 7 suicide attacks.

Four weeks after the explosions in the capital, a survey of forces by The Independent yesterday found a substantial increase in racially motivated crime, particularly in inner cities. Experts said as many as one in six of those abused or attacked were not Muslim but were simply of an Asian appearance.

As community leaders expressed alarm over the surge in race-hate crimes, a Conservative frontbench spokesman was accused of stoking racial tension by calling for Muslims to get out of Britain if they did not like its way of life.

More here.