Month: November 2006

Indiana Jones and the Cultural Patrimony of Doom

Posted on by Chris Heaney

When I was in college, one of my favorite discoveries was How to Read Donald Duck, a clever, if heavy-handed, cultural critique of Disney´s comic book adventures. According to the authors, Dorfman and Mattelart, writing in 1971, all those wonderful stories where Uncle Scrooge, Donald and the triplets claimed floating islands in the Pacific, rescued golden crowns from Mayan cenotes, and thwarted revolutionary “dogs” that looked suspiciously like Che and Castro were pure American Cold War capitalist propaganda. I’d like to say I’m not so easy now (I’d love the authors to back up their take with an intercepted memo from Disney to his artists reading, “Boys, Kissinger called. How soon can Huey, Dewey and Louie make Chile scream?”), but I have a soft spot for this kind of pop-culture-as-politics criticism.

MovieposterindianajonesandthethelastcrusWhich is why I was a little disappointed that no one brought up Indiana Jones earlier this year, when Greece and Italy finally forced the Met and the Getty to admit that their collections contained looted and smuggled artifacts. I couldn’t help but think that that fight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, between Indy and the looter over the Cross of Coronado, might really set us straight on the finer points of the debate over cultural patrimony and museums.

          
Looter: This is the second time I’ve had to reclaim my property from you.

Indy: That belongs in a museum

Looter: So do you.


The thought of a permanent exhibit on Indiana Jones at the American Museum of Natural History is appealing, but who does deserve to keep it? The looter who dug it out of a cave in the U.S.? The archaeologist? (Apparently not Coronado or his ancestors.) Happily, McSweeney’s halfway took on Indy’s credibility on the subject this month with a wry mock letter titled, “Back From Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied”: “Criticisms of Dr. Jones ranged from ‘possessing a perceptible methodological deficiency’ to ‘practicing archaeology with a complete lack of, disregard for, and colossal ignorance of current methodology, theory, and ethics’ to ‘unabashed grave-robbing’. Given such appraisals, perhaps it isn’t surprising to learn that several Central and South American countries recently assembled to enact legislation aimed at permanently prohibiting his entry.”


In honor of Harrison Ford’s recent boast that he’s fit enough for a planned fourth Indiana Jones movie, maybe it’s time to take a stab at “How to Watch Indiana Jones.” Unless I’m mistaken, no one’s really tackled the narrative of archaeological collection and patrimony politics in the Indiana Jones movies. That’s a shame, as I believe that what’s most salient about Indy—and what prompts lazy reporters to dub people everything from “the Indiana Jones of Tomatoes” to “the Indiana Jones of Finance” (I just Goggled “Indiana Jones of” and got 40,800 hits)—is that he makes archaeology look like the perfect mix of scientific brain and globe-trotting brawn. Indy can take back one kaddam from the Staff of Ra “to honor the Hebrew God whose Ark this is”, and lay a smack-down on the Nazis.


Except that, as the McSweeney’s satire suggests, his archaeological ethics and skills leave a lot to be desired. As an archaeologist, he makes Heinrich Schliemann look good. Take that justly famous first scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones is in the jungle of the eastern slopes of the Andes, searching for a hidden temple. After getting abandoned by his native guides (the Indy movies’ portrayal of native peoples is a rabbit-hole of its own), and betrayed by a young Alfred Molina, Indy literally brings down the house—the entire trap-laden death temple—to get that horrific golden fertility idol. He apparently left his plumb-bob and dentist’s brush at home.


Thankfully, his French nemesis Belloq  is waiting outside, with a coterie of armed “Hovitos” natives to help set Indy straight on why “Finders Keepers” just isn’t going to cut it this time.


Jones: Too bad the Hovitos don’t know you the way I do, Belloq.

Belloq: Yes, too bad. You could warn them… if only you spoke Hovitos.


So the American archaeologist destroys a temple and loses the artifact—to a French archaeologist, no less—because he failed to enlist the local peoples in the protection of their patrimony. Right? Had Indy gotten an advance copy of Patrick Tierney’s controversial Darkness in El Dorado he might have pointed out that Belloq’s presence would likely destroy the Hovitos’ traditional political and economic organization (and give them measles, natch). We should cut Indy a little slack, though. As Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade made abundantly clear, everyone else in archaeology in the 1930s was a murderous Nazi! In the face of this obviously irrefutable fact, can we really get mad at American museums’ collecting practices?


Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ditches the Nazi angle, but sharpens the specious critique—very much implied in “pro-museum” arguments this year—that “culture-rich” countries´ laws and protests are disingenuous political pander, and don’t represent the countries´actual will, or ability, to protect their monuments and artifacts. Granted, Temple of Doom makes our great American hero a little seedier from the start, when Indy trades the ashes of a Chinese emperor to a Hong Kong gangster for a diamond. The real critique, however, starts when Indy gets to “India”. (I put “India” in quotes because when the Indian government read Temple of Doom’s script, it supposedly wanted to remove the word “Maharajah” and asked that their citizens not all be cast as, well, members of a Thuggee Death Cult. Thankfully, Lucas and Spielberg stayed true to their artistic vision and filmed in Sri Lanka instead.) Indy, his wince-worthy Chinese sidekick and whining girlfriend discover that an Indian village has lost not only its ancient “Shankara” stone, but also all its children to the predations of a great nearby palace. It turns out that the English-educated Mola Ram’s Thuggee Death Cult has brainwashed the boy maharajah, and co-opted the Shankara stone for bloody rituals!


As always, Indy is victorious, and returns the children and the stone to the Indian village.  What does it all mean? Sadly, I can’t meet my own aforementioned standards and produce a letter from Lucas to Spielberg reading, “Steve, what if in the next Indiana Jones movie, he intervened in another country’s struggle over the meaning of the past (some sort of stone thing) for the sake of the future (some starving kids) and rescued both from a hypocritical anti-imperial cultural elite (I´m thinking Thuggees)?” That letter does not exist.


But Secret of the Incas does. In 1953 Paramount Pictures flew Charlton Heston to Cuzco, Peru to play the Ur/Indy, AKA Harry Steele, a square-jawed, unshaven explorer, complete with fedora and bomber jacket. As a few movie buffs have pointed out on-line, Paramount may never release Secret of the Incas on DVD, given the physical similarities shared by Steele and Indy, and a few lifted gimmicks. (Spielberg and Lucas’s explorer cannibalism was hardly unique: Secret of the Incas itself came from a producer who had read about explorer Hiram Bingham’s rediscovery of Machu Picchu, and Bingham’s right-hand man in Peru was the movie’s technical adviser). Which is really too bad, as Secret of the Incas is quite the mash-up of pulp exploring and archaeological ethics.


In a nutshell, Steele is a handsome rogue who’s been holed up in Cuzco, Peru for a few years, playing gigolo for visiting female tourists for money (“It’s the best kind,” he tells one. “It’s the hardest to get. It always smells sooo good.”), and waiting for “a line on that Incan treasure” everyone keeps talking about. He finally gets a clue, and with a beautiful Romanian blonde in tow (Indy, cover your heart, indeed!), he steals a plane, and flies to that famous lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu. Once there, however, he gets a rude surprise in the ruins. There’s a joint American-Peruvian-Mexican excavation going on, and local Andeans—along with the 1950s exotica singing sensation Yma Sumac—are dancing in the temples. Steele sneers. “Nobody comes here without a reason,” he growls. “The only reason is to dig. I don’t like the competition.”


Steele wants to find and steal the “Golden sunburst” of the Incan emperor Manco. His resolve falters, however, when he meets “Pachacutec,” a graduate of the University of Cuzco fluent in English, Spanish and Quechua. Pachacutec tells Steele they are hoping to find “the tomb of our last Incan chief.” When the sunburst “is taken back to the Temple of the Sun, only then will the people of the Inca be great again.” Steele finds the sunburst, of course, but he guiltily returns it to the archaeologists and Pachacutec, admitting “I guess finding it meant more to me than keeping it.”


Incredibly, the film is loaded with asides on cultural patrimony (an American archaeologist on his Peruvian military escort: “His job is to see that we don’t appropriate any souvenirs.”) and references to what we might call “archaeological self-determination.” By the film’s logic, Steele doesn’t suffer a crisis of conscience because he realizes stealing is wrong; he gives the sunburst back because the treasure’s cultural value to the Andean peoples outweighs its monetary and scientific value.

If it sounds a little preachy, that’s because it is, as any argument over the idea of cultural patrimony must be. But in a “funny” last twist that shines a mirror on America’s ambivalence about those sorts of arguments, the producers show that our Ur-Indy is still the bad-boy explorer we want to root for. In the movie’s final minute, Pachacutec restores the sunburst to the Temple of the Sun and Yma Sumac caterwauls in the background. Steele turns to go. Before he does, though, he hands his Romanian blonde girlfriend a golden Inca shawl pin. “Must have fallen into my pocket while I was in the tomb,” he says with a wink. 

The music swells, ‘The End’ flashes on the screen, and we’re remindend once again that our favorite guy in a hat and his big-picture archaeological ethics are just fiction. Right?

Teaser Appetizer: Dalai Lama Becomes the President of the USA

Posted on by Shiban Ganju

George Bush, in his last year of office, finally got the comprehensive immigration reform law passed. He signed the law in a ceremony in the White House on 10 Oct 08.  Two events compelled a bipartisan approach: the looming election fiasco and the intense lobbying by Arnold Schwarznegger

With election only a few weeks away, no one wanted to be the president to clean up the global Bush mess. No Republican. No democrat. No candidate. Period.

Iraq was the dilemma; while the republicans simply had no desire to withdraw, the democrats did not know how.

Arnold, aware, this was his only chance to be the president, garnered the support of democrats, republicans, free lancers, independents, dependents, deal makers, fence sitters, border crossers and lobbied successfully to change the law. The new immigration law said:

“In the absence of any candidates for the post of the president, the congress and the senate may appoint a person — including a foreigner – as the president of the USA, but on a temporary work permit, named POS-4: presidency outsourced for four years.”

The congress considered many candidates and finally selected The Dalai Lama because he had traveled through the USA more than he had done in Tibet and in a recent Nobel peace prize winners rally he was not critical of the US.

Next morning a benign smile replaced a silly smirk on TV screens while emasculated Arnold sulked in his gym.

In his inaugural speech president Dalai Lama declared, “We will launch novel initiatives in foreign, domestic and economic fronts; we will follow the doctrine of TLC: terrorism, liberation and consumption.

TERRORISM shall be our foreign policy. (Hillary’s jaw dropped, Kerry’s eyes popped, Kennedy’s heart stopped.) But we will give a new definition to TERRORISM: To Engage Rivals in Redirecting Our Resources In Serving Mankind (Hillary-Kerry-Kennedy body parts relaxed.)

On the domestic front, we will not only ensure life and liberty but seek liberation of the intellect from the clutches of the ego. Then and only then we will achieve true freedom. (Richard Gere smiled)

Our constitution ensures separation of religion and state. As a natural evolution of this cherished principle, I propose, we now separate religion from God because religion has lately become a major impediment in understanding God.” (Buchanan and Gingrich cringed)

Our economic policy shall be to cut our consumption. Our avarice for plundering the earth has exceeded its ability to sustain us.”(Cheney got pensive)

The Dalai Lama received inaudible applause in the house but thunderous appreciation in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Iran.

Next day he appointed three eminent persons as his close advisers. Donald Rumsfeld, Joseph Stiglitz and Arundathi Roy.

He chose Donald Rumsfeld as the chief adviser. When the nation protested, he calmed the fear. ”He is the single most valuable asset in my administration. If we do exactly the opposite of what he recommends, we will not go wrong.”

He invited the Nobel laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz and said,” You have an image of a person who opposes globalization.”

“But I don’t” Joseph protested, “I am only against the machinations of the world bank and IMF. I have written about it in my book — Globalization and its Discontent”.

Dalai Lama winked,” It doesn’t matter what you write. The street protestors don’t read. They follow the slogans. Look here, we can pursue the globalization of non violence with you leading it. With your image no one will suspect.”

  He selected Arundhati Roy – a writer gifted by her small god – with talent to oppose anything: dams, nukes, dictators, democracy, judges, foreign policies, wars, Saddam, Bush, corporations, globalization, free markets, long hair – almost anything. She could write expert opinions simultaneously with both hands; the left hand hurling invectives to the right and the right splashing sarcasm on the right. Her stunning looks, incisive intellect and strident criticism of the USA gave her credibility with its enemies. She had thundered in Turkey, “We are here to examine a vast spectrum of evidence about the motivations and consequences of the US invasion and occupation, evidence that has been deliberately marginalized or suppressed. Every aspect of the war will be examined – its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation, the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm, and cluster bombs, the use of and legitimation of torture, the ecological impacts of the war, the responsibility of Arab governments, the impact of Iraq’s occupation on Palestine, and the history of US and British military interventions in Iraq.”

At their first cabinet meeting, Joseph Stiglitz gave an overview of the state of the economy. He told that our priorities were skewed and we could easily afford to improve the condition of the world. He cited from the Human Development Report, 1998, the comparison between the total cost for health and education of the world and other frivolous expenditure the world was indulging in:

Cost of basic education for all $6 billion (Cosmetics in the USA $8 billion)

Cost of water and sanitation for all $9 billion (Ice Cream in Europe $11 billion)

Reproductive health for all women $12 billion (Perfumes in Europe and the USA $12 billion)

Basic health and nutrition $13 billion for all (Pet foods in Europe and USA $17 billion)

Business entertainment in Japan $35 billion

Cigarettes in Europe $50 billion

Alcohol in Europe $105 billion

Narcotics in the world $400 billion

Military spending in the world $780 billion

It was not any better in 2005 Human development Report:

Annual income of the richest 500 people exceeded that of the poorest 416 million

Cost of ending extreme poverty – $300 billion – less than 2% of the income of the richest 10% of the world’s population

Joseph also quoted from a report on health by Jeffrey Sachs and associates:

“8 million lives could be saved per year in low income countries by intervention in nutritional and infectious diseases. These countries need additional grants of 22 to 31 billion dollars per year by 2015 from donor countries. The USA gave only 0.012 percent of its GNP, an average of 920 million dollars between 1997 and 1999 as development assistance for health and population programs.

The Dalai Lama asked Joseph Stiglitz, “How much will the Iraq war cost?” Joseph replied,” I estimate, it will be at least 1.1 trillion dollars by 2016.”

The Dalai Lama said, “If we stop the war now and spend some money instead on health and education, do you think that will be a better foreign policy? Do you think we will make more friends? Do you think that is the right action?”  Rumsfeld disagreed,” First we need democracy in Iraq to ensure our national security. We can not cut our defense expenditure and our war effort”.

Dalai Lama had chosen the right path instinctively and Rumsfeld’s objection validated it. He asked Rumsfeld,” When should we withdraw from Iraq?”

Rumsfeld said,” Not for five years or may be ten.”

Taking Rumsfeld’s advice seriously he ordered the US army to withdraw immediately.

He asked Arundhati to go Iraq, publicize the new US foreign policy, convince them of our sincerity and embrace them with friendship and love. She hesitated,” Since I can not be guaranteed security I would rather not travel. Instead I would just write angry articles and persuasive letters.” 
Rumsfeld chuckled,” In New York she needed only a podium but in Baghdad she also needs courage.” Arundhati, livid and challenged, defied Rumsfeld and left for Iraq.

Dalai Lama blessed her with parting advice,” Mr. Bush had used WMD – words of mass deception — to fabricate excuses to attack Iraq but now it is your responsibility to use the right speech. And don’t practice in Iraq what you may have picked up from the communists in Kerala. Freedom of speech does not legitimize the freedom to shriek.”

Arundhati was a big hit in Iraq with her passionate persuasion.

The Dalai Lama then set out on an earnest campaign to convince Americans to cut consumption.

He cited from a report, that 20% of the world population living in the highest-income countries indulges in 86% of total private consumption. They also:

Eat 45% of all meat and fish

Use 58% of total energy

Own74% of all telephones

Use 84% of all paper

Own 87% of the world’s vehicles

The president pleaded,” We in the USA are the profligate market for the world. The whole world sells to us and we buy a disproportionate share of world’s production of goods and services. That makes us vulnerable and insecure. We should cut our consumption and lead simpler lives.”
When Americans finally decided to live without compulsive shopping, the imports decreased, trade deficit narrowed, national debt plummeted, credit card debts vanished, inflation leveled off and the need for Valium and Prozac abated.

The shopping outlet of the world, the USA, had pulled its shutters down. Main mart of the world was closed!

The experiment seemed to be work for two years.

But, by the third year of his presidency global effects of this policy sprouted. The Chinese had lost their outlet store for manufactured trinkets, the Indians who had facilitated the lives of Americans with their software (while neglecting their own poor people) had no users, the French and Italians had to keep their luxury frills at home, the Japanese inventory of cars escalated, the Korean electronics had no buyers.

In the US, as sales plunged, government revenues plummeted, unemployment escalated, bankruptcies multiplied, discontent simmered. And the Mexicans stopped crossing the border.

But Cuba insulated and hardened by decades of US blockade, was the only country unaffected by the global depression. Cuba had also recently hosted the Non Aligned Movement summit where they had decided to drop the word “Aligned” from the title and call it (appropriately) ‘Non Movement’ and Fidel Castro, whose guts had been surgically removed, became the president.

Fidel rose from the hospital bed and startled the comrades, who seduced by the promise of free markets had slumbered for half a century. The ‘Non Movement’, they figured, was a hint from Fidel to revolt.

The workers of the world united and threatened, “Either the US reopen its free market or now face the terrorist wrath of the Cubans, Chinese, Indians, South Americans, East Europeans, Koreans, Africans – all combined.”

The Dalai Lama was sad. The magnitude of global depression was worse than the world had seen before. That night, Dalai Lama had a dream —– Cubans had invaded the USA. He advisers told him to flee the country. He groaned, “Oh not again.” And then he reluctantly encouraged his followers to trek to Canada. “It is a flat land, an easier trek compared to my first one.”

In the background he heard Rumsfeld taunt, “Ha, Communists need free markets to feed them and pacifists need an army to protect them.”

Bush sniggered from his ranch and praised Rumsfeld with Bushism, “What a clever and apt simile!” Arundhati swiftly opposed the Bush metaphor and retorted, “No, it is called an irony.”

Unionization Pressures in Academia Extend Beyond Grad Students

Posted on by Robin Varghese

ScienceNOW Daily News on the first attempt to unionize postdocs:

An attempt to form what would have been the first major union of postdocs in the United States has ended in failure. But supporters of the controversial effort at the University of California (UC) system say they haven’t given up.

U.S. postdocs began joining together more than a decade ago to press for improvements in their working conditions and to clarify their ambiguous status on most campuses. But they have traditionally avoided affiliations with labor unions. So it was a shock to many in the scientific community when the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Workers Union (UAW) filed a petition in July with California’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) seeking to represent 6000 UC postdocs based on having collected a majority of their signatures. Some UC postdocs alleged that UAW representatives had collected signatures from many of their colleagues without fully explaining the implications of forming a union. Under state rules, signing up a simple majority of workers is enough to declare victory.

But yesterday, before PERB had ruled on the validity of the organizing drive, the UAW withdrew the petition. “About 500 to 600 of the signatures we had submitted were from individuals who are no longer postdocs,” explains UAW’s Maureen Boyd, who organized the drive although she’s not affiliated to UC. “That left us 100 signatures short of the required majority, and we decided to withdraw.”

PERB officials say that several UC postdocs had asked that their signatures be revoked. “But the petition was withdrawn before we got to the stage of counting signatures,” says PERB’s acting general counsel Robin Wesley.

Ahmad Chalabi, Now

Posted on by Robin Varghese

I wonder which side Hitchens will choose. In the New York Times Magazine:

Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake.

“It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.”

It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included.

“In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’

“What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.”

House Election Forecasts

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Andrew Gelman comments offers some comments on some simulations by Joe Bafumi, Bob Erikson, and Christopher Wlezien, which predicts Democrats gaining 32 seats in the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

Compared to our paper on the topic, the paper by Bafumi et al. goes further by predicting the average district vote from the polls. (We simply determine what is the vote needed by the Democrats to get aspecified numer of seats, without actually forecsasting the vote itself.) In any case, the two papers use similar methodology (although, again, with an additional step in the Bafumi et al. paper). In some aspects, their model is more sophisticated than ours (for example, they fit separate models to open seats and incumbent races).

Slightly over-certain?

The only criticism I’d make of this paper is that they might be understating the uncertainty in the seats-votes curve (that is, the mapping from votes to seats). The key point here is that they get district-by-district predictions (see equations 2 and 3 on page 7 of their paper) and then aggregate these up to estimate the national seat totals for the two parties. This aggregation does include uncertainty, but only of the sort that’s independent across districts. In our validations (see section 3.2 of our paper), we found the out-of-sample predictive error of the seats-votes curve to be quite a bit higher than the internal measure of uncertainty obtained by aggregating district-level errors. We dealt with this by adding an extra variance term to the predictive seats-votes curve.

On Pinochet’s Arrest

Posted on by Robin Varghese

The arrest of Augusto Pinochet a few days ago for torture during his dictatorship has received far less attention than I would’ve thought. From Human Rights Watch:

The arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who for the first time faces prosecution for torture, is a milestone in the struggle for justice in Chile, Human Rights Watch said today.

Pinochet is charged with the torture of 23 people, as well as the kidnapping of 34 and one homicide, which were carried out at a secret government detention center after he came to power in the 1973 military coup. The former dictator, who was placed under house arrest yesterday, is already being prosecuted on kidnapping charges in connection with the “disappearance” of 119 people in 1975. Until yesterday, Pinochet had never been charged with torture, which was a systematic practice throughout his rule.

The government-appointed National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture reported in 2004 that more than 18,000 people were tortured during the four months after the September 1973 coup, and another 5,266 people from January 1974 until August 1977.

“This is an important moment for the thousands of victims of torture in Chile,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The man who ran the regime that brutalized them is finally being made to answer for these crimes.”

The Return of Mercenaries, A Review of Pelton’s Licensed to Kill

Posted on by Robin Varghese

In the Asia Times, David Isenberg reviews Robert Young Pelton’s new book about mercenaries military contractors.

Licensed to Kill is divided into three sections, comprising 12 chapters. Some of these have been news stories in their own right. The first is about the exploits of legendary US Special Forces veteran and Central Intelligence Agency contractor Billy Waugh who, after September 11, 2001, was asked by the CIA to recruit contractors to operate in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his forces. It was here that Blackwater got its first CIA contract, to bolster personal-protection teams for CIA officers.

It is here that one appreciates Pelton’s eye for detail – details that are always generalized about in the mainstream press, but never clearly explained. Such as, what are security contractors actually paid? What is the difference between Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 operators? What the heck is a tier? All these questions get answered.

It bears remembering, because this is not an academic work with hundreds of endnotes, that this is an extremely well-researched book. Pelton has gained access to an enormous amount of insider information that normally never sees the light of the day. Researchers could undoubtedly spend years happily sifting though all the material he has accumulated.

One gets the answers to these questions only by hanging out with a wide variety of people where they live and work over the years. And while Pelton has spent the past three years sitting down with security contractors on different continents, often while they were on the job, whether doing convoy runs from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the airport or roaming the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is clear that his prior years touring the world’s killing zones have conferred on him a special sort of street credibility that has given him a special access to a tribe that does not normally talk to outsiders.

Joachim Radkau’s Max Weber

Posted on by Robin Varghese

In the New Left Review:

At the time of his death, Weber’s only book publications were the two texts necessary for an academic career, while the main body of his work—the vast mass of Economy and Society; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—either languished in manuscript or had appeared in specialist journals. It was Marianne who assembled these studies into posthumous collections and edited the unpublished texts, thus ensuring a growing but still limited reputation in the Weimar Republic. International sacralization came with Talcott Parsons’s rendition of The Protestant Ethic into English in 1930 and highly selective use of Weber for the construction of his own structural functionalism. It was this edulcorated transatlantic version that was re-imported into the fledgling Federal Republic as a ‘good’ German, tainted neither by Nazi collaboration nor Marxist sympathies.

In 1959 this image was decisively challenged by Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics. Mommsen’s meticulous reconstruction of Weber’s ‘unsentimental politics of power’ created a furore in Adenauer’s Germany. The counter-attack—and, to some extent, successful recapture—was led by Parsons himself at the Heidelberg Soziologentag in 1964. Weber’s influence as a far-sighted liberal advocate of the ‘ethics of responsibility’, theorist of modernity and a founder of the distinctively modernist enterprise of sociology continued to grow, both in Germany and internationally. Less a distinct tendency or school than an ether in which the social sciences are bathed, his generic concepts—‘the Protestant ethic’, ‘charismatic leadership’, ‘rationalization’, ‘disenchantment’ and ‘ideal types’—have entered the lexicon of modern intellectual life, if all too often stripped of the originary contexts of their formulation. Weber’s standing remains such that Lawrence Scaff could argue that whoever is ‘able to have his own Weber interpretation accepted could determine the further progress of the social sciences’: ‘Weber is power’.

For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monsters

Posted on by Azra Raza

From The New York Times:Kolata1

FIRST we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and they should just quit. Then we said they were repulsive and we didn’t want to be around them. Then we said they were costing us loads of money — maybe they should pay extra taxes. Other Americans, after all, do not share their dissolute ways.

Cigarette smokers? No, the obese.

Last week the list of ills attributable toobesity grew: fat people cause global warming. This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

More here.

BEST INVENTION: YOUTUBE

Posted on by Azra Raza

From Time:Youtube_1

Meet Peter. Peter is a 79-year-old English retiree. Back in WW II he served as a radar technician. He is now an international star.

One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke. The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.

Let’s be clear: we know who started it. That would be three twentysomething guys named Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. At a Silicon Valley dinner party one night in 2004 they started talking about how easy it was to share photos with your friends online but what a pain it was to do the same thing with video.

So they did something about it. They hacked together a simple routine for taking videos in any format and making them play in pretty much any Web browser on any computer. Then they built a kind of virtual video village, a website where people could post their own videos and watch and rate and comment on and search for and tag other people’s videos. Voilˆ: YouTube.

But even though they built it, they didn’t really understand it. They thought they’d built a useful tool for people to share their travel videos. They thought people might use it to pitch auction items on eBay. They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension.

More here.

How Close to Catastrophe?

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

“On The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock and four other books on global warming.”

Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books:

Lovelock_james20061116James Lovelock is among the planet’s most interesting and productive scientists. His invention of an electron capture device that was able to detect tiny amounts of chemicals enabled other scientists both to understand the dangers of DDT to the eggshells of birds and to figure out the ways in which chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were eroding the ozone layer. He’s best known, though, not for a gadget but for a metaphor: the idea that the earth might usefully be considered as a single organism (for which he used the name of the Greek earth goddess Gaia) struggling to keep itself stable.

In fact, his so-called Gaia hypothesis was at first less clear than that— “hardly anyone, and that included me for the first ten years after the concept was born, seems to know what Gaia is,” he has written. But the hypothesis has turned into a theory, still not fully accepted by other scientists but not scorned either. It holds that the earth is “a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system” and striving to “regulate surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life.”

More here.

Book-burning threat over town’s portrayal in Booker-winning novel

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Randeep Ramesh in The Guardian:

Screenhunter_8_5When she became the youngest ever winner of the Booker prize Kiran Desai inadvertently lifted the town of Kalimpong out of the shadows of the Himalayas and into the glare of the media spotlight.

But few in the town are now thanking her for setting her novel, The Inheritance of Loss, in this landscape. Instead internet forums hum with indignation about the book’s “condescending statements” while others threaten public book-burnings.

So intense is the fury that Desai’s aunt, a doctor with a practice in the market, told India’s Outlook magazine that she has not “told people here about my niece, or the book, or that she won an award. The book contains many insensitive things.”

More here.

the detail of decay

Posted on by Morgan Meis

P1950_parthenon

‘Between sublimity and the dissolute, we discover the aesthetics of revulsion’, writes the philosopher Dylan Trigg in his recent book The Aesthetics of Decay (2006). Trigg is the latest in a venerable line of thinkers to turn his attention to decay in general and garbage in particular. His book’s contention – that the ruin or remnant embodies a mode of ‘critical memory’ at odds with the sanctification of official monuments and sites of collective recall – may be argued at the level of contemporary cultural theory, but its terms and tone are actually ancient. There seems to be something in the study of ruins, rubbish, junk and trash that means its enthusiasts can’t help reverting to awed lists of defunct artefacts. They may begin with more rigorous and abstract ambitions, but time and again it is the details of decay that fascinate its theorists.

more from Frieze here.

Protecting the people of North Korea

Posted on by Morgan Meis

WHILE the focus in recent weeks has been on North Korea’s nuclear test, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the government there is also responsible for one of the most egregious human-rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today. For more than a decade, many in the international community have argued that to focus on the suffering of the North Korean people would risk driving the country away from discussions over its nuclear program. But with his recent actions, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, has shown that this approach neither stopped the development of his nuclear program nor helped North Koreans. It is time, therefore, for a renewed international effort to ameliorate the crisis facing the country’s citizens. And with the unanimous adoption by the United Nations Security Council of the doctrine that each state has a responsibility to protect its own citizens from the most egregious of human-rights abuses, a new instrument for diplomacy has emerged. States will retain sovereignty over their own territory, but if they should fail to protect their own citizens from severe human-rights abuses, the international community now has an obligation to intervene through regional bodies and the United Nations, up to and including the Security Council.

more from Vaclav Havel et al. here.

Brice marden: high stakes

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Ma86a_marden

“It’s hard to look at paintings,” Brice Marden once said. “You have to be able to bring all sorts of things together in your mind, your imagination, in your whole body.” Good paintings make the exercise worth the trouble. Great paintings make it seem valuable in itself, as one of the more rewarding things that having minds, imaginations, and bodies lets us do. Marden’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art confirms him, at the age of sixty-eight, as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades. There are fifty-six paintings in the show, dating from broody monochromes made in 1964-66, when Marden was fresh out of art school at Yale, to new, clamorous, six-panelled compositions, twenty-four feet long, of overlaid loopy bands in six colors. (His several styles of laconic form and smoldering emotion might be termed “passive-expressive.”) As selected and installed by Gary Garrels, the senior curator at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, the ensemble affords an adventure in aesthetic experience—and, tacitly, in ethical, and even spiritual experience. There are also some fifty drawings: too few. Marden’s drawings (and etchings, which are entirely absent) constitute an immense achievement in their own right, and their resourcefulness and grace are best perceived in quantity.

more from The New Yorker here.

the truth is so clearly unbelievable

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Jula190

For anyone who might imagine Julavits — a member of the McSweeney’s circle, best-known for her antisnark manifesto in the literary magazine The Believer — to be a soft touch, “The Uses of Enchantment” will be a welcome corrective. But despite its caustic style, the story, by its final chapters, reveals its sadder underpinnings. Because in the final analysis, the book’s central mystery is not about what happened to Mary. It’s about what happened between Mary and her mother — about Mary’s search for a clue that her mother was on her side. That she loved her. Or at the very least, that she forgave her for what did or did not happen.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Non-Coding DNA May not be Junk

Posted on by Robin Varghese

In ScienceNOW:

Once thought of as junk, noncoding sequences of DNA fill in the gaps between genes and make up more than 90 percent of our genome. Recently, scientists have discovered that these stretches of DNA contain regulatory elements that control how and when nearby genes are turned on and off (ScienceNOW, 16 August). An international team led by genome researcher Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California wondered how many of these noncoding regions might play a role in human evolution.

The team looked at 110,549 human noncoding DNA sequences that seem to have been conserved during mammalian evolution. Using statistical tests, Rubin and his colleagues found 992 sequences that appeared to have undergone changes during human evolution that were not due to simple chance, suggesting that the genetic alterations were due to natural selection. The team then used two existing gene databases, called Gene Ontology and Entrez Gene, to match the noncoding sequences with the functions of the coding genes closest to them.

The strongest evidence for accelerated evolution on the human line was found in noncoding sequences next to genes involved in helping neurons adhere to each other. The team found 69 such sequences, suggesting that changes in these regulatory elements may have contributed to the evolution of uniquely human cognitive talents.

How to Withdraw from Iraq, Richard Haas Evaluates the Options

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Richard Haas, in India Today:

A third approach to withdrawals can best be described as conditional. Under such an approach, the US would inform the Iraqi government – ideally, following intense consultations – that US troops will be removed unless the Iraqis demonstrate that they are able and willing to meet certain tests or standards by a specified date. Such standards could be military, i.e., achieve a certain level of proficiency, or political, i.e., gain broad agreement on new power- and revenue-sharing arrangements. Most likely, they would need to be both.

This third, conditional-withdrawal approach is another way of casting the first two approaches. If the Iraqis meet the tests in time, then this form of withdrawal resembles the existing performance-based strategy. However, if the Iraqis fail to meet the tests, then the withdrawal would take place after the deadline had passed. It thus would come to resemble in practice a calendar-based exit strategy, with the important difference that a substantial share of the onus for the policy change would ostensibly be on the Iraqis for their shortcomings rather than on the US stemming from a lack of resolve.

This last option of conditional withdrawal is hardly ideal, but it is the least bad course available to the US. This is a time for realism, not ambition.

Election Day

Posted on by Azra Raza

MICHAEL KINSLEY in The New York Times:

Election Democracy is about more than just counting votes. It is about democratic institutions — legislatures, courts — and a culture of respect for them. It is about political egalitarianism: we may not be equal in any other way, but we are all supposed to be equal as citizens. In the American tradition, democracy is also about individual rights, even though protecting these rights can mean thwarting the will of a democratic majority.

The current result of American democracy (though this may change on Tuesday) is Republican control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and (undeniably by now) the federal courts. And that, in turn, has produced policies that, unless I badly misjudge the demographics, most readers of The New York Times Book Review don’t care for: unjustified tax breaks for the rich, a miserable war in Iraq, unbelievable indifference to civil liberties (Secret prison camps? Torture?? America???), among other treats. But this doesn’t prove any flaws in democracy itself. Maybe it’s what people want.

More here.

Fish eavesdrop to avoid becoming dinner

Posted on by Azra Raza

From MSNBC:

Fish_5 Fish can eavesdrop on the calls of dolphins to avoid getting eaten, a new study suggests. “Probably a lot of fish can do this,” said lead researcher Luke Remage-Healey, a behavioral neuro-endocrinologist at University of California, Los Angeles.

A bottom-dwelling fish found off the coast of Florida called the gulf toadfish is prime prey for dolphins, which often listen to toadfish calls to find their targets. In fact, 80 percent of bottlenose dolphin diets containing sound-producing fish. But whether the toadfish peels its “ears” toward dolphins has remained a mystery. 

Remage-Healey first suspected that gulf toadfish could listen in on hungry dolphins’ calls two years ago while recording the mating calls of the male toadfish off the Gulf coast of Florida. The fish were hanging out above their nests. “Then, they all stopped calling,” Remage-Healey recalled. “My field assistant noticed dolphins foraging right over the toadfish site, and we heard we were recording dolphin sounds instead.”

More here.