Fearful of Restive Foreign Labor, Dubai Eyes Reforms

Jason DeParle in the New York Times:

Screenhunter_01_aug_10_1551They still wake before dawn in desert dormitories that pack a dozen men or more to a room. They still pour concrete and tie steel rods in temperatures that top 110 degrees. They still spend years away from families in India and Pakistan to earn about $1 an hour. They remain bonded to employers under terms that critics liken to indentured servitude.

But construction workers, a million strong here and famously mistreated, have won some humble victories.

After several years of unprecedented labor unrest, the government is seeking peace with this army of sweat-stained migrants who make local citizens a minority in their own country and sustain one of the world’s great building booms. Regulators here have enforced midday sun breaks, improved health benefits, upgraded living conditions and cracked down on employers brazen enough to stop paying workers at all.

The results form a portrait of halting change in a region synonymous with foreign labor and, for many years, labor abuse.

More here.

The Psychology of Subprime Mortgages

Jonah Lehrer in The Frontal Cortex:

Img_9753The shit is hitting the fan: all those sub-prime mortgages given out so recklessly over the past two years are getting their interest rates re-adjusted. And that, of course, is when the foreclosures begin.

By most measures, sub-prime loans are a bad idea. Look, for example, at the popular 2/28 loan, which consists of a low, fixed-interest rate for the first two years and a much higher, adjustable rate for the next twenty-eight. Most people taking out a 2/28 loan can’t afford the higher interest rates that will hit later on. It’s not unusual for interest payments on a 2/28 loan to double within four years. (That’s why you’re seeing such high foreclosure rates in the sub-prime market.)

So why do people take out sub-prime loans? Don’t they realize that they won’t be able to afford the ensuing 28 years of mortgage payments? I think a big part of the reason sub-prime loans remain so seductive, even when the financial terms are so atrocious, is that they take advantage of a dangerous flaw built into our brain. This flaw is rooted in our emotional brain, which tends to overvalue immediate gains (like a new house) at the expense of future costs (high interest rates). Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of a new home, but can’t really grapple with the long-term fiscal consequences of the decision. Our impulsivity encounters little resistance, and so we sign on the bottom line. We want the house. We’ll figure out how to pay for it later.

The best evidence for this idea comes from the lab of Jonathan Cohen.

More here.

In the Hole to China

Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch:

Story_china_us_diplomacyEarly this morning China let the idiots in Washington, and on Wall Street, know that it has them by the short hairs. Two senior spokesmen for the Chinese government observed that China’s considerable holdings of US dollars and Treasury bonds “contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve currency.”

Should the US proceed with sanctions intended to cause the Chinese currency to appreciate, “the Chinese central bank will be forced to sell dollars, which might lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar.”

If Western financial markets are sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the message, US interest rates will rise regardless of any further action by China. At this point, China does not need to sell a single bond. In an instant, China has made it clear that US interest rates depend on China, not on the Federal Reserve.

More here.

Poems from Guantánamo

From the Boston Globe:

THE JUST-released “Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak” is a collection of 22 poems by 17 detainees at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Edited by Marc Falkoff, each poem had to be cleared by the Pentagon. The result offers a rare glimpse into the lives of the prisoners. The following is an excerpt.

Jumah Al Dossari

Jumah al Dossari, a 33-year-old Bahraini national, is the father of a young daughter. He has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. Detained without charge or trial, Dossari has been subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuses, some of which are detailed in “Inside the Wire,” an account of the Guantánamo prison by former military intelligence soldier Erik Saar. He has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the US military, has tried to kill himself 12 times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.

DEATH POEM

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

More here.

The Summer Jam

3QD editor Morgan Meis has started writing a weekly column at The Smart Set:

Morgan2It is generally agreed but never specifically discussed that there is a thing called the “summer jam.” I suppose it bears some genetic resemblance to the “summer read.” But the “summer jam” is both a more fleeting and a more dominating sort of beast. There is typically only one summer jam per season and there is no such thing as a repeat. You can only be the summer jam once.

The summer jam is an unpretentious thing. It goes directly to the very essence of pop music, which is to create a sound that is unique enough to catch your attention and almost impossible to ignore. But the summer jam must capture the mind immediately and more forcefully and purely than the pop music hit of another season. This probably has something to do with summer itself. Summer is the season of immediacy, of quick glances and shimmering surfaces. Summer has needs, and more than other seasons those needs have a desperate quality to them. I don’t know whether it really matters if summer jams are even “good” or “bad.” Summer jams are beyond good and bad. They are best described as phenomena, events, things that occur.

More here.

rorty: still dead

Photo_rorty

Richard Rorty is dead. For those who loved him as a person, and also those who just knew him – I had the good fortune to spend an evening with him in Hamburg – this sentence is an expression of pain alone. But for those who loved him as a theorist, the question is what this sentence means besides. Certainly: one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century has died. What will come after him, will someone take his place? As with other great philosophers and writers, the answer is: of course not. One has to live with such losses; they are forever. But in Rorty’s case, questions and answers lead beyond truisms. To explain that, I need to get slightly personal.

more from Eurozine’s special Rorty edition here.

a man who “tells stories, narrates with images,”

Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni was obsessed with distraction. No other artist focused on inattentiveness to the degree of intensity on display in his best films. His subject was the alternately bored and viscerally excited modern human being, but he had the extraordinary discipline to keep himself from becoming such a person. His characters often broke down, losing sight of each other, their own desires, their barest needs; through it all, Antonioni would retain his trancelike alertness. He indulged long takes, luxuriating in static images and masterfully sustained tracking shots of characters flitting aimlessly from excitement to crushing boredom and loneliness. The extravagant tension in his extravagantly composed films derives from this crucial difference between sensibility and subject.

more from n+1 here.

not the least curious twist in the tale

Ia720005_lcccourbet_origine_du_mond

When Gustave Courbet’s painting “The Origin of the World” went on permanent display at the Musée d’Orsay in 1995, it was emerging from what must be one of the longest periods of visual quarantine in the history of art. Painted sometime in 1866, for the better part of 130 years it had been cordoned off in private collections, its existence known only to a small group of people, few of whom left any record of the work. Even Courbet, with his swashbuckling disregard for convention, seems for once to have erred on the side of caution. Neither signed nor dated, the picture was never mentioned by him in writing, and it is only on the strength of two small contemporary documents (the report of a dinner at which the painter, never more fulsome than when singing his own praises, likens his little figure to the nudes of Titian and Veronese, and a description by Maxime du Camp so slapdash that one doubts whether he had actually seen the picture with his own eyes) that we can be sure Courbet painted it at all.

Everywhere you turn in the painting’s history, you meet with the same pattern of secrecy and obfuscation.

more from the TLS here.

Antidepressant drugs work as roadblocks for brain chemicals

From Nature:

Drug The way in which antidepressants exert their effects on brain cells has been revealed by two separate teams of researchers working independently of each other.

Antidepressants work by preventing neurons in the brain from importing certain chemicals, such as dopamine and serotonin, which are used to pass messages from cell to cell. The route by which these chemicals are imported depends on passageways in the outer membrane of the cells called transporter proteins, and it is on these passageways that the antidepressants exert their influence. But how exactly they hold up the process has remained a mystery since the drugs were discovered 45 years ago, says Les Iversen, a pharmacologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

More here.

Emily Brontë hits the heights in poll to find greatest love story

From The Guardian:

Bronte_emily The passionate romance that proved that ardour can survive Britain’s grimmest landscape and weather has beaten countless steamy successors in a poll of the greatest love stories of all time.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, recounting the doomed affair between sweet Cathy Earnshaw and the brutal outsider Heathcliff, has seen off Shakespeare, Gone With the Wind and everything by Barbara Cartland in a survey which shows the lasting power of classic works.

Almost all the entries in the top 20 choices of 2,000 readers are major works of English literature, with Jane Austen pipping Shakespeare as runner-up and Emily’s sister Charlotte coming in fourth with Jane Eyre.”It’s really heartening to see how these stories, written so long ago, retain the power to captivate 21st century audiences,” said Richard Kingsbury, channel head of UKTV Drama, which commissioned the study.

More here.

The Life and Death of Brad Will

Matthew Power in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

Screenhunter_13_aug_09_1231In a decade of living in New York City, time and again I would run into Brad in the middle of the action, whatever that action happened to be: a street protest at the Republican National Convention, a guerrilla dance party on the subway, a crowd of thousands fleeing the collapse of the Twin Towers. I once saw him, while being chased by the police among hundreds of bicyclists on a protest ride through Times Square, shoulder his bicycle and run right over the top of a taxi to freedom. He always gravitated toward the conflict and conflagration, loved getting close enough to touch before leaping back. He was fearless, and he usually got away with it, coming back with stories of how the cops were just inches from grabbing him, how the railroad bull walked right by his hiding place without spotting him. And later, as he went further, to countries where tectonic social conflicts rumbled just below the surface, drawn by that same impulse, some junk-craving of conscience and adrenaline, he spoke of how the bullets whizzed by without hitting him.

So when a friend of ours called me one morning in late October 2006, her voice cracking in that tone that conveys the worst news: it’s Brad . . . I already knew, but still didn’t believe. Everything else was mere detail, whens and wheres, unmoored fragments of fact: Oaxaca. Filming a street demonstration during the teachers’ strike down there. Twice in the chest. Never made it to the hospital.

He filmed his own assassination.

More here.

An Ocean of Air

Screenhunter_10_aug_09_1130I’ve been reading this absolutely fascinating book by Gabrielle Walker over the last couple of days and couldn’t recommend it more highly. In the review that I post an excerpt from below, William Grimes unnecessarily tries to balance his overall-very-favorable opinion with a few petty gripes, like:

Like Dava Sobel in “The Planets,” Ms. Walker writes for a general audience and seems to assume something close to scientific illiteracy in her readers. There is plenty of gee-whiz and tee-hee in her merry tale, a colorful blend of anecdote, personality and pure science explained in the simplest terms.

Do you know how Galileo first figured out how much air weighs? How Torricelli first measured air pressure? How Robert Boyle came upon his eponymous law? How Priestly helped Lavoisier discover oxygen? Do you know how all these people are connected, one to the next? If not, then like me, and presumably unlike William Grimes, I suppose you are scientifically illiterate. Don’t believe Grimes. There is endlessly enchanting information here for the scientifically well-informed, as well as for others. (All the stuff I point out above is from just the first fifth of the book!) Get it. And read it.

William Grimes reviews An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, by Gabrielle Walker, in the New York Times:

Screenhunter_11_aug_09_1131As a metaphor for absence and nothingness, air has performed admirably for centuries. It has pulled off one of the great con jobs in human history, concealing endless complexities behind its bland, transparent facade. Layer by layer, from the ionosphere to the Earth’s surface, Gabrielle Walker exposes the Earth’s atmosphere for what it is, a restless, electrically charged, dynamic superhero, entrusted with the sacred mission of protecting our planet, nurturing life and even, when looked at from a certain angle, making love possible.

Ms. Walker, a chemist by training and a science journalist by profession, finds that angle in “An Ocean of Air,” her perkily popular take on air, wind, atmosphere and the scientists who unraveled their mysteries, from Galileo onward. It starts with oxygen, creator and destroyer, foundation of the atmosphere, the revolutionary element that quickens life and hastens death through its ferocious reactivity, and requires two sexes. Oxygen-burning, ever-aging mitochondria from the male expend energy seeking out cool, unaged mitochondria in the female egg, which guarantee that the human embryo’s biological clock starts at zero. Romance is in the air.

More here.  [Thanks to Anna Suknov.]

‘Sicko,’ Health Care and SCHIP

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Screenhunter_09_aug_09_1054Of course, there’s an army of ideologues and lobbyists who will depict the push for universal coverage as a nefarious effort to undermine the free enterprise system. Witness President Bush’s recent rejection of pleas from even a majority of fellow Republicans to compromise with Democrats on renewing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that gives health coverage to millions of children whose parents don’t qualify for Medicaid, yet can’t afford private insurance.

This popular decade-old program, which would cost between $7 billion and $10 billion more dollars per year to retain (financed by increases in tobacco taxes), will expire at the end of September if it’s not renewed. True to the politics of nope, Bush has threatened to veto it if it passes Congress.

The incongruities are almost too painful to note. Spending $1 trillion ($1,000 billion) on the utter debacle that is Iraq has not made us safer from international terror. Spending a few billion dollars on a children’s insurance program that has worked will make us safer from the domestic terror of facing life-threatening illnesses without medical care.

More here.

What’s keeping women out of the labs?

From BBC News:

Women If you’ve worked your way to the top in a university maths, physics or engineering department – you’re very unlikely to be a woman. But why should this be?

Despite changing attitudes, there are still very few women at the highest levels in certain fields. In 2005/6, while more than half of all UK students in higher education were female, just 3% of maths and 2% of civil engineering professors were women, a recent study revealed. Professor David Geary, of the University of Missouri in the US, suggests there are two key difference between the sexes that might account for the disparity in numbers. The first is a difference in spatial abilities – the capacity to visualise things, particularly in three dimensions. The second is an increased interest in objects and how things work. According to Dr Cronin, who studies evolutionary theory and sex difference at the London School of Economics, it’s the numbers of men at the extremes of ability that are most telling: “For males, the difference between the worst and the best is far, far greater. “This is a very important aspect of male-female differences.

“One way of looking at this is that among males there are more dumbbells, but there are also more Nobels.”

More here.

I Female Carnivore: Nothing Like Red Meat on a First Date to Win His Heart

The Style section of the NYT baffles me again (for HMN):

[R]ed meat on a date has become such an effective statement of self-acceptance that even a vegetarian like Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Random House, sometimes longs to order a burger.

“Being a vegetarian puts you at a disadvantage,” Ms. Crosley said. “You’re in the most basic category of finicky. Even women who order chicken, it isn’t enough.” She said she has thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister, famous for its frat boy associations, to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”

“Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson,” Ms. Crosley, 28, said.

Not all red meat, apparently, is equal in the dating world. The mediums of steak and hamburger each send a different message. Dropping into conversation the fact that steaks of Kobe beef come from Wagyu cattle, but that not all steaks sold as Wagyu are Kobe beef, demonstrates one’s worldliness, said Gabriella Gershenson, a dining editor at Time Out New York. It holds the same currency today that being able to name Hemingway’s four wives held in an earlier era.

Hamburgers, she added, say you are down-to-earth, which is why women rarely order those deluxe hamburgers priced as high as a porterhouse.

“They’re created for men who want to impress women, so they order the $60 burger, then they let the woman taste it,” Ms. Gershenson said. “The man gets to show off his expertise and show that he can afford it.”

Turning Points: A historian examines crucial decisions made during the Second World War

From The Washington Post:

Hit World War II made for great myths and great mythmakers. Consider this one, from Winston Churchill: “Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda.”

In fact, from May 25 to 28, 1940, while the entire British Expeditionary Force was threatened with destruction at Dunkirk, Churchill and his war cabinet engaged in an intense debate over whether to seek detente by approaching Adolf Hitler through Italy’s Benito Mussolini. Would a negotiated end to the war be possible? The foreign minister, Lord Halifax, forcefully advocated exploring the possibilities; Churchill passionately argued to the contrary and won, with crucial support from Neville Chamberlain, not often associated with such steadfastness. Even then, the war cabinet “did not rule out the possibility of an approach to Mussolini ‘at some time,’ though it explicitly did so in the current situation,” writes Ian Kershaw in Fateful Choices, his ambitious history of the war’s most important decisions. “It is not easy to imagine, in the light of later events, how insecure Churchill’s position was in the middle of May 1940. His hold on authority, soon to become unchallengeable, was still tenuous.”

More here.

Exit Wounds: The legacy of Indian partition

Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker:

Screenhunter_08_aug_09_0150Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority’s right to rule. British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity, and made partition inevitable.

This was a deeper tragedy than is commonly realized—and not only because India today has almost as many Muslims as Pakistan. In a land where cultures, traditions, and beliefs cut across religious communities, few people had defined themselves exclusively through their ancestral faith. The Pashto-speaking Muslim in the North-West Frontier province (later the nursery of the Taliban and Al Qaeda) had little in common with the Bangla-speaking Muslim in the eastern province of Bengal. (Even today, a Sunni Muslim from Lahore has less in common with a Sunni Muslim from Dhaka than he has with a Hindu Brahmin from New Delhi, who, in turn, may find alien the language, food, and dress of a low-caste Hindu from Chennai.) The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: “Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.”

More here.

Crime author charged with murder

Roger Boyes in the London Times:

Krystianbala185_196354aAn author leafing through a newspaper comes across tantalising details of a murder so grisly that he becomes obsessed, and imagines the events into a novel. Or a murderer, so self-satisfied with the brilliance of his perfect crime, pens an account to pass off as fiction and enshrine it in literary history.

Where reality ends and fiction begins in the stomach-turning novel Amok is the central task before the jury in Poland’s trial of the decade. Four years after he published his bloody bestseller, Krystian Bala has found himself on trial for the same torture and murder that he detailed in his novel.

More here.

Liberalism, Democracy, and the Jewish State

Gadi Taub in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The future of the state of Israel is once again a topic of heated public debate. For good reasons: The possibility of a nuclear threat from a hostile Iran is one; deadlock in the peace process in the region, and the chance of a gradual shift into chronic civil war between Israelis and Palestinians, is another. But it has become common in some circles to ask not only whether Israel can survive, but also if it has a right to.

Some commentators believe that “the Jewish Question” that has been buzzing around in the West for some three centuries — the question of how this ancient people, the Jews, should fit into a modern political order — should be reopened. National self-determination for Jews in a state of their own, such critics say, can no longer be part of a morally acceptable answer. That is a telling development. As in the past, Western attitudes to the “Jewish Question” are reliable indications of larger political moods and of the shifting meanings of political concepts.

More here.