Roger Scruton in The City Journal:

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate?

That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in two ways: by a real or implied “social contract,” whereby each person agrees with every other to the principles of government; and by a political process through which each person participates in the making and enacting of the law. The right and duty of participation is what we mean, or ought to mean, by “citizenship,” and the distinction between political and religious communities can be summed up in the view that political communities are composed of citizens and religious communities of subjects—of those who have “submitted.” If we want a simple definition of the West as it is today, the concept of citizenship is a good starting point. That is what millions of migrants are roaming the world in search of: an order that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

NEVER SPEAK ILL of the dead, at least if they had some redeeming qualities. That's the pattern that emerges from research that asked people to evaluate biographical summaries of hypothetical leaders. In general, leaders were viewed more favorably when they were known to be dead. This halo even helped mitigate perceptions of incompetence. However, there was an opposite reaction – a more negative posthumous attitude – to leaders who had acted immorally before they died. When asked to explain their evaluations, people viewed death as a sort of final verdict, as if “the jury was still out” during life. Likewise, in an analysis of media coverage of celebrities who died in the 1990s, the researchers found that there was more positive coverage several years after death than several years before, especially in the case of Princess Diana, JFK Jr., and Tupac Shakur. The one exception: Richard Nixon.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

You've got to admire a man who regularly wore a cape. This goes doubly if that man is an economist. But Joseph Schumpeter was no ordinary economist. Ending up at Harvard in the early 1930s, Schumpeter was an exile from the tumult of Central Europe, an orphan of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lost his mother, wife, and infant son all within a few months of each other. It was not difficult for Schumpeter to see the world as tragic, arbitrary, capricious.

Like Marx, Schumpeter didn't think that capitalism would last. But unlike Marx, the inevitable demise of capitalism made him sad. Schumpeter didn't think that capitalism would create a revolutionary class that would rise up to destroy it. He instead thought that capitalism was so inherently insane that the elites of society would simply get tired of the damn thing.

Schumpeter — and here is where the cape comes back in — admired the insanity. He saw capitalism as an immense innovation machine driving a process he named with the now-famous phrase “creative destruction.”

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Steven Wolfram in his blog at Wolfram Research:

Mathematica has been a great success in very broadly handling all kinds of formal technical systems and knowledge.

But what about everything else? What about all other systematic knowledge? All the methods and models, and data, that exists?

Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things.

And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.

I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules.

But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?

A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

More here.

[ via Accidental Blogger ]

Eliot Spitzer in Slate:

If we are going to improve American intellectual capital, we need to fix how Americans pay for higher education. For too long we have asked students entering college and graduate school to choose one of two unappetizing options: pay astronomical tuition bills upfront or amass enormous debt that demands fixed, sky-high monthly payments the moment they graduate and enter the work force. These options serve as barriers to educational opportunity, since many cannot afford upfront tuition payments or qualify for the needed loans. That also distorts career choices, since for most the obligation to repay loans immediately has reduced the ability to choose socially desirable jobs such as teaching, forcing the pursuit of the highest-paying job regardless of personal or social utility.

Yet there may be a “third way” that eliminates the educational financing problem. Milton Friedman first proposed the following idea, and James Tobin then refined and tried to effectuate it. If two Nobel laureates of decidedly differing worldviews agree, it must be worth at least a quick look. It is, moreover, successful and commonplace in Europe and Australia.

More here.

The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and “Everything and More,” a history of infinity. Depression often figured in his work. In “The Depressed Person,” a short story about an unhappy narcissistic young woman—included in Wallace’s 1999 collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”—he wrote, “Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT (during a two-week voluntary in-patient course of treatment at a regional Mood Disorders clinic), Parnate both with and without lithium salts, Nardil both with and without Xanax. None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.” He never published a word about his own mental illness.

more from the New Yorker here.

Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together in radical fashion. Yet, as these early letters of the young Guy Debord, the leader of the group, make clear, they were the stuff of legend from the start. In late July 1957, in a little town in the Ligurian Alps called Cosio d’Arroscia, Debord met with a motley crew of seven other alienated souls – including two artists, the Dane Asger Jorn and the Italian Giuseppe Gallizio (aka Pinot), the core of a momentary movement called the Imaginist Bauhaus – in order to found the Situationist International (SI), a grand name for such a small gathering in such a remote place. Even the vote to start it up was not overwhelming: a surviving scrap of paper shows a tally of five in favour – Debord, Michèle Bernstein (his first wife), Jorn, Ralph Rumney (an English ‘psychogeographer’ who soon goes missing) and Walter Olmo (an experimental composer whose name is followed by a question mark) – with one opposed and two abstaining (including Pinot). Yet, schooled in the history of avant-gardes, Debord seized on this occasion as the requisite origin-myth: ‘We should present the “Cosio conference” as a point of departure,’ he writes to Jorn a month later, ‘and, from now on, move quickly (a new legend must be created immediately around us).’

more from the LRB here.

The contemporary art world can cope with melancholy as style, but taste revolts at the reality of sad, severe, serious life in these painters’ work. The problem is, you can’t parlay it. You can’t fantasise on it. The authenticity of these artists annoys us because it tells us there are realities that rule us, The world, since the 1980s, has stopped believing in such a thing as reality. Money was unleashed from facts of any kind. Art became its delusive mirror. Art is fun, it’s a laugh, it’s entertainment, it’s spectacular, it’s cool … art now aspires to be all the things fashion is. And so it cannot accomodate the awkwardness of a Kossoff: cannot be a bone in anyone’s throat. Its success is totally bound up with the same fiction that anything is possible that has inspired banks to lead us all into a looking-glass world. I’ve tried to resist this fact for a few months, but I’m done with illusion. Art as we know it is finished. It is about to be exposed as nothing more than the decor of an age of mercantile madness. On what bedrock might a new art arise?

more from The Guardian here.

From The Telegraph:

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini offered a radical alternative to the puffed-up Pahlavis. His title denoted a considerable Islamic scholar. His lifestyle was simple and his opposition to the shah coherent and courageous. Yet these qualities do not fully explain the mesmeric hold he had over Iran and the wider Islamic world. There must have been something in his appearance and way of speaking to generate the wave of joy when he returned home in 1979, and of grief when he died 10 years later. In dealing with notorious figures, it is easy to underplay their personal charisma.

Not only was the ayatollah revered, but the political system which he founded has proved durable – 30 years this February. Velayat-e faqih, which invests supreme authority in a religious leader, has outlived the Ba’athist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in neighbouring Iraq and vies for longevity with the rule of Hafez al-Assad in Syria and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. As in all those countries, it has relied on terror to maintain its grip on power, from summary executions on the roof of the Refah School, Khomeini’s first headquarters, to public hangings today. But brute force has been combined with prudence. The revolution has been happy to use proxies – Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip – to confront Israel and its Western allies, and has been careful not to get too deeply involved in Afghanistan and Iraq.

More here.

Amen
Rajendra Kishore Panda

In the dark
I dug out my burning eyes
And hung them on a milepost.
And then I felt
many other eyes burning there,
many other people like me
standing in a queue.
I made the queue a little longer
and prayed for the third eye.

While singing
someone went dumb.
Others took it up
only to meet the same fate.

All of them gesticulated:
Here, we are in a queue
for centuries,
waiting for the visa.

The eyes in the mileposts said,
This is the only road
to the other world.
Amen.

From Edge:

INTRODUCTION
By Martin Rees

As an astronomer I'm lucky to work in a subject where there is already public interest, and where it's not too difficult to convey the key ideas and new discoveries in a non-technical and accessible way. It's far harder to make particle physics accessible and interesting. Brian Cox is one of the few scientists who succeed in doing this, and I much admire him for it. It's fortunate that he's been willing to devote so much time and effort to 'outreach'—and especially to seize the opportunity to publicise the LHC launch so effectively. Scientists—not just particle physicists—should be grateful to him for raising the profile of 'blue skies' research so engagingly and effective.

[BRIAN COX:]

It's a pitifully small amount, and what's begun to bother me is the question, is that optimal in any way? Has it been optimized? Has anyone even stopped to think what would happen if you doubled it or tripled it? And about a year ago that was a controversial thing to say because 3.5 billion pounds or 5 billion pounds—$10 billion—sounded like a lot of money. Now it doesn't sound like a lot of money at all. It's fractions of a percent of the bailout packages. I know in the US that it seems that there's going to be a large input, increase in science spending. I want to know whether it's optimized.

More here.

From The Economist:

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated.

More here.

Story about a 1966 test flight by Bill Weaver in Aviation Week & Space Technology:

Among professional aviators, there's a well-worn saying: Flying is simply hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. And yet, I don't recall too many periods of boredom during my 30-year career with Lockheed, most of which was spent as a test pilot.

By far, the most memorable flight occurred on Jan. 25, 1966. Jim Zwayer, a Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist, and I were evaluating those systems on an SR-71 Blackbird test from Edwards AFB, Calif. We also were investigating procedures designed to reduce trim drag and improve high-Mach cruise performance. The latter involved flying with the center-of-gravity (CG) located further aft than normal, which reduced the Blackbird's longitudinal stability.

We took off from Edwards at 11:20 a.m. and completed the mission's first leg without incident. After refueling from a KC-135 tanker, we turned eastbound, accelerated to a Mach 3.2-cruise speed and climbed to 78,000 ft., our initial cruise-climb altitude.

More here.

Shehla Anjum in the Anchorage Daily News:

I recently watched “Class Dismissed in Swat Valley,” a short, sobering video on The New York Times Web site. It's about the Taliban's decision to ban girls' education in the beautiful and formerly peaceful Swat Valley of northern Pakistan, the country where I was born and raised.

The video profiled Ziauddin Yousafzai, an educator, and his 11-year-old daughter, Malala, who dreams of becoming a doctor. As Malala talked about her desire, she knew she might have to defer that dream. To conceal her tears, she covered her face with her hands; tears welled up in my own eyes.

Malala's school, owned by her father, would close the next day. The Taliban has burned or bombed more than 100 girls' schools. Ziauddin feared if he defied the ban his school would be destroyed.

More here.

Amartya Sen in the NYRB:

In The French Window, we are witnessing a representation of the entire process of the act of creation of the idea as well as seeing the completed painting, all in one work. It is a revealing and great work of Bonnard, and to see it helps us to understand his quest. We see Bonnard experiencing for the first time his sensation, conceiving the first idea of the painting as image whilst looking at his model, Marthe. She is opposite him, the back of her head towards us, her face being viewed by the artist, who is probably drawing her at that moment on a small piece of paper, all of this takes place in the mirror, whilst we the viewers also see Marthe in front of the mirror as Bonnard would have seen her in front of him, intensely absorbed in a specific act of mixing or stirring a bowl tilted in front of her. In the painting, the clarity of the figure of Marthe is noticeably particular and detailed. It is only after carefully observing the “final” marks describing Marthe looking at the bowl (and looking inward at the same time, reflecting whilst being reflected) and describing the vitality of her hands grasping the bowl and mixing the ingredients that we realize their source – pencil incisions, scratched and etched into the paint. Defining the head’s expression and tilt, Bonnard uses the graphite and charcoal along with the pigments of color. We find charcoal again amidst colored oils in “TheWhite Interior,” a painting with a myriad of different whites, and a multitude of spaces, and a floor mysteriously turning into a crouching figure. Bonnard uses charcoal marks as final marks in and on top of the paint film to modify and control the flow of space.

more from artcritical here.

Un mauvais quart d’heure, the French say, of those painful 15 minutes when a son must tell his father that he failed in school or that he stole, or when a man thinks he now must tell his woman that he will leave her. They have to tell the truth: a truth. Now, near the end of my career as a historian, I have a truth to tell. So, for 15 minutes, please bear with me. I was still very young when I saw that historians, or indeed scholars and scientists and human beings of all kinds, are not objective. Many who wished to impress the world thought that they were objective. And there are still many historians and even more scientists of that kind, men with gray ice on their faces. But isn’t objectivity an ideal? No: because the purpose of human knowledge—indeed, of human life itself—is not accuracy, and not even certainty; it is understanding.

more from American Scholar here.

Food studies is a subject so much in its infancy that it would be foolish to try to define it or in any way circumscribe it, because the topic, discipline or method you rule out today might be tomorrow’s big thing. The inadequacy of our conventional conceptual framework for dealing with this unwieldy child is bathetically shown on the copyright page of The World of Soy, where the “Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data” lists the volume’s subject matter as “1. Soyfoods. 2. Cookery (Soybeans). 3. Food habits”. Thus do our categories of taxonomy reduce the current state of our knowledge about the world’s fourth most important food, measured in terms of calories, and first among legumes. Measured in cash terms, soy (Glycine max) is in some ways the most important crop, and in terms of imports and exports, second only to wheat. The fact that this important book has contributions by seventeen authors reflects more than the circumstances of its origins in a couple of academic conferences; it also shows the vastness of the topic and the large number of disciplines required to make sense of it. Dealing with soy comprehensively requires the attentions of historians, nutritionists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and specialists in agriculture, plant genetics – and cooks, for if we do not know how soy has been and can be used as human food, and why people would wish to eat it, we lack any fundamental knowledge of it.

more from the TLS here.