William Greider in The Nation:

After his brilliant beginning, the president suddenly looks weak and unreliable. That will be the common interpretation around Washington of the president's abrupt retreat on substantive heathcare reform. Give Barack Obama a hard shove, they will say, rough him up a bit and he folds. A few weeks back, the president was touting a “public option” health plan as an essential element in reform. Now he says, take it or leave it. Whatever Congress does, he's okay with that.

The White House quickly added confusion to the outrage by insisting the president didn't really say anything new. He's just being flexible. He still wants what most Democrats want–a government plan that gives people a real escape from the profit-driven clutches of the insurance companies. But serious power players will not be fooled by the nimble spinners. Obama choked. He raised the white flag, even before the fight got underway in Congress.

He hands the insurance industry a huge victory. He rewards the right-wing frothers who have been calling him Adolph Hitler or Dr. Death. He caves to the conservative bias of the major media who insist only bipartisan consensus is acceptable for big reform (a standard they never invoked during the Bush years). Obama is deluded if he thinks this will win him any peace or respect or Republican votes.

More here.

Chris French in The Guardian:

From next month, potentially thousands of teenagers at schools and colleges throughout the UK will start lessons that deal with telepathy, psychokinesis, psychic healing, near-death experiences and talking to the dead. Surely the minds of the nation's youth will be corrupted by all this mumbo-jumbo?

Don't panic. I believe this is a development to be warmly welcomed, although I should declare a vested interest. From September, anomalistic psychology will be offered as an option on the A2 psychology syllabus for A-level students from the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, the largest of the three English exam boards. For several years I have been teaching a course on anomalistic psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, as part of our BSc in psychology. I have also been trying, along with others, to raise the academic profile of the discipline through the work of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths and am therefore delighted by this latest development.

What exactly is anomalistic psychology and why should it be taught in our schools and colleges?

More here. [Photo shows Uri Geller, famous spoon-bender.]

From The Telegraph:

If William Golding tried, aged 18, to rape a girl of 15, as John Carey claims in his new biography, how should that change our view of his novels? It's not as if Golding pretended to a rosy view of human nature. The account by the author of Lord of the Flies of his bungled teenage sex attack, we learn, formed part of an explanation for his wife of his own monstrousness. Elsewhere he went as far as to say that if he had been around in Germany at the right time, he'd have become a Nazi.

As it happened, his intended rape victim ran away, and he was busy at Oxford when Hitler was recruiting. But Golding habitually surfeited on the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If he'd been a caveman he'd have joined in the extermination of the gentle Neanderthals, as his novel The Inheritors suggests. Real rape, though, is different from imagined genocide, for it makes us hate the perpetrator. If the guilty man has set himself up as a moral arbiter it undermines his credibility. That happened to Arthur Koestler. By the 1950s he had become the “universal voice of the twentieth century”, wrote one biographer. In the same decade, another biographer discovered, he'd also become a serial rapist. Jill Craigie, the late wife of Michael Foot, confirmed that she was among his victims.

More here.

The death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special representative in Iraq, robs the world of a calm voice of reason, humanity, and deep intelligence precisely when these qualities are most needed. In tribute, openDemocracy publishes his 11 November 2002 lecture on the universal character of human dignity.

In honor of World Humanitarian Day:

By conservative estimates, some eight million men, women and children died in the Great War of 1914-18. Countless others were wounded, imprisoned, displaced or disappeared. Millions more were scarred by this horror, a horror that occurred among what are viewed as being some of the pre-eminent civilisations of that time.

The international community resolved, at the end of that war – whose anniversary falls today – never again to allow such human devastation. Governments banded together to establish the League of Nations, an organisation dedicated to promoting international co-operation and achieving peace and security.

Many consider the League to have been unsuccessful. They consider it so because it failed to prevent the outbreak of what became the second world war of 1939-45, which was a conflict – to the extent these comparisons have any meaning – still more terrible than the first.

Yet it remains a fact that the League’s creation did see the emergence of a deeper appreciation and awareness of human dignity and the sanctity of human life, as well as of the world’s growing inter-connectedness. It laid the foundation for the establishment of the United Nations and paved the way for the international protection of human rights. It is a source of pride to me that the office of the United Nations Commission for Human Rights, which I arrived at only two months ago, is itself called the Palais Wilson – and was also the original home of the League of Nations.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Rave review of Harriet Harris (our own Elatia Harris's sister, who also played Frazier's agent Bebe Glazer in the long-running TV sit-com) playing Dottie Otley in Michael Frayn's play “Nothing On.” This is Anita Gates in the New York Times:

The fictional actress Dotty Otley is a very important woman. She may be playing a generally thankless role, the maid, in a dreadful British farce called “Nothing On.” That’s the play within a play in Michael Frayn’s hilarious “Noises Off.” But without Dotty, and without a real-life actress playing her to the hilt, “Noises Off” couldn’t rise to the heights.

Luckily for the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey’s joyous new production, Harriet Harris plays the dowdy Dotty with major flair. Ms. Harris is the star attraction, known for her 2002 Tony Award-winning role as a landlady and sex-slave trader in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” on Broadway; her turn on NBC’s sitcom “Frasier” as Bebe Glazer, the title character’s blithely cutthroat agent; and a more recent recurring role, as the passive-aggressive sister of a recently murdered neighbor on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.”

But to her credit, Ms. Harris, while demonstrating her comic genius, does not dominate the show. The best farce is ensemble work, and she stays both in tune and in line with the rest of this nifty nine-person cast.

More here.

One Should See One’s Home From Far Off

One should see one’s own home from far off.
One should cross the seven oceans
to see one’s home,
in the helplessness of the unbridgeable distance,
fully hoping to return some day.
One should turn around, while journeying,
to see one’s own country from another.
One’s Earth, from space.
Then the memory of
what the children are doing at home
will be the memory of what children are doing on Earth.
Concern about food and drink at home
will be concern about food and drink on Earth.
Anyone hungry on Earth
will be like someone hungry at home.
And returning to Earth
will be like returning home.

Things back home are in such a mess
that after walking a few steps from home,
I return homewards as if it were Earth.

by Vinod Kumar Shulk

translation: Vinod Kumar Shukla and Daniel Weissbort
From: Survival (ed. by Daniel Weissbort and Girdhar Rathi)
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2002

From Scientific American:

Ten years ago this month the promise of using normal genes to cure hereditary defects crashed and burned, as Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old from Tucson, Ariz., succumbed to multiorgan failure during a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Today the boardroom of the Translational Research Lab at the university is filled with artifacts reminiscent of the trial. Books such as Building Public Trust and Biosafety in the Laboratory sit on the shelves, and “IL-6” and “TNF-α” are scribbled on the whiteboard—abbreviations representing some of the very immune factors that fatally spiraled out of control in Gelsinger’s body.

These allusions to the past aren’t surprising considering how drastically the clinical trial changed gene therapy and, in particular, the career of James M. Wilson, the medical geneticist who headed Penn’s Institute for Human Gene Therapy, where the test took place. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned it from conducting human trials, and Wilson left his post at the now defunct institute (but he continued doing research at Penn). He disappeared from the public spotlight until 2005, when the agency announced he could begin clinical trials with a designated monitor but could not lead trials for five years and asked him to write an article about the lessons he has learned. He published it in Molecular Genetics and Metabolism this past April. Since then, he has begun giving university lectures about the importance of exercising caution as a clinical scientist, especially when it comes to stem cells, which today have the cachet once held by gene therapy.

More here.

Choe Sang-Hun in the NYT:

As president from 1998 till 2003, Mr. Kim was the first opposition leader to take power in South Korea.

Once vilified by his rivals as a Communist, Mr. Kim flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, in 2000 to meet that nation’s leader, Kim Jong-il, in the first summit meeting between the Koreas. That meeting led to an unprecedented détente on the divided Korean Peninsula, which remains technically at war because no peace treaty was signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Under Mr. Kim’s “sunshine policy,” the two Koreas connected roads and railways across their shared border. They jointly built an industrial park. Two million South Koreans visited a North Korean mountain resort. And in a scene televised worldwide, aging Koreans separated by the war a half century ago tearfully hugged one another in temporary family reunions.

“Through his political dedication and persecution, he has come to symbolize South Korea’s democratization,” Kang Won-taek, a political scientist at Soongsil University in Seoul, said Tuesday. “He also broke longstanding taboos in South Korea — he led the liberals to the fore of South Korean politics after decades of conservative rule, and he changed North Korea’s status among South Koreans from an enemy to be vilified to someone that can coexist with the South and can be engaged.”

From Science:

Your telephone may know more about your private life than you do, according to a new study of mobile phone calls. The insight opens the door to mining massive data sets from mobile phone call logs, which should allow researchers to test theories for how relationship networks make or break businesses, shape the flow of information, and even affect the course of epidemics.

A nagging problem for social scientists is the limitation of self-reported survey data. Not only are people expensive to poll, but they are also notoriously error-prone when they try to recall their own behaviors. What researchers would prefer is a record of people's behaviors that is cheap and accurate. Mobile phone call logs can certainly provide enormous amounts of cheap data. Researchers have used such data to map out people's social networks, utilizing the duration and frequency of calls between pairs of people as a measure of the intimacy of their relationships. Doing so has revealed patterns of people's contact with each other both in time and space, which is crucial for modeling everything from gossip to how flu viruses spread across populations.

But how accurately do call patterns reflect the intimacy of relationships? After all, sometimes the closest of friends rarely call each other, while some motor mouths call just about everyone.

More here.

With Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan, Stenger, and D.J. Grothe (moderator):

Via Lindsay Beyerstein, for Abbas:

Via Conor Foley over at Crooked Timber, Amnesty’s calling for an end to detention camps in Sri Lanka:

Amnesty International today called for the immediate release of 285,000 innocent civilians – including an estimated 50,000 children – being held in cramped and squalid camps in the north of Sri Lanka.

The camps – each surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by security forces – were set up during the recent Government offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.

Foley on the camps:

You can see in the first photo the emblems of a humanitarian agency. The second photo shows the barbed wire surrounding each camp. These were, and are, effectively concentration camps (in the original meaning of the word), and so the dilemma was whether humanitarian agencies should have helped to build and administer them?

The next two photos show the conditions that the people who are now in the camps were previously suffering. Thousands died either from direct shelling, or starvation and disease, in the space of a few months. Should the aid agencies have done more to publicise what was happening or spoken out louder for a ceasefire – even if it meant getting thrown out of the country or arrested?

Finally, should the agencies have allowed themselves to be used in part of a counter-insurgency campaign by the Government of Sri Lanka in which over a quarter of a million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes – which is a prime facie violation of the laws of armed conflict?

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s gilded bronze equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman, at the southeast corner of Central Park, across from the Plaza, is my favorite public art work in New York. I always pause, when I have time, to contemplate the grizzled warrior and the Angel of Victory who strides ahead of him, arm raised in joyous salutation, and “seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s,” as Frank O’Hara observed in a poem. There is so often a pigeon atop the General that it might as well be gilded, too. Old-fashioned monumental statuary attracts jokes and pigeons, of course. For generations now, we have lacked the mental means for taking it seriously, even when we notice it. But this work moves me. It is fantastically adept, for one thing. Willem de Kooning once remarked of Saint-Gaudens, “He got the guy to sit right on the horse! You know how hard that is?” The bluff oneness of rider and steed is indeed striking. And Sherman’s ravaged, ornery visage convinces utterly, crowning Saint-Gaudens’s signature feat of investing idealist art with realist grit. Modelling the head, in 1888, took eighteen two-hour sessions, during which the artist asked Sherman to button his collar and straighten his tie. The dishevelled sitter demurred: “The General of the Army of the United States will wear his coat any damn way he pleases.”

more from Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker here.

Woodstock’s 40th anniversary is being celebrated as well — with new books, a new documentary, a new Ang Lee movie and the inevitable remastered DVDs and CDs. But it’s “Mad Men” that has the pulse of our moment. Though the show unfolds in an earlier America than Woodstock, it seems of far more recent vintage, for better and for worse. As many boomers have noted, Woodstock’s nirvana was a one-of-a-kind, one-weekend wonder anyway, not the utopia of subsequent myth. It wasn’t even meant to be free; in the chaos, the crowds overwhelmed and overran the ticket sellers. That concept of “free” — known to some adults as “theft” — persists today in the downloading of “free” music, which has decimated the recording industry far more effectively than brown acid ever did. Even in Woodstock’s immediate aftermath, there was no consensus on its meaning. A Times editorial titled “Nightmare in the Catskills” saw “a nightmare of mud and stagnation” and asked rhetorically, “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” Time magazine, surprisingly, was more sympathetic. “It is an open question,” the writer intoned, “whether some as yet unknown politician could exploit the deep emotions of today’s youth to build a politics of ecstasy.” Actually, both proved wrong. Woodstock was no apocalypse, but neither was it a political turning point. Nixon would be re-elected in 1972, and the only politician with a touch of ecstasy, Robert Kennedy, had already been murdered.

more from Frank Rich at the NYT here.

In the earliest laboratory notebooks, the wall-mounted m­echanism shown in this image was simply called “the pinball machine.” In the published output of the research program of which it was a part, it wen­t by the more dignified­ appellation Random Mechanical Cascade, yielding a catchy acronym: RMC. Around the lab, however, the ­device was known affectionately as ­Murphy, since if anything could go wrong, it would. In a way, of course, this was exactly the point: the whole system—the nine thousand polystyrene balls droppin­­g through a pegboard of 330 precisely cantilevered nylon pins, the real-time photoelectric counters tallying (by LED readout) the segmented heaps forming belo­w, the perennially balky bucket-conveyor for resetting an experimental run—had all been painstakingly constructed and ca­librated in order first to exemplify, and then to defy, what the Victorian statistician ­Francis Galton dubbed the “Law of Frequency of Error.”­

more from D. Graham Burnett at Cabinet here.

Milton by Firelight
(Pine Creek, August 1955)

‘O HELL, what do mine eyes
with grief behold?’
Working with an old
Singlejack miner, who can sense
The vein and cleavage
In the guts of rock, can
Blast granite, build
Switchbacks that last for years
Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule hooves.
What use, Milton, a silly story
of our general parents,
eaters of fruit?

The Indian, the chainsaw boy,
And a string of six mules
Came riding down to camp
Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.
Sleeping in saddle blankets
Under the bright night-sky
Han River slantwise by morning.
Jays squall
Coffee boils

In ten-thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of scorpion.
Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with his Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
Oh HELL!

Fire down
Too dark to read, miles from a road
The bell-mare clangs in the meadow
That packed dirt for a fill-in
Scrambling through loose rocks
On an old trail
All of a summer’s day.

by Gary Snyder

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it’s on such a diet. It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age.

This optimism, however, is not fully shared. Evolutionary biologists, the experts on the theory of aging, have strong reasons to suppose that human life span cannot be altered in any quick and easy way. But they have been confounded by experiments with small laboratory animals, like roundworms, fruit flies and mice. In all these species, the change of single genes has brought noticeable increases in life span. With theorists’ and their gloomy predictions cast in the shade, at least for the time being, experimental biologists are pushing confidently into the tangle of linkages that evolution has woven among food intake, fertility and life span. “My rule of thumb is to ignore the evolutionary biologists — they’re constantly telling you what you can’t think,” Gary Ruvkun of the Massachusetts General Hospital remarked this June after making an unusual discovery about longevity.

More here.

David Gilbert. Inside Out. 2006.

More here.

Thanks to Jaffer Kolb for introducing me to this artist.