Jonathan Cook in The National:

Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than US$2 billion (Dh7.4bn) by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists revealed this week.

A new report, “State Robbery”, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.

According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers’ pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories – a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.

After the recent easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the “economic peace” promised by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.

Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labour federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labour disputes.

More here.

From Neurophilosophy:

If a rapid series of taps are applied first to your wrist and then to your elbow, you will experience a perceptual illusion, in which phantom sensations are felt along the skin connecting the two points that were actually touched. This feels as if a tiny rabbit is hopping along your skin from the wrist to the elbow, and is therefore referred to as the “cutaneous rabbit”. The illusion indicates that our perceptions of sensory inputs do not enter conscious awareness until after the integration of events occuring within a certain time window, and that the sensory events taking place at a certain point can be influenced by future events.

A group of Japanese researchers now shows that this illusion is not just confined to the body. In a new study published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, they report that the cutaneous rabbit can easily be induced to “hop out” of the body, so that the illusory sensations are perceived to originate not from the body itself, but from external objects that interact with it.

More here.

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

Day in, day out, they kill and maim and terrorize Pakistanis all across Pakistan. No city is safe. No Pakistani is safe. The ritual is now well entrenched. We mourn our dead. We cry. And just as the tears begin to dry, we are called upon to mourn some more. To cry, again.

The tears are unavoidable, and maybe even necessary. But they are no longer sufficient.

Let us begin, at least, by refusing to tolerate any excuse, any justification, any argument for such violence. Denial must no longer be an option. Yes, there may be forces great and small that are against us. Yes, Pakistanis are being killed also by outsiders too. Yes, the world is an unfair and unjust place. Yes, the wheels of history are complicated. All that, and more, may be as it is. But it is our children who are doing the dying. Everyday. Everywhere.

Those who train themselves to commit such acts – in whose ever name and for whatever purpose they do so – make no excuses for what they do. No excuses must be made for them either.

Let us listen, once again, to how the enemies of Pakistan justify this murder and mayhem:

More here.

Never-before-seen video of the Challenger space shuttle disaster has surfaced after almost a quarter-century locked away in a Florida basement. The chilling amateur footage was recorded by retired optometrist Jack Moss on his new home video camera on the morning of 28 January 1986. The four-minute film captures the moment the shuttle exploded, 73 seconds after launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, killing all seven astronauts on board and setting Nasa’s manned spaceflight programme back years. It is believed to be the only amateur film in existence of the world’s worst space disaster, recorded in an era before mobile phone cameras, when even home camcorders were rare. “I don’t think Mr Moss thought it was anything significant. He put it down in his basement with other tapes he had and just forgot about it,” said Marc Wessels, executive director of the Space Exploration Archive, a Kentucky-based group that collects space memorabilia for educational purposes.

more from Richard Luscombe at The Guardian here.

Todd Weeks in Allegro:

“Art thou troubled? Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee.”
– Ralph Ellison

Of Richard Wagner, Ralph Ellison once wrote that the composer’s symphonies were works, “which, by fulfilling themselves as works of art, by being satisfied to deal with life in terms of their own sources of power, were able to give me a broader sense of life and possibility.”

Like many artists of his generation Ellison utilized a multidisciplinary approach and drew on music, photography and the fine arts as sources of inspiration and cultural pride.

He saw music as a key to individual expression and the universality of experience and, in his own work, he pointed out the influence and impact of everything from Beethoven to Bessie Smith.

By examining the achievements of many jazz and blues musicians in the context of the Western canon, he broadened the listening audience for these performers, and contributed to their stature as artists of real and lasting significance.

In the summer of 2006, I was given exclusive access to Ellison’s Riverside Drive apartment with the express purpose of finding a home for his record collection. (I’m happy to say it now resides in the National Jazz Museum in Harlem).

Ellison was a known audiophile. Based on its contents, his collection appears to have been amassed between the earliest 1930’s and the late 1980’s.

That day, I found many of the expected items, including the music that Ellison wrote about so passionately – that of Charlie Christian, Mahalia Jackson and cante flamenco, among others.

But there were also many revelations: a truly varied range of 17th to 20th century classical, pop items, spoken word, and much more.

All in all, there are about 500 individual pieces in the collection, 125 of which are 78 r.p.m. records.

I Try to Wake You in the Dark

I try to wake You in the dark.
In Mecca or Jerusalem.
I try to wake You in the dark.

But You've been sleeping alone on dark stones.
Who knows for how long. In Mecca
or perhaps Jerusalem. Some say
millennia.
Or much longer.

But stubborn me, I still try.
I don’t give up. I'm still trying,
giving it my all, in the dark,
to wake You up.

In Mecca or Medina.
Jerusalem or Hebron.

Can You hear my voice
in the dark? To the right, down
there, in the tunnel?

Can You see me?
A tender youth, in the dusk
of madness?

Because all through the night
I have been throwing words at You,
expecting You.
In vain.

From Mecca or Medina.
Jerusalem or Hebron.

Perhaps some of the words hurt Your feelings?
Forgive me. I am only trying.
Perhaps millennia or more have passed.
In the dark. To wake You up.
With great tenderness.

Now,
in Jerusalem,

or
from Mecca.

Because if You awaken,
spontaneously, with a smile,
as my heart predicted,
You will say

suddenly:
Where art thou?

by Admiel Kosman

from Alternative Prayerbook
publisher: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv, 2007

translation: Lisa Katz and Shlomit Naor

Richard Dawkins in the Washington Post:

Versions of the Great Beethoven Fallacy are attributed to various Christian apologists, and the details vary. The following is the version favoured by Norman St John Stevas, a British Conservative Member of Parliament. One doctor to another:

“About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic. The mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?”

“I would have terminated the pregnancy.”

“Then you would have murdered Beethoven.”

It is amazing how many people are bamboozled by this spectacularly stupid argument. Setting aside the simple falsehood that Ludwig van Beethoven was the fifth child in his family (he was actually the eldest), the falsehood that any of his siblings was born blind, deaf or dumb, and the falsehood that his father was syphilitic, we are left with the 'logic'. As Peter Medawar, writing with his wife, Jean Medawar, said,

“The reasoning behind this odious little argument is breathtakingly fallacious . . . the world is no more likely to be deprived of a Beethoven by abortion than by chaste absence from intercourse.”

If you follow the 'pro-life' logic to its conclusion, a fertile woman is guilty of something equivalent to murder every time she refuses an offer of copulation.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Black History Month is an occasion for looking back at the past achievements of African-Americans – including the discoveries made by George Washington Carver and Benjamin Banneker. But it's also an occasion for looking ahead to future achievements – and that's what TheGrio is doing this month with its list of “100 History Makers in the Making.” The list includes 10 scientists, engineers and environmentalists who are making an impact even now. The newsiest name has to be NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, the first African-American to be named head of the space agency. Bolden is presiding over what is arguably NASA's most dramatic transition in a quarter-century. TheGrio cites the racial challenges that faced Bolden in his youth, when he was denied an appointment to the Naval Academy by lawmakers from his home state of South Carolina. He didn't just shrug his shoulders at the rejection, but instead appealed to President Lyndon Johnson. Bolden eventually won the appointment instead from a black congressman from Chicago.

Bolden went on to a 34-year military career in the Marines – including a 14-year stint as an astronaut. He flew on four shuttle missions, including the deployment flight for the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 and the first joint U.S.-Russian shuttle mission in 1994. Bolden returned to NASA after retiring from the Marines as a major general. No matter what you think of NASA or its future, there's no question that Bolden has brought a different tone to America's space effort. His predecessor, rocket scientist Mike Griffin, once acknowledged that “I don't do feelings.” Bolden, in contrast, sometimes wears his emotions on his sleeve. That's been particularly true in the past few days, when he's had to speak out about the space program's past tragedies and the difficult times ahead. “I am a big person for passion,” the 63-year-old told reporters in Washington this week. “I am here because I am passionate about space and exploration. Otherwise I'd be sitting in Houston, Texas, or I'd be in San Diego with my three granddaughters. I am here because I am passionate about this. I cry about it some times – so what?”

If you think that's an inspirational story for Black History Month, check out these nine others from TheGrio:

More here.

From The Telegraph:

In The Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever before. This sensational novel – her first since the Orange Prize-winning Small Island, recently adapted for the BBC – tells the life story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as emancipation is juddering into action. Levy’s handling of slavery is characteristically authentic, resonant and imaginative. She never sermonises. She doesn’t need to — the events and characters speak loud and clear for themselves.

The story is expertly fashioned around a metafictional conceit. The “editor”, Thomas Kinsman, explains in his foreword that the book was written by his mother. It’s a well-worn device, but here it has such conviction and idiosyncrasy that it feels irresistibly fresh. His mother, it transpires, is July herself, and so intimate is she with her “reader” that she might be leading them around the plantation by the hand. Her Jamaican lilt, which despite her son’s careful Anglicising retains the rhythm and syntax of her dialect, is unfaltering and immersive. And her seemingly artless testimony, which scorns “ornate invention”, is a masterclass in storytelling and self-presentation.

She begins with her conception — the casual molestation of her mother Kitty by the plantation’s vile Scottish overseer. It’s an “indelicate” way to open a novel, as her son argues in one of their endearing squabbles, but it’s indicative of her petulant, assertive style that she will not apologise for it. She is a woman “possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink”, and tells the reader plainly that if we don’t like her story, we can go elsewhere.

More here.

Kristin Johnson in American Scientist:

Our ambivalent responses to the rise of modern science and technology are among the most fascinating things to study in the history of science. From Margaret Cavendish’s criticism of the experimental method in the 17th century to the rebellion of the so-called Romantics against the notion of objectivity, our culture has had a complex love-hate relationship with science. Champions of feeling, emotion and subjective knowledge as a path toward understanding the natural world have proved especially persistent critics of science.

Naming Nature, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon, is a thought-provoking text that plays a new and fascinating tune on the old theme of objectivity versus subjectivity. Its subject is the history of biological systematics—the description, ordering and explanation of biological diversity.

In Yoon’s rendition, subjectivity is rooted firmly in our instinct. She explains that neuroscience, anthropology and evolutionary biology now tell us that we are born with the remnants of an instinctive perspective on the living world, which she calls the “human umwelt,” a vision “molded during our species’ days as hunter-gatherers.” This vision of a natural order is “thoroughly sensuous and wildly subjective,” Yoon says, and she maintains that the history of scientific taxonomy is really a “two-hundred-year-long battle against the human umwelt.” In modern times, we have given up this instinctive perception of the order of nature in favor of letting scientists find a more objective, evolutionary order, with the result that we are now disconnected from nature: “We are so used to someone else being in charge of the living world that we have begun not to even see the life around us.”

More here.

Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.

More here.

Lawrence Lessig in The Nation:

At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, Americans' faith in the Supreme Court remains extraordinarily high–76 percent have a fair or great deal of “trust and confidence” in the Court. Their faith in the presidency is also high–61 percent.

But consistently and increasingly over the past decade, faith in Congress has collapsed–slowly, and then all at once. Today it is at a record low. Just 45 percent of Americans have “trust and confidence” in Congress; just 25 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job. A higher percentage of Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today.

The source of America's cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn't) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn't) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution “dependent on the People,” the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers–as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered–not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.

This is corruption.

More here. And here's more:

Professor Lawrence Lessig has known Barack Obama for 20 years, and supported all his campaigns. In this video produced for The Nation and FixCongressFirst.org, Lessig outlines his concern over President Obama's limited approach to truly “changing Washington,” and his view that Congress is a deeply broken institution in need of need reform:

Via Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber, a profile of Samuel Bowles in The Santa Fe Reporter:

“In the wake of what happened in the last year, it’s much easier for an economist to describe himself as being liberal, maybe even Social Democratic,” Henry Farrell, a political science associate professor at George Washington University, tells SFR. “Sam Bowles is still unashamedly and unabashedly a radical—God bless him.”

However, Farrell says, Bowles’ radicalism kept him from finding a wider audience.

Now it’s the free marketeers who have a hard time being taken seriously. Last month, The New Yorker described defections and “turmoil” within the Chicago School. Even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a hero to free marketeers, admits that his way of understanding the world was wrong.

Bowles is keenly aware that this crisis presents an opportunity. “It’s not just that the Chicago School is on the ropes—it’s that people are much more sympathetic to people who have less income,” Bowles says. “That attitude—‘Hey, it could happen to me’—is something the Great Depression taught us.”

Sympathy was forgotten in the boom times. But thanks to the hardships of today, “it’s coming back with a vengeance,” Bowles says.

With it, the influence of what Farrell calls “the Santa Fe approach to economics” may also be growing.

Last year, Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. “She’s not a radical by any stretch of the imagination but, in terms of the methods she uses and the questions she’s interested in, she’s closer to Bowles than anybody. She is probably the only Nobel Prize winner in the last 20 years to have cited Bowles extensively and to be genuinely influenced by him,” Farrell says.

Ostrom doesn’t distance herself from that assessment. “I have great respect for professor Samuel Bowles,” she writes in an email to SFR. “I have worked with several of his PhDs who do simply outstanding experimental research.”

If Bowles has a following among people who think for a living, the people who actually make decisions have some catching up to do.

And so here, in plain English, is the implication of Bowles’ basic ideas: The US and New Mexico will keep falling behind until they learn to share the wealth.

………………..
Walt Whitman At Bear Mountain

…life which does not give preference to any other life,
of any previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence…
— Ortega y Gasset

Neither on horseback nor seated,
But like himself, squarely on two feet,
The poet of death and lilacs
Loafs by the footpath. Even the bronze looks alive
Where it is folded like cloth. And he seems friendly.

“Where is the Mississippi panorama
And the girl who played the piano?
Where are you, Walt?
The Open Road goes to the used car lot.

“Where is the nation you promised?
These houses built of wood sustain
Colossal snows,
And the light above the street is sick to death.

“As for the people—see how they neglect you!
Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.”

“I am here,” he answered.
“It seems you have found me out.
Yet, did I not warn you it was Myself
I advertized? Were my words not sufficiently plain?

“I gave no prescriptions,
And those who have taken my moods for prophecies
Mistake the matter.”
Then, vastly amused—“Why do you reproach me?
I freely confess I am wholly disreputable.
Yet I am happy, because you have found me out.”

A crocodile in wrinkled metal loafing . . .

Then all the realtors,
Pickpockets, salesmen, and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted
American dreams.

But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she’s dumb,
And the earth are relieved.

All that gave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . .

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras.
The Bay mists clearing;
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.

by Louis Simpson

from Poet’s Choice; Time Life Books, 1962

The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories. In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

more from Chris Anderson at Wired here.

Sir Frank Kermode’s career is a wonder. More than forty volumes have appeared since he began to publish in the 1950s, together with a wealth of articles and reviews. He has held senior posts in universities up and down the land, including a notable term of office as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in Cambridge. Retirement has done nothing to slow his publication rate. Now there are two new works, a thoughtful study of E. M. Forster and Bury Place Papers, a selection of some of the best essays he has written for the London Review of Books. Kermode’s learning and insight seem indestructible. His recent ninetieth birthday has been marked with affectionate tributes, and these books show how much there is to celebrate. Despite these claims to distinction, it is not easy to pin down Kermode’s contribution to literary culture. His turn of mind is brilliantly agile rather than polemical, and no identifiable Kermode school has emerged. This is not because his criticism is bland. The writing frequently crackles with hostility, or glows with admiration. Nor is he afraid of a row. He played a vigorous part in the convulsions of the early 1980s, when the Faculty of English at Cambridge tore itself apart over the merits of literary theory. Kermode was a defender of Colin McCabe, at that time a beleaguered young theorist denied promotion by traditionalists. Nevertheless, he refused to be identified with a theoretical approach to literature, either in general or in particular. He is an interpreter, not an evangelist. One of his most perceptive books, The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), speaks of Hermes as the patron of hermeneutics: “He is the god of going-between: between the dead and the living, but also between the latent and the manifest . . . and between the text and the dying generations of its readers”. The spirit of Hermes, subtle and stealthy, is never far from Kermode’s work.

more from Dinah Birch at the TLS here.

From Science:

When a brain injury leaves a person unresponsive and unable to communicate, doctors and nurses must provide care without input from their patient, and families agonize over whether their loved one might still have–or someday recover–a flicker of consciousness. A new study provides hope that technology might open a line of communication with some such patients. Researchers report that a man with a severe brain injury can, by controlling his thoughts, influence scans of his brain activity and thereby answer simple questions. The work builds on a 2006 Science paper by Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., and colleagues. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they tested a young woman diagnosed as being in a vegetative state following a car accident. Although she was unresponsive and apparently unaware of her surroundings, she exhibited distinct patterns of brain activity when asked to imagine herself playing tennis or walking through the rooms of her house. As in healthy volunteers, imagining tennis activated motor planning regions in the woman's brain, whereas picturing her house activated a brain region involved in recognizing familiar scenes.

In the new study, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, Owen and several colleagues used similar methods to examine 53 additional people who were in a vegetative state or in the slightly less severe minimally conscious state, in which patients show occasional flashes of responsiveness. In four of these patients, the researchers found distinct patterns of brain activity during the tennis versus house imagination task, hinting at some level of awareness that could not be detected by observing their behavior, says co-author Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liège in Belgium.

More here.