Michael Chabon over at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog (picture from wikipedia):

I've been thinking about the president's speech all night and this morning, how something about it left me feeling left out. Obama's presence—physical, moral, emotional—was palpable. It carried the charge of authority, of mastering a moment. You felt that he was acknowledging, reflecting, and accepting the hardness of life, drawing freely and even generously on his own experience of sorrow and on his capacity to imagine the sorrow of others. When he reached his peroration, as he moved from an invocation of the innocence and immanence of the dead little girl to a call, part admission, part admonishment, part fatherly exhortation, for Americans “to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations,” the speech found it true importance, its profundity. To attempt to live up to your children's expectations—to hew to the ideals you espouse and the morals that you lay down for them—is to guarantee a life of constant failure, a failure equivalent with parenthood itself. Surely this is something that the father of Malia and Sasha Obama knows all too well. Choking up at one point, imagining the Taylor-Greens' loss, it seemed to me, in terms of his own unimaginable bereavement, Obama was figuring himself (extraordinarily, I think) not as the Great Father but, more messily and searchingly, as an imperfectly lowercase father, “shaken from [his] routines … forced to look inward,” struggling in the wake of calamity to reclaim and to strive to measure up to a set of principles the burden of whose observance falls so unevenly on the narrow shoulders of the young. He was, at that moment, talking directly to me.

And yet … Was it all the weird, inappropriate clapping and cheering? Or the realization that I am so out of touch with the national vibe that I didn't know that whistling and whooping and standing ovations are, when someone evokes the memory of murdered innocent people, totally cool?

From The Guardian:

A protest was staged against rightwing talkshow host Glenn Beck today, calling for his immediate removal from Fox News. The organisers, Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), a charity that campaigns for social change, delivered a petition with 10,000 signatures. In the wake of the Tucson shooting, the TV and radio personality has had to defend his record against accusations that he has whipped up hatred within the public discourse. For a media figure who has been variously lambasted as a liar, buffoon, clown, bigot and racist Beck is no stranger to the vitriol that currently passes in America as public debate. In fact, he's built a multimillion dollar empire out of it. So the protest rally that was staged outside the News Corporation headquarters in New York today probably troubled him as much as water flowing off a duck's back.

The petition was part of a groundswell of opinion that when it comes to Beck, arguably the most extreme of America's multitude of rightwing talk hosts, enough is now enough. Amid the billowing criticism, Beck has defended himself by claiming he has “softened” the tone of his monologues over the past couple of years. “Nobody wants to recognise this. Why? Because it hurts their dialogue.” But the evidence belies his claim of moderation. The JFSJ accompanied the petition with a list of 10 of Beck's most egregious comments in 2010 (see below). They include Beck's radio comment on the financier and philanthropist, George Soros, that “here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps”. The remark was made in reference to Soros as a 13-year-old teenager in Hungary, who survived the Holocaust because his father hid their Jewish identity through elaborate forged documents.

More here.

From Nature:

A vial of saliva harbours a wealth of genetic information, and companies are mining this treasure trove to provide the public with personal disease-risk profiles. Some experts have questioned whether people might misinterpret such complex information and become anxious, but a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine¹ seems to debunk that idea. Test results also failed to prompt changes in diet and exercise. Direct-to-consumer genetic tests, such as those offered by personal-genomics companies 23andMe in Mountain View, California, and Navigenics in Foster City, California, scan an individual's DNA for a whole host of disease-related genetic variants. “The concern was if people hear that they're at risk of developing a scary disease, they would be terrified,” says Robert Green, co-director of the Alzheimer's Disease Clinical and Research Program at Boston University in Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study. Spurred by anxiety, people could then ask for unnecessary screening — pushing up health-care costs.

A previous study found that genetic testing for Alzheimer's diesease had no impact on anxiety². But a team led by Eric Topol, a professor of translational genomics at the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, has now looked at the effect on psychology and behaviour of commercially available genome-wide scans focused on a range of diseases. “This is an area that has been in the dark matter of our knowledge base,” says Topol.

More here.

It's real, and it's not going away anytime soon.

Lester Brown in Foreign Policy:

As the new year begins, the price of wheat is setting an all-time high in the United Kingdom. Food riots are spreading across Algeria. Russia is importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins. India is wrestling with an 18-percent annual food inflation rate, sparking protests. China is looking abroad for potentially massive quantities of wheat and corn. The Mexican government is buying corn futures to avoid unmanageable tortilla price rises. And on January 5, the U.N. Food and Agricultural organization announced that its food price index for December hit an all-time high.

But whereas in years past, it's been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it's trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and — due to climate change — crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future.

More here.

From Full Stop:

While visiting his wife’s family in Kansas in 2005, Daniel Radosh accompanied his sister-in-law to an evangelical Christian rock festival. At one point, one of his sister-in-law’s friends ran up to him and exclaimed, “That was awesome! They prayed like three times in a 20-minute set!” From that moment, Radosh writes in Rapture Ready, he “had to know what it meant to judge a band by how hard it prayed rather than how hard it rocked.”

Published in 2008, Rapture Ready is Radosh’s account of the “parallel universe” of Christian pop culture. Part travelogue, part investigation into the fault lines of the culture and its intersections with the mainstream, the reader follows Radosh as he attends Christian wrestling matches, alternative Christian music festivals, and Kentucky’s gargantuan Creationism Museum. While Rapture Ready may not be as well known as other excellent investigations of evangelical Christian culture, such as The Year of Living Biblically, it is the funniest and the most moving – Radosh is never cynical, always probing, and remarkably sharp.

Before joining the staff of The Daily Show in 2009, Radosh was a freelance writer whose work was published in The New Yorker, McSweeneys, GQ, and The New York Times, among many others. He also wrote and maintained Radosh.net, the loss of which I hope to mourn in Full Stop someday in the future. Over breakfast, we spoke about the past year at The Daily Show, the ways in which evangelical culture has shifted since the election of Barack Obama, and the best books he read in 2010.

More here.

Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

Terrible tragedies like last week's mass shootings in Tucson cause us to search for deeper answers. Many were quick to blame America's divisive and vitriolic political culture for the violence; others portray the shooter as an unhinged, clinically deranged person with his own unfathomable agenda. Arizona has been ground zero for the battle over immigration. Were the state's political and economic travails a contributing factor? There has been some talk about guns, too. Might tighter gun control laws have made a difference?

The map above charts firearm deaths for the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Note that these figures include accidental shootings, suicides, even acts of self-defense, as well as crimes. As of 2007, 10.2 out of every 100,000 people were killed by firearms across the United States, but that rate varies dramatically from state to state. In Hawaii, at the low end, it was 2.6 per 100,000; in New York and New Jersey it was 5.0 and 5.2 respectively. At the high end, 21.7 out of every 100,000 residents of the District of Columbia were killed by guns, 20.2 in Louisiana, 18.5 in Mississippi, and 17.8 in Alaska. Arizona ranked eighth nationally, with 15.1 deaths per 100,000.

More here.

One year and one day ago, Haiti was hit with a devastating earthquake. The year that's followed has witnessed economic collapse and exacerbating health crises, including a cholera epidemic. Partners in Health is still accepting donations for assisting recovery in Haiti, as are many others.

Glenn Greenwald, the winner of our first prize in politics, is an invaluable presence in the blogosphere (IMHO, as they say). He is holding a donation drive. If you find his voice and views valuable in this public e-sphere, consider donating:

Most journalistic enterprises, especially ones online, struggle to find a model for sustaining themselves. Relying on reader support is becoming increasingly common, and I consider that a very healthy development. It means that those reporting, commenting and otherwise working on political matters, but who want to do so outside of a large corporation or DC think tank or advocacy group, can compete on something approaching an equal footing. It also means that one can work full-time on journalism, analysis and activism without any concern for accommodating the interests of corporate employers and advertisers, and without having to devote time and energy to unproductive work in order to earn a living. In sum, reader support is both crucial and a healthy model for doing this work.

From the start of my working on political issues, readership involvement in general has been central to the work I've been able to do. Having an engaged, vibrant readership has provided important value to everything that is done here: it adds substantially to my knowledge base, checks flaws and errors, and amplifies the work and strengthens its ability to have an impact in numerous ways. I realize that not everyone is able to participate in this fund-raiser — it is entirely optional, for those who can and choose to donate — but I do truly appreciate all forms of reader involvement here.

Paul Krugman in the NYT Magazine:

Not long ago Europeans could, with considerable justification, say that the current economic crisis was actually demonstrating the advantages of their economic and social model. Like the United States, Europe suffered a severe slump in the wake of the global financial meltdown; but the human costs of that slump seemed far less in Europe than in America. In much of Europe, rules governing worker firing helped limit job loss, while strong social-welfare programs ensured that even the jobless retained their health care and received a basic income. Europe’s gross domestic product might have fallen as much as ours, but the Europeans weren’t suffering anything like the same amount of misery. And the truth is that they still aren’t.

Yet Europe is in deep crisis — because its proudest achievement, the single currency adopted by most European nations, is now in danger. More than that, it’s looking increasingly like a trap. Ireland, hailed as the Celtic Tiger not so long ago, is now struggling to avoid bankruptcy. Spain, a booming economy until recent years, now has 20 percent unemployment and faces the prospect of years of painful, grinding deflation.

The tragedy of the Euromess is that the creation of the euro was supposed to be the finest moment in a grand and noble undertaking: the generations-long effort to bring peace, democracy and shared prosperity to a once and frequently war-torn continent. But the architects of the euro, caught up in their project’s sweep and romance, chose to ignore the mundane difficulties a shared currency would predictably encounter — to ignore warnings, which were issued right from the beginning, that Europe lacked the institutions needed to make a common currency workable. Instead, they engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the nobility of their mission transcended such concerns.

The result is a tragedy not only for Europe but also for the world, for which Europe is a crucial role model. The Europeans have shown us that peace and unity can be brought to a region with a history of violence, and in the process they have created perhaps the most decent societies in human history, combining democracy and human rights with a level of individual economic security that America comes nowhere close to matching. These achievements are now in the process of being tarnished, as the European dream turns into a nightmare for all too many people. How did that happen?

Stephen Steinberg in Boston Review:

“‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback.” So read the headline of Patricia Cohen’s front-page article in the October 17, 2010 edition of The New York Times.

The article was prompted by a recent issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science under the title, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty.” In their introductory essay, the editors, Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, strike a triumphant note:

Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors.

Cohen begins with a similar refrain:

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named. The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a ‘culture of poverty’ to the public in his 1965 report on ‘The Negro Family.’

Cohen uncritically accepts two myths woven by William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard sociologist, and repeated by his acolytes: first, Moynihan was clobbered for bringing to light compromising facts about black families, and second, that this torrent of criticism constrained a generation of social scientists from investigating the relation between culture and poverty, for fear that it would be pilloried for “blaming the victim.” Thus, a third, patently self-serving myth: thanks to some intrepid scholars who reject political correctness, it is now permissible to consider the role that culture plays in the production and reproduction of racial inequalities.

These myths add up to something—a perverse obfuscation of American racial history. They suggest that for four decades academia has abetted a censorial form of anti-racism that prevented serious research into the persistence of poverty among black Americans. If only, the mythmakers insist, we stopped worrying about offending people, we could acknowledge that there is something amiss in black culture—not, as the politically correct would have it, the politics of class—and that this explains racial inequality.

Notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama, the last 40 years have been a period of racial backlash. The three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote)—have all been eviscerated, thanks in large part to rulings of a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. Indeed, the comeback of the culture of poverty, albeit in new rhetorical guise, signifies a reversion to the status quo ante: to the discourses and concomitant policy agenda that existed before the black protest movement forced the nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow—racism that pervaded all major institutions of our society, North and South. Such momentous issues are brushed away as a new generation of sociologists delves into deliberately myopic examinations of a small sphere where culture makes some measurable difference—to prove that “culture matters.”

Thomas Bernhard, Austria’s finest postwar writer, was born in Holland in 1931, the illegitimate son of a housemaid, and died at his home in Upper Austria in 1989. His childhood was spent mainly with his maternal grandparents near Salzburg – his grandfather Johannes Freumbichler was a minor Austrian writer and, Bernhard claimed, one of the two most important figures in his life. The other, whom he sometimes referred to as his “Lebensmensch” or “life companion” and sometimes as his aunt, was a woman 37 years his senior, the widow of a civil servant, whom he met at a sanatorium for tuberculosis in 1949. Bernhard had always had a weak chest and the deprivations of the war years, exacerbated by having to lug sacks of potatoes from the cellar to the grocery where he had been apprenticed after leaving school, led to his hospitalisation in 1948. His “aunt” Hedwig helped him escape what he felt would be certain death in the sanatorium. After that, he briefly trained as a singer (abandoned because of his bad lungs) and then took a job as a crime reporter, before turning to writing full-time.

more from Gabriel Josipovici at The New Statesman here.

In Leviathan Hobbes writes of ‘the privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only’. Nothing could be more absurd, according to Hobbes’s way of thinking, than killing oneself – except perhaps killing oneself in order to kill others. War shows the law of self-preservation working itself out in practice: humans kill other humans because they fear being killed themselves. But if that is so then any type of warfare that involves certain death for the combatants will be self-defeating. Soldiers who sacrifice their lives in order to protect their comrades are committing suicide – an attitude that Hobbes, for whom a self-interested fear of death was the primary human motivation, could never account for. Behaviour of this kind is not only irrational, but – Hobbes at times suggested – a symptom of madness. Though he is commonly seen as a grimly realistic thinker, Hobbes’s account of human conflict is a long way from the reality of violence. For all his insight into how humans are impelled to prey upon one another he would have been horrified by the world portrayed in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in which violence has come to be a way of life practised for its own sake. For Hobbes violence is instrumental: either it serves the goal of self-preservation, or it is pointless. Seeing humans as essentially driven by their passions, Hobbes cherished little hope that they would ever be guided by reason. Still, he never doubted that if people were more rational they would be less prone to violence. How could any sane person not seek peace? After all, everyone wants to go on living – or so Hobbes wanted to believe.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? In the film, the district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend police commissioner Gordon realise that the city’s morale would suffer if Dent’s murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman – another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death – yet another lie. The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of those classic westerns Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show that, in order to civilise the Wild West, the lie has to be elevated into truth: civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie. The film has been extraordinarily popular. The question is why, at this precise moment, is there this renewed need for a lie to maintain the social system?

more from Slavoj Žižek at the LRB here.

Richard Falk in Al Jazeera:

It is dismaying that during this dark anniversary period two years after the launch of the deadly attacks on the people of Gaza – code-named Operation Cast Lead by the Israelis – that there should be warnings of a new massive attack on the beleaguered people of Gaza.

The influential Israeli journalist, Ron Ren-Yishai, writes on December 29, 2010, of the likely prospect of a new major IDF attack, quoting senior Israeli military officers as saying “It's not a question of if, but rather of when,” a view that that is shared, according to Ren-Yishai, by “government ministers, Knesset members and municipal heads in the Gaza region”.

The bloody-minded Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi, reinforces this expectation by his recent assertion that, “as long as Gilad Shalit is still in captivity, the mission is not complete”. He adds with unconscious irony, “we have not lost our right of self-defence”.

More accurate would be the assertion, “we have not given up our right to wage aggressive war or to commit crimes against humanity”.

And what of the more than 10,000 Palestinians, including children under the age of 10, being held in Israeli prisons throughout occupied Palestine?

Against this background, the escalation of violence along the Gaza/Israel border should set off alarm bells around the world and at the United Nations.

Israel in recent days has been launching severe air strikes against targets within the Gaza Strip, including near the civilian-crowded refugee camp of Khan Younis, killing several Palestinians and wounding others.

Supposedly, these attacks are in retaliation for nine mortar shells that fell on open territory, causing neither damage nor injury. Israel also had been using lethal force against children from Gaza, who were collecting gravel from the buffer zone for the repair of their homes.

As usual, the Israeli security pretext lacks credibility. As if ever there was an occasion for firing warning shots in the air, it was here, especially as the border has been essentially quiet in the last couple of years, and what occasional harmless rockets or mortar shells have been fired, has taken place in defiance of the Hamas effort to prevent providing Israel with any grounds for the use of force.

Revealingly, in typical distortion, the Gaza situation is portrayed by Ashkenazi as presenting a pre-war scenario: “We will not allow a situation in which they fire rockets at our citizens and towns from 'safe havens' amid [their] civilians.”

With Orwellian precision, the reality is quite the reverse: Israel from its safe haven continuously attacks with an intent to kill a defenceless, entrapped Gazan civilian population.

More here.

Lyrics to “If It Were Up to Me” by Cheryl Wheeler

Maybe it's the movies, maybe it's the books
Maybe it's the bullets, maybe it's the real crooks
Maybe it's the drugs, maybe it's the parents
Maybe it's the colors everybody's wearin'
Maybe it's the president, maybe it's the last one
Maybe it's the one before that, what he done
Maybe it's the high schools, maybe it's the teachers
Maybe it's the tattooed children in the bleachers
Maybe it's the Bible, maybe it's the lack
Maybe it's the music, maybe it's the crack
Maybe it's the hairdos, maybe it's the TV
Maybe it's the cigarettes, maybe it's the family
Maybe it's the fast food, maybe it's the news
Maybe it's divorce, maybe it's abuse
Maybe it's the lawyers, maybe it's the prisons
Maybe it's the Senators, maybe it's the system
Maybe it's the fathers, maybe it's the sons
Maybe it's the sisters, maybe it's the moms
Maybe it's the radio, maybe it's road rage
Maybe El Nino, or UV rays
Maybe it's the army, maybe it's the liquor
Maybe it's the papers, maybe the militia
Maybe it's the athletes, maybe it's the ads
Maybe it's the sports fans, maybe it's a fad
Maybe it's the magazines, maybe it's the Internet
Maybe it's the lottery, maybe it's the immigrants
Maybe it's taxes, big business
Maybe it's the KKK and the skinheads
Maybe it's the communists, maybe it's the Catholics
Maybe it's the hippies, maybe it's the addicts
Maybe it's the art, maybe it's the sex
Maybe it's the homeless, maybe it's the banks
Maybe it's the clearcut, maybe it's the ozone
Maybe it's the chemicals, maybe it's the car phone
Maybe it's the fertilizer, maybe it's the nose rings
Maybe it's the end, but I know one thing.
If it were up to me, I'd take away the guns.

From a post by John Ballard at Newshoggers.

Gail Collins in The New York Times:

Maybe President Obama was saving the magic for a time when we really needed it.

We’ve been complaining for two years about the lack of music and passion in his big speeches. But if he’d moved the country when he was talking about health care or bailing out the auto industry, perhaps his words wouldn’t have been as powerful as they were when he was trying to lift the country up after the tragedy in Tucson. “Our hearts are broken, and yet our hearts also have reason for fullness,” he said, in a call to action that finally moved the nation’s focus forward. The days after the shootings had a depressing political rhythm. There was the call for civility, followed by the rapidly escalating rhetoric over whose fault the incivility was, which climbed ever upward until Wednesday when you had a congressman from Texas claiming that the F.B.I. was hiding information on the gunman’s political beliefs because the truth would embarrass the White House.

For me, Obama’s best moment came when he warned that “what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.” In his honor, I am not saying a word about Sarah Palin’s video.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

In a study published online January 12 in the journal Neuron, the research team helped identify areas of the brain involved in the choice between taking an immediate reward or deferring for a larger but delayed payoff. The decision involves a complex network that links multiple areas of the brain in a sort of complex feedback loop. “But in the instant before the choice is made, we can predict the outcome of the decision by listening to the firing activity in a single neuron,” said Daeyeol Lee, associate professor of neurobiology and psychology at Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study.

Scientists have described in general terms how the brain responds to potential rewards, such as food, alcohol or sex. However, Lee’s team looked at the information processed at the level of both brain regions and individual cells. They recorded activity in individual neurons of monkeys as they were offered choices between smaller rewards or larger ones, which were delivered after delays. Like humans, monkeys tend to opt for immediate gratification. They found in hundreds of tests that the activity of a single brain cell differed depending upon whether the monkey sought immediate award or delayed one.

More here.

After Love

Afterwords, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

by Maxine Kumin
from No More Masks
Doubleday Anchor, 1973

For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery. By the same token, for the past five thousand years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers; whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. In the throes of the recent economic crisis, with the very defining institutions of capitalism crumbling, surveys showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans felt that the country’s banks should not be rescued—whatever the economic consequences—but that ordinary citizens stuck with bad mortgages should be bailed out. This is quite extraordinary, as Americans have, since colonial days, been the population least sympathetic to debtors. (Back then, the ears of an insolvent debtor would often be nailed to a post.) The notion of morality as a matter of paying one’s debts runs deeper in the United States than in almost any other country, which is odd, since America was settled largely by absconding debtors. Despite the fact that the Constitution specifically charged the new government with creating a bankruptcy law in 1787, all attempts to do so were rejected on “moral grounds” until 1898, by which time almost all other Western states had adopted one. The change was epochal.

more from David Graeber at Triple Canopy here.