Omar Sacirbey in The Huffington Post:

Hindu Americans have run America's major companies and universities, won Nobel prizes and Olympic gold medals, directed blockbuster movies, and even flown into space. But one profession has so far been out of reach: Member of Congress.

That may change next week in Hawaii's 2nd congressional district, where Democrat Tulsi Gabbard is poised to win an out-of-nowhere bid over Republican opponent Kawika Crowley. Gabbard was leading Crowley 70 percent to 18 percent, according to an Oct. 12 poll by the Honolulu Civil Beat.

The heavily Democratic district also elected one of two Buddhists to have ever served in Congress, Mazie Hirono, who won her seat in 2006 but is now running for the U.S. Senate.

Gabbard, 31, was born in American Samoa to a Catholic father and a Hindu mother, and moved to Hawaii when she was 2. In 2002, at age 21, she was elected to the Hawaii state legislature.

The next year, she joined the Hawaii National Guard, and in 2004 was deployed to Baghdad as a medical operations specialist. After completing officers' training she deployed to Kuwait in 2008 to train the country's counter-terrorism units.

Not everyone would welcome a Hindu into Congress. When self-proclaimed “Hindu statesman” Rajan Zed was asked to open the Senate with a prayer in 2007, the American Family Association called the prayer “gross idolatry” and urged members to protest; three protesters from the fundamentalist group Operation Save America interrupted the prayer with shouts from the gallery.

Then-Rep. Bill Sali, R-Idaho, said the prayer and Congress' first Muslim member “are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers.” Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum told supporters this summer that equality was a uniquely Judeo-Christian concept that “doesn't come from the East and Eastern religions.” Crowley, in an interview with CNN.com, said Gabbard's faith was incompatible with the Constitution.

Richard Marshall interviews Jerry Fodor in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Your recent incursion into the Darwin wars caught some people by surprise but really it shouldn’t have. You basically were arguing the same case against a version of natural selection that you used against behaviourism weren’t you? The pesky intension/intention distinction was something you realised lay at the heart of a hidden piece of fallacious thinking in the Darwinian camp and although disguised it was a potentially devastating element. Can you say why the mechanism for natural selection used by Darwinists is flawed?

JF: That’s easy. Darwinism doesn’t have a mechanism for natural selection; in particular, the `theory of natural selection’ doesn’t provide one. That was the main theme of Piatelli and my book What Darwin Got Wrong. Darwin, like Skinner, is a `black box’ theorist; both insist that the non-random variables in explanations of biological traits are environmental .In consequence, Darwin is left with the hopeless problem, of (which the `linkage’ of traits is a parade example) how environmental variables could account for the effects of a creatures internal organisation in determining its phenotype. Hence the familiar loose talk about `Mother Nature’s role in guiding trait selection. Dawkins (among others) keeps assuring us that such talk is metaphorical. But he never does explain how to cash the metaphor. Skinner’s problem is exactly the same, except he’s interested not in innate phenotypes but in acquired `behavioral repertoires’.

Rob Verchick, over at the Harvard University Press blog:

Emily Eakin in the NYRB blog:

Cloud Atlas, the unlikely new adaptation by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer of David Mitchell’s ingenious novel, should do well on DVD, a format whose capacity for endless replay will enable viewers to study at leisure the myriad concurrences binding the movie’s half dozen plots. Better yet, the directors should hire their friend the philosopher Ken Wilber to provide expert commentary and spare us from having to hit “pause” and “reverse.”

Ken Wilber? In academic circles, Wilber remains obscure. A sixty-three-year-old autodidact, he is the author of an ambitious effort to reconcile empirical knowledge and mystical experience in an “Integral Theory” of existence. Yet his admirers include not only the alternative-healing guru Deepak Chopra—who has called Wilber “one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness”—but also the philosopher Charles Taylor, the theologians Harvey Cox and Michael Lerner, and Bill Clinton. Wilber’s generally lucid treatments of both Western science and Eastern spirituality have earned him favor with a coterie of highly literate seekers for whom the phrase “New Age” is nonetheless suspect. He’s an intellectual’s mystic, short on ecstatic visions and long on exegeses of Habermas (whom he regards, for his perception of “homologous structures” in human individual and social development, as something of a kindred spirit). At the Integral Institute, a Colorado-based think tank inspired by Wilber’s ideas, scholars like Jack Crittenden, a professor of political theory at Arizona State University, strive to apply his approach to “global-scale problems,” from climate change to religious conflict.

All of which makes Wilber a natural ally of the Wachowski siblings, whose films tend to reflect a similar grandiosity of ambition.

John Holbo over at Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism (with some interesting pushback from BHL's commenters) (pictured, Lysander Spooner from wikimedia commons):

Let’s look at the Chartier and Johnson (eds.) volume (PDF) that is the occasion for this symposium: Markets Not Capitalism: individualist anarchism against bosses, inequality, corporate power, and structural poverty. In “Socialist Ends, Market Means”, Gary Chartier argues that libertarianism is—can be, ought to be—socialism. (He admits saying so will probably cause more terminological trouble than it’s worth. So fine. Don’t call it that. No one is going to force you.)

There is good reason to use “socialism” to mean, at minimum, something like opposition to:

1. bossism (that is, subordinative workplace hierarchy); and

2. deprivation (that is, persistent, exclusionary poverty, whether resulting from state-capitalist depredation, private theft, disaster, accident, or other factors.

“Socialism” in this sense is the genus; “state-socialism” is the (much-to-be-lamented) species. (150)

Chartier’s title ought to be “Autonomous Ends, Socialist Means, Market Means To Those Means”. Libertarianism is commitment to maximizing (optimizing) the human supply of freedom (as autonomy), hitched to the hypothesis that socialism (in the generic sense) is the most likely way to do this, atop the hypothesis that market means (negative liberties all around) are the royal road to the true (generic) socialism (that is the royal road to true freedom.)

The social relationships that market anarchists explicitly defend, and hope to free from all forms of government control, are relationships based on:

1.ownership of property, especially decentralized individual ownership, not only of personal possessions but also of land, homes, natural resources, tools, and capital goods;

2. contract and voluntary exchange of goods and services, by individuals or groups, on the expectation of mutual benefit;

3. free competition among all buyers and sellers – in price, quality, and all other aspects of exchange – without ex ante restraints or burdensome barriers to entry;

4. entrepreneurial discovery, undertaken not only to compete in existing markets but also in order to discover and develop new opportunities for economic or social benefit; and

5. spontaneous order, recognized as a significant and positive coordinating force—in which decentralized negotiations, exchanges, and entrepreneurship converge to produce large-scale coordination without, or beyond the capacity of, any deliberate plans or explicit common blueprints for social or economic development. (Chartier, Johnson, 2)

Libertarianism, on this view, is an alloy of ‘high liberal’ ideals and social theory—really social prophecy. As such, it is more or less falsifiable. Libertarianism could turn out to be wrong about generic socialism being the social form most conducive to an optimized autonomy supply. It might be wrong about market anarchism being the best way to bring about generic socialism. If it turns out that state socialism, or actually existing laissez faire capitalism, or neo-feudalism, or Leninism, or Burkean conservatism, or ‘Nudge’-style paternalism administered by alien ant overlords, or expanded Obamacare, or giving everyone $1 at birth, would, in the event, optimize the effective autonomy supply, then the libertarian is philosophy-bound to run with the best plan.

Conversely, all high liberals ought to admit that if these libertarians are right—if generic socialism makes liberty, if markets make generic socialism—that’s the way to go. Probably. Fair enough.

Of course, all nations’ foreign policies are rooted in their own particular historical experiences. But China’s modern history has been unusually turbulent and traumatic. Westad argues that this, together with the country’s Confucian heritage, its geography and its traditional veneration of the state, have bequeathed three big ideas that continue to shape China’s worldview. The first is the concept of justice as central to the international order. As Westad writes: “In the Chinese view today, the outside world over the past two hundred years has treated China unjustly, and this grievance remains a leitmotif.” The second idea is a search for “rules and rituals” – general principles – that can bring order to an otherwise chaotic international society. The third is “a sense of centrality” and a belief in China as “the indispensable nation for its region.”

more from Gideon Rachman at the FT here.

“It is tempting to compare Plato with Marx,” he writes in one early discussion; “indeed, I have done so. Like Plato, Marx looked forward to a future in which the state, law, coercion, and competition for power had vanished and politics been replaced by rational organization. But we must not press the comparison.” Here, we see his method: to look for threads, connections, while at the same time considering each thinker on his or her own. Context, for Ryan, means two things: how his subjects echo one another, and the way they reflect their times. Thus, his take on Plato begins with a portrait of the philosopher as an aristocrat with ties to the oligarchy that “briefly replaced the Athenian democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War,” a position that influences “The Republic” and its sense of social hierarchy. “He assumes as a premise,” Ryan writes, “that we are naturally suited to different sorts of social roles, and that one of many things wrong with democratic Athens is that the wrong people end up occupying positions of power.”

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

It is easy to see why such a life, with its grand sweep and many events so central to American history, took up so many volumes by Henry Adams and then Dumas Malone. Meacham wisely has chosen to look at Jefferson through a political lens, assessing how he balanced his ideals with pragmatism while also bending others to his will. And just as he scolded Jackson, another slaveholder and champion of individual liberty, for being a hypocrite, so Meacham gives a tough-minded account of Jefferson’s slippery recalibrations on race, noting, “Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson’s sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform.” In 1814 Jefferson wrote, “There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.” This wasn’t true. Jefferson “was not willing to sacrifice his own way of life, though he characteristically left himself a rhetorical escape by introducing the subjective standard of practicability,” Meacham observes. In fact, his slaves were his most valuable possessions. He also believed emancipation would precipitate a race war. The only solution was for free blacks to be exiled to another country. These were the reasons, or excuses, that underlay Jefferson’s justifications of slavery, though they were not his ideas alone. Lincoln, too, considered expatriation a viable solution to the slavery problem.

more from Jill Abramson at the NY Times here.

Alan

I sat here all summer
under your books
like an i bent to an e
dreaming of
snapping to
with such a jolt
as to toss my dot
five lines up into
the paragraph
your bookshelves
make and glanced
to the left margin
where a cardinal
looped red poems
on the trellis
and tacked them
down with his
orange nose

by Jim Klein
from Blue Chevies
White Chickens Press,
Rutherford, NJ, 2008

From BBC News:

Targeting just one chemical inside cancerous cells could one day lead to a single test for a broad range of cancers, researchers say. The same system could then be used to deliver precision radiotherapy. Scientists told the National Cancer Research Institute conference they had been able to find breast cancer in mice weeks before a lump had been detected. The same target chemical was also present in cancers of the lung, skin, kidney and bladder, they said. The team, at the Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology at Oxford University, were looking for a protein, called gamma-H2AX, which is produced in response to damaged DNA. This tends to be one of the first steps on the road to a cell becoming cancerous.

The scientists used an antibody that is the perfect partner to gamma-H2AX and able to seek it out in the body. This was turned into a cancer test by attaching small amounts of radioactive material to the antibody. If the radiation gathered in one place it would be a sign of a potential tumour. The researchers trialled the test on genetically modified mice, which are highly susceptible to forming tumours. Prof Katherine Vallis said lumps could be felt when the mice were about 120 days old, but “we detected changes prior to that at 90 to 100 days – before a tumour is clinically apparent”. She told the BBC that gamma-H2AX was a “fairly general phenomenon” and it “would be the dream” to develop a single test for a wide range of cancers.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

About an hour south of London, in Sussex, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are preparing seeds for storage. Researchers at 48 partner institutions in 16 countries collect seeds and send them to Kew, where the specimens are cleaned, dried for about a month and then stored for perpetuity in an underground vault, kept at a chilly -20 degrees Celsius. The Millennium Seed Bank, as it is called, was founded in 2000 as an effort to stock away viable seeds, now, should we need them to restore plant populations in the future. Nearly 100,000, or about one quarter, of the world’s plant species, are currently threatened. “We can’t afford to let these plants, and the potential they hold, die out,” says Kew, on its Web site. The Millennium Seed Bank is a global seed garden of epic proportions. By 2010, the project had amassed about 10 percent of the world’s 400,000 plant species, and the trajectory is to reach 25 percent by 2020. Wouldn’t you like to see it? The vault itself, of course, is hidden from the public eye. But, MSB’s seed morphologist Wolfgang Stuppy and visual artist Rob Kesseler have come up with a clever workaround.

More here.

From Nature:

An unsuspecting worker ant in Brazil's rainforest leaves its nest one morning. But instead of following the well-worn treetop paths of its nest mates, this ant stumbles along clumsily, walking in aimless circles, convulsing from time to time. At high noon, as if programmed, the ant plunges its mandibles into the juicy main vein of a leaf and soon dies. Within days the stem of a fungus sprouts from the dead ant's head. After growing a stalk, the fungus casts spores to the ground below, where they can be picked up by other passing ants.

This strange cycle of undead life and death has been well documented and has earned the culprit the moniker: “zombie-ant” fungus—even in the scientific literature. But scientists are just learning the intricacies of this interplay between the Ophiocordyceps parasitic fungus and the Camponotini carpenter ants that it infects. Fossil evidence implies that this zombifying infection might have been happening for at least 48 million years. Recent research also suggests that different species of the fungus might specialize to infect different groups of ants across the globe. And close examination of the infected ant corpses has revealed an even newer level of spooky savagery—other fungi often parasitize the zombie-ant fungus parasite itself. “We have advanced a great deal in understanding how the fungus controls ant behavior,” David Hughes, an assistant professor of entomology and biology at The Pennsylvania State University, says. Every few months scientists are discovering yet another peculiar trait that, added together, make this parasite one of the most insidious infections—or perhaps that honor goes to the parasite that ultimately kills the killer parasite.

More here.

From The New York Times:

If you could recommend one book to the American president, what would it be? To the prime minister of Turkey?

Many years before he was elected president, I knew Obama as the author of “Dreams From My Father,” a very good book. To him or to any American president, I would like to recommend a book that I sometimes give as a gift to friends, hoping they read it and ask me, “Why this book, Orhan?” “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” is a great American book based on the vastness of America and the individual search for values and meaning in life. This highly romantic book is not a novel, but does something every serious novel should do, and does it better than many great novels: making philosophy out of the little details of daily life.

I respected the Turkish prime minister’s politics of pushing the army away from politics and back to the barracks, though I am not happy about going to courts for my political opinions like many, many others during his reign. He sued a cartoonist for picturing him as a cat, though as anyone who comes here knows we all love cats in Istanbul. I am sure Erdogan would enjoy the great Japanese writer Natsume Soseki’s book “I Am a Cat,” a satirical novel about the devilish dangers of too much Westernization, narrated by a smart cat.

More here.

Phillip Maciak on Film After Film: or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? and Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writing:

“Films mirror our reality. Let us look in the mirror.”

– Siegfried Kracauer

1.

There are two film critics. Each is in exile. Each makes his living review to review, lecture to lecture, amongst the journalistic hurlyburly of New York City. Each, in the prime of his intellectual life, writes a long, messy, virtuosic polemic about film and politics. The first traces how the political landscape of fear, paranoia, and violent nationalism in the critic’s homeland arose out of the aesthetic of popular cinema. The second, conversely, traces how the aesthetic of popular cinema arose out of the political landscape of fear, paranoia, and violent nationalism in the critic’s homeland. The first is Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film(1947), and the second is J. Hoberman’s new Film After Film, or What Became of 21^stCentury Cinema?

Admittedly, there’s a certain fuzziness to this comparison. For one thing, Kracauer, an elegant and path-breaking critic of film and mass culture, was in exile from Nazi Germany when he wrote his epic tome. He is rightly heralded, along with Andre Bazin, as one of the prime movers of modern film theory; his writings on German Expressionism still influence the way we think about Weimar film and culture, and he is one of the oldest standards for passionate cultural criticism of the cinema.

Hoberman, for his part, is merely in exile from The Village Voice. After almost 30 years as the paper’s senior film editor and columnist, he was laid off in January of this year, eliciting a collective cry from thousands of film buffs who had been introduced to a broad swath of international art cinema by Hoberman’s writing. (It is notable, however, that this cry was not reprised when Alan Scherstuhl replaced him as film editor earlier this fall.) While Hoberman has settled comfortably at venues like Tablet, Artinfo, and theNew York Review of Books (not to mention his day job as a professor at NYU) and is not, as far as we know, fleeing violent persecution, his displacement has, for a certain kind of cinephile, taken on the flavor of an existential crisis. If Hoberman is not at The Village Voice, then where are we?

Over at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, long but interesting, especially the section on P.T. Anderson’s ‘The Master’ starting at 01:00:46:

This is the first episode of the second season of our podcast series, “The Podcast for Social Research.” We recorded this episode on Friday, October 23 with an eye towards relevance to the upcoming election, and also to return to film criticism to inaugurate our second season, much as we began our first.  As such, this was recorded long before any of us realized that by this weekend, with a mere 4 days till the election, most of our city’s attention would be focused on displaced people, power outages, destroyed infrastructure, climate change, and the politics of crisis response. However, there is still an election on Tuesday, and there is still a place for discussion even in a crisis. So whether you are stuck at home because of the subways or heading out to Far Rockaway, Staten Island, Red Hook, or any of the other neighborhoods still in critical need, or anywhere else in the world, we hope you enjoy our discussion of political movements and elections and our friendly critique of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” As always, please see our Notations section after the jump for some references, asides, and more. Although we have a bibliography in our customary style, our own time constraints to post this before the election will keep this episode’s Notations largely without time stamps. We promise to return to our full, thorough style of Notations for next episode. Until then, share, enjoy, stay safe, and warm.

(You can download here by right-clicking and “save as” or look us up on iTunes)

Perhaps the closest predecessor for Taylor’s arguments is Max Weber, though Taylor’s differences with Weber are still major. Like Weber, Taylor argues that the Reformation attempted to obliterate the difference between the religious (in the sense of monastic) life and daily life by giving the latter a profound religious meaning in the doctrine of the calling—an effort that, to the extent that it succeeded, ended up undermining the very tension that the Reformation itself generated. But he diverges from Weber in maintaining that the success of the drive toward Reformation, mirrored to more than a small degree by the Counter-Reformation initiative, gave rise to new problems. On the one hand, the very success of these efforts seemed to imply that their religious underpinnings were no longer necessary—that secular “progress” could take over from religious impulses. Yet, as the book’s Part III shows, the new secularity produced its own problems, sometimes but not necessarily leading to a retrieval of religious belief. What we have now is a situation in which neither belief nor unbelief can be taken for granted and where ever more numerous examples of both continue to appear on the scene.

more from Robert Bellah on Charles Taylor in the first essay published at The Immanent Frame 5 years ago here.

China’s Communist Party is the world’s largest political party, with more than 80 million members. With its unmatched reach, the party is the most influential instrument in contemporary Chinese society. Its influence extends across cities, towns, villages, universities, schools and workplaces. Members of the party include government officials, army officers, farmers, workers and employees of state-owned companies. China is a one-party state, so all political participation must occur through the Chinese Communist Party. Dissent or difference of opinion can invite severe consequences. The party has a pyramid structure, with village members at the bottom and Beijing-based decision-making bodies at the top. Party members choose delegates to attend the National Congress.

more from Al Jazeera (with helpful video) here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

It's been a busy few weeks for announcements about how smart non-human life-forms are. First there was the talking beluga in California, then there was the elephant in Korea who could articulate a few words, then, finally, the report on a lowly slime mold's ability to make sophisticated decisions. All three of these reports repeated many of the conventional tropes for talking about animal intelligence; both trumpeted as wholly new and unheard-of the sort of data that have long been a staple of science reporting; and both are sure to leave everything exactly the same: with anti-anthropocentrists shouting see! See!, and with those who believe that human beings are something special in the cosmic scheme insisting that anything they are shown can be explained in terms of mimicry, stimulus, and other automatisms.

The irrelevance of empirical data for deciding the matter, in fact, long precedes the very existence of science journalism: it defines a clear rift already in 17th-century philosophy, while the 'new' discoveries themselves are for the most part only variations of what was already well documented in Aristotle's Historia animalium. And yet, the journalists always report as if until yesterday we were all fully committed to a hardcore version of the bête-machine doctrine. At the same time, however, they ensure that the topic will remain perpetually new by reinforcing, willy-nilly, the very doctrine their news item is supposed to be calling into question.

What do I mean by this? Consider the report from the New York Daily News, in which Koshik the Korean elephant is described as 'parroting' human speech.

More here.