Chris Clarke in Pharyngula:

One of the things that bugs me most about some of my fellow environmentalists, aside from the patchouli, is the near-religious adherence — even among those enviros who eschew religion — to the notion that natural ecological systems have an innate and emergent self-repairing property. It’s a dangerous idea that breeds complacency, and it’s really widespread.

I’m painting with abroad brush here, I know. I’ll continue to do so for convenience’s sake, but it’s true that a number of enviro types have dropped the notion of a “balance of nature.” In my experience, wildlife biologists and people who study aridland ecosystems are especially likely to have deprecated the Gaia idea of Earth being an overarching, self-regulating system. And paleontologists.

It’s easy to understand how the notion might have come about. Ecosystems get more diverse over time, with the species in them evolving as many ways of making a living as can fit in the space available, and so disruption of an ecosystem might merely open up opportunities for organisms to grow and reproduce. Those disruptions might be truly cyclical, as with tides flooding and draining a tidepool twice a day or freezing temperatures descending on half a continent for four months every year, or they might be cyclical in the stochastic sense — forest fires, 500-year floods and droughts, the occasional exotic pathogen making its way to a new continent. If you stand back and squint, those cycles can look like stability as organisms are killed off and new ones grow to replace them. Especially if you don’t pay attention to the fact that, say, the regrown forest no longer includes American chestnuts.

More here.

Hassan Hajjaj. Coca Cola, 2012.

More here and here.

James Gallagher at the BBC:

Stem cells made from skin have become “grandparents” after generations of life were created in experiments by scientists in Japan.

The cells were used to create eggs, which were fertilised to produce baby mice. These later had their own babies.

If the technique could be adapted for people, it could help infertile couples have children and even allow women to overcome the menopause.

But experts say many scientific and ethical hurdles must be overcome.

More here.

A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder.

Henry Wiencek in Smithsonian Magazine:

With five simple words in the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—Thomas Jefferson undid Aristotle’s ancient formula, which had governed human affairs until 1776: “From the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” In his original draft of the Declaration, in soaring, damning, fiery prose, Jefferson denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce …this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.” As historian John Chester Miller put it, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery.”

That was the way it was interpreted by some of those who read it at the time as well. Massachusetts freed its slaves on the strength of the Declaration of Independence, weaving Jefferson’s language into the state constitution of 1780. The meaning of “all men” sounded equally clear, and so disturbing to the authors of the constitutions of six Southern states that they emended Jefferson’s wording. “All freemen,” they wrote in their founding documents, “are equal.” The authors of those state constitutions knew what Jefferson meant, and could not accept it. The Continental Congress ultimately struck the passage because South Carolina and Georgia, crying out for more slaves, would not abide shutting down the market.

More here.

Ali Abunimah in Electronic Intifada:

Frequent and rising Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians almost always go unpunished.

Indeed, often, Israeli soldiers stand by and watch as Israeli settlers go on the rampage. The situation is so bad that a boy like Yousef Ikhlayl, 17, can be killed and there is no investigation or accountability.

So when an Israeli settler went to jail on Saturday for torturing and abusing a Palestinian child, it was quite an event, as Haaretz reported:

Prominent rabbis, public officials and a Knesset member, on Saturday, held a send off for a criminal about to enter prison after being convicted of abusing a Palestinian youth.

The event was held in the West Bank Shilo settlement in honor of Zvi Struck, who was convicted of abusing a Palestinian youth in July 2007, together with another man whose identity remains unknown. The two beat the youth up, bound him, fired their guns close to him, undressed him and threw him naked at the roadside. Three months earlier the two men had beaten up the same youth and killed a day-old kid.

The Jerusalem District Court sentenced Struck to 18th months in prison, which the Supreme Court extended after an appeal to 30 months.

According to Haaretz, “The send off was led by Bnei Akiva yeshivas head Rabbi Haim Drukman and Kiryat Arba Rabbi Dov Lior, Binyamin Council head Avi Ro’eh, his deputy Motti Yogev and MK [Knesset member] Arye Eldad.”

More here.

Michael Gecan in Boston Review:

One party starts with a belief that government can’t and shouldn’t deal with real issues, except perhaps to cut checks to private contractors and return tax dollars to “job creators.” It is led by a group of relatively young men and women—figures such as Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Mike Mulvaney, Jim Jordan, and Michelle Bachmann—who were sons and daughters of the period that William Schneider referred to as “The Suburban Century. They and many of their colleagues have only known sprawl and expansion, growth and prosperity, new housing developments, malls, schools, corporate parks.

The other party was shaped by the political culture of big declining cities, where politicians remained in office while the places they represented gradually eroded. Chicago has been losing population for more than half a century, with a million fewer residents today than at its peaks and the empty neighborhoods they left behind. Violent crime in much of the south and west side is out of control, making the Windy City the nation’s most dangerous place for young males of color. In this culture of scarcity and violence, the political class has prospered. Superb public relations and campaigning have insulated its leaders from accountability. Their security has increased, with families from the Daleys on down handing offices off to second and third generations, while the safety and wellbeing of the majority of the city’s residents unravels. Civic progress and political success are severed. And White House leaders have taken these municipal experiences to Washington.

Neither party offers a way forward for the majority of Americans. In fact, there are really three parties, with the third party being the largest of all: the party of people who want America to work. That means “work” in the literal sense of direct employment. It also means being part of a society that renews its capacity to make steady and imperfect progress. Pragmatic political life requires accepting the partial nature of every solution and the grief that comes when some miss out. Such pragmatism can be risky for politicians, but our country’s best statesmen have managed it.

Nina Jablonski in Berfrois:

Far from the bright lights of Holly/Bolly, many people think that their own dark skin casts a shadow over their lives. They sense that people think less of them because of it, and that somehow their skin is literally a black mark against them when they seek a job or a marriage partner. Why does skin colour matter so much, and why – in light of myriad anti-colour discrimination laws now on the books around the world – does it appear to matter as much or more today than it did at the height of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements a half century ago?

At the outset, recall that we are primates, and as such are obsessed with everything visual. We are observant, imitative and status-conscious too; and assess the appearance of others consciously and unconsciously as we decide what to do from one moment to the next. Our brains expend great cognitive effort in the interpretation of faces, and we instantaneously assess information about a person’s age, health, mood, intention and attractiveness as we scan their face. Our perceptions of attractiveness are also affected by social factors. We are inordinately influenced by our peers, especially as adolescents, because we seek acceptance and fear rejection. At the same time we also become highly conscious of social position, and seek to emulate individuals who we perceive as having higher status. Social anxiety about peer evaluation often persists through adulthood, with the tendency to imitate being more pronounced in women than in men. Looking or acting like someone with high status confers status by proxy.

Our urge to imitate people of higher social status or greater popularity has deep evolutionary roots. It has only been in the last few thousand years, however, that widely circulated and privileged images – on coins, stamps, photographs and in digital images – have given us opportunities to imitate people we have never seen. Images of “attractive” people and celebrities are electronically captured and rapidly propagated by the media, cell phone, social media and advertising. This highly dynamic and ever-growing reservoir of visual imagery affects how people translate perceptions of appearance into judgements.

Leo Ribuffo in Jacobin Magazine:

The death of a favorite teacher in his or her late old age typically evokes strong emotions from former students in their early old age. In this case the emotions are mine and the teacher is Gene Genovese, one of my professors at Rutgers when I was an undergraduate from 1962 to 1966. We remained in contact off-and-on over the decades and I saw him last in Atlanta in July 2010. This piece is not another attempt to offer an instant analysis of the “real” Genovese, an enterprise now well underway in cyberspace. Rather, I want to add something to the story from the perspective of an undergraduate he taught who subsequently entered what Gene called the “history business.”

I first heard about Gene in the fall of 1963, the first semester of my sophomore year, from my friend Ken O’Brien (who also entered the history business). Ken was taking Gene’s course in American Negro history. As a naive 18-year-old from a white working class-lower middle class New Jersey family, I was surprised to hear that this subject existed. I soon learned in detail that it did from Genovese himself. During the spring semester of 1964, the Intro US history course since the 1870s, taught in lecture by the terrifying Richard P. McCormick, allowed some students to take tutorials in small groups. Three of us were assigned to Gene. Our first assignment was to make sense of the currency issue in the late 19th century via debates in the Congressional Record. No, I’m not making this up. During the rest of the semester Gene tamped down my enthusiasm for William Jennings Bryan (a racist), delighted in my discovery that Theodore Roosevelt posed no threat to the standing order, and chided me for still liking Woodrow Wilson (the worst racist of the lot).

During my junior and senior years I took three courses from Gene, a two semester sequence on the history of the American South and a seminar on comparative slavery in which I first heard the word “hegemony.” I was attracted by Gene the professor rather than by the subject matter.

From The Atlantic:

I commute every week up top for my teaching gig, mostly on the bus. It's about a four-hour ride, the upside of which is the large amount of reading I get done. I knocked out Invisible Man, which I would love to talk to you about, given our conversations around Richard Wright. Another time. Right now I'm reading A Farewell To Arms and sort of amazed at the virtuosity of the prose. It's not simply that Hemingway can write beautifully, but that he can write beautifully in many different ways. He opens up with this really lyrical, almost dreamscape-like description, and then throughout the book alternates that style a kind of hard-edged staccato. He doesn't much like to go on with long descriptions of characters, he just sort of puts them there and lets you get to know them.

He looked at the priest and shouted, “Every night priest five against one!”

From Salon:

Right-wingers seem more than unbright,

Since when Ryan says Romney will fight

To end medicare,

Women’s rights, and clean air,

They hear, “Vote for us since we’re both white.”

Mike Moulton

Help for Mitt has been offered by — Newt!

To make debates wily and cute,

He tweets him to speak,

With brashness and cheek –

And Obama will have him en croute!

Shirley Stuart

More here.

Not Many Kingdoms Left

I write the lips of the moon upon her shoulders. In a temple
of silvery farawayness I guard her to rest.

For her bed I write a stillness over all the swans of the
world. With the morning breath of the snow leopard I cover
her against any hurt.

Using the pen of rivers and mountaintops I store her pillow
with singing.

Upon her hair I write the looking of the heavens at early
morning.

—Away from this kingdom, from this last undefiled place, I
write civilizations, governments, and all other spirit-forsaken
and soldiery institutions. O cold beautiful blossoms, the lips
of the moon moving upon her shoulders . . . Stand off! Stand
off!

by Kenneth Patchen
from Kenneth Patchen Selected Poems
New Directions Books, 1957

Having captured this Mathews omnibus, I didn’t begin reading immediately. How much time passed before I entered, via The Conversions, the Mathewsian orbit? (Surely my journals from the period could help me pin down the date—if only I could find the journals.) It hardly matters. The book had been waiting in the store for me; it had been waiting in its tangible form for 22 years; it has sat on my shelf, in five different homes, to be consulted again with pleasure. “Mathews’ work is virtually indescribable in brief,” the back cover stated, then went on to do so: “His is a genius of wild invention presented in a kind of meticulous deadpan narration that leaves the reader howling, amazed, and exhilarated.” It is not hyperbole. The Conversions begins with an impenetrable ideogram, a circular maze sealed off completely, no way in or out. From the start, the prose exudes an eerie and compelling calmness. In quick order, the narrator relates a racing competition of Rousselian strangeness (an intricate affair combining woodwinds and worms) and then meets a novelist who provides a summary of his book The Sores, in which three early music enthusiasts try to survive a polar plane crash.

more from Ed Park at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Nooteboom found the sort of fears that Grass expresses everywhere. “One question was on everyone’s mind at the time, and by everyone, I mean Germans themselves most of all: ‘What kind of country are we becoming?’” he writes. “Students at my readings would ask, ‘Aren’t you frightened of us?’ No, I wasn’t, but I was concerned that they thought I should be, as though they did not trust their own country.” Why not? Germany’s history certainly plays a role. “Never again” shall there be a Hitler, a Nazi revival, a nightmare such as Auschwitz, is the constant refrain that colours German political debate. But there is something else. “Germany is unfinished,” he says. “It is ancient, but it is still being made, and that ambiguity makes it fascinating.”

more from Quentin Peel at the FT here.

On the one hand, “Waging Heavy Peace” is a mess — sprawling, improvisational, like a sloppy 40-minute jam on “Like a Hurricane.” But it is also revealing, even (at times) oddly beautiful, a stream-of-consciousness-meditation on where Young has been, where he thinks he’s going and, perhaps most revealing, where he is right now. “Not that it matters much,” he tells us, “but recently I stopped smoking and drinking…. The big question for me at this point is whether I will be able to write songs this way. I haven’t yet, and that is a big part of my life. Of course I am now sixty-five, so my writing may not be as easy-flowing as it once was, but on the other hand, I am writing this book. I’ll check in with you on that later. We’ll see how it goes.” The smoking to which Young refers is, of course, weed, which he has long regarded as a key to his creativity. As such, his not altogether willing sobriety becomes one of the threads of “Waging Heavy Peace,” a through line that roots the book in the here and now.

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

Michele Pridmore-Brown in the Times Literary Supplement:

Darwinian sexual selection has not, in general, selected for particularly cosy relations between the sexes. The praying mantis female often cannibalizes her mate; she bites his head just as he is delivering his sperm and then completes her meal when he’s done. Aside from a hard-to-interpret wiggle, he seems not to protest the terms of the sexual bargain because he is solitary and unlikely to score again. By contrast, the male bedbug is a brutal bully; he has evolved a dagger-like projection with which to slash the female’s abdomen. The more graceful water strider has two precision antennae that serve no other purpose than to hold females down. As for the toxin-loaded scorpion, he has evolved a special toxin-lite to subdue the female of his species.

And so it goes. Sex on six legs, or eight, can be a decidedly sordid affair. As Darwin himself observed, one should not look for moral uplift in nature. For the economist and Darwinist Paul Seabright, insect sex nonetheless neatly illustrates the dialectical nature of sexual evolution. Male strategies for “scoring” escalate over time. In dialectic tandem, so do female counterstrategies for evading undesirables and exerting some choice – overt or covert – in their affairs. This is the “war” of his title.

Game theory enables evolutionary biologists and economists such as Seabright to think of the so-called war of the sexes as a strategic game. In general, the male evolves to “want” to score at all costs – whether that means being a bully, a martyr or something else entirely. The female, however, “knows” the real stakes are viable offspring. Of course, neither sex “knows” or “wants”, which would imply sentience or introspection; rather, they are unconscious vehicles for such behaviours. Insects and humans alike, we are the descendants of those who happened to play the game exceptionally well.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in TruthOut:

With the quadrennial presidential election extravaganza reaching its peak, it’s useful to ask how the political campaigns are dealing with the most crucial issues we face. The simple answer is: badly, or not at all. If so, some important questions arise: why, and what can we do about it?

There are two issues of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species is at stake: environmental disaster, and nuclear war.

The former is regularly on the front pages. On Sept. 19, for example, Justin Gillis reported in The New York Times that the melting of Arctic sea ice had ended for the year, “but not before demolishing the previous record – and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.”

The melting is much faster than predicted by sophisticated computer models and the most recent U.N. report on global warming. New data indicate that summer ice might be gone by 2020, with severe consequences. Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050.

“But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes. “To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe.

This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.

More here.

Nauman Naqvi in Outlook India:

The pogrom-like atmosphere gathering apace vis-a-vis its minorities in Pakistan is a far graver threat to society than is commonly realised. Sunnis, the majority community, do not appear to perceive that what is at stake is not an ‘altruistic’ concern for some weak, insignificant others. The larger framework of our lives—capitalism, and its partner in the abomination of our collective existence, nationalism—works to make us think and act as if ethical action towards others is reserved for exceptional moments of ‘altruism’, rather than being the everyday condition of a decent life. This destitute conception of ethics has come to pervade more and more of our lives, including our ‘religion’, which increasingly appears as a domain distinct from its own heart: ethics. Like everything around us, our ethics and religion too are fast becoming content-free.

What is at stake is the character, meaning and quality of life as such, inclusive, above all, of Sunniism and the integrity of its own nature and traditions. It is one of the key teachings of the Abrahamic faiths (and beyond, for example, in the Indic concept of karma) that what is of equal concern in acts of injustice and violence is the impact they have on one’s own soul. This cosmological insight is also at the origin of the philosophical tradition where, in Socrates and Plato, virtue is cultivated in the care of one’s own soul. Both rest on one fundamental: the most basic, enduring pleasure of life—the ground and potential of all other pleasures—is the pleasure of one’s own soul. Simply put, one cannot be a scoundrel to others without becoming a scoundrel to oneself. It cannot be denied that there are pleasures to be experienced in the ego of the scoundrel, but their destitute and transient quality is a common experience.

More here.