Robert Scheer in The Nation:

Here is a man who, more than anyone else in the Bush administration, trafficked in the campaign of deceit that caused tens of thousands to die, wasted trillions of dollars in resources and indelibly sullied the legacy of this nation through the practice of torture, which Cheney defends to this day. Still this villain claims that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the horrid methods he endorsed were a necessary response to the threat of Osama bin Laden. How convenient to ignore that it was Barack Obama, a resolutely anti-torture president, who made good on the promise of Cheney and the previous administration to take down the Al Qaeda leader.

Not to mention that bin Laden was killed in his hiding place in Pakistan, a nation that the Bush administration had befriended after 9/11 by lifting the sanctions previously imposed in retaliation for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, a program connected with the proliferation of nuclear weapons know-how and the sale of nuclear material to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Pakistan joined with only two other nations, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in granting diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government that provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda as bin Laden orchestrated the 9/11 attack. But instead of focusing on the source of the problem, Cheney led the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who had ruthlessly hounded any Al Qaeda operatives who dared function in Iraq.

You don’t have to slog too deeply through Dick Cheney’s advertisement for himself to grasp not only the wicked cynicism of the man but also how shallow are his perceptions.

More here.

Facing stiff competition from Salman Khan’s Bodyguard on Eid, Pakistani film Bol is managing to hold its own thanks to the word of mouth publicity.

Rawinder Bawa in Dawn:

Dealing with multiple issues ranging from misogyny to prostitution to fanaticism, Bol is director Shoaib Mansoor’s second offering after Khuda Ke Liye. Bol was released alongside mega blockbuster Bodyguard, ‘That girl in yellow boots’ and ‘Mummy Punjabi’. Unlike Khan’s masala movie, Bol offers a riveting storyline and great acting, with people publicising the film more than the PR agencies.

For starters, there is actress Vidya Balan who says, “Loved Bol! Love the performance of the father. The boy who played Saifuddin was cute. My heart went out to him.”

As one of the audience members, Tushar Pahwa, walking out after a show puts it, “Bol is a ubiquitous film- whether a Muslim family in Lahore or a Hindu family in Bihar, everyone can relate to it. Women and transgenders are disrespected in India and Pakistan both. I just hope people start to speak up after watching the movie. It was a good gift for Eid.”

Many have given the tickets to family and friends in beautiful gift envelopes as eidi. “This was my eidi to my sister The film’s message has been well received and I felt my sister must see this movie as an example,” says Shahnawaz Siddique, a shop keeper.

More here.

India’s economic ascent has launched a flurry of books, most of them touting neoliberalism’s power to not only propel the country out of poverty but to chase away its unsightly caste and class divisions, its nasty penchant for pogroms and female feticide. Siddhartha Deb’s very fine The Beautiful and the Damned tells a darker story, focusing on the boom’s seamy side: the scoundrels and profiteers, and the millions of farmers and migrant workers crushed beneath the juggernaut of “progress.” “The modernity of India,” he writes drily, is “an ambiguous phenomenon.” His point is that even as India has seen an increase in middle-class “aspirers,” “the poor have seen little or no improvement,” and he makes the argument with singular ease. Much of his reportage—on India’s villages, “cyber-cities,” and luxury malls—is done on foot, and his book possesses a gait of its own, achieving a contemplative, rambling rhythm that absorbs passing sights and sounds into anecdote, knits anecdote into analysis, and then analysis into advocacy. Deb’s inquiry begins with the beautiful people, the architects and beneficiaries of India’s gilded age: entrepreneurs, engineers, and their acolytes—“an army of Gatsbys, wanting not to overturn the social order but only to belong to the upper crust.” It’s a moment with its own name (“India Shining”) whose mantra is that you’re only as small as your ambitions (an ethos Deb nails in his observation that India’s evolving ideals have been mirrored in the career of actor Amitabh Bachchan, who went “from playing thin angry young men in the seventies to corporate patriarchs in the new millennium”). Deb strips away the myths to reveal a much harsher reality.

more from Parul Sehgal at Bookforum here.

I remember a scene related to me by a poet of the Belgrade surrealist circle, Dusan Matic. In 1941 he took part in the Montenegro guerrilla revolt, and while the to-be fighters were cleaning their guns around him, the poet sat on a nearby terrace, smoked and read Nietzsche. He was annoyed by the many soldiers who came to light their cigarette on his, he told me, he didn’t have the nerves to support the smoking habits of an entire people’s liberation struggle. So he returned to his room in Belgrade during the unpleasant period of occupation, with its many dangers. When I think about it now, I don’t believe that Matic distanced himself from war because of this smoker episode, but rather because the masses of soldiers had interrupted him while reading. It was quite a long time ago that Valéry Larbaud wrote about his observations of reading as a vice practiced with impunity. For myself, I know that this prolonged staring into a book interferes with the production routines in my family, the manufacture of everyday life – the admission of one who engages in the vice Larbaud describes. Personally I require many hours of reading, because I usually read tremendously thick books, and also notably boring ones; I am always convinced that at the core of an abstruse sentence lies the magnificence of a discovery just waiting to be made. And so I remain true to the pre-socratic philosophers, Musil and Lacan.

more from Bora Cosic at Sign and Sight here.

What are public memorials for? Are they meant to perpetuate the sorrow of loss; pay a debt of respect, or set a boundary about grief by turning it to public reverence? Must their primary obligation always be to the immediately bereaved? Should such places be no more than a site where those victimised by slaughter can find consolation in a community of mourning? Or is a public memorial, by definition, created to make something more universally redeeming from atrocious ruin? Does remembrance invite instruction or forbid it? Should it make mourners of us all; bow the heads and stop the mouths of all who stand before it? Is it greatly to their credit that Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama will stand at that haunted site on the 10th anniversary and not utter a word? Or is that silence a missed opportunity for reflection? For some of us these will never be purely academic questions. I was in New York on 9/11 and in London on 7/7. I am a citizen of both of these unapologetically secular, mostly tolerant, rowdily cosmopolitan cities that the exterminating apostles of destruction chose as their target. I am at home in both places: I think of them as “the mansion house of liberty” – in John Milton’s fine phrase from Areopagitica, the poet’s passionate 1644 defence of freedom of publication – and the temerity of that liberty was, in the mind of the murderers, cause enough for immolation.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

From The Boston Globe:

When people talk about overcoming tragedy and loss these days, it’s hard to avoid the word “closure.” Whether it’s the death of a loved one, a national catastrophe, or just an argument with a friend, closure is supposed to be what we need to heal and get on with our lives. It’s easy to see the appeal of the idea that we can put a definitive end to our suffering or grief and start a new chapter of life without sorrow, guilt, or anger. The term originates in Gestalt psychology, but the popular notion of closure emerged through the victims’ rights, pop psychology, and self-help movements of recent decades. By the 1990s, the concept had become a cultural commonplace, and today is cited in industries from marketing to politics. In May, when President Obama visited the World Trade Center site after Osama bin Laden’s death, the White House press secretary explained the visit as “an effort to perhaps help New Yorkers and Americans everywhere to achieve a sense of closure.”

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Who hasn’t struggled occasionally to come up with a desired word or the name of someone near and dear? I was still in my 40s when one day the first name of my stepmother of 30-odd years suddenly escaped me. I had to introduce her to a friend as “Mrs. Brody.” But for millions of Americans with a neurological condition called mild cognitive impairment, lapses in word-finding and name recall are often common, along with other challenges like remembering appointments, difficulty paying bills or losing one’s train of thought in the middle of a conversation.

Though not as severe as full-blown Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia, mild cognitive impairment is often a portent of these mind-robbing disorders. Dr. Barry Reisberg, professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, who in 1982 described the seven stages of Alzheimer’s disease, calls the milder disorder Stage 3, a condition of subtle deficits in cognitive function that nonetheless allow most people to live independently and participate in normal activities. One of Dr. Reisberg’s patients is a typical example. In the two and a half years since her diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment at age 78, the woman learned to use the subway, piloted an airplane for the first time (with an instructor) and continued to enjoy vacations and family visits. But she also paid some of the same bills twice and spends hours shuffling papers.

More here.

Roheena

—to a girl from Kyber Pass

suppose in the imagination of the tribes
she was kept hidden all her life
behind four walls
still it was possible …

suppose in the imagination of the tribes
if only to claim her name
they had waged wars
still it was possible …

suppose in the imagination of the tribes
all the text praising their own imagination
if all that sacred text were burnt
still it was possible …

yes this imagination
that wraps a girl in layers of shame
has survived for centuries on the pillars
of shameless, false bravery.

but when she finally arrives in Peshawar
having broken the siege of the imagination of the elders
it seems an ancient beauty
has reached her destination of eternal dawn.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

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Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on September 12, 2011. Winners of the contest, as decided by Patricia Churchland, will be announced on or around September 19, 2011.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Subjective Consciousness: A Unique Perspective
2. 3 Quarks Daily: What do we deserve?
3. 3 Quarks Daily: Why should we care about Kant?
4. A Collection of Selves: Radical Feminized Thoughts
5. Brains: Has Molyneux’s Question Been Answered?
6. Camels with Hammers: Goodness Is A Factual Matter
7. Common Sense Atheism: The Goal of Philosophy Should Be to Kill Itself
8. Deontologistics: On Ereignis
9. Evolving Thoughts: More on phenomena
10. Fledgling Philosophy: Potential and Possession: a Common Conflation
11. Footnotes on Epicycles: A paradox arises over beer
12. Gavagai!: There ain’t nothin’ about Mary
13. In Search of Enlightenment: Bentham, Sacred Values, and Ideal Theory
14. Narziss & Nietzsche: Nietzsche on Agency and the Will
15. Old Translations: Epistemic Trust and Understanding in a Model of Scientific Knowledge
16. PEA Soup: Edward Slingerland’s “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics” with commentary by Rachana Kamtekar
17. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Blame, Part 3: Criminal Blame and Meaning
18. PEA Soup: Williams, Thick Concepts, and Reasons
19. Philosophy Bro: David K. Lewis’ “On The Plurality of Worlds”: A Summary
20. Philosophy, et cetera: The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer
21. Philotropes: Singer’s problem for heroes
22. Rust Belt Philosophy: Spoken like a man who’s never been poor
23. Sola Ratione: William L. Craig’s knockdown argument
24. Specter of Reason: Merry Christmas, or, Ryle’s Idiotic Idea
25. Sprachlogik: Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality
26. The Consternation of Philosophy: Disgust, Magical Thinking, and Morality
27. The Constructive Curmudgeon: The Empathy Machine: An Unfinished Essay
28. The Ends of Thought: X-Phi, True Selves, and what Philosophy is Actually About: Knobe Again
29. The Kindly Ones: Demarcation’s revisited demise
30. The Philosopher’s Beard: Morality vs Ethics: The Trolley Problem
31. The Philosopher’s Magazine: No life is good
32. The Philosophy of Poetry: The Glimpse of Recognition
33. The Wise Sloth: An old man from Jersey explains: philosophy
34. Tomkow: Self Defense
35. Tomkow: Trolley Problems
36. Vihvelin: Two Objections to the Possibility of Time Travel
37. Yeah, OK, But Still: Art, Ethics and Christmas

by Hasan Altaf

The first time I heard the word “Gandhara” was when I was maybe eight or ten, and, driving from Islamabad to Peshawar with my father, brother, and grandparents, stopped in a town I’d never heard of to visit a museum that was equally unfamiliar. The little town was Taxila, and the museum was the Taxila Museum. I’m sure at the time someone, most likely my father, explained to me the significance, the historic and artistic value, of the objects presented there, but it seems I must have glazed over and ignored it. To the eight- or ten-year-old I was, none of the statues and relics, the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, were particularly memorable. We left Taxila and continued our drive, leaving the museum behind, and until recently, I never thought about them again.

Many of us who grow up outside Pakistan have Pakistan always in the back of our minds, but that Pakistan is an imagined one that is different for each of us, and mine, at least, did not encompass Gandhara. (Which is, at one level, strange, as my imagined France includes a Revolution, my imagined England a conquering William, and, thanks to my grandmother, my imagined Pakistan a Muhammad bin Qasim.) Even when I lived in Pakistan, in Islamabad, within easy driving range of the remains of the culture, “Gandhara” was an irrelevant if not foreign concept.

The new show of Gandhara art, at the Asia Society in New York (none of the work came from Taxila, but from Lahore and Karachi instead, after apparently a great deal of diplomatic wrangling), doesn’t seem to be particularly aimed at changing that situation – which is, all things considered, probably for the best; such an attempt could so easily swing towards the moralistic and the preachy. Instead, the exhibition restricts itself mostly to sobriety, to a calm display of the work and relevant facts. When the curators do conjecture, they do so about what a particular gesture might mean, whether a particular statue depicts Athena or simply an Athena-like goddess, whether a particular piece came from a dome or a pedestal.

Read more »

Isabella Kirkland. Back; from Taxa series, 2003.

Oil paint and alkyd on canvas.

“A visual artist and a research associate in aquatic biology at the California Academy of Sciences, Kirkland had already cultivated knowledge of and respect for the science of taxonomy when she began the series. “I had been working on individual, local endangered species,” she says.”

Upcoming exhibition at the Davis Museum, Wellesley College; Oct 19, 20011 to January 2012.

More here, here and here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Early in The 9/11 Wars, a magisterial history of the last decade, Jason Burke describes a battle in an Iraqi town called Majar al-Kabir, held in June 2003, soon after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The battle was described by press headlines in the UK as the heroic “last stand” of humanitarian-minded British soldiers against a mob of vicious Iraqi insurgents. Abruptly one morning, a British patrol in the town had found itself attacked from all sides. While they were fighting their way out, another contingent of six British soldiers entrusted with “reconstruction” found themselves trapped in a police station in another part of Majar al-Kabir. Following a short siege, when a local elder tried to negotiate safe passage for the British, angry Iraqis stormed the building. Pleading for their lives, the outnumbered British soldiers held up pictures of their wives and children, but were murdered none the less.

“I believe what I was doing was for the purpose of good,” one of the executed soldiers had written in a letter to his mother to be opened in the event of his death. The soldier couldn't be faulted for claiming virtue for his side. Post 9/11, politicians and commentators in the west had, as Burke writes, insisted that “the violence suddenly sweeping two, even three, continents was the product of a single, unitary conflict pitting good against evil, the west against Islam, the modern against retrograde.” The sheikhs of al-Qaida had their vision of Islam's extensive sovereignty. But as Burke points out, George Bush and Tony Blair, too, like the militant extremists, “both understood and projected the conflict as part of a cosmic contest – to propagate a series of universal principles”.

From the western perspective at the time, in which Iraq was supposed to blaze the trail for freedom and democracy across the Middle East, “the violence at Majar al-Kabir appeared to defy explanation”.

More here.

From Berfrois:

Berfrois: How radical was Playboy for postwar America?

Pitzulo: I’m not sure I would use the word “radical.” I would say that in the 1950s, Playboy was subversive in various ways: It celebrated free sexuality amongst single, “nice” girls, which was contrary to so much of postwar popular culture. Mainstream culture in those years acknowledged women’s sexuality, but insisted that marriage was its only appropriate outlet. But Playboy, whatever the motivation, selfish or otherwise, sent a message that good girls like sex, too. The magazine even subtly championed tolerance for homosexuality in the mid-1950s.

In the 1960s, Playboy became explicitly political and maintained a liberal stance on the various issues of that decade; civil rights, Vietnam, women’s rights (including abortion and access to contraception) as well as speaking out strongly in favor of gay rights, which at that point in time was a potentially radical stance.

However, what keeps me away from that word in a broader sense, concerning the whole of the magazine, was its intense consumer emphasis. That was right in the mainstream of American culture in the prosperous postwar years. Even as the culture moved toward the left in the 1960s, and critiques of capitalism grew more prominent than they had been in decades, Playboy defended consumption. It’s only tweak of consumer ideology was to say, in the face of criticism, that Americans should consume wisely (with consideration for the environment, etc.), but Playboy continued to promote consumer capitalism as a worthy goal.

More here.

John Lee Anderson in Guernica:

I had thought Afghanistan’s maskhara to be an extinct species. For centuries, maskhara had entertained the country’s monarchs with their japes and buffoonery, and by lampooning them. They may well have been the originators of the European tradition of court fools, as well, for maskhara is a term of Arabic or possibly Sanskrit origin, and along with the first royal jesters, words using the same root appeared in medieval Europe sometime in the thirteenth century, ultimately seeding the English language with such exoticisms as mascara and mask.

Samad Pashean, who estimated his age at sixty, was evidently one of Afghanistan’s last remaining maskhara. He had survived the abolition of the monarchy, the Soviet military occupation, the ensuing bloody civil war, and then the Taliban years by wandering from one warlord’s lair to another, plying his prankish wares in exchange for food, shelter, and the occasional handout of money. As my friend explained it, Atta had placed Pashean under his protection, maintaining him in a house nearby and giving him regular allotments of food from his harvests. Atta bade us all sit down as boys brought in large round trays heaped with salad, pilau rice, bowls of yogurt, mutton soup, fruit, baked chicken, and lamb, and laid them on the carpet in front of us.

Over our food, which we dug into with our hands, Atta boasted proudly of Pashean’s many talents, telling me that in addition to his prowess as an entertainer, he was also a professional blackmailer, a master thief, and a prolific murderer, with an estimated fifty victims killed by his own hand.

More here.

Roz Chast in The Paris Review:

I first noticed William Steig’s covers and cartoons around 1970, when I was a teenager and would page through my parents’ New Yorker magazines. His drawings didn’t look like the rest of the cartoons in the magazine. They didn’t have gag lines. There were no boardrooms, no cocktail parties with people saying witty things to one another. His men and women looked as if they were out of the Past, although I wasn’t completely clear as to what era of the Past they were from. Sometimes the drawings made me laugh, and sometimes they didn’t, but I always wanted to look at them. I had a sense that these cartoons were made by someone who had had to create his own language, both visual and verbal, with which to express his view of the world.

His subjects? Animals, both real and imaginary. Also cowboys, farmers, knights on horseback, damsels in distress, gigantic ladies and teeny-tiny men, grandmas, clowns of indeterminate gender, average joes, families, old couples, young couples, artists, deep thinkers, fools, loners, lovers, and hoboes, among other things.

More here.

Caroline Perry in The Harvard Gazette:

It has been recognized since ancient times that light travels at different speeds through different media. Reflection and refraction occur whenever light encounters a material at an angle, because one side of the beam is able to race ahead of the other. As a result, the wave front changes direction.

The conventional laws, taught in physics classrooms worldwide, predict the angles of reflection and refraction based only on the incident (incoming) angle and the properties of the two media.

While studying the behavior of light impinging on surfaces patterned with metallic nanostructures, the researchers realized that the usual equations were insufficient to describe the bizarre phenomena observed in the lab.

The new generalized laws, derived and experimentally demonstrated at Harvard, take into account the Capasso group’s discovery that the boundary between two media, if specially patterned, can itself behave like a third medium.

More here. [Thanks to Sughra Raza.]

Mike Lofgren in Truthout:

The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]