Analysis by Muhammad Sahimi at Tehran Bureau:

In Iran the elections are supervised by the Interior Ministry. There is no independent organization for the elections. The Interior Minister, Mr. Sadegh Mahsouli, and his principal deputy for the elections, Mr. Kamran Daneshjou, are both close aids and friends of Mr. Ahmadinejad and former commanders in the IRGC. Many of the provincial governors who also play important roles in the elections are former military men. Mr. Mahsouli had actually come out in support of his old friend.
Ever since General Jafari was appointed the top commander of the IRGC, he has been warning against internal dissent and internal “enemies,” clearly implicating the reformist/democratic groups. He even re-organized the IRGC to better respond to domestic disturbances.

In the last week of the campaign, signals started emanating from the high command of the IRGC that it was not happy with developments. General Javani warned on June 8 in Sobh-e Saadegh (True Dawn), the weekly published for the armed forces, that the high command of the IRGC considers the campaign of Messrs Mousavi and Karroubi tantamount to preparing for a “velvet revolution.” He warned that the IRGC “will kill it [the velvet revolution] at its inception.” Kayhan, the newspaper that acts as a public mouthpiece for the IRGC/security forces, also warned of a colored revolution. This was a clear signal something was being planned behind the scenes to prevent a victory by a reformist candidate. The leaders and ideologues behind the election coup were none other than second-generation revolutionaries, mostly from the IRGC, whose spiritual leader is Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi.

More here. [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

Peter Klatsky in The Huffington Post:

This week President Obama addressed a meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA), amid media reports that the AMA will oppose the president's call for a public health insurance option.

Over the last 50 years, the AMA has stood on the opposing side of numerous positive proposals for health care improvement. As a result, AMA membership has dwindled to less than 20% of practicing physicians. Most of their members no longer represent the views of most American physicians. Unfortunately, the AMA may again stand against a reasonable approach to providing assistance to unemployed and middle class families struggling to buy health insurance — the proposed public health plan.

The AMA opposed a similar proposal introduced in the 1960's, which we now know as Medicare. The AMA spent heavily to oppose Medicare, driven primarily over concerns for physician's wages. If the AMA had their way in the 1960's most seniors would have gone bankrupt in order to get needed care.

More here. [Thanks to Zaneb Khan Beams.]

For my old friend Syed Husain Murtaza Naqvi (in memory of the Mercedes night!):

Long time 3QD friend and brilliant musician Jay Braun puts Rush's Tom Sawyer together with The Beastie Boys' Pass The Mic. He did this without the newest fancy software and finished it, ironically, just before new sound editing technology made it possible for no talent suckas to cheat. Jay is also known for The Negatones, and Shilpa Ray and her Happy Hookers, among other things.

A day late Bloomsday post from our own J.M. Tyree’s new and excellent website/literary project, The Owls.

Gogarty and James Joyce met in 1903. Milling around the check-out desk at the National Library, the two young men fell into a conversation about Yeats, as one does. Both sniffed out the competition, and from then on their relationship consisted almost entirely of ball-busting and back-handed praise. Gogarty referred to Joyce as the “Dante of Dublin” and Joyce accused Gogarty of lacking sincerity. At the time, Joyce didn’t really drink. He was determined to be a rebel in his own land, but Gogarty, an accomplished drinker, took it upon himself to teach his friend about the pleasures of the national wine – stout. Joyce was a quick study. Money was often an issue with these two. Joyce, knowing that he was a genius, felt it a great injustice that he had to keep borrowing money from a hack like Gogarty. He once asked to borrow Gogarty’s rifle, for some unspecified purporse, and not long after Gogarty found out that Joyce had pawned it. Their decision to become roommates, a few months later, would prove disastrous.

more from Jim Gavin at The Owls here.

Brian Dillon in Art Info:

At first glance, the central premise of the Hayward’s summer show seems to court too eagerly the tedious controversy around neuroaesthetics. “Walking in My Mind” aims to “transform the gallery’s unique spaces into a giant brain by bringing together large-scale installations that explore the workings of the mind in different ways … while at the same time inviting visitors to explore their own thought processes.” It’s potentially a clunky conceit, and it risks the sort of interdisciplinary pratfalls that have made for such bathetic reading in recent attempts to bring together art and brain science. It’s as yet unclear exactly what, if anything, is to be gained from the neurologist Semir Zeki’s assertion that artists “are unknowingly exploiting the organization of the brain”; nor does John Onians’s book Neuroarthistory (2007) really convince with its claim that art critics like Ruskin and Pater were actually neurologists in disguise all along. Fortunately, Stephanie Rosenthal, the Hayward’s chief curator, and Mami Kataoka, its international curator, seem to have spotted the limitations of the field early on, and deliver instead a more expansive sense of an exhibition that thinks.

“Walking in My Mind” is in part an extension of the metaphorics of architectural immersion that the Hayward’s director, Ralph Rugoff, broached in his 2008 exhibition Psycho Buildings — a similar ambition to exploit the psychological potential of the gallery’s rigid but resonant Brutalist spaces seems in evidence. But whereas Psycho Buildings (which included work by Mike Nelson, Rachel Whiteread, and Atelier Bow-Wow) was very much a show about artists’ perversions of architecture itself, the subject of “Walking in My Mind” is rather the installation as expression of inner space.

More here. [Thanks to Sughra Raza.]

In light of Iran: “Politics is a matter of sorting things out
once and for all then after a time doing it again.”
……………………………………….………—Akbar McCarthy

Under the Capitol Dome
Carl Sandburg

There are those who speak of confusion today
as if yesterday there was order
rather than confusion.

There are those who point to confusion today
as though if given a chance
they could tomorrow transform it into order.

There are those who find benefits in confusion
and make it a labor of delight
to render any confusion more confounded.

There are those who expect today’s confusion
to be followed by another tomorrow,
the two confusions being different from each other.

The confusions of being born are followed
by the confusions of how to live
until a final moment when a stilled heart
holds release complete and absolute
from all former and earlier confusions.

When one confusions transforms itself into another
there has been a death and a birth
though the newborn confusion
becomes known only across time and silence.

When a confusion results
from seeing what is not all there
it is an identical twin of the confusion
to follow the hearing of what is not all there.

When a witness says
there was confusion in what he saw
and he can’t therefore be sure of what he saw,
he may be a strictly honest witness.

A fine sunrise or an elegant sunset
achieves moving colors and masses of changing light
in a properly organized confusion.

….The orderly marches
of the night stars and constellations
when looked at by powerful telescopes
…..hold flagrant and flaming confusions.

from: Harvest Poems 1910-1960; Harvest Books, 1960

From The Telegraph:

Michael Arditti takes the title of his new novel from Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.” Arditti writes with the same compassion and humanity as Voltaire, but without the biting satire. The Enemy of the Good is an engaging exploration of contemporary manners that is tragic and comic: a mild and forgiving book about the damage that vehement religious ideas do to ordinary lives. The novel is set in contemporary Britain: Gordon Brown is Prime Minister, deportation and asylum laws are draconian, and religious conviction of all varieties seems stronger than ever. There are four parts: the first and last centred on Clement Granville, a gay HIV-positive artist in his forties; and two middle sections, one devoted to Clement’s sister, Susannah, the other to his mother, Marta.

The Granville family is the unconventional kind that traditionally appears in English novels. Clement’s father, Edwin, now in his eighties, is a retired bishop with a stately home that has been passed down the generations. His wife, Marta, originally a Polish refugee and Holocaust survivor, is a retired Oxford don. Clement had a twin, Mark, who died in early adulthood, and 18 years later the family is still grieving. Mark’s widow, Clara, and two children belonging to a deceased former boyfriend of Susannah’s, are all part of the extended family circle. There are echoes of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in the way Arditti explores faith through the complicated, genteel Granville family. But whereas Waugh focused on Roman Catholicism, Arditti ranges across a wide spectrum of religious belief: Anglicanism, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism are all brought into the story.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Homosexual behavior seems pointedly un-Darwinian. An animal that doesn't pass along genes by mating with the opposite sex at every, well, conceivable opportunity, seems to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. So what’s in it for the 450-plus species that go for same-sex sex?
Two evolutionary biologists from University of California, Riverside, set out to answer that question in a paper published today in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. “It's been observed a lot,” says Nathan Bailey, a post-doctoral researcher at U.C. Riverside and lead study author, of same-sex sexual behavior in animals. “But it took people a long time to put it in an evolutionary context.”

After studying dozens of published articles on the topic, Bailey and his colleague Marlene Zuk concluded that, in addition to being an adaptational strategy, “these behaviors can be a force,” Bailey said. “They create a context in which selection can occur [differently] within a population.”
In the Laysan albatross, for example, previous research has shown that a third of all bonded pairs in a Hawaii colony are two females. This behavior helps the birds, whose colony has far more females than males, by allowing them to share parenting responsibilities. It also gives more stability to the offspring of males, already bonded to a female, who mate opportunistically with females in a same-sex couple. Such a dynamic, then may force gradual changes in behavior and even physical appearance of the birds, the authors note.

Picture: Male chinstrap penguins, such as the famous Roy and Silo of the Central Park Zoo, have paired and even cared for eggs.

More here.

The long-standing Middle East correspondent for The Independent, Robert Fisk, is defying the government crackdown on foreign media reporting in Iran.

From ABC News (Australia):

It was interesting that the special forces – who normally take the side of Ahmadinejad's Basij militia – were there with clubs and sticks in their camouflage trousers and their purity white shirts and on this occasion the Iranian military kept them away from Mousavi's men and women.

In fact at one point, Mousavi's supporters were shouting 'thank you, thank you' to the soldiers.

One woman went up to the special forces men, who normally are very brutal with Mr Mousavi's supporters, and said 'can you protect us from the Basij?' He said 'with God's help'.

It was quite extraordinary because it looked as if the military authorities in Tehran have either taken a decision not to go on supporting the very brutal militia – which is always associated with the presidency here – or individual soldiers have made up their own mind that they're tired of being associated with the kind of brutality that left seven dead yesterday – buried, by the way secretly by the police – and indeed the seven or eight students who were killed on the university campus 24 hours earlier.

Quite a lot of policeman are beginning to smile towards the demonstrators of Mr Mousavi, who are insisting there must be a new election because Mr Ahmadinejad wasn't really elected. Quite an extraordinary scene.

There were a lot of stones thrown and quite a lot of bitter fighting, hand-to-hand but at the end of the day the special forces did keep them apart.

I haven't ever seen the Iranian security authorities behaving fairly before and it's quite impressive.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Our youth, hoping to see their rightful will fulfilled, came on the scene and waited patiently. This was the greatest occasion for the government’s officials to bond with their people.

But unfortunately, they used it in the worst way possible. Declaring results that no one in their right mind can believe, and despite all the evidence of crafted results, and to counter people protestations, in front of the eyes of the same nation who carried the weight of a revolution and 8 years of war, in front of the eyes of local and foreign reporters, attacked the children of the people with astonishing violence. And now they are attempting a purge, arresting intellectuals, political opponents and Scientifics.

Now, based on my religious duties, I will remind you :

1- A legitimate state must respect all points of view. It may not oppress all critical views. I fear that this lead to the lost of people’s faith in Islam.

2- Given the current circumstances, I expect the government to take all measures to restore people’s confidence. Otherwise, as I have already said, a government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy.

3- I invite everyone, specially the youth, to continue reclaiming their dues in calm, and not let those who want to associate this movement with chaos succeed.

4- I ask the police and army personals not to “sell their religion”, and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before god. Recognize the protesting youth as your children. Today censor and cutting telecommunication lines can not hide the truth.

More here.

Mike Miliard in the Boston Pheonix:

Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off:

— Rathgar and Terenure!
— Come on, Sandymount Green!
Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.
— Start, Palmerston park!

Just about this time of day, 105 years ago, Leopold Bloom, the fictional ad-salesman antihero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, heard those words as he was stopping into the offices Weekly Freeman and National Press, the next stop on his day’s perambulations around “Dear Dirty Dublin.”
Why should you care?

Joshua Tucker over at The Monkey Cage:

As developments proceed in the next few days, I would keep a close eye on the following:

1) Will the planned recount go ahead, and or will Mousavi succeed in forcing a revote? While the latter still seems very unlikely, it would be an extremely significant development, demonstrating that the position of Khamenei is much weaker than we thought only a few days ago.

2) Will the security forces in Iran move beyond what they are doing now – basically low levels of violence and apparently detaining opposition leaders – and unleash a more concentrated show of force (e.g., something in the spirit of what happened in Tiananmen Square or Andijan, Uzbekistan)?

3) Will the Iranian authorities take further steps to shut down technological means of communication being utilized by the opposition, such as text messaging and Twitter?

4) Can the opposition continue to deliver large numbers of people into the streets as the protests head towards a second week? One of the truly fascinating things about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was the sheer number of days that people continued to protest, even in the dead of winter.

Also of interest at the Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell and John Sides on Twitter and organized political resistance.

Laura Secor in The New Yorker:

A sort of pernicious cliché has entered our discussion of Iranian politics, namely that the Western press cannot be trusted because American reporters are too lazy to leave North Tehran and too dazzled by the appearance of a vocal minority of upper-class Iranians who are congenial to our self-image. We believe Iran is overrun with people who think like we do, the argument goes, because these are the people who talk to us. It is true that the movements of American reporters in Iran are controlled and curtailed to the point where Tehran is the main, if not the only, point of access, apart from the hard-line holy city of Qom. I cannot speak for all American journalists who report from Iran, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who is acutely aware of, and frustrated by, the lack of insight into the rural heartland this affords us. The best that we can do is to familiarize ourselves with the full spectrum of urban life, across class and cultural boundaries. Most Iranians, after all, live in cities, of which Tehran is only the most gigantic.

It is from this reporting that I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, that the urban poor had ceased to be a reliable constituency for Ahmadinejad. They were in 2005. But by 2006, it was hard to find a South Tehrani who was pleased with the outcome of that vote or prepared to vote for him again. Why? Because under Ahmadinejad, the country’s economic crisis deepened in ways that hit urban populations—both the poor and the middle class—harder than anyone.

Read more »

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

The obvious evidence of fixing, fraud, and force to one side, there is another reason to doubt that an illiterate fundamentalist like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could have increased even a state-sponsored plebiscite-type majority. Everywhere else in the Muslim world, in every election in the last two years, the tendency has been the other way. In Morocco in 2007, the much-ballyhooed Justice and Development Party wound up with 14 percent of the vote. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the predictions of increased market share for the pro-Sharia parties were likewise falsified. In Iraq this last January, the local elections penalized the clerical parties that had been making life a misery in cities like Basra. In neighboring Kuwait last month, the Islamist forces did poorly, and four women—including the striking figure of Rola Dashti, who refuses to wear any headgear—were elected to the 50-member parliament. Most important of all, perhaps, Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah was convincingly and unexpectedly defeated last week in Lebanon after an open and vigorous election, the results of which were not challenged by any party. And, from all I hear, if the Palestinians were to vote again this year—as they were at one point supposed to do—it would be highly improbable that Hamas would emerge the victor.

Yet somehow a senile and fanatical religious clique that has failed even to condition the vote in a country like Lebanon, where it has proxy and surrogate parties under arms, is able to reward itself by increasing its “majority” in a festeringly bankrupt state where it controls the media and enjoys a monopoly of violence. I think we should deny it any official recognition of this consolation. (I recommend a reading of “Neither Free Nor Fair: Elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran” and other productions of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation. This shows that past penalties for not pleasing the Islamic Guardian Council have included more than mere disqualification and have extended to imprisonment and torture and death, sometimes in that order.

More here.

TEHRAN — In silence they moved, a vast throng, hundreds of thousands of people, down the street called Revolution. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had called his opponents mere “dust.” Well, said one student, “We will blind him with our dust.” This was the day followers of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist candidate defeated in Iran’s disputed presidential elections, rose up en masse to protest the theft of their votes. “Quiet! Quiet!” they shouted, arms raised and fingers forming a “V” for victory that they pointed at a lonely police helicopter overhead. Moussavi himself, not seen since the night of the election, appeared on Revolution Square, answering a question much debated here in recent days: Will he lead what he started? For the first time, I saw traffic police smiling at the crowd. Even the black-clad elite riot police were impassive. “Raise your arms, raise your arms,” one man murmured to them. If the regime had hoped to quell Iran’s powerful democratic stirring with a massive show of force since last Friday’s vote, it failed to do so.

more from Roger Cohen at the NYT here.

Venice was settled originally by refugees fleeing the barbarian hordes—who, apparently, didn’t like water. But that was then. This week, Swoon, a 31-year-old Brooklyn artist whose name is Caledonia “Callie” Curry, is leading a waterborne invasion of the Venice Biennale (she didn’t bother to try to get in officially) with a crew of 30 artists, musicians, and miscreants in tow. Though they have raised some $150,000 for this crash party, the money won’t show in the boats they’ll travel in, because the boats are made of trash—a symbol of the freedom that comes with radical self-reliance, and one that is meant to effect change. “Throughout history, pranksters have been looking at fences and then pushing them aside,” Swoon has said (the name came to an ex-boyfriend in a dream, in which he imagined her future as a graffiti artist long before her career began). “Through action, you can move the perception. It’s almost like a magic trick.” Swoon and her group are emissaries from a specific underground culture: the bike-riding, Dumpster-diving, anarchist street-art movement that has flourished in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and areas near the Gowanus Canal over the past decade.

more from Vanessa Grigoriadis at New York Magazine here.

ON AUG. 10, 1996, a single power line in western Oregon brushed a tree and shorted out, triggering a massive cascade of power outages that spread across the western United States. Frantic engineers watched helplessly as the crisis unfolded, leaving nearly 10 million people without electricity. Even after power was restored, they were unable to explain adequately why it had happened, or how they could prevent a similar cascade from happening again – which it did, in the Northeast on Aug. 14, 2003. Over the past year we have experienced something similar in the financial system: a dramatic and unpredictable cascade of events that has produced the economic equivalent of a global blackout. As governments struggle to fix the crisis, experts have weighed in on the causes of the meltdown, from excess leverage, to lax oversight, to the way executives are paid. Although these explanations can help account for how individual banks, insurers, and so on got themselves into trouble, they gloss over a larger question: how these institutions collectively managed to put trillions of dollars at risk without being detected. Ultimately, therefore, they fail to address the all-important issue of what can be done to avoid a repeat disaster. Answering these questions properly requires us to grapple with what is called “systemic risk.”

more from Duncan Watts at the Boston Globe here.

Bamiyan / Sang-e Sabur
Zara Houshmand

It was the beginning of spring: a new year

laid a finger on the balance of night and day.

Tiny green tassels ruffled the black fields,

the thirsty earth drank snowmelt, and wild

hyacinths, like headstrong brides,

experimented with perfume.

The stutter of guns. Silence. The guns again,

seconded after a heartbeat off the cliff face.

We drummed debate till the lamps died, nightly:

Idols or empty stone, round and round,

history and the eye of the beholder.

Guldar’s eye is blind to all but Roya’s beauty:

Guldar the half-wit, Roya the hairlip,

beauty hovers between them.

History’s a harlot, faithless, prone

to unprovoked fury: crockery flies,

the ceiling falls, the story lies broken.

Back to the plough you go, hungry.

History, would you stone her?

Read more »