Photos show young Israeli settlers watching the bombardment of Gaza, and a Gazan child.

Rory McCarthy in The Guardian:

Of all the horrors visited on the civilians of Gaza in this war the fate of the Samounis, a family of farmers who lived close together in simple breeze-block homes, was perhaps the gravest.

Around a dozen homes in this small area were destroyed, no more than piles of rubble in the sand yesterday. Helmi Samouni's two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.

They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a “High Quality Body Warmer”, dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full – the troops' portable toilets.

But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: “Arabs need 2 die”, “Die you all”, “Make war not peace”, “1 is down, 999,999 to go”, and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: “Arabs 1948-2009”.

More here. And Amnesty International finds “indisputable evidence of the widespread use of white phosphorus in crowded residential areas of Gaza City and elsewhere in the territory.” From the BBC:

The Amnesty group said one of the places worst-affected by white phosphorus was the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) compound in Gaza City.

Israeli shell fire set the compound on fire on 15 January, burning stocks of food and other humanitarian supplies in a warehouse and coming close to stocks of fuel.

The head of Unrwa in Gaza, John Ging, said at the time that “three rounds that emitted phosphorus” hit the compound.

The Israeli military said it had come under fire from Palestinian fighters inside the compound and had fired back.

Human Rights Watch also said it observed “dozens and dozens” of white phosphorus shells being fired by Israel at the Gaza Strip.

More here.

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber pointed to this one, from the inaugural celebration concert in DC. It seemed appropriate for the occasion. This version has the oft omitted choruses:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I'd seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

That side was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

Ernest C. Withers. Memphis Strike, 1968.
Photograph.

More here and here.

Stephen Holden reviews Zizek's new movie:

In this globe-trotting documentary, directed by Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph), Mr. Zizek, a blustery, excitable lecturer, is often filmed speaking on the actual locations of the films he discusses, or on recreated sets. We find him riding on a motorboat in Bodega Bay in northern California, the site of “The Birds,” and prowling around the locations of “Vertigo”; those are the two Hitchcock films besides “Psycho” to receive the closest scrutiny.

Like Freud’s division of the psyche into three parts, the movie unfolds in three loosely overlapping sections. The first examines how the movies arouse our desires and allow us to channel unconscious drives into entertaining thrills and chills. The shower drain in “Psycho” and the toilet bowl that backs up in Francis Ford Coppola’s conspiracy thriller “The Conversation,” he says, are vehicles for transporting evidence of our brute animal selves to a safe distance.

The second part examines sex and fantasy in movies and reaches some major conclusions: that sex is impossible without fantasy; that anxieties are the most authentic emotions we feel; and that fantasies, and by extension the movies that address them, are defenses against anxiety.

Part 3, which contemplates appearance versus reality in movies, explores the paradoxical scene from “The Wizard of Oz” in which the all-powerful Wizard is discovered to be an old man pontificating from behind a curtain. Even when the illusion of the Wizard’s omnipotence is exposed, Mr. Zizek theorizes, there is something more real in the illusion than in the reality behind it. And so when the old man hands the Scarecrow a diploma to prove he has a brain, the Scarecrow is convinced he is smart.

Matt Taibbi reviews Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded in the New York Press:

I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years.

Friedman then draws his napkin-graph, and much to the pundit’s surprise, it turns out that there is almost an exact correlation between high oil prices and “unfreedom”! The graph contains two lines, one showing a rising and then descending slope of “freedom,” and one showing a descending and then rising course of oil prices.

Friedman plots exactly four points on the graph over the course of those 30 years. In 1989, as oil prices are falling, Friedman writes, “Berlin Wall Torn Down.” In 1993, again as oil prices are low, he writes, “Nigeria Privatizes First Oil Field.” 1997, oil prices still low, “Iran Calls for Dialogue of Civilizations.” Then, finally, 2005, a year of high oil prices: “Iran calls for Israel’s destruction.”Take a look for yourself: I looked at this and thought: “Gosh, what a neat trick!” Then I sat down and drew up my own graph, called SIZE OF VALERIE BERTINELLI’S ASS, 1985-2008, vs. HAP- PINESS. It turns out that there is an almost exact correlation! Note the four points on the graph:

1990: Release of Miller’s Crossing

1996-97: Crabs

2001: Ate bad tuna fish sandwich at Times Square Blimpie; felt sick 2008: Barack Obama elected

That was so much fun, I drew another one! This one is called AMERICAN PORK BELLY PRICES vs. WHAT MIDGETS THINK ABOUT AUSTRALIA 1972-2002.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

Joseph Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

Fortunately, America has, at last, a president with some understanding of the nature and severity of the problem, and who has committed himself to a strong stimulus program. This, together with concerted action by governments elsewhere, will mean that the downturn will be less severe than it otherwise would be.

The United States Federal Reserve, which helped create the problems through a combination of excessive liquidity and lax regulation, is trying to make amends – by flooding the economy with liquidity, a move that, at best, has merely prevented matters from being worse. It’s not surprising that those who helped create the problems and didn’t see the disaster coming have not done a masterly job in dealing with it. By now, the dynamics of the downturn are set, and things will get worse before they get better.

From The Root:

The selection of Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander to write and deliver a poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama marks not only the return of poetry to a place of prominence in presidential history (she is only the fourth to read at a presidential swearing-in), but represents a true mind-meld between the president-elect and his chosen bard. Professor Alexander is a virtuosic writer and a shrewd analyst of American letters, a polyglot who moves fluently from essay to sonnet, from free verse to drama—and in her teaching, traces equally diverse themes. As the big day approaches, it’s hard to tell who will serve as muse to whom—Alexander and Obama share ties to Chicago and to the classroom, and a demonstrated commitment to the power of words and of community institutions.

I recently caught up with my former teacher to discuss her work and the now-finished poem she will deliver at Tuesday’s ceremony.

The Root: Congratulations! How were you chosen for the honor? Who called who?

Elizabeth Alexander: I actually don’t know! You’d have to ask the inaugural committee what happened. I just got a phone call saying that they were asking me to write a poem and deliver it. It was a tremendous thrill. Kind of like Sarah Palin, I didn’t even think about saying no.

I think one of the really exciting things about the Obama campaign and his election is that so many more people than in the past have felt called to serve, have felt that they needed to step up their game, do what they could. You know, not much has been asked of us in the last eight years—now is the time. So I thought that this question was a continuation of the same mission we heard expressed on the campaign trail.

More here.

Editorial in The Observer:

The notion that the country's security problems can be resolved by the unilateral use of extreme force is a persistent delusion among Israeli politicians. In this case, the problem was perceived to be Hamas rocket fire into southern Israel; the solution was judged to be a war against Hamas. That analysis did not allow for the vital, humane recognition that, in densely populated Gaza, an all-out war against Hamas is, by necessity, an attack on the civilian population.

Even on its own terms, the campaign has failed. Israeli authorities will insist that they have limited the ability of Hamas to launch rocket attacks. But the ostensible war aim was destroying that capability completely.

Israel will also claim that its campaign has exposed a lack of support for Hamas in many Arab capitals; that Hamas' position as the ruling authority in Gaza has been undermined; and that Hamas has been revealed as little more than a terrorist proxy acting on behalf of and armed by Syria and Iran.

But the reality is that the status of Hamas as the preferred vehicle for Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation has been enhanced by the indiscriminate brutality of the military assault.

More here.

All three items below are from Haaretz. First, Gideon Levy:

The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.

They liquidated Nizar Ghayan? Nobody counts the 20 women and children who lost their lives in the same attack. There was a massacre of dozens of officers during their graduation ceremony from the police academy? Acceptable. Five little sisters? Allowed. Palestinians are dying in hospitals that lack medical equipment? Peanuts. Whatever happened to the not-so-good old days of Salah Shahadeh? When we liquidated him in July 2002, we also killed 15 women and children. At least back then, moral qualms were raised for a moment. Here lie their bodies, row upon row, some of them tiny. Our hearts have turned hard and our eyes have become dull. All of Israel has worn military fatigues, uniforms that are opaque and stained with blood and which enable us to carry out any crime. Even our leading intellectuals fail to speak out on what havoc we have wreaked. Amos Oz urges: “Cease-fire now.” David Grossman writes: “Hold your fire. Stop.” Meir Shalev wants “a punitive operation.” And not one word about our moral image, which has been horribly distorted.

More here. A. B. Yehoshua writes:

Dear Gideon,

You remember that in recent years I called you occasionally to praise you for your articles and your writing about the wrongs done to the Palestinians in the administered territories, whether by the army or by the settlers. Physical wrongs, land expropriations, acts of abuse, perversions of justice and so on. I told you that it is very difficult to read what you write, because it weighs on our conscience, but that the work you are doing and the voice you are sounding are extremely important. I was also concerned about your physical safety, knowing that you risked your life by visiting such hostile places.

I did not ask you why you did not visit Israeli hospitals in order to tell the painful stories of Israeli citizens who were hurt in terrorist attacks. I accepted your position that there are plenty of other journalists doing this and that you had taken on the crucial mission of telling the story of the afflictions of the other side, our enemies today and our neighbors tomorrow. Accordingly, it is from this position of respect that I find it necessary to respond to your recent articles on the war in which we are engaged today, so that you will be able to preserve the moral validity of your distinctive voice for the future. A few years ago, when the Hatuel family – a mother and her four children, of blessed memory – were killed on the way to one of the settlements in Gush Katif, I believed that this terrible death pained you as it did all of us but that like many of us you said in your heart: Why should these Israelis endanger their children by living provocatively, hopelessly, dangerously and immorally in Gush Katif? By what right do 8,000 Jews expropriate a sizable area in the densely overcrowded Gaza Strip in order to build blossoming villages before the eyes of hundreds of thousands of refugees living in such abysmal conditions? You were angry, as I was, at the parents and at those who sent them. And even though I believe that like all of us you felt the pain of the children who were killed, you did not brand the leaders of Hamas “war criminals” as you did the Israeli leaders, and you did not demand the establishment of an international tribunal to try them. When I asked you after the disengagement from Gaza, Gideon, explain to me why they are firing missiles at us, you replied that they want us to open the crossings. I asked you whether you truly believe that if they fire missiles the crossings will be opened, or the opposite. And whether you truly believe that it is right and just to open crossings into Israel for those who declare openly and sincerely that they want to destroy our country. I did not get an answer from you. And even though the crossings were in fact opened many times, and were closed in the wake of the missile attacks, regrettably I still did not see you standing firmly behind a moral position which says: Now, people of Gaza, after you expelled the Israeli occupation from your land, and justly so, you must hold your fire.

More here. Gideon Levy replies:

Dear Bulli,

Thank you for your frank letter and kind words. You wrote it was written from a “position of respect,” and I, too, deeply respect your wonderful literary works. But, unfortunately, I have a lot less respect for your current political position. It is as if the mighty, including you, have succumbed to a great and terrible conflagration that has consumed any remnant of a moral backbone.

You, too, esteemed author, have fallen prey to the wretched wave that has inundated, stupefied, blinded and brainwashed us. You're actually justifying the most brutal war Israel has ever fought and in so doing are complacent in the fraud that the “occupation of Gaza is over” and justifying mass killings by evoking the alibi that Hamas “deliberately mingles between its fighters and the civilian population.” You are judging a helpless people denied a government and army – which includes a fundamentalist movement using improper means to fight for a just cause, namely the end of the occupation – in the same way you judge a regional power, which considers itself humanitarian and democratic but which has shown itself to be a brutal and cruel conqueror. As an Israeli, I cannot admonish their leaders while our hands are covered in blood, nor do I want to judge Israel and the Palestinians the same way you have.

The residents of Gaza have never had ownership of “their own piece of land,” as you have claimed. We left Gaza because of our own interests and needs, and then we imprisoned them. We cut the territory off from the rest of the world and the occupied West Bank, and did not permit them to construct an air or sea port. We control their population registrar and their currency – and having their own military is out of the question – and then you argue that the occupation is over? We have crushed their livelihood, besieged them for two years, and you claim they “have expelled the Israeli occupation”? The occupation of Gaza has simply taken on a new form: a fence instead of settlements. The jailers stand guard on the outside instead of the inside.

More here. [Thanks to Nikolai Nikola.]

From The Economist:

He leaves the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.

America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”.

More here.

///
The Naming of Parts
Henry Reed

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.
///

From The Washington Post:

Barack Obama's historic struggle to become the nation's first black president is over, but the fight over the meaning of his victory has only begun. In What Obama Means — one of what will certainly be many efforts to interpret and define the Obama phenomenon — Jabari Asim argues that Obama's victory is the culmination of decades of black political struggle, social advancement and cultural achievement. Obama promises to continue this cultural transformation with a new style of racial politics: more productive and less antagonistic than that of the “charlatans and camera hogs with whom we are all too familiar” (a group in which the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson figure prominently) but no less committed to social justice. Asim, editor of the NAACP's journal the Crisis and former deputy editor of Book World, insists that Obama is the latest and most inspiring of a long line of “dedicated champions of black advancement.” Because of Obama “it's becoming cool to be thoughtful, temperate and monogamous,” writes Asim, and Americans “may come to associate blackness with brilliance, thoughtfulness, confidence, and radical optimism.”

By contrast, Obama's detractors, left and right, have suggested that the new president inevitably will be limited by the racial politics of the past. Last year the conservative commentator Shelby Steele argued in A Bound Man that Obama was tethered, by his liberal ideology and racial loyalty, to a counterproductive politics of grievance that exaggerates white racism and denies the need for individual responsibility among blacks. By contrast, left-leaning black social commentators such as Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and Jesse Jackson have complained that, to win elections, Obama pandered to white voters, ignoring his responsibility to blacks.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Gravity is a weak force, which makes it extremely difficult to do actual experiments (or perform astronomical observations) that would give us any detailed, up-close-and-personal data about the behavior of quantum gravity. We should be thankful, therefore, that we’ve been able to learn as much as we have about quantum gravity (and we do know some things) just by sitting in our chairs and doing thought experiments, constrained only by the basic principles of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Undoubtedly the most prolific thought-experiment laboratories have been black holes. In particular, Hawking’s discovery that black holes radiate and have entropy has driven an enormous amount of research, and some of it has actually been productive! One of the highlights was certainly the calculation in 1996 by Strominger and Vafa, who used some tricks from string theory to actually count the number of quantum states hidden in a black hole, in a way that would have made Boltzmann proud, and come up with an answer that matched Hawking’s formula precisely.

There are still puzzles, however, as you might guess. Foremost among them is “How does the information get out?” An increasing number of physicists believe that the evaporation of black holes conserves information, but they don’t know precisely how the details of the state which created the black hole get preserved and then encoded in the outgoing Hawking radiation.

More here.

John J. Mearsheimer in the American Conservative:

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”

What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.

More here.

In closing, I direct your attention to a perfect sentence. Yes, they exist. One of the pleasures of my profession is discovering these elusive unicorns in the books sent for my review. I read half a score of books each week; I am a fast reader, and generally underwhelmed by what passes for good writing these days. But once in a while, among the gaudy offerings, I come across one of those luminous sentences that make the soul vibrate. I share with you a recent find:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

More from Harper's here.

Israel’s military attack on the Gaza Strip, home to a million and a half Palestinians, was launched on December 28, 2008, the last day of Hanukkah, the “Festival of Lights.” Hanukkah tells the story of how the ancient Hebrews, led by Judah Maccabee, in the second century BCE rose up against Antiochus IV Epiphanus. During the rededication of the Holy Temple, when the Maccabee revolt had succeeded in liberating it from Antiochus, legend has it that there was only enough oil to light the menorah for one night but that it had burned for eight instead! In launching its attack on Gaza, the Israeli military command knew the resonances this timing would have on the Israeli public: once more, it is the story of resistance against an enemy of the Jewish people. The threat to collective survival is heroically defeated by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the new Judah Maccabee! These potent memories of Jewish survival and resistance, together with the post-Holocaust determination that ‘Never again will the Jewish people be subject to destruction,’ provide the emotional well-springs of collective sentiment into which Israel’s leaders tap whenever it is under attack. Yet the strategic and Realpolitik considerations of the present Gaza military action are clear enough: no state, it is said, can accept that its citizens would be subject to continuous and unpredictable rocket attacks and is obliged to defend its borders and inhabitants! Those who dig a little deeper, however, point out that the Gaza operation is attempting to restore Israel’s seeming military invulnerability, lost in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon War. Furthermore, general elections will be held in Israel and in the Palestinian territories in the coming months and the current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni from the Kadima Party, as well as the current Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, from the Labor Party, are candidates for the position of Prime Minister. None of this though accounts for the ferocity and disproportional brutality of the Israeli action, its violation of international humanitarian law, and possible engagement in war crimes. Why?

more from Reset here.

But it would be a disservice to the blanket-with-sleeves to explain its appeal rationally. Despite comparisons to the all-purpose Thneed in Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax — both are multicolored, amorphous and overhyped — the Snuggie is the opposite: no-purpose. None of the products competing for the blanket-mobility niche close in the back, and all measure far longer than a human body, making it impossible to do anything in them but sit, or recline, and veg out. (I refuse to believe the infomercial’s claims to the contrary; it depicts one Snuggie-clad model standing in the kitchen, but doesn’t show the audience how long it took her to get there from the couch.) And this, of course, is the point: they’re selling leisure and solitude, not fabric. In a high-pace world where very few people feel at liberty to “take time off,” it says something to wrap oneself in a blanket and declare, “I’m not getting off this couch.” And the fact that it looks ridiculous is part of the point: no one else needs to see, anyway.

more from Culture 11 here.