Essay written and published in America by King Abdullah I of Jordan six months before the Israeli/Arab war of 1948:

Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews. We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more.

Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.

Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that?

Because of our perfectly natural dislike of being overwhelmed in our own homeland, we are called blind nationalists and heartless anti-Semites. This charge would be ludicrous were it not so dangerous.

No people on earth have been less “anti-Semitic” than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Arthur Rimbaud, one of the most revolutionary poets of 19th-century France, grew up in a small town, Charleville, in the north-east corner of the country near the Belgian border. As a child he'd been obedient to his strict mother (his father was a soldier who'd vanished after rapidly siring four children) and he'd been the best student in the region, excelling in the classics and French. But Rimbaud's real interest was poetry. He haunted the local bookstore and read all the latest poetry coming out of Paris. So attracted was Rimbaud to the capital that he ran away from home, arrived in Paris on 30 August 1870 – and was instantly arrested for not paying the correct fare on his train ticket. He was put in prison, and only his favourite teacher from back home was able to get him out. Despite this ignominious beginning, Rimbaud – who was 16 going on 17 – made several other attempts to reach the capital, even though the Prussians had invaded and Paris had declared itself a commune between 26 March and 30 May 1871.

The penniless and friendless Rimbaud could never survive for long away from home during these chaotic times. But in the early autumn in 1871 he fired off a letter to Paul Verlaine, his favourite poet. Without waiting for a response, Rimbaud sent off a few more poems to Verlaine two days later. Then came the fateful response from Paris: “Come, dear great soul, we call you, we await you.” Verlaine enclosed the train fare.

More here.

From Science:

If your cup of joe starts talking to you, chances are you're a caffeine addict. People who drink a lot of coffee or other caffeinated beverages are more likely to report hearing voices or having out-of-body experiences than those who go easy on the strong stuff, according to a new study. The link between caffeine and hallucinations makes sense physiologically. When stressed, the body amps up its production of the hormone cortisol, which can cause people to see and hear things that aren't there. Cortisol is also regulated by caffeine, which increases hard-core coffee and tea drinkers' responses to stress. Intrigued by the connection, psychologists Simon Jones and Charles Fernyhough of Durham University in the U.K. designed an online survey that was e-mailed to university students. The 200-plus participants, most of them women, answered questions such as “How often do you drink … brewed coffee?” and ranked the relevance of statements such as “I have had a sensation … that I left my body temporarily.”

On average, the students drank the caffeine equivalent of about three cups of strong tea or instant coffee per day, Jones and Fernyhough report today in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. More importantly, the data show that individuals who consumed more caffeine were more likely to hallucinate.

More here.

///
First Laws
Teresa Cader

Every body continues in its state of rest, but tonight I have
to tell you we have divided yours into two principalities:
domain of black box on the linen closet's top shelf—
…………………
out of reach of over-zealous cleaners, myself included,
who might discard you without thinking, or
grandchildren who might dump you into tea cups—

and domain of nature, fistfuls of ash tucked into humous
and peatmoss in pits dug in the yard, fertilizing the roots
of two kousa dogwoods and the stewartia,
…………………
matter which cannot (remember, cannot) be destroyed. Each at rest
continuing, or of uniform motion in a straight line, straight through
the summer when drought turned the leaves to cylinders,
…………………
when Dad began screaming that the trees were dying, why
couldn't I do anything. I hung a thimble of ash from a dead branch,
soaked the roots. A body in linear movement unless it is compelled to change
…………………
that state by forces impressed upon it. And what could have pressed
you, Mother, if love did not? I just want one more cigarette before I die,
you begged from under your oxygen mask, Take me to the back porch.
…………………
To every action force there is an equal and opposite reaction force,
and so breath is its own resistence, its own memorial. My opposite,
my appositive. My pleas to quit. The pen presses back against my hand.
…………………

Our own Kris Kotarski in the Calgary Herald:

On natural gas, the Russians get it and the Europeans don't. Gazprom (read: Putin) has found an area where Russia has leverage on the European Union (especially in the winter), and by signing individual contracts with states such as Germany and Italy, the Russians have driven a wedge into European politics and European unity. The reason?Russia wants its traditional buffer areas to stay friendly, and not to turn toward NATO and the EU.

Europe is too rich and too necessary to Russian industry to be treated like this, yet despite the obvious solution visible to all, on matters of energy security, the European Union is still not mature enough to present a common front.Until it does, Russia is wise to stoke up antagonism between those who have and who have-not, pitting Poland against Germany, or Romania and Slovakia against Ukraine. Just as it looks as if the Europeans will finally get smart and get together on a common negotiating position, the summer comes, the prices drop, and Gazprom smiles a wide and reassuring smile. The sense of urgency dissipates, Gazprom offers favourable deals to some but not others, and slowly but surely, the buffer states are isolated, one by one, as the sun shines down on the old continent.

More here.

At a dinner party that will forever be green in the memory of those who attended it, somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied—and I find I must stress this—in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments. This is the way, when discussing Rushdie and his work, that I like to start. He is sublimely funny, and his humor is based on a relationship with language that is more like a musical than a literary one. (I here admit to my own worst plagiarism: invited to write the introduction to Vanity Fair’s “Black & White Issue” some years ago, I took advantage of Salman’s presence in my house to ask him to riff on the two keywords for a bit. He free-associated about everything from photogravure to the Taj Mahal, without a prompt, for about 30 minutes, and my piece was essentially done.) And this is a man whose first language was Urdu!

more from Vanity Fair here.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century literary masterpiece The Decameron may hold the recipe to defy these troubled times. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 stories told over 10 days is set against the backdrop of a crisis that puts today’s credit problems in perspective: the black death. He begins it with a harrowing piece of reportage on the plague in his city, Florence, describing how the disease spread across Europe in 1347-8, killing rich and poor alike in such terrible numbers that bodies littered the streets, the sick were shunned by their families, and funeral rites were abandoned. He paints a picture of a society on the brink of absolute disappearance – would everyone in Florence die? Everyone in Europe? Yet this shocking opening is the prelude to a book of life, laughter – and sex.

more from The Guardian here.

This idea of nature’s harmonious balance has become not just the bedrock of environmental thought, but a driving force in policy and culture. It is the sentiment behind Henry David Thoreau’s dictum, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” It lies behind last summer’s animated blockbuster “Wall-E,” in which a single surviving plant helps revive an earth smothered beneath the detritus of human overconsumption. It underlies environmental laws that try to minimize the damaging influence of humans on land and the atmosphere. In this line of thought, the workings of the natural world, honed over billions of years of evolution, have reached a dynamic equilibrium far more elegant – and ultimately durable – than the clumsy attempts humankind makes to alter or improve them. According to the paleontologist Peter Ward, however, nothing could be further from the truth. In his view, the earth’s history makes clear that, left to run its course, life isn’t naturally nourishing – it’s poisonous. Rather than a supple system of checks and balances, he argues, the natural world is a doomsday device careening from one cataclysm to another.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Fatima Bhutto in The Daily Beast:

Pakistan’s new government, the only in the world headed by two former convicts—who have their fingers on the button of a nuclear-armed state, no less—is nothing if not a keen purveyor of irony. There’s currently an effort underway by the Pakistani diplomatic mission in Texas to raise funds for a chair of Pakistan Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. The chair, a dream of the Pakistani diplomatic community, is to be named after Charlie Wilson. For those who missed the movie, it’s worth noting that of all the people to name a chair of Pakistani Studies after, Charlie Wilson is possibly the stupidest.

“Good-Time Charlie,” as Wilson was affectionately known by Afghan warlords and Texan socialites alike, has the dubious reputation of being the godfather of what would later be known as the Taliban in Afghanistan. (He was also buddies with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.) In the 1980s, Wilson led Congress into supporting the CIA covert operation aimed at funneling money and arms into Afghanistan through Pakistan’s military and secret services, the ISI. That money, it should be said, did not go to Afghan refugees fleeing the Soviet’s communist invasion. No, it went to the mujahideen in the form of $17 million worth of anti-aircraft weapons, armaments, and other war toys. By the end of 1983, Wilson had managed to siphon $300 million of unused Pentagon cash to the Afghan mujahideen. Before they were the Taliban bad boys of the region, the mujahideen were one of Wilson’s pet projects. And now, Pakistan has decided to honor him by naming a chair of studies after him.

More here. (Thanks to Professor C.M.Naim)

From The Root:

It was all there today — the introspection, the cluelessness, the smirkiness, the defiance, the sense of humor, the surprising humility. When George Bush said goodbye for the last time to the White House press corps this morning, he refelcted on everything from the 'Mission Accomplished' to Katrina to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was an unsusally emotional performance by the president who seemed ready to take his bows. “This is the ultimate exit interview,'' he said. Bush admitted that he felt lucky to be witness to the dawning of the Obama Presidency. “I consider myself fortunate to have a front-row seat for what is going to be a historic moment,'' said Bush, who will hand off the presidency to Obama on Jan. 20. “President-elect Obama's election does speak volumes about how far this country has come.” True that, but the big question is how farther we will have to go to get out of the hole he's left us in?

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

A groundbreaking medical treatment that could dramatically enhance the body's ability to repair itself has been developed by a team of British researchers.

The therapy, which makes the body release a flood of stem cells into the bloodstream, is designed to heal serious tissue damage caused by heart attacks and even repair broken bones. It is expected to enter animal trials later this year and if successful will mark a major step towards the ultimate goal of using patients' own stem cells to regenerate damaged and diseased organs.

When the body is injured, bone marrow releases stem cells that home in on the damaged area. When they arrive, they start to grow into new tissues, such as heart cells, blood vessels, bone and cartilage.

Scientists already know how to make bone marrow release a type of stem cell that can only make fresh blood cells. The technique is used to collect cells from bone marrow donors to treat people with the blood cancer leukaemia.

Now a team led by Sara Rankin at Imperial College London has discovered a way to stimulate bone marrow to release two other types of stem cell, which between them can repair bone, blood vessels and cartilage. Giving mice a drug called mozobil and a naturally occuring growth factor called VEGF boosted stem cell counts in their bloodstream more than 100-fold.

More here.

Norman H. Olsen and Matthew N. Olsen in the Christian Science Monitor:

A million and a half Palestinians are learning the hard way that democracy isn't so good if you vote the wrong way. In 2006, they elected Hamas when the US and Israel wanted them to support the more-moderate Fatah. As a result, having long ago lost their homes and property, Gazans have endured three years of embargo, crippling shortages of food and basic necessities, and total economic collapse.

We spoke again Saturday with three of our longtime Gazan contacts. They and their families, all Fatah supporters, were in their eleventh day without electricity, running water, or heat. They are cowering in cold basements trying to protect their children from the storm of explosions that is filling Shifa hospital with amputees and the dead. Our friends in Israel are likewise living in fear.

The 850-plus dead Gazans, more than a dozen dead Israelis, and some 3,000 injured have since the end of the cease-fire become part of what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once called the birth pains of a new Middle East.

It didn't have to be this way. We could have talked instead of fought.

Hamas never called for the elections that put them in power. That was the brainstorm of Secretary Rice and her staff, who had apparently decided they could steer Palestinians into supporting the more-compliant Mahmoud Abbas (the current president of the Palestinian authority) and his Fatah Party through a marketing campaign that was to counter Hamas's growing popularity – all while ignoring continued Israeli settlement construction, land confiscation, and cantonization of the West Bank.

More here.

Esther Tyson. Tracking, 2004.

Painting, series.

More here and here.

I recently purchased a kit called “Le Nez Du Vin” that professes to teach me how to identify various aromas in a glass of wine. The kit, which is imported from France, comes in a dictionary-sized case covered in red fabric so that it resembles an old book. Inside are a dozen tiny glass vials, each of which is redolent of a specific, essential red-wine scent when uncapped. These vials are cosseted in crushed velvet (or likely velour). It was purchased at Williams-Sonoma. It cost $130. Go ahead: Roll your eyes; chuckle derisively; whatever you have to do. I’ll wait until you finish. OK, finished? The “Le Nez Du Vin” kit contains two slim manuals both written by Jean Lenoir, a French wine critic who over 25 years ago developed this method of wine education by way of aromas. In the first book, Lenoir lays out his methodology, explaining the primary, secondary, and tertiary aromas in wine. He talks about fruity notes like black currant and cherry, floral notes like rose and violet, vegetal notes like green pepper and truffle, roasted notes like smoke and dark chocolate, and animal notes like leather and musk. He explains how the sense of smell works and how it relates to the “art” of wine tasting.

more from Table Matters here.

From The Washington Post:

The list of cultural universals — those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern America — is surprisingly short. There's language, religion and a bunch of traits involving social structures, such as the reliance on leaders.

Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher, would like to add one more item to this list: art. As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct, people the world over are weirdly driven to create beautiful things. These aesthetic objects are utterly useless — W.H. Auden pointed out that they make “nothing happen” — and yet we enshrine them in climate-controlled museums and pay millions of dollars for a silkscreen of a soup can. What began with a few horses on the walls of a French cave has blossomed into a human obsession.

The premise of Dutton's work is that this instinct for art isn't an accident. Instead, he argues that our desire for beauty is firmly grounded in evolution, a side effect of the struggle to survive and reproduce. In this sense, a cubist painting by Picasso is no more mysterious than the allure of a Playboy centerfold: Both are works of culture that attempt to sate a biological drive.

More here.

///
Watching the History Channel in a
Topeka Hotel
Ben Lerner

Well, who really believes, when the lamps are nailed down
and this Haitian is shaking a song from one sad word.
History is boring. It's so easy to warm to. And the Shiva ends
and the people smooth their laps and stand to leave.
And the faint rain, that starts when the headlights disappear
is too predictable, making grief just another chore
that we take up to keep from getting fat and poor.
Of course, this man makes wonderful music,
his leathery French, prone both to poetry and riot,
is its own revolt. And below his left breast his skin erupts
in authenticating pinks. His scars still wet, he goes on singing.
But everywhere this channel's answered with another nakedness,
somehow starkest when it's scrambled, that shows us as fluid, dividing
packages, almost less animal, containing only what the other puts in.
Everything's a dirty war. And in this music more redeemed—
because the silly moans and disco riffs leave little room for cause,
for the one-sided story beauty tells us in our separate rooms.
///

David E. Sanger in the New York Times Magazine:

To get to the headquarters of the Strategic Plans Division, the branch of the Pakistani government charged with keeping the country’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons away from insurgents trying to overrun the country, you must drive down a rutted, debris-strewn road at the edge of the Islamabad airport, dodging stray dogs and piles of uncollected garbage. Just past a small traffic circle, a tan stone gateway is manned by a lone, bored-looking guard loosely holding a rusting rifle. The gateway marks the entry to Chaklala Garrison, an old British cantonment from the days when officers of the Raj escaped the heat of Delhi for the cooler hills on the approaches to Afghanistan. Pass under the archway, and the poverty and clamor of modern Pakistan disappear.

Chaklala is a comfortable enclave for the country’s military and intelligence services. Inside the gates, officers in the army and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, known as the ISI, live in trim houses with well-tended lawns. Business is conducted in long, low office buildings, with a bevy of well-pressed adjutants buzzing around. Deep inside the garrison lies the small compound for Strategic Plans, where Khalid Kidwai keeps the country’s nuclear keys. Now 58, Kidwai is a compact man who hides his arch sense of humor beneath a veil of caution, as if he were previewing each sentence to decide if it revealed too much. In the chaos of Pakistan, where the military, the intelligence services and an unstable collection of civilian leaders uneasily share power, he oversees a security structure intended to protect Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal from outsiders — Islamic militants, Qaeda scientists, Indian saboteurs and those American commando teams that Pakistanis imagine, with good reason, are waiting just over the horizon in Afghanistan, ready to seize their nuclear treasure if a national meltdown seems imminent.

More here.

Aaron David Miller in Newsweek:

If Obama is serious about peacemaking he'll have to adjust that balance in two ways. First, whatever the transgressions of the Palestinians (and there are many, including terror, violence and incitement), he'll also have to deal with Israel's behavior on the ground. The Gaza crisis is a case in point. Israel has every reason to defend itself against Hamas. But does it make sense for America to support its policy of punishing Hamas by making life unbearable for 1.5 million Gazans by denying aid and economic development? The answer is no.

Then there's the settlements issue. In 25 years of working on this issue for six secretaries of state, I can't recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity—including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions—does to the peacemaking process. There is a need to impose some accountability. And this can only come from the president. But Obama should make it clear that America will not lend its auspices to a peacemaking process in which the actions of either side willfully undermine the chances of an agreement America is trying to broker. No process at all would be better than a dishonest one that hurts America's credibility.

Second, Obama will have to maintain his independence and tactical flexibility to play the mediator's role. This means not road testing everything with Israel first before previewing it to the other side, a practice we followed scrupulously during the Clinton and Bush 43 years.

More here. [Photo shows Obama with Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak.]

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

On his PBS Journal Show last night, Bill Moyers delivered a poignant essay on Israel/Gaza (video below). The whole segment is worth watching — it begins with coverage of a mostly ignored anti-war march this week in Washington (while media hordes, down the street, fixated on the Roland Burris circus) — but Moyers' essay begins at roughly the 2:20 mark.

The most striking aspect is that sober, fact-based, even-handed commentary like this about Israel automatically subjects one to widespread, profoundly ugly accusations of being “anti-Israel” and even “anti-Semitic,” to the point where not a single U.S. Senator and no House member other than a handful dare utter anything other than unquestioning support for Israeli actions, such that most members of the U.S. Congress are, literally, far more willing to question and oppose American military actions than Israel's military actions (the establishment discussion rules are virtually identical to those that prevailed in the pre-Iraq-war days, though even more rigidly enforced: one can question the efficacy of the Israeli attack from the perspective of Israeli interests, but may not question its morality, legality or justifiability).

More here, including many other links.