From The New York Times:

LONDON — The advertisement on the bus was fairly mild, just a passage from the Bible and the address of a Christian Web site. But when Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer, looked on the Web site in June, she was startled to learn that she and her nonbelieving friends were headed straight to hell, to “spend all eternity in torment.” That’s a bit extreme, she thought, as well as hard to prove. “If I wanted to run a bus ad saying ‘Beware — there is a giant lion from London Zoo on the loose!’ or ‘The “bits” in orange juice aren’t orange but plastic — don’t drink them or you’ll die!’ I think I might be asked to show my working and back up my claims,” Ms. Sherine wrote in a commentary on the Web site of The Guardian.

And then she thought, how about putting some atheist messages on the bus, as a corrective to the religious ones? And so were planted the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign, an effort to disseminate a godless message to the greater public. When the organizers announced the effort in October, they said they hoped to raise a modest $8,000 or so. But something seized people’s imagination. Supported by the scientist and author Richard Dawkins, the philosopher A. C. Grayling and the British Humanist Association, among others, the campaign raised nearly $150,000 in four days. Now it has more than $200,000, and last Wednesday it unveiled its advertisements on 800 buses across Britain.

More here.

Sandra Knapp reviews Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon by John Hemming, in the Times Literary Supplement:

Images of ants both open and close this wonderful book. In the early chapters the unforgettable opening scene of Werner Herzog’s historically inaccurate but utterly compelling film Aguirre: Wrath of God is evoked – columns of soldiers and bearers descending ant-like down the Andes towards the Amazon river to attempt the search for the mythical riches of El Dorado. The closing chapter describes the incredible richness of organisms found in the Amazon ecosystem, with ants probably the most species-rich group of all. Both descriptions call up teeming multitudes and suggest wealth; therein lies the story of the Amazon itself, one of the most fascinating forest regions on the planet. The fixation of the first Europeans who entered the Amazon with the mythical land of gold beyond measure – El Dorado – led to the destruction of the indigenous people in a greedy search for the wrong sort of riches. All the while, the true riches of the Amazon were destroyed and plundered without consideration of their value beyond mere economics. John Hemming’s Tree of Rivers is not about the Amazon ecosystem itself – so it is not the place to find out the why and how of Amazonian ecology – but instead it is a powerful chronicle of the effects European and European-derived cultures have had on this most diverse and fascinating of river basins.

Hemming has constructed a brilliantly coherent history of man’s exploration of and influence on the Amazon Basin, home to the largest river on Earth, whose drainage area covers a land area almost the size of the continental United States (minus Alaska) and that is so large that for more than a thousand kilometres inland one cannot see the opposite bank.

More here.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

More info from Wikipedia here.

From Scientific American:

For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places: Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota. Today, close to 70 percent of all antibiotics and related drugs used in the United States are routinely fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Although this practice sustains a growing demand for meat, it also generates public health fears associated with the expanding presence of antibiotics in the food chain.

People have long been exposed to antibiotics in meat and milk. Now, the new research shows that they also may be ingesting them from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms. The Minnesota researchers planted corn, green onion and cabbage in manure-treated soil in 2005 to evaluate the environmental impacts of feeding antibiotics to livestock. Six weeks later, the crops were analyzed and found to absorb chlortetracycline, a drug widely used to treat diseases in livestock. In another study two years later, corn, lettuce and potato were planted in soil treated with liquid hog manure. They, too, accumulated concentrations of an antibiotic, named Sulfamethazine, also commonly used in livestock.

More here.

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions.

Avi Shlaim in The Guardian:

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources.

More here.

Over at Eurozine:

At Harvard University Press:

The hypothesis of this book is easy to state: Thinking what I ought to do is thinking what to do. The concept of ought, I propose, is to be explained on this pattern—not for every sense of the term, but for a crucial sense that figures in a wide array of concepts. These are normative concepts, concepts “fraught with ought”, as Wilfrid Sellars put it: moral concepts, concepts of rationality, concepts of the shameful or the enviable, of meriting credence or meriting aesthetic admiration, and other concepts. Thinking what’s admirable, for instance, is thinking what to admire—this is another instance of the hypothesis. There is no special mystery, then, in normative concepts, even though they behave in ways that have led some philosophers to speak mysteriously of “non-natural qualities”. If we understand concluding what to do, then we understand concluding what a person ought to do.

Does this mean that there are no facts of what I ought to do, no truths and falsehoods?

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Daniel Koffler in Jewcy:

Leon Wieseltier has a meandering, conceptually confused, pointless essay in the upcoming issue of TNR sort of criticizing the latest loathsome hit piece from Bill Kristol, sort of defending it, but mostly subjecting readers to a masturbatory public display that goes on for just about 1000 words and feels like ten times that number. As Wieseltier winds things out having proved nothing, argued for nothing, expressed no worthwhile insight, and informed no one of anything, the masochistic reader who makes it all the way to the end is treated to this:

And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: “A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith.” Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!

“Ponder that early adjective,” Wieseltier writes, referring to Sullivan's description of Kristol as a “non-Christian manipulator of Christianity.” If you're not determined to be a willfully obtuse prick, then also ponder the noun it modifies — “manipulator.” What Sullivan is obviously saying is that Kristol's affectation of taking offense to a slight to Christianity is a transparently cynical imposture on the part of a man who in fact regards sincere Christians as an alien species that happens to be useful in serving his electoral ends.

More here. And my own take on the odious Wieseltier from a couple of years ago is here.

From the GRIT TV website:

Rashid Khalidi Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood on the Israeli invasion of Gaza. What does Israel hope to achieve? Khalidi explores the role of the United States and Europe in the blockade of Gaza, Barack Obama's silence, and what if anything the international community can do to end the war.

We also hear from Sameh Habeeb, a photo-journalist and peace activist on the ground in Gaza. He has been reporting regularly from Gaza since the invasion began. You can read his blog here.

Finally, activists respond to the Israeli invasion. GRITtv speaks to Lubna Hammad a Palestinian lawyer and founding member of Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, Adam Shapiro a documentary filmmaker and American co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, and Courtney Sheetz a filmmaker who participated in two attempted shipments of aid sponsored by the Free Gaza Movement.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

It’s fear of another Holocaust that has driven Israel to bomb the crap out of the Palestinians in Gaza — at least, that’s if you believe what you read on the New York Times op ed page. (Never a good idea, of course, because as I’ve previously noted, when it comes to Israel and related fear-mongering, there simply is no hysteria deemed unworthy of the Times op ed page.)

Morris, a manic fellow at the best of times prone to intellectual mood swings — having laid bare the ethnic cleansing that created modern Israel, Morris then didn’t as much recant as complain that the problem was that Ben Gurion hadn’t finished the job. And since the 2000 debacle at Camp David, of course, he’s been a de facto editorial writer for Ehud Barak, the failed former Prime Minister nicknamed “Mr. Zig-Zag” while in office because of his inconsistency — and who, of course, is the author of the current operation in Gaza.

Barak, never shy about spewing utter rubbish when his audience is American and prone to be taken in by demagoguery, last weekend offered the priceless suggestion to Fox News that “expecting Israel to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda.” Presumably it would not occur to Fox’s anchors to ask why, then, had Barak maintained just such a cease-fire for the past six months? And why had he been seeking its renewal?

More here.

For Fares Akram, The Independent's reporter in Gaza, the Israeli invasion became a personal tragedy when he discovered his father was one of the first casualties of the ground war.

Fares Akram in The Independent:

My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in Gaza and educated in Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge who worked for the Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, he quit and turned to agriculture. Dad's father, Fares, who had been driven out of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon in 1948, had bought the land in the 1960s.

During the second intifada and until the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the farm was taken over by Israeli settlers, but after 2005 we went there every holiday. In Gaza, the only escape is the beach or, if you are lucky enough, the farmland. My father hated what Hamas was doing to Gaza's legal system, introducing Islamist justice, and he completely opposed violence. He would have worked hard for a just settlement with Israel and a better future for Palestinians. When the PA gained control over the West Bank, he moved to Ramallah to help establish the courts there.

My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father.

More here.

To a Sad Daughter
To a Sad Daughter
Michael Ondaate
……………

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you

sleeping in your tracksuit.

Belligerent goalies are your ideal.

Threats of being traded

cuts and wounds

–all this pleases you.

O my god! you say at breakfast

reading the sports page over the Alpen

as another player breaks his ankle

or assaults the coach.
////////////////

When I thought of daughters

I wasn't expecting this

but I like this more.

I like all your faults

even your purple moods

when you retreat from everyone

to sit in bed under a quilt.

And when I say 'like'

I mean of course 'love'

but that embarrasses you.

You who feel superior to black and white movies

(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)

though you were moved

by Creature from the Black Lagoon.
////////////////

One day I'll come swimming

beside your ship or someone will

and if you hear the siren

listen to it. For if you close your ears

only nothing happens. You will never change.

Read more »

From The Guardian:

Kindness was mankind's “greatest delight”, the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many people find these pleasures literally incredible, or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know; that as a species – apparently unlike other species of animal – we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking and that our sympathies are forms of self-protectiveness.

Kindness – not sexuality, not violence, not money – has become our forbidden pleasure. In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else's shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness – like all the greatest human pleasures – are inherently perilous, they are none the less some of the most satisfying we possess.

In 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume, confronted by a school of philosophy that held mankind to be irredeemably selfish, lost patience. Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: “He has forgotten the movements of his heart.” For nearly all of human history – up to and beyond Hume's day, the so-called dawn of modernity – people have perceived themselves as naturally kind. In giving up on kindness – and especially our own acts of kindness – we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Buzz has a whole new meaning now that scientists are giving bees cocaine. To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain. The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.

What’s more, bees exhibit withdrawal symptoms. When a coked-up bee has to stop cold turkey, its score on a standard test of bee performance (learning to associate an odor with sugary syrup) plummets. “What we have in the bee is a wonderfully simple system to see how brains react to a drug of abuse,” said Andrew B. Barron, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia and a co-leader in the bees-on-cocaine studies. “It may be that when we know that, we’ll be able to stop a brain reacting to a drug of abuse, and then we may be able to discover new ways to prevent abuse in humans.”

More here.

Mohammed al Hawajiri. Untitled.

More on this Palestinian artist here.

Joseph Massad on Israel's war on Gaza in Electronic Intifada:

While Hashemite-Zionist relations and Maronite Church-Zionist relations have always been known and documented, there has been less documentation of the services that Israel has provided and continues to provide to Arab regimes over the decades. It is now recognized that Israel's 1967 invasion of Egypt aimed successfully to destroy Gamal Abdul-Nasser, the enemy of all US dictatorial allies among the Arab regimes, whom the US and before it Britain and France had tried to topple since the 1950s but failed. Israel thus rendered a great service to Arab monarchies (and a few republics) from “the ocean to the Gulf,” whose survival was threatened by Nasser and Nasserism. Israel's subsequent intervention in Jordan in 1970 to help the Jordanian army destroy Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas and its final crushing of that organization in its massive invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 were also important services it rendered to these same regimes threatened by the PLO's “revolutionary” potential and its sometimes recalcitrant positions. Israeli intelligence has also provided over the decades crucial information to several Arab regimes enabling them to crush their political opposition and strengthen their dictatorial rule. Prominent examples among recipients of Israeli intelligence largesse include the Moroccan and the Omani dictatorships.

Israel's services to Arab regimes continue apace.