Praveen Swami in Outlook India:

India’s strategy — if it can be described as one — in essence appears to be one of retreat. Ever since the Police opened fire on protestors seeking to march across the Line of Control (LoC) to Muzaffarabad, leading to street battles which led to the loss of at least twenty lives, the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) government has withdrawn from confrontation. Large parts of historic Srinagar are in the de-facto control of Islamist groups, with Police and CRPF personnel holding a handful of fortified pickets at major street corners.

Perhaps the most spectacular demonstration of just how far the state’s retreat has gone became evident on August 18, after the J&K government allowed Islamists to stage a massive pro-Pakistan protest in the heart of Srinagar — ignoring warnings from India’s intelligence services that the decision could lead to a meltdown of state authority. Led by the Tehreek-i-Hurriyat’s (TiH) Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the All Party Hurriyat Conference’s (APHC’s) Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, at the time of writing, tens of thousands of protestors assembled at Tourist Reception Centre in an unprecedented show of strength, even as Police were ordered off the streets to avoid confrontation.

Srinagar district Commissioner K. Afsandyar Khan and Senior Superintendent of Police S.A. Mujitaba were earlier despatched to stage negotiations on the management of the scheduled protests with Geelani — a de-facto acknowledgment that the Islamist leader has emerged as an alternate source of administrative authority. Their request for the protest to be scaled down was rejected by the Islamist leader. Governor N.N. Vohra and his advisors then ordered Director-General of Police Kuldeep Khoda to move his forces out of central Srinagar, to avoid clashes with protestors.

More here.

From Carl Zimmer’s excellent blog, The Loom:

I just found that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, the 1980 TV series on life and the universe, is now on Itunes. You can get it here, at $1.99 an episode.

I’ve downloaded the first two episodes, which I don’t think I’ve seen since they first aired 28 years ago. I remember watching every episode intently as a 14-year old at the end of the Carter administration. The passage of time has revealed some hokiness around the edges.  The music, much of it by Vangelis, sometimes makes me think I’ve walked into a crystal shop. Sagan is fitted in corduroy blazers and what seems to be the precursor of the Members Only jacket. Some of the images still look good–like Sagan’s calendar of the cosmos–but there are also painfully long pans across a cardboard diorama of ancient amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. We are so spoiled today by Jurassic Park.

More here.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine:

As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working.

The fact that the economy grows — that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one — no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems to have ended without family income having risen substantially. Most families are still making less, after accounting for inflation, than they were in 2000. For these workers, roughly the bottom 60 percent of the income ladder, economic growth has become a theoretical concept rather than the wellspring of better medical care, a new car, a nicer house — a better life than their parents had.

More here.

///

Bearhug
Michael Ondaatje

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok.  Finish something I’m doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son’s room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug.  Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal’s name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pajamas
locks me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

///

From Scientific American:

He has a name, but most people just know him as “the Star Wars Kid.” In fact, he is known around the world by tens of millions of people. Unfortunately, his notoriety is for one of the most embarrassing moments in his life. In 2002, as a 15-year-old, the Star Wars Kid videotaped himself waving around a golf-ball retriever while pretending it was a lightsaber. Without the help of the expert choreographers working on the Star Wars movies, he stumbled around awkwardly in the video. The video was found by some of the boy’s tormentors, who uploaded it to an Internet video site. It became an instant hit with a multitude of fans. All across the blogosphere, people started mocking the boy, making fun of him for being pudgy, awkward and nerdy.

Several remixed videos of the Star Wars Kid started popping up, adorned with special effects. People edited the video to make the golf- ball retriever glow like a lightsaber. They added Star Wars music to the video. Others mashed it up with other movies. Dozens of embellished versions were created. The Star Wars Kid appeared in a video game and on the television shows Family Guy and South Park. It is one thing to be teased by classmates in school, but imagine being ridiculed by masses the world over. The teenager dropped out of school and had to seek counseling. What happened to the Star Wars Kid can happen to anyone, and it can happen in an instant. Today collecting personal information has become second nature. More and more people have cell phone cameras, digital audio recorders, Web cameras and other recording technologies that readily capture details about their lives.

For the first time in history nearly anybody can disseminate information around the world. People do not need to be famous enough to be interviewed by the mainstream media. With the Internet, anybody can reach a global audience.

More here.

From The Guardian:

What an egregious conundrum Dirk Bogarde was. If anything, the present chunky volume of letters, which appears to be the final instalment of the massive memorial to him masterminded by John Coldstream, former books editor at the Daily Telegraph and author of the standard biography, only deepens the mystery. Probably the most successful British film actor since the war, Bogarde consciously withdrew himself from the arena at the height of his career, when he had starred not only in many brilliant commercial successes, British and international, but also in a sequence of superb films written by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey, and one of the few films – Victim, about a homosexual blackmailing – which had a manifest effect on British social attitudes. At this zenith, he left the country and took up residence in a land he hardly knew and whose language he didn’t speak, declaring himself disgusted with the film industry, Britain and indeed the world at large, which, he believed, was going to socialist hell in a handcart. He then emerged from this self-imposed rustication from time to time to appear in a number of remarkable films for foreign directors, including the art-house experimentalists Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alain Resnais, creating a series of bold and subversive performances, while constantly giving interviews in which he trashed the art of acting as trivial, requiring no great skill or effort and, as he put it, “no job for a man”.

More here.

Over at Snagfilms, you can watch the entire documentary.

Dmitry Shostakovich, the greatest composer of the 20th century, remains one of its biggest mysteries. The nine chapters of the film are framed by nine days of the last round-trip journey of the composer’s life: a trip on a Soviet ocean liner to the United States. The film is narrated primarily in words of Shostakovich’s letters and diaries, which sharply contrast with the propaganda movies shown on board the ship, as the twentieth century itself weaves myth and reality. Never-before-seen archival fragments of the composer’s life – newsreel footage, photographs, letters, and personal memoirs – provide a unique perspective on issues of the artist versus the state, and truth versus survival. In contrasting official truth with personal truth, the film offers insight into the mystery of how Shostakovich was able to penetrate, through his music, the ironclad curtain and deeply affect Western audiences. Shostakovich’s music, full of dark sarcasm and glory, lyricism and sorrow, laughter and melancholy, plays the leading part throughout the film.

David Gordon in The American Conservative:

Rawls never abandoned the principal tenets of his theory of justice, but in his 1993 work Political Liberalism, he changed course in one respect. He began emphasizing that in modern constitutional democracies like the United States, disagreements over fundamental values and issues such as abortion can threaten the stability of society. Given the degrees of disharmony, what are we to do?

His answer recalls the original position of TJ. Individuals should, once more, put aside their own conceptions of the good. But this time, in deliberating on these divisive issues, people must rely only on “public reason.” This consists of principles that everyone, regardless of his conception of the good, will have cause to accept. By an odd coincidence, if public reason is used properly, we will arrive at exactly the same principles as those set forward in TJ. It is difficult not to wonder whether Rawls’s enterprise is merely an attempt to find arguments in support of the political opinions of professors of his social class.

An example will show how public reason works. If your religion forbids abortion, you cannot appeal to this fact in political discussions, since religious views do not form part of public reason. Later, Rawls modified this rigid view. His final position was that you could mention your private views as long as you also had an argument from public reason to support your stand. Rawls’s introduction to the 2005 paperback edition of Political Liberalism states, “Certainly Catholics may, in line with public reason, continue to argue against the right of abortion. That the Church’s nonpublic reason requires its members to follow its doctrine is perfectly consistent with their following public reason.”

Even with that concession, Rawls’s idea of public reason has little to recommend it. Rawls has simply defined a notion of social stability to suit his theory. He never shows that something bad will happen if a society is not “stable” in his sense. Why cannot a society like our own, with considerable religious and philosophical disagreement, continue to flourish without the crutch of public reason?

“Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” was the unnerving question put by Emily Dickinson in one of the poems she sent to a new correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in the summer of 1862. The answer, fascinatingly explored in a book that pairs the reclusive Belle of Amherst with the man who assisted in the first posthumous publication of her work, is that Colonel Higginson both dared and feared. Meeting Dickinson for the first time in 1870, after eight years of correspondence, the colonel told his invalid wife he had never encountered anyone “who drained my nerve power so much.” Riding home to Newport, a town he loathed, Higginson was nevertheless ready to express gratitude that the newly fashionable resort stood no nearer to Amherst. “I am glad not to live near her,” he confessed.

more from the NY Times here.

Whales have supplied a bewildering array of human needs. As recently as the 1960s, whale oil went into ice cream, soap, brake fluid, linoleum and margarine; whale livers were turned into vitamin A; whale ink was used to dye typewriter ribbons; tennis rackets were strung with whales’ insides and cat food was made from whale meat. In earlier times, during the 19th century, whales provided us with whalebone corsets for pushing ladies’ bosoms into unnatural forms, with lamp oil to light houses, with the pungent perfume of ambergris for anointing monarchs or seducing lovers, and with whale ivory – the teeth – for piano keys. Now, since the international moratorium on whaling of 1986, most of this giant whale economy has collapsed. Soya beans, plastics and various mineral oils have easily taken their place. But we still exploit whales for at least one thing: myth-making.

Ever since Jonah found himself stuck in the belly of one for three days and three nights, whales have been an epic spur to the human imagination.

more from the Sunday Times here.

Le Corbusier Le Grand is doubly well named. First, the book is the size of two breeze blocks and notably heavier. It is, according to Jean-Louis Cohen, not a coffee-table book but the coffee table itself: all you need do is fit legs to it. Ho ho. But he has a point. It is the least wieldy book I have ever been propelled across a room by – it is 0.67m wide when opened, and demands a physical as much as an aesthetic will if it is to be appreciated. This is peculiarly apt, for Le Corbusier’s buildings themselves require the attention of every sense you can think of and then some: they need to be swooned through. They are not comprehensible by intellect alone.

Second, this was a great artist, among the greatest of his century.

more from the New Statesman here.

From The New York Times:

A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Startegy for America in the Middle East By Kenneth M. Pollack

Pollack has long since confessed to having been wrong about Iraq. “A Path Out of the Desert” includes other mea culpas. “There has been far too little asking the people of the region themselves what they thought and what they wanted,” he ruminates at one point, though the book offers slim evidence of his having pursued this advice. While the administration that Pollack served gets some light wrist-­slapping, it is the following eight years of Bush policy that he calls “breathtakingly arrogant, ignorant and reckless.” Many of Pollack’s other judgments are as sound as is this criticism of the Bush administration. Since most of the post-cold-war world has stabilized, democratized and prospered, it is probably correct to suggest, as he does, that America should commit itself to helping the messy Middle East come up to par.

His proposal of a Grand Strategy to achieve this, which is to say a generation-long effort of a scale and intensity similar to America’s engagement with Europe after World War II, is challenging but not irrational, given the world’s growing dependency on Middle Eastern oil. And Pollack is right to say that violence and tyranny are not hard-wired into Islam, and to conclude that the threat of Islamist terror has been overblown. He is also right that internal unrest in Middle Eastern states is quite likely to be a strategic threat, and that this danger will not pass until they manage to produce better schools, more opportunities for youth, wider social justice and more inclusive, accountable government. He is correct, too, in describing the region’s current regimes as singularly awful, and even in admitting that George Bush showed unwonted acuity when he called for draining the swamps of extremism by promoting reform.

More here.

Over the last thirty-four years, Senator Biden has shown prescience and leadership on the most critical issues facing Delaware and our country. From his instrumental role in passing the bipartisan initiative to create a Commission on Civil Rights in 1983, to introducing the 1986 Global Climate Protection Act, to establishing an annual National Mammography Awareness Day, and to authoring the Rail and Security Act of 2007to regulate the transportation of hazardous materials on American railways, Senator Biden consistently works to tackle America’s toughest challenges.

Senator Biden grew up in New Castle County, Delaware. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965, and from the Syracuse University College of Law in 1968. Prior to his election to the Senate, Biden practiced law in Wilmington, Delaware and served on the New Castle County Council from 1970 to 1972. Since 1991, Biden has been an adjunct professor at the Widener University School of Law, where he teaches a seminar on constitutional law. He is a proud graduate of Archmere Academy, class of 1961. Senator Biden lives in Wilmington, Delaware and commutes to Washington, DC when the Senate is in session. He is married to Dr. Jill Biden, the former Jill Jacobs, an educator in Delaware’s schools for over twenty years. She currently is a professor teaching at Delaware Technical Community College. Senator Biden is the father of three children:

More here.

///

Vestibule

Chase Twitchell

……………………..

What etiquette holds us back

from more intimate speech,

especially now, at the end of the world?

Can’t we begin a conversation

here in the vestibule,

then gradually move it inside?

What holds us back

from saying things outright?

We’ve killed the earth.

Yet we speak of other things.

Our words should cauterize

all wounds to the truth.

///

Moderator’s opening statement:

The formal proposition put forward for debate is this:

“This house believes that we can solve our energy problems with existing technologies today, without the need for breakthrough innovations.”

Joseph Romm lays out the argument in favour of the proposition forcefully. He points to various evidence, including the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to conclude that a climate crisis is looming. This, he argues, means the world “must deploy staggering amounts of low-carbon energy technology as rapidly as possible.” This means government policy must not be distracted by the slow, if sexy, process of technology development. He insists that policy must focus on the speedy deployment of the many clean technologies we already have ready or close to commercialisation.

Taken at face value, the Con side does not disagree with the notion that a great deal of low-carbon technology needs to be deployed. Peter Meisen opens his argument by invoking President George Bush’s famous line about the world being “addicted to oil” and acknowledging the climate problem, and goes on to cite various forms of renewable energy that can help. He even appears to agree with the side opposite that the key is “scale and speed.” However, he goes on to cite examples ranging from Iceland’s embrace of geothermal over coal generation to rural villages leapfrogging to micro-wind and solar that make clear he believes in the need for entirely new innovations. A “design science revolution” is required, he insists, but it is possible now because “emergencies help us focus.”

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Can we please stop fussing over every new Olympic record?

A new record means that an athlete using today’s equipment outperformed an athlete using yesterday’s equipment. It’s not a fair fight.

In swimming alone, today’s advantages include:

1. LZR Racer suit. It reduces friction (compared with skin) and is structurally designed to compress and streamline the body for maximum speed. Estimated drag reduction: 5 percent to 10 percent. Estimated average improvement in top swimmers’ best times: 2 percent. Designed by NASA scientists and computers, among others. Cost: $500.

2. Pool depth. This is the deepest pool ever used in the Olympics. Depth disperses turbulence, reducing resistance.

3. Pool width and gutters. Two extra lanes at the margins disperse waves to gutters, reducing ricochet and resistance.

4. Lane dividers. The plastic ones in Beijing deflect turbulence down instead of sideways, reducing resistance.

5. Starting blocks. Nonskid versions have replaced the old wooden ones, boosting dive propulsion.

6. Video. Recordings and analysis identify target variables such as stroke distance and turns.

7. Medical tests. Swimmers are blood-tested after each race to measure lactic-acid buildup.

8. Sports scientists. They run the monitoring and analysis. The U.S. swim team has four.

More here.

Jordan Ellenberg in Slate:

Olympic gymnastics has a new scoring system, and not everyone’s happy with the departure of the famous 10-point scale. “It’s crazy, terrible, the stupidest thing that ever happened to the sport of gymnastics,” wailed excitable supercoach Bela Karolyi in the New York Times. “How could they take away this beautiful, this most perfect thing from us, the one thing that separated our sport from the others?”

What exactly is Karolyi kvetching about? This year, competitors get two scores, each from its own panel of judges. The “A” score measures the difficulty of the routine. A relatively easy move like a one-handed cartwheel on the balance beam adds 0.1 to your A score, while bringing off the astonishing Arabian double front layout rakes in 0.7. (And no, you can’t inflate your score by doing 10 cartwheels in a row; only the 10 most difficult elements are counted, and repeated elements don’t count at all.) Performing two or more elements in close succession tacks on “connection value” of up to 0.2 points per transition. The way to max out your A score, then, is to cram the toughest possible moves into your routine and pack them as tightly together as you can manage.

More here.

George Johnson in the New York Times Book Review:

In his new book, “The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics,” [Leonard] Susskind’s cosmos gets even weirder. Black holes already seemed scary enough, with their ability to swallow everything, including light. For a while, we learn, physicists were faced with the possibility that these cosmic vortexes might also be eaters of order, sucking up and destroying information. Like the Echthroi, the evil demons of entropy in Madeleine L’Engle’s novel “A Wind in the Door,” black holes might be chomping their way through the universe, ploughing sense into nonsense.

The story of how Susskind and a colleague, the Dutch physicist Gerard ’t Hooft, disproved (or at least undermined) the theory begins in 1983 at a San Francisco mansion owned by, of all people, Werner Erhard, the New Age entrepreneur who had made his fortune with a profitable cult called EST. Erhard, we’re told, was also a “physics groupie,” and he presided over salons in which some of the world’s great theorists came to butt minds.

The trouble began when Stephen Hawking made an astonishing prediction about what happens when information — a book, a painting, a musical recording or any pattern of matter or energy — falls into a black hole. Earlier, Hawking had proved that black holes eventually evaporate — at which point, he now claimed, everything inside them disappears from the universe.

That might not sound like such a big deal. Just find another copy of whatever was lost. But that, Susskind realized, was not the point. Among the fundamentals of physics is that information must always be conserved.

More here.

Orville Schell in the New York Review of Books:

On a snowy winter day in 1991, Lu Gang, a slightly built Chinese scholar who had recently received his Ph.D. in plasma physics, walked into a seminar room at the University of Iowa’s Van Allen Hall, raised a snub-nose .38-caliber Taurus pistol, and killed Professor Christoph Goertz, his thesis adviser; Robert A. Smith, a member of his dissertation committee; and Shan Linhua, a fellow Chinese graduate student and his rival.

Next, Lu went to the office of the chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dwight R. Nicholson, who was also on his dissertation committee, and fired three more fatal shots. Then, he walked over to Jessup Hall and demanded to see T. Anne Cleary, associate vice-president for academic affairs. When she emerged from her office, he killed her and then shot and maimed her twenty-three-year-old assistant. Finally, in an empty conference room, Lu raised the pistol to his head and killed himself.

Why a brilliant, hard-working young Chinese physicist, who had come to the US six years earlier filled with pride and hope, had come to such a bitter end is the subject of Dark Matter, a recently released feature film by Chinese-born director Chen Shi-Zheng. It stars Liu Ye as the initially idealistic and ambitious, then humiliated and enraged, protagonist (named Liu Xing in the film); Aidan Quinn as Liu’s arrogant faculty adviser (playing Christoph Goertz); and Meryl Streep as a kind, if naive, patron of the university who befriends Chinese students.

More here.