Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic:

Dear President Bush,

We have never met, and so I hope you will forgive the personal nature of this letter. I guess I should start by saying I supported your presidential campaign in 2000, as I did your father’s in 1988, and lauded your first efforts to wage war against jihadist terrorism in the wake of 9/11. Some of my praise of your leadership at the time actually makes me blush in retrospect, but your September 20, 2001, address to Congress really was one of the finest in modern times; your immediate grasp of the import of 9/11—a declaration of war—was correct; and your core judgment—that religious fanaticism allied with weapons of mass destruction represents a unique and new threat to the West—was and is dead-on. I remain proud of my support for you in all this. No one should forget the pure evil of September 11; no one should doubt the continued determination of an enemy prepared to slaughter thousands in cold blood in pursuit of heaven on Earth.

Of course, like most advocates of the Iraq War, I grew dismayed at what I saw as the mistakes that followed: the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora; the intelligence fiasco of Saddam’s nonexistent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; the failure to prepare for an insurgency in Iraq; the reckless disbandment of the Iraqi army; the painful slowness in adapting to drastically worsening conditions there in 2004–06; the negligence toward Afghanistan.

These were all serious errors; but they were of a kind often made in the chaos of war. And even your toughest critics concede that, eventually, you adjusted tactics and strategy. You took your time, but you evaded catastrophe in temporarily stabilizing Iraq. I also agree with the guiding principle of the war you proclaimed from the start: that expanding democracy and human rights is indispensable in the long-term fight against jihadism. And I believe, as you do, that a foreign policy that does not understand the universal yearning for individual freedom and dignity is not a recognizably American foreign policy.

Yet it is precisely because of that belief that I lost faith in your war.

More here.

William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

Certainly, the sort of attitudes to “abroad” that characterised the writers of the 1930s, and which had a strange afterlife in the curmudgeonly prose of Theroux and his imitators, now appears dated and racist. Indeed, the globalised world has now become so complex that notions of national character and particularity – the essence of so many 20th-century travelogues – is becoming increasingly untenable, and even distasteful. So has the concept of the western observer coolly assessing eastern cultures with the detachment of a Victorian butterfly collector, dispassionately pinning his captives to the pages of his album. In an age when east to west migrations are so much more common than those from west to east, the “funny foreigners” who were once regarded as such amusing material by travel writers are now writing some of the best travel pieces themselves. Even just to take a few of those with roots in India – Vidia Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Pankaj Mishra – is to list many of the most highly regarded writers currently at work.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Fatefulness about the survival of the species is not new. Religious thinking has end-time built in, and for most of our sentient life on the planet human­kind has been predominantly religious. That has changed in Westernized countries, but only relatively recently, and alongside advances in scientific knowledge. Our new pessimism no longer depends on a deity to wipe out this wicked world. Since the Manhattan Project, we have learned how to do it ourselves.

Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens. Yet fire or flood may belong to an Armageddon whose awful grandeur may not be our fate. Plague — unlovely, heroic, unstoppable, might well get us first. That’s what happens in Margaret Atwood’s new novel, “The Year of the Flood,” her latest excursion into what’s sometimes called her “science fiction,” though she prefers “speculative fiction.” If we have to have a label, that’s a better one, since part of Atwood’s mastery as a writer is to use herself as a creative computer, modeling possible futures projected from the available data — in human terms, where we are now. Her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” imagines a United States taken over by God-fearing fundamentalists sick of democracy and civil rights, especially women’s rights. Atwood is chillingly brilliant in depicting the slick twists a technology of freedom can take, shifting ease of access — in this case to financial records and personal information — into theft and surveillance. Overnight, the bank accounts of every woman are transferred to her nearest male relative.

More here.

Laura Secor in The New Yorker:

In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions. But the spectacle has found a subversive afterlife on the Internet. One image that has gone viral is a split frame showing two photographs of former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Before his arrest, on June 16th, he is a rotund, smiling cleric; in court on August 1st, he is drawn and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of apprehension. The juxtaposition belies the courtroom video, making the point that the only genuine thing about Abtahi’s confession is that it was coerced through torture.

Show trials have been staged before, most notably in Moscow in the nineteen-thirties. Typically, such rituals purge élites and scare the populace. They are the prelude to submission. Iran’s show trials, so far, have failed to accrue this fearsome power.

More here.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Joseph Locke and Robert Stephenson are past giants of engineering whose legacy remains one hundred and fifty years on, says Michael Bailey.

From The Telegraph:

One hundred and fifty years ago today, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the greatest engineers in history, died at the age of just 53. His funeral in Kensal Green cemetery was attended by several hundred people, including Joseph Locke who, with Brunel, had opened up Britain to the railway. He was buried a year later, also in Kensal Green.

There was another mourner, that day, however: Robert Stephenson, a household name who had risen from humble origins in the Northumberland coalfield to the highest echelons of London society. Although of a similar age to Brunel, Stephenson was already very frail. His death, a few weeks later, prompted a national outpouring of grief: his body was committed to Westminster Abbey, with the cortège watched by thousands of people as it made its way through Hyde Park by express permission of Queen Victoria. Stephenson's hometown of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, meanwhile, was plunged into mourning at the loss of its heroic son.

The passing of these three extraordinary men, so close together, robbed the country of an astonishing source of talent, energy and influence. The trio, who had done so much to accelerate the Industrial Revolution, were often portrayed by the press as rivals clambering to pursue their own agendas, but were in fact close colleagues and friends. Moreover, they were much more than engineers: they were consulted by (or sat in) Parliament and boardrooms, and advised foreign and colonial governments on railways, water supply and sanitation, dock and harbour improvements, land reclamation schemes and much more. They were titans of the Victorian age.

More here.

Shane Austen in No, Not You:

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

Several friends and associates have asked me how it feels to have our book on the Israel lobby plugged by Osama bin Laden. While it is usually gratifying to get kudos for your work, that is certainly not the case in this instance, given what bin Laden has done in the past and given what he stands for. I just wish we had captured him long ago, making it impossible for him to issue any statements to the world.

I do have a few additional comments on the matter, however. To start, Bin Laden's announcement that there is a powerful “Israel lobby” in the United States is not exactly a news flash. If he had not cited us, he could just have easily quoted the late Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) who wrote in his memoirs that “I was never put under greater pressure than by the Israeli lobby … it's the most influential crowd in Congress by far.” Or he could have cited former Senator Ernest (“Fritz”) Hollings (D-SC), who said that “you can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.” He might have invoked notorious terrorist sympathizer Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who called AIPAC “the most effective general interest group … across the entire planet,” or even former Senate Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-MO) who told AIPAC's annual conference that “without your constant support … the U.S.-Israeli relationship would not be.” Heck, bin Laden could even have brought up Alan Dershowitz, who once wrote that “my generation of Jews … became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fundraising effort in the history of democracy.” In short, he didn't need our book to tell people there's an Israel lobby with a powerful influence on U.S. Middle East policy.

More here.

Gerald Howard in Slate:

If Jim Carroll's name means anything to you, it is probably as the author of the electrifying memoir of teenaged misadventures and heroin addiction in '60s New York, The Basketball Diaries. It was made into a mediocre film in 1995, redeemed by a searing performance by Leonardo DiCaprio that was nevertheless deficient in one conspicuous respect: Leo did not have game, and his lame attempt to imitate the graceful All-City ballplayer that was Jim turned out to be an embarrassment. The musically inclined will remember Jim's terrific 1980 rock album Catholic Boy, which featured that anthem of early and grisly urban demise, “People Who Died.” Cognoscenti of downtown culture knew Jim as a literary prodigy who was publishing his poems and diaries in the Paris Review in his teens. He was a fully paid-up member of New York's hip aristocracy, Lou Reed's peer, Patti Smith's lover, Allen Ginsberg's acolyte, Robert Smithson's friend, permanently welcome in the Valhalla of Max's Kansas City's back room. And I had the pleasure of publishing most of his work when I was an editor at Penguin in the '80s.

Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is. The line of succession runs from Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker through Emmett Grogan and Al McGuire. In the '30s they would have cast him immediately as a Dead End Kid—he certainly had the unreconstructed accent for the part, an urban rasp that was sweet music to my aboriginal ears. He came up athletically in an era when New York produced the best basketball players in the country—and a lot of them were white.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

The Laffer Curve is a simple idea: a government can’t raise taxes forever and expect to increase revenue along the way. Eventually you’re taking so much in taxes that people don’t have any reason to earn income. The argument is simple (and correct): if you have zero tax rate you get zero tax revenue. If you raise taxes just a bit, nobody will be discouraged from working, and you will collect some amount of revenue; therefore, the curve of revenue versus tax rate starts at zero and initially rises. But if the tax rate is 100%, nobody has any reason to work, and your total revenues will be back at zero. By the wonders of math, there must therefore be a maximum of the curve somewhere in between 0% and 100% tax rate.

An important question is, where are we on the curve? The notion of the Laffer curve has been used to justify all sorts of tax cuts, under the assumption/claim that we are to the right of the maximum, so that cutting taxes will actually increase revenues. Serious economists generally don’t believe this holds true in the U.S. right now, but the lure of the idea is undeniable: lose weight by eating more ice cream!

Via Marginal Revolution, here’s a study by Mathias Trabandt and Harald Uhlig that tries to get it right.

More here.

Paul Broks talks fiction, football and cultural value with the godfather of lad-lit.

From Prospect:

Hornby is a man of many writing parts. Gifted with a prose style both erudite and easy on the inner ear, he is probably still best known for the original and hugely influential memoir, Fever Pitch (1992), which chronicles his lifelong obsession with Arsenal football club. If he didn’t actually spark the early 1990s “middle-class revolution” in English football he was, for good or ill, unquestionably in the vanguard. His five novels have been critically acclaimed bestsellers, with the sixth destined for similar. He is also an astute columnist and essayist, writing for the New Yorker and voguish American publications such as McSweeney’s and its sister magazine the Believer. Then there’s the screenwriting, first for the British adaptation of Fever Pitch (there was a second, Americanised, version with the Boston Red Sox supplanting Arsenal) and now for An Education.

More here.

Irish Poetry
For Michael Hartnett

We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland.
No music stored at the doors of hell.
No god to make it.
No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.

But I remember and evening when the sky
was underworld-dark at four,
when ice had seized every part of the city
and we sat talking—
the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.

And you began to speak of our own gods.
Our heartbroken pantheon.

No attic light for them and no Herodotus.
But thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
of the sharp cliffs
they spent their winters on.

by Eavan Boland

from Coe Review, Volume 35, 2009

From The Telegraph:

The playwright Arthur Murphy first came across Samuel Johnson in his lodgings “all covered with soot like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell”. And this was after the success of his labour of a decade, the great Dictionary. We perhaps assume that Johnson’s poverty was confined to the days after he came down from Lichfield with twopence-halfpenny in his pocket and walked about all night in the company of Richard Savage, with no roof to go to, setting the world to rights.

But in 1761, when he was already 52, Johnson’s annual income amounted to about £84, of which he paid 16 guineas for some dirty rooms. As far as that went, he might have got a poor deal, for James Boswell paid only £22 for his rooms in Downing Street. The rest of Johnson’s income could not clothe him decently or prevent repeated arrests for debt, when he would send urgently to a publisher to lend him money, then doggedly sit down to write periodical essays or prepare an edition of Shakespeare to pay the debt.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Who would have thought Tyrannosaurus rex had such a murderous “mini-me” in its family tree? Not Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. “This was completely unexpected,” he said. And not University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, who along with Brusatte and other colleagues figured out that the tiny tyrannosauroid had virtually all the lethal weapons brandished tens of millions of years later by a behemoth 90 times more massive. “From the teeth to the enlarged olfactory bulbs, the enlarged jaw muscles, the enlarged head, the small forelimbs, the lanky, running, long hindlimbs with thick-pressed foot for hunting prey – we see this all, to our great surprise, in an animal that is basically the body weight of a human,” he told reporters.

The 125 million-year-old fossil dinosaur, unearthed in China and dubbed Raptorex kriegsteini, is “as close to the proverbial missing link on a lineage as we might ever get for tyrannosaurs,” Sereno said. The researchers laid out their conclusions in a paper published online today by the journal Science. A T. rex expert who wasn't involved in the research, the University of Maryland's Thomas Holtz, agreed that the findings resolve some of the mysteries surrounding one of history's most fearsome predators. “It is unexpected, in a sense,” he told me. “It really helps clarify what was previously a missing portion of the tyrant dinosaur family tree.”

More here.

Kai Wright in The Root:

It’s self-evident that a movement that calls the president a lying, socialist, Nazi eugenicist with a fake birth certificate is about something more than deficit spending. People don’t brandish automatic weapons and pray for the president’s death because they want to keep their employer-sponsored health plans. But to name the stalking beast is more than we can bear.

Not, thankfully, for Carter. He knows the tea-baggers aren’t new, that their fear of “big government” is but the latest version of states’ rights, which was itself a pseudonym for white supremacy. And he wants us to recall this history: In the months following the 1954 Brown ruling, a Mississippi college football star and plantation manager named Robert Patterson launched a crusade to protect school children from “being taught the Communist theme of all races and mongrelization.” Patterson was angry, and proud of it. “You say this is not the time for hotheads and flag-waving,” he wrote in a public letter quoted in Gene Roberts’ and Hank Klibanoff’s must-read history of civil rights journalism. “We need those hotheads, just as we always have when our liberty has been threatened.”

More here.

Pakistan's military and government is finally turning the tide against the Taliban. Isn't it time we give them a little credit?

Imtiaz Gul in Foreign Policy:

We in Pakistan constantly hear that our country is a hopeless mess, an ungovernable shamble of a state whose military and intelligence services are more or less on the side of global terrorists and local insurgents. But few observers seem to have noticed that, over the last five months or so, Pakistan has made an astonishing turnaround. In fact, it's time for cautious optimism about my country's fate.

For one thing, the militants are reeling from a series of significant blows. The dramatic capture of Muslim Khan and four other Taliban militants in a Sept. 3 military-intelligence sting operation is just the latest deadly strike against the embattled Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It represents the third major setback for the dreaded outfit since Aug. 5, when a CIA-operated drone missile took out Baitullah Mehsud, TTP's founder and chief.

Only a few days after Mehsud's death, TTP spokesman Maulvi Muhammad Omar was captured in the Mohmand tribal region. The fate of Hakimullah Mehsud, whom the organization's shura purportedly picked as the new chief on Aug. 25, is still uncertain, with virtually no sign of him since the day he was made the ameer. Similarly, another fierce al Qaeda-aligned TTP leader, Maulvi Fazlullah, is handicapped by serious wounds and reportedly under siege — probably counting his days as a free icon of terror. And Shah Dauran, an infamous associate of Fazlullah who used to spread terror through mobile FM radio airwaves, is now dead.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

Today, September 18th, is Samuel Johnson's 300th birthday. The English essayist, poet, novelist, and witty conversationalist whom we know mostly through the anecdotes recorded by his friend and biographer, James Boswell, and his other friends, became famous in his day for his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755.

Dennis Baron in Behind the Dictionary, at the Visual Thesaurus:

It may have been Noah Webster, who was half a century younger, whose name would become synonymous with dictionary, but no lexicographer rivaled Samuel Johnson in turning out elegant, opaque, intricate, and occasionally witty definitions for words both familiar and obscure.

Johnson defined lexicographer as “a harmless drudge” (s.v.) and dictionary-making as “dull work” (s.v. dull, sense 8), but he surely enjoyed cranking out definitions for odd words like dandiprat, “an urchin,” fopdoodle, “a fool,” giglet, “a wanton,” and jobbernowl, “a block head.”

Besides the occasional definitional joke, like Johnson's often-repeated definition of oats, we also find in his dictionary words whose meaning has changed: fireman, “a man of violent passions,” pedant, “a schoolmaster,” and jogger, which Johnson characterizes as movement that is far from aerobic, and he liberally illustrates his definitions with citations from well-known literary and scientific sources…

More here.

Louisa Gilder in the New York Times:

Dirac is the main character of a thousand humorous tales told among physicists for his monosyllabic approach to conversation and his innocent, relentless application of logic to everything. Listening to a Dirac story is like slipping into an alternate universe: Dirac reads “Crime and Punishment” and reports it “nice” but notes that in one place the sun rises two times in a day; Dirac eats his dinner in silence until his companion asks, “Have you been to the theater or cinema this week?” and Dirac replies, “Why do you wish to know?”

His work was as sui generis as his social skills. “The great papers of the other quantum pioneers were more ragged, less perfectly formed than Dirac’s,” explained Freeman Dyson, who took Dirac’s course as a precocious 19-year-old. Dirac’s discoveries “were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought.” (Most notably, Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter in 1928 because his just discovered relativistic electron equation required it.) “It was this purity that made him unique.”

More here.

The two ’68s in the two Europes bespeaks of a paradigmatic division that has not vanished today. It has not vanished because the starting points were different: the meanings and goals differed. Both Europes strived for salvation, but one strived for salvation from consumerism and corporate interests, while the other sought salvation from socialist ideals and communist practice. For the former, the critics of capitalism, socialism was the alternative; for the latter, the critics of obligatory fraternity, there was no freedom in these premises. The intellectual Left of the West did not understand the anti-humanism of the Soviets, nor that of China’s communist party. For these intellectuals and its youth following, it was important to protest against the given social order and violation of rights, but also to take the opportunity to riot in Red Army outfits. It was the time for cultural revolution. The political and cultural fashion was to question capitalism at its roots. Besides, the French tradition of socialist collectivism was inseparable from the thinking of Parisian leftists.

more from Tomas Kavaliauskas at Eurozine here.

The Satanic Ritual Abuse (or SRA) conspiracy fad of the 1980s may have torn apart families, destroyed the lives of innumerable innocent people and set the credibility of clinical psychology back at least 50 years — but for fans of sleazy, poorly researched, exploitative true-crime books, it was a godsend. While cognoscenti hold a special place in their hearts for such early fabrications as Michelle Remembers and The Satan Seller, the pièce de résistance of the genre was Maury Terry’s enthralling 640-page bestseller,The Ultimate Evil, which attributed the Manson, Zodiac and Son of Sam murders to a global satanic underground masterminded by a sinister cult known as the Process Church of the Final Judgment, led by the shadowy and charismatic Robert de Grimston, who had disappeared from public view in the early ’70s. The only problem was that, by the time Terry’s 1987 magnum opus briefly rekindled the flames of the dwindling SRA media frenzy, de Grimston had reverted to his birth name of Robert Moor and was working an office day job on Staten Island, while the Process Church itself — from which he’d long been excommunicated — had morphed into the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, the largest no-kill animal shelter in America. Somewhere between these mundane and sensationalist extremes lay the truth about the Process Church and its role in the cultural upheavals of the ’60s, but reliable accounts were fragmentary and scattered.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.