Over at bloggingheads.tv, Loury (a Clinton supporter) and McWhorter (an Obama supporter) have an insightful discussion on Obama, race, and the campaign in the wake of Obama’s speech on race:

Pankaj Mishra is the Guardian’s Comment is Free:

Tibet’s economy has surpassed China’s average growth rate, helped by generous subsidies from Beijing and more than a million tourists a year. The vast rural hinterland shows few signs of this growth, but Lhasa, with its shopping malls, glass-and-steel office buildings, massage parlours and hair saloons, resembles a Chinese provincial city on the make. Beijing hopes that the new rail link to Lhasa, which makes possible the cheap extraction of Tibet’s uranium and copper, will bring about kuayueshi fazhan (“leapfrog development”) – economic, social and cultural.

Tibet has been enlisted into what is the biggest and swiftest modernisation in history: China’s development on the model of consumer capitalism, which has been cheer-led by the Wall Street Journal and other western financial media that found in China the corporate holy grail of low-priced goods and high profits. Tibetans – whose biggest problem, according to Rupert Murdoch, is believing that the Dalai Lama “is the son of God” – have the chance to be on the right side of history; they could discard their superstitions and embrace, like Murdoch, China’s brave new world. So why do they want independence? How is it that, as the Economist put it, “years of rapid economic growth, which China had hoped would dampen separatist demands, have achieved the opposite”?

For one, the Chinese failed to consult Tibetans about the kind of economic growth they wanted. In this sense, at least, Tibetans are not much more politically impotent than the hundreds of millions of hapless Chinese uprooted by China’s Faustian pact with consumer capitalism.

Shadi Hamid in the Washington Post:

While Barack Obama’s speech on race earlier this week was geared primarily toward domestic concerns, as an American of Middle Eastern origin, watching from a café in Jordan, I was struck by the possibilities it offered not only for race relations at home, but for our relationship with Arabs and Muslims abroad.

Obama declared that “the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding.” He was speaking, of course, about the legacy of slavery and segregation. But he might as well have been talking about the burgeoning anger toward America felt by millions of frustrated Muslims around the world. And the conversation Obama tried to initiate — contextualizing radicalism and seeking its source rather than merely denouncing it — is the sort of conversation that could also lay the groundwork for a long-overdue reassessment of our approach to the Middle East.

Thus far, the national discourse on the question of Muslim anti-Americanism, and particularly the violence and terror perpetrated in the name of Islam, has been dominated by condemnation and denunciation. As it must be. Targeting innocents — whether they are Israeli children on their way to school or the nearly 3,000 Americans who showed up to work one day and found it would be their last — can never be excused. And we must unapologetically wage war on those who seek to destroy us.

At the same time, we can’t simply wish future violence and terrorism away by relegating it to the domain of irrational, crazed fanaticism. We cannot say that “they hate us for who we are” and leave it at that.

More here.

In Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone is caught between her religion and her state. After her brother is killed assaulting the city, her uncle Creon forbids her to bury him. But according to the tenets of her faith, if Antigone does not bury her brother, she will have disobeyed the gods and forfeit her own afterlife. Eventually, she kills herself.

Martha C. Nussbaum tells the ancient Greek story in “Liberty of Conscience,” her grand and penetrating discourse on religion and American law, to illustrate how an unbending state can impose a “tragic burden” on a member of a religious minority. This demonstrates two of Nussbaum’s prodigious strengths. As a teacher and scholar of law, philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago, she brings the insights of each discipline to bear on the others. And because she’s attuned to the “springs of conscience” that well up from faith — Nussbaum left the Episcopal Church for Reform Judaism when she married — she can analyze some of the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence on religion with sympathy rather than disdain for the enterprise of accommodation. She’s no atheist, she’s no evangelical, and she’s still worried.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In his 1985 breakout novel, “Less Than Zero,” Bret Easton Ellis, then all of 21 years old, created young, jaded Angelenos who just didn’t care about anything: They recounted cocaine scores and semi-anonymous sex in the same tone with which they lamented their fading suntans. That ennui became Ellis’ literary signature, and as he began to grow up in public, he became known as a photogenic and glamorous figure who liked booze and excess.

More than two decades later and almost four years after returning home to L.A., the city in which he grew up as the offspring of affluent Goldwater Republicans, Ellis himself claims to be in a phase in which he just doesn’t care about anything — a middle-aged wrinkle on the old Ellis ennui. “The only thing I care about,” he requested when setting up a dinner interview, “is valet parking and a full bar.”

more from the LA Times here.

From The Boston Globe:

BEGINNING IN 1997, an important change swept over cotton farms in northern China. By adopting new farming techniques, growers found they could spray far less insecticide over their fields. Within four years they had reduced their annual use of the poisonous chemicals by 156 million pounds – almost as much as is used in the entire state of California each year. Cotton yields in the region climbed, and production costs fell. insecticide-related illnesses among farmers in the region dropped to a quarter of their previous level.

Strikingly, the number of insecticide-related illnesses among farmers in the region dropped to a quarter of their previous level. This story, which has been repeated around the world, is precisely the kind of triumph over chemicals that organic-farming advocates wish for.

But the hero in this story isn’t organic farming. It is genetic engineering.

The most important change embraced by the Chinese farmers was to use a variety of cotton genetically engineered to protect itself against insects. The plants carry a protein called Bt, a favorite insecticide of organic farmers because it kills pests but is nontoxic to mammals, birds, fish, and humans. By 2001, Bt cotton accounted for nearly half the cotton produced in China. For anyone worried about the future of global agriculture, the story is instructive. The world faces an enormous challenge: Its growing population demands more food and other crops, but standard commercial agriculture uses industrial quantities of pesticides and harms the environment in other ways. The organic farming movement has shown that it is possible to dramatically reduce the use of insecticides, and that doing so benefits both farm workers and the environment. But organic farming also has serious limits – there are many pests and diseases that cannot be controlled using organic approaches, and organic crops are generally more expensive to produce and buy. To meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming.

More here.

Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times Book Review:

The first large-scale scientific test of family planning took place in Khanna, India, beginning in the early 1950s. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers asked 8,000 villagers how often they had sex, whether they wanted to conceive and the details of the women’s menstrual cycles. The researchers met the villagers monthly and provided contraceptives, while closely monitoring another group that was given no contraceptives. After five years, the women given contraceptives had a higher birth rate than those who hadn’t received any assistance.

That initiative was an early warning that population policy can be very difficult to get right. In “Fatal Misconception,” Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, carefully assembles a century’s worth of mistakes, arrogance, racism, sexism and incompetence in what the jacket copy calls a “withering critique” of “a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry.”

Efforts to control population have long been ferociously controversial, and the United States under George W. Bush refuses to provide a penny of funding for the United Nations Population Fund because of its supposed (but in fact nonexistent) links to forced abortion in China.

More here.

COLM TOIBIN in The New York Times:

HUMAN SMOKE The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.

By Nicholson Baker.  The main figures in the book are Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; members of the pacifist movement including Gandhi; Hitler and his entourage; and diarists like Victor Klemperer in Dresden and Mihail Sebastian in Bucharest. But sometimes it is the simple stark fact that makes you sit up straight for a moment, like this one from early in the book: “The Royal Air Force dropped more than 150 tons of bombs on India. It was 1925.” This, coming soon after an account of the proposed bombing of civilian targets in Iraq in 1920 (with Churchill writing: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes”), sets a theme for the book, which Baker will skillfully weave into the fabric of events mainly between 1920 and 1942 — that the bombing of villages and cities from the air represents “the end of civilization.”

Churchill emerges here as a most fascinating figure — impetuous, childish, bloodthirsty, fearless, insomniac, bookish, bullying, determined, to name just some of his characteristics. Baker writes: “He wasn’t an alcoholic, someone said later — no alcoholic could drink that much.” The prime minister of Australia noted of Churchill: “In every conversation he ultimately reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war.” After the bombing of British cities Baker quotes him: “This ordeal by fire has, in a certain sense, even exhilarated the manhood and the womanhood of Britain.”

“One of our great aims,” Churchill wrote in July 1941, “is the delivery on German towns of the largest possible quantity of bombs per night.” Soon afterward, he said publicly: “It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homeland and cities something of the torments they have let loose upon their neighbors and upon the world.” Baker quotes large numbers of people who seemed to feel in these years that the entire German population, including women and children, were to blame for the Nazis and should be punished accordingly. For example, the writer Gerald Brenan: “Every German woman and child killed is a contribution to the future safety and happiness of Europe.” Or David Garnett (the author of the novel “Aspects of Love,” on which the musical is based), who wrote in 1941: “By butchering the German population indiscriminately it might be possible to goad them into a desperate rising in which every member of the Nazi Party would have his throat cut.”

More here.

..
——In a recent conversation, when I asked a firend how it was going he said, laughing, “My life is so good now, so wonderful, I’m in terror of things going to hell.”  My wife said to me later, “That’s what I like about him, he gets it.”
Jim C.

In Her Lovemaking She Grieves
Gagan Gill ””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’

In her lovemaking, she grieves
In her grief, she makes love

In her lovemaking, she gives him a name
The one she gives the name is illusion
Maya, whose desire moves through her sleep

She knows, in the end
Whatever name she calls him by
Each name will only be an empty space.

Making love, she thinks
She is safe in her oblivion
In her longing, in her selfishness
She doesn’t remember that
The one she desires
Is just one fistful of bones.
Bones that come out of the crematorium
In just five minutes

Making love, she breathes
In his flesh, his marrow, his soul

Somewhere around here was his soul
Would she find it
In these fistful of bones?

Each time in her fear
She holds him tightly to her
Each time he slips out from her arms

In her lovemaking
In her grief

”

From The Economist:

By the standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN‘s new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

More here.  [Thanks to Felix E. F. Larocca.]

Lisa Zyga in Physorg.com:

In an adapted version of the Harry Potter video game, players lift boulders and throw lightning bolts using only their minds. Just as physical movement changed the interface of gaming with Nintendo’s Wii, the power of the mind may be the next big thing in video games.

And it may come soon. Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel “biofeedback” games developed by its partners.

Several other companies – including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo – are also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

The technology is based on medical technology that has been around for decades. Using a combination of EEGs (which reveal alpha waves that signify calmness), EMGs (which measure muscle movement), and ECGs and GSR (which measure heart rate and sweating), developers hope to create a picture of a player´s mental and physical state. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which monitors changes in blood oxygenation, could also be incorporated since it overcomes some of the interference problems with EEGs.

More here.  [Thanks to David Gassoway.]

Paul Salopek in National Geographic:

After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.

The Sahel itself is a line.

The word means “shore” in Arabic, which implies a continental margin, a grand beginning and a final end. Stretching across northern Africa roughly along the 13th parallel, the Sahel divides—or unites, depending on your philosophical bent—the sands of the Sahara and Africa’s tropical forests. It is a belt of semiarid grassland that separates (or joins) Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, most disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there. And for 34 days in Darfur we joined their ranks.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Meera Nanda in New Humanist (reprinted at Eurozine):

Today’s generation of Indian upper and middle classes are not content with the de-ritualised, slimmed-down, philosophised or secular-humanist version of Hinduism that appealed to the earlier generation of elites. They are instead looking for “jagrit” or awake gods who respond to their prayers and who fulfill their wishes – the kind of gods that sociologists Rodney Starke and Roger Finke, authors of Acts of Faith, describe as “personal, caring, loving, merciful, close, accessible […] all of which can be summed up in a belief that Œthere is someone up there who cares’.” The textual or philosophical aspects of Sanskritic Hinduism have by no means diminished in cultural prestige: they continue to serve as the backdrop of “Vedic sciences” (as Hindu metaphysics is sold these days), and continue to attract a loyal following of spiritual seekers from India and abroad. But what is changing is simply that it is becoming fashionable to be religious and to be seen as being religious. The new elites are shedding their earlier reticence about openly participating in religious rituals in temples and in public ceremonies like kathas and yagnas. If anything, the ritual dimension is becoming more public and more ostentatious.

Not only are rituals getting more elaborate but many village and working-class gods and goddesses are being adopted by the middle classes, business elites and non-resident Indians – a process of Sanskritisation that has been called a “gentrification of gods”. Worship of local gods and goddesses that until recently were associated with the poor, illiterate and lower castes is finding a new home in swank new suburbs with malls and multiplexes. The enormous growth in the popularity of the goddess called Mariamman or Amma in the south and Devi or Mata in the rest of the country is a case in point.

The natural question is why? What is fuelling this middle-class devotion to “lesser” gods, traditionally associated with the unlettered?

Lena Corner in The Independent:

My raison d’être,” says American psychotherapist Jo Ellen Gryzb, “is simply to make people a little less nice.” It’s been her mission ever since she found herself huddled in her bedroom with her husband one Christmas, whispering about how on earth they were going to get rid of their house guests. “I had no idea how to tell them they had overstayed,” she says. “I was a complete walkover.”

Gryzb returned to work at Impact Factory, a personal-development agency, and found herself in conversation with colleague Robin Chandler, who had similarly spent his holiday tiptoeing round friends and family. “I know what our problem is,” declared Gryzb. “We’re suffering from the nice factor.”

The pair set about devising a workshop designed to harden us up and cut back on excessive manners; an etiquette class in reverse, if you like. It has been so successful that they are now bringing out a book entitled The Nice Factor: The Art of Saying No.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

The Arabic world nakbah, denoting “catastrophe” best describes what George W. Bush and his American-Taliban administration has wrought in Iraq — and, as a result, what it has meant for the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s failed attempt to violently reorder the politics of the Middle East; 4 million have been displaced from their homes; more than 4,000 American troops have been killed and some 60,000 maimed in a war that smart estimates suggest will cost the U.S. economy $3 trillion — it currently costs America $12 billion a month to maintain an occupation whose time-frame remains open-ended. The Financial Times reported today that the war has already cost the average American household of four (like mine) $16,000 in taxes.

And this blood-drenched disaster has done absolutely nothing to advance U.S. strategic interests; on the contrary, it has dramatically debilitated U.S. strategic influence by graphically demonstrating not the extent, but the limits of American military power. The “shock and awe” mantra that the U.S. media so dutifully chanted at the war’s commencement sounds like a pretty sick joke now.

More here.

Speaking of Cosma, he goes to town on Satoshi Kanazawa:

…Some of those people, owing to those tastes, pursue careers in academic research; the problem for them is that they are not actually very good at what they are supposed to do, which is come up with novel, insightful, important, precise, and accurate findings.  Suppose that you are such a person, and that you do not want to switch to some other line of work to which you might be better suited.  What to do?

Perhaps the best thing which could happen to you would be to run across a new and controversial theory which speaks to you at a deep level, both intellectually and temperamentally.  If you are what William James called “tender-minded”, like Teilhard de Chardin, then Medawar has already mapped out your trajectory, though nowadays the Templeton Foundation would likely be involved.  If instead you are what James called “tough-minded” — “materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, sceptical” — then edification-through-obfuscation is not an option, but it wouldn’t even occur to you.  Instead, you take your theory and you write papers about it, where you make claims about lots of hot-button topics, especially sex and current political controversies.  The papers seem to carry the signs of rigor, but are actually deeply fallacious — maybe you see this, but are so convinced the conclusions are right you don’t care, or maybe you’re so convinced of the conclusions you can’t see the errors.  (There is some peer-reviewed venue where you can publish almost arbitrarily sloppy papers, so getting into print won’t be a problem.)  Then — and this is the key — you start promoting your papers, and find that more salacious and provocative your spin on them, the bigger the response…

Ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished others, I give you Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, the Fenimore Cooper of sociobiology, a man who has leveraged an inability to do data analysis or understand psychometrics into an official blog at Psychology Today, where he gets to advocate genocidal nuclear war as revenge for 9/11.  He seems to mean it, rather than be fukayaming.

His argument — to the extent that it is an argument and not just a wish-fulfillment fantasy — has to do with his earlier attempt to explain “why most suicide bombers are Muslims”.  Leave to one side whether his attempted explanation is coherent, two things strike one on reading that. 

Via Cosma Shalizi, here’s a tool that “tracks the flow of oil money in US politics. Click on the search tools below to find out which companies are pumping their dirty oil money into politics, who is receiving it, and how it correlates to key climate, energy and war votes.”  My preference ordering over the Democratic presidential candidates seems to nicely be negatively correlated to the amount of money received.

Dean Christopher in Discover Magazine:

4  Although famously monogamous, female Adélie penguins slip away from their mates occasionally to couple with unattached males. They exact a fee (pdf) for such a dalliance—stones to bolster their nests—not unlike certain people.

5  Some talented penguin teasers can get a gift even without putting out. Again, not unlike certain people.

6 Barbary macaques have a distinctive way to get their mates to make a sperm donation: yelling. If the female does not shout, the male almost never climaxes.

7 How do we know this? German primatologist Dana Pfefferle watched a group of macaques, counting the females’ yells and the males’ pelvic thrusts. She says this work is “quite weird, but it’s science.”

8  Here in the US of A, that kind of stuff ends up on YouTube.

Gabriel Lafitte on the revolt in Tibet, in openDemocracy:

The Tibetan revolt of March 2008, like those of 1959 and 1987, will be crushed by the overwhelming might of the Chinese military. No match could be more unequal: maroon-clad nuns and monks versus the machinery of oppression of the global rising power. In recent months, fast-response mobile tactical squads whose sole purpose is to quell the people have been overtly rehearsing on the streets of Tibetan towns for just what they are now doing.

What is the point of revolt if it is almost certainly suicidal?

This uprising has many uniquely Tibetan characteristics. At street level, a favourite item seized from Chinese shops was toilet-rolls – hardly the usual target of looters. Not that Tibetans, over millennia, have felt much need for the paper rolls, or even for the basics of the Chinese cuisine such as soy sauce. What the Tibetans did with the loo paper was to hurl it over power lines, instantly making Lhasa, and other Tibetan towns, Tibetan again. Right across the 25% of China that is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, the unrolled toilet paper looks like wind horses, the white silken khadag [or kata] scarf with which Tibetans greet and bless each other. As all Tibetans know, they carry their message on the wind: victory to the gods!

That is what this revolt is about: making Tibet Tibetan once more.

Against Happiness is not a cultural critique, it’s a love letter to Wilson’s own emotional state. As the book progresses, the potential audience gets smaller and smaller. It opens talking to all Americans, but by the second chapters he has narrowed his focus to “we melancholics,” and later to “melancholic intellectuals.” By the end he’s just curled up with his aloneness, and we somehow stumbled into his interior monologue.

He sees himself as apart from and superior to all others, referring to the American culture with a sinister “they.” “They haunt the gaudy and garish spaces of the world and ignore the dark margins… They adore the Lifetime channel. They are happy campers. They want God to bless the world. They want us to ask them about their children… They join Book-of-the-Month clubs and identify with sympathetic characters.” These happy types are to be despised and avoided. Wilson turns away from America to take long walks in the woods and contemplate dead sparrows. “I must admit then that regardless of my own efforts to take flight through many escapes America offers, my basic instinct is toward melancholia – a state I must nourish. In fostering my essential nature, I’m trying to live according to what I see as my deep calling. Granted, it’s difficult at times to hold hard to this vocation, this labor in the fields of sadness.”

more from The Smart Set here.