If you decide to follow Robin’s prescription for sanity (see 2nd post below), here’s some stuff to listen to. Compiled by George Petros:

Over the course of 13 years I collected the tracks comprising this compilation. Most came from LPs and 8-Tracks that I found in thrift stores and at garage sales all across America. Some came from the LP collections of Joseph Lanza, author of Elevator Music; Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore; Athan Maroulis, proprietor of Stardust Records; and the illustrator Jim Blanchard. Some came from various Lounge-style CDs issued in the mid-90s.

I edited tracks in Peak on a G4. There was no “cleaning up” of the sound; I eliminated only the most blatant scratches and pops. Although many tracks came from beat-up vinyl, or from fragile 8-Tracks, or from umpteenth-generation cassettes, or from out-of-print budget CDs, the sound quality is generally good. Unfortunately, many songs didn’t make it in due to their damaged fidelity.

I was searching for druggy and/or exotic Pop songs reinterpreted by contemporaneous Easy Listening artists, from 1966 through 1971. A few compositions herein pre-date that era, but the performers presented them in the pseudo-psychedelic style of the day.

Go here to listen.

Via Lindsay at Majikthise, Chalmers Johnson pans Charlie Wilson’s War:

One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to “primitives” and “savages” (largely so identified because of their resistance to being “liberated” by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the “underdeveloped world.”

Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of “white” Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin’s discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check out Sven Lindquist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes.”)

When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed, or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a “comedy”), or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious. Thus, for example, Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles film-maker with inside information from the Charlie Wilson production team, notes that the film’s happy ending came about because Tom Hanks, a co-producer as well as the leading actor, “just can’t deal with this 9/11 thing.”

David Jay Brown in Scientific American:

Current studies are focusing on psychedelic treatments for cluster headaches, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), severe anxiety in terminal cancer patients, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism and opiate addiction. New drugs must pass three clinical milestones before they can be marketed to the public, called phase I (for safety, usually in 20 to 80 volunteers), phase II (for efficacy, in several hundred subjects) and phase III (more extensive data on safety and efficacy come from testing the drug in up to several thousand people). All the studies discussed in this article have received government approval, and their investigators are either in the process of recruiting human subjects or have begun or completed research on human subjects in the first or second stage of this trial process.

Psychedelic drugs affect all mental functions: perception, emotion, cognition, body awareness and one’s sense of self. Unlike every other class of drugs, psychedelic drug effects depend heavily on the environment and on the expectations of the subject, which is why combining them with psychotherapy is so vital.

“Psychedelics may be therapeutic to the extent that they elicit processes that are known to be useful in a therapeutic context: transference reactions and working through them; enhanced symbolism and imagery; increased suggestibility; increased contact between emotions and ideations; controlled regression; et cetera,” says psychiatrist Rick Strassman of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, who from 1990 to 1995 performed the first human study using psychedelic drugs in about 20 years, investigating the effects of DMT on 60 human subjects.

Benazir Bhutto’s death is just the latest evidence of the disastrous legacy of western involvement in the country’s politics.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Last week the portrait of Benazir Bhutto as the last great hope for democracy in Pakistan had barely received its finishing touches in the world media when it was muddied by accusations that the former prime minister had sponsored jihadists in Afghanistan and India-held Kashmir.

Neither assertion is without a measure of truth. Yet both obscure the major events that have rendered Pakistan unstable, even ungovernable, for at least two generations: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979; the American decision to turn Pakistan into the frontline state for a global anti-Soviet jihad; and, more recently, the Bush administration’s corralling of Pakistan into the so-called war on terror.

Like many Asian countries, Pakistan stumbled from primeval chaos into postcolonial life, with an army as its strongest institution – which grew even more formidable after enlisting on the US side in the cold war. Six decades later, it is possible to see how in a less exacting climate Pakistan could have moved durably to civilian rule, as happened in Taiwan and Indonesia, two other pro-American dictatorships frozen by the cold war.

Such, however, was the scale and intensity of the CIA’s programme to arm the Afghan mujahideen that it couldn’t but retard political processes in Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq, who faced disgrace domestically and internationally after his execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, abruptly became a prestigious ally in Washington and London. Emboldened by American patronage, Zia brutally suppressed all opposition, which included some of the country’s greatest writers and artists.

More here.  [Thanks to Michael Blim.]

One view that I am writing against in this book, ironically, is the belief that Darwin and the theory of evolution have no place in the social sciences, especially in the study of human social and economic behavior. Whereas scientists are up in arms about attempts to teach creationism and Intelligent Design in public school biology classrooms (see my book Why Darwin Matters), and are distraught by the dismal state of science education and the lack of acceptance of Darwin’s theory (less than half of Americans believe that humans evolved)¹¹, most scientists — especially social scientists — have resisted with the emotional intensity of a creationist any attempts to apply evolutionary thinking to psychology, sociology, and economics. The reason for this resistance — understandable at the time — was the equation of evolutionary theory with Social Darwinism and especially the extreme hereditarian views that led to enforced sterilization of the mentally retarded in America, and to the Nazi eugenics program that led to the Holocaust. As a consequence, post-World War Two social scientists steered a wide course around any attempts to employ evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior, and instead focused almost exclusively on socio-cultural explanations.

A second view that I am writing against is the theory of Homo economicus, which holds that “Economic Man” has unbounded rationality, self-interest, and free will, and that we are selfish, self-maximizing, and efficient in our decisions and choices. When evolutionary thinking and modern psychological theories and techniques are applied to the study of human behavior in the marketplace, we find that the theory of Homo economicus — which has been the bedrock of Traditional Economics — is often wrong or woefully lacking in explanatory power.

More here.

Via Andrew Gelman, a tool to see how close the candidates are to you.

This post against bi-partisanship by Jim Johnson, I agree with (via Crooked Timber):

[W]hy should we endorse bi-partisanship? That is a fundamentally anti-democratic response. Here I am persuaded by argument by political theorists who, following Joseph Schumpeter (whose conception of democracy is, despite common caricatures, neither a ‘realist’ nor ‘minimalist’), insist that robust competition is crucial to a healthy democracy. For instance, Ian Shapiro* suggests that competition has two salutary effects: (i) it allows voters to throw out incumbents (known more appropriately as ‘the bastards’) and (ii) it pressures the opposition to solicit as wide a range of constituencies as they are able. Given these effects, Shapiro suggests quite pointedly:

If competition for power is the lifeblood of democracy, then the search for bi-partisan consensus … is really anticompetitive collusion in restraint of democracy. Why is it that people do not challenge legislation that has bi-partisan backing, or other forms of bi-partisan agreement on these grounds? It is far from clear that there are fewer meritorious reasons to break up the Democratic and Republican parties than there are to break up AT&T and Microsoft.”

Now the final sentence does not follow; we need not break up any particular party and, insofar as they are essential mechanisms of political coordination, that might be self-defeating. What is wanted is vigilance against bi-partisanship and the sort of collusion it embodies.

Olivia Judson in the New York Times:

This week, I want to look at a figure in the history of biology: Alfred Russel Wallace. January 8th was his birthday. And 2008 is the 150th anniversary of one of the most important events in the history of biology. In 1858, Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin from the Moluccan Islands, in what is now Indonesia, where he was collecting birds, beetles, butterflies and anything else he could catch. The letter contained a manuscript in which Wallace outlined the idea of evolution by natural selection.

To celebrate this event and what it led to — of which, more in a moment — I decided to visit Wallace’s portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery, a Who was Who in paintings, photographs, statues and busts. I hurried past an anemic young prince in doublet and hose, and shot through the large gallery of Empire where Queen Victoria is presenting a Bible to a kneeling (and anonymous) African, to arrive in the smaller gallery of Victorian science and technology

More here.

From Harvard Gazette:

By activating multiple fluorescent proteins in neurons, neuroscientists at Harvard University are imaging the brain and nervous system as never before, rendering these cells in a riotous spray of colors dubbed a “Brainbow.” The technique is described in the cover story of the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Nature by a team led by Harvard’s Jean Livet, Joshua R. Sanes, and Jeff W. Lichtman.

Brainbow allows researchers to tag neurons with roughly 90 distinct colors, a huge leap over the mere handful of shades possible with current fluorescent labeling. By permitting visual resolution of individual brightly colored neurons, this increase should greatly help scientists in charting the circuitry of the brain and nervous system.

“In the same way that a television monitor mixes red, green, and blue to depict a wide array of colors, the combination of three or more fluorescent proteins in neurons can generate many different hues,” says Lichtman, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Center for Brain Science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “There are few tools neuroscientists can use to tease out the wiring diagram of the nervous system; Brainbow should help us much better map out the brain and nervous system’s complex tangle of neurons.”

More here.

Gail Tsukiyama in Ms. Magazine:

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo

We immediately recognize the alienation of 23-year-old Zhuang Xiao Qiao, known as Z to Westerners who can’t pronounce her name, as she arrives in London for a year to study English. Frightened and alone, her broken English no help when seeking housing from Arab landlords with equally limited language skills, Z finds London a “refuge” camp. Her parents, who own a shoe factory in rural China, believe their daughter will “make better life through Western education.” What she will also receive is an education in love.

Z soon sees that “the loneliness in this country is something very solid, very heavy.” In a city where everything is new and foreign, where the most precious reminders of her old life are gone, she gradually makes a place for herself, a process Guo cleverly describes through Z’s steadily improving English. Word by word, month by month, her insight into this new culture grows until, at the cinema, she meets an older Englishman, a part-time sculptor, and embarks on a relationship that will change the way she sees the world.

What begins as a blossoming of love, sex and freedom gradually finds Z questioning the different ways in which each views their life together. Their relationship unravels when his growing need for solitude and his lack of commitment conflict with the closeness and community for which Z yearns. The collective society she left back in China values family and tradition; this Western concept of individuality and living only in the moment is hard for Z to understand. She is left to reconcile their essential difference: “‘Love,’ this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved.’…Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite….In Chinese, Love…has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.”

More here.

Recently, I have been posting a number of music videos. I can only hope that you are listening to them using either good headphones or some other hifi equipment. It would be a terrible shame if you are hearing the music through the always-tinny and inadequate speakers of your laptop! Anyhow, here we go again:

Over at Reset, an extended debate between Nadian Urbanati, Michael Walzer and Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor on Islam, the Left, and Tariq Ramadan (via Normblog). Urbanati:

The philosophy of dialogue is based on these premises, both of which manicheanism radically rejects. To resume our main topic, on this rejection is based radicalism, both inside the Islamic culture and inside the Western one. The politics of “block thinking” – or the assumption that there are monolithic and hence unchangeable cultures — is risky since it tends to thrust all the members of the culture in question (be it Islamic and Western) into the arms of those radical minorities that do really want their culture to be a unitary block under their leadership. Positions such as those endorsed by Paul Berman (which I would define as one of Manichean Occidentalism) in addition to being reductionist and somehow deceptive is also politically dangerous since that it may unwillingly help the cause of Osama bin Laden’s extremism. Goankar and Taylor write that the best “antidote” to “block thinking” must be found precisely in the concept of Walzer’s “internal criticism”, hence in the invitation to thinking that within every society or group or culture there do however exist principles, forms of expression, words, ideas or symbols that allow people to start criticising or reforming or questioning some given representative interpretations of their own culture.

Walzer:

What should Western leftists be doing with regard to Islam today? We should be strong critics of jihadist radicalism—and since we are, most of us, infidels and secularists, we are bound to be disconnected critics, focused on issues like life and liberty, which have universal resonance. We should befriend Muslim critics of religious zealotry, both inside Muslim countries and in exile, and try to understand the reasons for their critique and the experience out of which it comes. We should be happy to talk to Islamic intellectuals and academics—though we are not bound to “dialogue” with people whose public position is that we should be killed (or who make apologies for the zealots who hold that position). We should be tolerant of Islam in exactly the same way that we are tolerant of Christianity and Judaism—even as we maintain a general critique of, or skepticism about, religious belief. We should be connected critics of Western intellectuals who make excuses for religious zealotry and crusading fervor (Paul Berman provides an excellent model of how to engage in this critique).

Taylor:

I consider the Berman-type position both incredibly imperceptive and extremely dangerous. It ignores a) the incredible diversity of Islamic modes of devotion and spirituality; b) that the present jihadism is only one form of these, and very dubious from the standpoint of Koran and Hadith (that you become a ghazi killing women and chilfdren, or a shaheed by killing yourself in order to kill women and children), c) that this jihadism is a modern amalgam in which the faith is mainly lived out in the register of modern identity politics of the polarized kind, complete with the identification of a radically opposed enemy, and in the language of honour, humiliation, annihilation of the enemy, etc, leaving no place for the God who is always addressed in the Koran as “the compassionate, the merciful” (al raham, al rahmin), d) that people can get recruited in and out of this amalgam depending on the prevailing climate of group conflict, e) that the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric serves to entrench the feeling of an all-englobing conflict, and hence tends to facilitate the recruitment of believing Muslims into the jihadist amalgam. In other words Huntington is helping Bin Laden’s recruitment drive, as is the whole gang of neocon numbskulls running the Us.

Stanley Fish over at his NYT blog, Think Again, asks “Will the Humanities Save Us?” and answers “No.”:

Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us?

The answer in both cases, I think, is no. The premise of secular humanism (or of just old-fashioned humanism) is that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy and history can create in readers the desire to emulate them. Philip Sydney put it as well as anyone ever has when he asks (in “The Defense of Poesy,” 1595), “Who reads Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wishes not it was his fortune to perform such an excellent act?” Thrill to this picture of filial piety in the Aeneid and you will yourself become devoted to your father. Admire the selfless act with which Sidney Carton ends his life in “A Tale of Two Cities” and you will be moved to prefer the happiness of others to your own. Watch with horror what happens to Faust and you will be less likely to sell your soul. Understand Kant’s categorical imperative and you will not impose restrictions on others that you would resist if they were imposed on you.

It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it.

Joseph Kugelmass responds over at The Valve:

It my sincere belief that this argument is worthless. I hope, when I am finished, that it will be ashamed to show its face again. It is hardly original with Fish; rather, it is everywhere, since it makes scholars in the humanities feel humble and forthright, and it makes people hostile towards the humanities rejoice.

To begin with, there is no universal standard of behavior to which Fish can appeal in order to prove his point. Instead, one of the foundational principles of much study in the humanities is the idea of incomparability: we give up trying to decide whether one individual, or one culture, is essentially superior to another.

I’m divided between 2 of the 3 major Democratic candidates. But the Obama candidacy offers at least one unique possibility the others don’t–an end to the blight that has been the GOP’s Southern strategy. Simon Rosenberg in NDN blog:

My final observation this morning is a point we focus on in our recent magazine article, The 50 Year Strategy. This election is the first post-Southern Strategy election since 1964. The Southern Strategy was the strategy used by Conservatives and the GOP to use race and other means to cleave the South from the Democrats. This strategy – welfare queens, Willie Horton, Reagan Democrats, tough on crime, an aggressive redistricting approach in 1990 – of course worked. It flipped the South (a base Democratic region since Thomas Jefferson’s day) to the GOP, giving them majorities in Congress and the Presidency. 20th century math and demography and politics dictated that without the South one could not have a majority in the US. But the arrival of a “new politics” of the 21st century – driven to a great degree by the new demographic realities of America – has changed this calculation, and has thankfully rendered the Southern Strategy and all its tools a relic of the 20th century. As Tom Schaller has noted, today the Democrats control both Houses of Congress without having a majority of southern Congressional seats, something never before achieved by the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Lyndon Johnson.

From NoUtopia:

A Lemon
Pablo Neruda

From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its planetarium
lemons descended to the earth.

Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.

Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid stained glass,
drops
oozed topaz,
altars,
cool architecture.

So, when you hold
the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles,
a fragrant nipple
of the earth’s breast,
a ray of light that was made fruit.

From The Washington Post:

GOD’S CRUCIBLE

Islam and the Making of Europe

By David Levering Lewis

“For a historian,” Lewis writes in his preface, “thinking about the present means thinking about the past in the present.” So it should be for the citizen as well.

God’s Crucible begins with the rise of Islam in the 6th and 7th centuries from the ruins of the conflict between imperial Rome and imperial Persia. This rise, Lewis writes expansively, is nothing short of “the greatest revolution in power, religion, culture, and wealth in history.” In the aftermath, the Fertile Crescent, the vast area of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, was forfeited to the Islamic upstarts in the Arabian peninsula.

Lewis’s treatment of Islam’s explosive beginnings and its expansion across North Africa into Europe is lucid, and his command of detail is encyclopedic. His narrative is enriched by Arabic sources that are often ignored by European scholars. For today’s Arabs and Muslims, these seminal events live intensely in the present: the life of Muhammad, the violent struggle for Mecca and Medina, the first four caliphs, the writing of the Koran and the split of the Shiites and Sunnis. If only for practical reasons, all Americans need to understand these things.

More here.

From Nature:

Old age does more than stealthily steal away our most cherished memories: it also seems to diminish our ability to imagine things. This finding, detailed in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, supports the ‘prospective brain’ hypothesis, the idea that imagining the future and remembering the past rely on the same neural machinery. “One implication of this study is that imagining is quite closely related to, and dependent on, remembering, perhaps more so than we previously realized,” says Dan Schacter of Harvard University.

Over the past year, the prospective brain hypothesis has gained steady support among neuroscientists. An intriguing possibility raised by the hypothesis is that the primary role of human memory may not be to remember the past, but to imagine and prepare for the future.

More here.

Jennifer Kay in the Seattle Times:

First published in 1858, “Gray’s Anatomy” has never been out of print and has become one of the most famous textbooks in the English language. Its detailed anatomical diagrams and descriptions continue to influence artists and medical students today.

Bill Hayes used the tome to spell-check anatomical terms for his previous two books exploring sleep disorders and the nature of human blood. “The Anatomist” is Hayes’ attempt to reveal the man behind the diagrams, Henry Gray.

As Hayes quickly discovers, however, “Gray’s Anatomy” is about all that remains of the gifted London medical student who became one of the leading anatomists of his day before his death in 1861 at age 34. None of Gray’s manuscripts, letters or journals survive.

Hayes’ inquiries could have stopped there, were it not for one significant discovery: Though the book bears his name, Gray didn’t actually draw any of its 400 diagrams. Those were handiwork of Gray’s collaborator, H.V. Carter, whose name was left off some subsequent editions of the book. Luckily for Hayes, Carter did leave behind family letters and journals written in the pinched script of a stressed-out medical student in 19th-century London.

More here.

Robert Levine in Rolling Stone:

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he’s not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. “They make it loud to get [listeners’] attention,” Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. “I think most everything is mastered a little too loud,” Bendeth says. “The industry decided that it’s a volume contest.”

Producers and engineers call this “the loudness war,” and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds.

More here.