Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Most human vices have enough sense to be very, very tempting. Lust, gluttony, sloth, hurling powerful if unimaginative expletives at a member of the political opposition, buying a pair of Thierry Rabotin snakeskin printed shoes at 25 percent off even though you just bought a pair of cherry-red slingbacks last week — all these things feel awfully good to indulge in, which is why people must be repeatedly abjured not to. One vice, however, dispenses with any hedonic trappings and instead feels so painful you would think it was a virtue, except that there’s no gain in lean muscle mass at the end: envy. Skulking at sixth place on traditional lists of the seven deadly sins, right between wrath and pride, envy is the deep, often hostile resentment you feel toward somebody who has something you want, like wealth, beauty, a promotion or the admiration of peers. It is a vice few can avoid yet nobody craves, for to experience envy is to feel small and inferior, a loser shrink-wrapped in spite.

“Envy is corrosive and ugly, and it can ruin your life,” said Richard H. Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky who has written about envy. “If you’re an envious person, you have a hard time appreciating a lot of the good things that are out there, because you’re too busy worrying about how they reflect on the self.” Now researchers are gleaning insights into the neural and evolutionary underpinnings of envy, and why it can feel like a bodily illness or a physical blow. They’re also tracing the pathway of envy’s equally petty foil, the sensation of schadenfreude — taking pleasure when those whom you envied are themselves brought down low.

More here.

From CBS News:

Of all the challenges facing President Obama, none will be more difficult to solve than the basket case that is Pakistan. The Muslim nation – whose support is critical to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan – is not only broke and embroiled in another crisis with its arch enemy India, it is now at war with Muslim extremists trying to destroy the government of President Asif Ali Zardari. As correspondent Steve Kroft reports, the growing insurgency run by the Taliban and al Qaeda is threatening the stability of a key U.S. ally that is believed to have as many as a hundred nuclear weapons.

For all of its 62 years, the government of Pakistan and its military have been obsessed with one thing: India, the enemy next door to the east with whom it has fought three wars. And every day for 50 of those years its soldiers at one of the border crossings have stared down their Indian counterparts, as their flags are raised and lowered.

But the biggest threat facing Pakistan today comes from within, from its lawless tribal territories on the western frontier, where the Taliban and al Qaeda were allowed to regroup and carry out attacks against U.S. troops across the border in Afghanistan, and now against the Pakistani government. During the past year, Islamic extremists have launched more than 600 terrorist attacks inside the country, killing more than 2,000 people. One suicide bombing last September, at the Marriott Hotel in the capital of Islamabad, killed 60 people just minutes away from the presidential offices, now occupied by a very unlikely leader, Asif Ali Zardari. Asked how important it is to stop extremism, President Zardari told Kroft, “It’s important enough. I lost my wife to it. My children's mother, the most populist leader of Pakistan. It's important to stop them and make sure that it doesn't happen again and they don't take over our way of life. That's what they want to do.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to AVM S.J.Raza).

Muriatic Acid Poured to get Coloreds Out of the Pool. June 1964.

Civil Rights Movement photograph.

More here, here and here.

From factmonster.com:

The Little Rock Nine, as they later came to be called, were the first black teenagers to attend all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. These remarkable young African-American students challenged segregation in the deep South and won.

Although Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in schools, many racist school systems defied the law by intimidating and threatening black students—Central High School was a notorious example. But the Little Rock Nine were determined to attend the school and receive the same education offered to white students, no matter what. Things grew ugly and frightening right away. On the first day of school, the governor of Arkansas ordered the state's National Guard to block the black students from entering the school. Imagine what it must have been like to be a student confronted by armed soldiers! President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to protect the students.

More here.

Christopher Flavelle in Slate:

President Barack Obama's administration is not yet a month old, and editorialists have already accused the new president of losing his innocence after he was forced to abandon his lofty talk of bipartisanship over the economic stimulus plan. But a touch of partisan politics at home is nothing compared with the ethical predicament now looming in Central Asia, where Obama may soon need to choose either funding a vicious dictator in Uzbekistan or hindering the mission in Afghanistan. Getting into bed with Uzbekistan could be Obama's first ugly but necessary foreign-policy compromise.

On Feb. 3, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the president of the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, announced that he would close a U.S. air base that the United States opened in October 2001 to supply the campaign in neighboring Afghanistan. Two days after the Kyrgyz announcement, the AP reported that Washington is looking to reopen its air base in neighboring Uzbekistan, which had been shuttered in 2005, to take up the slack.

More here.

Over at Security Council Report, as Japan takes over the Presidency of the Council:

Key Recent Developments

The situation in Darfur remains dire, with more than 2.5 million people living in internally displaced person (IDP) camps dependent on humanitarian assistance. Attacks against aid workers and their property reached unprecedented levels in 2008. These attacks were mainly attributed to rebel movements, but many incidents also occurred in areas under government control.

UNAMID has now lost 22 personnel, including a peacekeeper that died on 29 December. Violence and ongoing clashes continues to limit UNAMID and humanitarian access to affected populations.

Despite the unilateral declaration of a ceasefire on 12 November by the Government of Sudan, bombing attacks against rebels continue. In his briefing to the Council on 19 December, Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Alain Le Roy, said south and north Darfur had been bombed by the government in late November. After weeks of relative calm the Sudanese army bombed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) positions in the Muhajeriya area of south Darfur on 13 January. Ground fighting between JEM forces and the government-backed faction of the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement led by Minni Minnawi (SLA/M) was also reported in the area, which hosts a civilian population of 30,000. On 18 January, JEM reportedly took full control of Muhajeriya, SLA/M’s former stronghold. Further government bombing was reported on 24 January. UNAMID reported 3,000 newly displaced as a result of the fighting. Clashes were also reported between the government and rebels on the outskirts of El Fasher in north Darfur on 26 January. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Edmond Mulet briefed the Council on the two situations in closed consultations on 28 January. The Council condemned the increased military activities and called on all parties to cease hostilities. In addition to clashes between the government and rebels, inter-ethnic fighting in other parts of south Darfur has resulted in hundreds of deaths since early December and the displacement of thousands of civilians.

From the website of Human Rights Watch:

It is with enormous sadness that Human Rights Watch announces the death of our beloved colleague Dr. Alison Des Forges, who was killed in the crash of Flight 3407 from Newark to Buffalo on February 12, 2009. Des Forges, senior adviser to Human Rights Watch's Africa division for almost two decades, dedicated her life to working on Rwanda and was the world's leading expert on the 1994 Rwanda genocide and its aftermath.

“Alison's loss is a devastating blow not only to Human Rights Watch but also to the people of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist – principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people. She was among the first to highlight the ethnic tensions that led to the genocide, and when it happened and the world stood by and watched, Alison did everything humanly possible to save people. Then she wrote the definitive account. There was no one who knew more and did more to document the genocide and to help bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Des Forges, born in Schenectady, New York, in 1942, began working on Rwanda as a student and dedicated her life and work to understanding the country, to exposing the serial abuses suffered by its people and helping to bring about change. She was best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, “Leave None to Tell the Story,” and won a MacArthur Award (the “Genius Grant”) in 1999.

More here. [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]

Vladimir Isachenkov of the Associated Press:

The crash of two satellites has generated an estimated tens of thousands of pieces of space junk that could circle Earth and threaten other satellites for the next 10,000 years, space experts said Friday.

One expert called the collision “a catastrophic event” that he hoped would force President Barack Obama's administration to address the long-ignored issue of debris in space.

Russian Mission Control chief Vladimir Solovyov said Tuesday's smashup of a derelict Russian military satellite and a working U.S. Iridium commercial satellite occurred in the busiest part of near-Earth space — some 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth.

“800 kilometers is a very popular orbit which is used by Earth-tracking and communications satellites,” Solovyov told reporters Friday. “The clouds of debris pose a serious danger to them.”

Solovyov said debris from the collision could stay in orbit for up to 10,000 years and even tiny fragments threaten spacecraft because both travel at such a high orbiting speed.

More here.

Martin Lersch asks over at the wonderful blog Khymos:

Ewen Callaway in New Scientist. (Note, Monte Carlo simulations are hardly new. I think Fermi used them in the 1930s or 1940s.):

Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

In Der Spiegel, an interview with Frederick Taylor on the military logic of bombing Dresden:

For Saundra
Nikki Giovanni

i wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping

then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked – do you ever write
tree poems – i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed that the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green – no trees grow
in manhattan

then, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was elected

so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply

perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all

From lensculture:

photography and text by
George Georgiou

Turkey is a strategically important nation, poised geographically and symbolically between Europe and Asia. But the tensions at the heart of Turkey are becoming increasingly severe. A struggle is taking place between modernity, tradition, secularism, Islamism, democracy and repression — often in unlikely and contradictory combinations. Usually these tensions and our gaze are focused almost exclusively on Istanbul, the Kurdish issue, or religion, ignoring the far deeper complexities of a large country searching for a modern identity.

While living in Turkey for four-and-a-half years, I was surprised at how quickly change was taking place: landscapes, towns, and cities reshaped, an extensive road network under construction, town centers “beautified,” and large apartment blocks springing up at a rapid rate around every town and city. Almost always, the architecture and infrastructure follow the same blueprint. Cities are becoming carbon copies of each other.

More here.

Brad Gooch opens “Flannery,” his biography of Flannery O’Connor, with a lost moment: an account of how when O’Connor was 5, the Pathe newsreel company sent a cameraman to her home in Savannah, Ga., to film a chicken she had trained to walk backward. Such an image highlights O’Connor’s lifelong fascination with birds, but most telling is that even at this age, she was elusive, standing just outside our grasp. “O’Connor’s screen debut,” Gooch writes, “exists in all its fragility in a Pathe film archive. . . . For all of four seconds, O’Connor, a self-possessed little girl, is glimpsed in glaring afternoon light, a wisp of curls peeking from beneath her cap, calmly coping with three chickens fluttering in her face.” Here we have a stunning metaphor for not only her writing but also her existence: brief, glancing, almost impossible to pin down.

more from the LA Times here.

Carl also discusses Darwin and Darwin-mania in Time:

It's only fitting to recognize the accomplishments of a great biologist. But there's a risk to all this Darwinmania: some people may come away with a fundamental misunderstanding about the science of evolution. Once Darwin mailed his manuscript of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life to his publisher, the science of evolution did not grind to a halt. That would be a bit like saying medicine peaked when Louis Pasteur demonstrated that germs cause diseases.

Today biologists are exploring evolution at a level of detail far beyond what Darwin could, and they're discovering that evolution sometimes works in ways the celebrated naturalist never imagined. “The biological problems we're dealing with are much more complex,” says Massimo Pigliucci, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “That said, it's a lot of fun. I'm not complaining.”

In addition to being Valentine's day, today is the 20th anniversary of Khomeini's fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses (one of Rushdie's best and most beautiful novels).

Rumor has it that before publication, Rushdie was speaking of his novel, still in-progress, to a few people at a dinner at Edward Said's. When he got to the part about the story of Mahound, Eqbal Ahmad reportedly blurted out something like, “Are you mad? He'll kill you!” referring to Khomeini. Years later, when someone at the dinner brought up this near-prophetic remark to Rushdie, he allegedly replied, “Eqbal was wrong. I'm still alive.”

Lawrence Pollard in the BBC:

It must be both the most talked about and the least read book of recent times. Since it came out in 1988 The Satanic Verses has seemed more a principle to be argued over than a book to discuss.

From the very first call for it to be banned – made by Indian MP Syed Shahabuddin – its critics have proudly announced they didn't have to read it to know it was wrong.

And anecdotally, as I have been sitting re-reading the book, many colleagues have come up and admitted they had either bought it but never opened it or started and given up. So what is it like?

The Satanic Verses is three stories, told in three styles, threaded together in one novel.

In the first story, two contemporary Indians fall out of an exploding aeroplane and survive. One seems to become an angel floating around London, the other grows horns and cloven hoofs.

In another story a poor Indian girl of great beauty, surrounded by butterflies, leads a pilgrimage of Muslim villagers into the Arabian Sea, where they drown.

And in the third, most controversial strand, a prophet founds a religion in the desert. Although this story makes up only 70 of the 550 pages of the novel, it is the part which provoked the furious reaction we now call the Satanic Verses controversy.

From The New York Times:

LORDS OF FINANCE The Bankers Who Broke the World

By Liaquat Ahamed

“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.” So wrote the great economic iconoclast John Maynard Keynes in an essay titled “The Great Slump of 1930,” published in December of that year. Thirteen months had passed since the crash of 1929; the world was living, in Keynes’s words, in “the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.” I shuddered when I read this quotation in “Lords of Finance,” a magisterial work by Liaquat Ahamed, a veteran hedge fund manager and Brookings Institution trustee. A grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power, the book describes a world that long ago receded from memory: the West after World War I, a time of economic fragility, of bubbles followed by busts and of a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression.

The “delicate machine” Keynes referred to was of course the global economy. By 1930, when he wrote his essay, the West was in bad shape. A combination of divisive postwar politics, a refusal to abandon economic orthodoxy and a series of policy errors by the world’s four most important central banks — the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the German Reichsbank and the Banque de France — had led to the near collapse of capitalist economies in the West. “Industrial production had fallen 30 percent in the United States, 25 percent in Germany and 20 percent in Britain,” Ahamed writes. “Over 5 million men were looking for work in the United States, another 4.5 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain.”

And yet — and this is why I shuddered — it was also a moment not unlike the one we’re living through now.

More here.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member's autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.

Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn't originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean.

Realists have long argued that bipolar systems are the most stable. So if any of you lovers out there are thinking of adding more major actors to the system, please reconsider. As most of us eventually learn, trying to juggle romantic relationships in a multi-polar setting usually leads to crises, and sometimes to open warfare. It's certainly not good for alliance stability.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

John Allen Paulos in his excellent Who's Counting column at ABC News:

A quite different illustration of our short-sightedness comes courtesy of Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Imp in the Bottle.” The story tells of a genie in a bottle able and willing to satisfy your every romantic whim and financial desire. You're offered the opportunity to buy this bottle and its amazing denizen at a price of your choice. There is a serious limitation, however.

When you've finished with the bottle, you have to sell it to someone else at a price strictly less than what you paid for it. If you don't sell it to someone for a lower price, you will lose everything and will suffer excruciating and unrelenting torment. What would you pay for such a bottle?

Certainly you wouldn't pay 1 cent because then you wouldn't be able to sell it for a lower price. You wouldn't pay 2 cents for it either since no one would buy it from you for 1 cent since everyone knows that it must be sold for a price less than the price at which it is bought. The same reasoning shows that you wouldn't pay 3 cents for it since the person to whom you would have to sell it for 2 cents would object to buying it at that price since he wouldn't be able to sell it for 1 cent. Likewise for prices of 4 cents, 5 cents, 6 cents, and so on.

We can use mathematical induction to formalize this argument, which proves conclusively that you wouldn't buy the genie in the bottle for any amount of money. Yet you would almost certainly buy it for 1,000 dollars. I know I would. At what point does the argument against buying the bottle cease to be compelling?

More here.