///
Federico’s Ghost
Martín Espada

The story is
that whole families of fruitpickers
still crept between the furrows
of the field at dusk,
when for reasons of whisky or whatever
the cropduster plane sprayed anyway,
floating a pesticide drizzle
over the pickers,
who thrashed like dark birds
in a glistening white net,
except for Federico,
a skinny boy who stood apart
in his own green row,
and, knowing the pilot
would not understand in Spanish
that he was the son of a whore,
instead jerked his arm
and thrust an obscene finger.

The pilot understood.
He circled the plane and sprayed again,
watching a fine gauze of poison
drift over the brown bodies
that cowered and scurried on the ground,
and aiming for Federico,
leaving the skin beneath his shirt
wet and blistered,
but still pumping his finger at the sky.

After Federico died,
rumors at the labor camp
told of tomatoes picked and smashed at night,
growers muttering of vandal children
or communists in camp,
first threatening to call immigration,
then promising every Sunday off
if only the smashing of tomatoes would stop.

Still tomatoes were picked and squashed
in the dark,
and the old women in the camp
said it was Federico,
laboring after sundown
to cool the burns on his arms,
flinging tomatoes
at the cropduster
that hummed like a mosquito
lost in his ear,
and kept his soul awake.

translastion: Camillo Pérez-Bustillo & Author
///

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Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

Obama has tapped for the most senior positions in his Justice Department people who have been outspoken critics of the Bush administration's extreme and secretive arrogation of powers; people like Eric Holder, Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron. This, perhaps more than any single action on Obama's part, has signaled how serious he is about capping the last administration's geyser of President-Is-King nonsense.

How then, is it possible that Obama's Justice Department chose to stay the course on one of the most embarrassing legal theories advanced by the Bush administration—the so-called state-secrets privilege? If you're going to cling to any aspect of the “war on terror,” wouldn't it make sense to choose a power that could arguably forestall future terror attacks (like coercive interrogation) rather than the utterly bogus argument that courts are not fit to scrutinize government wrongdoing?

Yet in a San Francisco courtroom Monday, that is precisely what the new Justice Department did. Administration lawyers held to the Bush line of using the state-secrets privilege to urge the 9^th Circuit to block a civil suit filed by five foreign detainees against Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary. This suit was filed by the ACLU in 2007 on behalf of the five detainees and dismissed by a district court last February. The ACLU was hoping to reinstate the suit, which alleges that Jeppesen contracted with the CIA to fly detainees to countries where they were tortured under the CIA's “extraordinary rendition” program. The abuse these men describe in their court papers is appalling. Allegations have recently surfaced in the British papers that one of the detainees, Binyam Mohamed, had his “genitals . . . sliced with a scalpel.”

More here.

Thomas Fuller in the New York Times:

To many Americans, Maya Arulpragasam, known as M.I.A., is the very pregnant rapper who gyrated across the stage at Sunday’s Grammy Awards.

Yet in Sri Lanka, where she spent her childhood years, M.I.A. remains virtually unknown. And some who do know her work say she is an apologist for the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels fighting in the country’s long-running civil war.

M.I.A. — who has been nominated for an Oscar for the song she co-wrote for the hit film “Slumdog Millionaire” — has branded herself through music videos and interviews as the voice of the country’s Tamil minority. In the video for her song “Bird Flu,” for instance, children dance in front of what looks like the rebels’ logo: a roaring tiger.

“Being the only Tamil in the Western media, I have a really great opportunity to sort of bring forward what’s going on in Sri Lanka,” she said in an interview on the PBS program “Tavis Smiley” last month. “There’s a genocide going on.”

More here.

Steven Weinberg won the physics Nobel prize in 1979 along with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam (the only Pakistani Nobel laureate). This is a long, but interesting discussion:

Michael Brooks in New Scientist:

While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It's not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.”

More here.

From Nature:

Memories that we are not aware of may be just as accurate as those we recall, researchers have found. And they might also provoke unique changes in the brain's electrical activity during recall. The researchers have looked at a type of memory called 'implicit' memory. Whereas 'explicit' memory is full of the things we consciously remember, implicit memory contains memories we do not realize we have formed. The phenomenon has been demonstrated in patients with amnesia, who can, with training, learn to solve specific puzzles more quickly despite insisting that they have never seen the puzzle before.

In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, Joel Voss from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Ken Paller of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, report that implicit memory may be at work when we recall images that we have seen before. “What is exciting is they are sort of bringing an experimental lens to the most twilight aspects of our memory,” says neuroscientist John Gabrieli of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

More here.

In fact, most ethical issues, including those of human rights, require a synthetic judgment, one in which we must join normative first principles to the concrete matrices of experience by which we know events and read the existing ethos of our lives – that concrete network of events, traditions, relationships, commitments and specific blends of connectedness and alienation which shape the “values” of daily experience and our senses of obligation. It is not a case of “either or” but one of “both and.” The classic traditions of case-study, as well as the modern strictures of court procedure, exemplify this joining: they require both a finding of law, which involves the critical reflection on juristic first principles behind the law, and a finding of “fact,” which requires reliance on the experience-gained wisdom, often having to argue before a jury of peers. Moreover, they require an anticipatory assessment of the various consequences of various courses of action implied by a judgment about the interaction of principle and fact. Indeed, it is theologically paradigmatic that following the accounts of the Decalogue in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, surely prime example of universalistic abstract principles, the next several chapters are repositories of the casuistic results of the blending of the implications of those principles with the situations that people experienced concretely in their ethos. That joining rendered judgments that are held to contribute to the well-being of the common life and to the development of a morally righteous people. Similarly, much in the prophetic tradition makes the case against the infidelities of the people and/or the people in power by identifying the enduring principles in the covenants of old, the experience of social history in the present, and the prospects for a bleak, or a redeemed, future according to human deserts and divine mercy. And, for Christians specifically, to deny that any absolute universal can be connected to the realities of concrete historical experience in ways that lead to a redeemed future, is in fact a denial of the deepest insight of their faith: that Christ was both fully God and fully human, and that his life both fulfilled the commands of God, was concretely lived in the midst of a specific ethos, and nevertheless pointed to an ultimate future that we could not otherwise obtain.

more from Ovi here.

MARIO LIVIO IS an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math’s ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality? The question may seem irrelevant. As long as math works, why not just go with it? But Livio felt himself pulled into a deep question that reaches to the very foundation of science – and of reality itself. The language of the universe appears to be mathematics: Formulas describe how our planet revolves around the sun, how a boat floats, how light glints off the water. But is mathematics a human tool, or is reality, in some fundamental way, mathematics?

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

The New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett once said that Blossom Dearie’s tiny wisp of a voice “would scarcely reach the second storey of a doll’s house”. Indeed hers was a style which on first hearing sounded detached and impassive. After a while, however, one began to notice the deftness of her phrasing, as well as the wit and intelligence of her interpretation. She accompanied herself at the piano with the lightest of touches, rarely improvising, but employing sophisticated and immaculately voiced harmonies. Marguerite Blossom Dearie was born on April 29 1926 at East Durham, near Albany, New York, where, it is said, the locals are noted for their clarity of diction. Surprisingly, her name, so unusual and so perfectly suited to her fragile, blowaway voice, was also completely genuine. Dearie is an old Scottish name, and her father, a barman of Scottish-Irish extraction, hit upon Blossom after seeing some peach blossom shortly after her birth. She studied classical piano as a child and became interested in jazz while playing in her high-school dance band.

more from Telegraph here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn:

Pakistan's university system is breaking down, perhaps irreparably so. Thanks to the Higher Education Commission’s grand plans for a massive change, a tidal wave of money hit our public universities during the Musharraf years.

Although difficult financial times finally stemmed the flood, this enormous cash infusion served to amplify problems rather than improve teaching and research quality.

Naked greed is now destroying the moral fibre of academia. Professors across the country are clamouring to lift even minimal requirements that could assure quality education. This is happening in two critical ways. First, to benefit from three-fold increases in salaries for tenure-track positions, professors are speedily removing all barriers for their promotions. Second, they want to be able to take on more PhD students, whether these students have the requisite academic capacity or not. Having more students translates into proportionately more money in each professor’s pocket.

Nowhere is this more evident than at Quaid-i-Azam University, said to be Pakistan’s flagship public university. Barely two miles from the presidency and the prime minister’s secretariat, it was once an island of excellence in a shallow sea of mediocrity. Most other universities started lower, and their decay has gone further and faster than at QAU. Some are recognisable as universities in name only.

QAU’s departments of physics and economics were especially well known 35 years ago, which is when I joined the university. The faculty was small and not many PhD degrees were awarded in those days. Money was scarce, but standards were fairly good and approximated those at a reasonable US university. But as time passed, less care was taken in appointing new faculty members. Politics began to dominate over merit and quality slipped. That slow slippage is now turning into rapid collapse.

Last month, at a formal meeting, QAU professors voted to make life easy for themselves. The Academic Council, the key decision-making body of the university, decided that henceforth no applicant for a university teaching position, whether at the associate professor or professor level, could be required to give an open seminar or lecture as a part of the selection process. Open lectures were deemed by the council as illegal, unjust and a ploy for victimising teachers.

This is mind-boggling.

More here.

///
The Crying Hill
Yusef Komunyaaka

Lately, I've stood between one self
& another self, trying to call across
the gone years, & my voice floats
from a tower of Babel, saying,
Yes, I need my arms around you
to anchor myself. Or, maybe I hear Ray
with the volume turned down, singing

…………“If I were a mountain jack
……………………………….I'd call my baby back.”

Or, I am hearing again that old man
facing a silent field of land mines,
circled by barbed wire, calling
his daughter's name over a loudspeaker
on his crying hill near the Golan Heights.
The sunlight glints off his eyeglasses.
She arrives like an apparition unbound
from a stone. Whenever he comes here,
he goes away with pocketsful of dirt.
He's lamenting her mother's ashes
given months ago to the Sea of Galilee
one sunset. What is she saying to him,
her head thrown back, her black hair
flowing around her? She has a bouquet
of red roses. But for a second, an eye
blink, he thought she'd been wounded.
Do the flowers mean a birth or death?
A whisper floats out of the loudspeaker.
He remembers when he was wild-hearted,
climbing these hills with his two friends,
Seth & Horus, both dead now for years.
They were kings, three laughing boys,
daring the small animals to speak.
///

From Wikipedia:

After the disputed election of 1876 and the end of Reconstruction, White Americans in the South resumed political control of the region under a one-party system of Democratic control. The voting rights of blacks were increasingly suppressed, racial segregation imposed, and violence against African Americans mushroomed. This period is often referred to as the “nadir of American race relations,” and while it was most intense in the South to a lesser degree it affected the entire nation. The system of overt, state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression that emerged out of the post-Reconstruction South and spread nation-wide became known as the “Jim Crow” system, and it remained virtually intact into the early 1950s. Systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans took place in Southern states at the turn of the century and lasted until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s. For more than 60 years, they were not able to elect one person in the South to represent their interests. Because they could not vote, they could not sit on juries limited to voters. They had no part in the justice system or law enforcement, although in the 1880s, they had held many local offices, including that of sheriff.

Characteristics:

• Racial segregation. By law, public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate and unequal “white” and “colored” domains.
• Disenfranchisement. When White American Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more complicated. Black voters were forced off the voting rolls, and the number of African-Americans elected to office decreased. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disfranchised most African Americans and, in many cases, poor White Americans.
• Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination.
• Violence. Individual, police, organizational, and mass racial violence against blacks (and Latinos in the Southwest and Asians in California).

More here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part. It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views. Biologists quickly accepted the idea of evolution, but for decades they rejected natural selection, the mechanism Darwin proposed for the evolutionary process. Until the mid-20th century they largely ignored sexual selection, a special aspect of natural selection that Darwin proposed to account for male ornaments like the peacock’s tail.

And biologists are still arguing about group-level selection, the idea that natural selection can operate at the level of groups as well as on individuals. Darwin proposed group selection — or something like it; scholars differ as to what he meant — to account for castes in ant societies and morality in people. How did Darwin come to be so in advance of his time? Why were biologists so slow to understand that Darwin had provided the correct answer on so many central issues? Historians of science have noted several distinctive features of Darwin’s approach to science that, besides genius, help account for his insights. They also point to several nonscientific criteria that stood as mental blocks in the way of biologists’ accepting Darwin’s ideas.

More here.

And here, Neil deGrasse Tyson objects to Richard Dawkins' style, Dawkins gives a quick, 30-second response:

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?

The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be fired.” Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American university. What then?

I answered this one myself: “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.”

My assessment of the way in which some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom has now been at once confirmed and challenged by events at the University of Ottawa, where the administration announced on Feb. 6 that it has “recommended to the Board of Governors the dismissal with cause of Professor Denis Rancourt from his faculty position.” Earlier, Rancourt, a tenured professor of physics, had been suspended from teaching and banned from campus. When he defied the ban he was taken away in handcuffs and charged with trespassing.

More here.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Whereas Ariel Sharon saw the need to humor the Americans by indulging the rituals of Bush’s two-state vision, Netanyahu never bothered. In fact, it was Netanyahu’s rejection of Sharon’s tactical move to evacuate Gaza in order to tighten Israel’s grip on the West Bank that led to the Likud split that created the Kadima Party. Netanyahu isn’t stupid — even though right now there’s a good chance that he’d be able to build a ruling coalition only with blatantly rejectionist parties, he’ll make space for Kadima and Labor, hoping that he can stir the Pollyannaish hopes in Washington that their presence signals a “willingness” to make a peace agreement. Not that Netanyahu has any intention of doing so. Nor did Olmert, or Sharon.

Ariel Sharon campaigned furiously against Oslo, urging the settlers to “grab more hills” and making clear his own intention to stop the process. Sharon’s problem with Camp David was not that Arafat rejected what Barak’s “generous offer” (which even Barak’s chief negotiator, Shlomo Ben-Ami, later said he, too, would have rejected if he’d been Palestinian); it was that the offer had been made at all. That was why Sharon marched up the Temple Mount and onto the sanctuary around the Al-Aqsa mosque with a security detail of some 200 men, in the event that triggered the protests that mushroomed into the Second Intifada. And as soon as the fires were raging, Sharon triumphantly declared, “The Oslo Agreement is finished. It is null and void.”

More here.

Mona Hatoum. Marrow. 1996.

More here, here, and here.

Dr. A. Q. Khan has been set free by the Islamabad High Court in Pakistan after five years of house arrest following a publicly broadcast apology to the nation by Khan for his nuclear proliferation activities. Under international pressure, the government of Pakistan is considering appealing his release. This is a November 2005 article about Khan's activities by William Langewiesche in The Atlantic:

Rawalpindi is a city of two million residents on the northern plains of the Punjab, in Pakistan. It is a teeming place, choked with smoke and overcrowded with people just barely getting by. A large number of them live hand to mouth on the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a year. Much of their drinking water comes from a lake in the peaceful countryside north of town. The lake is surrounded by tree-lined pastures and patches of sparse forest. The navy of Pakistan has a sailing club there, on a promontory with a cinder-block shack, a dock, and one small sloop in the water—a Laser 16 with dirty sails, which sees little use. Though fishermen and picnickers sometimes appear in the afternoons or evenings, the lakefront on both sides of the promontory is pristine and undeveloped. The emptiness is by design: though the land around the lake is privately owned, zoning laws strictly forbid construction there, in order to protect Rawalpindi's citizens from the contamination that would otherwise result. This seems only right. If Pakistan can do nothing else for its people, it can at least prevent the rich from draining their sewage into the water of the poor.

But Pakistan is a country corrupted to its core, and some years ago a large weekend house was built in blatant disregard of the law, about a mile from the navy's sailing club, clearly in sight on the lake's far shore. When ordinary people build illegal houses in Pakistan, the government's response is unambiguous and swift: backed by soldiers or the police, bulldozers come in and knock the structures down. But the builder of this house was none other than Dr. Abdul Quadeer Khan, the metallurgist who after a stint in Europe had returned to Pakistan in the mid-1970s with stolen designs, and over the years had provided the country—single-handedly, it was widely believed—with an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

More here.

In The Know: Are Reality Shows Setting Unrealistic Standards For Skanks?

Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” said Miss Katherine Scott, Flannery O’Connor’s freshman-composition teacher, speaking to a reporter many years later about her most famous student—“warped, but a genius all the same.” The teacher no doubt focused on the warped part when the seventeen-year-old Catholic girl with the spectacles and the searing wit took her writing class at Milledgeville’s Georgia State College for Women in the summer of 1942; and it was the warped part she noticed some ten years later, when she read O’Connor’s first book, Wise Blood, and flung it across the room. “I thought to myself that character who dies in the last chapter could have done the world a great favor by dying in the first chapter instead,” she told the same reporter. This was the sort of understanding and encouragement that surrounded Mary Flannery O’Connor from her earliest years in Savannah to her death at the age of thirty-nine in the Milledgeville area. But we should not be entirely sorry about that. Familial and social disapproval evidently spurred this writer on, enabling her to form a pearl around each painful speck of grit. That O’Connor’s pearls are among the most luminous and valuable we have in all of American literature does not detract in any way from their strangeness and hardness. Indeed, their value lies precisely in that hardness, that strangeness. However many times you read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Good Country People,” you will not be able to figure out the source of their enormous power; in fact, they will become increasingly mysterious to you as the years go by.

more from Bookforum here.