Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

More info from Wikipedia here.

From Scientific American:

For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places: Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota. Today, close to 70 percent of all antibiotics and related drugs used in the United States are routinely fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Although this practice sustains a growing demand for meat, it also generates public health fears associated with the expanding presence of antibiotics in the food chain.

People have long been exposed to antibiotics in meat and milk. Now, the new research shows that they also may be ingesting them from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms. The Minnesota researchers planted corn, green onion and cabbage in manure-treated soil in 2005 to evaluate the environmental impacts of feeding antibiotics to livestock. Six weeks later, the crops were analyzed and found to absorb chlortetracycline, a drug widely used to treat diseases in livestock. In another study two years later, corn, lettuce and potato were planted in soil treated with liquid hog manure. They, too, accumulated concentrations of an antibiotic, named Sulfamethazine, also commonly used in livestock.

More here.

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions.

Avi Shlaim in The Guardian:

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources.

More here.

Over at Eurozine:

At Harvard University Press:

The hypothesis of this book is easy to state: Thinking what I ought to do is thinking what to do. The concept of ought, I propose, is to be explained on this pattern—not for every sense of the term, but for a crucial sense that figures in a wide array of concepts. These are normative concepts, concepts “fraught with ought”, as Wilfrid Sellars put it: moral concepts, concepts of rationality, concepts of the shameful or the enviable, of meriting credence or meriting aesthetic admiration, and other concepts. Thinking what’s admirable, for instance, is thinking what to admire—this is another instance of the hypothesis. There is no special mystery, then, in normative concepts, even though they behave in ways that have led some philosophers to speak mysteriously of “non-natural qualities”. If we understand concluding what to do, then we understand concluding what a person ought to do.

Does this mean that there are no facts of what I ought to do, no truths and falsehoods?

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Daniel Koffler in Jewcy:

Leon Wieseltier has a meandering, conceptually confused, pointless essay in the upcoming issue of TNR sort of criticizing the latest loathsome hit piece from Bill Kristol, sort of defending it, but mostly subjecting readers to a masturbatory public display that goes on for just about 1000 words and feels like ten times that number. As Wieseltier winds things out having proved nothing, argued for nothing, expressed no worthwhile insight, and informed no one of anything, the masochistic reader who makes it all the way to the end is treated to this:

And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: “A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith.” Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!

“Ponder that early adjective,” Wieseltier writes, referring to Sullivan's description of Kristol as a “non-Christian manipulator of Christianity.” If you're not determined to be a willfully obtuse prick, then also ponder the noun it modifies — “manipulator.” What Sullivan is obviously saying is that Kristol's affectation of taking offense to a slight to Christianity is a transparently cynical imposture on the part of a man who in fact regards sincere Christians as an alien species that happens to be useful in serving his electoral ends.

More here. And my own take on the odious Wieseltier from a couple of years ago is here.

From the GRIT TV website:

Rashid Khalidi Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood on the Israeli invasion of Gaza. What does Israel hope to achieve? Khalidi explores the role of the United States and Europe in the blockade of Gaza, Barack Obama's silence, and what if anything the international community can do to end the war.

We also hear from Sameh Habeeb, a photo-journalist and peace activist on the ground in Gaza. He has been reporting regularly from Gaza since the invasion began. You can read his blog here.

Finally, activists respond to the Israeli invasion. GRITtv speaks to Lubna Hammad a Palestinian lawyer and founding member of Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, Adam Shapiro a documentary filmmaker and American co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, and Courtney Sheetz a filmmaker who participated in two attempted shipments of aid sponsored by the Free Gaza Movement.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

It’s fear of another Holocaust that has driven Israel to bomb the crap out of the Palestinians in Gaza — at least, that’s if you believe what you read on the New York Times op ed page. (Never a good idea, of course, because as I’ve previously noted, when it comes to Israel and related fear-mongering, there simply is no hysteria deemed unworthy of the Times op ed page.)

Morris, a manic fellow at the best of times prone to intellectual mood swings — having laid bare the ethnic cleansing that created modern Israel, Morris then didn’t as much recant as complain that the problem was that Ben Gurion hadn’t finished the job. And since the 2000 debacle at Camp David, of course, he’s been a de facto editorial writer for Ehud Barak, the failed former Prime Minister nicknamed “Mr. Zig-Zag” while in office because of his inconsistency — and who, of course, is the author of the current operation in Gaza.

Barak, never shy about spewing utter rubbish when his audience is American and prone to be taken in by demagoguery, last weekend offered the priceless suggestion to Fox News that “expecting Israel to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda.” Presumably it would not occur to Fox’s anchors to ask why, then, had Barak maintained just such a cease-fire for the past six months? And why had he been seeking its renewal?

More here.

For Fares Akram, The Independent's reporter in Gaza, the Israeli invasion became a personal tragedy when he discovered his father was one of the first casualties of the ground war.

Fares Akram in The Independent:

My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in Gaza and educated in Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge who worked for the Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, he quit and turned to agriculture. Dad's father, Fares, who had been driven out of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon in 1948, had bought the land in the 1960s.

During the second intifada and until the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the farm was taken over by Israeli settlers, but after 2005 we went there every holiday. In Gaza, the only escape is the beach or, if you are lucky enough, the farmland. My father hated what Hamas was doing to Gaza's legal system, introducing Islamist justice, and he completely opposed violence. He would have worked hard for a just settlement with Israel and a better future for Palestinians. When the PA gained control over the West Bank, he moved to Ramallah to help establish the courts there.

My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father.

More here.

To a Sad Daughter
To a Sad Daughter
Michael Ondaate
……………

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you

sleeping in your tracksuit.

Belligerent goalies are your ideal.

Threats of being traded

cuts and wounds

–all this pleases you.

O my god! you say at breakfast

reading the sports page over the Alpen

as another player breaks his ankle

or assaults the coach.
////////////////

When I thought of daughters

I wasn't expecting this

but I like this more.

I like all your faults

even your purple moods

when you retreat from everyone

to sit in bed under a quilt.

And when I say 'like'

I mean of course 'love'

but that embarrasses you.

You who feel superior to black and white movies

(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)

though you were moved

by Creature from the Black Lagoon.
////////////////

One day I'll come swimming

beside your ship or someone will

and if you hear the siren

listen to it. For if you close your ears

only nothing happens. You will never change.

Read more »

From The Guardian:

Kindness was mankind's “greatest delight”, the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many people find these pleasures literally incredible, or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know; that as a species – apparently unlike other species of animal – we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking and that our sympathies are forms of self-protectiveness.

Kindness – not sexuality, not violence, not money – has become our forbidden pleasure. In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else's shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness – like all the greatest human pleasures – are inherently perilous, they are none the less some of the most satisfying we possess.

In 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume, confronted by a school of philosophy that held mankind to be irredeemably selfish, lost patience. Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: “He has forgotten the movements of his heart.” For nearly all of human history – up to and beyond Hume's day, the so-called dawn of modernity – people have perceived themselves as naturally kind. In giving up on kindness – and especially our own acts of kindness – we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Buzz has a whole new meaning now that scientists are giving bees cocaine. To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain. The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.

What’s more, bees exhibit withdrawal symptoms. When a coked-up bee has to stop cold turkey, its score on a standard test of bee performance (learning to associate an odor with sugary syrup) plummets. “What we have in the bee is a wonderfully simple system to see how brains react to a drug of abuse,” said Andrew B. Barron, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia and a co-leader in the bees-on-cocaine studies. “It may be that when we know that, we’ll be able to stop a brain reacting to a drug of abuse, and then we may be able to discover new ways to prevent abuse in humans.”

More here.

Mohammed al Hawajiri. Untitled.

More on this Palestinian artist here.

Joseph Massad on Israel's war on Gaza in Electronic Intifada:

While Hashemite-Zionist relations and Maronite Church-Zionist relations have always been known and documented, there has been less documentation of the services that Israel has provided and continues to provide to Arab regimes over the decades. It is now recognized that Israel's 1967 invasion of Egypt aimed successfully to destroy Gamal Abdul-Nasser, the enemy of all US dictatorial allies among the Arab regimes, whom the US and before it Britain and France had tried to topple since the 1950s but failed. Israel thus rendered a great service to Arab monarchies (and a few republics) from “the ocean to the Gulf,” whose survival was threatened by Nasser and Nasserism. Israel's subsequent intervention in Jordan in 1970 to help the Jordanian army destroy Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas and its final crushing of that organization in its massive invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 were also important services it rendered to these same regimes threatened by the PLO's “revolutionary” potential and its sometimes recalcitrant positions. Israeli intelligence has also provided over the decades crucial information to several Arab regimes enabling them to crush their political opposition and strengthen their dictatorial rule. Prominent examples among recipients of Israeli intelligence largesse include the Moroccan and the Omani dictatorships.

Israel's services to Arab regimes continue apace.

In the Wall St. Journal (via delong):

Mr. Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth Graduate School of Business, chose that moment to deliver a paper called “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?”

His answer: Yes.

He says he had planned to write about how financial developments during Mr. Greenspan's 18-year tenure made the world safer. But the more he looked, the less he believed that. In the end, with Mr. Greenspan watching from the audience, he argued that disaster might loom.

Incentives were horribly skewed in the financial sector, with workers reaping rich rewards for making money, but being only lightly penalized for losses, Mr. Rajan argued. That encouraged financial firms to invest in complex products with potentially big payoffs, which could on occasion fail spectacularly.

He pointed to “credit-default swaps,” which act as insurance against bond defaults. He said insurers and others were generating big returns selling these swaps with the appearance of taking on little risk, even though the pain could be immense if defaults actually occurred.

Mr. Rajan also argued that because banks were holding a portion of the credit securities they created on their books, if those securities ran into trouble, the banking system itself would be at risk. Banks would lose confidence in one another, he said: “The interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full-blown financial crisis.”

Two years later, that's essentially what happened.

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:

The Boltzmann Brain paradox is an argument against the idea that the universe around us, with its incredibly low-entropy early conditions and consequential arrow of time, is simply a statistical fluctuation within some eternal system that spends most of its time in thermal equilibrium. You can get a universe like ours that way, but you’re overwhelmingly more likely to get just a single galaxy, or a single planet, or even just a single brain — so the statistical-fluctuation idea seems to be ruled out by experiment. (With potentially profound consequences.)

The first invocation of an argument along these lines, as far as I know, came from Sir Arthur Eddington in 1931. But it’s a fairly straightforward argument, once you grant the assumptions (although there remain critics). So I’m sure that any number of people have thought along similar lines, without making a big deal about it.

One of those people, I just noticed, was Richard Feynman. At the end of his chapter on entropy in the Feynman Lectures on Physics, he ponders how to get an arrow of time in a universe governed by time-symmetric underlying laws.

So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s equations, are reversible. Then were does irreversibility come from? It comes from order going to disorder, but we do not understand this until we know the origin of the order. Why is it that the situations we find ourselves in every day are always out of equilibrium?

Feynman, following the same logic as Boltzmann, contemplates the possibility that we’re all just a statistical fluctuation.

Juan Cole in Informed Comment: