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I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear
Edna St. Vincent MillayI shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To stuggle on without a break thus far,—
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
Category: Recommended Reading
What You Don’t Know About Gaza
Rashid Khalidi in The New York Times:
NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.
THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.
THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza’s air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
More here.
An Unnecessary War
Jimmy Carter in The Washington Post:
After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.
Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.
More here.
Did black holes form before galaxies?
From Nature:
The huge black holes that lie at the centre of galaxies grow by devouring gas and stars that come too close, but their gravitational attraction can also encourage the birth of stars and the growth of galaxies. This dual role as creator and destroyer has left astronomers with a puzzle: which came first, the black hole or the galaxy? Research from radio astronomers now suggests that black holes got off to a faster start, at least in four galaxies that existed in the early Universe. “The significant implication is that the black holes formed first and then somehow they formed a stellar galaxy around them,” says Chris Carilli, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, who presented the research at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California, on 6 January.
Astronomers had already identified what seemed to be a predictable relationship between the mass of the black hole at a galaxy's heart, and the mass of the galaxy's central bulge of stars and gas. The galactic bulge tends to be 700 times the mass of the black hole, a proportion that holds true for galaxies throughout billions of years of the Universe's history. But the ratio for the oldest galaxies — formed within the first billion years after the Universe's birth some 13.7 billion years ago — remained a mystery. Quasar black holes at the centre of these galaxies glow so brightly that they prevent optical telescopes from seeing the surrounding galaxies in detail, so that galactic mass estimates were mostly impossible.
More here.
They Write the Right Stuff
Charles Fishman in Fast Company:
As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command. Four identical machines, running identical software, pull information from thousands of sensors, make hundreds of milli-second decisions, vote on every decision, check with each other 250 times a second. A fifth computer, with different software, stands by to take control should the other four malfunction.
At T-minus 6.6 seconds, if the pressures, pumps, and temperatures are nominal, the computers give the order to light the shuttle main engines — each of the three engines firing off precisely 160 milliseconds apart, tons of super-cooled liquid fuel pouring into combustion chambers, the ship rocking on its launch pad, held to the ground only by bolts. As the main engines come to one million pounds of thrust, their exhausts tighten into blue diamonds of flame.
Then and only then at T-minus zero seconds, if the computers are satisfied that the engines are running true, they give the order to light the solid rocket boosters. In less than one second, they achieve 6.6 million pounds of thrust. And at that exact same moment, the computers give the order for the explosive bolts to blow, and 4.5 million pounds of spacecraft lifts majestically off its launch pad.
It's an awesome display of hardware prowess. But no human pushes a button to make it happen, no astronaut jockeys a joy stick to settle the shuttle into orbit.
The right stuff is the software. The software gives the orders to gimbal the main engines, executing the dramatic belly roll the shuttle does soon after it clears the tower. The software throttles the engines to make sure the craft doesn't accelerate too fast. It keeps track of where the shuttle is, orders the solid rocket boosters to fall away, makes minor course corrections, and after about 10 minutes, directs the shuttle into orbit more than 100 miles up. When the software is satisfied with the shuttle's position in space, it orders the main engines to shut down — weightlessness begins and everything starts to float.
But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved.
More here.
The Shrinking Map of Palestine
From here.
SOURCE: London Times, 5 May 2006, titled, Truth in Mapping
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
— David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99
Who Ended the Cease-Fire in Israel/Palestine? Part 2: The View From Israel’s Security Agency
by Shiko Behar
It is difficult to tolerate any individual who pompously presents fallacies as facts, and does so without even a symbolic blinking or sober awareness of the gravity and magnitude of the deadly issues at stake. More troubling in this respect are individuals who are unwilling to recognize an error and correct it, let alone a fundamental one. Such immature, stubborn refusals become all the more annoying in cases where the error is nothing more than countless other errors that all humans occasionally commit. That, unfortunately, does not seem to be the case with the recent error by the NYT editors: they seem needlessly chauvinist, arrogant machos who apparently prefer not to budge from what after only five days looks like a pathetic text commencing with the (by now) immortal phrase “Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory.” George Orwell wouldn’t have been able to put this better.
It is precisely the absence of a simple correction that prompted me to waste even more time than I already have on this nonsense. Upon further research I was able to find for the NYT one additional view that can perhaps shed brighter light on the “who-ended-the-cease-fire” question. The single most supreme and authoritative Israeli body that deals with issues of terror and security is the Israeli Security Agency (ISA); it is also known in Hebrew (and colloquial English) as the Shabak (or the Shin Bet). Like deadly punctual state organs in every country, the Shabak too publishes every single week an update called “Terror Data and Trends.” Here is what the Shabak’s November 6, 2008 report had to say about that month’s first week (and, by proxy, perhaps also about the NYT/cease-fire question):
This week there was a sharp increase in the number of high trajectory weapon attacks (rockets/mortars) from the Gaza Strip into Israel, including towards Ashkelon. This was preceded by an ISA-IDF operation on the evening between November 4th and 5th, which exposed a tunnel ready for use, which was intended for the purpose of a large terror attack within Israel. This Israeli activity was undertaken in order to deal with an impending and urgent threat, and thus was not a rupture of the “Lull.”
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Can the US economy afford a Keynesian stimulus?
Little progress has been made in the past century or so towards understanding how economic policy, rules, legislation and regulation influence economic fluctuations, financial stability, growth, poverty or inequality. We know that a few extreme approaches that have been tried yield lousy results – central planning, self-regulating financial markets – but we don’t know much that is constructive beyond that.
The main uses of economics as a scholarly discipline are therefore negative or destructive – pointing out that certain things don’t make sense and won’t deliver the promised results. This blog post falls into that category.
Much bad policy advice derives from a misunderstanding of the short-run and long-run impacts of events and policies. Too often for comfort I hear variations on the following statements: “The long run is just a sequence of short runs, so if we make sure things always make sense in the short run, the long run will take care of itself.” This fallacy, which I shall, unfairly, label the Keynesian fallacy, compounds three errors.
The first error is the leap from the correct assertion that a long interval of time is the sum of successive short intervals of time to the incorrect impact that the long-run impact of a policy or event is in any sense the sum of its short-run impacts.
[H/t: Mona Ali]
lech: hero to has-been
The first time I laid eyes on him was on the 18 or 19 August 1980. It was midday, the early days of the Gdańsk strike, the sky was clear, the sun was hot. In two dextrous movements he swung himself on top of the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyards’ second gate, raised his hands and shook his closed fists above his head. I was astonished. There I was, looking at a man who knew no fear and whose very demeanour wiped fear from everyone else’s hearts. I stood ten steps away from him, beneath the wooden cross stuck in the earth, listening to his voice from above the gate adorned by carnations, a portrait of the Pope and a picture of the Virgin of Jasna Góra, and could not believe my ears. His voice rang out with an incredible, indisputable, strong, iron certainty: “We shall win!” And a few minutes later, when an electric cart drove out of the shipyard gates carrying a plaster model of the Three Crosses Memorial which was to be erected outside the shipyards a few months later, I just shook my head: “This is sheer madness!” I heard people say that a few kilometres from Gdańsk large security squads were massing, getting ready to overpower the strikers but here he was, a few steps away from me, standing on that famous gate endlessly shown by the world’s TV stations all day long, shaking his fists high above his head, taunting the party leadership and the Eastern empire with that brazen smile beneath his black moustache.
more from Salon) here.
thomas chambers double take
A viewer familiar with early- and mid-nineteenth-century American decorative arts, specifically with the painted ornamentation on the furniture, clocks, and china of the time—the squat travelers on their way, the sailboats with their pointy sails, the trees with their one-brushstroke boughs—might do a double take looking at the work of Thomas Chambers. It is as if all the curvy, streamlined, and dexterously executed flourishes on those pre–Civil War wood, fabric, and lusterware domestic items have been captured by, or perhaps stolen by, this British-born, American marine and landscape artist of the time. Whether he paints shipping in Boston harbor, with flags and clouds stretched by the wind, or sloops making their way up the Hudson River on a glistening autumn afternoon, or his subject is the wonder of being face to face with a giant waterfall, Chambers’s work, currently the subject of a rousing exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, seems at first less like the product of a particular person than an emanation of antebellum American life as a whole.
more from the NYRB here.
zizek and kirsch get it on
I am grateful to Mr. Kirsch for the time and effort he put into running over so many of my books in order to find incriminating passages that would support his thesis on my anti-Semitic Fascism-Communism. Perhaps, however, it would have been better for him to stick to just one or two books and read them with a simple unprejudiced attention – in this way, he would have been able to avoid many unfortunate misreadings, like the one apropos Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, where Mr. Kirsch writes:
Zizek’s dialectic allows him to have it all: the jihadis are not really motivated by religion, as they say they are; they are actually casualties of global capitalism, and thus “objectively” on the left. “The only way to conceive of what happened on September 11,” he writes, “is to locate it in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism.”
Well … first, in my Violence, I claim that jihadis are really motivated neither by religion nor by a Leftist sense of justice, but by resentment, which in no way puts them on the Left, neither “objectively” nor “subjectively.” I simply never wrote that Islamic fundamentalists are in any sense on the Left–the whole point of my writing on this topic is that the “antagonism” between liberal tolerance and ethnic or religious fundamentalism is inherent to the universe of global capitalism: in their very opposition, they are the two faces of the same system. The true Left starts with the insight into this complicity.
more from TNR here.
Wednesday Poem
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Lone, Glasgow
Kevin McFaddenWhere I first learned to say things, Ohio, my accent
was the local legal tender: good in Edinburg
as in Dublin or London. Then came Glasgow (proper).
One year abroad in Glaswegian, the notes
brought home bouncing everywhere, overdrawn.
Want a wild time? In Glasgow it was tame.
See the town? You had to hear the tune. New loans,
including my name; I began saying Cave-in
if I wanted the right introduction to a pub. The road
was rude, the power sometimes poor, My voice
skim milk in that butterchirn of gutterals, Scots vowels
clotted and spread like cream, I learned to hear
everything twice and nothing the same. Glasgow
still hasn't left me alone: it's left me a lane.
//
Atheists Decide to Send a Message, on 800 Buses
From The New York Times:
LONDON — The advertisement on the bus was fairly mild, just a passage from the Bible and the address of a Christian Web site. But when Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer, looked on the Web site in June, she was startled to learn that she and her nonbelieving friends were headed straight to hell, to “spend all eternity in torment.” That’s a bit extreme, she thought, as well as hard to prove. “If I wanted to run a bus ad saying ‘Beware — there is a giant lion from London Zoo on the loose!’ or ‘The “bits” in orange juice aren’t orange but plastic — don’t drink them or you’ll die!’ I think I might be asked to show my working and back up my claims,” Ms. Sherine wrote in a commentary on the Web site of The Guardian.
And then she thought, how about putting some atheist messages on the bus, as a corrective to the religious ones? And so were planted the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign, an effort to disseminate a godless message to the greater public. When the organizers announced the effort in October, they said they hoped to raise a modest $8,000 or so. But something seized people’s imagination. Supported by the scientist and author Richard Dawkins, the philosopher A. C. Grayling and the British Humanist Association, among others, the campaign raised nearly $150,000 in four days. Now it has more than $200,000, and last Wednesday it unveiled its advertisements on 800 buses across Britain.
More here.
Thousands of Israelis protest against the war in Gaza
The wonder of the world’s largest river
Sandra Knapp reviews Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon by John Hemming, in the Times Literary Supplement:
Images of ants both open and close this wonderful book. In the early chapters the unforgettable opening scene of Werner Herzog’s historically inaccurate but utterly compelling film Aguirre: Wrath of God is evoked – columns of soldiers and bearers descending ant-like down the Andes towards the Amazon river to attempt the search for the mythical riches of El Dorado. The closing chapter describes the incredible richness of organisms found in the Amazon ecosystem, with ants probably the most species-rich group of all. Both descriptions call up teeming multitudes and suggest wealth; therein lies the story of the Amazon itself, one of the most fascinating forest regions on the planet. The fixation of the first Europeans who entered the Amazon with the mythical land of gold beyond measure – El Dorado – led to the destruction of the indigenous people in a greedy search for the wrong sort of riches. All the while, the true riches of the Amazon were destroyed and plundered without consideration of their value beyond mere economics. John Hemming’s Tree of Rivers is not about the Amazon ecosystem itself – so it is not the place to find out the why and how of Amazonian ecology – but instead it is a powerful chronicle of the effects European and European-derived cultures have had on this most diverse and fascinating of river basins.
Hemming has constructed a brilliantly coherent history of man’s exploration of and influence on the Amazon Basin, home to the largest river on Earth, whose drainage area covers a land area almost the size of the continental United States (minus Alaska) and that is so large that for more than a thousand kilometres inland one cannot see the opposite bank.
More here.
Tilt shift lenses make normal things look tiny
Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
More info from Wikipedia here.
Worried About Antibiotics In Your Beef? Vegetables May Be No Better
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.
Israel’s senseless war in Gaza
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.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
An Interview with Homi Bhabha
Emrah Efe Çakmak: I would like to begin with the big picture, with the question posed to all contributors to this publication: “How much in common does a community need?”
Homi Bhabha: Well, first I think the question has to be reformulated. How much in common does a community need for what? The important thing is for what. If we are talking about a very diverse community, a community with great conflict within it, but whose members have a common love for sport, then during the Olympics or during football games on particular days or particular matches its members may well appear together despite their differences and despite their difficulties being together. At the same time the community that may represent a common front or a common faith in relation to sport may split terribly in relation to the distribution of particular kinds of resources, or indeed on the question of intercommunal or interfaith marriages. There is no general question of what a community needs in common. If you pose the question just generally, then you are tempted to revert to certain conventional or naturalistic ideas. Does everyone need to have been born in the same place, for instance? Does everybody need to have at least religious belief in common? Does a community need to be a proceduralist community, where, although it may have very different values, it at least believes in certain procedures so that it can interact and negotiate peacefully on a formal basis?
On the other hand, when the purpose of the community is, say, to produce a pluralist network of journals or other communicational media across Europe in which actors can speak to each other, can negotiate with each other, can have a lively exchange and a circulation of ideas and values, this would of course be very positive. I cannot see anyone saying this would not be a very positive move. But the question as to whether this could happen and what each institutional journal would have to have in common with the other institutional journals would really depend on what the specific issue that brought them together is. Is it about race or anti-racism? Is it about political democracy? Is the question of freedom the thing that these interventionist journals want to inspect? Do they want to make a critique of certain European Union policies on culture? Do they want to talk about the impact of globalization on regional cultures? It seems to me that on each of the things I have just mentioned there is the possibility that they might or might not come together.
An Excerpt from Allan Gibbard’s Thinking How to Live
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?