Last year, I published a book describing how right-wing economics had come to dominate American politics. Whenever you write a book about something bad that’s happening, you get asked for the solution. I’d shrug and admit that I didn’t have one. The questioner would usually look slightly disappointed, so I’d add that nothing lasts forever, and eventually something will come along to change things. The financial crisis might be that something.

When liberals talk about turning economic lemons into political lemonade, the usual model is the New Deal. The free market failed, government swept in, and the political landscape was transformed. Of course, the economy has recessions all the time, and most of them fail to result in a New Deal. In 1982 and 1992, to name a couple of examples, lousy economic conditions led to major Democratic victories. But neither led to any major transformation, and each was followed, in 1984 and 1994, by blowout Republican wins.

more from TNR here.

IN THE DARKNESS, from a distance, the park is a sea of glowing spots – indistinct, eerie, even spectral. But up closer, details emerge. Row after row of stainless steel benches curve up from the ground like fins, or wings of a creature arrested in motion. These 184 benches hover over 184 pools of illuminated water, one for each man, woman, and child killed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

I’ve long had a thing for visiting memorials at night. When I lived in Washington, I loved to go to the FDR Memorial in the wee hours, when the tour buses and the teenagers had gone and the bright sun had given way to the city lights and the stars, when the senses could be saturated by the sound of falling water. The blackness of night, of course, is evocative of death, but it is the stillness, I think, that transforms the experience; absent the familiar sights and sounds that distract our senses during the day, we are guided not by the footsteps of fellow travelers, but by our own response to architecture, to history, to memory, to loss.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

I recently discovered Reggie Middleton’s BoomBustBlog. He is simply a very smart and witty guy from whom one can learn a lot quickly about what is going on…

I’ve noticed a few queries as to my opinion of whether financial stocks will get better or if the worst is behind us. I actually thought I made my viewpoint clear. Obviously not, so let me be a bit more blunt. Things are going to get very ugly, starting this week – and from there it will get even uglier – and after that the bad part will start. Since I cannot predict the future I will shy away from X will happen in Y months, but the world’s credit and real asset markets are in a bad way and need a severe correction to reach a level of peaceful equilibrium. The central banks and governments appear to be dead set against letting capitalistic nature take its course, thus we will be in a tug of war akin to farmers trying to prevent tornadoes from destroying their crops. Best efforts may appear valiant, but in the end fruitless. Don’t mess with Mother Nature. I will put a post up in a few hours (partially free) that consists of the research that finally explains, in explicit detail, the industrial/manufacturing portion of my investment thesis and leads into the official global macro theme (it’s 33 pages and consumed a lot of resources at a very trying time, so the bulk of it will be for subscribers), followed by bankruptcy candidates that made it to the shortlists but were not selected for final analysis.

more from Reggie here.

Plus, an explanation of Credit Default Swaps and why anyone should care here.

“…he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
    –Bob Dylan, It’s Alright Ma

We Are the Music Makers
A. W. E. O’Shaughnessy

We are the music makers,
..And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

  On whom the pale moon gleams;

Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world forever, it seems.
…………………………………………….

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world’s great cities,

  And out of a fabulous story

  We fashion an empire’s glory:

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

  Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song’s measure

  Can trample a kingdom down.
…………………………………………….

We in the ages lying

  In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

  And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

  To the old of the new world’s worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying,

  Or one that is coming to birth.

///

From Science:

In a snub to one of the world’s most famous virologists, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, announced today that it has awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris for their discovery of the virus that causes AIDS. The decision passes over Robert Gallo of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, with whom Montagnier had a long-running battle over both credit for the AIDS virus’s discovery and the patents related to the test used to detect the virus in blood.

Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi together receive half of the $1.4 million award; the other half goes to German virologist Harald zur Hausen for finding that the human papillomavirus (HPV) can cause cervical cancer. Although the HPV discovery ultimately led to two recently approved cancer vaccines now being widely introduced in developed countries, zur Hausen’s prize has been overshadowed by the controversial choice of his fellow laureates.

The Nobel committee credits Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi for first isolating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a French patient with swollen lymph nodes. The researchers also detected activity of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, proof that the infectious agent belonged to a group called retroviruses, which insert their own DNA into the genome of the hosts. But Montagnier’s lab did not prove that their virus caused AIDS. That evidence first came 1 year later from Gallo and co-workers, who published four papers in Science that persuasively tied similar viruses they had found to the disease. Gallo says all three recipients of the prize deserved it, and he’s happy to see that the Nobel Assembly at long last gave an award to the HIV/AIDS field. But he acknowledged that he was “disappointed” to be left out. “Yes, I’m a little down about it, but not terribly,” Gallo told Science. “The only thing I worry about is that it may give people the notion that I might have done something wrong.”

“I’m very sorry for Robert Gallo,” Montagnier told Science today from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where he is attending an HIV meeting. Montagnier says he was “surprised” as well: “It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that.” Gallo, who was famously competitive with Montagnier and other labs during the race to find the cause of AIDS, also stressed that he’s mellowed a lot. “Twenty-five years ago, I’d be stuttering and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ As long as everything is not taken away from my legacy, that’s fundamentally what matters to me.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Last month a Georgia woman named DeShan Fishel was driving near a school and saw a Jeep rush past a stop signal on a school bus, clipping a 5-year-old boy. The other driver sped away. Ms. Fishel whipped a U-turn and gave chase. She stayed with the Jeep on surface streets and caught the driver on a highway in Dawson County, Ga., making him pull over. She watched the driver until police officers arrived. “All I could think about was that little kid, getting hit, and this person getting away with it,” Ms. Fishel said at a news conference. “It just really upset me.”

The public urge for punishment that helped delay the passage of Washington’s economic rescue plan is more than a simple case of Wall Street loathing, according to scientists who study the psychology of forgiveness and retaliation. The fury is based in instincts that have had a protective and often stabilizing effect on communities throughout human history. Small, integrated groups in particular often contain members who will stand up and — often at significant risk to themselves — punish cheaters, liars and freeloaders. Scientists debate how common these citizen enforcers are, and whether an urge to punish infractions amounts to an overall gain or loss, given that it is costly for both parties. But recent research suggests that in individuals, the fairness instinct is a highly variable psychological impulse, rising and falling in response to what is happening in the world. And there is strong evidence that it hardens in times of crisis and uncertainty, like the current one.

The catch in this highly sensitive system, most researchers agree, is that it most likely evolved to inoculate small groups against invasive rogues, and not to set right the excesses of a vast and wildly diverse community like the American economy.

More here.

Sughra Raza. At the Real Estate Office.

Painting: acrylic on canvas 2001; digital photograph: Oct 5, 2008 at the Boston harbor.

Any overview of a country’s contemporary literature throws up an inescapable paradox. The works that serve as the best examples in any account of “the current situation” are rarely the most artistically convincing. These representative books draw their strength precisely from the fact that they are so representative – from the ease with which reviewers can draw obvious parallels between literature and its directly political, social, or whatever, context. It is these titles, too, that attract the most attention at the time of publication. They are ripe subjects for media debates and are keenly discussed by commentators who have not read them but are more than happy to express opinions on them, since the concepts they contain are familiar and topical.

One example was Sisela Lindblom’s novel De skamlösa (The shameless, 2007), which, in conjunction with an interview with the author, sparked off the “cultural debate” of last autumn. It was all about handbags. Immensely expensive designer bags as symbols of an absurd consumer culture. The question of whether it can be considered reasonable to spend 40 000 Swedish kronor (approx. 4000 euros) on a handbag became a frame of reference for everything from globalization to gender perspectives.

more from Eurozine here.

“This longing for God — he had that quite strongly,” says Krysiewicz. He was invited to the apartment on Boguslawskiego, where the poet grilled him provocatively, for Milosz was as famous for his doubts as for his certainties. Their conversations became a fixture: two or three hours once a week, sometimes once a month. What did they discuss? “Let’s say you had an experience with a great fire once — you have a vague memory of it,” Krysiewicz recalls. “You have spent a lot of years trying to describe it, and read a lot of books describing it. What you remember is an echo of it. You search and look for someone who can testify about this fire — that it is real — who can testify beyond words, because we know that words are too weak.”

Krysiewicz speaks reluctantly, haltingly; he was Milosz’s confessor, after all, and performed last rites. “My position was to be in the shade, and remain in the shade,” he says. “He went reconciled, certainly. But there are some things I can’t tell you.” He pauses. “He was a mystic, his poetry is mystical and metaphysical.”

more from The LA Times here.

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.

Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone:

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

More here.

In case you missed it yesterday, in the NYT:

SINCE the vice presidential debate on Thursday night, two opposing myths have quickly taken hold about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. The first, advanced by her supporters, is that she made it through a gantlet of fire; the second, embraced by her detractors, is that her speaking style betrays her naïveté. Both are wrong.

Let’s take the first myth: Governor Palin subjected herself to the most demanding test possible — a televised debate. By surviving, she won. As the front page of The Daily News of New York screamed this morning, “No Baked Alaska.”

But as a test of clear thinking, the debate format was far less demanding than a face-to-face interview — the kind Ms. Palin had with Katie Couric of CBS.

Why? Because in a one-on-one conversation, you can’t launch into a prepared speech on a topic unrelated to the question. Imagine this exchange — based on the first question that the moderator, Gwen Ifill, gave Ms. Palin and Senator Joe Biden — if it took place in casual conversation over coffee:

LISA How about that bailout? Was this Washington at its best or at its worst?

MICHAEL You know, I think a good barometer here, as we try to figure out has this been a good time or a bad time in America’s economy, is go to a kid’s soccer game on Saturday, and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, “How are you feeling about the economy?”

Lisa would flee. (This was, in fact, Ms. Palin’s response.) In a conversation, you have to build your sentence phrase by phrase, monitoring the reaction of your listener, while aiming for relevance to the question. That’s what led Ms. Palin into word salad with Ms. Couric. But when the questioner is 30 feet away on the floor and you’re on a stage talking to a camera, which can’t interrupt or make faces, you can reel off a script without embarrassment. The concerns raised by the Couric interviews — that Ms. Palin memorizes talking points rather than grasping issues — should not be allayed by her performance in the forgiving format of a debate.

Ayşen Candaş Bilgen in Reset DOC:

The first point I would like to make is that in suggesting that a Muslim democracy is not compatible with constitutional democracy, I am not claiming that there is something essentially ‘wrong’ about Islam nor I am assuming that Islam’s theology is ‘essentially’ different from the theologies of other monotheistic religions. Although I am not an expert in theology, I think it is accurate to suggest that Islam’s theology is not essentially different from the theologies of either Judaism or Christianity. The differences of Islamic theology which differentiate it from other monotheistic religions’ do not seem to amount to an ‘essential inability’ for Islam’s liberalization. This essential similarity of Islam with other monotheistic theologies implies that insofar as other monotheistic religions have liberalized, both through struggles and in time, so can Islam, and so can Muslim societies. Therefore when I suggest that a Muslim democracy is not a constitutional democracy, I do not want to suggest that Islam in specific is incompatible with constitutional democracy but other monotheistic religions were. In fact, I find it also plausible to argue that a Jewish or a Christian democracy would also be incompatible with the idea of constitutional democracy.

If we could possibly convince ourselves that a constitutional democracy and a Muslim (or Jewish or Christian democracy) are the same thing, then we would not have felt the need to use the adjective “Muslim,” (or “Jewish” or Christian”) before the word ‘democracy’ in that specific context. We, at least intuitively, seem to know that there would be something anomalous in a Muslim, or a religious, democracy that would render that political regime less than a constitutional democracy. A religious political system which attempts to rule a complex society is an oxymoron if it also calls itself a democracy. A Muslim democracy must necessarily refer to a regime that is streaked by the culture and the vision of Islam and its world view.

The second point of clarification I want to make is about the perspective that I am taking in making the observations I am about to make about Turkey. The complexity of the context sometimes remains partly invisible to the observers’ perspective, especially if they are looking to find some ‘otherness,’ and if out of sheer good will they portray this ‘otherness’ that they encounter as something necessarily and unquestionably benign. That is partly what happens to European and American liberals when they analyze a predominantly Muslim country such as Turkey.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.

The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out ‘virtual office identity packages’ for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org, provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the group still hasn’t disclosed where it gets its money, as required by the IRS. Who paid to make ‘Obsession’ isn’t clear – it cost $400,000. According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work.

John Lundberg in the Huffington Post:

When Hayden Carruth’s collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award for poetry, it was no great surprise that he chose not to attend the ceremony. He was always something of an outsider. For most of his life, he kept a distance from the literary mainstream, publishing his work with small presses and staying out of academia (a rarity) until the age of 58.

One could offer that Carruth kept his distance from mainstream society as well, living more than twenty years on a farm in northern Vermont before moving to the small town of Munnsville, New York, where he passed away this past Monday. Many of his poems celebrate the hardworking people and natural beauty of these areas, examining what a New York Times review described as “The tension between the chaos of the human heart and the sublime order of nature.” You can see these themes at work in this terrific excerpt from The Cows at Night.  The heart’s tension, in this case, is Carruth’s.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

///

Beau: Golden Retrievals
Mark Doty

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again, muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’re sunk in the past,  half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning
—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time’s warp (and woof), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

Copyright 1998 Mark Doty, Sweet Machine:
Poems HarperFlamingo

///

Michael Dirda on Mrs. Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light in The Washington Post:

This fine book — superbly researched, often passionately eloquent, and enthralling throughout — gives the lie to a notorious catchphrase: “As for living: Our servants will do that for us.” That line — taken from Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s symbolist drama “Axel” — aptly encapsulates the weary languor of an etiolated aristocracy. But it also points up the huge psychological divide between the ruling classes and their domestic help, which was largely female. While the palely blue-blooded of 100 years ago might have found it comforting, or frightening, to imagine that their servants pulsed with red-hot animal vitality and energy, their actual cooks, chars and maids-of-all-work were generally too exhausted after 80- or 100-hour weeks to think about anything much but a warm bed and sleep. A chilling fact says it all: At the beginning of the 20th century, “the average life-expectancy for a woman was forty-six.” And, as Alison Light points out, “domestic service was still the largest single female occupation. It remained so until at least 1945.”

While Mrs. Woolf and the Servants focuses primarily on the interactions between Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and the women who cleaned, cooked and cared for her over the course of her 59 years (too few, too few), it also probes the complex nature of dependence and care-giving. “What is entrusted to the servant,” Light suggests, “is something of one’s self. . . . Servants were the body’s keepers, protecting its entrances and exits; they were privy to its secrets and its chambers; they knew that their masters and mistresses sweated, leaked and bled; they knew who could pregnate and who could not get pregnant; they handled the lying-in and the laying-out. Servants have always known that the emperor has no clothes. No wonder they were dubbed the scum of the earth and its salt, as they handled the food and the chamber-pots, returning dust to dust.”

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

We are winning in Iraq, John McCain declared in the presidential debate last week, “and we will come home with victory and with honour.” This may sound like some perfunctory keep-the-pecker-up stuff from a former military man. But the Republican candidate, who believes that the “surge” has succeeded in Iraq, also possesses the fanatical conviction that heavier bombing and more ground troops could have saved the United States from disgrace in Vietnam. On the same occasion, Barack Obama, who seems more aware of the costs of American honour to the American economy, claimed he would divert troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and, if necessary, order them to assault “safe havens” for terrorists in Pakistan’s wild west. Both candidates sought the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, the co-alchemist, with Richard Nixon, of the “peace with honour” formula in Vietnam, which turned out to include the destruction of neighbouring Cambodia.

An ominously similar escalation of the “war on terror” has ensured that the next American president will receive a septic chalice from George Bush in January 2009. In July, Bush sanctioned raids into Pakistan, pre-empting Obama’s tough-sounding strategy of widening the war in Afghanistan, where resurgent Taliban this year account for Nato’s highest death toll since 2001. Pakistan’s army chief vowed to defend his country “at all costs”, and his soldiers now clash with US troops almost daily. Obscured by the American economy’s slow-motion train wreck, the war on terror has already stumbled into its most treacherous phase with the invasion of fiercely nationalistic and nuclear-armed Pakistan.

More here.

////

I am Emtithal Mahmoud and I am 14 years old. My mother is Amira Tibin, and my father is Dr. Ibrahim Mahmoud. I am the oldest of three children, with both a younger brother and sister. My family originally comes from El-Fashir, Northern Kutum, Dar Zagawa, and Nyala, all of which are regions of Darfur, Sudan. I live in Northeast Philadelphia and go to J.R. Masterman High school. These are my poems for Darfur.

Framed
Emitihal Mahmoud

The government of Sudan is reeking of racism.
If they don’t like someone, they’ll kill them.

That is what the war in the south
Was all about.

The government had no army,
So they tore Darfurians from their families.

They were tricked, then forced to become soldiers
With time, their lives grew colder.

The government said they’d get a good pay,
Or maybe even be wealthy some day.

Though, they never got to see their families or even money,
And what they once dreamed was lost for all eternity.

On top of all that, the government said to the boys of Darfur,
“You are going to be fighting in a war.”

These boys fought against their will,
For if they didn’t, they’d be killed.

People started trying to make peace,
But the government still would not cease.

Then one man came so close to stopping the persecution
The government personally saw to his execution.

After so many years of war,
The government blamed it on the boys of Darfur.

Will this government stay behind its mask?
A fowl one, embroidered with lies of the past?

If you could see the faces of the people who cried,
Then you would understand that these boys would never lie.

Most of these boys were never seen again, what a shame.
Yet, until this very day you can hear them say “We were FRAMED!”

///

From Nature:

Great artists are said to pour all their energies onto the canvas, leaving them exhausted after a flurry of creativity. Now, researchers have found that female birds make a similar sacrifice when colouring their eggs, creating vivid hues at the expense of their health. The blue in many birds’ eggs comes from the compound biliverdin, a breakdown product of the heme unit in haemoglobin, which circulates freely in the blood. But biliverdin is not just a pigment, it is also an antioxidant used by the body to prevent cellular damage.

Previous research has proven that when females lay vibrant blue eggs, their partners are more likely to stick around and help rear the young. So researchers speculated that because the blue comes from an antioxidant, it is a signal to males of the female’s health status. Some scientists have argued that the female is making a dangerous trade-off, giving up resources needed to sustain her health to convince her partner that her offspring are worth looking after. 

More here,

From The New York Times:

As David Macaulay takes a bite of salad, you can follow along in his new book as the lettuce and tomato make their journey between his enamel-coated teeth, onto his knobby tongue, into a wash of saliva, past the flapping uvula and epiglottis, down the tubular esophagus and into the churning, burning stomach. (You can pick up with the rest of the travelogue later.) “I’m a big fan of the digestive system,” Mr. Macaulay said during a recent trip to New York. Of the body’s vast array of architecture, chemical reactions and moving parts, the illustrations of the digestive tract that he drew for “The Way We Work,” are his favorite.

Paging through this 336-page book, which is being released by Houghton Mifflin Company on Tuesday, he said, “I’m constantly changing the scale, so that the reader can move around these things and get inside them.” The view of the mouth, for instance, is from the back of the throat, looking out at a “sea of saliva,” a pinkish-red cataract in which broken stalks of broccoli swirl like fallen trees caught in a maelstrom. A semicircular row of teeth shaped like arches from the Roman Colosseum serve as the backdrop. Throughout the book tiny tourists can often be spied rafting down the duodenum or wearing yellow slickers to see the nasal cavity like Maid of the Mist passengers at Niagara Falls. Fans of Mr. Macaulay — and there are millions of them — are probably most familiar with his extraordinarily detailed, erudite and witty visual explanations of architecture and engineering, which include “Cathedral,” “City,” “Pyramid,” “Underground,” “Mosque,” and the most popular, “The Way Things Work.”

Now they can see his interpretation of the most complicated system of all, the human body.

More here.