Willem Marx in Prospect, via Oneworld:

The Toyota pick-up truck roared through the green gates into the dusty walled compound and juddered to a halt inches from a small well. Eight figures, their faces swathed in cloth, stood up stiffly from their crouched positions before clambering down. They lifted their weapons gingerly from the floor where they had lain concealed. I counted five semi-automatics, a light machine gun and a green rocket-propelled grenade launcher before the vehicle’s driver slammed his door. Iran’s most wanted terrorist walked towards me with his hand extended, a dazzlingly white smile beneath a Pashtun hat.

But 24-year-old Abdulmalik Rigi is not Pashtun, he’s Baloch—an ethnic minority that straddles an area across southeast Iran, southwest Pakistan and south Afghanistan. In February, the Iranian city of Zahedan was hit by a bomb—for which Rigi claimed responsibility—that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards, and placed Rigi at the top of Tehran’s hitlist. A series of American media reports had linked Rigi’s guerrilla attacks to a wider US-sponsored covert war against Iran. Rigi had agreed to meet me, a western journalist, to publicly refute these allegations, which he says have been levelled against his group by the mullahs of Iran.

Balochistan is a vast expanse of territory separating the middle east from the Indian subcontinent (see below—the Baloch region is coloured pink). The Baloch people are ethnically heterogeneous but united by their language and culture, and their Sunni Islam faith. In the late 19th century, the highly tribal Baloch homeland was carved up by British India, Afghanistan and Persia, and the Baloch have thus never enjoyed a modern sovereign state. Nevertheless, the difficult terrain kept the Baloch relatively isolated, allowing them to preserve a centuries-old cultural heritage, and in both Iran and Pakistan they have offered armed resistance to central government control since the early 20th century.

More here.

Reza Aslan at Slate:

A spate of books has appeared over the last year, gathering the words of America’s enemies. The first and best of these is Messages to the World, a collection of Osama Bin Laden’s declarations translated by Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence, in which Bin Laden himself dismisses Bush’s accusation that he hates America’s freedoms. “Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example?”

Now comes a second, more complete collection, The Al Qaeda Reader, edited and translated by Raymond Ibrahim, a research librarian at the Library of Congress. Unlike Lawrence, Ibrahim includes writings from both Bin Laden and his right-hand man, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. And while both volumes provide readers with a startling series of religious and political tracts that, when taken together, chart the evolution of a disturbing (if intellectually murky) justification for religious violence, Ibrahim’s collection is marred by his insistence that his book be viewed as al-Qaida’s Mein Kampf.

The comparison between the scattered declarations of a cult leader literally dwelling in a cave and the political treatise of the commander in chief of one of the 20^th century’s most powerful nations may be imprecise, to say the least. But Ibrahim’s point is that we can learn about al-Qaida’s intentions by reading their words, that a book like this can help Americans better understand the nature of the anger directed toward them.

More here.

From The Daily Telegraph:

Whether you’re a fan of John Lennon’s music or not, this enthralling film tells the real-life story of a man who was so driven by his own convictions that he was willing to risk his artistic reputation and the alienation of his enormous fan-base in order to uphold his beliefs. Film-makers David Leaf and John Scheinfeld trace Lennon’s evolution from everyone’s lovable pin-up to an anti-war activist who helped inspire a whole generation of young people to have a political voice. His growing interest in politics coincided, particularly in the US, with a distinct rise in anti-war sentiments, the civil rights movement and the New Left.

Despite its subject matter, The U.S. vs John Lennon shows Lennon and, to a lesser extent Yoko, as funny, intelligent artists who only employed crazy stunts such as their honeymoon bed-in to highlight their causes. Although there’s not a lot of personal content in this film the scenes with Lennon playing with his young son Sean are heartbreaking as they were filmed shortly before Lennon was shot outside his New York apartment.

More here.

From The New York Times:

How and when did we learn to speak, and to what extent is language a uniquely human attribute? Christine Kenneally, a linguistics Ph.D. turned journalist, shrewdly begins “The First Word,” her account of this new science, with candid portraits of several of its most influential figures. Appropriately, the first chapter is devoted to Noam Chomsky, whose ideas have dominated linguistics since the late 1950s, and who, as Kenneally reports, has been hailed as a genius on a par with Einstein and disparaged as the leader of a “cult” with “evil side effects.”

According to Chomsky, humans are born with the principles of grammar hard-wired in their brains, enabling them, from an early age and without formal instruction, to construct an infinite variety of sentences from a finite number of words. Moreover, Chomsky has suggested, language is a peculiarly human phenomenon, a trait so remarkable that evolutionary theory is virtually helpless to explain it. “It surely cannot be assumed that every trait is specifically selected,” he wrote in 1988. “In the case of such systems as language … it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them.” Chomsky’s impatience with the question of language’s origins effectively squelched inquiry into the subject for decades. 

More here.

Freeman Dyson at Edge.org:

The main subject of this piece is the problem of climate change. This is a contentious subject, involving politics and economics as well as science. The science is inextricably mixed up with politics. Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, but there are violently diverging opinions about the causes of change, about the consequences of change, and about possible remedies. I am promoting a heretical opinion, the first of three heresies that I will discuss in this piece.

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

More here.

A debate on complexity and evolution between Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones, and Lewis Wolpert at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Jason DeParle in the New York Times:

They still wake before dawn in desert dormitories that pack a dozen men or more to a room. They still pour concrete and tie steel rods in temperatures that top 110 degrees. They still spend years away from families in India and Pakistan to earn about $1 an hour. They remain bonded to employers under terms that critics liken to indentured servitude.

But construction workers, a million strong here and famously mistreated, have won some humble victories.

After several years of unprecedented labor unrest, the government is seeking peace with this army of sweat-stained migrants who make local citizens a minority in their own country and sustain one of the world’s great building booms. Regulators here have enforced midday sun breaks, improved health benefits, upgraded living conditions and cracked down on employers brazen enough to stop paying workers at all.

The results form a portrait of halting change in a region synonymous with foreign labor and, for many years, labor abuse.

More here.

Jonah Lehrer in The Frontal Cortex:

The shit is hitting the fan: all those sub-prime mortgages given out so recklessly over the past two years are getting their interest rates re-adjusted. And that, of course, is when the foreclosures begin.

By most measures, sub-prime loans are a bad idea. Look, for example, at the popular 2/28 loan, which consists of a low, fixed-interest rate for the first two years and a much higher, adjustable rate for the next twenty-eight. Most people taking out a 2/28 loan can’t afford the higher interest rates that will hit later on. It’s not unusual for interest payments on a 2/28 loan to double within four years. (That’s why you’re seeing such high foreclosure rates in the sub-prime market.)

So why do people take out sub-prime loans? Don’t they realize that they won’t be able to afford the ensuing 28 years of mortgage payments? I think a big part of the reason sub-prime loans remain so seductive, even when the financial terms are so atrocious, is that they take advantage of a dangerous flaw built into our brain. This flaw is rooted in our emotional brain, which tends to overvalue immediate gains (like a new house) at the expense of future costs (high interest rates). Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of a new home, but can’t really grapple with the long-term fiscal consequences of the decision. Our impulsivity encounters little resistance, and so we sign on the bottom line. We want the house. We’ll figure out how to pay for it later.

The best evidence for this idea comes from the lab of Jonathan Cohen.

More here.

Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch:

Early this morning China let the idiots in Washington, and on Wall Street, know that it has them by the short hairs. Two senior spokesmen for the Chinese government observed that China’s considerable holdings of US dollars and Treasury bonds “contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve currency.”

Should the US proceed with sanctions intended to cause the Chinese currency to appreciate, “the Chinese central bank will be forced to sell dollars, which might lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar.”

If Western financial markets are sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the message, US interest rates will rise regardless of any further action by China. At this point, China does not need to sell a single bond. In an instant, China has made it clear that US interest rates depend on China, not on the Federal Reserve.

More here.

From the Boston Globe:

THE JUST-released “Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak” is a collection of 22 poems by 17 detainees at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Edited by Marc Falkoff, each poem had to be cleared by the Pentagon. The result offers a rare glimpse into the lives of the prisoners. The following is an excerpt.

Jumah Al Dossari

Jumah al Dossari, a 33-year-old Bahraini national, is the father of a young daughter. He has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. Detained without charge or trial, Dossari has been subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuses, some of which are detailed in “Inside the Wire,” an account of the Guantánamo prison by former military intelligence soldier Erik Saar. He has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the US military, has tried to kill himself 12 times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.

DEATH POEM

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

More here.

3QD editor Morgan Meis has started writing a weekly column at The Smart Set:

It is generally agreed but never specifically discussed that there is a thing called the “summer jam.” I suppose it bears some genetic resemblance to the “summer read.” But the “summer jam” is both a more fleeting and a more dominating sort of beast. There is typically only one summer jam per season and there is no such thing as a repeat. You can only be the summer jam once.

The summer jam is an unpretentious thing. It goes directly to the very essence of pop music, which is to create a sound that is unique enough to catch your attention and almost impossible to ignore. But the summer jam must capture the mind immediately and more forcefully and purely than the pop music hit of another season. This probably has something to do with summer itself. Summer is the season of immediacy, of quick glances and shimmering surfaces. Summer has needs, and more than other seasons those needs have a desperate quality to them. I don’t know whether it really matters if summer jams are even “good” or “bad.” Summer jams are beyond good and bad. They are best described as phenomena, events, things that occur.

More here.

Richard Rorty is dead. For those who loved him as a person, and also those who just knew him – I had the good fortune to spend an evening with him in Hamburg – this sentence is an expression of pain alone. But for those who loved him as a theorist, the question is what this sentence means besides. Certainly: one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century has died. What will come after him, will someone take his place? As with other great philosophers and writers, the answer is: of course not. One has to live with such losses; they are forever. But in Rorty’s case, questions and answers lead beyond truisms. To explain that, I need to get slightly personal.

more from Eurozine’s special Rorty edition here.

Michelangelo Antonioni was obsessed with distraction. No other artist focused on inattentiveness to the degree of intensity on display in his best films. His subject was the alternately bored and viscerally excited modern human being, but he had the extraordinary discipline to keep himself from becoming such a person. His characters often broke down, losing sight of each other, their own desires, their barest needs; through it all, Antonioni would retain his trancelike alertness. He indulged long takes, luxuriating in static images and masterfully sustained tracking shots of characters flitting aimlessly from excitement to crushing boredom and loneliness. The extravagant tension in his extravagantly composed films derives from this crucial difference between sensibility and subject.

more from n+1 here.

When Gustave Courbet’s painting “The Origin of the World” went on permanent display at the Musée d’Orsay in 1995, it was emerging from what must be one of the longest periods of visual quarantine in the history of art. Painted sometime in 1866, for the better part of 130 years it had been cordoned off in private collections, its existence known only to a small group of people, few of whom left any record of the work. Even Courbet, with his swashbuckling disregard for convention, seems for once to have erred on the side of caution. Neither signed nor dated, the picture was never mentioned by him in writing, and it is only on the strength of two small contemporary documents (the report of a dinner at which the painter, never more fulsome than when singing his own praises, likens his little figure to the nudes of Titian and Veronese, and a description by Maxime du Camp so slapdash that one doubts whether he had actually seen the picture with his own eyes) that we can be sure Courbet painted it at all.

Everywhere you turn in the painting’s history, you meet with the same pattern of secrecy and obfuscation.

more from the TLS here.

From Nature:

The way in which antidepressants exert their effects on brain cells has been revealed by two separate teams of researchers working independently of each other.

Antidepressants work by preventing neurons in the brain from importing certain chemicals, such as dopamine and serotonin, which are used to pass messages from cell to cell. The route by which these chemicals are imported depends on passageways in the outer membrane of the cells called transporter proteins, and it is on these passageways that the antidepressants exert their influence. But how exactly they hold up the process has remained a mystery since the drugs were discovered 45 years ago, says Les Iversen, a pharmacologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The passionate romance that proved that ardour can survive Britain’s grimmest landscape and weather has beaten countless steamy successors in a poll of the greatest love stories of all time.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, recounting the doomed affair between sweet Cathy Earnshaw and the brutal outsider Heathcliff, has seen off Shakespeare, Gone With the Wind and everything by Barbara Cartland in a survey which shows the lasting power of classic works.

Almost all the entries in the top 20 choices of 2,000 readers are major works of English literature, with Jane Austen pipping Shakespeare as runner-up and Emily’s sister Charlotte coming in fourth with Jane Eyre.”It’s really heartening to see how these stories, written so long ago, retain the power to captivate 21st century audiences,” said Richard Kingsbury, channel head of UKTV Drama, which commissioned the study.

More here.

Matthew Power in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

In a decade of living in New York City, time and again I would run into Brad in the middle of the action, whatever that action happened to be: a street protest at the Republican National Convention, a guerrilla dance party on the subway, a crowd of thousands fleeing the collapse of the Twin Towers. I once saw him, while being chased by the police among hundreds of bicyclists on a protest ride through Times Square, shoulder his bicycle and run right over the top of a taxi to freedom. He always gravitated toward the conflict and conflagration, loved getting close enough to touch before leaping back. He was fearless, and he usually got away with it, coming back with stories of how the cops were just inches from grabbing him, how the railroad bull walked right by his hiding place without spotting him. And later, as he went further, to countries where tectonic social conflicts rumbled just below the surface, drawn by that same impulse, some junk-craving of conscience and adrenaline, he spoke of how the bullets whizzed by without hitting him.

So when a friend of ours called me one morning in late October 2006, her voice cracking in that tone that conveys the worst news: it’s Brad . . . I already knew, but still didn’t believe. Everything else was mere detail, whens and wheres, unmoored fragments of fact: Oaxaca. Filming a street demonstration during the teachers’ strike down there. Twice in the chest. Never made it to the hospital.

He filmed his own assassination.

More here.

[Thanks to Asad Raza.]

I’ve been reading this absolutely fascinating book by Gabrielle Walker over the last couple of days and couldn’t recommend it more highly. In the review that I post an excerpt from below, William Grimes unnecessarily tries to balance his overall-very-favorable opinion with a few petty gripes, like:

Like Dava Sobel in “The Planets,” Ms. Walker writes for a general audience and seems to assume something close to scientific illiteracy in her readers. There is plenty of gee-whiz and tee-hee in her merry tale, a colorful blend of anecdote, personality and pure science explained in the simplest terms.

Do you know how Galileo first figured out how much air weighs? How Torricelli first measured air pressure? How Robert Boyle came upon his eponymous law? How Priestly helped Lavoisier discover oxygen? Do you know how all these people are connected, one to the next? If not, then like me, and presumably unlike William Grimes, I suppose you are scientifically illiterate. Don’t believe Grimes. There is endlessly enchanting information here for the scientifically well-informed, as well as for others. (All the stuff I point out above is from just the first fifth of the book!) Get it. And read it.

William Grimes reviews An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, by Gabrielle Walker, in the New York Times:

As a metaphor for absence and nothingness, air has performed admirably for centuries. It has pulled off one of the great con jobs in human history, concealing endless complexities behind its bland, transparent facade. Layer by layer, from the ionosphere to the Earth’s surface, Gabrielle Walker exposes the Earth’s atmosphere for what it is, a restless, electrically charged, dynamic superhero, entrusted with the sacred mission of protecting our planet, nurturing life and even, when looked at from a certain angle, making love possible.

Ms. Walker, a chemist by training and a science journalist by profession, finds that angle in “An Ocean of Air,” her perkily popular take on air, wind, atmosphere and the scientists who unraveled their mysteries, from Galileo onward. It starts with oxygen, creator and destroyer, foundation of the atmosphere, the revolutionary element that quickens life and hastens death through its ferocious reactivity, and requires two sexes. Oxygen-burning, ever-aging mitochondria from the male expend energy seeking out cool, unaged mitochondria in the female egg, which guarantee that the human embryo’s biological clock starts at zero. Romance is in the air.

More here.  [Thanks to Anna Suknov.]

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

Of course, there’s an army of ideologues and lobbyists who will depict the push for universal coverage as a nefarious effort to undermine the free enterprise system. Witness President Bush’s recent rejection of pleas from even a majority of fellow Republicans to compromise with Democrats on renewing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that gives health coverage to millions of children whose parents don’t qualify for Medicaid, yet can’t afford private insurance.

This popular decade-old program, which would cost between $7 billion and $10 billion more dollars per year to retain (financed by increases in tobacco taxes), will expire at the end of September if it’s not renewed. True to the politics of nope, Bush has threatened to veto it if it passes Congress.

The incongruities are almost too painful to note. Spending $1 trillion ($1,000 billion) on the utter debacle that is Iraq has not made us safer from international terror. Spending a few billion dollars on a children’s insurance program that has worked will make us safer from the domestic terror of facing life-threatening illnesses without medical care.

More here.