In the winter of 1776, John Adams read “Common Sense,” an anonymous, fanatical, and brutally brilliant seventy-seven-page pamphlet that would convince the American people of what more than a decade of taxes and nearly a year of war had not: that it was nothing less than their destiny to declare independence from Britain. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind” was its astonishing and inspiring claim about the fate of thirteen infant colonies on the edge of the world. “The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom; but of a continent—of at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.” Whether these words were preposterous or prophetic no one could say for sure, but everyone wondered: Who could have written such stirring stuff?

more from The New Yorker here.

Three gherkin stumps are looking at a pile of carpets, while a dealer advises them. (Actually, they’re not carpets but slices of Mortadella and Lyon sausage, and the dealer is a piece of radish.) Is this a snapshot taken by a drunk looking at the remains of a smorgasbord at four in the morning? No, it’s Peter Fischli and David Weiss in 1979, staging and photographing miniature incidents for Wurstserie (Sausage Series). Just what kind of artistic partnership is this? Who comes up with this kind of mind-expanding silliness? A 30-minute film from 1981 provides something of an answer: it’s a rat and a bear. Shot on 8mm blown up to 16mm, Der Geringste Widerstand (The Least Resistance) features the two Swiss artists dressed in furry brown rat and panda bear costume roaming around a Los Angeles reminiscent of a third-rate buddy-cop flick. Meeting on a bridge over a busy motorway, they discuss the latest developments in the art world: ‘Any work?’ ‘No, but some money.’

more from Frieze here.

Davies’s big idea goes back to the Big Bang. According to the standard picture, the laws of physics were already in place at the explosive origin of the universe. But he contends that perhaps the universe and its laws emerged together in malleable form: “We would expect that these laws were not infinitely precise mathematical statements, but they would have a certain sloppiness or ambiguity that could lead to observable effects from the earliest universe, when these laws were still congealing.”

So how did compatible life and mind come into being? Davies’s explanation, involving quantum mechanics and something called backwards causation, is impossible to compress without sounding “ludicrous”, he confesses. He’s right: it’s impenetrable.

But this scenario requires an act of faith as great as that of any religious believer. So hasn’t he sidestepped the God question? Science can meet religion on middle ground, he says, but a superbeing who intervenes in events is anathema to most scientists. “You have to understand that science deals with hypotheses that can be tested, and religion proceeds from acts of faith that can’t be tested.”

more from The Sunday Times here.

One wants, post-apartheid, to be able to frame South Africa more cohesively. But what exists now doesn’t feel diverse, it feels schizophrenic. The sweep of the view from Silvermine; famous farm-stall fig preserves; a man left for dead on the shoulder of the road, having been robbed of his prosthetic leg; it won’t, it cannot, cohere. The splitting going on now is not so much about race or public disclosure as it is about time: the newness of this democracy vs. the welter of memory, and its bitterness, fueling what V. S. Naipaul called “the depth of that African rage.” Mandela deferred this schism for a while. He acted as a stopgap, a magical hybrid, his promises of a gorgeous future sound because of his ancient face. His national nomens, Madiba and Mkhulu, remind everyone of what he has weathered: Madiba is the title conferred on honorary elders of his clan, and Mkhulu means grandfather.

In his novels, J. M. Coetzee returns, over and over, to the problem of forming a national identity in the midst of a crippling allegory, a prewritten, prefigured narrative borne from the rape of the past. (He now lives in self-exile in Australia.) If the new South Africa first needed a grandfather, now it needs veritable Indigo Children – or at least, a generation of young people who believe in transparency even as they behave creatively, as risk-takers and iconoclasts. Give them (another) ten years. Things change, says a Sesotho proverb. Matsatsi a loyana: Days are not the same.

more from n+1 here.

You’re a Grand Old Flag

You’re a grand old flag,
You’re a high-flying flag,
And forever in peace may you wave.
You’re the emblem of
The land I love,
So fuck Puerto Rico. Fifty stars is a nice round number,
and it’s hard enough to memorize all the capitals as it is.

God Bless America

God bless America.
We basically just kick ass.

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.
I probably won’t vote when I’m finally 18.
My older brother is a gay libertarian
From sea to shining sea.

more from McSweeneys here.

Some traditional philosophical problems, though unfortunately not very many, can eventually receive a scientific solution. This actually happened with the problem of what constitutes life. We cannot now today recover the passions with which mechanists and vitalists debated whether a “mechanical” account of life could be given. The point is not so much that the mechanists won and the vitalists lost, but that we got a much richer conception of the mechanisms. I think we are in a similar situation today with the problem of consciousness. It will, I predict, eventually receive a scientific solution. But like other scientific solutions in biology, it will have to give us a causal account. It will have to explain how brain processes cause conscious experiences, and this may well require a much richer conception of brain functioning than we now have.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

I am a pariah. That is the main result of my journalism throughout the years of the second Chechen war, and of publishing abroad a number of books about life in Russia and the Chechen war. In Moscow I am not invited to press conferences or gatherings that officials of the Kremlin administration might attend, in case the organisers are suspected of harbouring sympathies towards me. Despite this, all the top officials talk to me, at my request, when I am writing articles or conducting investigations – but only in secret, where they can’t be observed, in the open air, in squares, in secret houses that we approach by different routes, like spies.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

Time and influence are funny things. Artistic debt is generally attributed vertically, across a linear pedigree from master to apprentice, teacher to student, art star to poseur. Just as often, though, a cultural Zeitgeist will emerge from a flurry of tightly orchestrated stylistic homages, satires, ripostes and outright thefts among a peer group of artists — ideally producing a recursive, fractally detailed blast of feedback like the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Among artists, though, connections can also span millennia, or even seem to move backward in time. Picasso’s lengthy and spirited dialogue with 17th-century fellow Spaniard Velázquez arguably left a legacy as vital as his hothouse-pas-de-deux invention of Cubism with Georges Braque in 1909.

Somewhere in between lies the case of hometown boy Philip Guston and Italian proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico

more from the LA Weekly here.

From Nature:

A single gene may explain the vast size difference between that tiny terrier yapping in the park and the massive mastiff ignoring the din. Nate Sutter, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, wanted to know the reason why big dogs, such as Irish wolfhounds, can grow up to 50 times larger than other members of their own species, such as chihuahuas. So he started out looking at large and small dogs of one breed — the Portuguese water dog.

Scientists on the team took X-rays of 500 Portuguese water dogs and made 91 measurements of their skeletons. Based on these data, the researchers classified the water dogs as either big or small for their own breed. They then looked for differences in DNA between the large and small water dogs. This is a relatively easy job: a consortium of scientists including Sutter published the DNA sequence of the dog genome last December, and have mapped out the places where there is a lot of variation between individuals in a given breed. There are fewer of these places of variation in purebred dogs than there are in humans.

The team found that one of the few differences in these Portuguese water dogs occurred in a gene called ‘insulin-like growth factor 1’, or Igf-1.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Emerald City in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s revealing new book is not the fabled metropolis in Oz, but the Green Zone in Baghdad, headquarters for the American occupation in Iraq. And yet, as Mr. Chandrasekaran tells it, the walled-off, heavily guarded enclave, centered around Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace, became as much a fantasyland as anything dreamed up by L. Frank Baum, a place where members of the Coalition Provisional Authority lived in a shiny bubble cut off from the grim realities of Baghdad and the rest of Iraq, a place where the air-conditioning and electricity worked, where Americans wearing “Bush-Cheney 2004” T-shirts could feast on pork and guzzle beer.

“From inside the Green Zone,” Mr. Chandrasekaran writes, “the real Baghdad — the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams — could have been a world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of American troops was rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a detonated car bomb didn’t fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world’s most ancient cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside, the calm sterility of an American subdivision prevailed.”

Mr. Chandrasekaran, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post and the paper’s former Baghdad bureau chief, spent nearly two years reporting from Iraq, and in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” he draws a vividly detailed portrait of the Green Zone and the Coalition Provisional Authority (which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004) that becomes a metaphor for the administration’s larger failings in Iraq.

More here.

An odd and probably increasingly typical story about Muslims and, now, Macs:

Recently, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) stated that an anonymous Islamic website in the Middle East urged Muslims to show their outrage at the Apple Store in New York City, which built a pavilion coincidentally resembling the cube shape of the Ka’aba, the ancient structure in Mecca towards which all Muslims pray (the actual structure is glass, though MEMRI referenced a black plywood cover during construction). Predictibly, the post brought out cries of indignation from people upset that Muslims would be offended (yet again). But missing in the report was the name of the purported website, why it was considered authoritative on the matter, or any actual offended Muslims (our straw poll garnered a collective shrug, along with much respect for Steve Jobs, himself the son of an Arab). It’s not the first time the controversial organisation has selectively framed an issue to show Muslims in a less than positive light, nor is it the only instance of pre-emptive outrage attributed to Muslims in recent months. Take the case of a Kate Moss advertisment across the street from a New York mosque. The idea that Muslims might be offended by this went from blog post to mainstream media, somehow becoming “hundreds” of Muslims “infuriated” along the way. Nobody bothered to ask Muslims, though. In fact, no Muslim ever complained. A similar story happened when a UK art gallery pulled some sexually explicit art pieces depicting young girls so as to not “shock the population” of Muslims who live in their east London neighborhood. As with the above, no Muslims actually complained, but it didn’t matter – the damage was done, and Muslims were labeled anti-art without even having a say in the matter.

In the New York Review of Books, Aryeh Neier looks at the assault on Human Rights Watch in the wake of the recent Israel-Lebanon war.

The principal claim of bias against Human Rights Watch was that it failed to fin Israel blameless for the Leb-anese civilian deaths it caused in view of Hezbollah’ practice of mixing with the civilian population and placing its rocket launchers i populated areas. This is the basis for Alan Dershowitz’s charge that “Human Right Watch cooks the books.” Yet the fact that Hezbollah fighters mingled with the civilia population in some places does not mean that all attacks on civilians were justified. I that were the case, it might also be argued that attacks on Israeli cafés and buses ar justified because Israeli soldiers patronize cafés and ride buses. Such a stance woul clearly be monstrous. Each attack must be justified by the presence of specific militar targets and by specific consideration of the incidental harm to civilians in the vicinity Inevitably, of course, in a war setting, mistakes will be made. Hence it is important t engage in systematic monitoring such as that conducted by Human Rights Watch t assess patterns and practices.

Alan Dershowitz claims that “Human Rights Watch ignored credible news sources” which pointed out Hezbollah’s practice of mingling with civilians. His article in The Jerusalem Post cites eight press accounts to prove his point. In response, Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, wrote:

Dershowitz cites numerous articles to knock down a straw man. Human Rights Watch never denied, in the words of our report, that sometimes Hizbollah “store[s] weapons in or near civilian homes and [its] fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas.” Indeed, we called these Hizbollah abuses “serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.” Our point was that there was no evidence of such Hizbollah presence for some two dozen cases, representing a third of Lebanese civilian deaths at the time, that Human Rights Watch field investigators examined in depth.

Ms. Whitson did not go on to point out, as she might have, that closely examined, the eight press accounts cited by Dershowitz prove less than he suggests. Two of them refer to quotations in Canadian publications from a retired Canadian military officer, General Lewis MacKenzie, who was apparently nowhere near Lebanon when the conflict took place but speculated about Hezbollah’s practices. As Dershowitz may not have known but should have found out before citing the general twice, this is characteristic of MacKenzie.

Also in the NYT:

China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.

The proposed rules are being considered after the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a new doctrine that will put greater emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of the country’s remarkable growth.

Whether the foreign corporations will follow through on their warnings is unclear because of the many advantages of being in China — even with restrictions and higher costs that may stem from the new law. It could go into effect as early as next May.

It would apply to all companies in China, but its emphasis is on foreign-owned companies and the suppliers to those companies.

For the first time ever, a financial institution has won the Nobel Peace Prize, in The New York Times:

Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their pioneering use of tiny, seemingly insignificant loans — microcredit — to lift millions out of poverty.

Through Yunus’s efforts and those of the bank he founded, poor people around the world, especially women, have been able to buy cows, a few chickens or the cell phone they desperately needed to get ahead.

The 65-year-old economist said he would use part of his share of the $1.4 million award money to create a company to make low-cost, high-nutrition food for the poor. The rest would go toward setting up an eye hospital for the poor in Bangladesh, he said.

The food company, to be known as Social Business Enterprise, will sell food for a nominal price, he said.

”Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty,” the Nobel Committee said in its citation. ”Microcredit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights.”

(The announcement from the Nobel Institute can be found here.)

From Time:

Who murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl? Since his kidnapping and execution by Islamic militants in Pakistan in 2002, various suspects have been identified. Pakistani authorities initially put the blame on Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheik, a British-born Islamist who was convicted and sentenced to death for the crime in Pakistan in 2003. Three fellow conspirators received jail terms of 25 years.

More recently, a new book by Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire, speculates that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was “the man who may have actually killed Pearl or at least participated in his butchery.” According to Musharraf, “When we later arrested and interrogated him, he admitted his participation.” A new HBO documentary, The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl, leaves the question unresolved; it focuses on the intersecting lives of Pearl and Sheik, the man convicted of the crime, but also cites unnamed U.S. and Pakistani officials who blame Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the murder.

More here.

From BBC:

Wafts of fried beef and onions, the rich smell of Japanese curry and even the obnoxious smell of rotten eggs all mingle together in the cramped room. But the stench is not the product of an absent-minded professor surrounded by the detritus of late night snacks snatched during marathon experiments. Instead, the aromas are intimately tied to the Professor’s work.

Housed in the School of Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Professor Nakamoto is building a range of gadgets and sensors which sniff, mix and pump out a range of hundreds of scents. One of the most ambitious devices his team has built is a sophisticated “odour recorder” which can sniff an object and then reproduce its smell using a host of chemicals. If you present the recorder with a shiny red apple, the electronic nose will take a cursory sniff, analyse the odour and then draw up a recipe of chemicals needed to recreate it.

More here.

In the BBC:

Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the [British] General Staff, told the Daily Mail that the military campaign fought in 2003 had “effectively kicked the door in”.

He also said that initial planning for the post-war period had been poor.

There are currently more than 7,000 British soldiers in Iraq, based largely in Basra in the south of the country.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said Britain had “a clear strategy” and worked with international partners “in support of the democratically elected government of Iraq, under a clear UN mandate.”

BBC political editor Nick Robinson described Sir Richard’s remarks as “quite extraordinary”.

He said the new head of British army was “effectively saying we are making the situation worse in Iraq and worse for ourselves around the world by being in Iraq”.

[Hat tip: Mark Blyth]

Over at improbable.com:

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.

REFERENCE: “Cure for a Headache,” Ivan R Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 86, 2002, p. 843.

REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, Joaquin M. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7957, February 28, 1976, pp. 454-5.

REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, Joaquin M. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7973, June 19, 1976, pp. 1347-8.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Ivan Schwab

NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.

REFERENCE: “Dung Preference of the Dung Beetle Scarabaeus cristatus Fab (Coleoptera-Scarabaeidae) from Kuwait,” Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Musalam, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 35, no. 3, 1997, pp. 511-6.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Faten Al-Musalam

Steven Pinker’s recent review of George Lakoff’s Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea in The New Republic has set off a debate, with Lakoff and others entering the fray. Pinker:

Let’s begin with the cognitive science. As many of Lakoff’s skeptical colleagues have noted, the ubiquity of metaphor in language does not imply that all thinking is concrete. People could never use a metaphor to reason with unless they had a deeper grasp of which aspects of the metaphor should be taken seriously and which should be ignored. When reasoning about a relationship as a kind of journey, it’s fine to mull over the counterpart to a common destination, or to the bumpy stretches along the way. But someone would be seriously deranged if he wondered whether he had time to pack, or where the next gas station has clean restrooms. Thinking cannot trade in metaphors directly. It must use a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic–progress toward a shared goal in the case of journeys and relationships, conflict in the case of argument and war–while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.

Also, most metaphors are not processed as metaphors as all. They may have been alive in the minds of the original coiners, who needed some sound to express a new concept (such as attack for aggressive criticism). But subsequent speakers may have kicked the ladder away and memorized the idiom by rote. That is why we hear so many dead metaphors, like coming to a head (which most people would stop using if they knew that it alludes to the buildup of pus in a pimple), mixed metaphors (like “Once you open a can of worms, they always come home to roost”), Goldwynisms (“A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”), and figurative uses of “literally,” as in Baruch Korff’s defense of Nixon during his Watergate ordeal: “The American press has literally emasculated the president.” Laboratory experiments have confirmed that people don’t think about the underlying image when understanding a familiar metaphor, only when they are faced with a new one (such as step on the brakes for a relationship).

Lakoff:

There is another scientific divide that Pinker and I are opposite sides of. Pinker interprets Darwin in a way reminiscent of social Darwinists. He uses the metaphor of survival as a competition for genetic advantage. He has become one of the principal spokesmen for a form of evolutionary psychology that claims that there are present genetic differences between men and women that stem from prehistoric differences in gender roles. This led him to support Lawrence Summer’s suggestion that there are fewer women than men in the sciences because of genetic differences.

Luckily, this unfortunate metaphorical interpretation of Darwin has few supporters.

This divide matters because my cognitive analysis, in Moral Politics, of conservative and progressive ideologies in terms of a nation-as-family metaphor is inconsistent with his version of evolutionary psychology. The seriousness of present-day politics in America makes these issues more than a merely academic ivory-tower matter. If I — and other neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and cognitive linguists — are right, then Pinker is wrong, and vice versa.

Weighing in are also Chris at Mixing Memory and Gene Expression.

In the LRB, Corey Robin looks at war, national security and our liberties.

Because war mobilises all spheres of society, defenders of the social order claim that any disruption to that order – from, say, striking labour unions – is as threatening to the war effort as opposition to the war itself. It was on these grounds that in 1950 the Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s denial of labour protection to Communist-led unions. These union leaders, the court argued, might use their positions of power ‘at a time of external or internal crisis’ to call ‘political strikes’ and disrupt the channels of commerce. In January 2003, the office of Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, sent out a fundraising letter to supporters of the National Right to Work Foundation, a business group seeking to rid America of unions. Claiming that the labour movement ‘presents a clear-and-present-danger to the security of the United States at home and the safety of our Armed Forces overseas’, the letter denounced ‘Big Labour Bosses . . . willing to harm freedom-loving workers, the war effort and the economy to acquire more power!’

Republicans in Congress also worked closely with Bush to deny union rights and whistle-blower protection to 170,000 employees in the Department of Homeland Security. Even though many of them are clerical workers, and even though employees in the Defense Department are not denied these rights, the administration claimed that eliminating them would make the department as ‘agile and aggressive as the terrorists themselves’. After Congress passed the anti-union bill in November 2002, a White House official declared it to be a model for all federal employees.

The government shares these weapons with private employers, who are often better positioned to use and abuse them. Because they aren’t subject to the constraints of the First Amendment, they are generally free to use their powers of hiring and firing, promotion and demotion, to silence dissent. During the McCarthy years, for example, the government imprisoned fewer than two hundred men and women for political reasons. But anywhere between 20 and 40 per cent of the workforce was monitored for signs of ideological nonconformity, which included support for civil rights and labour unions.