To The Concerned Citizen of The World:

“Killing innocent civilians is NOT an act of self-defense. Destroying a sovereign nation is NOT a measured response.”

Lebanese civilians have been under the constant attack of the state of Israel for several days. The State of Israel, in disregard to international law and the Geneva Convention, is launching a maritime and air siege targeting the entire population of the country. Innocent civilians are being collectively punished in Lebanon by the state of Israel in deliberate acts of terrorism as described in Article 33 of the Geneva Convention.

Go here to sign the petition.  [Thanks to Feras Samad.]

Slate has a series of interviews conducted by Robert Wright on the topic “The Evolution of Religion”:

Go here for the interviews.

Timothy Noah in Slate:

For the last two and a half years, the Marine Corps has been equipping troops with a sort of abbreviated Emily Post-style guide to etiquette in Iraq. The laminated “Iraq Culture Smart Card” consists of 16 panels and can fold down into something you can slip into your breast pocket. “It seems late in the day for such niceties,” observed Steven Aftergood in Secrecy News, a Web log maintained by the Federation of American Scientists, which posted the Smart Card online. That may be so. But if one is going to occupy a country, surely we’d rather that soldiers had some sort of primer than not about local sensitivities, and how to avoid setting them aflame.

More here.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Even the powerful tyrannosaurs seem to have encountered a midlife crisis.

Once they made it to about age 2 they could take on just about any other predator and had very little mortality until they reached sexual maturity in their teens, researchers reported in the current issue of the journal Science.

“Survivorship stabilized at between 2 (percent) and 4 percent per year until midlife, at which point they went through an honest-to-God midlife crisis,” said Gregory Erickson, who teaches comparative anatomy at Florida State University.

His team studied the remains of several species of North American tyrannosaur, including Albertosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus.

They concluded that mortality could be high for youngsters, both because some didn’t have much resistance to disease and because of predators.

But after about age 2, some 70 percent survived to reach sexual maturity between 13 and 16, when mortality increased to 23 percent a year. Their potential lifespan reached to the late 20s and early 30s.

“I think love was a dangerous game for tyrannosaurs,” said Erickson.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A couple of years ago, the government of India decided to ban a Yahoo newsgroup allegedly run by Naga insurgents. In the process, all Yahoo newsgroups were inadvertently blocked, leading to a furore among internet users in India. After about a week, matters were rectified, but the lessons seem not to have been learnt.

Now, internet users across India have been unable since this weekend to access any sites hosted on Blogspot or Typepad, two popular domains for India-based blogs. (Geocities is also blocked.) Again, it seems that there isn’t a blanket ban on these blogs, merely a government order to block of couple of blogs that has gone awry.

When I first heard from a friend on Saturday that he couldn’t access either his blog or mine, both of which are hosted on Blogspot, I assumed that it was just a temporary blip. The Indian government does not have a history of internet censorship, and bloggers have never faced the kind of issues with free speech that their Pakistani and Chinese colleagues have had to deal with. However, it soon became evident that the blocks were due to a government order. As it spread across the internet providers, a process that took a couple of days, bloggers monitored the situation, and set up a wiki against censorship and a public-access newsgroup to discuss the matter.

More here.  [Thanks to Aditya Dev Sood and Tony Cobitz.]

And here is one way to bypass the censorship. A more comprehensive list of workarounds is available here at Wikipedia.

We encourage blogs which are not on Blogspot or Typepad to publicize this information so that people in India can see it.

My friends Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss have written a new book about the history of Brooklyn place names, entitled Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges and More Got Their Names. Last week there was an excellent reading at the Brooklyn Historical Society. From the NY Sun:

“This is not a completist book,” Leonard Benardo, co-author with his wife, Jennifer Weiss, of “Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges and More Got Their Names”(New York University Press), said. Speaking at a book launch at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Park Slope resident said jazz aficionados often talk of “completism,” as in, “having the entire John Coltrane discography at their fingertips.” By contrast, their Brooklyn reference book doesn’t cover every street, place, and name in the borough. Rather, it focuses on what the authors felt to be the culturally curious and historically interesting.

The reading was held on Pierrepont Street, and the authors started off the evening by first reading the entry about that street. Mr. Benardo, who is also author of several chapters to “The Big Onion Guide To Brooklyn: Ten Historic Walking Tours” (New York University Press), noted that the street’s name comes from Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, a businessman who helped develop Brooklyn Heights into a residential area.

Mr. Pierrepont, who lived in France where he witnessed Robespierre’s beheading, helped back Robert Fulton’s ferry. His grandfather, Reverend James Pierrepont, a founder of Yale College, anglicized the family name to “Pierpo but, as Mr. Benardo noted, “Hezekiah returned the surname to its original spelling for his own family, though he kept ‘Pierpont’ for business purposes.”

From The Guardian:

A community action group in Tower Hamlets has launched a campaign to stop production of a film based on Monica Ali’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Brick Lane. In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing “pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes” and of containing “a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community”.

Community leaders attacked the book on its publication in 2003, claiming that it portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a “despicable insult”.

More here.

From BBC News:

One of the biggest responses to my pieces I’ve received so far came when I wrote about experimental science – about the way science tries to arrive at the best fit between a general principle and the experimental evidence. The pressure to be first to reach a particular scientific goal has always been intense. The rewards in terms of personal fame and financial profit can be considerable. Consequently, some scientists have not been above falsifying the evidence in order to claim an important scientific “breakthrough”. There are several notorious hoaxes in the history of science.

In 1912, at a meeting of the Geological Society in London, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward produced fragments of the skull of so-called Piltdown Man, allegedly discovered by workmen in gravel pits in Sussex. They proposed that Piltdown man represented an evolutionary missing link between ape and man, and that it confirmed the current cutting-edge theory that a recognisably human brain developed early on in mankind’s evolution.

Over 40 years later, Piltdown Man was shown to be a composite forgery, put together out of a medieval human skull, the 500-year-old lower jaw of an orangutan, and chimpanzee fossil teeth.

More here.

Carl Chiarenza. Grotte.

Photographic print.

Posted with permission from CC.

More on this influential American artist, art historian, and critic here and here.

Judith Thurman in The New Yorker:

If you had an hour in a hotel suite, alone with Charlotte Rampling, to talk about sex, what would you ask her? For forty years, the British actress, whose name has become a verb (“to rample”—ensorcell with an enigmatic gaze) and the title of a rock song by Kinky Machine (“I always wanted to be your trampoline,” they sing to her), has specialized in fatally obsessed, perverse, smoldering, reckless, and unmoored women. She has played the survivor of a concentration camp who engages in sadomasochistic sex with her former torturer, in “The Night Porter”; a waifish “basket case,” in “Stardust Memories”; and a widow in pathological denial of her husband’s death—a probable suicide—in “Under the Sand.” “I generally don’t make films to entertain people,” Rampling said. “I choose the parts that challenge me to break through my own barriers. A need to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it’s certainly a big part of sex. To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.”

More here.

Richard Greenberg reviews The Rock from Mars: A Detective Story on Two Planets by Kathy Sawyer, in American Scientist:

When it comes to telling stories, science writers and scientists are at a disadvantage in that, unlike novelists (who are free to create their own reality), they must reconstruct events accurately. But once in a great while, science offers up a tale as compelling as any found in fiction and someone comes along who is equipped to tell it well. In The Rock from Mars, journalist Kathy Sawyer realizes the full potential of a great science story in all its multidimensional complexity and richness.

The rock here is meteorite ALH84001, named for the place in Antarctica (Allan Hills) and the year (1984) it was found. Sawyer’s account encompasses the details of the rock’s discovery, the painstaking analysis that revealed its Martian origins, the surprising suggestion that it might contain evidence of past (fossil) life on Mars, the high-level political ramifications of that revelation, and the media frenzy and scientific firestorm that ensued. The book doesn’t focus exclusively on the hot topics of extraterrestrial life and the origin of life on Earth; Sawyer manages to work in crucial information on geology, planetary science, meteoritics, biochemistry, microbiology, geochemistry and microscopy.

More here.

In Dissent, Constance Morrill looks at Rwandan politics in the shadow of the genocide 12 years ago.

RWANDAN political culture under the RPF is defined by the familiar Orwellian dynamic in which the state is the arbiter of historical truth. The RPF’s own “regime of truth,” to use Foucault’s term, has consisted of shrinking political space to avoid criticism and maintain power, and of “instrumentalizing” the genocide in its relations with the international community, while denying crimes committed by its own military wing against Rwandan Hutu civilians in 1994 and in the northwest in 1997–1998. Evidence of this cynical strategy abounds, although the U.S. government, one of Rwanda’s chief sources of aid, diplomatically characterizes the country as “a republic dominated by a strong presidency.”

Political space is constrained by a 2002 law that makes incitement to irondakoko (“ethnicism” or discrimination) and amacakubiri (“divisionism”) crimes that carry prison sentences of up to five years and a two-million-franc fine for government or political party officials who are found guilty. Divisionism is defined as any “speech, written statement or action that causes conflict . . . ” In practice, this law is less a tool to fight ethnic division than a political weapon designed to suppress dissent. Being accused of divisionism is tantamount to being accused of perpetuating the “genocidal ideology.”

René Lemarchand, a political scientist and scholar on Rwanda and Burundi, writes, “What is being thwarted through the ban on ethnic identities is the memory of atrocities endured by Hutu and Tutsi, where ethnicity, though singularly unhelpful for discriminating between victims and perpetrators, is crucially important for addressing the roots of the injuries suffered by each community.” The ban is heavy-handed—both psychologically and practically—and could well backfire. So far, numbers of Rwandan journalists and other civilians have been accused of inciting divisionism, arrested, interrogated, and otherwise threatened; many have fled the country.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men–half self-described as “strong” Republicans and half as “strong” Democrats–were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.

The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning–the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex–was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and–once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable–the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

More here.

Jon Gertner in the New York Times Magazine:

Over the past year, the debate over nuclear power has increasingly been framed as an environmental one, as several commentators — most notably Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace (and now estranged from the organization); the British conservationist James Lovelock; and the Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand — have stepped forward to assert that global warming requires an embrace of new nuclear plants, because unlike gas- or coal-powered plants, nuclear reactors produce electricity without emitting greenhouse gasses. The nuclear industry, in turn, has capitalized on the chance to adopt a green tinge, or at least greenish one; among its recent slogans is the exhortation to “Go nuclear: because you care about the air.” Most environmental groups have not softened their opposition, however. “This is more a propaganda exercise than a serious discussion of the viability of the industry,” Jim Riccio, the nuclear policy analyst at Greenpeace, told me. By using global warming, he added, “the nuclear industry is trying to find some fear greater than the nuclear fear to be their selling point.”

More here.

“As President Nixon geared up for re-election, his administration enlisted the FBI, immigration and police to get the ex-Beatle deported. Now a new film by the team behind ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ reveals the full extent of the plotting.”

Anthony Barnes in The Independent:

John Lennon outraged ordinary Americans with his remark that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. He angered the American authorities almost as much after he set himself up in New York and openly criticised the war in Vietnam.

Only now, however, is it being fully revealed how the authorities in Washington spent years amassing a dossier of evidence against the most outspoken Beatle with the sole aim of ejecting him from the United States for good. The evidence is to be exposed in a new film by the team behind Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s documentary opposing George Bush’s “war on terror”.

The Lennon movie, which opens in US cinemas in September, will embarrass the agencies which unsuccessfully tried to block his stay.

More here.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies of the Middle East Institute, Columbia University. Interview from PBS:

Some have suggested that Israel’s response to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers is excessive and disproportionate. What’s your reaction?

Israel has hit and closed Beirut airport, depriving the country of its sole air link to the outside world. It has blockaded the coast, and has hit the route to Damascus, effectively cutting off Lebanon from the outside world. It has hit the main electricity facilty at Jiyye, knocking out the fuel tanks, and causing electricity cuts in much of the country. So far about 60 Lebaanese civilians have been killed against three Israeli civilians killed in Hizballah shelling (this is besides Israeli soldiers killed and captured, and Hizbullah militants killed).

This offensive is nothing if not disproportionate, and grossly excessive, not to speak of counter-productive in terms of Israel’s stated aims vis-a-vis releasing its captured soldiers and weakening HIzbullah.

Those of Israel’s attacks directed against the civilian population constitute war crimes (or terrorism if you prefer) as does Hizballah shelling of Israeli civilians (but not the killing or capture of Israeli soldiers or Hizballah fighters).

More here.

In The Guardian, a edited extract from Doris Lessing’s introduction to Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

“We are among the ruins,” says Lawrence, opening the tale which is supposed to be all about sex, and announcing what I think is the major theme of the novel, usually overlooked. It is permeated with the first world war, the horror of it. And against the horrors, the rotting bodies, the senseless slaughter of the trenches, the postwar poverty and bleakness – against the cataclysm, “the fallen skies”, Lawrence proposes to put in the scales love, tender sex, the tender bodies of people in love; England would be saved by warm-hearted fucking.

Now, looking back from our perspective of over 60 years after that second terrible war, we see Mellors, who was a soldier in India in the first world war, and Constance Chatterley with her war-crippled husband, clinging on to each other, and just ahead the next war that would involve the whole world.

It is not that, once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Now I think this is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. How was it I had not seen that, when I first read it?

From The London Times:

MURDER IN SAMARKAND: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror by Craig Murray: Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. To get the flavour of his astonishing career there from 2002-04, consider some of the headings under his name in this book’s index: “accusations against; bugging suspicions; sacking; Tashkent, asked to leave; topless bathers; visas for sex allegations; marriage, end of”. Lest anyone still fears this is a humdrum diplomatic memoir, here is Murray’ s account of his first meeting with a teenage belly dancer in a Tashkent niterie: “I astonished her by saying that I wanted her to give up the club and be my mistress. I explained that I could not marry her, as I was married, but I would keep her. I gave her my card and urged her to phone me.”

“So much for your dolly-bird secretary,” he records his wife remarking, in a characteristic marital conversation after a less-than-successful embassy dinner. “Even if you aren’t screwing her, everybody thinks you are, and that suits you and your bloody ego!”

The pity of all this soap-opera stuff is that it cripples Murray’s purpose in writing his book: to expose the ghastly conduct of the Uzbek dictatorship and Anglo-American collusion with it. From the day Murray arrived in Tashkent in 2002, aged 43, he was appalled to discover that the regime of President Islam Karimov subsisted on a diet of mass murder, torture and slavery.

More here.