Embarking upon a 12-day tour of Africa earlier this year, Chinese President Hu Jintao likely expected a warm welcome. Over the past five years China had emerged as a new power on the continent: Trade between China and Africa is growing by nearly 50 percent annually, Beijing may soon become Africa’s top aid donor, and in the winter China hosted nearly every African leader for a historic summit in Beijing. On Hu’s previous trip to the continent, in 2004, African leaders basked in China’s new interest.

But this time around, Hu found a far different welcome. Though he received polite applause from leaders across Africa, he had to cancel part of his trip to Zambia amid fears of street protests over poor safety records at a Chinese-owned mine there. In South Africa and other countries, he faced condemnation in the media for China’s human rights abuses, while across the continent African opinion leaders wondered why China was not doing more to help stop the genocide in Darfur. Before Hu’s visit, Nigerian militants had kidnapped Chinese workers; in April, Ethiopian militants killed nine Chinese oil workers.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Simon Baron-Cohen in Entelechy:

In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination be biological? How could the products of the imagination – a novel, a painting, a sonata, a theory – be thought of as the result of biological matter? After all, such artefacts are what culture is made of. So why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than culture.

Let’s start with a few definitional issues. What do we mean by ‘imagination’? I do not mean mere imagery, though clearly the imagination may depend on the manipulation of imagery. Imagery is usually the product of one of the five senses (though it can also be generated without any sensory input at all, from the mere act of thinking or dreaming). Imagery typically comprises a mental representation of a state of affairs in the outside, physical world. I don’t want to put you off from reading this essay by littering it with jargon, so let’s just think of a mental representation as a picture in your head. That is what we are going to be calling an image, but that is not the same as imagination. Consider why not.

When we create a visual image of a specific object in our mind, the image as a picture of the object has a more or less truthful relationship to that object or outside state of affairs. If the image is a good, faithful, representation, it depicts the object or state of affairs accurately in all its detail. So, mental images typically have ‘truth relationships’ to the outside world.

More here.

John Otis in the Houston Chronicle:

When a passenger train crawled into the station bringing Gabriel Garcia Marquez back to his hometown for the first time in 24 years, tears welled up in the Colombian writer’s eyes.

So many well-wishers showed up at the white-washed terminal in Aracataca — the setting for the surreal village of Macondo in his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude — that police officers struggled to clear a path for him. Everywhere the Nobel Prize-winning author paraded under overcast skies in a horse-drawn carriage, people chanted his nickname, breaking it into two distinct syllables, “Ga-bo! Ga-bo! Ga-bo!”

But the full-throated welcome for the man people here reverently call “El Nobel” also may prove to be a final farewell.

Now a silver-haired 80-year-old who was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999, Garcia Marquez is clearly slowing down. Although friends say he continues to write for two or three hours a day, it’s uncertain when he’ll finish his next book, the second part of a planned three-volume memoir.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Gustav Jaboda reviews Abducted by Susan A. Clancy, in Metapsychology:

Half a century ago, during the cold war, the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues studied a millennial sect who believed that the earth was going to be destroyed, but that they would be saved by extra-terrestrials. The book by Susan Clancy deals, in lively semi-popular fashion, with a similar topic. It opens with a refreshingly candid account of how she came to embark on such unusual research. She presents extracts from interviews with people of varying backgrounds who shared a set of — to us — weird beliefs. For instance, a number of them were convinced that they had been taken aboard a space ship where they became the objects of sexual or medical experimentation.

The question asked is how it is possible for 21st-century Americans to have such strange thoughts. Clancy’s main approach was connected with her special interest in ‘false memories’, a phenomenon extensively investigated in relation to alleged child sex abuse. Such memories were often elicited by psychiatrists or other therapists, and similarly she found that most of her ‘abduction’ cases had ‘either sought out or fell into the hands of an abduction researcher [who was a believer] or therapist.’ These ‘experts’ apparently tended to reinforce the beliefs, if not actually shaping them.

More here.

Laura Hanna and Astra Taylor in The Nation:

Pointing imaginary guns and roughing up “Iraqi civilians”, a group of antiwar veterans brought the realities of the Iraq debacle to Manhattan, in a Memorial Day protest that briefly turned the streets of the city into a combat zone. In “Operation First Casualty,” a half-dozen members of Iraq Veterans Against the War employed the tactics of street theater to stage mini-dramas in Times Square, Union Square and the World Trade Center site, simulating sniper fire and staging mock arrests of fellow protesters who portrayed Iraqis. The group plans to take Operation First Casualty to the streets of Chicago June 17.

Jahanshah Rashidian in Butterflies and Wheels:

With the arrival of spring, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s police have launched this year their traditional crackdown on women’s dress. Such crackdowns have become a regular feature of life for Iranian women. The crackdown is to force women to respect the strict Islamic dress code.

Under Iran’s Islamic laws (Sharia) women are obliged to cover their body from head- to-toe with a black chador or at least long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their whole figures. The Islamic dress code is severely imposed at this time. Violators can receive lashes, fines or imprisonment.

Since the existence of the IRI, not a day has passed without attack, physical assault, arrest, acid-throwing, harassment and psychological pressure on women in Iran. The IRI has clearly specified that for women no other sort of dress is permitted except the Islamic hijab.

The first question is: why does the IRI since 1979 stubbornly impose Islamic hijab on women of different social backgrounds, ethnic groups, and religious minorities?

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

The war in Iraq is now four years old. It has cost more than 3,000 American lives and has run up a tab of $200 million a day, or $73 billion a year, since it began. That’s a substantial investment. No wonder most members of Congress from both parties, along with President George W. Bush, believe that we have to “stay the course” and not just “cut and run.” As Bush explained in a speech delivered on July 4, 2006, at Fort Bragg, N.C.: “I’m not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done.”

We all make similarly irrational arguments about decisions in our lives: we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses and unsuccessful relationships. If we were rational, we would just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward and then decide if the investment warrants the potential payoff. But we are not rational–not in love or war or business–and this particular irrationality is what economists call the “sunk-cost fallacy.” The psychology underneath this and other cognitive fallacies is brilliantly illuminated by psychologist Carol Tavris and University of California, Santa Cruz, psychology professor Elliot Aronson in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007). Tavris and Aronson focus on so-called self-justification, which “allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done.”

More here:

From Newsweek:

June 11, 2007 issue – It’s near midnight in a small Fairfax, Va., bar, and Omar Waqar stands on a makeshift stage, brooding in a black tunic and brown cap. He stops playing his electric guitar long enough to survey the crowd—an odd mix of local punks and collared preps—before screaming into the microphone: “Stop the hate! Stop the hate!” Stopping hate is a fairly easy concept to get behind at a punk-rock show, and the crowd yells and pumps its fists right on cue. But it’s safe to say that Waqar and his band, Diacritical, aren’t shouting about the same kind of hate as the audience. Waqar wants to stop the kind that made people call him “sand flea” as a kid and throw rocks through the windows of the Islamic bookstore he worked at on 9/11. Waqar, 26, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, is a Muslim—a punk-rock Muslim.

More here:  (Thanks to Hassan Usmani)

Tayseer Barakat. Untitled 1992.

Ink on paper.

More of this Palestinian artist’s work here and here.

From The Daily Dish:

“The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Republicans Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture.’ But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture…

The CIA KGB hardly ever uses manacles or chains, and rarely resorts to physical beatings. The actual physical beating is, of course, repugnant to overt Republican Communist principles and is contrary to C.I.A. K.G.B. regulations…

Prisoners are tried before “military tribunals,” which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court…

In typical Republican Communist legalistic fashion, the O.L.C. N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or ‘confession,’ it simply declared the prisoner an enemy combatant a “war-crimes suspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war,” – “Communist Interrogation,” The Annals of Neurology and Psychology, 1956.

Eric Ormsby in The New Criterion:

Not surprisingly for “one acquainted with the night,” Robert Frost cultivated a lifelong penchant for dark sayings. These sayings included aphorisms and maxims, apothegms and proverbs, wise saws and the occasional bon mot, alongside interjections, exclamations, and guffaws, interrupted thoughts and broken utterances. They were dark because they riddled, sometimes as much by their sound as by their content. Many, of course, made their way into his finest poems. “Good fences make good neighbors” is the obvious example, but the closer you look the more you find. So strong is this tendency in Frost’s poetry that even his less aphoristic lines have taken on a lapidary sheen. “And miles to go before I sleep,” though hardly an aphorism, is often intoned as though it were. These dark sayings of our own Heraclitus of New Hampshire have by now become so familiar as to appear immemorial folk wisdom. And yet, clad in cunning homespun though they are, they conceal contradictory flashes of wit as well as mischief. Like the milkweed pod with its “bitter milk,” of which he wrote so memorably, their rough husks hold hidden, and sometimes ticklish, silks.

Now, with the publication of his Notebooks, we can gauge just how fundamental such fragmented wisdom was to Frost’s own peculiar cast of mind.

More here.

Lee Smolin in the New york Review of Books:

In his new book, Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson explains that

studying Einstein can be worthwhile [because] it helps us remain in touch with that childlike capacity for wonder…as the sagas of [science’s] heroes reminds us…. These traits are…vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity….

As he elaborates in a recent interview with Thomas Friedman, “If we are going to have any advantage over China, it is because we nurture rebellious, imaginative free thinkers, rather than try to control expression.”^[1]

Noble sentiments, and certainly sufficient justification for continuing to promulgate uplifting myths about science and its heroes. But what does this have to do with the actual character and life of the real person who happened to be the most important physicist of the last two hundred years? There is no doubt that any attempt to understand who Einstein actually was and what he actually did is hampered by a smokescreen that was created by his executors, his colleagues, his biographers, and perhaps even Einstein himself. The myth of Einstein presents us with an elderly sage, a clownish proto-hippy with long hair, no socks, and a bumbling, otherworldly manner. As Isaacson writes it:

Adding to his aura was his simple humanity. His inner security was tempered by the humility that comes from being awed by nature. He could be detached and aloof from those close to him, but toward mankind in general he exuded a true kindness and gentle compassion.

This certainly describes a role that the older Einstein might plausibly have chosen to play as a defense against the onslaught of fame and responsibility. But what Isaacson is describing is a role, not a human being. Who was the person behind that role, and what were his reasons for playing the endearing sage?

More here.

Via Minervan Musings:

It’s particularly fitting that the title of Damien Hirst’s new headline-grabbing work came from an exasperated exclamation of his mother’s: “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”

The answer, pictured here, is a life-size platinum skull set with 8,601 high-quality diamonds. If, as expected, it sells for around $100 million this month, it will become the single most expensive piece of contemporary art ever created. Or the most outrageous piece of bling.

At home in Devon, Hirst insists it’s absolutely the former. “I was very worried for a while, because if it looked like bling — tacky, garish and over the top — we would have failed. But I’m very pleased with the end result. I think it’s ethereal and timeless.”

more from The NY Times Magazine here.

We can look at the fossil record and trace many of our genetic traits back to ancient species. In fact, scientific reasoning can explain nearly every stage of life from the Big Bang to the present day. I say “nearly” because the period that scientists claim lasted from roughly 205 to 250 million years ago, commonly known as the Triassic period, was quite obviously the work of the Lord God Almighty.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those religious nut cases who denies that evolution is real. Of course evolution is real, just not during the “Triassic period.”

This so-called Triassic period saw the formation of scleractinian corals and a slight changeover from warm-blooded therapsids to cold-blooded archosauromorphs. Clearly, such breathtakingly subtle modifications could only have been achieved by an active intelligence.

more from The Onion here.

Superior work, Krissy. Your brushstroke is improving with each day of strenuous, disciplined practice. Do not slacken! Do you want to be the best in this classroom or not? Up, down, left, right! More wrist, less forearm! I am hard on you only because I see great promise; you must place total trust in my methods. Yes, yes … Better, girl.

Jonas, what do you have for me today … Hmm, a lone snowcapped mountain. Let me ask you, Jonas: Are you a sketcher or a painter? An amateur sketcher has the energy and drive merely for one mountain; a serious painter, two or more. Oh, really—the single peak symbolizes the majestic loneliness of the human condition? While we’re at it, why don’t we regress to a rudimentary Hudson River School style of shallow transcendentalism? Destroy it, and do not show your face again until you are ready to depict multiple summits. Wrong, that’s the recycling bin. The garbage is on the left. My left.

more from McSweeney’s here.

A poem by Mahmoud Darwish in The New Yorker (via Amitava Kumar):

If I were told:
By evening you will die,
so what will you do until then?
I would look at my wristwatch,
I’d drink a glass of juice,
bite an apple,
contemplate at length an ant that has found its food,
then look at my wristwatch.
There’d be time left to shave my beard
and dive in a bath, obsess:
“There must be an adornment for writing,
so let it be a blue garment.”
I’d sit until noon alive at my desk
but wouldn’t see the trace of color in the words,
white, white, white . . .
I’d prepare my last lunch,
pour wine in two glasses: one for me
and one for the one who will come without appointment,
then I’d take a nap between two dreams.
But my snoring would wake me . . .
so I’d look at my wristwatch:
and there’d be time left for reading.
I’d read a chapter in Dante and half of a mu’allaqah
and see how my life goes from me
to the others, but I wouldn’t ask who
would fill what’s missing in it.
That’s it, then?
That’s it, that’s it.
Then what?
Then I’d comb my hair and throw away the poem . . .
this poem, in the trash,
and put on the latest fashion in Italian shirts,
parade myself in an entourage of Spanish violins,
and walk to the grave!

(Translated, from the Arabic, by Fady Joudah.)

This is from part one of Sid Schwab’s nine-part series in Surgeonsblog:

With as much detail as is useful, and as descriptively as I can manage, I’d like to relate what it’s like to do an operation, from before laying knife on skin to after placing the bandage. I’m a general surgeon, so I choose sigmoid colectomy as my prototype; it’s always been one of my favorites, although the particular operation isn’t the point. The idea is to let the reader into the operating room as much as possible. I figure it’ll be several parts. Let’s see how it goes.

First stop: the pre-op holding area, where my patient — and most often family — and I exchange greetings minutes before the operation. If I’ve done my office-job well, the patient is likely to be relatively calm and optimistic. I touch a hand, a knee, a belly, say something like “Seems like a great day for a colon resection.” To the oft-said “Hope you’re not hung over, Doc,” I respond with a raised hand, deliberately shaking, saying “Steady as a rock.” Laughs all around. Then more seriously, “Any questions since we talked, anything you want to go over again?” And a reminder of the plan: “You’ll meet the anesthesia person any minute. You’ll be sound asleep for the operation; we’ll be making the incision right here. I’ll numb it up with local before we’re done so when you wake up there should be little or no pain. It does wear off, though, in a few hours, and we’ll hook you up to a little push-button device so you can give yourself pain medicine whenever you want it. I expect you’ll be up walking in the halls tonight. (“Tonight?! Really??” “Yep! It’s the best thing there is for you. Gets the circulation going, gets those lungs working.”) [To the family:] OK, I figure the operation will be give or take an hour, little screwing around before and after, I’ll come out and talk to you soon as we’re done — probably an hour and a half. Don’t get worried if it’s a little longer. [To the patient:] See you in the OR.” Exit, stage left.

More here. The next eight parts can be found here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

Purnima Mankekar in Ms. Magazine:

As women gain more seats in public office, why is the world not a safer place for women (or, for that matter, for children and men), Zillah Eisenstein asks in Sexual Decoys. She suggests this is because some of these women, as well as some people of color, are sexual and racial decoys: They mask the damage caused by sexism, racism and avaricious forms of capitalism while also contributing to it. Pointing to the (in)famous examples of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, she describes how the appointment of women and people of color to positions of power neither reflects a just social order nor results in one. Instead, as decoys, these individuals participate in the reinforcement or aggravation of the unequal and violent treatment of women and people of color.

Gender decoys, for instance, were central to the scandalous abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The different roles performed by women — ranging from Lynndie England, an inmate-processing clerk, to Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general in charge of the prison — raise complicated questions about culpability and accountability. Karpinski was one of the few senior officers punished for the abuses. And, as Eisenstein points out, England and some of the other low-ranking women who perpetrated the abuses were pawns who supported “disgusting practices that they should have refused to perform.” As decoys, these women covered up the “misogyny of building empire, while also actually building it.”

More here.

David Smith in The Observer:

Two students are sunbathing in bikinis. A man picks his nose in San Francisco. In Miami, a group of protesters carry signs outside an abortion clinic. Men slip into pornographic bookshops or shuffle out of strip clubs. There is even a burglar apparently caught in the act.

Has Google gone too far? That was the fear being expressed online yesterday after the internet giant launched Street View, which can zoom in so closely that individual lives are captured and offered up to a global audience. The innovation has done nothing to allay fears of a surveillance society, nor concerns that Google is becoming too intrusive.

Street View was introduced on Google maps for the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami last week, and there are plans to expand the service to other US cities and other countries, likely to include Britain.

The high-resolution images were taken from vans driving along public streets during the past year and will be periodically updated, but the company has not specified a timetable.

The backlash against Street View began after Mary Kalin-Casey, from Oakland, California, looked up her own street and saw her pet cat, Monty, sitting on a perch in the window of her second-floor flat.

She complained on the blog website boingboing: ‘I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. Dang, it’s so detailed, I can even see he’s a tabby!’

More here.

Photo from Slipperybrick article here.