How government-sponsored groups masquerade as civil society.

Moisés Naím in Foreign Policy (via OliviaB):

The Myanmar Women’s Affairs Federation is a gongo. So is Nashi, a Russian youth group, and the Sudanese Human Rights Organization. Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic Relief Organization is also a gongo, as is Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. Gongos are everywhere, in China, Cuba, France, Tunisia, and even the United States.

Gongos are government-sponsored nongovernmental organizations. Behind this contradictory and almost laughable tongue twister lies an important and growing global trend that deserves more scrutiny: governments funding and controlling nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), often stealthily. Some gongos are benign, others irrelevant. But many, including those mentioned above, are dangerous. Some act as the thuggish arm of repressive governments. Others use the practices of democracy to subtly undermine democracy at home. Abroad, the gongos of repressive regimes lobby the United Nations and other international institutions, often posing as representatives of citizen groups with lofty aims when, in fact, they are nothing but agents of the governments that fund them. Some governments embed their gongos deep in the societies of other countries and use them to advance their interests abroad.

More here.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, how many honorary degrees separate George W. Bush from other, controversial leaders? In Foreign Policy:

In June of 1975, the Allahabad High Court in India found Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of using the state appartus to win the 1971 elections. The Gandhian socialist JP Narayan agitated against the Prime Minister and mobilized mass protests against the government. In response to the Court and popular agitations, the Prime Minister declared a State of Emergency, began cracking down on civil liberties and opposition parties on the right, left and center, and brought Indian democracy to a halt. (That apparent admirer of the vile, vile Enver Hohxa, Mother Teresa, supported this new Indian dictatorship.) The Emergency ended 20 months after it was declared with new, fair elections. The resistance to the Emergency is taken to be a sign of the resilience of Indian electoral democracy. Now an Indian historian, Ramachandra Guha, argues that JP Narayan and the opposition to Gandhi are also to blame for the suspension of India’s democracy. In Outlook India:

In your Emergency chapter, you say that JP and Indira Gandhi wrote the script for the Emergency together, which suggests a kind of equivalence between their actions.

In a sense. Because Mrs Gandhi had the instruments of state at her command and because she grossly abused them through the Emergency, she would be the greater culprit. But one can’t let JP off the hook either. One placed too much faith in the state, and the other placed too little faith in the state and in representative institutions. One said I am Parliament, I am India, the other said disband Parliament…

You strongly suggest that the single biggest reason for Indira Gandhi calling elections in 1977 was western criticism of her and the Emergency. That’s interesting..

Yes, I do argue that. There are other reasons, too, but this is something no one has said before, and I have documented it, from the private letters by Horace Alexander, and public criticism by Fenner Brockway and John Grigg. Horace Alexander taught Indira Gandhi bird-watching. He was a Quaker, an emissary between Gandhi and the Raj. Fenner Brockway was a very important socialist and a very close friend of Nehru.

MONROVIA, Liberia—Jonathan Koffa, known to his fans as Takun J, wore fake diamond earrings and a rhinestone-studded D&G necklace that was missing most of its bling. One day in March, he and several other Liberian rappers gathered around a plastic table next to a blazing strip of asphalt in downtown Monrovia. Only a flimsy umbrella separated us from the punishing midday sun, and the musicians sweated into their do-rags.

They were members of L.I.B. Records, one of Liberia’s most popular rap outfits, which is not a record label in the traditional sense but a group of like-minded artists who sometimes perform together. Unlike the American rappers they admired—50 Cent, DMX, Jay-Z—their lives lacked any hint of glamour. Most were in their 20s and lived at home. They walked everywhere, because in Liberia, even a rapper with three simultaneous radio hits couldn’t afford a bicycle. On nights when he ran out of food, Takun J told me that he ate hot cereal with sugar before bed, just to have something in his stomach.

more from Slate here.

David Brooks was delighted by the response he received when he popped the Reinhold Niebuhr question to Barack Obama a week or so ago. “I love him.” Obama said. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Needless to say, Brooks was impressed. “So I asked, What do you take away from him?”

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

more from TNR here.

‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

more from the LRB here.

From Science:

Researchers have used a new gene-hunting technique to pinpoint a novel genetic variant that raises some people’s odds of having a heart attack. The results, reported online today in Science, suggest a possible new contributor to heart disease and could lead to a genetic test to pinpoint people who are susceptible. Over the past decade, many genes have been reported to increase the risk of heart disease, but few of these findings have held up in subsequent studies. They found a genetic variant on chromosome 9 that was much more common in people who had suffered a heart attack. They and U.S. collaborators then confirmed the association in another Iceland sample and three U.S. groups totaling nearly 4600 cases and 12,800 controls.

A separate team found the same genetic clue. Researchers led by Ruth McPherson of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute in Canada and Jonathan Cohen of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas examined about 300 heart disease patients and 300 controls using 100,000 markers. The results, which point to the same gene on chromosome 9 fingered by deCODE, held up in five more groups of people in the U.S. and Denmark. Given that two separate teams found evidence for the same variant in a large number of sick people, “one can be absolutely confident that this risk allele is real,” says McPherson.

The results could eventually help doctors predict which individuals are prone to heart problems.

More here.

From Science:

Researchers have developed a way to vaccinate mice against deadly prion diseases, which include scrapie, kuru, mad cow disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The findings, presented today at the annual American Academy of Neurology meeting in Boston, suggest that these degenerative brain diseases can be stopped if caught early enough.

Searching for a more effective vaccine, a team led by neuropathologist Thomas Wisniewski of the New York University School of Medicine in New York City took a new approach. They genetically modified a strain of Salmonella bacteria to express prion proteins. When researchers fed these bacteria to mice, the bugs multiplied in the rodents’ guts, and the animals developed antibodies against the prions. A month later, the researchers fed the mice disease-causing prions; mice that had developed antibodies against the prion proteins stayed healthy for the remainder of the study, 400 days, while those not inoculated with the modified Salmonella developed a degenerative brain disease, like mad cow disease, and died within 200 days.

More here.

For Hart Crane’s first book of poems, the slender White Buildings (1926), there was a whole bouquet of reviews to die for. True, the owlish Edmund Wilson was not impressed: “almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was, not merely not applied to a great subject, but not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all.” But he was outnumbered by the reviewers who trumpeted Crane’s arrival: Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Mark Van Doren, Archibald MacLeish, Matthew Josephson, and still others—several of them already Crane’s friends.

It may not have been all to Crane’s good that his advent was greeted with so much rapture and so little circumspection. (“Not since Whitman,” intoned Frank in The New Republic, “has so original, so profound and . . . so important a poetic promise come to the American scene.”) Crane’s belief in himself, already huge, ballooned astronomically.

more from Boston Review here.

NOTHING, I remember nothing,” the middle-aged witness insisted to the court. “I was sick during the genocide.” She was standing before a man accused of multiple murders, an audience of her neighbors, and a row of judges at a session of gacaca, one of nine thousand local sessions set up by the Rwandan government in 2001 to try tens of thousands charged with participating in the 1994 genocide. On a Saturday last June, some thirty people from surrounding farms gathered outside a small government building tucked into a space between fields to participate in the trials of three prisoners. The scene was bucolic when I arrived—lush fields, twittering birds, butterflies. The simple structure, a galvanized roof over wooden benches, looked oddly like a picnic pavilion in a quiet American park. But the serenity was belied by the tense silence that hung over the crowd, as everyone waited to begin. The prisoners sat in front. One, a stooped middle-aged man, was nervous and fidgety; the other two, in their mid to late twenties, affected aggressive indifference.

more from Dissent here.

After Brodsky’s arrest and trial on charges of “parasitism” in 1964, Akhmatova famously commented that “our redhead is making quite a biography for himself”. The remark was prescient. In a detailed treatment of the accusations, trial and sentence Losev argues persuasively that Brodsky, whose poetry had scarcely made it into official or even samizdat print, was a most unlikely target for persecution. In the backlash against Khrushchev’s short-lived thaw, as Losev explains, KGB lackeys were quick to exploit opportunities for advancement. Brodsky fell victim to the careerist ambitions of one lowly operative who orchestrated the charges that led to his conviction (after two harrowing incarcerations in psychiatric hospitals) and internal exile (after passage through two notorious prisons) to a tiny village in the Archangel region. Exile turned out to be the start of a formative creative period in which Brodsky countered isolation by steeping himself in English and American poets such as Hardy, Frost, Auden and Eliot: all masters of the first-person voice that Brodsky would soon make his own. Although Brodsky’s poetry always seemed to be evolving in new directions, Losev observes that the essays on Frost, Rilke, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak that Brodsky published from the 1980s on were based on work undertaken some thirty years earlier.

more from the TLS here.

Anne Enright in the London Review of Books:

Last year, when she was five, my daughter announced that she was going to become a Muslim.

‘It’s an awful lot of washing,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, I am able to reach the sink with my feet.’ She went up to her room and stuck six sheets of paper together to make a prayer mat. It was time, I decided, to send her to Catholic Instruction. This is an after-school class that, besides fulfilling her tribal spiritual needs, provides a solid half-hour of free childcare, every Monday. It is conducted by a catechetics expert in lace-up shoes who looks like she means business. When I drove my daughter home after her first class, she was quite unhinged, muttering like an old gossip and quietly raving in the back of the car.

‘I didn’t know he was arrested,’ she said.

‘What? Who?’

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I knew they killed him all right. I just didn’t know they arrested him first.’

Hot news. It is still a great story, it seems.

More here.

From CNN:

Stace Owens has no intention of leaving this world when he dies. He plans to stick around for decades or longer, preserved in plastic and displayed in a museum or medical school.

The 33-year-old real estate agent is among more than 7,000 people who have agreed to donate their bodies for plastination, a process in which body fluids are replaced by liquid plastic. The plastic hardens, leaving tissues intact and allowing bodies to be displayed in their natural color and without formaldehyde.

The process was made popular by Gunther von Hagens’ “Body Worlds,” a controversial anatomy exhibit that puts real human specimens on view. Most are flayed and dissected, revealing their organs. Others are kept intact and displayed in dramatic action poses, such as a basketball player driving to the hoop or a runner in full stride.

More here.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens on religion (no thanks), Iraq (not a mistake), and his own loud reputation.

Boris Kachka in New York Magazine:

One of the most annoying things about Christopher Hitchens is that, even at his most vitriolic, he makes at least as much sense as the majority of sober journo-intellectuals buzzing around Washington. This despite the fact that he is one of the last defenders of Bush’s Iraq war—a position that has cost the former Nation contributor a multitude of friends and gotten him new ones like Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens, who started questioning his faith at age 9 (and wrote a polemic against Mother Teresa called The Missionary Position), has finally written the ultimate attack book, God Is Not Great. He spoke to us about his favorite religious stories, Karl Rove (infidel?), and the one time he found himself praying.

You say in your acknowledgments that you’ve been writing this book your whole life. Do you think it’ll mean as much to others as it means to you?
No, it’s one small step for C.H. into one enormous argument dominated by giants in philosophy and theology and science.

So what makes it different from recent atheist screeds by the likes of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins?
I don’t think Richard Dawkins would mind me saying that he looks at religious people with this sort of incredulity, as if, “How possibly can you be so stupid?” And though we all have moods like that, I think perhaps I don’t quite.

More here.

One of my longtime friends (from my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins), and sometime writer at 3QD, is Abhay Parekh. He has started his own blog:

Some people love to solve mathematical brainteasers, but most consider it a silly waste of time. There is something really inefficient (and even dumb) about allocating so much time and toil on these mental boondoggles! Yet sometimes brainteasers can serve as “toy” versions of much more important problems. Since they have a small number of variables, you can “play” with these problems and subsequently make headway on more involved ones. Most great scientists have used toy problems that somehow captured the essence of a bigger problem to make significant discoveries. In this post I will look at such an “impractical” problem and show that it can actually instruct. This is an old teaser but I actually have a twist to the solution that I think is new. I’ll present that in my next post. Today all I will do is pose the problem and give some hints.

The Oddball Problem: You are given n identical looking balls. n-1 of them weigh the same, but one of them is either heavier or lighter than the others (you don’t know which). Given a two pan weighing machine what is the minimum number of weighings you need to do to be sure that you have identified that odd ball? You can only use the weighing pan as follows: put some balls in the left pan, some in the right pan and observe one of three possible outcomes: either the left pan is heavy or the right pan is heavy, or they are even.

Since you don’t know if the odd ball is heavier or lighter things get a bit tricky. This problem is often posed with 12 balls. Here’s a problem worth working on:

Show that for 12 balls you can always identify the oddball in 3 weighings!

More here.

From Science:

Cutting calories does more than just shrink your waist size–it also increases the lifespan of organisms ranging from yeast to flies to mice. Earlier studies in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans pointed to a mysterious interplay between longevity and two regulatory genes called DAF-16 and SMK-1 . In these roundworms, which had abnormally reduced insulin signaling, SMK-1 and DAF-16 together lengthen lifespan when nutrients are scarce. But in subsequent experiments on worms with normal insulin signaling, molecular biologist Andrew Dillin at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, California, showed that one member of the pair–DAF-16–wasn’t necessary for longer life. So he and his colleagues predicted that SMK-1 might regulate another gene to help lean worms live long.

The team screened the complete C. elegans genome and found 15 genes closely related to DAF-16. Working with a technique called RNA interference, they inactivated each of the genes in turn. This revealed that a gene called PHA-4 , which regulates gut development in the roundworm embryo, is essential to diet-induced longevity. Without this gene, diet-restricted worms lived no longer than control worms maintained on a normal diet, while diet-restricted worms with the intact gene lived about 62% longer than controls.

More here.

From Nature:

Allergic reactions to metal are on the rise, although no one knows why. Now research suggests that bacterial infections experienced while wearing metal objects may be responsible. How an allergy to metal develops is a matter of much speculation. Yasuo Endo at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and his colleagues had noticed that in previous animal experiments looking at metal allergies, researchers often used a chemical trigger or ‘adjuvant’ to encourage an allergy to form. In mice, researchers used hydrogen peroxide to stimulate the animals’ immune system and encourage a reaction. Endo and his team suspected that something was similarly provoking allergic reactions to form in humans — but not hydrogen peroxide, as we rarely come into contact with it. Instead, they focused their attention on a set of molecules called lipopolysaccharides, commonly found in bacteria, which are known to be able to provoke other immune responses.

The team injected small groups of mice with a nickel salt solution, with some groups also receiving a dose of lipopolysaccharides. Ten days later, the mice were injected with the same nickel salt in the ear, and the team measured the resulting inflammation. Mice that didn’t get the lipopolysaccharide dose in the first injection had almost no reaction to the nickel within a day of the second exposure; but mice that did receive lipopolysaccharides had an almost immediate, strong reaction to the metal.

More here.

Judith Harris in Prospect Magazine:

It wasn’t until the 1970s that behavioural geneticists worked out productive techniques for answering questions about nature vs nurture. None of these methods is perfect, but they each have different flaws. It is therefore noteworthy that they all produced essentially the same results. Two results, actually—one surprising, the other not.

The unsurprising result was that genes matter. About half the variation in the measured characteristic—the differences from one person to another—could be attributed to differences in their genes.

The surprising result had to do with the environment. The aspects of the environment that don’t seem to matter are all those that are shared by all the children who grow up in a given family—which includes most of the things the word “home” makes you think of. Whether the home is headed by one parent or two, whether the parents are happily married or constantly rowing, whether they believe in pushing their children to succeed or leaving them to find their own way in life, whether the home is filled with books or sports equipment, whether it is orderly or messy, a city flat or a farmhouse—the research shows, counterintuitively, that none of these things makes much difference.

More here.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviews Impotence a Cultural History by Angus McLaren, in The Telegraph:

In the 1980s it was reported that in parts of West Africa enraged mobs had killed a number of “penis snatchers”: witches who had been accused of leaving their victims as smooth between the legs as Action Man.

Like many stories involving impotence, it provoked winces of sympathy as well as comic sniggers, especially from men who recognised that in cultures where ideals of “manhood” were based more on sexual potency than on, say, being good at crosswords, “penis snatching” was more or less equivalent to “body snatching”.

The sad truth that emerges from Angus McLaren’s cultural history of impotence is that this amounts to just about every Western culture since the Ancient Greeks. Impotence may have produced a far richer vocabulary than headaches or piles – pillock, fumbler, bungler, and dozens more – but when it comes to explaining why they have no lead in their pencils, men’s creative energies have usually been diverted in a single direction: finding someone else to blame.

Early witch hunters in Europe warned how easily simple spells could cause impotence in otherwise virile men. By the Renaissance, these causes had expanded to include idleness, abstinence and over-soft beds.

More here.