Jessica Clark in In These Times:

Libertarians are a strange lot. Their targets often seem reasonable; their solutions myopic and partial. So it goes with Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday, a sub-Swiftian sendup of the looming threat of an overwhelming federal deficit, set in the carnivorous confines of D.C.’s wonkscape.

Cassandra Devine is a heroine for our spin-crazy times—or actually, for five years from now, when the first wave of Baby Boomers will be eligible to retire, an event dubbed “Boomsday.” A “strategic communicator” for excessive executives, pesticide manufacturers and mink-farmers, by night, the twenty-something blogger imbibes Red Bulls and Ayn Rand in equal measure and sets her sights on the greed of those determined to make her “Generation Whatever”—Gen W—peers foot the bill for their golden years. Her modest proposal? Offer senior citizens a reprieve from estate taxes in return for their voluntary suicide at retirement—a publicity ploy that she terms a “meta-political device.”

Leo A. Lensing in the Times Literary Supplement:

In the late 1970s, as the brilliant, brief career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder approached its zenith, the New York Times heralded the prolific young filmmaker, born in 1945, as both “wunderkind” and “messiah” of the New German Cinema. In Germany, where his work regularly provoked outrage and scandal, the left-wing magazine konkret portrayed him as “the thermometer in the asshole of culture”, ridiculing the director’s uncanny ability to operate as a constant irritant on the artistic scene. Since Fassbinder’s untimely death in 1982, from what his friend and frequent collaborator Harry Baer called an “overdose of work”, the importance of his complex cinematic and literary oeuvre has been consistently undervalued in Germany. The 2005 retrospective of the films, designed to celebrate what would have been his sixtieth birthday, was shown first in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and only then came to Berlin in a much scaled-down version. For most Germans, it seems to have been more an occasion for renewed wonderment over a delinquent native son’s international reputation than for celebration of one of their great twentieth-century artists.

Even if Fassbinder’s homeland has been slow to recognize his high standing in film history, the rest of the world has not.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Trace your geneology back 25 million years, and you’ll meet long-tailed monkey-like primates living in trees. Those primates were not just the ancestors of ourselves, but of all the other apes–chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons–along with the monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere, such as baboons and langurs. By comparing ourselves to these other primates, scientists can get clues to our evolution over the past 25 million years. Until now, most of those clues have come from fossils and studies on the behavior and physiology of apes and monkeys. But in the past few years scientists have begun to pore over a new record: the one that is inscribed in our genome and the genomes of other apes and monkeys.

The first draft of the human genome was published in 2000, and in 2005 came the genome of the chimpanzee–our closest living relative. Scientists compared the two genomes to get a sense of what the genome of our common ancestor looked like, and how the genomes of both species have changed over the past few million years. (I wrote about the first wave of chimp/human studies here). One of the biggest surprises came when one team of researchers concluded that the ancestors of chimpanzees and humans interbred for over a million years, producing hybrid humanzees.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Every country’s difficult literary guys are different, and you know from experience how to handle the kind you’ve grown up with. Reading Geoffrey Wolff’s excellent biography of the truly ornery American writer John O’Hara, you sense that you could have managed him, for one night, with a mixture of office-adultery gossip and writerly mumblings about advances and sales. But when you come to the super-ornery English novelist Kingsley Amis you realize that you have no idea what you could possibly have said to get through an evening. Office gossip would be bound to hit a clunker, publishing talk would seem vulgar: this is a writer who devotes an entire chapter of his memoirs to the minor American Jewish humorist Leo Rosten in order to tear him apart, because, on the one evening Amis spent with him, Rosten (a) didn’t give him enough to drink and (b) misused the English expression “local” to mean a nearby restaurant instead of a neighborhood pub. With someone like that, you just hide under the sofa, or hope you never run into him at all.

The bewildering thing is that, after having seen all his cussedness catalogued and inventoried—friends insulted, children ignored, wives betrayed, with maximum pain inflicted whenever possible—everyone on his side of the pond still regards him with backhanded affection: wonderfully wicked, magnificently rude, hilariously horrible, and so on.

More here.

From The Economist:

Trees are good. Good enough to hug. Trees have a nifty biochemical strategy called photosynthesis that enables them to take carbon dioxide in through their leaves, and swap that nasty gas for oxygen, a nice one. They use the carbon thus sequestered to make molecules like cellulose, and thus more tree.

That is why some rich people who love to burn things containing carbon, such as petrol and aircraft fuel, have recently started paying others to plant trees on their behalf. Burning adds oxygen to carbon, making carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide makes the world warmer. A warmer world will mean higher sea levels. So if people burn things without offsetting the carbon dioxide thus produced, their holidays in the Maldive islands will disappear, along with the islands themselves.

This chattering-class environmental picture is not necessarily wrong, but it does include many assumptions. One of them, that planting trees will make the world cooler than it would otherwise be, is the subject of a newly published study by Govindasamy Bala, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, and his colleagues. Dr Bala has found, rather counter-intuitively, that removing all of the world’s trees might actually cool the planet down. Conversely, adding trees everywhere might warm it up.

More here.

From the West Virginia Surf Report:

Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

Many more such comparisons here.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise:

I’m so sick of the charges and counter-charges of “exploitation” of the Va-Tech massacre for political purposes.

If people of good will think that they have an apt political point to make, let them make it without assailing them for somehow taking advantage of the tragedy. That goes for both the gun control and the anti-gun control camps.

Current events should shape policy discussions.

It’s not a question of exploitation. It’s a matter of proffering solutions and offering critiques while our increasingly fragmented national attention is focused on an issue.

If Instapundit thinks that the concealed carry ban caused the tragedy, let him say so. I think it’s a dumb argument, but I don’t see why there should be any kind of inverse statute of limitations for offering it. Yesterday I made fun of some wingnuts for rifling through their personal anxiety closets in public, trying to come to terms with the killings–but I was mocking them for saying stupid and venal things, not for “exploiting” anyone’s death.

Trying to enforce an arbitrary line between “human” and “political” responses to tragedies is a political strategy in its own right.

More here.

From BBC News:

The problem with intelligence has been to find ways of fairly assessing both types – and many others. Try these two questions:

• How do you define “fallacy”?
• If I say to you a random series of 9 numbers, for example: 7, 4, 8, 7, 3, 6, 6, 2, 5, can you repeat them back to me in reverse order?

Can intelligence really be measured by tests like these? The Horizon programme took seven people who are all experts in their own field and put them through a range of “intelligence” tests. We had Quantum physicist Seth Lloyd; ex-Wall Street Trader Nathan Haselbauer, who runs the International High IQ society; musical prodigy Alex Prior; artist Stella Vine; RAF fighter pilot Garry Stratford; international chess grandmaster Susan Polgar and dramatist/critic Bonnie Greer.

The IQ-type tests produced predictable results. The IQ expert and Quantum physicist came out on top. But what about “creativity”? It is not really tested by an IQ test. We assessed creativity by using a test developed in the 60s: “Name as many uses as you can for a sock in 10 minutes.” The intriguing thing about this “alternative uses” test is that it is not just the number of alternative uses that count, it is the originality of them and the extravagance of the description that also count. So a sock that could be used as a “bikini bottom, tied on with string – provided you were waxed – and that you were daring”, suggested by Bonnie Greer, gets a good score.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

A changing climate may be responsible for the sharp drop in more than a dozen species of lizards and frogs in Central America, according to a new long-term study. The research adds another challenge to understanding the rapid extinctions observed in Central and South America, where more than a hundred amphibian species have disappeared since 1980. The massive decline of frog populations in particular has been widely linked to a fungus known as BD, which can wipe out a species in months. But the new study found slow, steady declines of both lizards and frogs in pristine, protected rain forests that are free of the BD fungus, researchers say.

The new study, published in the current issue of the Proceeedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reviewed data collected over 35 years at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. The scientists found a 75 percent drop in local amphibian and reptile numbers during that period. Not only is BD fungus absent at La Selva, but BD is also not known to affect reptiles at all, Whitfield explained, so another factor must be to blame for the drop in numbers. His team’s findings suggest that increased rain and higher temperatures observed over the same 35-year period may be responsible. Hotter, wetter conditions speed decomposition of the fallen leaves that the animals depend on for their habitat, Whitfield said.

More here.

Ruchira Paul at (the new and improved!) Accidental Blogger:

So what is it about [It Can’t Happen Here]’s message that makes it chillingly prescient and as fresh as our currrent headlines? Consider, compare and contrast the following scenarios in the fictional reign of Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip (1934 – 1938) and that of the real George W. (Dubya) Bush (2000 to present). (Buzz was shadowed by a Rovian figure who groomed him for years to one day launch him on the national / international stage!)

• A populist leader (a Democrat in the book) is elected on a simplistic platform of petty nationalism, military jingoism, wearing religiosity on one’s sleeve and not so veiled anti-intellectualism. ( Buzz (like Bush) even pronounced the United States of America as the U-nited States of America! )
• Government was not to function just as an institution of public service but an efficient corporation as well. Buzz’s administration was proudly named the “Corporate- Government” or “Corpo” for short.  Its most trusted ally and beneficiary was big business, not the common man who brought it to power.
• The freedom of the judiciary was severely curtailed in order to strengthen presidential powers. Suspension of the habeas corpus, use of secret military tribunals, arrests on suspicion alone (while going from home to the hardware store) and concentration camps were the order of the day.  It was all made possible by invoking threats to national security.
• Dangers to peace, prosperity and national security were blamed on certain groups of “un-American” people who could be then be persecuted and their loyalties questioned. In Buzz’s case, they were communists, Jews, Negroes and atheists. The logic was that as long people can look down upon someone else, they feel good about themselves, no matter how miserable they actually are.
• Citizens and public officials  were encouraged to spy and tattle on their friends, neighbors and employees. (See Joe’s post on Michelle Malkin)
• Big city clergy of affluent churches enthusiastically supported the government’s efforts at curtailing freedoms and promoting war efforts when promised a bigger role for religion (Christianity) in public affairs.
• Drumming up public support for the invasion and occupation of other nations who didn’t play by our democratic rules and Christian values – all for the good of their savage souls.
• An actual pre-emptive invasion of Mexico on the flimsy and concocted grounds that Mexico was planning an attack on El Paso, San Antonio, Laredo and other US border towns.
• Newspapers and radio were mostly cowed down into compliance or enthusiastically on board with the government’s vision of America and the world. Public protest to the “Corpo” appeared in the form of anonymous underground pamphleteering. (Blogs?)

And there is more.  ICHH is often compared to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But there is a crucial difference between it and its British counterparts. Orwell and Huxley described totalitarian regimes already in place where the subjects see the light from within an oppressive system.  Lewis warns about the danger of an open society sliding into a fascist mode using the very processes of democracy which we take for granted as “abuse proof.”

More here.

Joel Waldfogel in Slate:

Everyone from economists and sociologists to Oprah knows that women work more than men. Their longer combined hours, at the home and at the office, stop men from taking afternoon naps on the couch and cause fights that end with men spending nights on the couch. And yet according to new study, those longer hours are a myth, because it’s just not true that women carry a heavier load.

Three economists, Michael Burda of Humboldt University in Berlin, Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas, and Philippe Weil of the Free University of Brussels have analyzed data from surveys in 25 countries that ask people how they spend their time. Some of the countries are rich, like the United States and Germany, some are poor, like Benin and Madagascar, and some are in the middle, like Hungary, Mexico, and Slovenia. The people surveyed were asked to fill in diaries indicating how they spend each segment of their day.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

You’ve probably heard of Lake Wobegon, the little town in Minnesota where all the children are above average. There’s been much head-scratching about this statistical miracle. What happens to the kids who fail to surpass themselves? Are they shipped across the lake to another little town, where all the children are below average? That practice wouldn’t necessarily work to the detriment of either community. It might be like the migration from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl years, which Will Rogers said raised the average intelligence of both states.

One small town that beats the law of averages is strange enough, but even more mystifying is the finding that Lake Wobegon is not unique—that in fact everyone is above average. In 1987 John J. Cannell, a West Virginia physician and activist, discovered that all 50 states report that their children do better than the national average on standardized tests. (And this was years before the No Child Left Behind Act!)

I can’t promise to resolve these paradoxes. On the contrary, I’m going to make matters worse by describing still more funny business in the world of averages. The story that follows is about a data distribution that simply has no average. Given any finite sample drawn from the distribution, you are welcome to apply the usual algorithm for the arithmetic mean—add up the values and divide by the size of the sample—but the result won’t mean much. Whatever average you calculate in this way, you can improve it just by taking a bigger sample. Perhaps this is the secret of the Lake Wobegon school board.

More here.

In Dissent, Daniele Archibugi, Ofra Bengio, Seyla Benhabib, Paul Berman, Mitchell Cohen, Thomas Cushman, John Lister, Shibley Telhami on what Iraq implies for the idea of “exporting” democracy. Paul Berman:

The question seems to me wrongly put in one aspect. To hurl curses and insults at the Bush administration is a worthy, right, and just thing to do; and yet there is no reason to trip all over ourselves in acknowledging that Bush and his administration did sincerely desire to achieve a democratic outcome in Iraq. For some sixty years before the Iraq War, American policy in the Middle East had nothing to do with democracy. American policy was based on a principle of malign stability, conducted in the belief that stable dictatorships would guarantee American interests.

The pursuit of malign stability governed America’s Iraq policy over the decades, and the results were unusually hideous, given that Baathism is a kind of fascism, and Baathist Iraq was an exceptionally murderous totalitarian state. The pursuit of stability led the United States to abandon the Iraqi Kurds in the mid-1970s; to support Saddam against the Iranians in the 1980s; to follow a policy of hands-off, see-no-evil serenity, even in 1988, when Saddam was once again massacring Kurds, this time at a more gigantic level than before, sometimes by means of poison gas, no less. And, in keeping with this same malign policy, the United States decided to leave Saddam in power after the 1991 war, even while applying sanctions and conducting a permanent mini-war, in order to prevent the dictatorship from starting up yet another war. The policy of malign stability grew, in short, ever more malign, until, in the years after 1991, we ourselves were inflicting damage on the Iraqi people with our sanctions. Iraqi society fell into a dreadful downward spiral, and the results were ghastly.

In The Nation, William Greider looks on some revisions of thought on free-trade by mainstream economists.

Ralph Gomory, on the other hand, is a gentle-spoken technologist, trained as a mathematician and largely apolitical. He does not set out to overthrow the establishment but to correct its deeper fallacies. For many years Gomory was a senior vice president at IBM. He helped manage IBM’s expanding global presence as jobs and high-tech production were being dispersed around the world.

The experience still haunts him. He decided, in retirement, that he would dig deeper into the contradictions. Now president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, he knew something was missing in the “pure trade theory” taught by economists. If free trade is a win-win proposition, Gomory asked himself, then why did America keep losing?

The explanations he has developed sound like pure heresy to devout free traders. But oddly enough, Gomory’s analysis is a good fit with what many ordinary workers and uncredentialed critics (myself included) have been arguing for some years. An important difference is that Gomory’s critique is thoroughly grounded in the orthodox terms and logic of conventional economics. That makes it much harder to dismiss. Given his career at IBM, nobody is going to call Ralph Gomory a “protectionist.”

He did not nail his “theses” to the door of the Harvard economics department. Instead, he wrote a slender book–Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests–in collaboration with respected economist William Baumol, former president of the American Economic Association. Published seven years ago, the book languished in academic obscurity and until recently was ignored by Washington policy circles.

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

I  believe that HDF is a vanguard example of Pakistanis in and out of Pakistan – one amongst many (e.g., DIL, Citizens Foundation, Edhi Foundation, etc.) – who have decided that it is not only that they can do something, but that they must.

On their 10th anniversary, HDF hopes to celebrate that which they have done in the last ten years but they also hope to discuss that which they and all of us can and should do in the next 10. It would be good for the ATP fraternity to also think about this question – what can we do – both here and, hoepfully, at the HDF Convention in May.

Here is a video clip of the beginning of the PBS documentary on HDF in their series called ‘Visionaries.’ The rest of the documentary is available on YouTube.

Much more here.

Bertha Alvarez Manninen reviews The Stem Cell Controversy: Debating the Issues by Michael Ruse and Christopher A. Pynes (Editors), in Metapsychology:

Now in its second edition, The Stem Cell Controversy has been an invaluable anthology for my own personal research, and in my teaching as well. I should say, right away, that in my experience this is one of the best books available for introducing the issue to students and really discussing the scientific, ethical, and religious implications of embryonic and adult stem cell research. One of the main reasons that this book is so helpful and accessible is that it is broken down into five distinct sections that provide comprehensive overview of the different aspects of this current and divisive issue. I will mostly deal with the contents of the second edition, since this is the one currently available, but will refer back to the first edition if I believe that it was superior to the second edition in any respect.

The book begins with the full text of President George W. Bush’s August 9, 2001 speech, where he announced his decision to allow federal funding for stem cell research only on existing stem cell lines derived from embryos prior to that point in time, but that no new embryos were to be killed for the research using tax-payer dollars. I like that the students, and readers in general, are able to read exactly what Bush’s reasoning was when he made this decision, and I usually go through it carefully with them, extracting some philosophical arguments from the speech and then critically evaluating them.

More here.

Owen Gibson in The Guardian:

The author Hanif Kureishi accused the BBC of censorship last night, after it dropped a radio broadcast of his short story describing the work of a cameraman who films the executions of western captives in Iraq.

Radio 4 cancelled a reading of Weddings and Beheadings, one of five nominations for the National Short Story prize due to be broadcast this week, after concluding the timing “would not be right” following unconfirmed reports that kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston had been killed by a jihadist group.

Kureishi, whose work includes The Buddha of Surburbia, Intimacy and the screenplay for the film My Beautiful Launderette, said he was angry at the decision, which he described as a result of “stupid thinking” on the part of BBC executives.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Observed in the wild and tested in captivity, chimpanzees invite comparison with humans, their close relatives. They bear a family resemblance that fascinates people, and scientists see increasing evidence of similarities in chimp behavior and skills, making some of them think on the vagaries of evolution. Chimps display a remarkable range of behavior and talent. They make and use simple tools, hunt in groups and engage in aggressive, violent acts. They are social creatures that appear to be capable of empathy, altruism, self-awareness, cooperation in problem solving and learning through example and experience. Chimps even outperform humans in some memory tasks.

Jane Goodall, a young English woman working in Africa in the 1960s, began changing perceptions. At first, experts disputed her reports of chimps’ using tools and social behavior. The experts especially objected to her references to chimp culture. Just humans, they insisted, had “culture.”

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a Kyoto primatologist, described a young chimp watching as numbers 1 through 9 flashed on the computer screen at random positions. Then the numbers disappeared in no more than a second. White squares remained where the numbers had been. The chimp casually but swiftly pressed the squares, calling back the numbers in ascending order — 1, 2, 3, etc.

More here.

From BBC News:

The Department of Health has asked the Academy of Medical Sciences to assess these so-called “cognition enhancing” drugs, some of which are already being widely used in the US. In the 1960s the self styled guru, Dr Timothy Leary, urged American youth to “tune in, turn on and drop out”. Now a new generation of so-called designer drugs are becoming available. But instead of fuelling a new drop-out culture, they are being used by people who think they will help them do better at school and work.

One of these drugs, Modafinil, was developed to treat people who involuntarily fall asleep. The drug is among a new class of cognition enhancing drugs. Professor Gary Lynch, from the University of California, Irvine, helped invent another class called Ampakines. Professor Lynch designed them specifically to increase memory and cognition. And he claims that animal experiments suggest that the drug enables the brain to rewire itself or make neural connections between different regions that normally people cannot make. This rewiring, he claims, may enable people to “build thoughts that are a little bit beyond the normal brain”.

More here.

Deborah Solomon in the New York Times:

Q: Your new novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” ascended to No. 1 on the Barnes & Noble best-seller list virtually the moment it was published in this country. What do you make of that? Now perhaps I can quit my job. Three days a week, I do some consulting for a little branding firm in London.

Is it fair to describe your second novel as a Muslim’s critique of American values? That’s oversimplifying. The novel is a love song to America as much as it is a critique.

I didn’t find it so loving. It takes place on a single evening at a cafe in Lahore, as a charming, well-educated Pakistani in his 20s recounts his life story to an unnamed American stranger, who seems suspicious of him. The American is acting as if the Pakistani man is a Muslim fundamentalist because of how he looks — he has a beard.

More here.