I read of a thousand killed.
And am glad because the scrounging imperial paw
Was there so bitten:
As a man at elections is thrilled
When the results pour in, and the North goes with him
And the West breaks in the thaw.

(That fighting was a long way off.)

Forgetting therefore an election
Being fought with votes and lies and catch-cries
And orator’s frowns and flowers and posters’ noise
Is paid for with cheques and toys:
Wars the most glorious
Victory-winged and steeple-uproarious
… With the lives, burned-off,
Of young men and boys.

As the number of US troops killed in Iraq exceeded one thousand, Chritopher Hitchens has dredged up this poem, “A Thousand Killed,” by little known British poet Bernard Spencer here in Slate.

Paul Samuelson, perhaps the greatest economist of the post-war era, has weighed in on the debate on outsourcing, on the side of its critics, or rather against the enthusiasts.

“His dissent from the mainstream economic consensus about outsourcing and globalization will appear later this month in a distinguished journal, cloaked in clever phrases and theoretical equations, but clearly aimed at the orthodoxy within his profession: Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve; N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a leading international economist and professor at Columbia University.

These heavyweights, among others, are perpetrators of what Mr. Samuelson terms ‘the popular polemical untruth.’

Popular among economists, that is. That untruth, Mr. Samuelson asserts in an article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, is the assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs.

Sure, Mr. Samuelson writes, the mainstream economists acknowledge that some people will gain and others will suffer in the short term, but they quickly add that ‘the gains of the American winners are big enough to more than compensate for the losers.’

That assumption, so widely shared by economists, is ‘only an innuendo,’ Mr. Samuelson writes. ‘For it is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings.’

Trade, in other words, may not always work to the advantage of the American economy, according to Mr. Samuelson.

Although, “Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Bhagwati agree that the way to buffer the adjustment for the workers who lose in the global competition is with wage insurance programs.” That fits with my social democratic sensibilities.

The article and the response by Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, and T. N. Srinivasan are forthcoming in the American Economic Association’s The Journal of Economic Perspectives.

“Pedro Almodóvar has sanctified society’s transgressors, rescued Spanish surrealism and liberated international cinema,” says Linn Hirschberg here in the New York Times Magazine.

“Walking through the retrospective exhibition of Lee Bontecou, on view at MoMA-Queens, is uncannily like visiting an out-of-the-way museum of natural history, as if her entire work to date had been dedicated to the creation of a single work of installation art: a musée imaginaire. It begins with some animal sculptures and continues through what look like scientific instruments–cameras and other devices for the observation and recording of nature. These evolve into larger and larger structures, made of wire armatures covered with scraps of used fabric, each with one or two dark holes; like tribal masks, they convey an air of menace and mystery. One could construct a speculative anthropology for these extraordinary structures–what they mean, and how they function.”

Arthur Danto, still one of the sharpest art critics around, reviews the Lee Bontecou exhibit at MOMA here in The Nation. See also my earlier post on Bontecou here.

The fourth and last bad writing contest was won by Judith Butler in 1999 for this sentence in an article in Diacritics.

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Many of those accused of bad writing respond in Just Being Difficult? (Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb eds.). Here’s a review of that book from Philosophy and Literature (subscription required).

“In 1999, Philosophy and Literature gave the top prize in its annual Bad Writing Contest to Judith Butler, and the national press echoed the journal in denouncing critical theory as overblown, jargon-ridden, and ungrammatical. Academic theorists reacted with pique, but not a soul in the public sphere came to their defense. Now, the professors have issued an anthology justifying their prose and denouncing Denis Dutton and other critics of bad writing. They claim that bad, or rather ‘difficult’ writing has a critical thrust: to break down common sense and dismantle unjust social notions.They fail to make their case. Much of the writing is, alas, bad. Entries offer tendentious, petulant reactions to the hubbub. Rarely do they address the basic point of the contest: that humanities professors no longer respect ideals of wit, eloquence, and learning. Instead, we have another parade of academic parochialism and radical chic passing itself off as adversarial culture and social justice.”

Colin Powell has annouced to the Senate Foreign Relations committee that genocide has been comitted in Sudan, according to an investigation by U.S. officials. “However, he said the finding would have no immediate effect on the Bush administration, which he said is already doing everything it can to try to curb the Darfur violence.”

“Are American college professors unwittingly misleading their students by teaching widely accepted ideas about men and women that are scientifically unsubstantiated?

Why is the dominant narrative about the sexes one of difference, even though it receives little support from carefully designed peer-reviewed studies?

One reason is that findings from a handful of small studies with nonrepresentative samples have often reported wildly overgeneralized but headline-grabbing findings about gender differences. Those findings have then been picked up by the news media — and found their way back into the academy, where they are taught as fact. At the same time, research that tends to debunk popular ideas is often ignored by the news media.

Even worse, many researchers have taken untested hypotheses at face value and used them to plan their studies. Many have also relied exclusively on statistical tests that are designed to find difference, without using tests that would show the degree of overlap between men and women. As a result, findings often suggest — erroneously — that the sexes are categorically different with respect to some specific variable or other.”

More here from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“During the past 150 years, artists have regularly challenged power: Modern art emerged, after all, from revolutionary traditions. Artists made posters to rally rebels, lampoon officialdom, and propose new and better worlds. Last week, George Bush and the Republican National Convention staked out New York City—the capital of the American art world—and presented to the eye a large, inviting, and even outlandish target. More than 200,000 protesters, by some accounts, marched up Seventh Avenue. And yet apart from a few pro forma group shows, surprisingly little of note emerged from the traditional art world. What doesn’t happen is sometimes significant. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: ‘Why didn’t the art world bark?'”

Short article here from New York Magazine.

“In the annals of consumer electronics, certain devices have proven so compelling, they’ve created consumer cults. You know, Mac heads. Palm freaks. TiVoholics. Among the white-collar crowd, though, one particular gizmo has earned a street nickname all its own: CrackBerry. That’s a reference to the RIM BlackBerry, an addictive wireless palmtop that displays your e-mail in real time, as it arrives. The airports and commuter trains on both coasts are filled with BlackBerry fanatics, hunched over, eyes glazed, flailing at its microscopic alphabet keyboard with their thumbs callused in funny places. But for all its popularity among executives and financial-industry types, the BlackBerry is practically unknown to everyone else. RIM hopes to change all that with the BlackBerry 7100t, which it unveiled yesterday. (The device, with phone service from T-Mobile, will go on sale next month.)”

Review of the new Blackberry 7100t here from the New York Times.

“In the sex trade, sellers work hard to make buyers believe they will get their money’s worth. That’s sure true of Jenna Jameson’s extra-large memoir and improbable self-help book, ‘How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.’ Jameson, who is today’s top name in what is known as adult entertainment, takes readers on a round-the-world bender that begins in a tattoo parlor in Las Vegas, where as a 17-year-old biker chick she decides to become a stripper, and culminates at the pinnacle of dirty-movie success, the Hot D’Or awards in Cannes, where at 21 she is anointed Best New American Starlet.” Jane and Michael Stern review How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale by Jenna Jameson with Neil Strauss, here in the New York Times.

“Can we rely on forensics as the arbiter of truth in the courtroom? In his latest investigation, Simon Cooper exposes a case of corrupted science at the heart of our justice system.” More here from Seed Magazine.

“What is the next stage in the evolution of internet search engines? AltaVista demonstrated that indexing the entire world wide web was feasible. Google’s success stems from its uncanny ability to sort useful web pages from dross. But the real prize will surely go to whoever can use the web to deliver a straight answer to a straight question. And Eric Brill, a researcher at Microsoft, intends that his firm will be the first to do that.” More here from The Economist.

Those who fantasize about history’s great athletes facing the best of the present should watch the U.S. Open quarterfinals (USA network, right now). Top-ranked Roger Federer, tennis’s virtuoso emergent, meets perpetually resurgent Andre Agassi, playing his nineteenth straight year in Flushing Meadows. The Nosferatu-like Agassi, after all, is the sport’s past living in its present, having started during the days of McEnroe and Connors, and played through the eras of Lendl, Becker, Edberg, and Sampras. The dude abides. If, however, you think ponytailed youth will inevitably defeat bald wisdom, don’t be so sure. Two years ago, a thirty-two year-old Agassi faced the dominant number one and defending U.S. Open champion, twenty-one year-old Lleyton Hewitt, in the semifinals here. Agassi swept Hewitt off the court in an exhilarating display of precise hitting. Tonight, Roger may be rusty, having had four days off due to an opponent’s default. Agassi, famously a fast starter, might well hammer his way to an early lead. Whether he can weather the ensuing barrage Federer is likely to rain upon him should produce some captivating drama.

The events in Breslan again raise a familiar, difficult, and depressing issue. I’ve followed the problem of Chechnya for a while. I remember the leveling of Grozny. Here’s a brief primer by Masha Gessen of Bolshoi Gorod.

“The war, which began on Dec. 11, 1994, lasted nearly two years, cost at least 80,000 Chechens and about 4,000 Russian soldiers their lives, and ended in military defeat for Russia. In 1996, Russia pulled its troops out of a virtually demolished Chechnya, leaving it to fester—again. For the next three years, Chechnya, whose infrastructure had been bombed out of existence, turned into a state run by and for criminals. . . . The second war in Chechnya began in September 1999, following a bizarre and brutal series of terrorist acts. Two apartment buildings in Moscow and one in the south of Russia exploded, killing more than 300 people.” (read on)

Gessen side steps a very large issue: a host of movements and peoples who’ve been the victims of horrid atrocities have not chosen to kill children en masse. And we may be left to only judge them to be evil or psychotic or both.

Like the attacks of 9/11/01, the recent terrorist atrocity in Russia has been so shockingly evil in character and scale, that most of us are still left in choked silence about it. Sometimes it feels like our hearts and souls might finally be damaged beyond repair. But like last time (and every time), we must overcome our grief, once more gather our courage, regain our resolve to prevent such enormities, recover our hope, and again try to make sense of a stunningly senseless act of the most extreme barbarity possible. As the usual sensationalistic replay of the footage of the tragedy dies down, a few brave souls have taken up the challenge of bringing reason to bear on this calamity, and I salute them. Every decent or even normal human being knows that those who prepetrate these acts are vile monsters, but all too often our hatred for them and anger at them gets turned toward other decent and moral people who might disagree with us about why these things happen or how to prevent them, thereby poisoning rational discussion of the issues involved. Let’s see if we have learned anything from the recent bitter past.

Here are a couple of starting points in the blog world to look at, and you’ll find more things from there.

A new article by Naomi Klein in The Nation, entitled “Bringing Najaf to New York,” has sparked debate and condemnation from corners inside and outside the magazine.

“Before Sadr’s supporters began their uprising, they made their demands for elections and an end to occupation through sermons, peaceful protests and newspaper articles. US forces responded by shutting down their newspapers, firing on their demonstrations and bombing their neighborhoods. It was only then that Sadr went to war against the occupation.”

Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, has this to say about it.

“When I quit writing my column for The Nation a couple of years ago, I wrote semi-sarcastically that it had become an echo chamber for those who were more afraid of John Ashcroft than Osama Bin Laden. I honestly did not then expect to find it publishing actual endorsements of jihad. But, as Marxism taught me, the logic of history and politics is a pitiless one. The antiwar isolationist ‘left’ started by being merely ‘status quo’: opposing regime change and hinting at moral equivalence between Bush’s ‘terrorism’ and the other sort.”

But responses have also come from Marc Cooper from The Nation.

“I find these assertions, simply, astounding. Al Sadr’s group are, indeed, terrorists. Maybe not ‘generic’ ones,. But certainly ultra-fundamentalist gangs. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever that they represent the ‘mainstream sentiment’ in Iraq. If so, then why has none other than Ayatollah Sistani (who now outflanks Naomi Klein on the left!) negotiated their disarmament? Most disturbing is the last line of this graph. Al Sadr’s ultimate goal, Klein concedes, is a ‘theocracy’ but ‘for now’ his demands are democratic because he’s for elections and he’s against the U.S. occupation. These twin assertions are so blatantly self-contradictory that it would be overkill to say anything more about them.”

and from Doug Ireland.

“It is useful to remember that the deeply flawed logic of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ motored US policy in the Cold War, driving it to embrace all manner of repressive regimes and dictators from Franco to Pinochet to Suharto. That’s why it’s sad to see Klein engage in the same sort of thinking in her column justifying the depradations of the so-called ‘Mahdi Army’ as somehow expressing the desire of genuine Iraqi democrats. Muqtada al-Sadr is a sanguineous religious fanatic, whose thuggish followers engage in the slaughter of the innocents.”

As interesting are the debates it has sparked in the comments. Decide for yourself.

Well, a number of models by Americanists (people who study the United States) suggests that Bush will win the November presidential election.

Predictions in Short:

Alfred Cuzán and Charles Bundrick predict that George Bush will win with 52% of the vote.

Ray Fair predicts that George Bush will win with 60% of the vote.

Allan Lichtman predicts that George Bush will win but gives no forecast of the share of thevote that he’ll receive.

Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien believe that the election is too close to call.

Brad Lockerbie predicts that George Bush will win with 57.6% of the vote.

Helmut Norpoth forecasts that George Bush will win with 54.7% of the vote.

Wlezien and Erikson predict that Bush will get 52.5% of the vote.

I guess we’ll see in November whether any of this is worthwhile.

The Guardian has this extract from Richard Dawkin’s latest book, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.

“The Ancestor’s Tale is cast in the form of an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past. All roads lead to the origin of life. But because we are human, the path we shall follow will be a human pilgrimage to discover human ancestors. As we go, we shall greet other pilgrims who join us at a series of rendezvous points, as we encounter the common ancestor we share with each of them.”

“Frank Kermode salutes the bleak virtuosity of Julian Barnes’s new collection of short stories, The Lemon Table.” More here from The Guardian, and more reviews here.

“For quite a while now, those who knew Czeslaw Milosz couldn’t help wondering what it was going to be like when he was gone. In the meantime he more than held his own, writing away for all he was worth in Kraków, in his early nineties, in an apartment where I had the privilege of visiting him twice. On the first occasion he was confined to his bed, too unwell to attend a conference arranged in his honor, and on the second he was ensconced in his living room, face-to-face with a life-size bronze head and torso of his second wife, Carol. His junior by some thirty years, she had died from a quick and cruel cancer in 2002, and as he sat on one side of the room facing the bronze on the other, the old poet seemed to be viewing it and everything else from another shore. On that occasion he was being ministered to by his daughter-in-law, and perhaps it was her hovering attentions as much as his translated appearance that brought to mind the aged Oedipus being minded by daughters in the grove at Colonus, the old king who had arrived where he knew he would die. Colonus was not his birthplace, but it was where he had come home to himself, to the world, and to the otherworld; and the same could be said of Milosz in Kraków.”

More here from The New Republic.