Johann Hari in CommonDreams.org:

Discarded Idea Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 per cent of the warming gases in the atmosphere – yet 70 per cent of the effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter doesn't pay.

So we have racked up a climate debt. We broke it; they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that the compensation offered “won't even pay for the coffins”. The cliché that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: “At this summit, the pole of environmentalism has moved south.”

When we are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realise that we are badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain themselves when the rich refuse to?

A deal based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world – carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture – won't. They are a global placebo.

Amy Rosenberg in The National:

And then I began to notice that other Indian novelists I met and read about, and writers from other former British colonies (and from Japan, France, Germany, Holland and, of course, Britain itself) also talked often about Blyton, and that they underwent similar transformations whenever they did. They displayed intense nostalgia, as if they’d actually visited the worlds Blyton had created, and they knew they could never return. I heard them saying that, more than any other writer, Blyton had exposed them to the pleasures of fiction. For many, she opened up the English language, saturating the dry lessons learnt in school. She brought them inside an idealised world, the world of the former conquerors; in a funny kind of reversal, that world seemed as exotic as it did quixotic. Kids owned their own islands, ate Christmas goose for dinner, slept outdoors in fields of heather and explored moors and gorse and rocky shores. For a kid, especially a lower-middle class kid, from Calcutta, Delhi or smaller urban centres in India or other parts of the former empire, how could you get more exotic than that?

More here.

One of life’s oddities is how often a series of genuinely comedic incidents congeals into, if not tragedy, then tragic loss. Robert Sellers certainly has no intention of turning readers’ thoughts in that moody direction, but “Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed” probably will, though there’s a tremendous amount of unapologetic, unself-conscious fun to be had on the way to introspection. Burton, Harris, O’Toole and Reed were four of the great actors to emerge in postwar British stage and cinema; they also were legendary drunks, who not only pursued their avocation — it surely was more than a recreation — in public and without regrets. Today, when what we used to term a “hard drinker” is routinely referred to as a “high-functioning alcoholic,” it’s difficult to imagine an account of their lives free of judgment or amateur psychoanalysis. Sellers, a drama school grad and former London stand-up comic-turned-film writer and pop culture critic, manages to pull it off. It may be, in fact, that he just loves a great series of stories about fascinatingly intelligent and preternaturally talented men behaving in utterly outrageous ways.

more from Tim Rutten at the LAT here.

Avishai Margalit in the NYRB blog:

For a war to be just, there must be moral grounds for going to war and moral conduct in the war. Thus, going to war requires having a just cause, whereas correct behavior in the war requires discriminating between combatants and civilians. Obama mentioned both conditions as well as some others. But then there are also conditions that must be met for continuing a war, among them having a reasonable prospect of success. Yet in his Nobel speech, Obama omitted this important condition for continuing the war in Afghanistan. It is not only stupid, but it is also immoral, to go to war, or to continue a war, when there is no prospect of victory. Having the right cause on your side is not enough; your chances of winning are just as important.

As an admirer of President Obama I have listened attentively to his recent speeches on Afghanistan. But at no point has he made a plausible case for how he will win the war. He counts on our taking a leap of faith to support his strategy, but leaps should be reserved for frogs, whereas we should subject our faith to critical thinking.

The main declared objective of the war—defeating al-Qaeda—is not a matter for helmeted marines but for bespectacled bank accountants, computer whiz-kids, and people who can speak the relevant languages. The war in Afghanistan, by now, has very little to do with defeating al-Qaeda. Vice President Joe Biden got it right when he argued that fighting al-Qaeda is not the same thing as fighting in Afghanistan. Moreover, the conflict in Afghanistan bears little relevance to the problem of keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of radical Islamists; the Pakistani army is as much of a problem as the Taliban.

Adhering to just war doctrine requires having the right intent for continuing to fight in Afghanistan. Continuing the war out of fear of being accused of not giving the generals the resources they need to finish the job does not count as the right intent.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from “centrist” senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies — with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite.

But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.

At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Every 10 years or so, Heidegger's Nazism bursts into public consciousness again. Often, this happens with the publication of a book. The most cataclysmic of these bursts was probably the publication of Victor Farías' Heidegger and Nazism, in 1987. Farías' book took the Nazi accusations to a new level. Previously, it had been possible to discuss Heidegger's Nazism as a political misstep, the naïve blunderings of a philosopher trying to deal with the real world. Farías showed that the relationship was far deeper, that Heidegger's thinking was infected with Nazi thinking and that Heidegger was well aware of that fact. Admirers of Heidegger accused Farías of oversimplifying and conducting a witch hunt. Fancy persons in France wrote elegant essays explaining the importance of Heidegger's thought and the infinite complexity of the relation between thought and politics.

A boring war raged on for decades. But let us be honest, friends — Farías was more or less correct. Over time, the fact of Heidegger's Nazism and its integral relationship to his thinking has sunk in. This brings us to the present, and to the English-language publication of Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. If Farías provided the nails to Heidegger's coffin, Faye has come along in the role of Big Hammer. Carl Romano, in his essay “Heil Heidegger!” in The Chronicle Review, sums up the situation following the publication of Faye's book with the following:

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

The coffin is sealed.

This is an ambitious portrait of an American legend. Ray Robinson was not just a prizefighter. He was an extraordinary fighter. Someone once said: “There was Ray Robinson. And then there were the top 10.” He was certainly the greatest prizefighter I ever saw. But Wil Haygood has written more than a simple chronicle of a sports career. He wants to place Robinson as a central figure in the rise of urban African-Americans in the 20th century. At the peak of his success, in the 1940s and ’50s, Robinson epitomized the tough grace and style and confidence of an entire generation. He would display those qualities all over the United States and Europe. Haygood chooses to tell this tale, in part, as a kind of prose ballad. In lyrical language, he traces the life of Robinson from his birth in Detroit in 1921 as Walker Smith Jr. to his truest home, in Harlem, on the great glittering island of Manhattan, to California, where he died in 1989.

more from Pete Hamill at the NYT here.

From The Telegraph:

Only one thing can be braver and more terrifying than going into battle, and that is going into battle without a weapon. This moving and inspiring book is about the medics who enter the battlefield moments behind the fighting troops in order to bring back the casualties. By the end of it, one can only feel one emotion in contemplating the incredible professionalism and self-sacrifice of the Royal Army Medical Corps: awed admiration.

The history-writing team of John Nichol – the former RAF pilot shot down and captured in the first Iraq war – and the journalist Tony Rennell have already produced excellent books on Second World War escapees and rear-gunners, but this covers the British Army medics from the First World War right up to today’s conflicts.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Patricia Highsmith said of herself, “I am always in love. . . .” Yet at her memorial service in Tegna, Switzerland, in 1995, there were no lovers from the past, and there was no lover to mourn her in the present. The service was filmed, which Highsmith would have liked, because although reclusive, she was interested in posterity. Such display also allowed Highsmith to hide in plain sight (as her hero Edgar Allan Poe put it in “The Purloined Letter”) the fact that all her relationships had failed. Highsmith had died in a hospital alone, and the last person to see her was her accountant. Highsmith was obsessed with taxes.

There had been so many lovers, usually women, but men, too, including Arthur Koestler, who had the good sense to give up. Highsmith was attractive to men and to women, until her diet of alcohol and cigarettes (she hated food) raddled her beauty. Men never fired her imagination, except in her fiction, where her males, especially Tom Ripley, are versions of herself. It was women she wanted, and she found them in bars, on boats, at parties and, best of all, in settled relationships with other people.

More here.

Paul Berman in TNR:

The death of my friend Jack Diggins has led me to look up my edition of Montaigne in search of the essay on friendship, and I am amazed to see what is there. The essay catalogues and describes the various types of intimate relationships that Montaigne notices in the old Greek and Roman authors–sexual relationships between men and women, and between men and boys; the family relationships of parents and children, and between siblings; the relationship of marriage. And among those several kinds of intimacy, friendship looms in Montaigne's eyes as the purest and best. He means friendship between two equals–or rather, between equal men, since Montaigne for some reason imagines that women are incapable of forming a proper friendship.

He makes a number of acute and touching observations about friendship. But what strikes me is that, in selecting an example of friendship at its finest, he has chosen his own friendship with Étienne de la Boétie, who was the author of a famous treatise on politics. La Boétie's treatise is called Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. It presents the case for liberty and against tyranny. And it proposes an immortal observation — namely, that tyranny depends on ordinary people agreeing to submit. This observation has sufficed to keep la Boétie's treatise in print during the last 450 years. Montaigne's essay on friendship turns out to be, in short, a reflection on a very specific kind of friendship–a friendship between intellectuals: in this case, between a literary man and a political philosopher.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The first sentence of A Christmas Carol is “Marley was dead: to begin with.” It's a terrible way to start a story about Christmas. But A Christmas Carol isn't great because it's a great story. In fact, A Christmas Carol is a flimsy story. The characters are mostly clichés. Scrooge is a parody of miserly behavior. He is not only against Christmas, he is against love. He is also against charity, kindness, and even heat, preferring to keep his coal locked up rather than warm the office with it. Scrooge lives in darkness and gloom. “The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.”

In contrast, Tiny Tim — the blessed little cripple and son of Scrooge's employee — seems to bear no resentment to the world at all. His love for everyone knows no bounds, despite the fact that Scrooge has done everything in his power to keep the Cratchit family in misery. God bless us, every one, and so forth.

Then Scrooge has some bad gravy, a nightmare about three ghosts, and he spends Christmas Day in a hysterical fit sending turkeys all about the city and giving everyone raises. He's so happy not to be dead (as the third ghost suggested he soon would be) that he has a chuckling fit and bursts into tears, perhaps having gone insane. An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness. I, for one, don't buy it.

More Scroogish stuff here.

In 2009 we were in Denmark witness to a rather unusual and spectacular literary incident. The Danish author Claus Beck-Nielsen declared himself dead in 2001. A year later he was resurrected as the nameless director of the art factory Das Beckwerk, the mission of which was to continue the life and work of Claus Beck-Nielsen. In 2003, accompanied by the performance artist Thomas Skade-Rasmussen Strøbech, he journeyed to Iraq under the name “Nielsen” with the stated aim of establishing democracy in the war-ravaged country. Their trip resulted in a series of newspaper articles and TV programmes. Subsequently, the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen wrote the book Selvmordsaktionen (The suicide mission, 2005) about the journey. In 2006 the pair travelled together again with a similar project, this time to the USA; Suverænen (The sovereign) was published in 2008, with Das Beckwerk credited as the author. The book, which is promoted as a novel, is largely about Thomas Skade-Rasmusse, and describes among other things elements of his friend’s private life. Skade-Rasmussen, who, to make things even more confusing, also works under a number of pseudonyms, sued Das Beckwerk in 2009; in his opinion, the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen had invaded his private life and made public sensitive and private information. Confused? With good reason. Essentially, a fictional character is suing the novel’s author! This has never before been seen in Denmark – and probably nowhere else either.

more from Andreas Harbsmeier at Eurozine here.

Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy. While the actress Myrna Loy starred in the “The Thin Man” films, the Modernist poet Mina Loy was busying herself with the avant gardes of Italian Futurism, Dada, and to a lesser extent American Surrealism. The confusion is recurrent. Yes, their names are similar and yes, they were contemporaries, but the mix-up makes an even deeper sense given the two Loys’ shared elegance, and the Platonic rightness of imagining the poet ordering and lining up a sequence of martinis while in the company of William Powell. In point of fact, Mina Loy was not even Mina Loy. Born in England as Mina Gertrude Löwy, our Loy dropped the “w” and the umlaut early, undoubtedly a step in becoming what Marjorie Perloff calls a “deracinated cosmopolite”—she would spend the least amount of time in the country of her birth, opting instead for Germany, Italy, Mexico, France, and finally the United States. While Myrna Loy played on screen with Asta the pedigreed dog, our Loy played with a mongrel language, and she started those games with her name. In her poems she would call herself Imna, Nima, Anim, Ova, and Gina, and later in life her autograph’s surname read Lloyd. One of her fiercest advocates, Roger Conover, refers to Loy’s “pseudonymania.”

more from Jessica Burstein at Poetry here.

Telephoning in the Mexican Sunlight

Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt
Someone had called it a man/woman
shirt. The phrase irked me. But then
I remembered that Rainer Maria
Rilke, who until he was seven wore
dresses and had long yellow hair,
wrote that the girl he almost was
“made her bed in his ear” and “slept him the world.”
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me.
As we fell into long-distance love talk
a squeaky chittering started up all around,
and every few seconds came a sudden loud
buzzing. I half expected to find
the insulation on the telephone line
laid open under the pressure of our talk
leaking low-frequency noises.
But a few yards away a dozen hummingbirds,
gorgets going drab or blazing
according as the sun struck them,
stood on their tail rudders in a circle
around my head, transfixed
by the flower-likeness of the shirt.
And perhaps also by a flush rising into my face,
for a word — one with a thick sound,
as if a porous vowel had sat soaking up
saliva while waiting to get spoken,
possibly the name of some flower
that hummingbirds love, perhaps
“honeysuckle” or “hollyhock”
or “phlox” — just then shocked me
with its suddenness, and this time
apparently did burst the insulation,
letting the word sound in the open
where all could hear, for these tiny, irascible,
nectar-addicted puritans jumped back
all at once, as if the air gasped.

by Galway Kinnell

Peter Singer published this three years ago yesterday, in the New York Times Magazine:

What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life.

With Christmas approaching, and Americans writing checks to their favorite charities, it’s a good time to ask how these two beliefs — that a human life, if it can be priced at all, is worth millions, and that the factors I have mentioned do not alter the value of a human life — square with our actions.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

EM Forster was once asked why he wasn’t more open about being homosexual, even at the cost of living abroad. After all, the French novelist André Gide had done it. Forster’s answer came quickly: “Gide hasn’t got a mother.” It’s a beautifully Forsterian answer, funny, glum and putting human considerations in front of ethical principles. Forster attempted high ethical debate in his novels, but discovered a human story could almost always make him think twice. Frank Kermode has turned a series of Cambridge lectures on Forster into a short but instructive book, adding a series of unordered reflections on aspects of Forster, which he calls a “causerie”. There is no key to Forster, apart from the general one of being an English liberal, and always being ready to retreat from and apologise for most intellectual positions. Which is a fairly unassailable intellectual position, as someone in the act of apology is always in.

Forster is caught for all time in his comments on the death of D H Lawrence. T  S Eliot found them inadequately serious: “Unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by ‘greatest’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘novelist’, I submit that this judgment is meaningless.” Forster wrote that he, indeed, couldn’t explain what he had meant by the words and moreover couldn’t explain what ‘‘exactly’’ meant. Eliot, he said, “duly entangles me in his web”, but “there are occasions when I would rather be a fly than a spider and the death of D H Lawrence is one of these”. It’s a marvellous comment, both genuinely humble and a terrific stroke of one-upmanship.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Top breakthrough: It took 15 years for researchers to reconstruct the skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an apparent human ancestor unearthed in Ethiopia in 1994. The results were surprising: Ardi's image didn't look like a cross between an African ape and early hominids such as Australopithecus afarensis (represented by another famous skeleton, nicknamed Lucy). Rather, her skeleton was structured for upright walking as well as climbing, with long, curving fingers suited for grasping tree branches.

The message was that apes as well as humans have changed significantly since Ardi's heyday to adapt to their particular evolutionary niches. Anyone who still thinks that “humans evolved from apes” will have to shift their paradigm.

….

The other nine: Science doesn't rank the other items in its list of top 10 breakthroughs – but here they are, as they were listed in the journal.

Pulsars in the gamma-ray sky: NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a new wave of pulsars.

How plants get a rush: Scientists are learning how ABA receptors help plants get through stressful times.

Mock monopoles spotted: An elusive phenomenon, involving materials that have only a north or a south magnetic pole, is created in the lab using special materials. Magnetic monopoles have figured in the debate over the Large Hadron Collider's safety as well as in episodes of “The Big Bang Theory.”

The stuff of longevity: Drugs such as rapamycin are being targeted for animal studies that eventually could lead to life extension for humans.

Our icy moon revealed: NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite crashes into the moon to find fresh evidence of water ice.

The return of gene therapy: Gene therapy has suffered setbacks over the past 20 years, but this year researchers reported success in treating maladies such as X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, Leber's congenital amaurosis and “bubble boy” disease.

Graphene takes off: Single-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms are the hot new thing in materials science, potentially opening the way for graphene transistors that can outdo silicon.

Hubble reborn: The Hubble Space Telescope gets its final scheduled upgrade from shuttle astronauts and emerges working better than ever.

First X-ray laser shines: SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source was fired up for the first time in April, beginning a series of experiments that will use X-rays to probe structures on the atomic scale. Check this item to look back at my tour of SLAC while the LCLS was under construction.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in New Statesman:

If you have overdosed on Darwin this anniversary year, the great man himself is partly to blame: he was inconsiderate enough to publish On the Origin of Species when he was exactly 50. The resulting coincidence of sesquicen�tennial with bicentennial was bound to excite the anniversary-tuned antennae of journalists and publishers. Anniversaries are arbitrary, of course, dependent on the accident of our having ten fingers. If we had evolved with eight instead, we would have to suffer centenaries after only 64 (decimal) years, and style gurus would prate about the changing fashions of octaves instead of decades.

Incidentally, it is not far-fetched that we might have evolved a different number of fingers. The pentadactyl limb (five digits on each) has become a shibboleth of vertebrate zoology, and even animals such as horses (which walk on their middle fingers and toes) or cows (two digits per limb) have lost the extra digits from a five-fingered ancestor. But the lungfish-like group of Devonian fishes from which all land vertebrates are descended included species with seven (Ichthyostega) or eight (Acanthos�tega) digits per limb. If we were descended from Acanthostega, instead of from an unsung five-fingered cousin of the same fish, who knows what feats of virtuosity pianists might now perform with 16 fingers? And would computers have been invented earlier, because hexadecimal arithmetic translates more readily than decimal into binary?

Historical accidents of this sort are rife, contrasting with the illusion of good design to provide some of our most convincing evidence that evolution happened.

More here.