Obama Axes Pentagon Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In Shape Of Dragon

by Stefany Anne Golberg (who also happens to be my wife).

From Prospect Magazine:

Ten years ago Pakistan had one television channel. Today it has over 100. Together they have begun to open up a country long shrouded by political, moral and religious censorship—taking on the government, breaking social taboos and, most recently, pushing a new national consensus against the Taliban. One channel in particular, Geo TV, has won a reputation for controversy more akin to America’s Fox News than CNN or Sky News. Some Pakistanis see it and its competitors as a force for progress; others as a creator of anarchy and disorder. Certainly, the channels now wield huge political influence in a country where half the population is illiterate. But their effect is now felt beyond Pakistan’s borders too—revealing an underappreciated face of globalisation, in which access to television news means that immigrant communities, and in particular Britain’s 0.7m Pakistanis, often follow events in their country of origin more closely than those of the country where they actually live.

I went to Islamabad this April to learn about what many Pakistanis call their “media revolution.” The previous month, during a spate of anti-government protests, Geo TV had again demonstrated its influence by using its popular news programmes to support a “long-march” by opposition groups on the capital Islamabad, and even hosting a celebratory rock concert on the city’s streets when the government caved in to demands to reinstate the country’s most prominent judge.

More here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

For many years, I taught an introductory philosophy class based on Plato's Republic. It is a wonderful work through which to bring students to some of the crucial issues that engage and divide human beings—the nature of knowledge, the desirability of democracy, the place of women in society, mathematics, and God. Above all, there is the Theory of Forms, extrasensory entities that are supposed to inform and determine the objects in this world of sensation and experience. They are Plato's answer to the challenge posed by two earlier thinkers: Heraclitus, who claimed that everything changes (“You cannot step into the same river twice.”), and Parmenides, who claimed that nothing changes (“How could what is perish? How could it have come to be?”). The Forms are timeless and yet manifest themselves in this physical world of corruption and decay.

Others intent on the same ends as I was might have chosen different works by Plato, but I suspect that few if any would have seized on Timaeus, a rather odd dialogue (at least to us) in which Plato argues that the world is a giant organism fashioned by a God, the Demiurge. Today it's hard to imagine that in the early Middle Ages, until Thomas Aquinas and others discovered the attractions of Aristotle, Timaeus was the only known work of Plato. And very influential it was, too, as almost everyone in the early centuries of the last millennium agreed that the world was an organism of a kind. Hence, as with all organisms, it was appropriate to think of the world as having sensations and feelings, and also to ask questions about ends and purposes.

More here.

The Rarest Thyme

For you I would have built a herb-garden,
Not a pathetic patch for mint and chives

But a real olitory, with old-
Fashioned southernwood and rarest thyme.

I might have built a wooden seat between
Two plants of rosemary, their astringent

Scent seeping through your workshirt to the clean
Flesh of your back. I would have grown a plant

Of basil for you to stroke into form;
And, certainly, a row of lavender

To infuse carefully over a warm
Stove, for you to sip at whenever

The world became darkened with sick headaches,
Or a loss of blood whitened your small hands.

by Thomas McCarthy

from Mr. Dineen’s Careful Parade – New and Selected Poems;
Anvil Press Poetry, 1999

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

In “Military Misfortunes,” the historians Eliot Cohen and John Gooch offer, as a textbook example of this kind of failure, the British-led invasion of Gallipoli, in 1915. Gallipoli is a peninsula in southern Turkey, jutting out into the Aegean. The British hoped that by landing an army there they could make an end run around the stalemate on the Western Front, and give themselves a clear shot at the soft underbelly of Germany. It was a brilliant and daring strategy. “In my judgment, it would have produced a far greater effect upon the whole conduct of the war than anything [else],” the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith later concluded. But the invasion ended in disaster, and Cohen and Gooch find the roots of that disaster in the curious complacency displayed by the British.

More here.

In the summer of 1979, the director Werner Herzog found himself in the Peruvian river-port city of Iquitos preparing for “Fitzcarraldo,” a period epic starring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger that he planned to shoot in the rain forest. Two and a half years later, he was still there, struggling to finish. Robards and Jagger had long since quit, rendering their footage unusable. Locals had set fire to the filmmakers’ camp; the crew fled waving white flags. Robards’s replacement, the German actor Klaus Kinski, had proved so difficult that two Indian chiefs who witnessed his behavior approached Herzog and helpfully offered to murder him. Another member of the filmmaking team had gone completely insane, grabbed a machete and taken hostages. By then, surrounded by bugs and snakes and rooting pigs, beset by injuries and chronically, critically short of money, Herzog apparently found nothing particularly outlandish in what was happening, so consumed was he by a film that all reason suggested he should have abandoned several crises earlier. “I live my life or I end my life with this project,” he said.

more from Mark Harris at the NYT here.

“Inherent Vice” is Thomas Pynchon doing Raymond Chandler through a Jim Rockford looking glass, starring Cheech Marin (or maybe Tommy Chong). What could easily be mistaken as a paean to 1960s Southern California is also a sly herald of that era’s end. This, of course, is exactly the kind of layered meaning that readers expect of Pynchon. His fans tend to be drawn to either his massive, bafflingly complex efforts — the iconic, National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “Mason & Dixon” and “Against the Day” — or to the more constrained, plot-driven narratives of “Vineland” or “The Crying of Lot 49.” It is the big books, with their parades of gloriously obtuse set pieces, full of slapstick and conspiracy and minutely researched ephemera, that established Pynchon as a writer worthy of intense inquiry. Yet having a plot doesn’t make his work any less brilliant, any less Pynchonian. “Inherent Vice” is a perfect case in point. It has a plot. It has a main character. This clear structure will, no doubt, disappoint the big-book boosters, the obsessives who began contributing to the online wiki annotation of “Against the Day” before finishing its 1,085 pages. But maybe we should all take a hit off a fat spliff and enjoy the dirty, brainy achievement of Pynchon’s “Vice.”

more from Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times here.

Via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Midnight Moon

The midnight moon climbs down
to pause on the bamboo span

Smearing itself with the blue from the sky
becomes rain the night long

Drenched in the rain
the moon’s hair grows longer
like the notes of Chaurasia’s flute

The spring carries the smell of the hair
to the river

It makes the hyacinth bloom
furtively

In the sun after the rain
the warbler drinks
the blue water of the river

gazing the while at the river

by Jiban Narah

translated from the Assamese by: Pradip Acharya
from The Buddha and Other Poems; Monsoon Editions,
Calicut, 2009

From Edge:

Sixty-one years ago Aldous Huxley published his lesser-known masterpiece, Ape and Essence, set in the Los Angeles of 2108. After a nuclear war (in the year 2008) devastates humanity's ability to reproduce high-fidelity copies of itself, a reversion to sub-human existence had been the result. A small group of scientists from New Zealand, spared from the catastrophe, arrives, a century later, to take notes. The story is presented, in keeping with the Hollywood location, in the form of a film script.

On July 24, 2009, a small group of scientists, entrepreneurs, cultural impresarios and journalists that included architects of the some of the leading transformative companies of our time (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PayPal), arrived at the Andaz Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, to be offered a glimpse, guided by George Church and Craig Venter, of a future far stranger than Mr. Huxley had been able to imagine in 1948.

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already — life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. “We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer,” George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made.

More here.

Fouad Ajami in The New York Times:

A departure and a return: In the legend of Moorish Spain, Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, is said to have paused on a ridge for a final glimpse of the realm he had just surrendered to the Castilians. Henceforth, the occasion, and the place, would be known as El Último Suspiro del Moro, The Moor’s Last Sigh. The date was Jan. 2, 1492. More than five centuries later, on March 11, 2004, there would be a “Moorish” return. In the morning rush hour, 10 bombs tore through four commuter trains in Madrid, killing more than 200 people and wounding some 1,500, in the deadliest terror attack in Europe since World War II. This was not quite a Muslim reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, but a circle was closed, and Islam was, once again, a matter of Western Europe.

In his “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” Christopher Caldwell, a meticulous journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine and other publications, gives this subject its most sustained and thoughtful treatment to date. The question of Islam in Europe has occasioned calls of alarm about “Eurabia,” as well as works of evasion and apology by those who insist Islam is making its peace with European norms. Caldwell’s account is subtle, but quite honest and forthright in its reading of this history. “Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But, all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture,” he writes.

More here.

In the Brooklyn Rail:

Rail: Why do you think the bankers won?

Henwood: There are two parts to that. The longer term structural issue is that Wall Street, the financial system, is basically a mechanism for the creation and exercise of ruling class power. It is the heart of the capitalist economic and social system. So taking on Wall Street is very, very complicated.

But, there is also the sense in which these guys represent a social interest that has done very, very badly and they could have had their toes stepped on a bit—and they haven’t. If you go back and compare when Roosevelt gave that speech to the Democratic Convention in October 1936, he said: “Never have the rich and powerful been so lined up in their hatred of a political candidate and I welcome their hatred.”

You cannot imagine Obama saying anything remotely similar. That’s partly because the bust has been less dramatic than it was in the 1930s, but also because Roosevelt came from the aristocracy and thus had more personal confidence in stepping on their toes. Obama is a guy who has been created by the meritocracy and it has treated him very well. He’s kind of in awe of wealth and power and much less willing, for personal reasons, to challenge such interests.

The political environment is also totally different now. Going into the 1930s—there was a whole radical tradition: the populist tradition, the progressive tradition—there were people who had different ways of looking at an economy.

A friend of mine once said that the fact that Martha Stewart never shows a mistake, unlike Julia Child, revealed the ethic of an arriviste. Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine:

[H]ere’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

What is wrong with this picture?

When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to her, she explained that “for so many of us she took the fear out of cooking” and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato show (or, as Julia pronounced it, “the poh-TAY-toh show!”), one of the episodes that Meryl Streep recreates brilliantly on screen. Millions of Americans of a certain age claim to remember Julia Child dropping a chicken or a goose on the floor, but the memory is apocryphal: what she dropped was a potato pancake, and it didn’t quite make it to the floor. Still, this was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than let such an outtake ever see the light of day.

Over at the Monkey Cage, Steven Kelts looks at the issue:

An economic crash spurred on by a weakness for profit and a blindness to risk; but efforts at reform are resisted in the name of the “free market.” A healthcare system that is more costly and less effective than many others in the developed world; but efforts to change it run aground on the reluctance of some to pay for the benefits of others. Federal coffers drained by unaffordable handouts to the largest corporations, highest income-earners, and wealthiest estate-holders; but efforts to roll back these mistakes are met by an astro-turf tax revolt that smacks more of class warfare than the progressive tax system itself.

We could see these as the same old battles between left and right, the same tired pantomime that ends in stalemate. But it seems to many that something is different this time around, that change in our political system is inevitable. New regulations will be issued for Wall Street and corporations. A new national plan for healthcare will emerge. And changes in our tax laws will have to occur to reverse the deficit and arrest the debt. No doubt each of these will be resisted by those who still cling to a retrograde American “libertarianism.” But it may finally be the case that their outsized and undeserved influence on the politics of the past 30 years is ending. It is time for us to reflect on this free market ideology, and ask whether American libertarianism is (or ought to be) dead.

Parts 2, 3 and 4.

Andrzej Rapaczynski on Kolakowski in Project Syndicate:

Kolakowski came back to Poland a number of times in his last years, although he never settled there again. He was an icon among his fellow countrymen – indeed, for his 70th birthday, the largest newspaper in Poland organized a celebration during which they crowned him (with a crown of laurel leaves, of course) … the King of Europe. When he died, the Polish Parliament observed a minute of silence. Poland went into mourning.

But the man himself was never a monument. Indeed, his experience with the “Hegelian bacillus” made Kolakowski forever sensitive to all enthusiasms and all-encompassing creeds. He preferred humor to hectoring, gently making fun of those whom he criticized, while always making sure that even the most severe intellectual critique did not deny the humanity of his opponents. Refusing to believe anything unconditionally, he retained that most important characteristic of a truly great man: he never had unconditional faith in himself.

Another quality he shared with Socrates.

We air passengers are not accustomed to perceiving, or even imagining, planes in this way, as almost animate beings, with a capacity for suffering and endurance, requiring consideration and esteem, and being sensitive, almost, to gratitude and rancour. We board them and can barely distinguish between them; we know nothing of their age or their past history; we don’t even notice their names, which, in Spain at least, are chosen in such a bureaucratic, pious spirit, so lacking in poetry, adventure and imagination, that they’re hard to retain and recognize if ever we entrust ourselves to them again. I would like to ask Iberia, in this the twenty-first century, to abandon their anodyne patriotic gestures and adulatory nods to the Catholic Church – all those planes called Our Lady of the Pillar and Our Lady of Good Remedy, The City of Burgos and The City of Tarragona – and instead choose names that are more cheerful and more literary. I, for one, would feel safer and more reassured, more protected, if I knew I was flying in the The Red Eagle or The Fire Arrow or even Achilles or Emma Bovary or Falstaff or Liberty Valance or Nostromo. Perhaps reading that air hostess’s epistolary revelations had something to do with the diminution of my fear.

more from Javier Marías at Granta here.

Our idea of modernity is in many ways defined by that extraordinary flowering of scientific and philosophical ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Enlightenment. Yet current attitudes to the Enlightenment are ambivalent. Many still see it as unequivocally a good thing: mankind’s coming of age, learning to think freely and independently and throwing off the shackles of obedience to received authority. But there is a dissenting view that has gained new momentum in recent years — that far from heralding a new and glorious dawn, the Enlightenment was born of an overweening arrogance, grossly overestimating the power of human reason and technology to solve our ills and inaugurating a crass materialistic era that has destroyed our reverence for the world and eroded our sense of the sacred. Susan Neiman’s latest book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists (The Bodley Head, £20), offers a distinctive reading of the Enlightenment that attempts to recover its authentic ideals and rescue it from some of the caricatures advanced both by its defenders and its critics. An American moral philosopher who has taught at Yale and Tel Aviv and now works in Germany, Neiman is committed to promoting a broadly liberal political agenda and, as a writer, to making philosophical ideas accessible to a wide reading public.

more from John Cottingham at Standpoint here.

In 2001, Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, advertised on the Cannibal Café website for someone to have dinner with. He received numerous replies, but some withdrew when he responded and he considered others not serious enough. Eventually he invited Bernd Brandes for dinner. The plan was that Armin and Bernd would dine on Bernd’s severed penis, to be bitten off at the table for the occasion (this failed and it had to be cut off). Bernd found it too chewy, he said, so Armin put it in a sauté pan, but charred it and fed it to the dog. Later, Armin put Bernd in the bath (to marinate?), gave him alcohol and pills, read a science fiction book for three hours and then stabbed his dinner guest in the throat, hung him upside down on a meat hook in the ceiling, as any good butcher would, and sliced him into manageable portions. The world was agog at the news of the German cannibal and his two trials, at the first of which he was found guilty of manslaughter (no law against cannibalism in Germany, and his ‘victim’ had consented, volunteered actually, to being killed and eaten) and sentenced to eight years. He was retried on appeal for first-degree murder on the grounds that Bernd might not have been in a position to consent once his penis had been severed and the blood loss taken its intellectual toll. Armin Meiwes was given life.

more from Jenny Diski at the LRB here.