Chris Mooney in Slate:

The “war on science” is over. Or at least it is in the sense that I originally meant the phrase: We're at the close of the Bush administration's years of attacks on the integrity of scientific information—its biased editing of technical documents, muzzling of government researchers, and shameless dispersal of faulty ideas about issues like global warming.

The attacks generated dramatic outrage and considerable activism from the traditionally staid science community and the sympathy of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So it's no great surprise to find the president-elect setting out to restore dignity to the role of science in government. George W. Bush didn't even bother to name his White House science adviser until well into his first term, and his appointee (physicist John Marburger) didn't win Senate confirmation until October 2001. In contrast, Obama has already named a Nobel laureate physicist (Steven Chu) to head the Energy Department and a climate specialist and prominent leader of the scientific community, Harvard's John Holdren, as his Cabinet-level science adviser.

Scientists are ecstatic about these developments and about Obama's recent promise to listen to them “even when it's inconvenient—especially when it's inconvenient.” But it would be the gravest of errors for researchers to simply return victorious to their labs and fall back on a time-honored stance of political detachment.

More here.

Jonathan Shainin in The National:

It is important to understand that Israel did not leave Gaza in 2005. Israeli settlers left Gaza, and Israeli soldiers moved from its center to its perimeter. The deprivation inflicted by the subsequent siege has been widely chronicled elsewhere, and while it may provide little justification for Hamas violence, one thing is absolutely clear: Israel has controlled the Gaza Strip from June 1967 until today. It decides who enters and who leaves, decides when food and medicine and money can cross the border and when they can’t. It decides where the walls go and who guards them, when to send in its tanks and planes, who can govern and who cannot govern, and above all, who lives and who dies.

The prominent Israeli commentator Ari Shavit – a former leftist and brilliant writer who became the foremost liberal hagiographer of Ariel Sharon – wrote on Tuesday that this is “a war for Israel’s sovereignty.” Close, but not quite. Israel’s sovereignty has never been at issue: it is the unquestioned sovereign power, the authority over those that are its citizens and those that are not. It is the perpetuation of Israeli sovereignty over the Palestinian territories – and not the occupation of territory, per se – that is precisely the issue. Palestinian residents of the occupied territories are citizens of no state; they are subjects of no government and no law, bearing no rights. The problem is that this is not a temporary situation: the abysmal failure of the Oslo process, which perceptive observers saw from its start, was that it promised territory without sovereignty, a meaningless offer that represented Israel’s most generous proposal.

More here.

Segev in the Washington Post:

The latest violence hasonce again brought reporters from all over the world to the region. Many of them wonder why Israelis and Palestinians don't simply agree to divide the land between them. Indeed, Israeli leaders support a two-state solution, which had previously been advocated only by the extreme left. Palestinian leaders, though not the heads of Hamas, have agreed to accept this solution. Apparently, only the details of the agreement have to be worked out. If only it were that simple.

This conflict is not merely about land and water and mutual recognition. It is about national identity. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians define themselves by the Holy Land — all of it. Any territorial compromise would compel both sides to relinquish part of their identity.

In recent years, with the rise of Hamas and the increasing militance of some Jewish settlers, this precariously irrational conflict has also assumed a more religious character — and thereby become even more difficult to solve. Islamic fundamentalists, as well as Jewish ones, have made control of the land part of their faith, and that faith is dearer to them than human life.

So I find myself among the new majority of Israelis who no longer believe in peace with the Palestinians. The positions are simply too far apart at this time.

In Entertainment Weekly:

He will always be Captain Kirk's finest foe, the would-be conqueror who first tried to steal the Enterprise in the classic Star Trek episode “Space Seed” and then finally robbed Kirk of his best friend in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Montalban's magnetic, robust presence; that voice that sounded like a ride over rolling hills — he made Khan Noonien Singh the worst kind of despot: the kind you're pretty sure you'd die for. The product of a Eugenics program that rendered him stronger and smarter than the average bear, Khan was a tragic figure — the man who would not be denied, born into a world that did nothing buy deny him his birthright — and that tragedy is part of what lifts Star Trek II to an almost Shakespearean level.

And in the Guardian, a piece on the late Patrick McGoohan:

In the series McGoohan met several sinister Number Twos but could never find out who Number One was until the last episode, improvised by McGoohan and his large writing team at the last moment, when Number One's false face was pulled off to reveal a monkey's underneath. When that too was pulled off, it revealed the face of McGoohan's Number Six himself.

From Fox News:

The scientists suspect alien microbes may be alive and kicking just below the soil of the big planet, after large quantities of what may be the organisms' waste products were detected.

The organisms — called methanogens — are suspected to have been living in water beneath underground ice, where they are disgorging tons and tons of methane.

On Earth, methane is produced in massive quantities by animals such as cows, sheep and goats, as well as by geological processes.

Giant telescopes from Earth and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have spotted a haze of the gas surrounding Mars, and according to some scientists this can only point to the presence of life on Mars.

“Methane is a product of biology,” British Mars expert Professor Colin Pillinger told the London tabloid The Sun Wednesday night.

As existentialist injunctions go, “Measur[e] your own grave” and “Live forever” could be said to represent polar opposites, of heaven and (literally) earth. And yet, the painters to whom these phrases serve as subtitles for their museum surveys, respectively at the Modern and the New, are anything but opposed. It is not as if, for instance, Elizabeth Peyton has the exclusive on ethereality, Marlene Dumas on groundedness. Indeed, Peyton and Dumas, though different ages and with markedly contrastive personal histories, could be construed as soul sisters. In the manner of that Greek legend where different maidens lined up to inspire separate body parts for the statue of a goddess, these two artists could almost be enlisted to collaborate on a portrait of the postmodern (and post- or neo-feminist) condition, one that in painterly touch and depictive attitude alike is torn between intimacy and remoteness, memory and visceral presence. And this collaboration would take place without a major compromise on either’s part in terms of modus operandi, touch, or – deep down – philosophy.

more from artcritical here.

Eighteenth-century Scots was clearly a language rich in synonyms for this last pastime, and Burns makes use of most of them in his poetry. Even after his marriage to the long-suffering Jean Armour, he continued to take advantage of the numerous opportunities for sexual conquest opened up by his personal charm and powers of persuasion. Although Burns was a poet who was forced to earn his living by means of agricultural labour for much of his life, the Ayrshire communities in which he lived were not entirely deprived of contact with the currents of thought emanating from Edinburgh, the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. Crawford lists the many formal and informal social networks promoting the development of individual culture and literary activity to which Burns belonged. Through his membership of the Freemasons, his participation in the Tarbolton “Bachelors Club”, and his friendship with like-minded people of his own class and background, he found ready support and assistance for his earliest poetic efforts, and encouragement for his desire to have his songs and poems published.

more from the TLS here.

Richard Silverstein in The Guardian:

A reader of my blog has received the following email which documents both the efforts and the agency that originated them. The solicitation to become a pro-Israel “media volunteer” also includes a list of media links which the ministry would like addressed by pro-Israel comments:

Dear friends,

We hold the [sic] military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media. We need to buy time for the IDF to succeed, and the least we can do is spare some (additional) minutes on the net. The ministry of foreign affairs is putting great efforts in balancing the media, but we all know it's a battle of numbers. The more we post, blog, talkback, vote – the more likely we gain positive sentiment.

I was asked by the ministry of foreign affairs to arrange a network of volunteers, who are willing to contribute to this effort. If you're up to it you will receive a daily messages & media package as well as targets.

If you wish to participate, please respond to this email.

My friend did so and received this official communique from the ministry with talking points about Operation Cast Lead which s/he was to use in her/his propaganda efforts. Among the links was was a Peter Beaumont Cif piece. The following were identified as “target sites”: the Times, the Guardian, Sky News, BBC, Yahoo!News, Huffington Post, and the Dutch Telegraaf. Also targeted were other media sites in Dutch, Spanish, German and French considered critical of the invasion.

More here. Meanwhile, Donald Macintyre and Kim Sengupta report in The Independent:

Israel is under suspicion of committing war crimes and should halt the “clear and present danger to the lives and well-being of tens of thousands of civilians” in Gaza, nine of the country's main human rights organisations have declared.

The Israeli organisations have written to the government, armed forces chiefs and the attorney general, condemning the “unprecedented” harm to a civilian population now in “extreme humanitarian distress”, the “wanton use of lethal force” and a series of what it says are “blatant violations of the laws of warfare”.

These include the fact that, apart from the death toll, with border crossings closed residents are unable to escape the war zone and are living in “fear and terror”. The organisations also cited the dire capacity problems of Gaza's hospital system and the failure to evacuate about 600 wounded and chronically ill patients; what they say is prevention by the army of rescue teams reaching isolated areas which have come under intensive attack; and the fact that, with sewage now flowing in many streets, more than half a million people are without clean water and 250,000 residents have been without electricity for 18 days. Another million residents are without power at any one time, the organisations said.

More here.

///
Mirador
Randolyn Zinn

Your eyes were brown like my grandmother's wherein
I watched the faces of my entire family shuffle past
………..
like a deck of cards or video transmission from space,
choppy and with time delays. Relatives I'd only seen
………..
in photos pasted in old albums showed up as you
batted your lashes, then others, born before the camera
………..
yet clearly bearing the family resemblance: an El Greco
duke in doublet, a young Vandal girl crossing the Strait
………..
of Gibraltar, a Visigoth shepherd in rough furs, even
a dark-haired Roman with wide smile carrying wheat
………..
sheaves bound for his Emperor. I kissed your two fringed
almond lids and danced like a bayadére on Persian carpet,
………..
arms lifted, in time with your oud, before settling back
on your wide-striped couch when I heard the generations whisper
………..
that we are all related.
//

Christopher Hitchens in The Slate:

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her “greatness” (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

More here.

Philip Slater in The Huffington Post:

I can understand that after centuries of persecution it's satisfying for a Jewish state to be the aggressor for a change, but there's a codicil that goes with that role. You don't get to act like a victim any more. “Poor little Israel” just sounds silly when you're the dominant power in the Middle East. When you've invaded several of your neighbors, bombed and defeated them in combat, occupied their land, and taken their homes away from them, it's time to stop acting oppressed. Yes, Arab states deny your right to exist, threaten to drive you into the sea, and all the rest of their futile, helpless rhetoric. The fact is, you have the upper hand and they don't. You have sophisticated arms and they don't. You have nuclear weapons and they don't. So stop pretending to be pathetic. It doesn't play well in Peoria.

(Yes, I know, we Americans should talk–always trembling in our boots about terrorists and 'rogue states' and 'evil empires' when we have enough nukes to blow up entire continents, and spend more on arms in an hour than most of the world's nations spend in a year. But just because we're hypocrites and Nervous Nellies doesn't mean you have to be).

Calling Hamas the 'aggressor' is undignified. The Gaza strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy–even deprived of hospital supplies. They cannot come and go freely, and have to build tunnels to smuggle in the necessities of life. It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn't fire a few rockets back.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Zeba Hyder)

Scott Indrisek in Asylum:

Most struggling novelists are penniless, pathetic, poorly dressed wretches who piss and moan about how no one appreciates their “Art.” Thankfully, “Absurdistan” author Gary Shteyngart isn't most novelists. The Russian-born scribe makes a handsome living off bestsellers that satirize ethnicity, love, Jewish identity, Iraq war contractors and everything in between. “I don't know what explains it,” the novelist told us, “but [my books] do sell in the hundreds of thousands, and that enables me to really keep my caviar ratio up.”

We asked Shytengart to share some secrets of the writing trade, from appropriate booze choices to matters of dress — and let's not forget the importance of a little depression and tragedy. “If you're happy, things are not going well,” he advises. “Stop being so goddamn happy! Unless you want to join the Obama transition team, this is not the field for you. It's all about despair.”

Have a Daily Writing Schedule
“Take a lot of Xanax in the morning to really calm the hell down. Try to wake up no later than 11. Work from 11:30 to 4:30, then go see the shrink, then meet some friends for drinks. Find a good bar where everyone knows your name and you can get a nice buyback. Try to relax. This is the major problem. Writing is both boring and stressful, it's the worst combination. Sometimes I go to the gym, but it's very hard to lift things there, because they're so heavy.”

Finding Inspiration
“I think all good books come from heartbreak. Focus on the worst thing that's happened to you — usually it's interpersonal. Could be your parents drank themselves to death; an ostrich killed your baby brother. Or focus on the worst, horrible break-up. Go off from that. Feel something. It's very hard to feel something these days because we're living such electronic lives; everything's just some weird electronic echo. Try to access what human beings used to have — emotions. Go from there.”

Coping with Writer's Block
“I don't have it. Often what I write is crap, so that's not writer's block, that's writer's crap. You know what I do? I take long showers, sometimes three hours long. It's really helpful.”

More here.

Letter to The Guardian:

We the undersigned are all of Jewish origin. When we see the dead and bloodied bodies of young children, the cutting off of water, electricity and food, we are reminded of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. When Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, talked of putting Gazans “on a diet” and the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, talked about the Palestinians experiencing “a bigger shoah” (holocaust), this reminds us of Governor General Hans Frank in Nazi-occupied Poland, who spoke of “death by hunger”.

The real reason for the attack on Gaza is that Israel is only willing to deal with Palestinian quislings. The main crime of Hamas is not terrorism but its refusal to accept becoming a pawn in the hands of the Israeli occupation regime in Palestine.

The decision last month by the EU council to upgrade relations with Israel, without any specific conditions on human rights, has encouraged further Israeli aggression. The time for appeasing Israel is long past. As a first step, Britain must withdraw the British ambassador to Israel and, as with apartheid South Africa, embark on a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Ben Birnberg, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Deborah Fink, Bella Freud, Tony Greenstein, Abe Hayeem, Prof Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Dr Les Levidow, Prof Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes, Prof Jonathan Rosenhead, Seymour Alexander, Ben Birnberg, Martin Birnstingl, Prof. Haim Bresheeth, Ruth Clark, Judith Cravitz, Mike Cushman, Angela Dale, Merav Devere, Greg Dropkin, Angela Eden, Sarah Ferner, Alf Filer, Mark Findlay, Sylvia Finzi, Bella Freud, Tessa van Gelderen, Claire Glasman, Ruth Hall, Adrian Hart, Alain Hertzmann, Abe Hayeem, Rosamene Hayeem, Anna Hellmann, Selma James, Riva Joffe, Yael Kahn, Michael Kalmanovitz, Ros Kane, Prof. Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Mark Krantz, Bernice Laschinger, Pam Laurance, Dr Les Levidow, Prof. Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof. Moshe Machover, Beryl Maizels, Miriam Margolyes, Helen Marks, Martine Miel, Diana Neslen, O Neumann, Susan Pashkoff, Hon. Juliet Peston, Renate Prince, Roland Rance, Sheila Robin, Ossi Ron, Manfred Ropschitz, John Rose, Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead, Leon Rosselson, Michael Sackin, Ian Saville, Amanda Sebestyen, Sam Semoff, Prof. Ludi Simpson, Viv Stein, Inbar Tamari, Ruth Tenne, Norman Traub, Eve Turner, Tirza Waisel, Karl Walinets, Renee Walinets, Stanley Walinets, Philip Ward, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Ruth Williams, Jay Woolrich, Ben Young, Myk Zeitlin, Androulla Zucker, John Zucker

Ian Sample in The Guardian (for Morgan Meis):

The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy's personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.

Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals' hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker's nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Pro-Israel demonstration in New York City, January 11, 2009:

The first time I saw Odia Ofeimun was at a party in Lagos. We came late, Toni Kan and I. It was a Friday, we had left the office and stopped at several barrooms on the way, and by nine o’clock, when we arrived at the party, we were tipsy. But we were in good company: almost everyone was high. There was an air of euphoria in the room; it was the same all over the country. This was November 1999. The country had just emerged from fifteen years of military dictatorship. Everyone was savouring that feeling of having survived a shipwreck, or a plane crash. The future looked bright, especially for the people gathered in this room: over a hundred of them, poets and writers and playwrights. In everyday life they were journalists and teachers and out-of-work graduates, a handful who had narrowly survived General Abacha’s elite-exterminating agenda which saw a lot of pro-democracy intellectuals killed or exiled or compromised. Those who could not afford to go into exile during the reign of terror, and who refused to become turncoats, had lived in a sort of limbo, occasionally bringing out a book of poems or stories or essays whose oblique metaphors and idioms made sense only to other writers. Tonight these writers were being hosted by Maik, a novelist and journalist, and the booze was flowing. They were exchanging stories about fellow writers exiled in foreign capitals. Next to me two young men were arguing about a poet who had been found strangled in his car the year before.

more from Granta here.

THE past year has been a bad one if you hold to the old-fashioned belief that the work of gifted writers constitutes a warning against forms of oppression, whether of the piously conventional or the totalitarian varieties. I assume that Norman Mailer (who died, aged 84, on November 10, 2007) held Alexander Solzhenitsyn in high regard, just as I imagine that Solzhenitsyn (who died, aged 89, on August 4) looked on Mailer as a decadent. But in retrospect we can see that the careers of the two writers were more in harmony than might appear. The American, it is true, burst on the literary scene as a wunderkind of sorts in 1948 with The Naked and the Dead; the older Russian had to wait until 1962 for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to plant his foot in similar style. But each established his reputation through his first publication, both were colossally ambitious (and egoistic in proportion), both became public figures (albeit in very different ways), both unexpectedly (indeed, reluctantly) found nonfiction to be their most effective medium, and for both their native land was an overwhelming obsession. (That Solzhenitsyn was as Russian as borsch goes without saying; but it is odd to note how uncosmopolitan both writers were. Mailer was well travelled but rarely wrote on non-American topics.)

more from The Australian here.

TA Frank in The Guardian:

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds – all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we've gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

I think I started to dislike Gore when he stirred up a media storm after the Feds broke up the terrorist ring conspiring to fly airplanes into buildings back in 2001. He could have let it pass quietly, as Bill Clinton did with the millennium plot arrests in 2000. Instead, Gore held a press conference to milk it for political gain and scare us into a 15 cent per gallon gas tax. But who can afford to pay over a dollar and a half per gallon? No wonder we're resorting to electric cars these days.

And why did he pressure the universally admired Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to step down early in 2002? Replacing him with that old warhorse Paul Volcker was a nasty surprise, especially when Volcker choked off a promising housing boom in 2002 and imposed old, outdated regulations on lenders. Some properties lost as much as 8% of their value that year. Now housing prices are rising really slowly, and GDP barely grew by 3% this year.

More here.